I once made a man cry. He was a big tough guy, a punk, and he was on a crime spree. At first glance, he was not the sort you could picture breaking down and blubbering like a baby.
I was in my thirties at the time, living in the city, and I spotted this man out my window at about 2:00 in the morning. He was moving like a pale ghost in the shadows between the buildings. Burglaries were common around where we lived, and in fact, our own house had been burglarized only the week before. Fortunately, one of our housemates had been returning home late at night, and he had surprised and frightened off the intruder in the very act. We had found most of my tools from my basement shop, piled in boxes by the back door, ready to go.
It was a strangely eerie feeling, seeing that: "Sure, help yourself!" I had thought. "Take whatever you want; it's all free!" I was working as a cabinetmaker at the time, and these tools were literally my livelihood. Plus, I had been collecting tools since I was a boy, and this was a very personal violation to me.
So, it's not hard to imagine what I felt when I saw a suspicious character sneaking between the houses across the street at two in the morning. I was furious, and my heart instantly began pounding with adrenaline. I was clad only in shorts, a T-shirt and slippers, but I had no time to even grab a jacket. I slipped silently out the front door into the cold darkness, in pursuit of the pale figure which had slipped out of sight around the corner.
I followed him down the block, keeping within the shadows myself, as I watched him darting into alleys and inspecting locked windows. I had no thought other than to keep him in sight, and maybe to dash back to my house to call the cops, if I saw him enter a building.
This was the situation as we reached the end of the street, and he crossed the brightly lit but deserted intersection. I saw him crouch down and examine the lock of a bicycle which was chained to a lamppost. I had no way to remain in concealment at this point if I still wanted to follow him, and now I had all the proof I needed that he was up to no good. So without really thinking about what I was doing, I strode across the brightly lit street right towards him and said, "Nice bike."
As I approached him he snapped upright, and fixed me with an intense and venomous look of hatred. He seemed suddenly to tower over me, his eyes an ugly red and his body tense with menace. His first words to me were, "If you called the cops on me, I'm going to beat the **** out of you while they watch."
I started talking fast. I told him to calm down; I didn't call the cops; I just didn't like seeing what I saw him doing. He kept calling me "you little toad" and telling me how stupid I was and how little I understood my danger. I told him, stop calling me "little toad"; I'm not ignorant; I'm only trying to be a good citizen; this is my neighborhood. Why do you act like I'M the bad one?
We went back and forth in this way for a while, both still quite heated, but without the dangerous intensity of the initial encounter. (The truth is, being a very fast runner, I never felt particularly vulnerable in the first place. I just stayed wary.) I wanted to get through to him somehow, and I began to spin a little yarn. I didn't want him to know where I lived, so I didn't tell him that we had been broken into just last week. He might have been the very one that did it. So I made up a story, telling him I was an auto mechanic. I told him my shop had been broken into, and that ten thousand dollars worth of tools and equipment had been stolen. I said I had no way of replacing the equipment and was now completely busted; ruined. I was a hard working man, I said, and now I can't even pay my rent. It was the best story I could come up with on the spur of the moment.
"How do you feel about that?" I asked the man.
"I don't give a **** about that", was the man's response. " It was your fault for leaving the door unlocked."
"I didn't leave the door unlocked," I said. "The guy broke the lock."
"I don't do B and E's" the man told me. I told him it doesn't matter if you do breaking and entering, you're still a thief and you're hurting innocent people. Doesn't that matter at all to you?
It didn't matter to him. Nothing seemed to matter to him. We had been talking a long while, and I was running out of things to say, when the man suddenly got quite emotional and blurted out, "I don't care about anyone but myself. Myself, and my mother."
So I got an idea, and I told him, "Well, picture this. You come home someday and you find that your mother has been hurt. Some punk has knocked her down, cut her purse and run away with it. That was all the money she had, and she got hurt when she fell down. How would you feel about this?"
"I would kill the **** who did it. I would kill him." he told me passionately, the red light burning in his eyes again.
"No you wouldn't," I told him. "The thing is, you never find the guy who did this. By the time you find your mother hurt, it's already three hours since she was attacked, and you never find the guy who did it. He's gotten clean away. Now, how do you feel? How do you feel, knowing that there are people out there that you can't stop, who don't care about you or anything, as long as they get what they want?"
It was at this point that the man started crying. He just literally broke down in great heaving sobs, telling me he would be good some day, he was just too angry, he was so sorry, but he would be good some day.
All of a sudden, reaction set in with me as well. I started shivering. I looked up and realized it was getting light out. The man was sobbing and calling out after me, but there was nothing more I could do. I was freezing there in my shorts in the cold light of dawn, and I ran home.
I Don't do B and E's - Chasing down a Midnight Burglar
Hold-Up Man
I really don't like to bother anybody, let alone to hold up an entire train. But here we were, immobile for two hours so far. The mood of the passengers had gone from simple curiosity,
to an agitated buzz like a hive of angry bees.
"Why are we not moving?" the people were asking, but no one knew. If someone did know, they weren't saying. I circulated among them, going from dining car to coach, and back to my cabin, nodding to everybody and listening to their excited murmurings, but I kept mum.
No, I hadn't pulled the emergency brake or something stupid like that. I was having a problem, and I was as concerned as everybody else, but for a completely different reason.
I was a passenger on that train, returning to Boston from performing a show in Chicago. Thanks to my gracious sponsor, I was traveling in a first-class cabin, and I had been enjoying the restful luxury of it on the return trip. The ride had been like a dream, gazing out the window at the endless miles of factories in the outskirts of Chicago, rolling along under a fantastic sunset.
The next day, for some reason we had stopped at an unscheduled station in NY state. I had just been thinking of settling down for a nap after lunch, and I was taking off my shoes when I looked out the window onto the platform. There, gray in the drizzling rain, I saw a baggage cart came wheeling by my window, heading towards the front of the train. The baggage cart was piled with luggage, including some very large cases. Those were my cases, containing all my hand-made instruments. This was a very bad sign.
My cabin was in the first car of the train, right behind the locomotive. Back at the rear of the train was the baggage car, in which all my instruments had been carefully stowed. So why is my stuff now being pushed forward on a cart, through the rain, at this unscheduled stop?
All thoughts of napping were now banished as I feverishly put my shoes back on. I ran out of the cabin and dashed down the aisle to the end of the car, unhooked a chain and made an unauthorized exit out the door onto the platform.
I ran up to the retreating cart, now heading forward past the locomotive. "Where are you taking this?" I panted. "This baggage is supposed to be on the train."
"We're losing our baggage car here. These will have to be transferred."
"These cases contain my homemade instruments. It was clearly stated in my contract that these were to arrive in Boston along with me. I made sure of it."
"Don't worry. These will go out with the next train that comes along."
What next train? "No." I said, "That won't be acceptable." I had already engaged a van to meet me when the train arrived in Boston, to bring all my stuff home from the city. This sudden development wasn't just an inconvenience; it might be a disaster. It brought up a vivid memory of a previous trip, in which one of my cases had been misplaced and had been lost for three days. I was never going to risk having that happen again. Plus, it was raining, and I was quite concerned that everything was getting wet; it was all just sitting out in the open. It's a lucky thing that I had looked out the window when I had!
Meanwhile, the conductor had come out into the rain to inform me, "Sir, no passengers are allowed on the platform."
"These cases have to come back aboard with me."
"There is no place to put them."
"My contract says they have a place. That's what we arranged. Why are we losing our baggage car?"
By this time, more men had congregated in our little group, and anxious conversations were being conducted into big wireless devices that looked like walkie-talkies from a World War II movie. I suggested that we could bring my instruments into our cabin car; there was plenty of room. The suggestion was not considered. Soon we were told that another baggage car could be switched to our train from a yard only about a mile away.
"Sir," the conductor insisted, "you'll have to re-board the train while we wait."
"Can you please put my instruments under cover? These cases are not waterproof."
That would never have occurred to them! One man pushed the cart down the platform and under a very scant overhang in a baggage area, while I reluctantly allowed myself to be ushered back onto the train. From there, I uneasily peered back through a window towards my precious cargo, which was only partially protected by the overhang, and still getting rained on. We waited.
After a while, I sought out the conductor, and asked for a progress report. "We're working on it." he told me. Then again, somewhat later, "It looks like we won't be able to get that baggage car."
"We have to find a place on this train," I told him. "My instruments are getting damaged out there. What will we do?"
"I don't know yet, sir."
Meanwhile, I had been trying, in my anxiety, to get back out of the train to go over to the rain-blown cart with my instruments on it, to try to move it to a dryer place. But now I discovered that all the doors to the outside had been locked. I had gone up and down the whole train trying doors; seven or eight long cars with a door at each end. It was in my progress through the train that I had heard the people voicing their curiosity and concern at our delay. None of the officials had told the passengers anything about the reason we weren't moving, and that's all everybody was talking about: trying to figure out what was going on. As I mentioned, I certainly wasn't going to tell them.
I could see men moving along the platform outside, talking into their walkie-talkies. I had made the conductor swear several times that he would not let the train leave the station until we had this sorted out. Everyone was in a fine buzz.
At last, what they decided to do, was to bring my large cases into the passenger car where my cabin was. That's what I had suggested in the first place; but they had said it wouldn't do. Now they decided it would do; although it did mean stowing them in the aisle itself, partially obstructing it. At this point, we had been at this station for over two hours; two hours behind schedule.
The passengers, seeing these wet cases coming in to our cabin car, were naturally curious. So was the steward who served my cabin, and whom I had gotten to know a bit. Now he was surprised to notice that as the cases were coming aboard, I was helping to handle them myself.
"You seem to have some direct knowledge of what this delay has been all about." he ventured.
"Yes, I do," I told him, as I wiped down the outside of a case with a towel. I felt a bit awkward, but I was greatly relieved to get my instruments out of the rain and safely aboard again.
"Yes I do; it was all about me."
Escarpment
Visiting Niagara Falls one time, I stood by the thundering torrent on a foggy misty morning, and watched the dawn slowly lightening over the chasm. Presently, a shirtless jogger appeared, and he stopped alone on the edge of the precipice, and roared out into the abyss, his arms outstretched over the void. Then he looked around at me and smiled, laughed, and trotted off. Later, when the observation deck on the tower opened (American side), I spent a few hours there, watching the clear sunshiny day unfold over the gorge, the swift current churning away far below. Waves of tourists would roll out onto the deck, pose prettily and take pictures, and roll away back to their bus, leaving the tower quiet again. Then the next wave would roll in, they would take pictures and then roll away, chattering happily. I felt like I was in a film noir, where time was standing still for me, while everything around me was moving at unnatural speed.