Sometimes You Take Chances

I wish I could say that it was a deliberate act, planned as a bravura gesture of civic amity. I wish I could say that I did it because I was thinking that if it were my brother, I’d want someone to do the same for him.

But I can’t say that. It wasn’t planned at all. It was something that just happened too suddenly for much more than impulse and intuition to kick in: Three scared teenagers were being chased down a dark street by men with a baseball bat, and a woman who chanced to be driving by decided to help them.

It happened by instinct, the way the very best and the very worst of life’s choices get made.

*

It was just turning 10 o’clock. I knew that because the nightly nostalgia radio program was wrapping up. The voice was telling me that the program I had just heard was “Dragnet,” that the names had been changed to protect the innocent.

Heading home from dinner with friends, I turned the corner from a major busy street onto a quieter one, deserted so late at night. In a car, it is a quick route to the Golden State Freeway. On foot, it is as barren of hiding places as a blank wall.

I drove past two men, one with some hefty object in his hand. Then, a few yards farther along, I passed the three boys.

All five were running. But anyone who has ever watched “Wild Kingdom” recognizes the difference between predators and prey. Predators have a focused, steady pace, intent but assured--precisely the way the two men were running.

Prey run wildly, frantically, in bursts, darting this way and that, searching for escape. The three boys, teenagers, were running in that fashion, pounding and panicky. I reached the freeway onramp, and they were almost there too. I rolled down my window a few inches and asked, somewhat superfluously, whether they needed help.

Please, they hollered. Their words broke with the raggedness of their breathing. They’re after us, they gotta baseball bat.

By then my car had rolled onto the deserted freeway ramp. My forefinger was poised at the button that unlocks all four car doors at once. Now, you’re not screwing with me, I said. It wasn’t really a question, only my own affirmation of the obvious, that these desperately frightened boys needed help.

My one risk assessment was this: I can’t outdrive a bullet, but I can a baseball bat.

I pressed the button. The door locks sprang open, and the three jumped in, crawling over dry cleaning and piles of books. I drove onto the freeway. The kid in front wore a long-sleeved knit shirt. When I patted his shoulder and told him to calm down, I felt it wet with sweat.

All three talked at once, “fool” this and “fool” that, someone at some party where he shouldn’t have been, someone with someone else’s beeper.

Soon, I got off the freeway and doubled back. They wanted to go home. Keep down, I told them--for their sake, in case those guys with the bat were still out there, but for mine too. Still, they kept popping up like meerkats at the zoo, looking around and ducking back down.

Abruptly, they were talked out. Fatigue or relief set in. Near where one of them said he lives, I let them out. Hey, thanks, they said, and then, more formally, thank you, yeah, thank you.

*

As I drove back to the freeway, two cop cars, lights whirling, were parked near where I’d first spotted the boys. Looking for those guys with the baseball bats? I asked. Yeah, said the cop. We think they’re in here. He nodded toward an apartment building.

Well, I said, my family would probably kill me, but I picked up three kids they were chasing and gave them a ride home.

The cop looked at me. If I were your family, he said, I’d kill you too.

The common-sense hypothetical in the urban safety manual goes something like this: “You’re driving down the street at night, and three young men being chased by two other men with a baseball bat beg you to give them a ride. You (a) hit the accelerator, (b) call the cops, (c) open the doors and invite them in.”

Now I’ve written news stories about carjackings and rapes and drive-bys, about good Samaritans who wind up dead Samaritans. I suppose it could have happened to me that night. I also suppose I could have passed them by, and then 10 minutes later, a drunk driver could have spread me like corned beef hash all over the freeway.

Sometimes, you’ve got to throw out the book. You’ve got to take a chance on people--on kids--and on your own gut.

Guts are not infallible. The frantic stranger who put the touch on me for $20 because her car had been Denver-booted and she had to get her daughter to the doctor swore she’d send me the money. As if.

There was the man who asked me for 70 cents for bus fare, and--I confess--I watched him, and damned if he didn’t get on the bus.

And then there were the three scared kids in my car. I took a chance. So did they. All of us got lucky.