A Face at the Window

Sometimes when red-eyed insomnia keeps me lying awake at night making figures out of shadows on the ceiling, I get out of bed, get dressed and drive.

Driving quiets the demons in me and gives me a look at the city long after the bass drums have stopped pounding and a softer riff has set in. There’s something about 2 a.m. that stills the soul.

I was cruising the streets that way the other morning, sinking slowly into myself, and was about to head home when any serenity I’d managed to achieve went flying off like a flock of startled crows.

It happened when I was stopped at an intersection in the Valley. I sensed motion at the right corner of my peripheral vision and glanced over to see what it was.

A face had suddenly appeared at my window.

It was the hard, lined face of a gaunt man in his 30s, pressed close to the glass on the passenger side. His eyes were fixed on me. Our glances locked.

I remember his face as though it were a still-life painting, hanging there in the darkness, alternately illuminated and shadowed by the headlights of passing traffic.

So surreal was the man’s sudden appearance that at first I wondered if I was hallucinating. The guy reminded me of a killer named Jack Santos whose execution I covered a long time ago at San Quentin.

Santos had turned and stared directly at me on the witness side of the gas chamber in the last few seconds before a hydrocyanic atmosphere sent his evil spirit cascading into hell.

Had I been thinking of Santos when the face appeared? Had I juxtaposed memory on the window?

*

I didn’t wait to find out. I hit the gas pedal hard enough to drive it through the floorboard, and my Grand Am shot through the intersection like it was running at the Indy 500.

By then, soul-deep serenity was a thing of the past and I spent the rest of the night awake too, but at least something came of it. In a flash of awareness, I remembered whom the face belonged to.

It was that of a homeless man who hangs around the intersection asking for money. Sometimes he approaches cars stopped at the signal and stoops down to confront people inside.

What he was doing there at 2 in the morning is hard to say, but it doesn’t matter. I had once more been made aware of the kind of fear that winds through L.A. like a dark fog, and I hated it.

I’m not easily frightened. I had terror driven out of me 40 years ago on the war-shattered mountains of Korea, and I’ve yet to see anything that could make me that afraid again.

But that face at the window made me realize again how quickly starry nights can turn deadly.

It could have just as easily belonged to the kind of psycho who took the money and the life of a young mother Wednesday night as she waited in her car in front of a Northridge home.

It could have been the face of eternity come to say my name.

*

I’ve written about fear before, but it’s been on my mind again lately for reasons other than that sudden appearance of a face at my car window.

The murder of Laurie Myles, the young mother in Northridge, is one reason.

So is the death of a terrified elderly woman killed when her car was struck by a train because she was afraid the man trying to save her was trying to rob her.

So are the number of responses from frightened people to a moderately anti-gun column I wrote more than two weeks ago.

So is the strange announcement by city boosters to launch a multimillion-dollar campaign not to improve the city but to alter its image for the sake of tourism.

So is the comment by council member Laura Chick that there’s nothing wrong with L.A., it’s the media that are making us look bad.

But it isn’t the media and it isn’t an image problem we ought to be worrying about. Fear is a tangible presence in town. It’s why gun lovers were able to force the city to start issuing firearm permits to private citizens.

As one letter writer promised in a chilling footnote to his pro-gun attitude on crime: “We’re going to start shooting back.”

How palpable is the fear? Not long ago a woman named Suzanne Lewis, responding in her way to the growing crime problem, initiated a candlelight march against urban terror.

Though the march was well-organized, only about a dozen people turned out. I asked one man who had promised to attend why he hadn’t. His answer glowed with irony. He said simply: “I was afraid.”

There’s a face at everyone’s window in L.A., and the face is fear.