"Nobody moves or whitey gets it" (Sep94)

I'd been out of the States for 5 years when I found myself stuck in Augusta, GA for a year of generally useless Army communications (Signal) training.  Having been gone for so long, I was going through a lot of culture shock.  The last 4 years had been spent in idyllic little German villages, right out of postcards.  Villages where the town square was the center of a quiet social life.  Where the German Frauen would weekly sweep the streets in front of their houses.  Because that was the same section of cobblestone street that had been in front of their family's home for 200yrs, and it had come to represent generations of their family.  Quiet, friendly, safe and spotless.

Then I got dragged back to the US.

When I was looking for a place to live for my year, I knew that I needed a garage.  The Porsche was barely water resistant on it's best day, so leaving it in the rain was a non-starter.  The homes with garages were pretty expensive, but I finally found a place to rent that would be workable.  A person that had any standards might not have agreed, but a dump would be workable as long as the dump had a garage.  And it did.  Not surprisingly, the neighborhood left something to be desired.  It was a struggling minority neighborhood.  

I was the minority.

One of my first mornings, as I was warming up the Porsche  to drive to the pool, I heard a “WHAM” behind me.  My first thought was that my 280k mile engine had fell out of the car and was now resting on the garage floor.  Recalling the immediate action procedure for dropping your entire engine, I turned the key off and reached for my checkbook.  But then I noticed, in the rearview mirror, that the power wires across the street were whipping all around and generally going nuts.  “What the hell”?  

I got out of the car and walked out of the garage. There, across the street was some poor soul hadn't quite made the turn and had just put his car into the telephone pole up to the windshield.  60mph in a residential neighborhood has it's perils.  Reacting like any other red-blooded American male, I immediately went into “CPT America” mode and was just beginning my race to the rescue when a black thuggish looking gent rolls out of the car.

With a pistol.  

Now this isn't fair.  All I had was my checkbook.

So I put CPT America on pause.

 Then a police car comes flying around the corner and skids to a stop.  The black dude runs, still clearly shaken, away from his car.  He slips a little in the mud, hops a fence and he is off.  

One of Augusta's finest, Officer Frankly Obese, levers himself out of his car and gives chase.  He sets up for the fence, slips in the mud and hits the ground so hard that mud flies up and reaches my side of the street.  Getting his knees under him, he gets up, struggles with the fence and then both he and the fence go down in the mud.  He had became one seriously muddy law enforcement official.  As if broken field running wasn't something he'd done since a child, he gave chase.  I wouldn't have given him a doughnut for his chances.

On cue the rubber-neckers began to assemble. Intending to bond with my august fellows I moved to join them.  I figured my alternative would be to snipe from the yard, but a .22 would only make the bad guy mad.

Then it occurred to me.  If Mr. Driving School Failure came running back out towards us with his pistol, he'd take one look at the crowd and it would be "NOBODY MOVES OR WHITEY GETS IT”.  So I got back into the car and went swimming. 

The neighbors told me later that it was a drug bust.  Welcome home.  Sheeze.