Last Sunday the wife, my Mom and I made the trip to Riverside California to visit my daughter Melissa, who’s attending the University of California there, UCR. It’s about seventy miles away from where we live in Burbank, and we made the trip in my Chrysler Towne & Country in about an hour or so.
When we arrived at the campus dorms everything seemed to be under standard operating procedure for a UC campus, security was at a maximum for some reason, and we shrugged it off as a reaction to all the shootings across the country at colleges. We picked up my kid, and took off to downtown Riverside for some lunch.
Things seemed a little, err, deserted in downtown Riverside, not a whole bunch of people milling around, kind of spooky. A lot of shops were boarded up tight, obviously out of business, and we only had a few choices for decent places to eat, not wanting to choke down anything from Taco Bell or Mickey D’s.
The first place we stopped at was the Mission Inn, a historical hotel where Teddy Roosevelt stayed back in the early 1900’s. It’s a beautiful ornate building with first-rate dining facilities and the bar was available, but the lunch buffet was $39.00 per person, so to get out of there with four people, drinks, desert and such would have ran us right around a hundred bucks for lunch. Scratch that.
So we wandered around a little in the oddly deserted downtown section of Riverside, until we came upon a Cajun place that looked like the inside of a gymnasium dressing room. It too sported larger than life prices for Cajun delicacies that again, would have cost us a C note easy. And Cajun food gives me gas, so nix to the overpriced overcooked spicy fish and crawdads.
Ah, but right next door was a sandwich shop that seemed reasonable enough, I mean seven fifty for a BLT is a might steep, but we were kind of hungry from all the rolling around, and decided on sandwiches for lunch. I had a BLT that was the consistency of two pieces of cardboard with some bacon and a giant tomato stuffed in between the hardest bread on earth. It was like a sawdust sandwich. Of course they didn’t serve beer, so I had a root-bear that cost $3.50 for a twelve ounce bottle. Man, Riverside was getting expensive.
It was getting to be around three o’clock and the kid was getting tired and had to go back to the dorm to study for a test the next day, so we made our way back to the van, parked about a mile away, next to a park filled with homeless teenagers. I mean a lot of homeless teenagers.
Somehow I got separated from the rest of the family, and found myself alone in my wheelchair, rolling down some alley trying to find the folks. Right about then a homeless girl and some toothless speed freak started following me, and offered to help me cross the street, one of ‘em went to grab the handles on the back of my chair, and I wheeled around quick enough to face them, and politely declined their offer for help.
That didn’t seem to make any difference to these two, because they obviously wanted to help me out of my wallet, my wrist watch, cell phone or my chair. I started to get a little freaked out, and put myself in high gear and began wheeling away as fast as I could, with the homeless couple right behind me, yelling stuff like “SPARE CHANGE?”
Now usually I’m packing heat when I go to a less than desirable place like skid row, or the garment district, because you never know what is going to happen, especially when you’re seen as an easy mark. I didn’t think I needed to pack heat in daytime Riverside, and only had a pocket knife on me, hardly a weapon to persuade my malefactors to back off.
Right about then my wife Amparo, my Mom and daughter came around the corner of this alley, and the homeless found themselves suddenly outnumbered. My wife knew exactly what was going on, and quickly got behind me, between the two crooks and myself, a brave woman. The two homeless types mumbled something about money and scampered off quickly down the alley and disappeared. Phew. That was a close one.
So we dropped the kid off at the dorm, and on the way home decided UC Santa Barbra might be a better choice for next year.
Because evidently Riverside has gone straight down the tubes, another victim of this rotten economy, bad morals, homeless encampments and God knows what else. Like some cheesy sci-fi flick, I expected to see Charlton Heston come skidding around the corner on an old SL350, like in Omega Man.
And if we ever go back there for lunch (a very unlikely proposition at this point) my .380 is going along with us. You don’t bring a pocket knife to a homeless fight.
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