Grand Concourse in the South Bronx, a late Sunday afternoon sometime in 1974.
I was visiting, as I often did, the apartment of a former college classmate, S, her husband, M, and their two recently arrived roommates, B and D. B and D were what used to be called “male nurses”, both of them LPNs who had left their tiny home towns in central Pennsylvania for the freedom of a city where they could live somewhat openly as a couple. They worked at a public hospital and sometimes removed leftover drugs from the bedsides of discharged patients — painkillers, opioids, muscle relaxants, which they mixed at home with marijuana and alcohol. That day they were both high on some of their pilfered supply, while I had been smoking weed with S and M. The doorbell rang. A few moments later one of them opened the apartment door and someone came in. I was in S and M’s bedroom, lying on their waterbed, fooling with an acoustic guitar and playing with their tortoiseshell cat, so I heard but did not see who entered.
Time passed, I kept fooling with the guitar, the others kept talking to whoever had come in. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with another person but finally decided it must be a friend of theirs so I should be polite and say hello. I laid the guitar down, walked into the kitchen where everyone else was and said hello to a man who was a complete stranger to me. As soon as I greeted him, he greeted me back with some diffident words like “Hey, how ya doin’ man” and a wave of his right hand. It was when he waved the hand that I noticed the gun he was holding.
A small revolver, brownish, greyish, cheap looking, small but awful, as if it were built just well enough to fire some bullets before breaking apart. At the sight of it, the universe collapsed inward and I was suddenly seeing everything as if through a tunnel. The unshielded fluorescent light in the kitchen ceiling made it all harsh and decolorized. Everyone’s expression was grim, the grimmest of grim; we’d been rendered immobile, and the scene had the quality of a theatrical performance with each of us unsure of our next lines.
I learned later that the stranger had been ringing random doorbells at the building entrance: “I’m collecting donations for a drug rehabilitation program. Can I come in?” S and M would not have fallen for the ruse, but D and B were still relatively naïve newcomers, and with their brains muddled by downers. So one of them buzzed him in. In the South Bronx in 1974. And now this.
Everyone, it must be said, was high on their drug of choice including apparently the stranger. He had maintained his pretext for a while but finally dropped it and let them know he was a heroin addict and needed to get some dope soon. That was shortly before I walked in, right about the point where he pulled out the gun. And now even with gun in hand and things coming to a head, the unlikely chat continued for a while. Maybe he was disarmed by how earnestly the four of them had chosen to go along with his pretense, and now he was behaving in ways he hadn’t considered when the ploy first popped into his head, earlier on the street. “Why are these people talking to me as if this is a normal conversation? I came here to rob them.” I suspect S and M had been trying to connect with him on some precognitive level and calm him down. But now he was getting a little incoherent and agitated. The talk turned into random musings about his addiction and then he blurted out, “You don't understand: I’d kill my own mother to get dope!” I couldn’t discern how the others reacted to that statement; I could only think about what the next few minutes might produce, regardless of what any of us thought or did or said.
And then he suddenly had an idea: rip the telephones out of the walls so we couldn’t call the police while he was robbing us.
“We're not gonna call the police.”
“Rip ‘em out anyway.”
M tried to oblige, starting with the one in the kitchen, but it resisted being yanked, instead the wire just kept pulling away from the baseboard it was stapled to. This was before the age of the RJ-11 modular connector, and the phone was hard-wired. After trying for a while, M found himself standing there with a telephone in one hand, wire in the other still connected to the outside world. I knew that in other circumstances this might be comical, and that the very idea of tearing out the phones had probably been planted in the man’s mind by ridiculous scenes in crime movies and TV shows. As M kept pulling uselessly on the wire, the rest of us stood or sat there frozen, and our assailant stood in our midst with his weapon. “Do you want me to get a pair of scissors?” I thought to myself but said nothing.
The kitchen was not a large room, not for six people and a gun. The man realized the phone thing was taking a long time so he shifted gears, suddenly grabbing me around the waist and holding me close against his body with the tip of the gun barrel against my temple. Glancing sideways I could see the lead tips of the bullets in the cylinder three inches from my brain. Absolutely sure that I would die, I became calmer than I’ve ever been before or since. It was as if an overdose of adrenaline had tipped me over into some other realm entirely. Reality, already pared down to the basics, shrank even further to just this room, this gun, the two of us. His embrace felt strangely intimate to the small part of my mind that was still in normal mode. It was like we were a ballroom dancing couple; I could feel his body warmth; he wasn’t that much taller than me.
With me now as a hostage, he demanded that everyone go get all the money they had. S and M got some from the bedrooms, then he asked D what was in his pockets. “Nothing”, replied D.
“Turn ‘em inside out so I can see.” D, standing, pulled his jeans pockets inside out and a fat wad of rolled-up bills fell on the floor.
“Gimme.”
It was four hundred dollars, his cashed paycheck for that week, as it turns out. Why he was carrying it around inside his own apartment was beyond me. D picked it up and handed it to the man.
Still holding me tight, he softly but firmly hit the side of my head with the gun butt. “Damn it, now this man is gonna die because you lied to me! Don’t you understand? People have been lying to me ever since I was born!”
D had nothing to say. His face revealed that despite a drug-addled brain he understood what he had done, and what might happen because of it. The man, meanwhile, was now dopesick and becoming unhinged.
“That’s it, I got six bullets in this gun, and I’m gonna kill all five of you and then I’m gonna kill myself.”
The rational corner of my mind, very small by now, registered this shift as strategy number three so far in the man’s repertoire. I imagined a New York Daily News front page headline: ADDICT KILLS FIVE, SELF, IN BOTCHED BRONX STICKUP. I hoped he would kill me first so I wouldn’t have to witness the horror. I didn’t want to see brains splattering on walls, bodies collapsing to the floor, living people suddenly becoming inert matter. I hate bloodshed, and since it was certain I had only a few moments left to live, I was begging fate for that tiny favor at least. Please, kill me first. I wondered if the others were thinking the same thing, and how it was ultimately meaningless if we were all going to die anyway.
I’m not sure how long the man maintained his crazed thought, but the act of getting money into his hands inspired him to shift gears one last time. A vision of soon getting high must’ve taken over, because he decided not to kill us, but to leave and go find some dope. Still holding me tight against his body, and with the gun still pointed at my head but with his hand now wavering, the two of us heaved awkwardly toward the front door like contestants in a three-legged potato sack race. Somehow the door got opened and we were out in the dim green-painted hall with its mosaic tiled floor, then down the first flight of faintly echoing stairs.
“Now when I say run, motherfucker, you run.” And a couple of seconds later, “Run!” as he dashed down and out of the building and I ran back up the stairs.
The phones M had tried to rip out of the walls still worked, so we called the police. The flashing cop car lights on the street outside stirred some neighbors to check on the commotion, including the folks directly upstairs whose flamenco dancing practice sometimes sounded like bowling balls being dropped on the floor. It was the first time my friends had interacted with some of these building residents. They sympathized, said we were lucky. After everyone else left and it was just the four of them plus me, I had to ask D:
“Why did you lie to that guy?”
“Because it was my whole paycheck and I didn't want to lose it.”
Somehow I was never able to forgive D for that astoundingly bad decision; from that point onward I could barely stand to be around him. He later broke up with B and moved to the West Coast; years afterward I felt nothing but a sense of grim finality when I learned that D had died in Los Angeles.
What a terrifying experience! But so beautifully recounted. Your description of the clarity of imminent terror was cinematic.