I Was ROBBED!

Let me take you back in time to late summer 1979. I was living in an apartment with my oldest (and only at the time) daughter, Keeley. To say I was poor is probably an understatement.

I’ll walk you through my apartment. As you enter from the screen patio doors (though I don’t remember ever having a patio), you walk into my living room/dining room. The furnishings in both rooms consist of lawn chairs (the old fashioned plastic ribbon type), trunks, and a card table with four chairs.

To the left of the dining area is a tiny kitchen bare of furniture or furnishings, and to the right of the dining area is a small bathroom and a bedroom. In the bedroom are two cots, one for me and one for my daughter.

There. I think you have an accurate picture in your mind of our living conditions.

Now let’s add humidity and heat – lots of heat, so hot that I had to open the door to the patio so we could get some fresh air.

Mistake with a capital M.

During the night, I awoke with an asthma attack and attempted to get up so that I could get my inhaler, which was sitting in my purse on top of the card table.

Suddenly a little man wearing a ski mask leaped on me, pushed me back onto the cot, and held a knife to my throat!

In my sleepy mind, and possibly because I’m blind without my contacts (I now wear glasses), I thought the guy who pushed me down on the bed and held a knife to my throat was my fiance.

It didn’t occur to me at the time why I would think my fiance would behave that way, but I did.

Thinking he was my fiance, I pushed him aside and yelled, “Can’t you tell I’m having an asthma attack? I need my inhaler!”

I think I scared him.

Surprisingly (well, now anyway), he allowed me to go into the dining area and grab my inhaler. As I stood at the table gasping for breath, I noticed another guy going through my freezer, his face hidden by the freezer door. Confused, I asked my pseudo-fiance, “Are we having a party?”

At this point pseudo-guy grabbed me around my neck with one arm and again held the knife to my throat with the other.

Hmm. Maybe this wasn’t my fiance after all. I snuck a look at his arms. No tattoo. Oh oh! Not my fiance. Now what?

My daughter stirred in the bedroom.

“What’s that?” pseudo-guy wanted to know.

I wanted to lie and say it was my husband, but I hate lying and I didn’t want him to kill my daughter, so I told him the truth.

My daughter ran up to me and I wrapped my arms around her, realizing that on one hand, I wore my engagement ring and on the other, I wore my heirloom ring, so I hid each one inside the opposite arm. The rings were quite valuable, and probably the only physical things of any value in the entire apartment. The robbers didn’t even notice.

After the other guy slammed my freezer shut, the guy with his arm wrapped around me asked his thief friend, “What should we do with them?”

“Tie them to the table.”

I looked at the legs on my card table. WOW! Really?

Do you have any idea how hard it is to stifle a laugh when somebody is holding a knife to your throat?

Apparently they noticed my stifle, because they agreed to put us into the bathroom, where we were told to count to 100 (probably because they wanted to learn how to count).

Yes, I was robbed all right, by the inability to laugh out loud at two of the most ridiculous set of would-be thieves I have ever encountered.

By the way, the reason they were rummaging through my freezer, I later found out, was because the previous tenants were drug dealers who stashed their goods in there.

One more thing – though both robbers together didn’t quite make for one brain, one of the robbers had a conscience. “Next time, lock your patio door,” he warned.

Sorry, you sorry sap, there will be no “next time.” (I moved.)

Share this Post:

6 thoughts on “I Was ROBBED!”

    1. Thank you lbwoodgate! The funniest part about the story to me was that because I thought the guy was my fiance, I can’t help but laugh when I think about how he must have reacted to my actions. I’m sure he was expecting me to be scared.

    1. Yeah, how can you NOT laugh at the absurdity of somebody coming up with that solution? Thank you for commenting.

  1. Thanks, Donna. And thank you for the tweet. I have a weird response mechanism. I know. I tend to look for the humor in EVERYTHING (not always appropriate).

  2. Well, good thing you have a sense of humor about it. I probably would have passed out or cried. Yep, crying would definitely be part of my response. Great job!

Comments are closed.