I was mugged tonight.

It was about 11pm, and I was walking home from the gym, and for some reason I decided to the Other Route.

I walked down Valencia to 15th instead of 14th, and headed down the block that's supposed to be one of the worst in the city, along the side of the Valencia Street Projects.

It was a beautiful, warm night, and tons of people were hanging out outside. It looked like a few drug deals were being had, but usually no one hassles me. I was wearing my torn up jeans jacket that I bought 13 years ago in high school, my jogging shorts and old Nikes, and my hair was all messy. How the hell could I have looked like a person with money?

I was walking down this one particular block, thinking to myself, "wow, racism is bad." And then I thought about how this block was one of the first things that people warned me about when I moved into my hood, and how mad at me my ex-boyfriend John would be if he knew I was walking down that street, and how my parents would be pissed, and how really, logically speaking, it was a pretty stupid thing to do.

But I made eye contact with one dude who was pretty cute and he smiled at me and I smiled at him and I kept walking, thinking, "well, there are some cute people in the projects."

I was almost at the end of the block, near where the car wash is, when some skinny, hyper dude leapt in front of me and said to me, "Don't move. Don't go anywhere."

I looked at him perplexedly. He was about 5' 9" and weighed maybe 135 pounds, and he did not look like he had a gun, and was not brandishing a knife, and I said, "What?"

And he said, "Don't move. Don't go anywhere. Gimme everything."

I said to him, "Wait, I don't understand."

"Gimme everything!"

But he wasn't screaming and I suspected that he was not armed at all. He tried to keep his right hand in his windbreaker's front pocket, but it looked like he kept forgetting to maintain the mirage.

"Are you mugging me?"

"Yeah, yeah, I am mugging you."

Wow, I thought to myself. I have never been mugged before. This kinda sucks.

"Well, do you have a gun?"

I actually said this. It's the truth, I swear. I am such a gangsta.

"Yeah," he said, and shook his hand around a little, from inside the front pocket of his windbreaker. And I was resisting the urge to push his wimp-ass aside, when from out of nowhere this other skinny dude came up from behind me and poked what was definitely his finger into my back, and not even that hard.

"Yeah, yeah, give us everything," the second one chimed in.

This was getting pathetic.

I pulled out my wallet, and I said, "Ok, ok, you can have my fucking money. But I don't have much of it. And you don't get my cards."

As if I was gonna go to the DMV and wait five hours to get a new drivers' license.

I was pissed because I am not exactly rolling in the dough these days, and betrayed, because the cute guy at the beginning of the block let these ugly guys assault me on the end of the block.

But I gave them my cash, which totaled less than thirty dollars, and told them to go away.

"You have more money than that!" the first one told me.

"I fucking do not," I replied, showing him my empty wallet, save a few friends' business cards.

"Yeah, yeah, okay, okay," he said, and they both ran off.

I walked toward the streetcorner, not even running, turned around, and yelled towards them. "You pathetic losers! You got my money, but you don't have my pride." (Sure it is a cliché, but hell, give me some credit, I did just get mugged!) "You two are the losers for doing that!"

Why bother filing a report?

These skinny kids have enough problems without having the cops go in there and remind them how desperate and lacking in dignity they are.

In the war between good and evil, it is not always who walks away with the goods, but the who deserved them in the first place, and how they were attained.

So I trotted home to write this up. Thirty bucks for a story to tell.

Not a bad deal, really.