Mugged by a Palm Tree
From “Duck Hunter Diaries”:
January 2, I went to see the doctor whose office Wanda manages. A sore on the base of my spine that came out of nowhere has swelled up painfully and begun to weep bloody fluid. The doctor identified it as a something kind of cyst — can’t recall the name. Surgery indicated, with ten days off my feet, but I was due in L.A. January 3.
Sunday, January 7 — I came back to L.A. and worked the week. On Sunday I drove to Kern National Wildlife Refuge to see how that reservation/lineup business works. I got there 11:30 a.m…lined up behind about thirty cars and was into the hunting area by 1:30; some cars had been there all night. I should have tried Area Two, cropland bordering marsh. But there were so many hunters I moved to Area Three — treacherous slimy mud under the water as soon as I stepped off the footbridge. I fell on my ass in knee-deep water, made it to a muskrat house, snorting and blowing, and crawled on it to rest. There was a shout, a shot, then a high flier, gaining altitude. I swung the 870’s full-choke barrel through, sustained the lead — and he came spinning down, with an audience of more than twenty.
“What a shot!” I heard.
Both boots full of water again to make the retrieve…I perched on my decoy bag to empty them, covered with slimy adobe mud from head to foot. It was bitterly cold. My spinal cyst was screaming. I wanted to stay, but the pain drove me back to toast in the rental wagon’s heat. I gave the widgeon to a family that had sprig, coots and a cinnamon teal, so they’d each have a duck to eat…
I checked into my usual Wasco motel, showered scaldingly, took a pain pill, positioned my new electric heat pad under the cyst, and finally had some relief. I watched Yul Brynner and Charles Boyer play pirates in a black-and-white movie and drove back to L.A. I finally broke the California jinx by killing that widgeon drake, and learned how those public game areas work. I talked to a guy with an Irish setter, there since Saturday morning, five cars away from going in when I got there. He boards his dog all week because it barks, lonesome, when he goes to work, and his neighbors complain. He undergoes that cost to have hunting weekends together. That’s dedication of a whole different order.
February 12, 1973 — Rain. For three nights now, rain of the steady winter kind in L.A., though the song says it never rains in Southern California. Angelenos say among themselves, mutteringly, it should be letting up by now. I walked Hollywood Boulevard in the rain, deserted as a small town. I revert to old weekend habit outside hunting season — sleep very late, eat one big meal a day and walk in the rain. I buy miscellaneous newspapers from “home towns” that the open-front news-stand off Hollywood Boulevard advertises.
My pilonidal cyst is miraculously gone, removed courtesy of a mugger the size of a linebacker who punched me into the clubbed-off frond of a cabbage palm when I went after him for mugging a little old man…excised my cyst as neatly but not as painlessly as a surgeon’s blade. On my next trip to Tallahassee, Wanda’s boss examined my spine. The cyst was just — gone. An old-fashioned GP, he just shook his head, said whatever works, and gave me antibiotics in case it got infected while I was back in L.A.; but it hasn’t.
The notes in my hunting log reminded me of enough detail to write about it years later in my “Newspaper Gypsy” novel years later:
It was February now and raining steadily in Los Angeles, despite the popular song still on the charts that said it never rains in Southern California. For three days the rain had been falling almost without letup. The storm drains on Spring Street were overwhelmed. They were sandbagging the Western Union Telegram office on Spring to prevent flooding the day the union area director sent Buck to City Hall with the monthly plain white envelope for a councilman on the take. The councilman was very cordial and accepted the envelope without looking inside, slipping it deftly into a desk drawer and apologizing for the inclement weather as if his vote had failed to carry a motion for California sunshine.
Buck though it would make the councilman uneasy if he said he liked the rain. Floridians and Californians were supposed to share a simple love of sunburn…
Native Angelenos who worked for the union’s city-employee organizing drive were as unhappy about the persistent rain as the city councilman. They muttered darkly among themselves that the rain should be letting up any time now. When the famous freeways got wet, L.A. drivers piled cars up in fender-crumped stacks, as if driving on black ice in a whiteout.
Buck…liked it that the rain swept the streets almost as empty as a ghost town. Hollywood Boulevard was abandoned at 9 p.m. under the unrelenting downpour when he drove over there to see Deliverance, the new movie based on the Georgian James Dickey’s novel…The theater was more than half-empty that night as Angelenos stayed home in droves. He liked the rain even though the damp made the pilonidal cyst on his spine ache badly. The damn cyst had come out of nowhere during his Christmas vacation week at home in Florida…
In a break in the weather, he was on the way back from the printer’s on Santa Monica Boulevard with his rental station wagon full of new campaign brochures for the blue-collar and clerical-unit elections. He was still in Hollywood when he pulled up to a stop sign and noticed a small man in a baggy suit on the street corner, arguing heatedly with a huge black man.
The black man hauled off and smacked the little man down like swatting a fly. The little man went down behind a parked car. The big man jumped right on top of him and was lost to sight.
Before he could think it through, Buck slammed the wagon in park, jumped out and ran over there. When he came around the parked car, the attacker was on his knees and the old man was flat on his back.
The attacker had one hand in the old man’s front pants pocket.
Buck grabbed the big man and snatched him to his feet, spun him and slammed him up against a hurricane fence along the sidewalk. He shoved an open hand in front of the man’s face, like telling a dog to stay, and yelled “Hold it right there!” in his best Military Police command voice, which seemed to come out of nowhere.
The big man was a good half a head taller than Buck, making him at least six foot six, and wide as an NFL right tackle. He seemed momentarily stunned by the rough handling and the barked order. Then his beady little eyes nearly bugged out with rage. The little old man was trying to struggle to his feet. He was bleeding from his mouth.
“Damn t’ief!” he wheezed.
Buck made the mistake of taking a half-step back to look down at him. The enraged black man launched himself off the fence as soon as Buck broke eye contact.
Buck threw in a right hook, square on his left temple, turning with it, putting his full 240 pounds behind it, giving it all he had. The big man stopped in his tracks, straightened up by the punch — but that was all. He just shook his head, as if to clear it, and threw a straight overhand right at Buck.
Nothing fancy, just a fist that looked as big as a cantaloupe and unstoppable as a truck bumper, coming right at Buck’s face.
Buck swayed back — and back — trying to slip the punch. But he was brought up short by something behind him.
The punch landed square on his mouth, but Buck didn’t notice.
Because whatever he hit rammed the most incredible blast of pain up his back from the cyst on the base of his spine. It felt like a lightning bolt of pure agony shot right out the top of his head. In some remote part of his brain he knew that the punch had loosened his teeth. But he didn’t feel that. All he felt was his legs gone to rubber, knees buckled by that blinding stab of pain. The only reason he didn’t fall was that he was hung up on whatever he had backed into.
His enormous opponent stared at him. “You take a pretty good punch,” he said in surprise. Then he tucked his chin and raised his fists to finish the job.
Somehow Buck wrenched loose from whatever held him and started throwing both hands, right, left, right, left, as fast and hard as he could, like a windmill. He didn’t want the other guy to get another chance to throw one of those enormous fists. Buck wasn’t landing anything solid, except on those muscle-packed upper shoulders, but his opponent was covering up and backing away.
Out of nowhere, the little old man, back on his feet, rushed at this giant, getting between the two large men. Buck stopped swinging. The black guy kind of absently backhanded the little man down again. He fell hard, skidding. Buck saw flesh on his hands tear on the rough sidewalk.
“T’ief!” the old man squawked, struggling to his knees and holding his bleeding hands against his stomach. He was little and he was hurt, but he was furious. “Try to steal my med’cin!”
“I ain’t no thief!” the big man yelled, dropping his hands.
“Then what were you doing to him?” Buck said.
“I tol’ him! This here’s my corner. Don’t nobody step on my corner!”
Buck’s spine was hurting so bad he wanted to kill this moron. So he stepped right into his face. “I’m on your damned corner!”
The big man threw that big right fist again. Buck slipped most of it, took the brunt on his shoulder, and went after him again hammer and tongs. He was swinging so hard he threw his sunglasses off his face and they flew across the intersection, distracting him. He paused in his attack, saw his opponent square up to let him have it.
“Break it up, you two!” somebody yelled.
The black guy was looking off to one side. Buck followed the look. A wiry brown guy with an enormous Afro and fresh grease on his clean white T-shirt had come out of the garage of the house on the corner. He was waving a chrome tire iron back and forth like a metronome.
“I’ll use this if I have to,” he said.
The black guy bolted suddenly, taking Buck completely off-guard. He ducked around Buck and snatched open the door of an old red Dodge Dart, jumped in and slammed the door. The motor fired in almost the same instant. He gunned it, laying twin streaks of smoking rubber away from there. California plates, expired tabs. Buck pulled his old reporter’s notebook out of his inside coat pocket and wrote the license down with hands that shook so badly he was surprised he could fashion numbers.
Back on the sidewalk, the little old man was crawling around on his hands and knees gathering up spilled prescription bottles into a torn white pharmacy sack. There was blood on the sack. “Dam t’hief,” he said again. “Try to steal my med’cin.” He sounded Middle European.
“Druggie, probably,” the guy with the Afro and the tire iron said. He pointed with his tire iron. “I wasn’t going to interfere, but look.”
A car full of black men was double-parked just down the street. They pulled away as Buck watched.
“You looked like you were holding your own,” the brown man said. “Then I saw you lost your glasses. I figured the ‘brothers’ over there were getting ready to jump in on his side, and you couldn’t see.”
Buck limped over to retrieve his sunglasses, miraculously unbroken. He was too grateful to mention that they weren’t prescription. His spine hurt so bad he couldn’t seem to think straight. He could feel wetness down the back of his legs like he’d wet himself, so he knew the cyst had busted open and was bleeding.
“We need to call that plate in to the cops,” Buck said. “His pupils were completely pinpointed. He’s liable to go somewhere else and do this again.”
“No cops!” the little man said. “I vant no trouble!” He clutched his white pharmacy bag to his chest and shuffled off with surprising speed.
The tire-iron guy smiled wryly. “The thanks we get, huh?” Then he looked at Buck a little more closely. “You look pretty rough, friend. Did he get you pretty good?”
“Not him.” Buck pointed to one of the sidewalk cabbage-palm trees. The lower fronds growing out of its bole had been sawed off into blunt clubs, one of which had speared him. “The tree got me. Busted a sore open on my spine.”
“Better get it looked at,” the brown man said…
By the time Buck got back to the Wilshire Hyatt, it was raining hard again. He shoved his bloody-pus filled pants and underwear into a hotel bag for the French laundry to deal with, took some pain meds prescribed by his Florida doctor, and then a hot shower before he rubbed prescription antiseptic salve on the raw sore. He sat on the heat pad also recommended by his doctor and called the 77th Precinct detectives with the license plate and a description of the mugger. They took the information but were pretty casual about it, as if that sort of thing happened all the time in Hollywood.
“He probably won’t try another mugging today, after you roughed him up,” the detective said.
“I guess it depends who you ask, who got roughed up,” Buck said, and the cop laughed.
After he got off the phone he just sat and stared out the window at the rain, waiting for the pain pills to kick in, while that crazy song about how it never rains in Southern California went round and round in his head.
