Don't go LEFT!

"Don’t go left".

"Keep to the right".

Left is bad, right is good.

Well, it had been a long day and it was dragging, so I went left.

Should have gone right, in retrospect, as I had been instructed. You live and learn, or you hope to anyway. The learning is down to you, the living can be down to someone else entirely. Someone you may not have even met yet.

Left was not looking as bad as I had been led to believe, so I kept on going. “Left is BAD”. The words stayed with me, but their meaning ebbed away with each successful step forward. After a considerable amount of leftward steps I decided Left was not as exciting as I had hoped it would be, so I stopped, looked about at nothing much happening, turned around fully expecting my day to continue dragging… but slower now I had exhausted the possibilities of Left. Right was not even worth considering. Still, I had to cover some amount of right just to get back to where I was… in the middle between the two.

My problems began as soon as I stepped right. So, when you think about it, Left was a doddle, it was right that was the clincher. Left was fine. Right was bad. Life is so full of these unexpected twists.

One step rightwards and further up the road someone began shouting at someone. Mates mucking around. More steps right. More shouting, a little louder, a little more animated. Right 2, 3, 4. Although I was walking right, I wasn’t particularly looking right. So I did, I looked right towards the shouting, which was louder. Louder not as I was closer to it, but because it was louder. Perhaps they weren’t mates mucking about. Perhaps someone was in trouble. It saw 4 men who were shouting. They were shouting leftwards. (“Left is BAD”). Someone left of them seemed to be the focus of their attention. I was left of them. They were right of me. Right ahead. Still there were many people between me and them. Actually, now I was looking right, do you believe there was no one between me and them. There had been moments before, but not any more. Soooo, that meant they were shouting at someone behind me. I gave a casual leftward glance back over my right shoulder, just to see who they were angry with. And they did seem, from this closer distance, to be really very angry. Do you know what? There was no one behind me either. Actually not one person. They were all gone. I knew they had been there as I had walked passed them just moments ago.

No one. At all. Me.

Obviously an error has occurred. “Don’t go left!” I wondered what this error was.

I kept walking right, towards the angry men. I had never met them, and they me so everything would be fine. Sometimes people don’t want fine. I do. Others don’t. These men, who were to my bemusement, apparently angry at me, were the types not to enjoy ‘fine’ in its many forms. I walked along the empty footpath, rightwards, and crossed a side road which now put me firmly on the same section of pavement as them.

They liked this strip of concrete to the extent they felt protective of it. A little over protective if you ask me. This was clear by the shouting and some of the names they had decided upon for me, which I felt were somewhat unfair as already stated, we were not previously acquainted. The names and the knives. The knives were a tipping point from my perspective. A critical moment where I decided that, despite our previous unfamiliarity, things were about to become extremely personal. They were also running at me pretty much as hard and as fast as they could.

Left is Bad, Right is Bad. I had no time to decide. What I did decide was to leg it. Straight across the busy main road to where all those people previously on my straight of footpath had been. I expect they were probably pretty annoyed that I was joining them on their side. I didn’t feel I had much time to ponder this let alone begin to apologise to them all. Particularly individually. Especially when the 4 angry men were much nearer and saying, not very nicely, how dead they would like me to be and what method of said dispatchment they preferred.

I ran between the cars. There was honking. I seemed to be annoying the drivers as well. It can be hard to please everybody. On this evening, the Left evening, I was apparently unable to please anyone. As I was running between the moving annoyed cars I was scared. 4 angry men were close behind me and were for reasons unclear to me, undertaking a course of action which was to lead to my death. Scary. At the same time, a voice in my mind said “this is pretty cool, I told you to go Left”. How Hollywood. I was, after all in America.

I hit the far pavement running almost as fast as I could, and then sped up a little more. There was a small side alley. It was night time and the alley had very poor lighting. Only the occasional small sodium bulb at the rear entrance of one of the cafes or dinners. I ran up the dark alley. Why did I do that? I wondered this as I ran. Fast. Really quite dark and a quick glance over my shoulder revealed the angry men had not yet reached the entrance. I expect they were not as nimble through the traffic. I was motivated. They were angry. My stakes were higher. Any moment they would be across the main road and level with my dramatically lit alley. There was a chance they had not seen me enter it, as they had run across the main road at a rightward diagonal to the side street, so I had a brief period where the view of the soles of me feet was obstructed.

If I kept running they would look up and see me. In the alley. I have seen films. All alleys are dead ends. Aren’t they. Best to assume they are. Should have assumed that before running up one. Committed now. Based on this process of reasoning I stopped and hid amongst a pile of trash and boxes out the back of a Pizza place called Marco’s. Marco’s did not have a light and relied upon the radiant glow of his bill paying neighbours. Marco’s had a light, but it was smashed, like most of the other lights in the alley. It was dark where I was and the sound of my stillness and the shout of my breathing seemed revealingly loud to me. I waited. I listened. I heard a voice. “Left is BAD!!!”. That was in my head but I heard it non the less. Louder now though.

I waited for 45 minutes, just in case they knew it was a dead end and were patiently rehearsing the moment they would strike as I stepped out into the light of the side street. I waited 5 minutes. 45 was an exaggeration. It did feel like 45 though. I tentatively peered out from beneath a stack of greasy half flattened pizza boxes and one of Marco’s larger discarded oil tin boxes. No angry men. No knives. No immediate threat of death. I stood in the alley. Left or Right.

I continued right until I was back in the middle. Where I had started. Strangely, just as I arrived, so did the sheriff and his boys, who arrested the 4 angry men, who had gone back to the middle to find me, who were in the midst of a street fight with two bouncers swinging a chair and a heavy, well used and slightly stained, wooden baseball bat.

The men were cuffed at gunpoint and taken away, in the back of the two sheriff cars. All because I went LEFT.

Soon YOU will go left or right. Very soon. That Left or Right will be the next determining action setting a course for the rest of your life.

Left or Right.

Choose well.