Welcome To Shepherd's Bush, Mind Your Wallet

Hear I am, sitting in my room on my PowerBook after a long day of working on web design work and editing photos, just about to go to bed. It’s 2 AM on a Thursday in London, and just like with most places, the drunks are out wondering the streets. My street is not exempt from drunken crazies and tonight was no exception. Needless to say, when I heard, “GIVE ME YOUR MONEY FUCKER!,” things changed pretty damn fast.

I hop up out of my plush leather work chair (inherited from the Auzzie girls downstairs) and looked out the window three floors down onto the street. There I see a three pack of excessively drunk white guys harassing a sole black dude. The black guy, oddly enough, seemed to have the situation under control and managed to walk off with out much of an ordeal. I took this as a sign that the incident had subsided, and sat back down at my computer for some last minute nightly BitTorrent download obsessions.

Now, here is where it gets crazy. The yelling started again, but this time it was elevated. I quickly jumped up out of my chair and looked down once again onto the sidewalk below. It was the same three white guys, but this time one of them wasn’t doing so well. He was being brutally attacked by the other two parts of the threesome. When I say brutally, I mean it. Fully wound up kicks to the head and groin, as well as full-fledged stomping to the chest and stomach. I watched in fear and shock from my window, not knowing what to do.

My roommate Ben was asleep, seeing as he had to be at work early the next morning, and I debated a second or two before finally deciding to wake him up. (He is quite the heavy sleeper, and even a full on brawl outside seems to get by him at night.) So now we are both on my bed watching out the window as this craziness unfolding.

This is when the knife comes out and my shock turns to panic. Both Ben and I are frantic by now, and we start yelling out the window, not even really saying anything at all, just kind of trying to show we can see them and take some attention off the beaten dude. We did it with a bit of restraint though, most likely out of fear of them coming up and getting us. Which now seems pretty unlikely, but at the time anything could of happened. I finally realized I had my cell phone on the table and I dialed 999 and got the bobbies on the scene.

By this time, it was escalating to fast for any one to handle. The guy on the ground seemed too drunk to get himself up and run, as well as being incapacitated by the many blows to the head. The guy with the knife was swinging it wildly, and the entire time, he seemed more racked with fear then the victim. At one point I though I saw the knife catch the guy on the ground in the forearm. Right about then, the two attackers took off down my street seemingly frustrated by their lack of success, leaving the lone guy to lay motionless in the gutter, right outside my front door.

Intense, oh yea. You can say that again.

After they took off, I ran down three flights of stairs as fast as humanly possible only to be greeted by the other girls that live in the front of the house. Most of them had only heard the commotion, but Emily was in tears out of fear and shock of what she had just witnessed. Good thing she hadn’t seen everything.

When I got outside, the police had shown up and they were helping the guy stand up out of the gutter. At first I thought his face was bloody and mangled, but then I realized it was just dark filth from the gutter he had been laying face down in. He hadn’t been cut on the arm like I had thought, but he definitely had trouble standing up. Could have been the pints, or the blows to the brain, but he wasn’t lookin’ too hot…that’s for sure.

So, there you have it. Welcome to Shepherd’s Bush, London, England. Hope you enjoyed your stay.


B-Nitty on the Spot.