The Pack

Always watch your shadow when you're in the wrong part of town.

I remember back before my first change, going to a show somewhere out in the ass end of Brooklyn.  Might have been Bushwick, maybe Bed Stuy.  I was going to some shitty little apartment somebody was trying to pass off as a venue, hoping a $5 door charge could keep the heat on for another week.  I was pissed off, walking with my hands buried in my pockets and my head hunkered down, more than a little distracted.  There were elevated railroad tracks everywhere, but no people.  It had snowed a few days ago, but enough time had passed for it to melt and mix with the dirt to make it feel as though I was walking through a quarter of an inch of diarrhea.  As I walked under an overpass, a kid walked up to me, his hat turned around backwards and his jeans halfway to his knees.  

"What time is it?" he asked.  Instinctively, I looked down at my watch and realized two things simultaneously.  

First, a flash of flash of reflected light from the kid's wrist told me he had a watch, so what did he need the time for?  Second, I noticed two shadows slip under me from behind.

These realizations were drowned out as an explosion of light blinded me for a second, and all of a sudden I had a foul taste in my mouth.  My eyes weren't working right, but I saw a t-shirt on the ground next to me, and was that a brick inside it?  The foul taste in my mouth was the dirty snow-shit.  My eyes weren't working right because I'd been hit in my head.  The foul taste in my mouth was also from some blood that was dripping down the side of my face.  I'd been hit in the head.  By a brick. The hands in my pants were the people robbing me.  I'd been hit.

My thoughts were all disjointed, but I managed to throw myself up off the ground, and grab the makeshift weapon my assailants had discarded.  I must have looked fucking crazy, half covered in dirt, blood dripping down my face, swinging a brick wrapped in a bloody t-shirt.  I shouted at them, a hoarse primal cry, they took one look at me and ran.  I kept the bloody t-shirt and brick above my TV for years after that.  I figured it was worth at least the twenty bucks I lost to the little shits.

Point is, if I'd been paying more attention to the shadows and less to the color and consistency of the snow, I would have kept the 20 bucks and the blood, and probably could have gotten to the show that night.  I was alone, so I had to make those sorts of cost/benefit analyses.  

Now?  Now, I'm the hunter, I'm part of a group of hunters, and when we're walking down the street, they watch the shadows for me.