SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 — It’s a weekend night, late, and I’m walking along Dartmouth Street in the South End, a little drunk, sort of singing to myself, when I feel a presence closing in on me. I look around and see about eight kids, 16 or 17 years old, balaclavas pulled up to obscure their faces. Before I even have the chance to react, the biggest one is on me, his arm around my neck, pulling me down.... Oh, crap.

The mind does odd things at such moments. The first thing that strikes me is the weird intimacy of it all: two strangers — boy, man; black, white — embracing on a city street. No, not embracing: fighting. In a few seconds, I have processed an entire catalogue of horrible possibilities: the knife to the ribs, the knee to the nose, the fist, the boot, the bullet.

"Shit!" I cry, pushing the guy away. "What the fuck are you doing?"

Apparently, these kids haven’t been keeping up with the trends. According to figures released by the Boston Police Department this week, aggravated assaults in the city have seen a slight decline recently — 4412 in 2001, down from 4507 the year before. Less comforting is the fact that homicides increased 69 percent in the same period. Just a few weeks ago, there was a shooting on my South End street, a few short blocks from the spot where the hooded louts and I are facing off.

I look around: there’s no one to come to my rescue. Given the 500 or so cigarettes I’ve smoked that night, running is not an option. So I just stand there. Finally, one of the kids pipes up, "That’s called blah-blahing" (I don’t catch the word — wilding?). "Is it?" I snap. "Well, fucking do it to each other." And then I look the ringleader — the one who grabbed me — in the eye. "You scared the shit out of me," I say. With this he shrugs and walks away, followed by his minions.

Dumb luck? Maybe not.

I was raised in a rough area of London, and I’ve encountered my share of violent thugs. But I’m in my late 30s now, and my fighting skills aren’t what they used to be (okay, they never really were). As I stood there with those kids milling around me, I knew that attempting to fight them would be tantamount to suicide. I was in a bad spot, and the only thing left was to try to talk my way out of it.

Violence is a form of objectification, and to talk is, necessarily, to become a subject. "Your first line of defense is always going to be your verbal skills," says David White, assistant director of Impact Model Mugging, a local self-defense workshop. "Talking is very important."

True, but it’s what you say that matters. In these situations, there’s a fine line between taking on the role of victim and taking on the role of aggressor. The trick, for a man at least, is to find a balance between submission and defiance, to calibrate don’t-mess-with-me and I’m-messing-with-you.

"Saying, ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ people are going to pounce on that," White says. "You have to be assertive. But you don’t want to assert dominance. That guy was there with his buddies, so he wasn’t going to back down. You addressed him in a way that built rapport. It sounds like you gave him a way to walk away with his self-esteem intact — and yours as well."

Well, I wasn’t exactly Dirty Harry. "What you did wouldn’t look good in a movie, but you weren’t in a movie," says White. "If you’d said, ‘You want a piece of me?’ — that would have been seen as a challenge. You avoided a fight. You got back in one piece. Your girlfriend’s happy, your parents are happy. What we often forget is that our loved ones would rather see us piss on ourselves than get hurt."

White is quick to point out, however, that what works in one situation may not work in another. For one thing, he says, my repeated use of "fuck" and "shit," while establishing that I’m no quivering milksop, could have upped the ante to a dangerous degree. "The fact that you’re here telling this means you did something right," he adds. "But who knows? It could have gone either way."