The only time I managed to talk somebody out of a robbery was through a strange combination of circumstances in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was living with a black social worker, Tony, whose father owned one of the worst bars in the black ghetto. I used to hang out at the bar at night.One night I
met two young black women of the criminal type there and we decided that I
should go home with them. First we stole some wine in a store and dashed right
out into a waiting taxi. When we were in the back seat and had started off, I
asked them how they intended to pay the cab, as I knew they had no money. "Don't
worry," they said, "just wait. Let us take care of it. When we get there, we'll
just knock him down and take all his money." This took me a bit by surprise
since I had never tried mugging a taxi driver before, but I kept quiet, which
is one of the first things I learned to do in America. After a while they came running hack,
looking very upset, and said that I should come quick. We got a room in a motel
and I discovered that they had far more than the ten dollars you usually get
for a "blow job" on the street. I asked them how they got it, but they wouldn't
say. Only later did they tell me about it. It turned out that one of them had
lured the white man into a dark alley, where she did the "job." But then she
had suddenly grabbed a big brick at her side and hit the man over the head. As
he didn't fall down unconscious immediately, she had taken a steel pipe and hit
him in the head again and again until apparently he was dead. Then she took his
wallet and ran back to the other woman, who had stood in the back-ground
watching the whole thing. The thing was that she had felt she might as well
take a hit more than the ten dollars so she could enjoy the night with a shot
of heroin. But as we all three lay there in a double bed in the motel, they
were obviously in anguish; it turned out they were both very religious. For
several hours they prayed, "Oh God, God, please don't let him die!" It was a
nervous, stammering prayer, in between attempts to find a vein to shoot up in.
By the next morning they had already forgotten the whole thing. They worried
more about having overslept so that they were late for church, where they
should have been singing in the choir.
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