Apr 29 2003
Assman!
Today started out with an extreme compliment. Very. Or a minor assault. You decide.
Given that the swampage at work is of Okefenokee-like proportions these days, I’ve been getting in as early as I can to start the day’s Sisyphean activities. As Winston Churchill said to the Temperance woman who held her hand halfway up the wall and said all the alcohol he had drunk would reach that point: “So little done, so much to do.”
So I left the apartment around 5:00 this morning, which, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, looks approximately the same as midnight. Despite my route to work taking me through money-laden Pacific Heights and Nob Hill to the equally money-laden Financial District, a girl walking alone in the dark needs to keep her wits about her. So I was aware that there was someone walking behind me up the California Street hill, but I wasn’t overly concerned.
I easily outpaced the person walking up hill – I’m so used to it now that it doesn’t even slow me down – but I could tell that he caught up with me when the street flattened out around the Cee-ment Church and the grand hotels. Yet he didn’t pass me, and that made me feel a little weird, so I crossed the street. He followed, and as I approached the Huntington Hotel, he suddenly lunged forward, grabbed my ass, and then ran away like an Olympic sprinter.
It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to feel scared. I just yelled after his rapidly-vanishing figure, “What the hell was that?”, which brought the Huntington’s doorman on the run. He asked me what had happened and I told him. By now I was laughing with relief and absurdity, but the doorman found it no laughing matter. He offered to call the police, but I refused – I couldn’t describe the guy other than what he was wearing – and he was long gone, anyway. He then offered to put me in a cab, but I told him I was OK. He said, “If you need me, you just call”, and gave me his card. What a sweetheart.
I must be having what Fran on Mad About You called “a good ass day”.