Our lives settled down again. We cut a safe into the floor of our dining room and hid our remaining valuables in it. It was never discovered, even though they took the Oriental rug that covered it.
We went to a wedding in San Francisco on a Friday night. The week before, I had prepped the house as you might prepare for medieval warfare: two-by-six boards bolted into doorframes with lag bolts six inches long and a socket wrench. That sort of thing. Anything we had left that was slightly portable—my wife's doctor bag, a pair of binoculars, our passports and checkbooks—I threw into two suitcases, which I put into storage.
When we returned from the wedding there was no back door and no doorframe, only an enormous hole with smashed edges leading into a set of empty rooms. We were left with a bed, some pots and pans, and a bookcase. It was one of our more memorable Thanksgivings.
On the seventeenth of December in 1978, I saw a woman mugged for her purse—and I watched her run screaming after her assailant until she collapsed, crying in the street.
On the eighteenth or nineteenth of December, my wife was at a meeting, everybody else was busy doing something, and I walked alone to the Venice Sidewalk Cafe for some dinner. It occurred to me that it was silly to put on a shoulder holster just to go out for a beer and a sandwich, but I did it anyway, although I had never been threatened physically, ever, except in foreign countries.
Walking home about six-thirty at night, just off the corner of West Washington Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, I was confronted by five young, well-dressed uptown brothers. Black. Okay. Let's get that right out front. They could just as easily have been white. We were directly under a streetlight and less than fifty feet from an intersection thick with traffic.
I was not dressed as a high roller. I am not a high roller. I don't look like a robber baron or a rich dentist. I look like exactly what I am, a middle-aged guy who's seen a little more than he needs to see. I thought, what are these guys doing?
Their leader pulled a kitchen knife out of his two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. His mistake was that he wasn't close enough to me to use it, only to threaten me. He smiled at me and said, "Just the wallet, man. Won't be no trouble."
That was a very long moment for me. I remember it just as it happened. I remember thinking at the time that it was one of those moments that are supposed to be charged with electricity. It wasn't. It was hollow, silent, and chilly.
I looked at this guy and at his companions and at his knife, and I thought: Don't you see how you're misreading me? I am not a victim. I used to be a victim, but now I'm not. Can't you see the difference?
I pulled the automatic, leveled it at them and said very clearly, "You must be dreaming."
The guy smiled at me and said, "Sheeeit," and his buddies laughed, and he began to move toward me with the knife. I thought, this guy is willing to kill me for thirty-five dollars. I aimed the automatic at the outer edge of his left thigh and shot him.
He dropped like a high jumper hitting the bar and yelled "Goddamn!" three times, the first one from amazement, I guess, and the second two higher pitched and from pain.
He yelled at his buddies, "Ain't you gonna do nothing?" They did do nothing.
I backed off and walked away, right across busy West Washington Boulevard, with the gun still in my hand. I remember thinking, shouldn't I call a doctor? And then I thought, would he have called a doctor for me? And I kept right on walking.
I am not a macho guy. White water to me is club soda. I haven't been skiing in ten years. Anything I order from L.L. Bean ends up on the dining room table and then in a box in the basement. I'm never going to shoot a zebra and have it made into a rug, okay?
I was not coming on like James Bond, and I was not being territorial or aggressive. I was simply protecting my right to walk around town with a lousy thirty-five dollars in my pocket and not be afraid for my life.
I walked home. I felt terribly strange, but it was a strangeness that I could identify. I realized that what I was doing—in our current state of affairs—was a cultural procedure no different from going to the grocery or getting a haircut or buying a shirt. And that I had balked over it and felt strange because it was a new procedure, something I was doing for the first time, not unlike dealing with one of those twenty-four-hour banking devices with the code numbers and the buttons—and that if I wanted to stay alive, it was possible I would have to get used to it.
I am not proud of this. I did not swallow it easily, either. More than a year passed before I talked about it with anybody, not even my wife. But I did it. And I could do it again if I had to.
What happened to us, of course, is that we got hit in the face with time's swinging door. My world changed sometime between 1975 and 1980, and we had a couple of tough years getting from one Pullman car to another. We were lucky. We lost more than eleven thousand dollars of what we owned, but we weren't killed. We adapted. Now the guns are a normal part of our lives. We accept them, just as we accept the seven motors of suburbia. They are a necessary convenience, like the washing machine or refrigerator or one of those devices that zaps mosquitoes with electricity.
Sometimes I think, this is a stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situation. And it is. But we've adapted to other stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situations: 20 percent interest rates. Iran. And now we've adapted to this one.
Let me tell you how we've adapted. We dress low key, we don't flaunt anything, we keep loaded guns in the house, and we don't keep them stashed in some drawer where we can't find them if we need them. We keep them right out in the open, and we always know exactly where they are. The difference is in that exterior framework of protection and in our attitudes toward it: it is something that was not necessary when we were younger, and it is something which most of us, Adam Smith included, still carry on about. We don't even think it's too bad anymore; we're beyond that. We accept it as a fact of life and go right on. And it will stay a fact of life until our fellow countrymen get it out of their heads that they can do as they please, that there is no such thing as social responsibility, that they have a right not to behave. Because the way we see it, if they have the right to mug us, we have the right to shoot them.
I used to believe that these people had some justifications on their side. I used to feel that I ought to have some compassion for them, and I did. I used to believe that a job and some credit would put them on the right path. It isn't true. I also used to believe that much of the human wreckage—the millions upon millions of people with emotional damage—could be repaired. That isn't true either. They can't be, for the most part, because the effort necessary to straighten out a single one of them is enormous: four or five years perhaps of therapy, in an age when there is no time for anything but emergency medicine.
Let's face it. Some of these people are poor Some of them are driven crazy with desire for stuff they will never be able to afford. But not all of them are poor, not by a long shot. A lot of them make as much money, or a great deal more, than you or I do. They do it because it's easy. They do it because they believe no one will stop them. And they're right.
Let's talk for a moment about John Lennon. Adam Smith brought him up. I'm particularly interested in this one because John and Yoko had something very similar to what my wife and I have: two equal people who happened to be able to witness each other's life to the fullest possible extent. The grand passion. The real thing. Now it's gone.
When all is said and done, the real tragedy of John Lennon is that he dinosaured out. He ought to have known better. He stayed in the house for four or five years, and when he came out again, the world had changed. He could have had a bodyguard, for Christ's sake. He could have lived in the country. He did not have to stay in New York City and rub people's noses in it with his $150 million and his blue jeans. The clown who killed him did it for fame, not money, obviously. But if someone is willing to stick a knife in me for thirty-five dollars and not bother to find out what blood type I am, you can just imagine what they are willing to do to someone who has real money.
I think a lot about John Lennon. You know what I think? I think, Jesus Christ, if it's this bad for my wife and me now, what will it be like if either of us ever becomes well known?
More to the point, let's talk about Adam Smith's friend Michael Halberstam. I did not know Halberstam, but I liked his work. He surprised a burglar in his Washington, D.C., home and was shot.
Halberstam figured all of this out in the very last seconds of his life. He didn't like being killed. He must have thought it was pretty damned unfair. He was furious. In his last few moments, rushing adrenaline and pouring blood, he got in his car and ran down his assailant.
You know what? If he had made this discovery even slightly earlier—long enough to buy a weapon and wait for the permit to go through—he would very likely be alive right now.
Now listen to me a minute. The guns themselves don't cause all this. What causes it is that people think they can have the American dream by sticking someone up for it. They think that there ought to be a huge equal society out there. Equal shares for everybody. Forced equal shares if necessary.
What is true is that we are entering a time of vast restratification. The United States is becoming more European...but it is a Europe of a different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we'll have cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brewmasters, vintners, industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers, and kings and queens of a sort. And, of course, we'll also have highwaymen, cutthroats, and thieves. Think of it in terms of a vast panorama, a huge cross section much like the—world Balzac,, Hugo, and Dumas described. Think about Dickens. Read Weber's The City. Read Pirenne's The Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. None of this is new. What is new is that we're experiencing it. What was new was the social structure in America of the past three or four decades, which has collapsed.
To have any kind of culture or civilization in a world like this, it is going to be necessary to stop talking about things like prisoners' unions and start talking about the concept of crime and the definition of the word "criminal."
It would be nice also to talk about police. But if you'll read these books, you'll find very little mention of police. What you will find are numerous references to people who wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.
People now fashionably put down the Seventies, but it was a time when many people reached a level of personal success and satisfaction that may not be achieved again in our lifetimes. By comparison, we are in the pit, and I don't mean the floor of the commodities exchange. In many ways the Seventies gave us a glimpse of what life may be like in 125 years.
But it's like the Dark Ages now. Each time there is a major change, it is necessary to gain a clear understanding of what the changes are, what skills still hold, which ones need to be discarded, which new ones need to be developed.
Now, about those fifty million handguns: taking them away will not automatically give us a society like England's or Holland's. We are just not like that. It would be nice if we were. That's why Americans run away to Europe. What might help is a good set of disk brakes on people's behavior here. But anything that might put such desperately needed stops on people's personal "freedoms" is perceived out there in the streets as a violation of civil liberties, of constitutional rights. That is, it is a "right" to mug, rape, burglarize, murder, and commit arson for the insurance money. So there you are: a nation of pirates.