A Friendly Mugging

Dear Diary:

While walking quickly through the crowded Midtown streets en route to the 49th Street N train, I saw a roadblock on the corner of 50th and 8th, as several guys were selling their CD’s and taking up the whole sidewalk.

I decided to walk behind them, close to the curb, when one of them confronted me: “Man, I can’t you believe you just did that! You walked right behind our store.”

I looked back and realized he was referring to the small foldout table with a white tablecloth that held their various CD’s. I apologized and said I didn’t realize that it was their store.

He said, “Well, for disrespecting us, you gotta buy my CD.”

I looked into his angry eyes and realized that he was just an artist like me trying to sell his music. I asked him how much it was and he said, “Ten bucks.” I took out my wallet and grabbed a 20 when nine other rappers on the corner approached me and said: “You gotta buy ours, too. You disrespected all of us!”

I said, “I only have a 20, so I can only buy from two of you.” The left-out rappers pleaded, “How you gonna buy theirs, but not mine?”

At that point, I said: “You know what I do? I’m a comedian.” I showed them my composition notebook and said, “You see this? These are jokes.” One of them went, “For real?” I said, “Yup, I do the same thing you guys do.”

The rapper said, “He cool,” and let me proceed toward the subway, down 20 bucks.

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