My first apartment out of college was right on the main drag in downtown Frederick. It was a house that was converted into two apartment units. I shared one of them with a girl I met when I was previously a pedicab driver. She was a hostess at a restaurant then who would give me free food for free rides. The apartment itself was modeled like one of this shotgun-style homes you would find in the south — with every room placed continuously in one straight line, doors in the connecting walls being the sole entry to and exit from each one. My bedroom doubled as the foyer to the main entry of the apartment. The distance between my bed and Market Street being only a small staircase and two doors, each with a single lock.

I don’t remember where I was off to. It was a weekend, and Kevin was still in college across the state. Maybe I was on my way to write in my journal at Cafe Nola. Or to stop by a friend’s house on a Saturday afternoon. Heading to the car to visit my parents, maybe.

As soon as I closed the front door on my way out, with the bed I slept in every night just yards away, I heard someone yelling to me from across the street. It could’ve been any one familiar: college friends who also stuck around after graduation from Hood College, someone I knew from being a bicycle taxi or a working journalist in town for a period.

So I turned around to wave back to what could’ve only have been someone saying a friendly hello.

I didn’t know them, though. There were four of them. One of them was a woman with messy hair. All of their clothes were a bit ragged, full of holes, and they zig zagged a little as they walked – presumably drunk. It honestly might just be the hyperbole of fear talking, as I didn’t spend much time looking at them, but I see a baseball bat resting on one of their shoulders whenever I think of them.

Let’s be real, though. They all have baseball bats

or a gun.

“Hey, you! We know you’re a faggot!” One of them yelled looking directly at me.

I turned and began to walk away without missing a beat, smile immediately sunken, staring only at the ground before my feet. In a panic, I realized I had started walking the wrong direction of where I was going.

And they were following.

I must’ve walked four or five blocks with them trailing me on the opposite sidewalk yelling the ways I should expect to die by their hands.

“We’re going to kill you, you faggot.”

“We have bricks and rope in the car. They’ll never find your body at the bottom of the river!”

Terrified, I began to walk to the nearest friend’s house as they kept on yelling. I texted her on the way to let me in as quickly as possible, and luckily she and her roommate were home, and they got the message right away. Inside, door locked and heart pounding, I told my friends quickly about what is going on. Thuds and clattering emanated from their window panes as these four people threw trash and rocks at the house. I escaped to the bathroom and hugged my knees in the bathtub, shower curtain drawn, because I needed as many locks and physical barriers between me and them as possible.

It is a small town. They may have seen me walking around holding hands with Kevin during one of his weekend visits. They might have seen me around, but they didn’t know me in the slightest.

And they wanted me dead, specifically.

My friend called the police, but the group disbanded and escaped before they could come.

The story kind of fades out from there. I don’t recall the conversation with the cops. I don’t even remember whose house I sought refuge in. The only things I have left from the that day are a sensation of not having a body and the loud ringing noise in my ears that canceled out all other sounds.

At the time, I was about six months into my new job as a case worker for Abilities Network, a statewide disability support agency, via their Frederick County office. Within a month or two, I found an opening for a job with the company in their Baltimore branch, and I got a transfer, which would eventually land me in a cubicle next to Tony’s.

It was here when I learned to do the only thing that would keep me safe throughout the subsequent years.

I left when the moment called for it, even though I really didn’t want to.

****

This is a warped memory due to PTSD, though the framework of the event is still recognizable. I can’t bring myself to write the correction.