This Will Only Hurt a Little(66)
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than we heard a commotion coming up our front steps. Marc jumped up and ran to our front door, which is a huge glass door. On the other side was a man, in his late thirties probably, with a woman who was pulling her hair in front of her face. The man was screaming profanities through the glass at Marc and yelling that he was going to kill him. It was all so chaotic, I got up and waddled into the foyer forcibly saying, “NO! NO! THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
The man looked at me, taking in my sizable figure, and shouted, “My beef isn’t with you, pregnant lady! My beef is with the BEARD!”
I grabbed Marc to pull him away from the glass door. Marc was legitimately trying to figure out what the man was upset about, but it was clear to me that they were cracked out on drugs. They had somehow made it up into the hills from Hollywood and were looking to fuck some shit up and saw our lights on. I was not about to be murdered while eight months pregnant, or worse, have my husband murdered in front of me, leaving our unborn child fatherless before her birth. I called the police on my home phone as the man started pounding on our glass door, screaming that we needed to give him back his car (the most we could ever figure out was that he had parked a stolen car across from our house and it had been towed, which was not our doing, anyway).
“I’m on the phone with the police!” I yelled. “They’re on their way!!!”
“Yeah! You call the police!”
He screamed back at me defiantly as he banged on the door a few more times. I was terrified the glass was going to shatter, but then there was silence. He and the woman were gone. My cell phone rang. I handed the home phone to Marc to stay on the line with dispatch as I picked up my cell phone. It was my neighbor across the street, Johnny.
“Shit! Busy! What’s going on!? Are you guys okay??”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I told him. “Some fucking crazy dude is trying to kill us maybe? Can you see over your fence?”
Just then there was a crazy commotion and screaming from the street.
“HOLY SHIT! Busy! Are the police coming—HOLY SHIT! Oh my God. I’m gonna call you back!”
The lady from dispatch was asking what was happening, but we couldn’t see down to the street from our house.
“MARC!” I said. “Do not go outside!!!”
But of course he did. Because men are dumb. (I’m sorry, that’s a generalization. They’re not all dumb. Just when it comes to things like this.) Eventually, I saw the red-and-blue lights on the street and felt like it was relatively safe to waddle down the steps and talk to the police. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw in the street: a yellow cab with the seats and center consoles ripped out. There was money and change everywhere and also lots of blood. There was an older man, the driver of the cab, holding a rag to his horribly beaten face, talking frantically to the police in a heavy Russian accent, trying to explain what had happened. I had never actually seen someone who’d been beaten up that badly in person. It was truly horrifying. Another police car pulled up, along with several cabs, who apparently the driver had reached out to and were coming to check on their friend. It was chaos and the two perpetrators were nowhere to be found. After a few minutes, the two cabs sped off, followed shortly by one of the cop cars. The other officers stayed to take statements from all of us and then told us to try to go to bed and not worry about it. And to obviously call 911 if they came back. And to HAVE A GOOD NIGHT!
Even with our house alarm set, I barely slept. Marc took a giant kitchen knife and put it next to the bed, but then I made him return it to the kitchen because I was afraid that somehow one of us would end up accidentally stabbed. I tossed and turned all night, sure that the two perps would come back for vengeance against the beard and the pregnant lady. Here I was, my life was just beginning, and I would be murdered in my sleep over a stolen car. A few days later, I got a call from a detective who was assigned to the case.
“Hey! You must have seen the news! Yeah. Those two went on quite a spree. Seems like it started at your house! We may need you to testify, but honestly, them threatening you is the least of their problems, so we may actually get away with just playing your 911 call. The prosecutor will reach out eventually. You sound really distressed on the call.”
We hadn’t seen the news but then we looked it up. They had indeed gone on quite a spree, beating up several more people and eventually successfully stealing a cab that, after a high speed chase, they then crashed into a restaurant, which was thankfully closed, with no one inside. And thankfully, they ended up behind bars, so they didn’t come back to kill us. Yet.
As the summer wore on, I tried to remain cool, both physically and mentally. I was huge. And it was hot. I was roughly the size of a house and had taken to getting on the scale at my doctor’s office backward so I didn’t have to see the number. What I do know is that I was hovering around 140/145 when I got pregnant, and two weeks after the baby was born, when I was brave enough to weigh myself, I was 212. So that’s sixty-seven pounds right there and I’ll bet it’s possible I had lost a solid fifteen to twenty in those first two weeks. It’s always fucking amazing to me what people say to you when you’re pregnant. I mean, the number of people who asked if it was twins, or would say knowingly, “Any day now?” and I was like five months pregnant. One time I was hiking with Candi when I was about six months along and a woman sidled up to us and cut in, “Are you trying to put yourself in labor?! You look like you’re about to pop!”