Three thugs and a tourist

The buttheadguy effect, part 4

I’d traveled in over twenty countries and I’d never been mugged. This is mostly because I have good instincts, and take care not to put myself in dangerous situations.

But when the game is backpacking in crime-ridden tropical countries, your winning streak is bound to end eventually.

And so, late one night as I walked home from a bar in Malate, Manila’s bayside tourist district, I realized that the street had suddenly become forebodingly dark and deserted. My spidey sense tingled.

“I’d better get out of here,” I thought. “This is exactly the sort of place where a guy could get—”

And it was at that very moment that a trio of young toughs emerged from an alley and headed straight for me.

Freeze frame. Cue title sequence:

THE BUTTHEAD GUY EFFECT

Peril and bloodshed that transpired in 2009 because Chris D broke Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984

PART 4: THREE THUGS AND A TOURIST

Action continues:

Their point man had a crappy white women’s belt slung over his shoulder. He was trying to pass himself off as a street hawker, which gave him a pretext to approach me—not that his ruse was at all convincing. He ran ahead of me and cut me off while the other two crowded around us.

Years ago when I took a self-defence class, the instructors warned us that the fancy-shmancy techniques we were learning would go right out the window in the event of an actual assault. When you’re attacked, everything happens so quickly you can’t think—you just react.

And they were right. The moment these three guys moved into my personal space, I just reacted. I waved my arms defensively and shouted, “Back off! No touching! Stand back! Get the fuck back!”

It was pretty much the same tactic I use to repel groups of street kids who swarm tourists and try to pick their pockets. And it worked. The trio backed off slightly, now unsure whether they wanted to take on this suddenly very loud and animated foreigner. They probably thought I’d quietly hand over my valuables based on the three-on-one dynamic. And perhaps that would have been the smartest course of action.

I was scared absolutely shitless now, and perhaps they were too. Their eyes were wide, twitchy and full of rage; from the look of them they could have been hopped up on shabu—the local name for crystal meth—and therefore experiencing a greater-than-usual impairment of their natural human empathy for foreign tourists.

Women’s belt guy was shouting “You give me money!” over and over. Then I turned and saw the yellow-shirted guy to his left swearing and conspicuously fumbling behind his back, as if he were about to pull a gun or knife. A gun or knife he probably had.

I had no doubt that these dudes were prepared to kill me. During my year-long stint in the Philippines in 2006-7, two acquaintances I met in Manila were brutally murdered. Martin the accountant was stabbed to death by a shabu-head during a Manila jeepney robbery; Julia the Peace Corps volunteer was randomly killed by some nut in a popular mountain town. Another friend was mugged by a group of men with handguns, just a couple of blocks from where I was standing.

The Philippines is a rough country. People get killed all the time—I’ve seen the chalk body outlines and blood for myself. I had every reason to fear the worst.

So as yellow-shirt guy fumbled, my gut told me that whatever he had, I didn’t want to see it—because if I saw it, maybe he’d feel that much more emboldened to use it if I turned my back on him. A dangerously stupid assumption, perhaps, but that was what streaked across my mind, and I acted on it.

Still shouting and waving, I turned away from yellow-shirt guy to find a space had opened up between the other two.

And I ran.

They didn’t chase me, as I was only a few seconds’ sprint from the next intersection, which would put me in sight of the security guards on the sidewalk outside the hotel around the corner. I passed by those guards without telling them what had just happened. I needed to get the hell away from there, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk to the cops.

Strangely, everything had happened so fast that the fact I’d just been the intended victim of a street robbery didn’t properly sink in for a couple of minutes. I rushed along, my whole body trembling, thinking, “What the hell just happened? Were those guys trying to mug me? They were trying to mug me!” I didn’t know it then, but the adrenaline that had flooded my bloodstream would prevent me from getting a wink of sleep that night.

It’s an awful feeling, realizing that you were probably within seconds of being shot or stabbed. What a shitty demise it would have been, getting rubbed out on the seedy streets of Manila for a cheap cell phone and a wallet with perhaps $150 in it.

And so I speed-walked home, my mind playing and replaying the frightening circumstances of the only attempted mugging I’ve ever endured. A potentially fatal threat that never would have threatened me, if not for the smile-sabotaging smackdown I suffered at the hands of a certain depraved someone, so many years ago....

Crane shot. Glen hurries off the street into his guest house and the camera rises up above the rooftops to close on an ominous panorama of the night-time Manila skyline. Cue baritone-voiced announcer:

“So ends another chapter in a sordid tome of peril that would never have been written, had not Chris D broken Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984. Tune in again next time, when Glen is not remotely endangered, but is forced to overhear the virulent anti-Chinese tirade of a morbidly obese white woman….”