Close Encounter With Robber Took Reporter Too Up Close, Personal : Crime: It was no secondhand account this time as a man brandished a gun in a grocery store.

I stopped on the way home from work for bananas and lottery tickets. My daughter likes bananas with her cereal in the morning and I fancy myself lucky.

Lucky me. I was second in line, but the guy ahead of me wanted to talk. About the relative merits of fast-food restaurants. About the lottery. About the weather.

Then, to my right, there was a loud voice, a voice sharpened to a screech by fear or craziness. “Get out of there!” the voice said. “Get out!”

The 30 or so patrons and clerks at the Alpha Beta store at Tampa Avenue and Rinaldi Street in Northridge discovered at that moment Wednesday that we were part of an armed robbery.

No one moved or uttered a word except the robber. “Don’t do anything stupid!” he said as he caught the eye of the clerk in my aisle. He came toward us, stuffing a big wad of bills into the pouch he wore around his waist and waving a small black pistol.

I felt no fear. A stray thought, which now seems quite odd, crossed my mind. How, I wondered, would I get change from my purchase if the robber cleaned out the store’s supply of money?

Just as quickly, I reminded myself to watch the guy’s every move.

Long, brownish hair hung from around the gray stocking cap and over the collar of his reddish plaid shirt. A blue bandanna concealed most of his face. He wore glasses and his eyes kept to the corners of their sockets, watching his flanks.

He also wore gray sweat pants and white, high-topped athletic shoes. I looked for some mark on the wall to take the man’s measure, but there was none. Guessing, I’d put him at 5’10.”

Age? Unknowable. Young enough to run. Inexperienced enough to be nervous. Old enough to know that he didn’t need to use the gun to get what he wanted.

Ervin Fields, a clerk at the store for 19 years, stepped away from his till as the robber came close. The intruder stuck his hand beneath the change tray, grabbed the wad of bills and shoved it into the pouch without looking at it.

Unhesitating, he ran out. In the space of 30 seconds, he’d hit three cash registers.

One customer, an athletic young man wearing sweat clothes, raced after him. No one else spoke. We stood around, confirming what we’d seen by repeating it to each other. The customer who’d gone after him returned to tell what kind of car the man had.

In a few minutes, a till reopened for business.

I paid for my bananas and went next door to buy a lottery ticket. As quickly as that, the kind of crime I’ve probably written about dozens of times, using accounts provided by police, was over.

I usually prefer to get firsthand knowledge of the subjects I write about. But next time I write about an armed robbery I’ll be happier to take the word of the police and witnesses.