Nearly Stabbing a Stranger … with a Ballpoint Pen

I once traveled for a few weeks with a guy who’s life motto was, “Every day, do one thing that scares you.”

I’m kinda down with that … so long as you change ‘day’ to ‘month’ and balance it inwardly as well. I think sometimes the scariest moments in life are just confronting your own thoughts. And, really … who has time to jump out of a stupid plane three times a week?

This idea of upping one’s adrenaline gets tossed around in conversation with my friends who are compulsive travelers as well, and I find the discussion of facing what scares you gets particularly interesting among female travelers. Because here’s what a guy with biceps, a 6-foot-something frame and an actual set of testicles could never really understand. Just traveling alone as a female fulfills the quota of doing something every day that scares you.

Don’t get me wrong. I view the world as a very approachable ball of dirt and water. Our media and government have dealt an unfair tourism slap to many places. Take the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Cambodia, for instance. All safe. All filled with lovely people. Your fellow humans generally aren’t out to get you. I’m more than happy to hop a solo flight to the jungle and 99-percent of the time, the locals always seem ready with a smile and a fist bump. Nothing more, nothing less.

Last night, I woke up around 3:30am. Jet Lag and I get along quite well. I wrote for a bit, and around 5:30, I decided I would head for the Penang Hill Railway station to take the train up the side of the mountain. It’s a nearly 90-degree ascent, and the 6:30am train will land you at the summit just prior to sunrise. The railway station is located in Bukit Bendera, roughly 20 minutes by taxi from my hotel.

I wandered around the historic district of cute Penang until I noticed a group of men standing by two taxis. Here’s what I mean, guys. As a normal human in every day life, you would look at the cabs. Then look at the men leaning on them. You would say, “Oh … there are some taxi drivers.” When traveling as a girl, I have to say, “Huh? Are they taxi drivers? Are they just men leaning on taxis? Did they just paint ‘taxi’ on the side of those Toyotas? Are they serial killers pretending to be taxi drivers?”

It was early. I said these things to myself, but maybe not hard enough. Maybe the blame isn’t on me, and I’m just having some weird after reaction? I’m not sure.

Anyways, I explained that I wanted a taxi to Penang Hill. There was fast chatter in a language I don’t speak. There was a thin, dark-skinned Indian man, with two large scars up the sides of his face. He says, “Yes, I will take you.”

Right now, if you’ve never  traveled in Southeast Asia, you are possibly shaking your head in disbelief that I would just wander up to a group of men and assume they were licensed cab drivers.

If you have traveled in this part of the world, you are wondering why I didn’t just hop on a stranger’s motorcycle and head off with an ill-fitting helmet for the agreed upon price of a dollar.

That’s how things work here. You get in cars all the time that aren’t officially cabs. Hell … half the official cabs are pre-1970 scrap heaps with ‘cab’ painted on the side. You take rides on the back of mopeds for what amounts to American couch change, and everyone generally gets to their railway stations just fine.

If you insisted on a real taxi every time you needed to get somewhere or on an actual car instead of a motorcycle … you’d be stranded at least once per day for at least three hours. Call an actaul cab? Nope. That’s not a thing over here.

I wanted to see the sunrise over the mountain. Time was ticking. I got in the front seat, and we began chatting. He told me his name, and that he was from Northern India originally. Things seemed on the up-and-up. He asked me about President Obama. That’s when we ran the first red light. Again, if you’ve traveled here, this is pretty common. Especially early, when there are no cars on the roads. He sped up and swerved aggressively around a bus. I checked my seatbelt and asked him to slow down. He cranked up Miley Cyrus on the stereo and sped up. We ran a second red light.

I realized he was either drunk or high. He was now also waving his hands around, leaving the wheel unattended for horrifying stretches.

“Pull over,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of him at this point, more just upset about being in a car with an intoxicated driver.

“We are taking short cut. Why you don’t believe me?!” (Hands leave the wheel again. Car almost leaves the road.)

“I do believe you, but I think you’ve been drinking sir. Please. Stop the car. I will pay you, but I want to get out now.”

We were leaving the town behind at this point, and sleepy guesthouses were vanishing, replaced by shuttered fruit carts and long stretches of rocky roadside shoulders, littered with broken bottles and bits of plastic.

“Look. See that gas station? Pull in there. I want to get out. I will pay you the full amount. No problem.”

He slammed on the gas, veered around a truck and ran the third red light. We shot past the gas station.

At this moment, my stomach did that thing it does when you get life-or-death scared. Stomach is all “Screw this noise. I’m outta here. I’ve just liquefied. See how well you hold up now, brain. Why did you put all our organs in this stupid car? Oh God! Vagina is in here too?! Dammit, brain!”

I’m making this sound funny now. But at the time, I really was as scared as I’ve ever been. The whole scenario seemed headed in that direction no woman likes to think about. Much like my stomach, I wish I’d left my female bits back home. Inside of a safe. In an aquarium, guarded by sharks.

While continuing to demand that he pull over, I shoved my passport and credit card into my back pocket. I took out the cash we’d agreed upon for the ride and dug around in my bag for anything sharp. It came down to a ballpoint pen and the keys to my room. I slid the room keys between my fingers, facing outwards. The pen I wrapped my entire hand around, pointy part out. Unless I somehow figured out a way to McGuyver a ballpoint into a bomb in the next 15 seconds, it was all I had.

“SIR, YOU’RE DRUNK. PULL OVER!! NOW!”

He began slurring and swearing under his breath about how Americans never trust Indians … about how we hated them. My hands were shaking, and my heart felt like it was something I needed to throw up in order to breathe normally again. I checked my seatbelt and stared at the emergency brake. I cobbled together a quick plan that went something like this:

Wait for him to slow down a bit when we aren’t on a curve.

Yank the emergency brake.

Unbuckle and bail out. If he comes after me, stab him in the eye or the throat with the pen.

Could I actually do this? Stab a stranger with a Bic pen?? Hell if I know. No one knows if they could or could not shove a pen into another person’s trachea until they actually have to shove a pen in someone else’s trachea. I was raised by Presbyterians in Alabama, not the Taliban. No one discussed defending yourself with an everyday object in my youth.

I did know one thing at that moment. I had yelled at the top of my lungs to let me out of the car and he’d sped up. As upsetting as it was, it was time to assume that I was being kidnapped and move forward with fixing it. My policy is: If you’re gonna kidnap me, I’m going to fight you. I’ll likely lose. But violence will be exchanged.

I screamed again, this time directly at the side of his face. “PULL OVER! LET ME OUT!”

He swung the wheel hard, and we careened onto the gravel shoulder. I threw the money at him and was out of the door before he even came to a complete stop. There was an older gentleman about 200 yards away, opening the garage doors to his hawker-stall restaurant off the freeway, and I ran towards him yelling for help.

And then shit got even weirder.

The driver got out of the car. He was waving his hands all around and slurring that he had only wanted to take me to the train. The Chinese man, who I would later learn was Mr. Lin (or as I like to think of him – Chinese Bruce Willis), stepped in between us. “You need to leave,” he said to the guy. “She is upset. Leave. Just go.”

After a final minute of very scary tense awkward arguing, the driver got in his car, and completed a crazy-ass U-turn. Barely escaping cremation by an oncoming bus, he disappeared from my life forever.

I didn’t realize how badly I was shaking until Mr. Lin turned to me and said, “Did he touch you?”

I looked at him blankly. “What?”

“Did he touch you? I will call the police. Should I call them?”

I suppose I looked as though I had been assaulted. I assured him that I was fine. He sat me down and offered me coffee in his still-closed restaurant. I felt like I could have scaled the building with the amount of adrenaline I had going on. “Sure,” I said. (Coffee is never something I turn down.)

Mr. Lin and I hung out for almost an hour. When no other cabs passed by, his wife offered to take me to the train on her moped. It was just another few miles down the road, and I realized the crazy, drunk Indian man was taking me the right way all along.

Mrs. Lin and I arrived as the sun was rising. I tried to pay her, but she refused. On this flight now, headed to an island off the northern part of Peninsular Malaysia, I’m still thinking about the situation. There’s a very real part of me that feels badly that the Indian man is out there somewhere … and because of my own fear, he’s more convinced than ever that Americans don’t trust Indians. That we hate them. It was never about him being Indian, obviously. It was about him being really drunk. It was about the fact that it took me five times of yelling before he stopped the car. But he likely doesn’t get that, and I’m left feeling accidentally racist. Is that weird? Perhaps.

As a female traveling alone, there are day-to-day decisions that can suddenly become very dangerous situations. And when you find yourself in a very dangerous situation, by simply doing something normal like taking a taxi … it makes you question if you’ve pushed your wanderlust to such a degree that it’s now tumbled off a cliff. Are you going to die? Even worse … are you going to get raped? And most importantly, is it going to be your own stupid fault?

It begs the question … how much trust do you have to offer up in order to find true adventure? Where’s the line in the sand between trust and stupidity? As a female traveling alone … should something scare you every day? Is that just the cost? Could I have really stabbed someone with a Bic Pen? No one has the answers to any of these questions. It’s certainly a discussion I’ve had before. And it’s a thought I can’t seem to shake just yet … even if I’ve finally managed to stop physically shaking by now.

There will be more on lovely, awesome Penang later on today, but much like the Turkish Tear Gas experience, I just needed to get this one on cyber paper first.