Ammo Grrrll draws on a favorite HBO series for THE FOLLOW HOME. She writes:
When you have lived long and prospered as I have, among the many things you learn is that “crime” is not what it was in your childhood. If you live in a small enough town, “crime” per se is almost impossible. A thief cannot steal your car because everybody KNOWS what car everybody in town drives. In fact – no really, this is true! – we kept our keys IN the car.
Naturally, we had no subway on which a deranged homeless person could set a hapless passenger on fire. In fact, we had no homeless persons. Anybody who had mental issues went for a voluntary stay at Fergus Falls Mental Hospital. And failing that, an involuntary stay.
So crime was a distant peril. Not that I wasn’t worried about it. I was a Professional Adolescent Worrier. One time when I was 11 my parents were out playing bridge for the evening and I was babysitting my two younger sibs, ages 5 and 2. News came on the radio that a couple of convicts had escaped from prison in California, barely 2500 miles away!
I did what any self-respecting babysitter who was super-responsible but somewhat high-strung would do: I made a bed in the bathtub for the two little ones and locked the bathroom door – the only internal door with a laughable lock — and stood watch over them with a baseball bat. Our parents got home at 10:00 and were not quite as proud of my vigilance as I had hoped. “Concerned” was a word I remember hearing.
Much later, Joe/Max and I lived in Minneapolis, California of prison-break fame, and even for a few weeks in New York City itself. Rita Rudner, an ’80s woman standup, had a great line about New York in her early comedy set (paraphrasing from memory): “I wake up every morning in New York and think, ‘Well, at least I wasn’t SLAIN.’” SLAIN was a very popular verb in the headlines of the seamier New York tabloids in the 70s.
So Crime marched on and mutated like a lab-created COVID virus. Home invasion, carjacking, identity theft, BLM-permitted looting, phishing – anything but working. And now a new wrinkle, at least to us. Which usually means it’s been around for at least 10 years.
Joe/Max and I – and our evening TV-watching buddy, the Paranoid Texan Next Door – just finished the final season of the HB series Bosch. I don’t want to create too may spoilers, but one of the threads in the series is a criminal enterprise run by a pretty Mexican Girl Boss and two Lame-os in her orbit. This new twist on armed robbery was called “The Follow Home.”
A ringleader – in this case the pretty girl who had appropriate clothes and looked rich enough to pass – would go to an upscale restaurant and observe couples dressed expensively and sporting jewelry and watches high-end enough to make a Rolex look like a Timex.
It goes without saying that none of the three of us had even heard of most of the desirable brands. As my decades-ago comedy colleague, Jeff Cesario said, asking why a rich person would waste all that money on a high-end timepiece: “Dude, If you can afford to spend that much money on a watch, you can afford to be LATE.” Point taken.
Anyway, when the rich couple gets ready to leave, the ringleader texts her accomplices, they pick her up and follow the couple home where they pull in behind them before they get to open their garage door. Masked up worse than Taylor Lorenz years after COVID, they shove guns in their faces, take their wallets, cellphones, jewelry, watches, and purses. Nice.
And it caused me to imagine a scenario where miscreants followed US home from our usual restaurant choice, the Plaza Bonita, a lovely family restaurant, albeit a chain, run by efficient, friendly, polite Mexicans who actually appear to appreciate your patronage.
You have to be TRYING – drinks, desserts, extra guac – to break $50 for two people. So the first problem with my little fantasy is that the restaurant would not be upscale enough for Follow Home Criminals. Plus, they would NEVER choose us! We wear no jewelry, no watches, and I reluctantly own a $25 Walmart purse since my trusty Fanny-Pak fell apart.
Second, even if I were dripping with bling, what kind of idiots would select a woman wearing a t-shirt that says “I don’t fear guns. I fear a government that fears guns”? On top of that, the answer to the old Mae West joke, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” would cause the more prudent Follow Homer to worry which was the case with that tall fella with the curly hair.
Third, the Follow Homer would not be able to get INTO our subdivision without a transponder on his vehicle. Now I have no doubt that fake universal transponders exist. Whatever law-abiding people will invent, criminals will circumvent. But that brings us immediately to another problem: we are SENIORS. We eat EARLY. I don’t mean a little bit early. I mean between 4:30 and 5:00 to “beat the rush.” Which means it would be broad daylight when we were followed home, even in the dead of winter! Not an ideal time to be leaping out of vehicles, sporting weapons, in a Gated Geezer Enclosure with 911 on every Speed-Dial.
Arizona is a Constitutional Carry gun-friendly state. Any Arizona criminal, even unaware my sobriquet was “Ammo Grrrll,” would know that odds were decent that he could be outgunned. Once at a busy gas station, a dispute arose over who got which pump. Two guys got out of their vehicles and huffed and puffed at each other in front of The Paranoid Texan who was there as well. He heard one say, “I have a gun,” and the other respond, “So do I,” and he decided that he didn’t really need gas right then and got the heck out of there.
Lastly, I imagine a conversation ensuing like this:
Follow Homer: “Crap! Your car is twelve years old, and you aren’t wearing any jewelry. At least give me your cellphone, [witch]!”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“That’s crazy. You’re lying, [witch]! EVERY woman carries her cellphone.”
“Well, I don’t. It’s new and I hate it and it came with a ringtone I hate and I don’t know how…”
“Please shut up now. What did you do at the restaurant without a cellphone?”
“We ate joyfully and conversed.”
And just when the criminal fell down in a faint to learn that such a restaurant option existed, the PT, a one-man Neighborhood Watch with a lot of time on his hands, came up behind him with the RPG he had ordered yesterday off Amazon. He is a personal friend of Jeff Bezos due to his daily order of cat accoutrements for our feral cats. He has Super Dark Amazon Prime Same Day Delivery! The Abrams tank (not Stacey) arrives in an hour. Follow THIS, suckas!
