Didn't See It Coming

In this sloppy, complex, crowded world, people get away with murder all the time.  Perfect (and less than perfect) crimes go unpunished every day. The police do the best they can, and so did my mother. She tried her hardest when assisting a police investigation because there was always the chance that something would shake loose as a result of her impressions. Sometimes it did, which led to her being a sort of subculture celebrity. She appeared on Merv Griffin's show back in the day, on Arsenio Hall, on Psychic Detectives, on Japanese television, and in various newspapers and local news shows.

She never stuck her nose into a police case unless she was asked. She often did them for free. The one time she was accused of publicity-seeking (more in another blog), she was deeply hurt and offended and for good reason. She might share her psychic feelings with me while watching the news, but she never called up and volunteered. She didn't need to. The families of victims were quick to find her and she had a network of police detectives that believed in her, though sometimes their bosses were harder to convince. Ironically, despite the many personal and professional confirmations of her ability, and our close connection, she didn't see a really bad thing coming in my life; something that still can make me shudder and see darkness. October 1984 was a time of celebration for me. I had been a contributing writer/editor on an elaborate dessert cookbook, and this night the author was giving an elegant launch party in her beautiful Palo Alto home. The food was (of course) delicious, the evening was mild, the people were congratulatory and I hummed with a sense of accomplishment. I needed that feeling just then. I had recently separated from my second husband and moved into a cheap apartment on the border of East Palo Alto. The dwelling itself wasn’t too bad, although I couldn’t get over seeing cockroaches lined up around the cat’s dish like kids waiting around a swimming hole. The last tenant had not been fastidious, and the building was old. I had done my best to decorate it, and its interior was cozy and pleasant. The problem was the neighborhood.

In that particular part of the San Francisco Bay area, upper-class mansions (like the one I was partying in) stood only a stone’s throw across a dry creek bed from a pocket of low-income dwellings. The worst 'hoods were on the east side of Hwy 101; I was (barely) on the west side. Although most of the people in my building were students or young professionals, many of the complexes surrounding us were inhabited by individuals whose idea of a good time was screaming and breaking bottles over each other’s heads at 3:00 in the morning. In the three months since I’d moved there, I had called the police several times in an effort to prevent what sounded just like a murder. (Also known as "a domestic disturbance", a term that didn't do these hair-raising howls justice!

After the book launch party, I went back to the apartment with my friends Kristee and Richard. (Kristee had done the illustrations for the cookbook.) Mother was there, visiting from Maryland, where she’d recently moved after marrying her fourth husband.  We talked for a while, then I took my border collie, Dulcie, for a short walk and left Mom to visit with my friends.

Rounding a corner after Dulcie had completed her duties, I had a clear feeling to turn around and go back. The feeling was like running into an invisible membrane that resisted my forward progress. But full of wine and compliments as I was after the party, I ignored that resistance and decided to go a little further. I wasn’t afraid, I told myself.  It was a pleasant evening, and only 8:00. People laughed in the distance; someone jogged by; a bicyclist passed.

The worst moment of any life is when it suddenly flips from good to bad and you realize you're in trouble. A minute ago, everything was fine. Now, you are going to be terribly hurt or die. In my case, I went from innocent dog-walker to a victim of violence. For a second, I felt stupid and vulnerable — how could I let this happen?  After that, it was just a struggle for survival.

The slender young black man who approached and threatened me was well-dressed and neatly groomed.  He told me that he had a knife, though I never saw it. He asked me to be quiet, and given my ignorance of his weapon’s location, I agreed. I put my hands up, palms forward, in what I hoped was a placating motion and told him it was cool. His eyes never stopped moving in his head; his left hand never let go of a small brown paper bag. From these indications, I figured he was on drugs.  Right across the street was a row of small houses; right behind me was a street light. Right next to me was a silent but curious dog, but he was undaunted by any of these. He turned me to face the steep banks of the dry creek bed, and demanded that I follow him down.

And that's where he made his mistake.

I do not do "down" well. I'm afraid of steep slopes, I can’t do gymnastics, I would never attempt skiing, and I hesitate at down escalators. I can climb upwards like a mountain goat, but once the angle of the land beneath me reaches a certain acuteness, I break into a sweat and become immobile. I need the hand of someone I trust to help me traverse the terrain.

So at that moment, I was willing to die rather than descend that creek bed. (Looking at it in the daylight later, it was obvious that I would have died either way, it was that steep.)

My body became a lead weight; I fell to my knees. Impatient, the man pulled on the bulky fisherman’s sweater I'd changed into after the party.  I shrugged my shoulders, lowered my neck, and let the sweater slide over my head. In a fraction of a second, we were far enough apart that I was out of range from his knife.

“Fetch him off, Dulcie,” I said.

My border collie was 10 years old at the time, and only 35 lbs., but she was the quickest, smartest dog I have ever known. I'd bought her in Cornwall when my first husband and I lived there, and both her parents were working dogs on neighboring farms.

Her bewildered brain had just been waiting for my orders to clarify this confusing situation. When I gave her the command, she launched herself at my attacker; he startled and moved away; I filled my lungs (and I’ve got real good ones) and screamed loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. Then I scrambled to my feet and headed in the opposite direction, calling Dulcie as I ran; she was down the street, still leaping and snarling at the guy and I was afraid he’d turn his knife on her, but he never stopped running. Dulcie turned and joined me and we fled home.

The whole incident, from beginning to end, probably took about five minutes. It seemed like hours. People talk about time stretching in certain instances, and this was one of them. Perhaps because you are so present, moment to moment.

I didn’t feel any pain but as I ran I noticed that the last two fingers on my left hand wouldn’t bend when I told them to. There was a slash across the top part of my palm. When I'd held up my hands to placate my attacker, he'd sliced me.

Later, Mother told me she'd felt uneasy all day. She’d called Maryland, but everything there was okay. I seemed to be fine, what with the book party and everything. My brothers were fine. Since she couldn’t place the problem, she let it go. Our day had been filled with shopping, visiting friends, and spending time in my new apartment before the book launch. She wasn’t crazy about the neighborhood and said so, but (and she’s regretted this since) she never sat and tracked down just what was bugging her. If she had, I might not have gone out on that walk by myself.

As it was, even I had felt uneasy about wearing my jewelry that night, and had taken it all off when I changed my clothes. But I didn’t put it together. And neither did she.

Naturally, it was a great shock when I threw open the front door and stood there, blood splattered all over my white sweater and tennis shoes from the cut in my hand. Fifteen minutes later I was in the emergency room of Stanford Hospital.

I won’t go into the details of hospital procedure, the delay, the pain, the lack of medication until a doctor and a policeman could get through with me. Stanford was wonderful, and—over the next eighteen months—I endured three hand surgeries trying to restore functionality to the tendons that drugged-up son of a bitch severed that night. They were 85% successful. I can’t play piano well with my left hand, and the fingers will never be completely straight, but they do just about everything else well enough. Even now, small pills tend to drop out of my fisted left hand, but oh well. Thank god for the miracle of microsurgery! I was also incredibly fortunate to qualify for a fund created for victims of violent crime, a fund that was later dropped from the state budget. Without it, I would have been poor for a very long time.

After I was admitted that night, Mother went into action immediately. She tore a new one on the cynical interviewing detective who tried to insinuate that I'd provoked the attack (possibly by dressing in that alluring fisherman’s sweater and blue jeans?). She called up her contacts in local law enforcement and rang a police artist she'd worked with on many cases. She started pouring out her intuitions about my attacker before I was asleep in my hospital room. Her information, as it always is in these cases, was detailed and specific. She told them what this guy was like, what part of the neighborhood he lived in, what sort of life he led.

“There’s a garage where he lives. It has an engine taken apart in it, with oil standing in containers and oily rags on the floor. The building is three-story, it’s cinder block, it’s on the left side of road beginning with an “L.” He has a girlfriend who he fights with a lot of the time. She doesn’t like what he’s into. He’s done this sort of thing before. If you don’t catch him, he will again.”

After my surgery the next day, I went to stay with Kristee and Richard at their house. The police artist came over and made a sketch; unlike most police composite drawings, his portrait was frighteningly lifelike. Despite this, when I looked at albums of mug shots later on, I couldn’t pick out my attacker; as a result, the police didn’t do a line-up. Maybe if they had, I would have been more certain, because I struggled to connect the living person I had experienced with a set of frozen, inexpressive polaroids. On the other hand, maybe he wasn't in them!

Mother had to return to Maryland eventually, but she continued to work on the case. But they never caught the man.

The reality is, the police have more than they can ever handle. They are busy picking up the guys they know are guilty, the ones who are identified or caught red-handed. Even if my mother’s information matched a known bad guy, unless they could find proof of the man’s crime—even if I could identify him—it would be a hard, long, legal haul. And more often than you'd like to think, the result was they had to let the guy go.

One of Mom's detective friends told me that, from a certain standpoint, it was probably better for my peace of mind to go on with my life and try to heal and be spared the ordeal. Luckily, he said, I wasn’t raped or murdered. I had a bad hand, but it was being fixed. I’d lived in a bad neighborhood, but I’d since moved. Better not to face the guy in a criminal court, relive the details ad nauseum, and end up knowing that he knew who I was and vice versa. If that happened, I might live in fear the rest of my life.

This pragmatism enraged my mother, because she wanted revenge for her injured child. I would feel the same if it was my child. I felt like a failure when I couldn't identify him, but the detective's advice consoled me.

I also told him I felt stupid for being caught out, and so inadequate...to be so passive and quiet in the face of potential death instead of fighting hard. It's not how I expected myself to react. He pushed my opinion aside and said, "You did exactly the right things. How do I know? Because you're here. You survived. So don't second-guess yourself anymore." That was immensely comforting. I'll always be grateful to him for his perspective.

As it was, I had enough to deal with in the years to come: like flinching when any man walked toward me, being afraid on nature trails, reliving the incident at unexpected moments, finding raised voices unendurable, being nervous that I would experience that horrible "turning on a dime" situation again, where life went from good to bad. Sometimes, even a sunny day went black for me.

I never blamed my mother for anything connected to my event, of course—but I did ponder how bizarre it was to have a psychic as a mom who didn't foresee the worst thing I ever experienced. Perhaps it's a natural blind spot re: the ones we love. Who wants to see trouble for them? Or maybe we have no choice about certain nexus events in our time stream, to be real sci-fi about it. Maybe there was a cosmic reason, though I'm not a big believer in those. What I do know is what I felt: that membrane of resistance. Something was trying to warn me; from that moment on, I've tried to sense that warning and pay attention to it. Fortunately, it has been very rare.

I moved to Washington, DC a couple of years after the attack. I couldn't bear driving past the neighborhood where it happened, even on the freeway. In one sense, this may not have been the wisest decision because the African-American population in DC is vastly more than it is in California. Every day I was confronted with dark-skinned men on my way to work, some of them with chips on their shoulders. I was pushed on a sidewalk by a man who uttered "bitch" under his breath. Groped on the Metro by a well-dressed professional while I was dozing in my seat. For someone already jumpy about men—and yes, let's be honest, especially black men—this was not conducive to my recovery. But in all other aspects, the move was a very good thing and I look back on those years with happiness.

My own trauma was relatively minor and mercifully brief, compared to the horrific attacks that other women endured. I spoke with some of them. Their endurance and struggle to find peace in the aftermath deeply inspired me. If they could savor life again, what excuse did I have not to?

If there was one moment of recovery I can point to, it happened back in California as I walked a trail on Stanford land. I'd climbed a hill and was among gnarled old live oak trees. I've always loved trees, they are as essential to my happiness as air. So I wrapped my arms around this massive old oak and leaned my cheek against its rough bark. I felt the sap of life running beneath its surface, feeding all the branches and leaves, digging deep into the soil with its roots. It seemed to flow onto me as well, filling me with a calm energy, a shared life force. The message I received was one of permanence, of endurance, of life before and after this one incident in my history. Of oneness between living entities on this earth. And it lifted my spirits. I saw light instead of darkness.

I held onto that moment whenever the shadows started creeping in, and it really helped.