I GREW up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s funny; people who have never been to Jersey City in their lives will often assume that it must be a crime-ridden shithole — and especially so during the 1970s — simply because they hear the word ‘Jersey’ in there (twice, even!). Or because they’re racist asshats and Jersey City is very diverse, that is also a possibility, yes.
I am here to tell you that Jersey City was a great place to grow up. I was a pretty free-range kid, and roamed the streets at all hours and never once got abducted or knifed or forced to kill innocent tourists as part of an elaborate gang initiation rite.
Of course, I was a very soft, eyeglass-wearing child. It’s possible the gangs simply didn’t want me.
Anyways, none of this is to say that Jersey City was a paradise. It had (has) it’s bad areas, and I did have several brushes with crime during my formative years. I once got a brand new Huffy dirtbike for my birthday, and about three days later while I struggled to ride it ON TRAINING WHEELS two teenagers came over, casually pushed me off, and stole it. Once, when my friends and I were hanging out in a park about one block from my house, we were accosted by a group of older kids who made off with my one friend’s leather jacket. Shit happened. It’s a city, after all.
But I’m not here to talk about those minor brushes with crime. I’m here to talk about the most polite mugging ever.
Road to Nowhere
When I was maybe 12 or 13, my friend and I went to the 440 Mall, probably to see a movie and/or play video games at the huge arcade that once resided there. It’s weird to Present Day Jeff (aka Very Very Aged Jeff) how important malls were to Young Jeff; much energy and time was spent scheming on how to get to a mall and how to fund those excursions.
Coming home, my friend and I got on the wrong bus. By the time we realized we were going away from home, we were in an unfamiliar and kind of scary-looking section of town. We got off in a panic, got ourselves oriented, and began walking back to the bus depot through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. This is when I experienced the most polite mugging of my life.
A group of older kids surrounded us and began walking with us and chatting us up. They offered us cigarettes, inquired after our health, and then calmly threw us up against a wall and began searching our pockets. To say I was petrified would be an understatement. I’d watched television. I knew how these muggings ended. I prepared for death.
I remember I had a Velcro wallet with a camouflage design, because I was 13 and Velcro wallets were cool.
The kids, upon discovering that we had nothing but pocket lint and dreams between us, helped us up, dusted us off, returned our Velcro wallets and told us, cheerfully, that we were lucky because we had nothing worth stealing. Then they happily offered us directions and waved as they walked off.
I’m not making any of that up. They almost made me feel cheerful about being robbed. What’s interesting to me is that my brushes with criminals have always been kind of weirdly polite, while my interactions with police have always been negative and stressful. Weird, that.