Reply #21

A couple decades ago, I lived in Manhattan and enjoyed going out for a run every now and then. I didn't wear fancy jogging togs, and looked like just another long-haired urban teenage youth at the time in a tee-shirt, sneakers, and bluejeans.

Late one Fall afternoon, I was jogging down the sidewalk next to Central Park on 5th Avenue in the upper 80s, about ten blocks from my father's apartment. Never had a problem before. Not there, not in the burned-out South Bronx, where I had friends.

A yellow cab came to a tire-smoking stop in front of me, and the driver jumped out and started yelling. I stopped in my tracks, and the driver came around the back of his cab toward me.

He was in his 30s, pudgy, and had what looked like an unusual bulge on his wasteband under a windbreaker.

The taxi-driver tried to interrogate me: Why are you running? Where have you been? What are you doing here?

I told him, "I enjoy running. It's a public sidewalk." He said I didn't look like a jogger. I told him I don't wear running clothes, and it was none of his business where I live, or what I'm doing. He eyed me. I looked at his middle. I felt vulnerable. I knew the next thing I had to say would make a difference.

"Do I match the description of someone who just committed a crime nearby?" I asked.

"No."

"Look, buddy. Either you call the cops or I will," I told him. This was long before cellphones. I had no way to call the cops, unless one happened to drive by.

He got back into his cab and roared off into the dusk of another night on patrol as the Guardian of Manhattan's Upper East Side. My Taxi Driver.

I know something of the fear that Trayvon Martin must have felt that night a month ago. The difference was, I'm white. And, I was lucky.