We’d ordered some takeout sushi for dinner tonight, and when I walked out to the car to go pick it up, my first indication that something was wrong was an empty Thunderbird bottle set on the ground near the front bumper. I opened the door and saw a pair of legs and boots stretched out in the back. The large, groggy man with a sandy moustache responded incoherently when I told him to get out, and only stirred slightly. One eye was almost swollen shut and he had a crack in his head.

A clean-cut, lean blond man was sitting nearby on a dumpster, and when he saw me walking around the car, opening doors, trying to reason with someone inside, he asked if I needed help. He and a black man managed to get him out, while I went upstairs (ostensibly) to call the cops. I didn’t want to. When I checked the front upstairs window and saw they had him out of the car, I came back down. After I thanked him and before he walked the man away, the blond guy scolded me for “confronting” the man rather than simply going in and calling the police.

This was one of those moments when I wished that, instead of being a small, skinny woman, I was a big man with a ponytail. After they got him out, the blond guy asked me why the car was unlocked. I pointed out that nobody in that SOMA neighborhood who parked on the street kept anything valuable in cars or locked our car doors. The windows would just get smashed.

I can still see that injured man, the state of him, the way he had trouble heaving himself up, could not quite focus his good eye on me. I can still hear his half-pleading voice when those other men told him I was going in to call the police. “But my head’s already broken.”