Wait, did I just almost get robbed?
That was the thought that was swirling through my head after one of the strangest encounters of my teenage years. The answer was, maybe? I guess?
For this story, we need to take a trip back to the good old days of the 1990s. The summer of 1995, to be more specific. It was nearing the end of the summer, at least the part of the summer where kids were out of school.
I was seventeen years old and getting ready to begin my senior year of high school. Being that it was the 90s, and I was a nice, responsible young man, I had already been working during the summers for the last five years.
Granted, I wasn’t raking in loads of cash as a dishwasher and food prep boy, but it was good enough that I was looking to secure a little bit of a status symbol. No, it wasn’t a car, or some fancy sneakers, or anything like that. What I wanted was something different. I wanted something to show off my minuscule financial wealth to my friends. I wanted an ATM card.
ATM cards, debit cards, whatever you want to call them, had been popular since the 1980s. Before then, you had to go inside the bank and write a slip and go to a teller to withdraw money.
Being an introvert, having a way to get money from my bank account without having to talk to anyone was a dream come true. The bank I had my account through was Cape Cod Bank & Trust. They went out of business after being bought in a merger in 2004, to show how old I am.
Typically if I was out riding bikes with my friends, I’d stop at a CCB&T ATM so I wouldn’t incur a ridiculous user fee. However, for this story I would have had to have gone in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go to find a branch. I decided the dollar surcharge, which I believe is what it was at the time, was worth it.
It was later in August. The sun was setting around 7:30pm on Cape Cod. I wanted to get some money from the ATM and then hit up the nearest convenience store for some surely healthy snacks. It was probably some bottles of Jolt Cola to fuel late-night outdoor adventures.
My friend Rob came along. It was getting close to dusk. We had been having fun messing around after dinner, so we started off from my house later than we should have. Our neighborhood was always quiet, so we rode right down the middle of the road as the streetlights began popping on over our heads.
At this time in 1995, the nearest ATM I knew of was a branch of Cape Cod 5 located on the outer edge of a shopping plaza near a highway entrance. The ride to that ATM was roughly 1.5 miles. We were in the parking lot in a little over ten minutes.
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| The bank in question. |
Rob and I laid our bikes in the grass. This ATM was an indoor one. I had to slide my card into a reader to get the door to open after hours. Being teenage boys, neither of us looked around as we did this.
I slid my card through; the door beeped, and we both entered. I was laughing at something funny that Rob had said. I wish I could remember what it was. Suddenly the laughter was cut short by banging on the door.
We both spun around, and standing at the glass door was a man. It was hard to tell how old he was, as the light was brighter inside the bank than outside, so he was silhouetted. What was for sure was he was trying to get in.
He banged on the door again, and this time he began shouting.
“Access the door!” He screamed. Rob and I were both confused and scared. I believe one of us shouted, ‘What?’ This only angered this guy more. “Access the door!” The man shouted again.
This was 1995. Neither Rob nor I had cell phones. There were payphones nearby, but this would have meant having to go outside and past this stranger who was furiously trying to get inside with us.
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| We needed one of these inside the bank. |
Looking back, I don’t know what the best course of action would have been. Fear took over a little, and I foolishly opened the bank door to let this person in.
Why was he there? Because he believed that we were thieves who had somehow stolen someone’s ATM card and were now going to use it to steal their money.
How do I know that? Because he said as much as he angrily demanded that I give him my card. That was a bridge too far. I refused and told him it was mine as he accused me of being a thief.
This man had to be over fifty. I have no idea where he had been or what led him to think that pursuing a pair of teenage boys into a bank after hours was a good idea, but it was irrelevant at that point. We were trapped as he stood looming over us.
“I’m going to watch you as you make this transaction,” the angry man said. I think he thought he was calling my bluff. Rob stayed facing the man while I turned my back. I punched in my code, hiding it from the man.
I believe I withdrew ten dollars. The machine spat out the cash. I quickly grabbed it and stuffed it into my wallet along with my card again. At this point I turned around and faced the man.
Seeing that it was indeed my ATM card and that we weren’t thieves, he muttered ‘ok’ or something dumb before getting out of there as fast as he could. He must have had an epiphany of how the whole situation looked and knew he had screwed up.
Rob and I waited a minute or two before stepping out into the darkness. It was a beautiful, if humid, night on Cape Cod. We were thrilled that the lunatic hadn’t done any damage to, or stolen, our bikes.
I can’t remember what exactly we said to each other after, but I am sure it was something along the lines of ‘what the hell just happened?’ We had gone to grab a little cash for a snack run and ended up in the middle of a scene from America’s Most Wanted.
Teenagers are resilient though. We hadn’t been hurt. We hadn’t been robbed. So we chalked it up to some idiot thinking he was going to be a hero but ended up being a complete jackass.
We still did our snack run. We returned to my house, and there were a few other kids around. In the 1990s and in that neighborhood, darkness didn’t mean everyone went inside. Rob and I dropped our bikes in the wood chips at the very edge of the front yard near the quiet street.
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| Loads of bikes in the front yard were common in the 90s |
The retelling of our story likely began with ‘you won’t believe what happened.’ I remember telling the story to at least one of my sisters, maybe one of Rob’s brothers and my brother, and also Mikey, who was down visiting Cape Cod during weekends in the summer as he did back then.
As the years go by and some details, like what we got at the convenience store after, get hazy, I still firmly remember the sound of the banging on the glass door and that guy shouting for us to ‘access the door.’
The other kids looked at us in shock and awe. We had survived a brush with death, or at least we made it sound like we did. It was certainly not an average adventure that I was used to on Cape Cod.
I can’t remember when I told my mother about what had happened. I know that when Rob told his mother, she was livid. She wanted to go to Cape Cod 5 the next business day and ask them to check the security footage to see the guy who had caused this trouble. Nothing came of it, though.
It has been thirty-one years since a man shouted at me to access the door of a dark and relatively isolated ATM. I have never had an experience like that again. I will say that I didn’t go back to that Cape Cod 5 ATM for any withdrawals for many years. It was like I expected that weirdo to be lurking in the bushes waiting for me to come back.
For as much as Rob and I made jokes about that guy after the fact, there is no denying that it was a scary situation while it was happening. Until he vanished into the night, there was no telling how things were going to end.
He could have been an addict trying to get some cash for drugs. He could have had a gun, or a knife. He could have been a whack job looking to get his rocks off by assaulting teenage boys. These were all real possibilities as we stood face to face with an angry older stranger.
Luckily it never got to that. I stupidly accessed the door, and then he watched ominously while I used my ATM card to withdraw some of the money I had earned by working. Then he scurried away after realizing what a stupid mistake he had made.
I do wonder if we had tried, if Rob and I could have beat the hell out of him. It would have been the ultimate irony. This guy thinks he’s going to foil some thieving kids like he’s a Scooby-Doo villain, but we end up not only not being thieves but then whopping his ass.
That Cape Cod 5 location is still in business, and on the off chance I go by there, I can still hear ‘access the door’ ringing in my ears. I wonder what ever happened to that guy? Did he ever tell the story to someone? He probably didn’t. Or if he did, in his version, he thwarted a pair of giant meathead guys trying to rob a little old lady.
I am so blessed and lucky to have grown up when I did. There really will never be another time like the 1990s. It was the last decade where you weren’t bound by technology. When you spent summer outside until the streetlights came on, and sometimes even after.
It was a time I wish I could go back to. A time that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Even if every now and then you had to deal with creepy older guys looking to chaperone your bank visit. But hey, that’s a fair trade for all of the good stuff.
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| The 90s on Cape Cod were something else. |
