When the Sun Goes Down

I used to walk at night. I’d stroll up moonlit trails that surround my house in the Santa Monica Mountains, along the beach at the foot of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and sometimes in town when I worked late.

I like the texture of the city after sundown, when darkness mutes the calamity of ambition and peace settles over the abandoned towers of commerce.

I walked when it rained and I walked when the wind howled, escaping the stresses of day by striding through storms mighty enough to dwarf even writing’s high anxieties.

A city editor used to say only fools, felons and whores wandered around at night, and then wonder aloud into what category I fit.

None now.

I don’t walk at night anymore. The reasons are obvious. No neighborhood is safe, no street secure, no darkness serene.

Those last few times when I did wander the night, I carried a heavy walking stick. All my senses were alert to slowly passing cars, to shadows on the side streets, to sounds the ear could not immediately identify.

I found myself stopping suddenly, hunched forward, and searching those areas beyond vision, my walking stick carried like a rifle at the ready.

Then one night it hit me. My God, I was at war again.

I was back in Korea on night patrol and the walking stick was my M-1. Every wind-rustled bush hid danger. Every cluster of shadows concealed an enemy.

I realized when I returned from that last walk, more tense than content, I was becoming afraid of the night, and that terrified me.

I write today of fear for three reasons: my own frustration, the weekend murders of two women in widely separated parts of the city, and a disquieting conversation with an old lady.

You know of the murders.

Ann Yao, 31, was shot to death as she sat in her car in the Wilshire district that is known, with obvious irony, as “the Miracle Mile.”

Rufina Stevens, 47, determined not to be afraid in her own neighborhood, was ravaged a few yards from her Burbank home as she set out to shop.

Both were victims not of the night but of the madness night hides. Predators far more dangerous than any wild animal stalk the streets when the sun goes down.

The old lady knows about being victimized.

“I used to walk everywhere,” she said to me the other day. “Night was the best time. Hell, now I won’t even step out the door in broad daylight without looking both ways.”

Her name is Helen Margulies. She’s 78 and barely 5 feet, 2 inches tall. A slight hunch makes her seem even smaller. She weighs less than 130 pounds.

A few weeks ago, three young men climbed a back wall and pounded on her kitchen window. It was mid-afternoon.

She opened a door slightly. One of them demanded to know the time. Margulies told them to leave; they didn’t belong there.

“They cursed me,” she remembered, “and said awful things. One of them pointed to his crotch and . . . .” She shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

“Let’s switch her,” another boy said, picking up a tree branch.

She slammed the door and called 911. “They put me on hold,” Margulies said. “I’m still on hold.”

Her neighborhood in Van Nuys is a model suburban street. Its lawns are mowed, its garden carefully tended and its homes in good repair.

The old lady has lived there for 30 years, and she hasn’t been afraid . . . until now.

“It’s impossible to live in peace and security anymore,” she wrote to us in desperation. “Can you help?”

The incident with the boys, encompassing dark overtones of sexual violence, wasn’t the first time she felt terrorized. Her windows have been smashed twice, once by rocks that narrowly missed her frail, 96-year-old husband.

In other parts of the neighborhood, there have been muggings, burglaries and attempted burglaries.

Doors, once left unlocked, are now bolted. Helen Margulies, barely able to lift a coffee pot, is thinking of buying a gun.

“We aren’t safe anymore,” she said. “I used to walk to classes at night at Valley College. It’s just a hop and a spit away. I walked a mile and a half to the store every evening.”

She shook her head. “Not anymore, honey. Not anymore.”

The poet Acrisius wrote, “To him who is in fear, everything rustles.”

I love the night, I loved walking after sundown and I despise the rustling we must all heed in a society gone berserk.

I can’t help Helen Margulies, the police can’t help her and all the facilities of this large and powerful newspaper can’t help her.

All we can do is listen to the rustle, and rage against the monsters that make us afraid.