Existence is simple. <i> Living</i> requires courage. : The Life & Times of Leroy Lewis

Leroy Lewis, a tough old man with a rage to live, was walking down the street on a foggy morning in the minutes before dawn, following a brisk routine of exercise prescribed to save his life, when a knife was plunged into his back.

Fifteen times the blade struck, severing a carotid artery and puncturing a lung, but Leroy Lewis, fighting and yelling, crawled back to his feet and battled his two attackers with all the strength of a wounded grizzly.

Blood filled his mouth and legs turned to rubber, but still Lewis bellowed, “If you want me, you’re going to have to take me!”

The muggers, younger and stronger than their victim, tried but couldn’t. They grabbed a watch and a handful of dollar bills and ran when the headlights of a passing car lit the bloody scene in garish still life on a morning laced with pain and mist.

And they left Leroy Lewis to die.

It was a swift and brutal encounter, not unlike the muggings that occur every day in cities across America, and not unlike the attacks of political terrorists that occur, with larger consequence, around the world.

The difference in this case, quite simply, was Leroy Lewis. The attempted murder, that ultimate violation of body and spirit, made him madder than hell.

He talks of a fury that surged through him like liquid fire when the knife first struck home, and of the great will to survive that kept his fists doubled and his arms pumping even as he fell choking on his own blood.

“I’m not a violent man,” he said to me the other day, “but sometimes you just gotta fight. Sometimes you have to be counted. . . .”

Forget that he’s had two heart attacks severe enough to require bypass surgery. Forget that he’s 61 years old and just barely 5 feet, 7 inches tall.

The man has a rage to live as wild as God’s own thunder. It carried him not only through the attack that cost him 14 pints of blood, but also through the days that followed, when life fluttered like a candle in the wind, and only the old man’s will kept it burning.

Leroy Lewis is the living embodiment of the Dylan Thomas admonition not to go gentle into that good night, but to rage against the dying of the light.

But there’s more than that here. Existence is simple. Living requires courage.

I met with Lewis in a Chatsworth game parlor where he works occasionally to help out a friend. He’s a gray-haired man with a set to his jaw and a glint in his eyes and a manner that says Damned if I can’t! A Depression kid who knows the rules of survival.

The purpose of my visit was to ask if the assault that almost killed him had changed his way of living. Did he fear the darkness and the fog for the horror they might hide? Did he avoid the streets where a regimen of exercise had once found him walking?

Lewis observed me in a gaze as firm and steady as a laser beam. “Hell, no,” he said.

He began walking again through the streets of Van Nuys barely two weeks after the attack, four miles a day, five days a week, up Victory to Van Nuys to Owensmouth to Vanowen to Kester to Sherman Way to Sepulveda, and back to Victory.

“And I’m here to tell you,” he said, bristling with challenge, “I intend to continue walking the same route, the same way, the same time for as long as I damned well please! They’re not going to chase Roy Lewis off the streets, and you can put that in the bank.”

It’s a scary world, my friends. Revolutionaries creep through the jungles, terrorists bomb the airports and governments tilt on the edge of calamity. Nuclear tensions chill the vivid air. Trigger-fingers tighten.

Fear prowls the cities like a jungle cat, with eyes as hard and green as matching emeralds, stalking from the urban alleys into the rural neighborhoods, cat-tense, wind-silent.

Doors slam shut, windows lock, alarms go off, hammers cock. Something’s out there, something’s coming. . . .

But it’s not going to drive Leroy Lewis off the street.

“If they want me,” he says, chin tilted upward, “I’ll be there. But it’ll be different next time. I got me a rosewood cane. I’ll be ready.”

He thinks about that for a moment. His smile is almost apologetic. “Maybe that’s not very smart,” he says, “but it’s me.”

Maybe it’s not very smart and maybe it’s not even very brave, but there is something that glows of the human spirit’s strength and tenacity when Leroy Lewis walks down the street.

There is something to the tilt of his chin and to the determination of his stride that makes us all somehow a little taller and a little stronger.

If one old man with a bad heart can walk alone through the biome of the stalking cat, we can too.

The streets and the night and the fog, in the end, will belong to those who dare to walk them and to those who, like Leroy Lewis, find voice to rage against the dying of the light.