Getting Stabbed in the Tenderloin

Tue, March 7, 2006 - 7:36 PM

I just posted to Red Tux's Blog: "Last night, I was almost murdered", where he was at a club when some gangbanger shot at him and people fell and he (being a trained EMT guy) tried to save some guy, but the bullets just tore the patient apart and there was nothing Tux could do because the damage was done.

Here in the bay area we don't have near the kind of violence people are seeing in Iraq or Afghanistan. But even here, with the random acts of violence we do encounter, the taint is just as strong in that moment. When it happens to you, well, there's no discounting it, eh. There's plenty of bloody horror to go around. And at anytime the whole artifical notion of civilization could be stripped away, regardless of where you are.

The whole civilization thing is fragile and always at the tipping point. But there is a fine line between paranoia and intellect. We have to keep producing enough children who understand that line, otherwise we'll all be living in red states eventually, with the Haves behind walls that separate them from the disenfranchised Have Nots out there. ...with the Haves sitting on their security and waiting for their imaginary concept of the Rapture to take them up into the fuzzy clouds where they'll all live happily ever after.

Does every culture have a mythology that abdicates it from the responsibility of raising up the underclasses so we can move towards utopia? Ours certainly does.

I blame the Baby Boomers for all this. They've always been hedonistic to a fault and my age group follows in their wake. Now I've got to see all these drug and health commercials as they start breaking down into the slippery slope of gaping death. Greatest consumer generation in our history. And now that they've done all their drugs and had their sexual revolution and rebelled and bought their houses and IRAs , they're finding God.

God, please spare me from your followers.

But I digress, Red Tux was posting follow ups to his blog, the murder, the investigation, and I remembered when I got stabbed in the Tenderloin.

Here's one of my funny "I was almost dead stories". I've got a couple.

I've spent some time down there, in the Loin and in the Mission, doing things I'd rather not get into any detail about. Back in the nineties, between serious relationships I was known to galavant and befriend the people who live beneath the stairs and who wander the streets at early morning hours with tweak in their step and guns in their pockets. I've sat up in No Tell Hotels with a girl for hire and a pipe, with her angry pimp prowling about and with me at the peephole sweating and then sitting in the grayish pallor of a television droning in the corner thinking what the fuck was I doing there.

I've known those girls and those gangstas who are all probably dead or long gone by now and I've been in those uncomfortable situations where your tiny paycheck will be devoured that weekend and you will be dying with the poison you've injested.

I remember one night, walking home from the Montgomery BART, thinking, tonight I'll be good. I won't hook up with the freaks or the gangbangers or the homeless or the other assorted San Francisco losers who have been sucked into that hectic paranoid survival zone of pain just behind the Welcome to San Francisco sign. I was bopping along with my bag and not a care in the world. Up past the bars and the liquor stores. Up past the girl who saw the taint in my eye and asked if I wanted to "Come upstairs" and I said "no darlin."

Then I was going down Larkin towards the Civic Center and suddenly someone blindsided me from behind with a huge punch between the shoulder blades, causing me to spin around and to grab into my bag where, if you'd have asked if you could borrow my knife, it would have taken me 5 minutes to find, but the knife was in my hand and open.

There were five or six kids, all youngish, wearing big puffy Raider's jackets, staring me down as I stood against that fence. The biggest of these kids said, "Give me your money," and I took out my wallet which was empty and showed them I was busted. I was actually on my way to the ATM, but I didn't mention that. One kid said, "He's got a knife."

Ha. It was a tiny, laughable knife.

I said, "So what are we going to do here?"

They stood there in front of me for a moment and I expected them to be on me like a pack of wolves, but the big kid said, "Nothing, we got the wrong person." and they were gone, ducking and holding their big Raiders' jackets about them as they made their way around the corner.

I stood there a moment and looked at my knife and laughed, then I made a big whew, right as the sun slipped down behind the buildings and those sick yellow street lights came on and flooded that filthy concrete expanse. I collected my wits beneath the Air Travel Motel sign and resumed my bopping along, down towards Civic Center.

A block or so later I felt something on my back that tickled and I stuck my hand up there behind my shirt to scratch it and I felt a warm and stickiness and pulled my arm out and around to find it covered and glistening with rich crimson blood all the way halfway up my arm. It was bubbly bright. Frothy even. I was like, fuck. That son of a bitch stabbed me.

I walked a couple more blocks to a coffee shop that was open and went in. At the counter I said, "You need to call an ambulance."

The girl behind the counter shook her head and said, "No can use phone."

I sighed and put my arm back up my shirt and let some blood pool into it then I slapped a big puddle of warm bubbly blood onto the counter that splattered all over the doughnut display case and the Leukemia quarter cardboard collection thing and her and I said again, "Call an ambulance."

Luckily for your's truly, some guy was in there who said he was a doctor and he ran behind the counter and called 9-11.

I took a seat at one of their rickety round tables, bleeding heavily, and I lit a cigarette and bitched about how the kids in the Tenderloin just couldn't be trusted these days, and I remember the blood all over my cigarette and caked in my beard where I'd rubbed my face. There were other people in there who were horrified with all the blood all over me and the smoking inside, then the paramedics came and for some reason they cut off my trousers and right as they were putting me on the stretcher I started nodding off.

They took me to General where I was moved to the front of the line in ER because evidently I was dying and a nice nurse woman held my arm as they inserted a chest tube and I remember her saying, "This is going to really hurt," and it did. They cut a slit in you down into the ribs, then they have to force the end of the tube through your chest peritoneum and they can't get in there with anaesthetic or a scalpel.

It was kind of fun watching the tube after they put it in because they just let it drop down and all of the sudden all this blood starts pouring out into an open bucket on the floor. I kept that tube. Still have it, bloodstained and all, down in the basement at my workbench.

I spent 2 days in General. They gave me morphine for the pain and it was in a drip. Whenever the nurses would change shifts I'd get the new one to give me an extra dose. By Sunday night I was ready to go. They'd taken out the chest tub (an orderly assisted a medical student with his first chest tube removal on me) a procedure that also, as they told be beforehand, hurt like hell.

I took out my IV and my roommate gave me a ride home. I went into the Cop Shop on Bryant Street that week to get my back photographed. They'd missed my spinal cord by about 5 millimeters. Man I'd have been pissed if they'd have paralyzed me. And when I told the cop that a kid in Raider's jacket had stabbed me, but I couldn't really remember what he looked like, he told me he doubted they'd ever find them. At least not until they'd killed someone.

Waiting in that dull room in the police station, in the Victim's Unit, with the cheap polaroids taken by a desk duty cop, with the mug shots and the Victim form -- that was when the feeling of being a Victim is most likely to take hold. It hangs in the air there like a sick helpless demon ready to pounce on you. But I'm not a vicitm. I like to think that I'm moving through this life like a glacier, cutting out valleys behind me. Son of royalty. I'm going to spray paint myself over any boring surface I encounter, leave my scent, so someone says, "A big animal slept here" and I'm going to inject myself into the bloodstream of our species.

It'll take a lot more than some kids with a knife to slow me down.

After that I found that my body wouldn't let me go to the Mission or the Tenderloin any more. I could no longer hang out with the hustlers and the gangsters. I couldn't make my feet walk there because I'd break out in a sweat and become cold and nervous. I've never really understood anxiety, and objectively I could tell that this was a reptillian brain response to what had happened, but subjectively, I just wasn't able to go back to that life. And that worked out well for me, actually.

I was suddenly cat sensitive to people walking closely behind me (and I still am). I went through a period where I carried a .380 around in my coat, then I carried a 12 inch knife. I remember finally getting rid of that knife the night that Jenny and I went to the Cellspace for the first time for some Casino Night thing Chicken John was putting on where he had a large roach that ran around in some kind of gambling game.

Years later, I can do the walk down the Loin or the Mission. I can still sense the dealers and they see me but I nod them away. I carry that taint in my walk even though it has been years since I've been lost down there. Jenny had a show at the PawnBrokers Gallery, now part of the Shooting Gallery last year and I found myself walking the 1/2 block down there to stand beneath that Air Travel Motel sign and to watch the good people pass by beneath those sick pale yellow street lights. It was good mojo.

And I'm glad that I was the one to get stabbed that night and not someone else who may have had a harder time of it. I hope I took the bullet (or blade if you will) for some other unsuspecting schlep who may have been there in the wrong place at the wrong time.




2 Comments

RedTux


Tue, March 7, 2006 - 10:17 PM
Ya sounds like you can pretty close to purchasing the farm so to speak. Glad that was not your day to meet the maker. :-)

Any time there is a trauma situation the patient will get what's called a "strip and flip". That's where all of their clothes are cut off so that every surface of the body can be visualised.

Glad you're still here. :-)

Tracy


Wed, March 8, 2006 - 12:47 PM
wow....
Holy shit. That is a fuckin nightmare. I've learned a bit more about "residential hotels" this year than I ever wanted to know. But you never think that you're actually gonna get rolled.

I wonder If I met you at the Lost Vegas where you ditched your knife? I work the crap table.
Chicken will be doing the 1st Lost Vegas in 5 years on April 14th. All the old crew & I'm very excited. Happinin at Nimby & I'm lookin forard to seein you....

Perhaps, in your honor I could mug people at the event.