CLOSE CALL

My most memorable close call occurred in 1967 while on vacation from school. My family had moved away from the low-rent district of Tulsa and settled near the center of the city where the jobs were. While going to school, I worked as a veterinary assistant. Earlier, my father had gotten me a job at his place of employment. It didn't take long for me to save up for a motorcycle, or long for me to injure myself and wind up in the hospital. Before I could recover and buy myself another bike, my friends brought me to their home in the new Toyota their parents had bought them.

Their neighborhood had become even more shoddy and dangerous since I'd lived there. This place of old, big trees and well-mowed lawns had gradually transformed into trash-strewn dirt yards with junk cars pulled up onto driveways and to curbsides. Dirt blew around in small tornadoes. Doors with torn screens and broken springs slammed and creaked noisily in the hot summer drought. People who didn't give a damn had moved in, causing people who did to give up and move out. Somehow it is thought to be inoffensive to call the latter "white flight," yet it is TABOO to name the former. My friends, Gary and Gordon, suffered this malaise, exhibiting it in their drug seeking behavior. They would get the cheapest "high" and stay blown for days. They wanted to continue this perversion when they picked me up, but I diverted them toward going out to a ranch I'd worked at and shooting some cans. We shot two rifles and a .25 automatic until dark, then drove back to their home to catch up on what was new in our lives. They continued to get inebriated while we reminisced. At about midnight, we decided to hike up to a coke machine a few blocks away. As we were leaving, Gordon asked me if he could carry my pistol. Since I was on crutches, and Gordon was "high," I chose to keep it myself.

Good thing I did, though I never thought that the neighborhood had gotten bad enough to really need a gun. It was very dark. Only one street lamp tried to illuminate the Chamberlain Recreation Center fields that we cut across to get the coke machine. We hadn't gotten 200 yards into the dark before two strangers came up to us out of the gloom.

They were not Caucasians like us, but we thought nothing of the slight difference. They were slightly older, and one of them apparently wanted a cigarette. Gary told him, "I don't have any cigarettes" and kept walking. Then he asked me. I told him, "I don't smoke." He asked Gordon for a cigarette. Gordon began patting his pockets, looking for a cigarette to give him. Like an idiot, I didn't wait but went crutching up behind Gary since I was the slowest.

I made it about four steps then heard a great thud as something heavy was thrown to the ground, accompanied by a loud "oof!" Upon turning around to determine the source of the commotion, and, subconsciously, already knowing it by simply accessing cultural information already in my possession ("racial profiling") I saw that the second "man" had sneaked around behind Gordon while he had been preoccupied with giving and lighting a cigarette for the moocher-"man." He had then picked Gordon up and slammed him to the ground. Presently, he engaged himself in vigorously kicking Gordon, while Gordon writhed in pain on the ground, trying to get his breath back.

The moocher guy-stood just out of the range of my crutch, watching stupidly, waiting to see what I would do instead of attacking the cripple. Apparently, he and his crony had sneak-attacked enough Caucasians in the lonely darkness to feel quite comfortable. No doubt his store of cultural information and experience told him that Caucasian kids tend to give up their possessions rather easily. Possessions mean much less to the affluent than to the poor, just as scars, broken bones, gouged eyes, ripped noses, and broken teeth mean much less to the needy than to the affluent.

Or, maybe their motive was not even the acquisition of what little "wealth" a teenage Caucasian may possess. No demands were ever made. It seems that the one wanted only to watch, and the other wanted to simply beat and kick a Caucasian while he was gasping, helpless, on the ground.

There were no cops or district attorneys to guide me. Cops do not police North Tulsa at night. They cruise fearfully around the edges until told to converge with overwhelming force at a specified location. They will chase a speeder or other traffic revenue inside, but they will not get more than a few feet away from their cop cars. Gordon wasn't going to wait. He needed my help to get this vicious sub-human to stop trying to kick his face off.

My first thought was the minimalist approach, but moocher boy had already thwarted my crutch plan by wisely standing out of range. Soon as I hobbled over to bash his crony, moocher boy would attack me, and I would be sent back to the hospital that I'd just left. There was no chance that Gary or Gordon would protect me even if I did manage to bash Gordon's attacker because Caucasians don't have the "gang-up" pack mentality except when forced by artificial environments, such as prison. Their experience and cunning at sneak attacks forced me to use that which I tried never to have to use. The trouble with a gun, which almost no young school-age people seem able to conceive, is that once you pull it, it has the tendency to make everyone into bigger idiots than they already were to begin with. I didn't want to kill or maim these idiots, but once they saw I had a gun, they may, like bigger idiots, try to take it away from me simply for the value it held. Back then, minorities were not allowed to have guns. Caucasian teenagers were not often supposed to have pistols. Being gun-poor and viewing a pistol as their ticket into the fast land of liquor-store and gas station robbery popular at the time, idiots already in the trade of assaulting people were likely to believe they could grab a gun from a cripple without any consequence.

This would be the biggest mistake of their short lives.

A defensive weapon is no defense until it is used. It was stuck in my back pocket. While I was tugging it loose, moocher boy noticed, and demanded suspiciously, "whatchugot `en yoe pocket!"

About that time, it came loose. I ripped the safety off, jacked the slide to put a bullet in the chamber and set the firing pin on its spring, ready for action. It was so dark, and the gun so small that I held it over my head, the better to catch a glint from the street light to sparkle off the chrome finish. Loudly and theatrically, I simply said, "This!" as I brandished it up to where even the biggest, stupidest, idiot could quickly realize that I could easily kill him if I chose.

His reaction was exactly that which I expected of cowards who must hunt in backs by stealth: moocher boy's eyes bugged out so far that I could see white all around his pupil, tinged with yellow. (Back then, most of them had bilirubin deposits in their eyes as a result of a genetic adaptation that protected their ancestors from a disease we had long ago eradicated in America.) Without giving any warning to his pal, moocher boy turned and scrambled off as fast as his legs would take him.

Gordon was still on the ground, dodging kicks and stomps of fury from sneak-attack-boy. This C.H.U.D was so busy enjoying the little orgy of violence that he had initiated that he didn't notice that his "gang" had fled in terror, or that I could simply blow his damned brains out as he was rapidly beginning to deserve. (It is a well documented sign of psychosis to keep torturing a victim after he has rolled up into a fetal ball.)

Obviously, this parasite would only understand force, and he was forcing me to do the last thing I wanted to do: to attract undue attention to myself. Reluctantly, I fired my gun into the air, straight up: Ka-Boom!

In the silence that followed the explosion, I heard his neck pop as he turned to face me. His eyes bugged out, whites showing all around. Then he broke his ass running away from me and the expected steel jacketed pursuers. For a few milliseconds, I tried to seriously entertain the notion of going ahead and killing both of these poor excuses for humanity, especially the one who brought the attack. I tried to justify killing them with the idea of saving future victims from these vicious, conscious-less parasites. I couldn't convince myself of this, and let them escape with their sorry lives, not even bothering to empty the clip in their general direction in hopes of scaring some ethical behavior into them. There was no logic in this: fear is easy to overcome, while ethical behavior is difficult to acquire once shed.

Gary ran up to me from the dark, breathless and excited. "Did you shoot yourself a (minority)!' he asked. Gordon leaped up out of the dirt and shouted, "Come back here, you fucking (minorities), and fight like a man!"

There was a short pause after I explained to them that no one got shot. Then, Gordon looked at Gary, and Gary looked at Gordon, and then Gordon suddenly sprinted off in the same direction that the two scum had taken. Gary looked at me, and then raced off after Gordon, leaving me to go to Hell on crutches, alone in the dark. My guess was that all four of them were running for their momma's houses, to hide. I had just woken up every household within a 500 yard radius, and each one of them was calling the cops. My parents lived 9 miles south and to get there, I had to hobble through minority-town where Caucasians were hated even worse than where I was. Or, I could go spend the rest of the night at my friend's house, as planned.

My disgust-quotient said "no." Instead of rejoining my fair-weather "friends," I hobbled on off, heading south all night long toward another, much less remarkable close call.