I was kidnapped once. Well, now that I think about it, it was really more of an abduction than an actual kidnapping. But what the hell, kidnapping, abduction...it's all scary when somebody's got a gun to your head, right? I would assume it would be, because when I was abducted, I never actually saw a gun and I was still scared to death. I was scared because the presence of the gun was strongly implied shortly after my assailant grabbed me by the arm and told me that the coffee shop was closed...
Maybe I should start at the beginning. It was midnight, mid-September, 1994. I was sitting at my computer when I heard a loud car crash down the street. I decided I would step out of my apartment to go check things out. It was a very busy intersection near a college, so even though it was midnight, it wasn't like I was in any position to be a first responder. I was gonna get my gawk on, maybe scope the gathering mob for some college girls, that kind of thing. Plus, the mean season was coming; there wouldn't be many more balmy nights like this to go out for a leisurely walk.
I should also mention I was really stoned, but I say that only for context, and with no fear of self-incrimination; I'm pretty sure it was second-hand smoke from the upstairs apartment.
So anyway, there I was, walkin' reeaalll slowwww. As I got closer to the scene of the accident, I saw a really large car that appeared to be waiting inside the roadside bus stop, which was all busted up. There were a few people walking around, but there didn’t seem to be any real urgency or activity up ahead. I began to wonder if there had been anyone in the bus stop, when suddenly I was confronted with a thick, shortish man who smelled BAD, and seemed to be talking to me.
"Excuse me?" I said. He had said something to me that I didn't catch; the guy pointed his finger at me, got real pissed off and said, "I asked you where you were going." Right away, I started to perk up, because I could tell something very bad and weird was about to happen.
I didn't know what to say. Instinctually, I knew it would be a mistake to say that I was going down to look at this crash. I was starting to get paranoid that this guy saw me come out of my apartment, and he knew that I was just going down there to gawk. So instead of telling him that I was (slowly) going down there to see if anybody needed help, I instead gestured over to the coffee shop on the corner.
"I'm going to the coffee shop", I said, hopefully.
"Oh yeah?" he said, not missing a beat, "Coffee shop's closed". And as I squinted at the shop, I realized that he was right. As the situational dominos starting tumbling in my brain, he grabbed my arm hard, got close to my face, and said:
"I think you were going down there to tell them about my accident. Well I'm not going back to prison for you or anybody. See this gun?" And with that, he hiked up his shirt with his free hand to show me something wrapped in a red bandana, tucked in his waistband. He tightened his grip on my arm and said, "You and me are going for a walk."
Ten seconds with a stranger can change your night so dramatically. There we were, turning an about face as my assailant forcefully walked back down the street, towards my apartment. The evening had taken a dramatic turn for the worst; I was scared to death, and it was clear that my assailant was even more impaired than I am. He was staggering badly, and his alcohol breath gave me my second contact-high of the night. My assailant was forceful, but seemed vulnerable, too. He confirmed as much when he told me "You’re going to help me get home."
We slowly walked past my apartment, and I remember looking at it, wondering if I would make it back inside. We had walked perhaps 30 steps at that point. He still had the iron grip on my arm. I was thinking pretty much exclusively about what he had in that red bandanna. Was it a gun? Was he a Blood? Was it an ice cream sandwich? God, do I wish he had an ice cream sandwich. All I knew was he had a red bandanna with something in it that he said was a gun, and he seemed to have just been involved in a serious traffic accident that he apparently can just walk away from without anybody even so much as bothering to notice, and he seems to really not want to go back to prison. I remember thinking, "What else can go wrong?"
Well, for starters, my assailant could have told me his name, so that I could positively ID him, and thus give him a motive for really hurting me. "My name is Tony", he slurred. Thank you for telling me your name, Tony. I think that's really going to add a new dimension to our relationship. Why don't you just go ahead and tell me about an alias or defining physical characteristic, so I can give the police the best description possible? "But my friends call me T", and with that, he pointed to the back of his shaved head, where he had a two-inch tall letter "T" tattooed. Perfect.
T's ("Can I call you T?") revelations about his name were startling to me, because his manner had changed instantly. T was no longer holding my arm; his tone had softened considerably. "I got four kids, and I can't get a job", he wailed. T began a stream of consciousness inventory of lifetime wrongs that he had either suffered or perpetrated. He began to lean on me; his leg, it seemed, got knocked around in his hit and run crash. T was reeling. I noticed he was pulling up lame, which was jarring to me in a Darwinian way. Deep inside, in the very far reaches of my primal begin, I knew that I could capitalize on his physical weakness if it came to that.
But then my intellectual being joined the conversation, and told my instinctual side that kicking this guy in his bad knee in order to create a window for a getaway would be just the kind of thing that would make him want to shoot me. I mean, it's one thing to shoot a guy in the back as he's running away from you. But you take a pissed-off drunk guy with a gun, and you try to break his very injured knee, and suddenly shooting somebody seems like a great idea to him.
I immediately played through endless scenarios in my brain. Run. Kick him in the knee and run. Kick him in the knee, grab the gun, and run. Kick him in the knee, kick him in the nuts, and run. The plans quickly turned to the desperate, in search of an option where there wasn't a chance I would be shot. Distract him. Point at the sky, step on his foot when he looks up, and head-butt him when he looks down, and stick my fingers in his eyes. Every plan was foiled by the presence of the gun. The gun was trump. I took stock of the situation. Collectively, our faculties were declining. T probably outweighed me by 30 pounds despite an approximate height of 4'2". The gun. Sizing it up, I opted to employ a strategy I call Waiting For Something To Happen, while promising myself that I would look into the Run option if the opportunity presented itself. The Kick options were all still on the table, but only as the very last resort. I had a plan. Not a very good plan, but a plan nonetheless.
I checked back in to my evolving crisis to find that T was sharing a story about a difficult domestic situation he had with one of his kids. Or was it getting fired from his job for drinking a six-pack in his car over lunch? I heard so many tales of woe, it was hard to keep them straight. Why did I have to get the chatty assailant? I actually started to try to comfort T with empathetic comments. "Tough break, man." "That sucks, T." But then T would change again. He'd mention the accident again, and threaten me for seeing it. He would suddenly reference the gun, even show the bandanna to me. And that's when I really started to get scared; T was unpredictable. His moods were starting to swing so wildly, I couldn't relate to him at all. Our relationship had been complicated from the start, and it was clear we had no real future together. I was really ready to move on, but T just wouldn't let go.
I decided to get serious about the Run plan. The next intersection was about a half block away. Finally, a workable idea came to me: At the intersection, I would dart through traffic! It was perfect; the cars (and their hapless drivers) would provide cover for my daring escape.
I would explode into street, blending seamlessly into the flow of traffic. I would slide over the first car's hood, Starsky & Hutch-style. T would unsheath his weapon and drop to his good knee to take aim. He would briefly glimpse his target as the car in front of me moved. T's eyes would narrow as he started to squeeze the trigger, but no! He cannot see me now! I would drop and roll to the next lane; now I'm ducking beside an El Camino, running low to the ground with it as it moves through the intersection. I would be like a panther. T would be helplessly confused. Where had I gone? I would hear his anguished cry, "Where are yoooouuuuu!" as I sped away on foot, hiding behind a double-length bus, a 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood and a stretch limo who all seem to be tailgating the vehicle in front of them.
Well, I can tell you that plan looked a lot better on paper than it really was. One critical element of the plan was that there would actually some traffic to dart through. Without the traffic, I might as well have run into an empty street, done the Walk Like An Egyptian dance and begged T to shoot me. As we approached the intersection, I was looking for my traffic. There was none. Not a single car was to be found. I was distraught.
We stopped at the intersection. I looked up and down both streets. Nothing. I was baffled. There was a serious accident three blocks down the street. Where were the police? Where was anybody? Of all nights for T and me to be on that corner, we picked the only one with no traffic for me to dart through. What now?
As we stood there, I started to think about my plan again. Darting through traffic wasn’t going to be an option. My thoughts turned again to T's cranky knee, and his profound intoxication. His moods were swinging wildly, still. I would have had to time any attack carefully, seizing my opportunity when he wasn't alert or aggressive. I studied him carefully. His face showed the emotional stress of the crash; his eyes revealed his struggle to maintain coherent thought.
I figured I had one last chance to make the Run plan a success story, and then it was going to be time to come to terms with my Kick plan. That last chance was a 24-hour grocery up ahead. My main concern was that it was on the other side of the street, which once again focused all of my thought on the gun. T had mentioned it four or five times by now, and showed the bandanna to me twice. But I had never actually seen the gun. There was at least some doubt in my mind that T had a gun, and there was quite a bit of doubt that T could pull it out and shoot it accurately before I could make my way into the store. I was consumed with one thought: Could I get across the street and into the store before T could shoot me?
Now, I'm pretty quick on my feet; I was maybe 80% sure I could get across before he fired. But what if I was wrong, and running across to the store deprived me of what may have been a safer opportunity to escape down the road? Eighty percent was worse odds than Russian Roullette. We were getting closer to the store with every step. I knew this was a life or death decision I was about to make.
Suddenly, I remembered that this particular grocery store had a security guard at all times. Well... at least some times. I knew that I had seen uniformed officers there before. What if I were to make my dash across the street in search of a police officer, only to find there wasn't one on duty at this time of night? If T wasn't able to shoot me as I crossed, what would he do? Would he simply continue down the road? Would he wait for me outside the store? What if he followed me to the store? Then I would have led a gunman into a public place.
But perhaps that was my best chance at escape. I imagined myself tearing through the aisles, toppling displays and leaving an impassable sea of sundries in my wake. Naturally, for both ethical and safety reasons, I wouldn't just be able to run amok through the store without screaming to the other late-nite shoppers why I was there, or that they too could be in peril. "He's chasing me!" I would scream as I burst through the doors and into the produce section. I would fling cantaloupes and seedless grapes to the floor to impede T as I cry out to the other shoppers, "He has something wrapped in a red bandanna that he says is a gun and he thinks I saw his crash, but I didn't, and I wasn't going to gawk at it, I was only going to buy coffee!" T would be in hot pursuit, screaming "I'm not going back to prison for you or anybody!" T’s gunshots would miss me, hitting watermelons and bottles of ketchup instead. It would be spectacularly messy. We would run through every aisle in the store; the voice over the intercom would call our race like we were coming down the home stretch at Hollywood Park: "Cleanup in produce...cleanup in aisle two...rotisserie chicken cleanup in deli...the Express Lane is open if you have less than 10 items or are fleeing in terror..."
And hey! What do you know? We were a full 50 feet past the store now! I got completely sucked into the Grocery Store Destruction Fantasy; I totally blew whatever chance I may have had to play Supermarket Scramble. It began to dawn on me that the largest obstacle I was going to face that night wasn’t T or his mysterious gun; it was my inability to think clearly or act decisively.
I started to consider that the Run option may not present itself. Clearly, time was slipping away on the Wait And See Plan; we were now about 10 blocks from T's apartment, which I was now thinking of as my own personal Ground Zero. That's where T would be most likely to take action. T needed me to get him home, but once there, I was conceivably the last link that could tie him to the accident. I was T's ticket home, and T's ticket back to prison, in that order, and we both knew it all too well. I was determined to force the issue before we ever made it to Ground Zero. There was no point in denying what my primal being was now screaming in my ear: There was going to have to be a Showdown.
Finally, all my years of TV crime drama viewing and Walter Mitty daydreaming were going to converge in one explosive confrontation with a drunken Hobbit-sized man who could scarcely walk or talk. I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked to have been, considering this short five block walk was the most physical activity I had undertaken in many weeks, but it was too late to lament that now. I had to focus.
All I could produce was the beginning of my plan. When I had an area to run to which would provide me with at least some cover, I would raise my foot, and kick him in the side of his injured knee as hard as I could. This in itself was going to be hard to do. Trying to break somebody's leg wasn't something I did every day. But there were no other choices. The kick had to be hard, swift, and decisive. It must land with precision accuracy, as well, no easy feat when your target is walking erratically.
The problem I had was that no matter where on the street I chose to kick him, there was still a chance he was going to be able to recover in time to shoot me. Once we crossed the upcoming intersection, there were few places to run and hide; the street was practically all storefront. It would be a shooting gallery for T if he recovered from my kick.
There was an intersection nearby. Suddenly, instead of having a few more blocks in which to plan my escape, I might only have a few more feet. I began to shake and feel physically ill as we approached the next intersection. I was sweating hard; I couldn't swallow and could barely breathe. "Good God," I thought to myself as the intersection loomed some 30 feet ahead. "This is it." Fleeting thoughts of my parents, friends and cats were in my head when something quite remarkable happened.
T had stopped walking. Three businesses down from the intersection, there was a laundromat. A tall man had stepped out with a basket full of freshly laundered clothes; I could still smell the fabric softener on them. I turned to look at T, and even slowed down a bit to wait for him before I realized that would obviously be a very stupid thing to do. So, I just kept walking, slowly, looking back at T as he stepped up close to the man and belligerently asked "Is tonight laundry night?"
The guy didn't know what the hell was going on. I kept walking slowly towards the intersection. If I could just get to the corner, I would have a 30 foot head start on T, and he wouldn't be able to take a shot at me until he got to the intersection. I thought there was a chance I could get around to the alley before T could disengage the laundry man and get around that corner. If I made it to the alley, I could double back and dart through yards. Even a healthy T wouldn't have a chance to get a clean shot at me then, much less catch me. I just had to get to that corner. 10 feet away now. Five feet...
I turned to look back at T and the laundry man. T was in the guy's face, pointing at his laundry basket; I couldn't tell what he was saying. The laundry man was genuinely confused; as I looked back, I saw him turn from T to me. The look on his face was one I'll never forget; it must have been the same look I had back when T and I first met, no more than a half-hour ago. It was a look of confusion, but I also saw a glimmer of recognition, as if the laundry man realized that although I had been with T, I wasn't really "with" T of my own volition. I felt bad for him; who knew what trouble he was about to inherit?
I decided that wasn't my problem. That moment of eye contact and recognition lasted perhaps a second, at most. I was at the corner; I took one last look at T and I was gone. I ran to the alley, doubled back for about a half block, then cut through back yards to the next street, and then the next. In the span of a minute, I was probably three blocks away. I don't even know if he gave chase; it didn't matter. I took every back alley and circuitous route I could think of to get back to my apartment. I never stopped running. I hid in the bushes and scanned the street to make sure T wasn't around before I had the guts to go back inside, where I sat quietly in the dark and peered out of my windows for almost an hour.
I never saw T again. I checked the newspapers the next day, to see if there had been any killings of laundromat customers, but there didn't seem to be anything that pointed to T. I finally called the police the next day to report both T's hit-and-run and his abduction of me, but the police weren't interested! They said they had already solved the traffic accident, and if I wanted to file a report on the abduction, I was welcome.
I decided against it. I don't know why, really. Maybe the police already had T in connection with the traffic accident, I told myself. Either way, T seemed to have a lot of problems, and I figured he'd end up in prison soon enough. Besides, I didn't exactly want to have to ID T in a lineup, and then have him get out of prison again and find me walking down the street. Covering my tracks became my only priority.
Sometimes, I still think about T, and what would have happened had we crossed that street. Would I have been able to do what I needed to do to get away? Thankfully, I'll never know. More than anything, I think about the way the guy from the laundromat looked at me when he realized I wasn't ditching a friend, but was getting away from a problem that was now his. I would love to know how their relationship worked out, but it doesn't really matter in the long run. No matter what, for a half-hour, T and I had something special and unique that one of us would remember the rest of their lives.
