I posted this as a reddit comment, but I’ve told the story enough times that I think you guys might like it too:
STORY TIME REDDIT It’s long, and only a small part makes me look like a badass, but people seem to like it so, here we go!
A few years ago: It was early Winter in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was nearly midnight, and I was putting the finishing touches on a take-home midterm in our house’s office area. It was at least -10 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and probably colder. I was about to go to my room and hit the hay when I heard a very loud repeated banging on our kitchen window.
“What the fuck?” I thought (naturally) and looked out the window. What I see is a man, with blood all over his forehead and spattered on his t-shirt, without a jacket of any sort, bawling and begging to be let in, on the door that has a sign on it saying, “THIS DOOR IS FROZEN USE THE OTHER DOOR.”
In retrospect, the sensible thing would’ve been to call the cops. But, I was worried about the guy. I mean, he was bloodied and without a jacket in the freezing cold. So, I made the biggest mistake of the night: I let him in.
I opened the other door (in the office) and called to him until he realized that I was, in fact, letting him in. He entered, and crumpled onto the floor, his back against the wall, and started bawling.
He said that he locked himself out of his house across the street, so he went to his neighbors (who he had never met previously) to ask them for help. He said the neighbors were some hard core drug dealers that thought he was the Popo and beat the shit out of him.
Even at this point, something didn’t feel quite right. I started to get a bit nervous, being around this total stranger by myself, so I woke up my unemployed roommate to back me up. The stranger, who was named “Rand–Randy without the ‘y’,” was finally standing up and we gave him a rag to wipe himself off with. Around this time, the stranger started trying to convince us to let him spend the night on our couch. Of course we were uncomfortable with this, and suggested that maybe we should call the cops instead.
“No, you can’t do that!” he said. He explained to us that he “grew up in LA,” was “fifty-three…no, fifty-four years old” and that if we were to call the cops that the drug dealer neighbors would know we aided him and would start a thug battle with our gang of three Magic-playing nerds.
So, as he started trying to give my first roommate his wallet as collateral (”I’m a Christian, I’m a good man…”), I woke up my other roommate to back us up. Over the next two hours we went back and forth between trying to let him use our phone to call relatives (whose numbers he would forget every time he tried to dial them), trying to convince him that the police or the hospital were his two options (“I grew up in LA”), and getting into group huddles (“What if he won’t leave? Should we call the cops in secret? What if he freaks out?”). Finally he got the idea in his head that, if we took him to the hospital (insisting that the headlights be off while we were in sight of his thugg neighbors) that he wouldn’t be putting us in danger anymore, and he let us drive him to the hospital at around 3:30am. Before we left, I decided to give him one of my extra hoodies. I didn’t want him freezing to death on the cold Alaskan streets, after all. ”I’ll get this back to you” he said, to which I responded on many levels, “No, that’s okay, you keep it!”
Then, while part-way to the hospital, he started laughing maniacally to himself. “What?” we asked.
“I KNOW WHERE THOSE FUCKERS LIVE!” he exclaimed. He continued to tell us how he knew some hard pipe-hittin’ niggers that he could get to roll on their shit. “If about six months later you notice them move, you’ll know why!”
A few days later, my roommate and his girlfriend were eating cereal and drinking orange juice while reading the paper, and she says to me, “Hey, isn’t that your hoodie?” I look outside, and on the railing is unmistakeably my distinctive obnoxious-orange, Cheetos-branded hoodie. That fucker knew where we lived.
Six months later, the people across the street did indeed move out. This was somewhat unnerving until word on the street hit us that, well, it had nothing to do with Rand, and everything to do with a sick relative.
Okay, so the badass part: While Rand was curled up against the office wall, I started to get nervous. So, I went to arm myself, y’know, just in case.
The only decent weapon in our house was this amazing knife–nay, sword–that belonged to one of my roommated. It was fashioned out of an extremely heavy old fourteen-inch long file, with a handle made of Caribou horn. It’s one of the coolest blades you’ve ever seen. It happened to be near the fridge, and, well, I’m always hungry. So, I grabbed an apple at the same time.
So, picture this: A bloodied, sobbing man is sitting against the wall. I’m standing in the doorway, with a huge fourteen inch blade, absent-mindedly slicing up an apple while listening to his tale. “Holy crap I would’ve been scared shitless!,” my housemates later commented.
(Here’s hoping you enjoyed my tale, Reddit.)
In other news: