Originally Posted by
Bostondevil
Glad you're OK, CD!
As long as we don't count random strangers grabbing my backside or tits on the street (which has happened to me many, many times), I've only been confronted/threatened in public twice. Both times on the T which is what Bostonians call the subway. Boston makes up for it by being the only major city where I have spent significant time where no one has ever grabbed my backside or my tits on the street. I always forget you can't say rhymes with class around here, but tits are OK. I guess it's cause we don't call each other TITS when we're mad.
Durham/Dallas/London/LA/New York/Montreal cannot make that claim. There are others but I don't care to remember them all right now. The first few times it happened, I would get very upset. Then I got mad. Then I realized that these sad, sad men needed help, not help that I was willing to give them, but help nonetheless cause their lives were obviously in the crapper. So, I started yelling, "Get therapy, you need it!" as I kept walking. I've said that to obscene phone callers too.
The two incidents on the T, both in the late '80s: One. There was a young woman on the train with bright pink hair. I was staring at it wondering how long it took to get one's hair that color and if it required bleaching first and what might her natural hair color be and suddenly, angrily, "What are you looking at?" Disturbed from my reverie, I made eye contact and said, after a beat, "Your hair." That ended that.
Two. I had gone to meet my brother at Logan who came for a visit. My car had been stolen and I had not yet replaced it, so we took the T back to my place. While on the Blue Line a young man kicked out the plexiglass window behind my head in an effort to impress me (I think.) It shattered all over me and if it had been actual glass . . . let's just say I am very grateful that it wasn't. I turned to him and said, "Oh great. Breaking things. What would really impress me is if you could put it back together." My brother was terrified. He's like, "Sis, I do not have your back on this." But the guy got off at the next stop. His friends didn't. The MBTA police got on at the stop after that. Everybody on the train pointed to his friends who suddenly didn't know the guy. I saw him again when I got off the train and I was about to march up to an MBTA officer to point him out when my brother stopped me. He convinced me that going on record for one broken T window wasn't worth it. Just because the guy didn't actually hurt me this time, it probably wasn't a good idea to be seen ratting him out. I didn't report him. I can't decide if I regret it or not, but my brother was probably right. Given that this happened not long after my car was stolen (and both within 6 months of moving to Boston), my brother thought that I should move back to Durham. He didn't think Boston was ready for Durhamdevil.