Reply #53: "Your point is?" [View All]

[iverglas]

I thought it was obvious. Poor domesticated Canadian has to get vicarious thrills by reading about wild and woolly goings-on in places where she once (twice, actually) hung out.

Actually, got them non-vicariously once. No firearms in this anecdote, sorry. Back just before your 1984 election (and just after ours), I spend a couple of weeks in Chicago, staying with a Trotskyist librarian I'd met through the NYR personals. (Don't ask about his ex-girlfriend.) Late one night after we returned from a party ... well, I'd returned early, having been bored; I took a cab, he took the subway, and he got mugged, first time in his life. Anyhow, he got home, and the doorbell rang, and we thought it was his ex-girlfriend, so I hid in the bathroom and he went down to the apartment building entrance, and he came running back upstairs and said "get down there! I have to call 911!" So I did, and there was a guy lying in the corner of the lawn by the entrance, in the shadow out of the streetlight light, moaning, so I tried to figure out what was wrong with him. No obvious punctures or amputations, no foreign objects protruding from his body. I crouched there by him in the wet grass in the dark, in my stocking feet, and eventually cops and ambulance people arrived, and I went back inside ... leaving bloody footprints all across the white tile floor and up to the apartment.

Next morning, we slept late, and when we got up one of the roommates announced that the cops had called looking for us, but he'd said he didn't know us, because he thought it might have something to do with all the pot in the apartment. I did eventually talk to them, and it turns out that the guy had had his head smashed in with a baseball bat in some contretemps among the dealers who had recently moved into the basement apartment and split around the time they left him there. I never did hear whether he survived or not, but I had the impression that it was going to be not.

And then I had the thrill of seeing Bush I (while he was still the Dauphin) and Ronnie Raygun speak to a few thousand adoring fans at a hockey arena. I'd got to see some torchlight parade thing involving Gerry and Walter just as I arrived in town.

You folks sure do put on a show for the rubberneckers!

Anyhow, in point of fact, I was just reacting the way most people would to hear that something rather horribly exciting had happened in a place where they once sat, the facts about that something being the actual substance of my post. Maybe it's me ... the day after I took the Metrorail to the airport and flew out of DC a few years ago, a plane hit a bridge over the Potomac and a metro train derailed.

(edit to add: http://www.roadstothefuture.com/AirFlorida_SubwayDis.html
the disasters in question that I did indeed get a vicarious shiver from)

If Kennedy had been assassinated after you visited Dealy Plza, you might have a tale to tell ...