A few years ago, some friends and I were celebrating a birthday at a bar down on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, California. As a friend and I left the bar, two men approached us on the street corner just south of the bar. One of them was holding a big, dark, semiautomatic pistol across his body, not aimed directly at us, but menacing, frightening.
He muttered something at us. It sounded as if he were saying, “Drop it down, drop it down.” The words didn’t make sense. Still, we understood what they wanted, and so, gingerly, almost delicately, the two of us surrendered our wallets, and I my car keys.
There was a comic element to this. The muggers hadn’t timed their mugging very well. We had been in a bar for a while, and, since we had been celebrating a friend’s birthday, we were completely tapped out. I think I had two dollars left in my wallet.
I had a flash of panic: what would happen if they looked in our wallets? What would they do?
They didn’t look, but scurried off, and we scuttled back around the corner to the safety of the bar.
We had both stayed calm during the confrontation. Once indoors I felt the rush of anxiety. The shock of the mugging collided with me. My legs were wobbly, my hands jittered, and I remember that my thoughts, which had been so intensely focused during the few seconds of the confrontation, became scattered and haphazard.
We called 911. A cop arrived in two or three minutes — too late to save us from our assailants, but reassuringly quickly nonetheless. Within ten minutes of our encounter, we were giving statements to the police about the men who had robbed us.
Some things were and are still vivid. I remember the gun, the large, dark, menacing outline of the semiautomatic held across the man’s body. I remember hoping that the man with the gun didn’t slip or flinch or start.
Beyond those facts, our recollections and our descriptions to the police were astonishingly different. I don’t know now whether I thought the man with the gun had a beard or whether my friend did — but one of us was almost certain he had a beard, and the other was almost certain he didn’t. I thought the man with the gun was shorter than I am — my friend thought he was taller. Did he have a hood on his head? One of us said yes, the other — of course — no. Did his sweatshirt had a logo? One “yes,” one uncertain “maybe.”
The questioning went on for a while, and the precision of my answers was not improved by the kindness of the bartender, who topped off my drink more than once. The police officer was frustrated by the enormous divergences in our accounts, not because we had done anything wrong, but because that divergence meant that this act would remain unpunished.
When it was clear that we could not give him anything precise to work with (we had tried for at least half an hour), he looked at me, directly, intently, and said, “Don’t you wish you’d had a gun so you could’ve just blown him away?”
The intensity of the encounter with the two men has long since faded. Neither I nor my friend were injured. I eventually found my car keys, which one of the muggers had hurled into a vacant lot down the street from the bar. My wallet never turned up. (I think we found my friend’s wallet, but I’m not sure anymore.)
But I am still haunted by the police officer’s question. It was probably said in a moment of exasperation: this mugging was perhaps another sign of the Sisyphean nature of his work, a continual effort to accomplish a task that could not be accomplished.
I have wondered ever since just what the cop thought the situation might have looked like had I really been armed. Where would I have kept my gun? In my waistband? Tucked into a sock? Carefully stowed in a leather holster under my arm? And what would I have done in the moment of confrontation? Looked at the man with the gun and asked him to hold on while I fumbled for my weapon?
And what would the 911 call have sounded like then? Would it have simply been a report about a stickup? Or something far worse? Who would have made it?
Leave a Reply