This wasn't my first mugging. This pair had gotten the jump on me in broad daylight, and knocked me down from behind. Once I realized that they were content with taking my iPod, and not my credit cards or cash, I relaxed.

I was the perfect yuppie mark. I wish I could have seen them scroll through my obnoxious hipster playlist after a clean getaway and heard them ask, "What's a Death Cab for Cutie, and why does it sound like a vampire getting his nuts stomped?"

Greek Batman raced over to me seconds after the attack. I call him Greek Batman because he was Greek, and a believer in vigilante justice. He was squat, like a gargantuan hobbit. A black, fuzzy mustache dangled from beneath a pocked nose. His fists were clenched and ready for combat.

This is how you keep a working-class neighborhood in Queens safe: You have men like Greek Batman ready and willing to bust open the skulls of evildoers.

The kids who had mugged me were running down the street and almost out of sight. "Come on! We get them! We get them!" he said. He pointed down the street, then to his Batmobile, a white van parked at the curb, and then once again in the direction of the junior criminals. "Now!" he cried. "Let's go!

And do what? I thought

I had been through worse
The first time I was mugged, I was pistol-whipped by an angry junkie in Richmond, Va. He kicked me repeatedly as I was sprawled out on the street. I remember him asking if I had any money.

"No, sir!" I said, terrified.

"Don't call me 'sir'!" he replied, and jabbed me in the skull with the barrel of his .22. He searched me and violently probed my testicles, as if I'd roll up dollar bills and tuck them in my taint.

If there is a God, he certainly works in mysterious ways. Just that morning I had been bitched and moaned to my stoner buddies that it had been weeks since I'd seen any action, and lo and behold, my prayers were answered in the form of a drugged-out crook molesting my unmentionables.

He got away with some coins, lint and my shoes. If I moved, he said, he'd shoot me dead. I lay on the cold concrete for half-an-hour until I got up, barefoot and bleeding.

A couple of hooded teenagers roughing me up and snatching my iPod is an inconvenience, but it's not as bad as being kicked in the guts at gunpoint. Greek Batman wanted to literally street-fight crime. I looked at him and told him I was going to call the cops. Greek Batman jumped into his van, revved the engine and roared off in hot pursuit.

I called the police
Law enforcement is a lot like the military -- the best and the worst of our society signs up for noble and dishonorable reasons. On that day, I got a couple of cops who were as unimpressed with my weakling white-collar ass as Greek Batman. They wanted a real case, and they got "Law & Order: The Real World."

They knew and I knew the iPod was lost, and these kids were miles away. Still, the cops drove me around, then dropped me off near my place and told me to watch my back next time.

Still a little rattled, I swung by my neighborhood bar, the one where the old timers get bombed. I tell the bartender, a proper Irish lady with an actual shillelagh under the bar, that I had just gotten mugged not four blocks away. But she already knew. The bar was buzzing with the news. She bought me a drink.

Midway through my third, Greek Batman walks over to me. "Don't worry. When we find those bastards, we're going to break their f**king legs."

John Devore is an Asylum contributor who believes in full cooperation with criminals.