I repeated the phrase—“the Famous Rick”—as verification. I liked it. I stood there and told my story about what had happened to whoever asked. The secretary finally had me come in the office, where she took my name, address, and phone number. She asked me when this occurred. I asked her the time. She said it was three thirty-five, and I told her it happened five minutes ago: three-thirty. She wrote that figure down and then told me to go see about my neck and said they would get in touch with me later.
I went back to my apartment and tried to decide what to do. I called 911, the emergency number, and asked the woman who answered what I should do. She said that would have to be my decision. I looked in the mirror at the blood on my neck, and went down to Chris’s apartment to show him. I knocked on his door, but there wasn’t any answer. On my way back to my apartment, I saw him coming toward me, just back from a walk. I told him the boys had shot me and showed him my neck. He was interested in the drama of it, but his attitude was basically “I told you so.”
I asked him what he thought I should do, and he said I should probably wash it. I went in the bathroom and cleaned off the blood where it had dripped down my neck; where the blood was coagulating I pressed lightly with my fingers. It was swollen and I wondered if there might be something actually imbedded there. I came back out to Chris and he looked at it in the sunlight. He said he couldn’t really tell if there was anything there or not, so I decided to go to the hospital.
While we were talking, two boys came up to speak to me: Mordy, who’d been in the office a few minutes earlier, and the Nondescript Boy, who’d tried putting out a cigarette on my pants the other day.
“Hey, Rick, how’s it going?”
“Are you all right?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“What happened?”
“One of the boys shot me.”
“You think one of the boys at the school shot you?”
“Who else would want to shoot me?”
“With what?”
“I don’t know, a BB gun, I guess.”
“A BB gun can’t shoot that far away—”
Chris was listening to this conversation with interest and interjected that a BB gun certainly could shoot that far away, that he had one as a kid, and he went on to describe two different kinds of BB gun, one with a spring action and another that used a C02 cartridge which could really shoot far.
“So what are you going to do?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
After they had gone, Chris turned to me and said, “They’re lying.” He said they obviously knew who did it and were just trying to find out how serious it was, to see if they might get charged with murder or something.
That was interesting.
When I went back in my apartment I called Josh to tell him what had happened and see if he might give me a ride to the hospital. He wasn’t there, so I left a cryptic message on his machine, for the sake of its suspense and entertainment value: “I’ve been shot in the neck and I’m bleeding. I guess I’ll go to the hospital.” I got my backpack, put in a book to read, and headed out on my bicycle. I wore my hat.
I was almost to the corner when one of the smaller boys flagged me down. He was all dressed up in a suit and wore wire-rimmed glasses, which sat on the very thick bridge of his nose. He looked like a little businessman. His self-confidence suggested he must be at least thirteen years old, although he looked younger.
“Hey, Rick, where are you going?”
“To the hospital.”
“Are you hurt very bad?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going to the hospital.”
“You think one of the yeshiva boys shot you?”
I just looked at him: What do you think?
“These are religious boys, they don’t have guns. It’s not possible that a yeshiva boy would shoot you.”
This was a pointless conversation.
“I have to go.” I tried to steer away, but he grabbed my hands on the handlebars of the bike and held me there.
“Rick, people want to kill you.”
“So?” and I tried to explain to him the freedom of having nothing left to lose: “I don’t care. I’m forty years old and forty of my friends have died of AIDS—so what difference does it make to me if somebody wants to kill me? Who cares?”
“Rick, nobody wants to kill you,” he said, reversing his previous position, idly experimenting with different modes of procedure. “So are you mad at the boys?”
“I—don't—care," I said, ridiculously raising my voice. And then, quietly, I tried to explain my feelings to him as carefully as I could. “I’m embarrassed it makes any difference to me at all. Okay? Now I’ve got to go.”
I managed to get my bike across the street, but he wouldn’t let go of it, staying with me, holding fast to the handlebars and blocking my way.
“Rick, Rick, you want to know who shot you? You want to know who did it? It was the schvartzers. You know who that is?”
I just looked at him. It was strange to see that kind of ugly self-righteousness in such a little boy.
“The schvartzers,” he said. “The niggers. It was the niggers. They’re the ones who did it.”
I thought of their maintenance man whom I’d met that afternoon. “You mean Leo?” I asked.
He deflated in exasperation and disgust. “No, not Leo,” he said.
I pried myself and my bike from his cold little hands, and finally got cycling on down the street.
I had the weird feeling of being an insect prior to dissection: there was such a sense of superiority in his tone, such disdain, such an incredible feeling of inconsideration toward anything non-Jewish.
He had no responsibility to me whatsoever as a fellow human being.
I was beneath contempt.
25 / the police
At the hospital, Cedars-Sinai, they took three X rays, determined there were no fragments embedded in my neck, cleaned my wound, and gave me a tetanus shot. They told me to come back in two days. I received treatment by virtue of a health plan I was eligible for through the Screen Actors Guild.
The woman in charge of admittance I spoke to was shocked when I told her what happened. She said that she attended temple herself, but that my wearing the hat was no reason for anyone to shoot me. She told me I should very definitely make a police report.
I bicycled home, and as I rode up Alta Vista, I noticed Josh in front of my apartment. He was sitting on one of the little walls bordering the walkway and smoking a cigarette. He was hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees, in what I have defined for myself as the classical male heterosexual position (in the sauna at the gym I feel you can always tell which men are heterosexual because they usually sit that way—looking down at their hands, as if they were resigned to some overwhelming defeat and as if to say, “I did what I could—now what more do you want?”).
As I rode my bike up on the sidewalk I called out to him and he looked up.
“My God, are you all right?” he asked, standing up and flipping his cigarette away as he came toward me.
I reassured him. “I’m fine. I went to the hospital and they gave me a tetanus shot. Did you see the holes in my window?”
I brought my bike up the steps onto the walkway and parked it, then took Josh over in front of my window, where we examined the glass.
“I talked to them,” Josh said.
“Who?”
“The boys.”
I turned around and looked at him. “You did? You talked to the boys? What did they say?”
Josh went back to the walkway and as he sat on one of the little walls he lit another cigarette. “When I got your message, I called you right back, but you were already gone. I was really mad, so I got in my car and drove over here.”
I began to feel a little queasy—that somebody would get really mad because of something that had happened to me.
“You still weren’t here, so I looked around and saw one of the old m
en with a yarmulke, so I went up to him and told him that one of the boys in the school had shot a friend of mine.”
“Who was it?”
Josh shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t even know if he had anything to do with the school.”
“What did he say?”
“He said a yeshiva boy would never use a gun and told me to go talk to a rabbi. So I went over to the school and looked around, but I couldn’t find anyone. That place is a dump, by the way, it’s a real pigsty—”
“You went in the school?” I asked. “And nobody stopped you? Did you go in the main entrance?”
Josh shook his head and pointed toward the building. “No, I went in the side entrance around the corner.”
I knew which one he meant—it faced Waring and led into the dormitory part of the school.
“So I wandered around, I even went upstairs, but I couldn’t find anybody. I finally went outside in the back and found some of them playing basketball.”
Josh took a deep drag on his cigarette before going on with his story. “ ‘I’m a friend of the guy that lives across the street,’ I said and pointed over here. ‘This is America,’ I said. ‘And just as you have the right to wear funny clothes, so does anybody else, and you don’t just go around shooting people if you don’t like them.’ ”
“What did they say?”
“They said you didn’t have any proof who did it, and I said, ‘Don’t give me that. He saw you.’ ”
“You know,” I said, “I didn’t actually see who did it.”
Josh shrugged. “You know it was them . . .”
I nodded, and then we both said, “Who else?” together and laughed.
“So what did they say?”
“One little kid said to me, ‘Well, some of us don’t like him,’ and I said, ‘That doesn’t give you the right to shoot somebody!’ And then I got really mad and I told them that this was America and that here you’re innocent until proven guilty—‘I don’t want to ever hear that you shot at him again.’ ”
How weird—it had never really occurred to me that I might have a friend who would stick up for me in a confrontation.
“What did they say?”
Josh shrugged. “Nothing. No, that’s not true—it was really strange, they started saying, ‘We respect your opinion,’ and they kept repeating that: ‘We respect your opinion,’ almost like a chant.”
“So what happened?”
Josh shrugged. “Nothing. They just kept saying, ‘We respect your opinion,’ and then I came back over here.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I think that’s really amazing,” I said, finally. “I’m really humbled. I don’t think anyone has ever done anything like that for me before. It seems like some—ultimate definition of friendship. It seems like something worth writing about.”
After Josh had gone home, I went into my apartment and played back my messages. There was this: “Hi, Rick, this is Josh. I mean, that’s some message you left. . . uh . . . How? With a BB, with a bullet, what? Uh, if I’m not here, please leave a message and tell me—if you come back. I mean, when you come back. Okay. Bye.”
I sat at my desk wondering what I should do and then, after several minutes, I picked up the phone and called 911. They transferred me to a police department that gave me another number to call. However, that office was closed, and they referred me to the Hollywood Division, which briefly put me on hold, transferred me somewhere else, and finally took down my information, saying they would send a police car over.
After I hung up I went outside to wait for the police. The typical spring overcast had made the sky particularly gray in the early evening. I walked out to the end of one of the walls bordering the walkway and looked over toward the school. I still had the hat on and I stood there with my arms folded across my chest. The hospital bandage was prominent on my neck.
Some boys were out in the compound across the street, and in a moment they were joined by others. Pretty soon there was quite a little gathering, and they began standing up on their wall and holding on to the fence that surmounted it. A few boys called my name, but I didn’t say anything.
“What’s he doing?”
The boys who were arriving were unsure just what the occasion was, and I wondered if my solitary self, standing still on the end of a wall, was the whole show.
There was a tension between us: they had hurt me, and in that action had become the aggressors. Their gathering together was instinctive, to wait and watch for some action from me that would comfortably allow them to perceive themselves as victims once again. Their sense of victory was palpable, but it contained a taint of dishonor, a dishonor that could be eradicated only by some act of craziness or violence on my part that would retroactively justify their attack.
But I didn’t feel like giving them that satisfaction: let them stew in their guilt. And besides, when the police arrived, that would be all the answer they would need.
After a while some of the boys, including the big ugly one, came across the street toward me.
“Hey, Rick, what are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for the police.”
“You think one of the boys shot you?”
“Who else hates me enough to shoot me?”
“Who do you think did it?”
Standing at the end of one of the walls above the sidewalk, I was looking down at the boys who were standing in the street. Like God I pronounced my verdict and, without saying anything, pointed my finger straight at the Big Ugly Boy.
He put his hand up to his chest incredulously. “You think I did it?”
“You’re the only person I ever heard threaten to kill me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Several days ago, when you were talking to Shaul, our plumber, I heard you, right here on these steps: ‘I want to kill him. I just want to kill him.’ ”
He sputtered some denial and I wondered if, in his general hatred of me, he could actually remember one particular instance of it.
“No one has ever called me worse names than you,” I told him. “No one has been more abusive to me than you have.”
The Big Ugly Boy and his friends went back across the street, and I paced back and forth on the wall.
Among the boys congregating across the street I noticed Mordecai in particular, the beautiful Arabic-looking boy: he was pantomiming shooting me. The boy I think of as “passing”—the one who mooned me—was particularly concentrated on my actions, standing on the low cement wall and leaning forward against the fence, staring at me with a fascinated intensity.
And then they started yelling things at me. My position as a victim was intolerable to them, and any means to make me reveal myself as a genuine threat was now deemed acceptable.
“Hey, Rick! We hear you can’t pay your rent and your landlord wants to evict you.”
I had always imagined that there would eventually be a meeting of some kind, in an office with a presiding rabbi and his charges, or a school assembly perhaps, where I would be asked to speak and state my position clearly. That would be the beginning of a meaningful dialogue between me and the school. I would be asked to join them in their study of the holy Scriptures and, ultimately, I would either successfully refute their belief in God’s existence or make them admit their “religion” is a front for a social organization that wants to claim a tax-free status.
“Hey, Rick, we think it’s about time you moved out of this neighborhood!”
But this fantasy was apparently never to be. The only forum I would ever be given was this one, atop a four-foot-high wall, from which I would have to shout to be heard, and with my audience not much more than a mob, across a street and behind a fence.
“I was here before you,” I yelled back at them, and with this first answer to their noise, I felt myself starting to sink into an ugly, name-calling world.
The disturbing thing about the situation—as I imagined my landlord in cahoots with t
hem—was their sense of invincibility, and it was more than knowing I didn’t have any proof who shot me: it had something to do with an assurance they had been given from above that, not only were they being vindicated, they were right.
It was getting cold, and I went back into my apartment, as if I were through with them, but a moment later I returned with my police jacket on. Suddenly they all scattered and I thought a teacher must be coming, that they were going to get into trouble, but a cautious moment later they were all back in their places.
“Hey, Rick, you got a gun? Huh? You got a gun?”
And then I saw the man with the wire-rimmed glasses who had threatened me the other day. He came out into the compound and tried to disperse the boys but to little effect, answering their inquiries and suppositions in a let’s-put-an-end-to-this-now manner: “I shot him, okay? I shot him.”
They didn’t pay him much attention and continued to taunt me, yelling across the street, and finally letting go with their most powerful weapon, the ultimate accusation: “Racist!”
Some other boys took it up, once it had been uttered. “Racist!” and it was on its way to becoming a chant when I stepped down off the wall and walked across the yard in front of my home.
“I am not a racist,” I shouted back at them, as clearly and definitely as I could. “But I do have absolute contempt for your religion. Not your ‘race.’ I think Judaism is the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet, and I think your belief system, your belief in God, is not only stupid and a lie but offensive and dangerous. But I would fight anybody to defend your right to believe in whatever you want.”
I was marshaling all my thoughts, all my feelings, and making every effort to present my position as clearly as possible, and yet I knew that by condemning their religion I was, as far as they were concerned, condemning them. But I was not condemning them genetically, and their lack of a unified response to my statements underscored this distinction. They were and are, in my eyes, a declension: animals first and foremost, human beings second, and, third (gloriously!), males. Only much more insignificantly are they “Jews.”
The Boys Across the Street Page 18