graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guns drawn, sting operations and police threats I am having the week from hell. I knew going into it that was going to be the week from hell - there are always hints of it prior to the hell unleashing. People who say it came out of nowhere, they're lying. On Sunday, after traveling back from Philly, I loitered aimlessly around town with my friend, desperate to stay busy so that I wouldn't have to think about the upcoming week. On Monday morning, as I hailed a taxi, my mind wandered as a busy raced past me and I thought, wouldn't it be lovely if a car just accidently reared over 1 foot and lightly smashed into me. Just enough to knock me onto the windshield, maybe break a femur...nothing critical. Sure, there would be the instant of pain, maybe an hour of it before they sedated me, but it would be worth the magnificence of being laid out on a gurney with crisp white hospital linens, calling my boss and saying, "Bad news boss, I'm laid up in the hospital. Yes, I'm afraid I can't walk. I may be getting a cast....they'll probably keep me over night for observation so I won't make it in tomorrow either. No, I'm afraid not...but let me tell you where everything is on my desk..." And then I woke up from my dream and stepped into my nightmare. Of course I can't talk about my job. It's confidential and I really should save it for the book. The scathing tell-all with "fictious" characters based on all of the unprofessional and self-centered celebrities who forget where they came from and have no sight of the interminable fall they will endure when they fall from the top. And I can assure you, they always fall. God, I can't wait for the celebrity market to bottom out. So anyway, a couple of nights ago I was in Times Square, hobbling around on these heels I had been wearing for about 3 hours too long, I finally stopped and held onto a stop sign, to put on my Puma's. I'm standing next to, what I think is some random tourist on the phone and it turns out the guy is an undercover cop, conferring with another undercover cop, on whether or not it was time to make the sting. After I a few minutes of listening to this guy go back and forth about "the victim" and "the lookout" I sighed and said kinda low, "You've got to be kidding me. Is this really stealth?? COME on." I didn't even look up at the guy - frankly, because I don't want to be able to identify him. He should go out there and do his business and I should do mine and never should the twain meet. Ignorance is bliss. So he moved away. I went across the street to an official taxi line, with no cop there because of the P.A. cuts, and wait for a taxi for about 10 minutes in extreme heat. I am dying. The next thing I know, some young playa jumps in the street and tries to hail a cab. There's three white guys in line in front of me, but I can see they aren't going to do anything. That's fine. If I were a white male, I probably wouldn't say anything to a black urban male either. I'm not racist, but I've seen how things go down btwn the two. So I went over. I got behind this guy and I yelled, "Yo, dude. You can't just jump into the street and hail a cab. That's not how it works. We've all been waiting in line. There's a line. Get in line." As you can imagine, he didn't like that. His friend, or should I say friends, didn't know what to do. I hadn't realized that he had a posse. So now I'm kinda of stuck between them. He started coming at me and I said, "What? What are you going to do right here? If I were you, I'd walk. This place is crawling with undercover cops. Just about every 3rd guy in front of you is a cop. Make a move and they'll take you down." And I stood there. At that moment I realized, it really didn't matter if the cops were all around and took this guy down, he could shoot me and kill me faster than they'd take him down. I was pretty scared for a few seconds. really scared. And then he walked past me and headed toward the line, trashing talking the line the whole way, but he walked. I walked back over to the line and the three men in line in front of me all shook their heads with disbelief at me. "What?" I said. "There's a line. There's an order. There needs to be order or there's chaos. And I'm not letting some jackass jump the line." The first guy in line smiled at me. One woman with a man thanked me. And that was the stupidiest thing I've done in a while. So it should be understandable when today, I was standing in the street in Chelsea asking my car driver to wait a moment for me to run back into the building and grab one more bag, that I saw some people running from in front of the projects across the street, screaming "HE'S GOT A GUN!!!!" I said to the driver of my car, "Hold on one minute, okay," smile at him, look up and see a man looking like a homocidal maniac, running toward me and waving a gun in the air. In that moment, when I smiled at the driver and asked for a moment, I made the decision not to jump in the car because a man running with a gun may decide to either shoot a passenger in the car as he runs by with class as motive, or he may decide to hijack the car as a getaway vehicle. Now, I have an active imagination, I will admit that. I also had a reoccuring nightmare for exactly one year as a child, that was me being taken hostage in an airplane. It terrified me, night after night. So it's not so unusual, that I would think hostage and bolt. I ran behind a parked car and dropped to the street. Laying down, hands on head. It was from this position that I could see the NYPD van race past me, and two undercover cars screech in from the other direction and stop about 20 feet away from me, surrounding the first gunman and a second one. I am not even shitting you. In broad daylight, I am in a lace skirt and heels with my faux balenciaga bag, face down behind a car with my hands on my head, watching the police jump out and surround these two with guns drawn and people in apartments above have opened their windows and are screaming, "Get Down!" to the other bystanders who are frozen and just standing there watching as all of this unfolds. The police started moving in, so still crouched down, I moved over to my car and jumped in. I told the driver to go. He had to drive thru the police area. I started dialing work to let them know what happened. So we're crawling through the street - all of these police vehicles are parked every which way - and just as we get to them, this band of screaming, irate, minority folks come whipping around the corner and literally leapt on the cops. The cops were lined up, weapons drawn, and luckily some of the mob actually pulled their people back - obviously understanding that the police were going to shoot at any moment. I slid down to the floor of the car with my phone to my ear as the driver yelled, "It's the blacks against the whites!" and my boss answered the phone, heard that and said, "where ARE you, what's going on?" "Yeah, I've got a situation here," I said. Which is actually really funny, because incidentally, just that morning on my way to work, I was rerouted by the cops because of the UN situation and then told to get out of my car and walk. At which point I got into an argument with a cop - in the middle of a busy midtown intersection - advising him that his people had better find a way to secure the UN without closing down the midtown grid, because they are not doing their job well. And frankly, it's unacceptable and an embarrassment that they couldn't secure a 5 block area without shutting down another ten blocks each way. The cop offered to give me a ride after that...to central booking. I declined and started walking, but dialed into my boss to let her hear the rage. So that covers just about everything *but* work. You can only imagine. I'm going to bed now. I need some rest. I anticipate I'll be in jail or the hospital by Friday. Either way, I'll need to be rested. 9:01 p.m. - 2005-09-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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