The Body Cannot Travel Where the Mind Has Never Been

“No, I’m not getting in the car with you. If you want to shoot me, go ahead. But I’m not getting in that car.”

Everyone has – or should have – a line they won’t cross. For me it is this: I’m unwilling to allow my person to be transported by force to another location where thugs can do God knows what to me. I don’t care if someone draws a gun on me and orders me to get in their car. No, I’m not getting in your car. I won’t be under your power in that way. You can shoot me first. That is one line I won’t cross. I have thought it through.

The body will not go where the mind has never been. If you have never given deep thought to what you will do in a personal safety crisis of one sort or another – and if you have no experience with it – you will struggle to know what to do when it actually happens. A criminal approaches with a weapon to rob you? You are in a convenience mart when someone wearing a mask and holding a gun walks in? Some deranged individual starts shooting or stabbing randomly at people near you? A man threatens to sexually assault a woman – or actually lays hands on her? Someone out in public gets in your space and says inappropriate stuff to you? They threaten you? Even after you tell them to go away, they won’t? What are you going to do? How will you act? – each of these dangerous situations is worth thinking about at length.

These questions have relevance to me more than most because I am a father of daughters. And here are two specific examples of how I have tried to help my daughters grow up better able to manage threats to their person:

Some two years ago I was with my 16-year old daughter near the Government Center in Ventura, California. I was in line at the Chipotle restaurant at 1145 S. Victoria Avenue, while my daughter went three doors down to the Blenders in the Grass to get a smoothie. Suddenly my phone rang and I heard my daughter say a few terse words which I had difficulty understanding. I did understand that she was scared. I immediately left the restaurant and went some 100 feet to where my daughter was. There I saw young-ish African American guy with a backpack talking to my daughter. “Yes, yes, I would give you beautiful babies. Beautiful babies!” he said with a big smile on his face to my obviously afraid daughter. This guy was totally under the influence of some drug. I would bet a fair amount that he had been recently released from the county jail across the street, and was now homeless and loitering in this Blenders in the Grass store because he was high and had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. There he encountered my daughter.

As I entered the restaurant I saw a lady customer ask my frightened daughter, “Is this man making you uncomfortable?” I was thankful to her. I then positioned myself between this homeless guy and my daughter. “Scram, loser! This is my daughter!” I said loudly. An irate father protective of his daughter is a spectacle that penetrates even fentanyl-addled brains. He got the message and gambled away slowly out of the place, that shiteating smile still on his face. My daughter was seriously shaken, on the verge of tears.

But this was very much a teachable moment for her. She and I had a number of subsequent meetings about how a situation like this could be handled better next time. “Tell the guy loudly, ‘Back off!’ ‘Leave me alone!’ ‘Stay away from me!’” Put your hands up in a defensive posture and take a step back. Make sure others can see what is happening. Ask for help from bystanders. Call the police, or ask someone else to do so. If you really feel you’re in danger, turn around and flee. Run as if your life depended on it! But remember your cell phone is your link to help. If you can get any kind of message to the authorities, the clock starts to tick for help to arrive. Call the police. Then call me. Or at least send an emergency text message quickly. Do whatever you need to do to save yourself. You are not helpless. Think. Then act.

I play-acted a similar situation with my older daughter. I got in her space and confronted her. I had her reply loudly and boldly for me, the aggressor, to respect her person and wishes. “What will you do?” “What about if this or that happens?” Next time something like this happens, I am semi-confident she will be better able to think it through and act to protect herself. Getting upset, freezing up, and crying quietly was not getting the job done. But a person is not born knowing how to act in such a situation. Experience is a good teacher, and then thinking it through and understanding what is happening is key. “The body cannot travel where the mind has never been.” Moving forward, my older daughter has experience and has thought through how to deal with sketchy aggressive homeless people. She is in a better position than she was before.

It is something one might easily learn in the City of Ventura, California. The homeless situation is nowhere as bad as in neighboring Los Angeles, or up north in San Francisco or Oakland, but there is a sizable homeless population in the area, nonetheless. In Ventura there have always been homeless around downtown and near the beach, but in the last decade the homeless are also to be seen on the east end in the housing developments there, too. This all too often is part of the enraging dynamic of coastal California: super-expensive real estate prices for very modest properties, with a homeless dude taking a shit twenty yards away on the street corner. 

The City of Ventura has historically struggled with its indigent population. This is partly because the city houses the County Jail on the corner of Victoria Ave. and Telegraph Ave., right next to where my daughter’s incident took place. Vagrants are driven in by police from cities all over the county to the central jail here, and then they are eventually released out into the neighboring streets. They linger there, at least for a while. In addition, there is also the Ventura County Medical Center nearby. The severely mentally ill from all over check themselves into the VCMC, or the authorities bring them there involuntarily, and later the patients are discharged into the surrounding neighborhoods. As a result, in the City of Ventura there are more than the usual homeless types in the city limits, often drug addicts or mentally ill – people who have nowhere else to go. It has been this way for decades. Homelessness is one of the things I have always disliked about the City of Ventura, and it has gotten worse in the past decade, as it has in most of the rest of California. Homelessness gives the area a tawdry, disreputable feel. And while most homeless people are not dangerous, some certainly are.

But I have also always thought that “a bit of dirt is good for a kid.” My older daughter having had some experience with sketchy assholes on the streets is a good practice for later when as an adult she might encounter the same – and without her dad right next door to help. My daughter can develop a modicum of “street smarts,” and that is no bad thing to carry around with you in the world. This Blenders in the Grass incident can prove a prophylactic for future incidents – or, at least, my daughter will take more efficacious action than freezing up and growing teary. If something like this happens again, she has been in this situation before. She knows how it goes. My daughter can think more clearly. Then she can act more decisively.

I also bought my older daughter pepper spray. I urged to carry this less-than-lethal weapon in her purse. Especially at night time around the beach area downtown. I showed my older daughter how to use the canister, pointing and spraying it straight at a threat – “bless the deserving with the hot sauce.”

A similar situation took place also with my younger daughter. This summer I dropped her off near her at a coffee shop on Main St. across from Ventura High School. We were a bit early for her Thai boxing class, and my daughter wanted to read for a bit before walking up to the nearby boxing gym. I urged her to go to her gym and just hang out and socialize for a few minutes, but she wanted to go to the coffee shop. So I dropped her off at Café Ficelle at 2126 E. Main St, as she had requested. I then drove to the nearby Pierpont Racquet Club where I myself had a tennis match scheduled.

This is what happened next, according to my younger daughter: an older guy, maybe 50-years old, also African American, sat down next to her at a table outside. He then struck up a conversation. “How old are you?” “What are you doing here?” “Are you a runaway?” My younger daughter had with her a large duffle bag with her boxing gloves, hand wraps, head gear protection, shin guards, mouthguard, etc. in it. He probably thought she might be a homeless teenager with all her possessions in that bag.

When I heard later that this guy had asked if my daughter was a runaway, alarm bells rang furiously in my head. I recognize that predators often specifically target prostitutes and homeless kids. They conclude, often rightly, that such people make good victims. Sex workers and runaways are hesitant to call for help from the police, for obvious reasons. They live on the margins of society, and all too often nobody is looking out for them. A predator who targets vulnerable young people is not going to come face-to-face with an irate father ready to kick his ass in five minutes. So predators gravitate towards runaways.

Was this guy profiling my teenage daughter?

Or maybe he was just making small talk? Trying to help?

I dunno.

But still.

My younger daughter, 15-years old at the time, started crying. She asked him to leave her alone, and he didn’t. She finally grabbed her boxing stuff and proceeded to walk the half mile to her gym. The homeless guy followed her, continuing to talk to her. I was happy to hear that a mother and teenage son passing by did approach my daughter, and asked her if she needed help. “We’re Christians,” my daughter told me they said to her, as if those words made them more trustworthy. So there is the scene: my teenage daughter walking down Main St. with her boxing bag and tears in her eyes, and this homeless guy following and trying to talk to her.

By the time my daughter arrived at the Pu’u Muy Thai Boxing academy and at 2024 E. Main St. location, the homeless guy chose to make himself scarce. A full grown man walking into a boxing gym and hectoring a teenage girl in front of her fellow fighters would risk getting himself physically ejected at best, seriously beaten up at worst. It is hard to think of a more foolhardy course of action. So I suspect that the homeless guy decided to go somewhere else. I never saw this man myself. All I have are my daughter’s words on the matter. 

The instructors at the Muy Thai boxing gym saw my daughter’s tears. They inquired as to what was wrong and what had happened. My daughter told them the story. So I got a phone call from the owner, Jonathan Pu’u, explaining to me what my daughter had told him. Jonathan urged my wife and I to file a police report. 

I sat down and had a serious conversation with my younger daughter – a number of serious conversations, actually. This was a “teachable moment,” and I was convinced she should learn from it. The whole situation alarmed me, to put it mildly. I asked her why she had not called the police. She replied, “I did not want him to get in trouble.” I explained to her that the police probably would not have arrested the homeless guy, but they could have made him leave her alone. And that guy might have been dangerous, had warrants, on parole, etc. The police might have had other complaints about him. The police could arrive, take charge of the situation, make sure it was safe, and then go from there. “That is the job of the police. It is what they get paid to do,” I explained to her. I urged my daughter to call the police if she felt unsafe in the future. I told her it was better to be safe than sorry. “You have a cell phone that your parents pay for you to have. Use it to call the police, if you feel unsafe. Please.” I suspect the lesson will stick and my daughter will remember it for next time, because she had been scared.

But one thing is for sure: panicking quietly and crying softly does not improve the situation. It is the precise opposite of understanding exactly what is happening in a crisis and then taking decisive action.

Again, a person is not born knowing how to respond to a stressful (and possibly violent) encounter like this – a touchy moment where things could take a dangerous turn. But my hope is that next time such a similar incident happens, my younger daughter will be ready. She can better navigate the situation. She is too young to have pepper spray in her possession, even with parent permission, but I will get her some when she turns 16-years old. I will walk her through similar situations and ask her, “What are you going to do now?” I will role play and physically get her in personal space and guide her through the proper response. “What is the best thing to do in this situation, beloved daughter mine?” I will try to help her grow up with some street smarts. The body needs to take action, but it is the brain which directs the body. “Don’t panic. Think. Take action.” Don’t freeze up. “What exactly is happening here?” “Therefore what should you do next?” Everything comes from the initial question and the requisite action. There are sketchy fuckers all over Ventura, California – the crystal meth dudes with backpacks riding their decrepit bikes around, the semi-homeless living in the cheap Motel 6 rooms on Harbor Blvd., rented out by the county to the indigent. It would be good to learn how to navigate them safely, if you live in the area.

So it goes. It is an often dangerous world. The ability to know the lay of the land, and to avoid hazardous people and places, is super helpful in adult life. So as a father I would try and use “teachable moments” to better prepare my daughters. If I can as a dad, I would make myself redundant. In short: I would teach my daughters how to take care of themselves, so their daddy doesn’t have to. I won’t always be around. But my daughters are not helpless. Far from it. They are more able and mature everyday. They have had important painful lessons in boundaries and safety on the Ventura city streets, and I have tried to help them learn from them. My daughters need to be able to learn how to take care of themselves – to be ready and capable for what might come their way next.

With a bit of luck maybe it might work out that way – that my daughters become competent, confident, capable, yet still charitable and humble young women. Street savvy. Without becoming hardened and mean. Nobody’s fool, nobody’s bully.

Amen.