I found a non violent solution....sort of.
Anyways, after about 20 min looking for a cab I realised that I'm pretty much in this place at a very bad time. No one is around, traffic is light, and the only people I do see are really fucking sketchy. So eventually I come by this strung out girl that's probably a cheap ass prostitute. I ask her if she thinks I'll be able to get a cab here or if I should go somewhere else. She tells me that the cabs are all in the downtown core at that time of night to get all the people spilling out of bars, and are probably returning from the runs there. They usually are easier to get in half an hour or so. Great. I'm happy with that news because it means I'm not going to have to walk through some other shady ass streets to get to another place to get a cab.
So I'm like 50 feet away from where I was talking to her and I hear this kind of shuffiling. I turn around to light a smoke and there's this guy walking out of the alley she was standing in. He kind of stops when I turn around. Oh, this is fucking great. So after about a block of this guy walking behind me it seems pretty aparent that he's following me. Apart from myself, I've only seen one other person not completely fucked up on meth, heroin, or crack in the last 30-45 min (not including the cab drivers who lied to me about being off duty and about calling cabs to get me)....and that guy was commenting on how we're idiots for going down there to get cabs.
It's not like I haven't been in worse places it's just that for some reason it seemed really bad last night. There's some dude yelling and chasing another dude, an obvious fight going on in an alley, shit like that and there's no one else around from bars or anything, it's all just the local crack heads.
So after another clock or so of this guy following me I figure that he's either going to try to jump me with a needle or he's going to just price me with a needle. Either way I'm going to lose about $200 or I'm going to get pricked. So, after another min or two I duck into a parking lot to fake taking a piss and sure enough I hear him shuffiling along behind me on the path thing to the lot. So, I reach into my pocket, pull out my work utility knife, flick it to snap the blade and hope he thinks it's a switch blade or something. Well, he got the fuck out of there pretty quickly and I got back onto the street to see him walking back the way he came.
It wasn't neccesarily rash because I pulled out a knife. In that respect it was probably better that I had it in my pocket from carving a tree where we spread the ashes in the day, if I didn't I probably would have thrown a brick at him or something. I wasn't about to let him get close enough to jab me with whatever he may have had. The rash part is I probably should have just kept walking and not let him get anywhere within arms length to me.
It wasn't that bad really, and there's a pretty good chance that he wasn't going to do anything, but I wasn't going to find out the stupid way.
