There is a woman on my block who is totally crazy. I see her every morning at approximately 6:45am when I walk to the subway. She is a tallish black woman, probably in her forties. She wears sweat pants (pushed up to the knees in the summertime) and a dirty flannel shirt (with a coat in the wintertime). Her hair is large and frames her face in an uneven aura of graying frizz, but somehow it looks regal rather than ragged. She shuffles her feet and her shoulders slope, but she has a way of keeping her face tilted at a rakish angle that, when combined with her above average height, lets her drop you a menacing look from the very bottom corner of her eye. That look has as much potential meaning as of a drop of blood for a lab, squeezed from a pricked finger.

It should be noted that this woman also wields a tennis racket—aggressively. The first time I passed her, she swiped at me with the racket, her arm moving with the agility and precision of a boxer. I jumped just in time to be grazed by the rush of air passing in the racket’s wake. It was truly a close call. What she lacked in punch, however, she had in bite.

“HOOKER!” she yelled at me. “Get out of here, HOOKER!”

Startled by her name for me and also still fearing for my person, I continued my hasty retreat down Ashland.

Things went on like this through the summer and into fall. The one day, Tennis Racket Woman (TRW) decided to make a friendly overture. I saw her ambling up to me with her tennis racket, but also with what looked like a crumpled newspaper. I approached with trepidation and offered her my usual weak smile that simply says, “I see you and know your ways. Please don’t hit me with your tennis racket, okay?”

“Here,” she said, and handed me a greasy, ketchup stained front page from Hoy, Chicago’s Spanish-language newspaper. I was pretty touched. Seriously. I accepted her gift and said, “Thank you.” She grumbled, “hooker…,” but the word was only breathy and half-felt this time. I eyeballed the tennis racket and kept walking.

This morning, I’m sad to report, we regressed. I hadn’t seen TRW for a couple of months and I was wondering where she was just yesterday. I think I conjured her presence because suddenly she was before me, looking all the more menacing in the dark, early hour. I didn’t like the look in her eyes; the look said, “I want to hit a girl in the face with my tennis racket this morning.”

As we got closer, I could smell the booze on her, even through the sterilizing chill in the air. I sighed and smiled with only half my mouth. The muscles in my shoulders tensed.

“There you are, HOOKER!!” she screamed, her voice cracking like breaking ice against the buildings. “HOOKER!” she shouted again, for good measure.

Now, I was wearing a large, brown down jacket. The jacket is, in fact, so large and formless that I have trouble getting a good range of motion from my arms. I also had on my moon boots (they’re just as they sound), jeans, a large scarf twice wrapped, a hat and gloves that would serve a boxer well. I’m fighting a cold, so my nose and lips were chapped and red, my eyes watering. There’s no way I looked like a hooker unless I was standing on a corner in Antarctica, trying to pick up a snowman.

As I scooted past her, TRW took a good, hard swing at my knee and made contact. “What the hell!?” I shouted indignantly. “Come on!”

“You’se a HOOKER. You’se a TRAMP.”

“I AM NOT…” then, more quietly, “a hooker… or a tramp…geeze!!!”

TRW put her hands on her hips and leaned her broad shoulders back, keeping her head pushed forward like a contortionist. She sized me up, looking at me with those smart brown eyes that only betrayed her craziness through that peculiar gleam of ever-present, punishing, desperate need. She straightened her back and let out a “humph,” then walked away.

I sincerely hope TRW and I can return to the days of the Hoy exchange. It’s going to be my winter 2008 goal to win her over… or to at least, keep her racket at bay.