Face to Face With Guns and the Young Men Who Use Them

My wife was out that Wednesday evening and, too tired to cook, I decided on one of those small self-indulgences civilized cohabitation often precludes: pizza and a televised hockey game. I phoned for the pizza and was told I could pick it up in 20 minutes.

Ours is an older Spanish-style house with a detached garage at the back of the property. You have to step out on the sidewalk, then through a gate to reach the steps leading up to the service porch door.

Like most city-dwellers, I’m cautious. I scan the street and sidewalk for anything--or anyone--unusual before pulling into the garage. That night was no exception. But, as I walked out of the garage, pizza in hand, a burly, stubble-cheeked young man in a stocking cap and dark nylon Windbreaker stepped out of the tall shrub at the edge of the parkway and put the barrel of his pistol between my eyes.

“Give it up, mother------,” he snarled. “Give it up.”

“Hey,” I said, “just take it.” As I spoke, I set the cardboard pizza box on the lip of the planter that runs along the sidewalk toward our gate, contriving as I did so to toss my house keys into a nearby rose bush.

“Where’s your money? Where’s your money?” he barked.

“It’s in my wallet. It’s in my wallet,” I said.

By that time, he had slid around behind me, put his gun to the back of my neck and begun to go through my pants pockets.

“Where’s your wallet?” he asked. Perhaps he was nervous; perhaps he thought I was slow. Everything he said during our encounter was repeated; instinctively, I did the same.

“It’s in my back pocket.”

I felt it being snatched away.

“Where’s the rest of your money?”

“I don’t have any more money. That’s it.”

“Where’s your watch?”

“Here, on my wrist.” I replied, extending my left arm sideways.

At that moment, his companion appeared. He was shorter and rather slight. He had a thin mustache and wore a denim jacket. In his left hand was an outsize blue steel revolver. Even in that dim light, his dark eyes glinted like polished glass, and his arms and legs twitched unexpectedly, as if attached to unseen wires.

“This one,” I thought, “is going to kill me.”

“Where’s the watch? Where’s the watch?” he hissed. And then, his voice rising: “Stop looking at us. Stop looking at us.”

He may have been loaded, but he wasn’t stupid. I’ve been around enough criminal trials to know that one of the reasons victims of armed attacks are seldom able to firmly identify their assailants is that their attention naturally focuses on the guns, rather than on the people holding them. In those brief moments, I made a conscious effort to note what I could of this pair’s faces.

“I’m not looking at you,” I lied, bending my head forward as the big one ripped the watch from my wrist.

“Get down. Get down,” the thin one snarled. And, as I went to my knees, he grabbed my glasses and tossed them onto the parkway lawn.

“Down. Down,” he said.

By that time, I was flat on my face on the sidewalk. I felt its grit against my forehead. I felt the big one’s gun at the back of my head and the thin one’s revolver at my left temple.

I took a deep breath and thought, “I am going to die.”

I thought of my wife and of my soul.

“This is going to kill Leslie.” And then: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“What’s this?” the big one growled.

I rolled my head to the right, feeling, as I did, the barrels of their guns digging into my head.

“It’s a pizza,” I said.

“We’ll take it,” the big one snapped.

And, suddenly--wallet, watch and pizza in hand--they were off in a clatter of footsteps down the darkened street.

I turned to see their shadows get into a car and speed away.

I had been spared, but by what? Mercy? A short attention span? Hunger?

“Good Lord,” I thought, “to have your life saved by a pizza. How peculiar. I saw eternity; they saw food.”

I got to my feet, fished around for the house keys, let myself in and called 911. The operator took a quick description of the robbers and said a police car would arrive shortly. I poured myself a stiff drink and, in less than five minutes, two efficient, solicitous uniformed officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were there. They took a report and told me that the “important thing” was that nobody had been hurt.

“But geez,” one officer said as they left, “taking your pizza--that’s rough.”

I agreed.

A few days later, a Wilshire Division detective telephoned to collect additional details. He said my description of the pair’s methods suggested they might be the same men who had committed a number of robberies in the neighborhood over the past few months. He asked whether I was willing to go down to the station and look through mug books.

So, early on last Monday’s gray morning I sat in the bustling detectives’ room at the Wilshire station looking through album-sized books entitled “Parolees” and “Robbery 10,” “Robbery 11” and “Robbery 12.” Most of the pictures were of young men--some of them defiant, some of them dazed, some of them obviously frightened; an astonishing number of them actually were children.

To turn those pages and study the photographs there is to be borne along on a melancholy current that, like that of Blake’s dreary Thames, seems to “mark in every human face, marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

Together, these young men are indeed a kind of river--one that is out of control, one that is gnawing at the foundations of things we hold essential: our freedom to move about; the fruits of our labor; our own lives and those of the people we hold dear. Someday, all of us will have to confront this river at its source and plumb the depths of its discontent.

For the moment, all we can do is look at mug shots and stick our fingers in the dike.