Dear Seattle,
Last night I witnessed ugly. Coming home from a run, I stopped by Julie’s Garden for a bowl of pho before heading home to do laundry and tune my cello. Pioneer Square was unusually packed for a weeknight – judging from the colored flags and jersey’s a sounders game had just let out. I was listening to Michael Franti and Spearhead singing “Sometimes, I feel like I could do anything” and munching my pot stickers at the stoplight on the corner Yesler and Third when a group of people standing on the corner ten feet away caught my attention. I’m used to seeing this corner full of activity at all hours: it’s a pretty common hangout for the homeless crowd in the area. But last night the energy of the people on the corner was different. I know it sounds kooky and if you feel like calling it my subconscious primitive recognition of threatening body postures, I won’t blame you. All I know is: without looking I knew something was wrong.
Three men were beating up on a fourth who was on the ground at their feet. After a lifetime of movies, it took a moment to convince myself of what was going on. There were no well-landed roundhouses or spraying blood, and no audible “th-chunks” of cabbage heads being split to emphasize the force of punches being landed. Instead it was a determined, swift and jerky action of three striking at one more vulnerable.
I watched, stunned, then I started honking and flashing my lights. I reached for my phone and dialed 911, pulling my car out of traffic and next to the curb which brought me even closer to the conflict. The beating went on as I was on the line with 911 dispatch and more people began to take notice. Homeless people gathered, watching with the silent eyes of those who see a portion of the city that most of us never do. A few straggling spectators from the soccer game hung back; parents clad in green and blue reaching for their kids. A young blond woman was screaming at the top of her lungs as she dug through her purse, presumably for a cell phone. A bus stopped in the intersection, the driver opening the door and shouting. Adrenaline increased my vision clarity to notice details that I never would have just sitting at the stop light: the dark roots of the screaming blond woman, the looks of horror on the faces of the parents and confusion on their children’s faces, the unsurprised stares of the homeless guys hanging back on the steps of the nearby building who probably see scenes like this more often in a week than I have in my 30 years.
No one intervened. There is not an ounce of blame in that statement. In that moment I was instantly aware of how helpless I felt. I couldn’t do anything. My very realistic fears that there may have been weapons more deadly than fists involved kept me from getting out of my car.
As though some unspoken signal had gone off (probably the sight of gathering crowd) the attack dissipated. As the men hurried away, covering their faces with Sounders scarves, they passed my car. Before their faces disappeared under layers of green and blue, I saw their expressions – a kind of high-energy, ferocious glee that was both savage and irresistible to watch. Before this, I mistrusted the descriptions of people with a “light in their eyes” presumably from inner emotion, but having seen it in this context I know why it’s a cliché and why the sight of some such “light” is a terrible thing. As they passed, one looked into my car and we made eye contact. Another cliché about this moment struck me as all wrong: there was no physical sensation of hot or cold when our eyes met. Instead I experienced a sudden absence of sound.
In that moment, under the influence of adrenaline, I saw that he was my age, maybe a little younger and familiar in that basic way that people we pass on the street and trouble to make brief eye-contact can be. I wondered what had happened on the street that had pushed him and his companions into rage strong enough to pin another man to the ground with their fists and feet. I wondered who he was and who loved him and who he loved. The moment passed and they were gone.
The line with the dispatcher went dead and I sat in my car, immobile as the first cop car pulled up. The dispatcher called back and I finished giving my description and the direction I saw them headed last. She thanked me and I sensed the conversation was over but I still felt like there was something missing. I asked “what do I do now, do I stay here? Can I go?” The altercation was over, the threat was gone. The flight instinct in me had triggered, finally, and I wanted to be very much in my apartment behind a locked door with bourbon. I took a couple of deep yoga belly breaths and tried to be patient.
But what interests me in retrospect is that flight wasn’t my first instinct. If it’s true that humans can be simplified in terms of have two instinctual responses to danger – flight or fight – my first response was fight.
My instinct was to stay, to make a stand, to march into that mess of men and drag them (by scruff of the neck ideally) away from the one they had on the ground. I am suddenly, intimately aware of why we crave superheroes. I didn’t want to feel helpless. I wanted to do something good in the face of that evil. And if I couldn’t than I wanted someone who was bigger and stronger and more capable than I to hop in to that fray. Where was Seattle’s Batman, Spiderman, Superman at that moment? I guess the obvious is answer is that’s why there are cops – not to say that they saved the day – but ostensibly this is their purpose.
In reality, by the time the cops came the guys were long gone and the uniforms spent the time talking to the witnesses and on their radios. I hung around to see if I needed to make a statement, but when the officer I was talking to ran off to follow the lead of some homeless man who said they caught the guys in the alley I let my urge to flee win. I waited long enough to see that the man who had been on the ground was now sitting up and being treated by EMTs. He was talking, and aside from a few facial injuries seemed to be okay. I did sit in the car for a while, waiting for my hands to stop shaking so that I could drive home. The officer never came back, so after a while I went home.
Dispatch has my name and apparently my number, so I’m assuming if I need to do anything else, they’ll let me know.
When I got home I made myself go through the motions of my intended evening: shower and laundry at least, I didn’t have the heart for cello. I did pour my bourbon and sat on my stool by the kitchen window, watching the night for an hour. I didn’t slept well that night. My eyes kept popping open because I kept seeing, in my mind’s eye, the man I made contact with as he left the scene. Part of me was a little afraid, that he would recognize me or one day I will run into him on the street and he will remember me. The bigger part of me wonders what kind of superhero I would have been, and what would I have done: Storm, Rogue, Wonder Woman? What power would I have needed?
But I’m not a superhero. I’m only human. I’m acutely aware that humanity is far from perfect. We can be ugly. We can be cruel and hurtful to both strangers and to the ones we love. I suppose that’s just the way we are. At a time like this, I have to remind myself that we can be kind, generous, full of love, unselfish, and that it’s important, in the face of one not to forget other. Because it’s true that if you lose sight of the good than the other wins. In a way, I think that’s what the world’s superheroes allow us to do by taking that stands we cannot and by wading into the fray to make the world a better place, one street corner at a time.
Be well,
Eds
In rather oddly titled article (uh, what is this Glamour magazine for cellos?), Strings Magazine actually does a really good job of outlining the process for choosing a step-up cello for the beginning student and reviews of thirteen quality cellos under $5k. Which I know sounds like a lot of money but in the cello world appears to be a drop in the bucket. I would wonder why all of my hobbies seem to be the expensive kind but I realize that’s something of the definition of a hobby: an activity in which it is possible to spend an inordinante amount of money on with little – if any- tangible return. Enjoyment, however, is priceless.
