Post by Magnet Man on Jan 30, 2008 19:04:04 GMT -5
Back in 1984 I was a struggling writer living in a small Hollywood apartment with a wife and a new born son. My only secure source of income came from a paper route. I delivered the L.A. Times, by car, to the doorsteps of residences in Beverly Hills. Tough as it was getting up so early every morning, the routine suited me at the time. The thousand bucks I was paid each month for three hours of work each day of the week between 3.a.m. and 6 a.m. paid the rent and put basic foods on the table, and left me with almost a full day to get on with my writing. The routine went fine for a year or so, then, one particular morning, everything went bad.
Unknown to me, ten miles away, a black gang in South Central Los Angeles, met for an initiation rite. A new member was to be inducted into the gang. His initiation was to go out and kill a man – any man. This was to be no gangster-style killing with gunshots from a moving car. The chosen victim had to be knifed from close-up with a stiletto. Around Midnight the gang, seven in all, including the imitate, set out to bear witness to the murder.
I got up that morning with alarm as usual at 2.30.a.m. and was out the front door of the apartment block fifteen minutes later. My car was parked in the dimly-lit basement. As I walked down the pavement under the street lights to get to it, I casually noticed two well- dressed young black men coming from the opposite direction.
Hollywood streets have people on them at all hours, late-nighters, homeless and so on, so I took no particular notice of them as I turned down the ramp leading into the parking garage. I was busy with the key and had opened the door of the car when I faintly heard the hurried shuffle of leather soles on the concrete directly behind me. I turned just in time to see the looming silhouettes of the two men and the glint of a knife blade stabbing down at me. My right arm reacted instinctively. The descending blade slashed across my knuckles. I deflected the second stabbing thrust the same way with the left hand, while, at the same time, desperately throwing myself backwards through the open door as far into the car as I could. I landed on my back across both seats. I could feel the steel shaft of the hand-break buckle under me as my weight bore down it.
A rain of stabbing knife thrusts followed and I defended myself with my feet, by kicking out wildly at each thrust. Unable to get beyond my defense, all the would-be assassin could do was slash repeatedly at my ankles and shins. I could feel the blade bouncing off bone. A stiletto is primarily meant for stabbing. The slim blade inflicted only superficial damage to my legs. The frenzy of stabbing and my defensive kicking went on in total silence for perhaps half a minute.
Throughout the attack, I could see the other gang member standing silently aside, taking no part in helping is companion to over-come me. One of his hands clutched at a something hidden inside his coat. After staving off more than a dozen slashes at my legs, I ended the stand-off with a desperate appeal.
“What the hell do you want?”
My question seemed to give the attacker a reason to cease his futile attack. He stepped back and then saw the keys to the car still clutched in my hand.
“Gimme the keys to your car.”
The sudden opportunistic tone clearly revealed that car-jacking was not the original motivation for the attack.
I pretended to comply. I eased cautiously forward, as though to get out. As he stepped further back to give me room, I grabbed the door handle and slammed the car door shut and snapped on the lock. The drama ended right then. With barely a second glance at me, the two men calmly turned and strolled out of the garage.
As I sat there shaking inside the car, the most sensible thing for me right then would have been to simply thank my lucky stars that I had escaped with my life with little more than a dozen superficial stab wounds to my hand and legs. But instead a different reality surfaced in my consciousness.
Something very deep within me had been terribly violated. We all have within us an innate, one might say, childish, trust in the inherent kindliness of the human brotherhood. Unless a serious trespass has been made, or a horrible distortion in upbringing, we do not reach out and kill each other in casual passing. That inborn trust had been rudely stripped from me.
The irony of the situation was that I was an expatriate South African, exiled from my country for my anti-apartheid stance and for publishing a warning about the racial hatred whites were creating among the blacks. I had worked in Soweto and had learned only too well how to sympathize with the grievances blacks had about race discrimination – only to find myself now almost callously murdered by a black in a supposedly more enlightened milieu.
All these thoughts raced through my consciousness within a few seconds. I tried to confront the shame of living with a vision of myself cowering inside a locked car for the rest of my life, while letting the attacker calmly walk off without the slightest concern about the human behavioral distortion he had initiated. As this mix of personal shame and social outrage coursed through my consciousness, an angry force, beyond my own reason, suddenly rose up inside. It drove me out of the car and sent me running after the two men.
I caught up with them before they were more than a hundred feet beyond the front door of the apartment. They halted under a street light when I called out to the attacker. I raised my right fist and challenged him to see if he would try and stab me again. I could see the flicker of fear in his face. This was not the type of attack he had in mind. The other gang member then walked closer to me and put his hand inside his coat.
“Do you want me to blow you away?”
All the outrage exploded into words.
“What are you? An animal? What have I done to you?”
Some remnants of soul was left in the young man. I could see that my social outrage cut into him. The fact that he did not pull out the weapon and threaten me further also confirmed my instinctive sense that he was there primarily as a witness not as an assassinator..
‘You’ve got money honky.” It came out lamely.
“I deliver newspapers to pay the rent for Christ sake! You are better dressed than I am.”
.
At that moment a police helicopter cruised overhead, its search-light sweeping the streets.
“Common,” the cowardly gangster said, staring fearfully upwards “Lets beat it man.” With that, they both walked away again
The Gods would have been kind if they had left me standing there, this time with my pride intact and my sense of social justice more or less mollified by the fact that I had revealed the coward in my attacker to his face, and delivered a telling reproach to his accomplice.
With that said, I have no rational explanation for what made me continue to follow the two men. I was morally wrong to do so and as a result severe punishment awaited me.
I was intent on getting my bare hands on the man with the knife and wreaking some sort of revenge. The possibility of the hidden gun made me consider my options. I decided I needed a missile of sorts and began searching the pavement as I followed them both to the end of the block. All I could find was a loose brick, too large to hurl from a distance. I picked it up and continued the stalk. We turned the corner and that is when I knew I had stepped across to the wrong side of a immoral boundary.
At the top of the next block, fifty yards away, the other five members of the gang were waiting. I could have still got out of there if I had turned and beat a hasty retreat back to the apartment. But the force that was inside kept driving me on. A shout from the knife man, brought the other five racing down the block. The guy with the knife tried to sneak back and out-flank me. So I charged him with brick held high. He saw it and ran like hell with me hot on his heels. He slipped in panic and I had him dead to rights. But the flow of adrenaline was too strong to control and the missile smashed harmlessly down with tremendous force on the road beside him.
It was only then that I turned to run and save myself. But I had left it too late. I felt a hand grab my jacket. I turned just in time to see a balled black fist come smashing into the center of my face. Then blackness.
I came too, lying prone in the middle of the road. I got up. The gang was gone. The bones in my nose had been crushed and my face was a bloody mess. Other than that I seemed alright.
I did not realize then, that while I was lying unconscious the guy with the knife has completed his initiation by stabbing me in the chest with his stiletto. The blade had been deflected downward away from the heart by a rib and gone into my chest an inch below the organ. Miraculously the slim nine inch shaft had not touched any other vital organ on the way in. On the way out the half inch-wide slit sealed itself closed before a drop of blood could flow out of it.
Leaving me for dead, the gang had hurried off.
As I stumbled back to the apartment, the severe pain in my crushed face left me without any consciousness of the wound in the side of my chest. I will never forget the mixture of horror and concern in my wife’s face when she awoke to my shake and saw the bloody mess of my face with the nose mashed completely to one side, hovering over her. Nor can she forget, or halt her own self-recrimination, every time the subject has arisen since, that she had not somehow sensed in her sleep that her husband was fighting desperately for his life just a few yards directly below her bed, and done something to come to my assistance. I remember mumbling something as she dressed hurriedly, grabbed the baby and we headed for the hospital. On the way down the stairs, the stretch of my legs opened the knife wound for the first time. The pressure in my left lung suddenly collapsed. It was only then as I groaned and doubled over in agony that I realized that I had been stabbed below the heart.
There is not much more to tell. All the above is in the police report I gave to the detective from the LAPD. He took down the details as a matter of course. As a new citizen of no significant social standing, no attempt was made by the police to initiate a manhunt. With tens of thousand gang members roaming the streets out there it would need more than ten times the police force we had in the city in trying to deal with the rising rate of gang-related crimes.
There were seven million possible initiation victims in L.A. that night. Now, twenty years later, I am still not quite sure what special lesson there was in the selection that targeted me. What I do know is that I discovered an unpleasant, unrelenting and vicious streak of reprisal within myself, that, if we ever have a chance at a second life and have anything at all to do ourselves with how we design it, it is a failing characteristic that I will definitely want to prune away.
If there is a lesson in this story for mankind in general, it is that far more of us have to become aware that there is a dehumanizing characteristic spreading like a cancer in the ghettos of all our modern cities, one that is infecting far too many of our young men. Simply relying on police force to control it is not the answer. Today thriving street gangs in every major city are way beyond police control.
I went into South Central a year after the attack and produced a documentary film on gang violence. Part of the program featured an attempt to rehabilitate young gang members of the Cripps and the Bloods. It was broadcast on city TV in Santa Monica a month or two later.
Unknown to me, ten miles away, a black gang in South Central Los Angeles, met for an initiation rite. A new member was to be inducted into the gang. His initiation was to go out and kill a man – any man. This was to be no gangster-style killing with gunshots from a moving car. The chosen victim had to be knifed from close-up with a stiletto. Around Midnight the gang, seven in all, including the imitate, set out to bear witness to the murder.
I got up that morning with alarm as usual at 2.30.a.m. and was out the front door of the apartment block fifteen minutes later. My car was parked in the dimly-lit basement. As I walked down the pavement under the street lights to get to it, I casually noticed two well- dressed young black men coming from the opposite direction.
Hollywood streets have people on them at all hours, late-nighters, homeless and so on, so I took no particular notice of them as I turned down the ramp leading into the parking garage. I was busy with the key and had opened the door of the car when I faintly heard the hurried shuffle of leather soles on the concrete directly behind me. I turned just in time to see the looming silhouettes of the two men and the glint of a knife blade stabbing down at me. My right arm reacted instinctively. The descending blade slashed across my knuckles. I deflected the second stabbing thrust the same way with the left hand, while, at the same time, desperately throwing myself backwards through the open door as far into the car as I could. I landed on my back across both seats. I could feel the steel shaft of the hand-break buckle under me as my weight bore down it.
A rain of stabbing knife thrusts followed and I defended myself with my feet, by kicking out wildly at each thrust. Unable to get beyond my defense, all the would-be assassin could do was slash repeatedly at my ankles and shins. I could feel the blade bouncing off bone. A stiletto is primarily meant for stabbing. The slim blade inflicted only superficial damage to my legs. The frenzy of stabbing and my defensive kicking went on in total silence for perhaps half a minute.
Throughout the attack, I could see the other gang member standing silently aside, taking no part in helping is companion to over-come me. One of his hands clutched at a something hidden inside his coat. After staving off more than a dozen slashes at my legs, I ended the stand-off with a desperate appeal.
“What the hell do you want?”
My question seemed to give the attacker a reason to cease his futile attack. He stepped back and then saw the keys to the car still clutched in my hand.
“Gimme the keys to your car.”
The sudden opportunistic tone clearly revealed that car-jacking was not the original motivation for the attack.
I pretended to comply. I eased cautiously forward, as though to get out. As he stepped further back to give me room, I grabbed the door handle and slammed the car door shut and snapped on the lock. The drama ended right then. With barely a second glance at me, the two men calmly turned and strolled out of the garage.
As I sat there shaking inside the car, the most sensible thing for me right then would have been to simply thank my lucky stars that I had escaped with my life with little more than a dozen superficial stab wounds to my hand and legs. But instead a different reality surfaced in my consciousness.
Something very deep within me had been terribly violated. We all have within us an innate, one might say, childish, trust in the inherent kindliness of the human brotherhood. Unless a serious trespass has been made, or a horrible distortion in upbringing, we do not reach out and kill each other in casual passing. That inborn trust had been rudely stripped from me.
The irony of the situation was that I was an expatriate South African, exiled from my country for my anti-apartheid stance and for publishing a warning about the racial hatred whites were creating among the blacks. I had worked in Soweto and had learned only too well how to sympathize with the grievances blacks had about race discrimination – only to find myself now almost callously murdered by a black in a supposedly more enlightened milieu.
All these thoughts raced through my consciousness within a few seconds. I tried to confront the shame of living with a vision of myself cowering inside a locked car for the rest of my life, while letting the attacker calmly walk off without the slightest concern about the human behavioral distortion he had initiated. As this mix of personal shame and social outrage coursed through my consciousness, an angry force, beyond my own reason, suddenly rose up inside. It drove me out of the car and sent me running after the two men.
I caught up with them before they were more than a hundred feet beyond the front door of the apartment. They halted under a street light when I called out to the attacker. I raised my right fist and challenged him to see if he would try and stab me again. I could see the flicker of fear in his face. This was not the type of attack he had in mind. The other gang member then walked closer to me and put his hand inside his coat.
“Do you want me to blow you away?”
All the outrage exploded into words.
“What are you? An animal? What have I done to you?”
Some remnants of soul was left in the young man. I could see that my social outrage cut into him. The fact that he did not pull out the weapon and threaten me further also confirmed my instinctive sense that he was there primarily as a witness not as an assassinator..
‘You’ve got money honky.” It came out lamely.
“I deliver newspapers to pay the rent for Christ sake! You are better dressed than I am.”
.
At that moment a police helicopter cruised overhead, its search-light sweeping the streets.
“Common,” the cowardly gangster said, staring fearfully upwards “Lets beat it man.” With that, they both walked away again
The Gods would have been kind if they had left me standing there, this time with my pride intact and my sense of social justice more or less mollified by the fact that I had revealed the coward in my attacker to his face, and delivered a telling reproach to his accomplice.
With that said, I have no rational explanation for what made me continue to follow the two men. I was morally wrong to do so and as a result severe punishment awaited me.
I was intent on getting my bare hands on the man with the knife and wreaking some sort of revenge. The possibility of the hidden gun made me consider my options. I decided I needed a missile of sorts and began searching the pavement as I followed them both to the end of the block. All I could find was a loose brick, too large to hurl from a distance. I picked it up and continued the stalk. We turned the corner and that is when I knew I had stepped across to the wrong side of a immoral boundary.
At the top of the next block, fifty yards away, the other five members of the gang were waiting. I could have still got out of there if I had turned and beat a hasty retreat back to the apartment. But the force that was inside kept driving me on. A shout from the knife man, brought the other five racing down the block. The guy with the knife tried to sneak back and out-flank me. So I charged him with brick held high. He saw it and ran like hell with me hot on his heels. He slipped in panic and I had him dead to rights. But the flow of adrenaline was too strong to control and the missile smashed harmlessly down with tremendous force on the road beside him.
It was only then that I turned to run and save myself. But I had left it too late. I felt a hand grab my jacket. I turned just in time to see a balled black fist come smashing into the center of my face. Then blackness.
I came too, lying prone in the middle of the road. I got up. The gang was gone. The bones in my nose had been crushed and my face was a bloody mess. Other than that I seemed alright.
I did not realize then, that while I was lying unconscious the guy with the knife has completed his initiation by stabbing me in the chest with his stiletto. The blade had been deflected downward away from the heart by a rib and gone into my chest an inch below the organ. Miraculously the slim nine inch shaft had not touched any other vital organ on the way in. On the way out the half inch-wide slit sealed itself closed before a drop of blood could flow out of it.
Leaving me for dead, the gang had hurried off.
As I stumbled back to the apartment, the severe pain in my crushed face left me without any consciousness of the wound in the side of my chest. I will never forget the mixture of horror and concern in my wife’s face when she awoke to my shake and saw the bloody mess of my face with the nose mashed completely to one side, hovering over her. Nor can she forget, or halt her own self-recrimination, every time the subject has arisen since, that she had not somehow sensed in her sleep that her husband was fighting desperately for his life just a few yards directly below her bed, and done something to come to my assistance. I remember mumbling something as she dressed hurriedly, grabbed the baby and we headed for the hospital. On the way down the stairs, the stretch of my legs opened the knife wound for the first time. The pressure in my left lung suddenly collapsed. It was only then as I groaned and doubled over in agony that I realized that I had been stabbed below the heart.
There is not much more to tell. All the above is in the police report I gave to the detective from the LAPD. He took down the details as a matter of course. As a new citizen of no significant social standing, no attempt was made by the police to initiate a manhunt. With tens of thousand gang members roaming the streets out there it would need more than ten times the police force we had in the city in trying to deal with the rising rate of gang-related crimes.
There were seven million possible initiation victims in L.A. that night. Now, twenty years later, I am still not quite sure what special lesson there was in the selection that targeted me. What I do know is that I discovered an unpleasant, unrelenting and vicious streak of reprisal within myself, that, if we ever have a chance at a second life and have anything at all to do ourselves with how we design it, it is a failing characteristic that I will definitely want to prune away.
If there is a lesson in this story for mankind in general, it is that far more of us have to become aware that there is a dehumanizing characteristic spreading like a cancer in the ghettos of all our modern cities, one that is infecting far too many of our young men. Simply relying on police force to control it is not the answer. Today thriving street gangs in every major city are way beyond police control.
I went into South Central a year after the attack and produced a documentary film on gang violence. Part of the program featured an attempt to rehabilitate young gang members of the Cripps and the Bloods. It was broadcast on city TV in Santa Monica a month or two later.
