VIEWPOINT / JIM HERRON ZAMORA : Reporter Crosses Thin Line Between Savagery and Civility

There was blood on my pen.

And it wasn’t mine .

I went looking for victims of violence last week and within a couple hours I became one. But, while fighting for my life and dodging bullets, I also became a part of the violence. My face and head were bruised and battered, but the blood on my pen--my only weapon--came from one of my attackers.

The line between savagery and civility is thinner than you think. I went there to report, but once several people were beating my head and another strangling me, I learned I would have done anything to escape.

Anything.

I was interviewing several shop owners on Friday who were cleaning up their businesses in a partially burned mini-mall at Cedros Avenue and Parthenia Street in Panorama City. A mob of 200 people had burned and looted the place the night before.

While surveying the damage with the mini-mall’s owner about 2 p.m., we saw several youths begin looting a shop, San Carlo Deli and Imports, that had been damaged in the fire. Only minutes earlier, the deli’s proprietor, a 64-year-old Italian immigrant, and several of his grandsons left to find some plywood to nail over the broken windows and doors. The youths were carrying out everything from chairs and light fixtures to cans of spaghetti sauce.

Calling from a nearby dry cleaners, I urged my city editor to send a photographer.

“They’re trashing the place in broad daylight. This is getting wild,” I said frantically.

A few minutes later, I realized just how wild.

I stood in the parking lot, taking notes as looters walked past. Several even joked with me. When I asked a plump teen-ager why she was stealing, she shrugged and replied, “Why not?”

One sullen young man pulled up to the deli’s entrance in his car and began opening up the car doors. When he saw me looking at him, he ran up about two inches from my face and shouted:

“What the hell are doing? Did you write down my license plate? Did you? Did you?”

“I’m a reporter. I’m just taking notes for my story,” I replied as I held up my press credential and slowly backed away.

My press pass only inflamed him. He slapped it and tried to grab my notebook. He was only about 19, but I saw that vacant “crack look” in his eyes--with the same sickly yellow clouding I had seen many times before when I worked as a taxi driver in Oakland.

“Let me see what you’re writing,” he shouted, adding a few profanities, then patting an ominous bulge in the right pocket of his shorts.

As several people surrounded me, I thought: “Jimmy, you’re not going to talk your way out of this one.” Then I calculated how fast I could run two blocks to a grocery store, where I had earlier seen armed security guards.

Before I could run, the crack-head started yanking my tie and smashed a fist into my glasses. At the same time someone else tried to grab my notebook, clawing at my right hand. I pulled back, holding the notebook to my chest.

Someone else pushed me from behind. Still clasping my notebook, I tried to shake free, throwing elbows, spinning and driving my legs like a fullback trying to bust a tackle. But when I played football, someone always blew the whistle. This time, the action was punctuated by gunfire.

When someone whacked me in the jaw--was it a brick? a board?--I went crazy. I started swinging wildly with my left arm--the one with the pen.

“Let him go,” someone shouted. “I called the police. They’re on the way.”

On my left, someone else said: “Get out of the way. Let me get a clear shot.”

I saw the glint of metal about 10 feet away and a youth near the side door of a pickup truck.

Then he fired. Everyone froze. I freaked. I dropped my notebook and ran to my right, zigzagging through the crowd as I dashed down the middle of Parthenia, weaving in and out of traffic.

I ran three blocks and only looked back when I heard a police siren. I saw two patrol cars arrive at the beating scene.

As I walked back I noticed a broken, blood-spattered pen in my left hand. I tossed it aside, without thinking. I patted myself down, checking for blood but found only scratches. That’s when I realized the deep red blood on the pen wasn’t mine. I sighed and didn’t give it much thought at the time.

Only much later, as I tried to will myself to sleep, did I realize that the bloody pen symbolized my descent from a high-minded defender of the First Amendment to a cornered, fearful rat, ready to gnaw anything in my escape path.

“I’d have loved to shoot the scumbag,” I casually told the police officer taking my crime report.

This came from the lips of a person often chided as a “typical Berkeley liberal” as he surveyed a bullet hole in the side wall of the mini-mall. The 9-millimeter bullet had landed to my left, about as high as my belly.

I know it’s irrational, but I’m still steamed that they took my notes. Some reporters risk jail to protect their notes. I almost got my brains splattered.

My anger slowly ebbs, but I now feel a growing discomfort knowing how close we are--how close I am--to crossing the brink of violence.

Some teen-ager and his pals nearly killed me because of the way I looked at them. I might have killed one of them to protect my stupid little notebook. Violence has to start in the mind before it can become a reality.

That’s what it really takes. The mind, not weapons. The angry, disaffected crowds who took over much of Los Angeles were armed, but not that well-armed. Like a stampeding herd, they relied on their vast numbers. When 100 people loot a liquor store, everyone knows the cops can only catch a couple.

It was all so easy. I would have killed to avoid being killed. Healing isn’t so easy.

Most of my damage was between the ears. I don’t know if I’ll ever be healed from this violence.

But then, I don’t know if L.A. will either.