Summertime Brownouts

Eventually, as the years passed and I grew closer to adulthood, more and more of my neighbors acquired air conditioners. This would have been great if the electricity had been up to handling the increased load. Unfortunately, it was not. So we would get brownouts.

We would be sitting inside with a fan blowing 85 degree heat on us when all of a sudden the TV would snap off with a click! The lights would go out and the fan would wind down. Then we would hear our neighbors one by one coming out onto their front porches to discuss this latest power failure. The weird thing about a brownout it that it's small. Sometimes we would have power while the people across the street were in darkness. Sometimes the brownout would extend all the way to Fox Park. On those nights I would go out wandering. I would explore the darkness like it was a new toy, wandering down alleys sending out feelers, looking for danger. Being a teenager, I was totally convinced that I could handle anything. After all, I had seen a biker almost die. I had sniped at my friends with a homemade pull-tab gun. I had walked through the projects alone at one in the morning... I could cope with anything lurking in the humid blackness that engulfed my neighborhood from time to time. Riiiight.

One night, I decided that I needed to go get cigarettes in the middle of one of these brownouts. The streetlights were out almost all the way to the Vicker's Gas station, so I strutted through 4 blocks of murky night, totally unafraid. The lights were on at the station, and there were 4 adolescent boys hanging out by one of the pumps. I sized them up; decided I could take out any two of them if need be, and went inside to buy my cigarettes.
When I came back out of the store, the boys appeared to be talking themselves into something... and I started to smile.
I sauntered slowly into the darkness, mentally egging them on, "Are you gonna be chicken, or will you dare to follow me?" They took the bait and started after me. Heh. I extended my senses and heard one of them whisper, "We really gonna do her?" That was all I needed to hear. My adrenaline shot up and I broke out in goose bumps. This was danger, and I was so riding that rush. I heard them quicken their pace, their cheap tennis shoes slapping the sidewalk behind me, so I sped up myself. I could almost feel their breath on my neck when I broke into a run. My brain had kicked into over-drive. I thought, "I can outrun them!"

Instead I dashed around a corner into an alley. I ran past an empty glass bottle, rejected it as a weapon, thought about scaling the cast-iron drainpipe to my right, decided it would take too much time, debated running the length of the alley to the glowing street beyond, and did none of it. This all flashed through my head in a split-second as I picked the darkest spot I could find and turned to face my would-be attackers bare handed.

They came around the corner and lost their nerve. All the shit that I had seen and experienced and kept quiet about came welling up inside of me, and I yelled at them, "You want to rape me!? Come on! Not one of you will be walking out of here, I guarantee it!"

The little bastards went back to the Vicker's station. I was left shaking from head to toe, stunned with myself and stunned at the world in general. These boys were probably around my own age of 16. I don't think any of them could have talked themselves into actually raping me, and I'll bet I scared the hell out of them. They probably thought I had a gun or something; after all, it was dark in that alley.