Amid Temblor’s Havoc, a Neighbor Becomes a Lifesaver : A quake victim who is disabled recounts how a woman came to the rescue in the dawn hours of Jan. 17. The heroine took action despite being told to ‘save yourself.’

I had always told my friends that in case of earthquake they shouldn’t hang around to save me--just run. I thought I was only being practical. I got around in a wheelchair on the third floor of my building. How could I ever get down the stairs?

So while the earth rocked and roared on Jan. 17, I didn’t cry for help as everything fell around my bed. This was it, the end of my life.

When the shaking stopped, I made no effort to get up. My apartment was in ruins. Where could I go through that battleground?

It was a while before I heard a voice call, “Judy! Judy!”

Standing at my door, a flashlight in her hand and a long bathrobe around her, was Brenda Blackman, a neighbor whom I’d given a key months ago after my stay in a nursing home.

Brenda, who never took out the trash without her makeup on.

Brenda, a former modeling teacher who conducts seminars at junior colleges on subjects like “How to Find 100 Lovers,” “How to Romance a Woman” and--the one that got her on the Oprah Winfrey show--”How to Marry Money.”

*

She had shrieked in terror when the quake was destroying her apartment, but when she saw that the only object left on the wall was my key, she told herself, “I have to get Judy and me out of here.”

Now, her hair uncombed, her face pale, the flashlight wavering in her hand, she said we were leaving here.

We?

“Save yourself,” I said. I thought I meant it. I did not want to be the cause of someone else’s death. At the same time, I found myself getting into my wheelchair. Brenda wrapped my blanket around my nightgown. I pulled a coat around myself.

The outside hall was empty. The earth kept groaning. And although I told her she should run for it, she shook her head. Water on the floor blackened the hem of her robe. We froze for a long moment near the stairs. Then a man came hurrying through the hall.

“You have to carry her down the stairs!” Brenda ordered.

There was doubt in his eyes as he lifted all 102 pounds of me, and he missed a step as Brenda guided the wheelchair down the stairs from behind.

*

At the first landing, he’d had enough. “She’s too heavy,” he told Brenda, depositing me in the wheelchair. The ground still shook. Brenda, an expert at finding men, found another one--smaller but fitter. Down we went.

Would we all make it? I kept my eyes closed and prayed as the ground shook again, “Oh, God, don’t let these people die because of me.”

And of course they didn’t. Outside in the still, dark early morning, a million stars shining overhead, we huddled with others, none of whom I knew. But as I shivered, one young woman ran for some towels to cover me.

Brenda now started to worry about my need for a restroom for the disabled. She conferred with others and decided they’d push me across Burbank Boulevard to Tarzana Hospital.

“Wait a second,” she said, and amazingly ran back into the building to get her purse and my medication and change clothes. Earthquake or not, she wasn’t about to leave the grounds in her bathrobe.

We were all a sight, but on earthquake morning who cared! Two young women stood on either side of the roadway and stopped cars so we could pass.

I didn’t hear anything about Tarzana Hospital on television, but despite a ceiling ready to fall, water leaks everywhere, regular patients being removed to make way for emergencies, they were kind to a refugee like me. They fed me, comforted me and said I could stay if I didn’t have a place to go.

Brenda came back to the hospital later and sat with me until my son came to take me to his home in Laguna Niguel.

*

I suppose Brenda Blackman and I may not be neighbors again. We were not close friends before the quake, and our building may be pulled down. I have no idea where I will be living in three months.

I shall always remember her as one who reached for the substance within her when life was on the line. If she needs another course to teach, she can call it “How to Be a Hero.”