The following piece appears in the author’s new book, Places: Things heard. Things seen (BlazeVox). An earlier version was published in Counterpunch.
Wednesday noon
I was walking east on Wilshire and crossing Second Street in Santa Monica. A block south on Second street, at the intersection with Arizona Avenue, I saw a big awning and a big sign that said “Orgasmic Vegetarians.”
My first thought was that this is the place where, perhaps more than any place else in America, people take their bodies seriously, where maintaining and displaying bodies is a fulltime job. It is also the place, perhaps more than any other in America, where the loopiest technologies for health, happiness and personal transcendence are advertised, adored and tried out just in case one of them actually works.
My second thought was that I should maybe put on my glasses. I did, and everything got far more mundane: “Orgasmic Vegetarians,” once in focus, was “Organic Vegetables.” The big awning was several small awnings, around which a lot of people were moving. It was one of the farmer’s markets, of which there are several in that area on Saturdays. This Wednesday market cut across Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade like the transverse of the Christian cross.
Three Santa Monica police cars were parked at the northwest corner of Third Street, the north end of the three-block Promenade. Two of them were closed up, one had its windows open, computer on, and motor running. I didn’t see any policemen anywhere. I suppose they were confident that no one would steal their police cars, since they’re pretty easy to spot. Where I grew up, New York City, a minor consideration like that wouldn’t trump temptation and opportunity.
On Saturday and Sunday the place would be filled by this time of day, but not in the middle of the week. The street people who hung out on the Promenade’s benches were there. Days of the week mattered less to them. I recognized several for whom that three-block-no-autos stretch of restaurants and shops was home base. The intersection with Arizona was full of people walking, carrying bags, pushing strollers.
I went into Hennessy & Ingalls to check out the new photography books. The photography section is in the front of the store, just behind a large window facing on the Promenade. As soon as I got there I saw people running toward Arizona. It’s common to see runners in Santa Monica, but not on the Third Street Promenade and not with expressions like the ones I was seeing on their faces. There were more and more people running. I went outside and joined them.
The intersection looked as it had before, but almost immediately I realized that none of the faces were as they had been before. Some people were just standing, as if they were trying to walk but couldn’t. A young woman came from the direction of the awnings, sobbing. A lot of people were sobbing. Other people were walking very slowly, their eyes focused somewhere far away or not at all.
I looked to the right and saw a baby stroller and some people kneeling down in front of it. I couldn’t see what they were doing but I saw a child’s feet and they weren’t moving at all.
Plums and peppers and radishes were scattered all over the street. Some of the stands were skewed and their awnings hung at odd angles. There were clumps of things in the street, a lot of them. Then I realized that the clumps weren’t things; they were people.
To the left and to the right, there were bodies everywhere. And spilled fruit and vegetables. And skewed awnings. And people bending to help and other people just standing and other people crying.
“It was a terrorist,” someone said. “He just drove through here at 80 miles an hour and kept on going.”
“How do you know it was a terrorist?” someone asked him.
“Who else would do something like this?” the first man said.
“It could a been somebody else,” the second man said.
For what seemed a very long time, there were no police and no sirens. I wondered how something like this could happen and there were no police and no sirens. After a while, two policemen in khaki ran past me, coming from Fourth Street, heading toward Second Street. I wondered where the others were. I wondered where the cops who drove those three empty police cars were.
I knew what I was seeing but something in my head kept trying to say this couldn’t be real because if it were, there would be sirens and police. Eventually sirens started. And police came. A lot of sirens. A lot of police.
I thought of the time when I was seven years old and had been jumping up and down on the bed and had slipped and fallen and whacked my forehead on the radiator. I went to the mirror to see what had happened and I saw a huge gash but there was no blood and I thought “There is no blood so I’m really all right” and then, as I stood and looked at the mirror, blood gushed from the cut in my forehead, all over me, over the floor, even on the mirror, and I wasn’t all right after all.
One of the street people asked a policeman walking quickly toward Second Street, “Did you get the guy? Was he a terrorist?” The policeman hurried on. “Them cops don’t never tell you nothing,” the street person said, annoyed.
A policeman passed in front of me walking very fast, heading toward Fourth Street, carrying a child who was two or three years old. I think he was trying to give her mouth-to-mouth as he went, but she was dead. I could tell that and surely he could too. His face was terrible.
I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what I could do that would be useful. I don’t know first aid. I didn’t want to wander around, just looking, getting in the way of people who did know what they were doing, who might be able to do something useful. Professional journalists are free to look at the most awful suffering because it’s their job, but I’m not a professional journalist. A lot of people were running around now, bending over the injured and the dead, and more and more police and fire people were there. After the policeman passed in front of me with the little girl in his arms I headed went back to my hotel room, crying like nearly everybody else.
A jogger
I walked back up the Promenade to Wilshire, turned left a block, then turned right on Second. My hotel was a hundred yards or so up that block.
A jogger was running toward me on Second, not unusual in that part of Santa Monica where joggers sometimes outnumber walkers. He was a man in his thirties, wearing a t-shirt, walking shorts and shoes that weren’t running shoes. He carried something in his right hand which, as we passed one another, came into focus: a stethoscope and what looked like some plastic gloves. He was a doctor who’d probably been at home. Maybe somebody had called him. Maybe he heard it on the radio or something was already on tv. He’d just grabbed the instrument with which, among other things, doctors differentiate the quick from the dead, and he’d run from his house, in clothes not worth the time it would take to change out of, to do what he could.
TV
I went to my hotel room and sat a while, then turned on CNN. Wolf Blitzer was jabbering in his Wolf Blitzer voice, which punches out all syllables as if they were of equal importance. After a minute or two, he gave an update about the event in Santa Monica, California, for which camera footage was just coming in, which he showed bits and pieces of, then went on to another story. And another. After a while he came back to the event in Santa Monica. It wasn’t one dead, as he’d said previously; now it was two dead. There was more footage. Stay tuned. More to come.
It was hard to hear him because of the sirens down in the street and the helicopters going by the window. I got up to close the window and I noticed that the helicopter going by at that moment said NEWS 2. It rounded the building and the next helicopter said NEWS 4.
Ah, I was there, wasn’t I. Why was I listening to Wolf Blitzer giving fragmentary second-hand reports from Atlanta, Georgia, when the people he was getting his feeds from were delivering it live a click away?
I switched to channel 2 and watched it live. I switched to channel 4 and watched it live. I watched those two channels broadcasting live all afternoon, their chopper steadicams showing the three blocks from Fourth Street to Ocean, with frequent shots of the dark red Buick with its dented roof, its shattered windshield and, just in front of its bumper, the yellow tarpaulin police in LA use to cover dead people in the street.
Something changed in the light. I went to the window and saw that it was raining. Lightly at first, then heavily. My room was on the fifteenth floor and faced the ocean. The bright backlighting surface of the Pacific made the raindrops shimmer like falling crystals, almost like snow. I heard the two tv reporters talking about the sudden downpour. “I don’t remember it raining here in July in twenty years,” one said. “Neither do I,” the other said. “It’s pouring on the triage area,” the first reporter said.
I watched the tv set and listened to the reporters trying to make sense of what had happened and I listened to the helicopters and sirens until it was time to go meet my friends Warren Bennis and Grace Gabe.
Wednesday evening
I left the hotel about five that evening, drove one block west on Wilshire to Ocean Avenue and turned left. Warren and Grace lived two miles south of that intersection, just above where Santa Monica ends and Venice begins.
Yellow police tape was stretched across the foot of Arizona. A few people stood on the Ocean Avenue side of it—looking, taking pictures, hanging out. A little way in, one of the bodies, covered by a yellow police tarpaulin, was in front of the dark red Buick LeSabre, where it had been since the Buick plowed through all two-and-one-half blocks of the farmer’s market. The front of the Buick was dented, the windshield was smashed and there was a dent on the roof.
I know I saw that tarpaulin covering the body and the smashed windshield and dented front of the car, but I don’t know if I actually saw the dent on the roof or if I’m remembering it from the television coverage I’d watched the previous few hours. I’d learned from one of the local stations that when the Buick finally stopped a dead man was on the hood and a woman was underneath. About twenty people, the newsperson said, had lifted the car and gotten her out.
Almost immediately after I got to their house Warren said, “There was a terrible thing that happened only a block from where you’re staying this afternoon.”
“I know,” I said.
I told them that when the terrible thing happened I was in Hennessey + Ingalls, an art and architecture bookstore about fifty feet from where Arizona crosses Third. I had been on my way to the market to get some things for lunch, but a photography book in the Hennessy + Ingalls window caught my eye, so I’d gone in, walked to where the book was, and immediately saw people running by the window. They looked strange so I went back outside to see what was up.
I told Warren and Grace what I’d seen.
“Did you take pictures?” Grace asked me. It was a reasonable question: maybe a dozen of the photographs on their walls were mine and ever since she’s known me I’ve almost always had some kind of camera in my pocket or bag or on my shoulder.
“No,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you so shaken,” Warren said. We’d known each other for thirty-five years. I knew he was thinking back to the night in 1970 when he and I had been in a campus building surrounded by Buffalo police who were firing tear gas canisters and shooting up the glass front doors with buckshot.
“It was the dead girl,” I said. “I keep seeing her.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Grace said.
“No,” I said. Then I said, “What’s like this?”
“It’s what people in Israel live with all the time,” she said.
“You’ve seen it,” I said to Warren. He had been an infantry lieutenant in the Battle of the Bulge.
“Yes,” he said. He paused for a moment, then said, “The thing I remember most is the smell of burning hair.”
By the time I drove back to my hotel at ten o’clock, everything along Ocean Avenue seemed normal. The sidewalk on the right was full of people and so was the esplanade on the left. Lots of people were crossing Ocean both ways going to and from the Santa Monica pier. The intersection at Arizona still had the yellow police tape across it and the Buick was still there, but the body and the yellow tarpaulin were gone.
Thinking about what Grace said
That night, when I was back in the room, I thought about what Grace said—that this is what people in Israel live with all the time. She’d spoken about people coming to a market, a disco, a pizzeria and seeing carnage, and of people going to shop or dance or eat and being killed or horribly injured.
I didn’t think to say, “And it’s also what people the other side of the Israeli lines go through every time the Israeli tanks or helicopters blow up a house in which they think some malefactor they want to kill might be, and in that house are men and women and children who are not that malefactor who get blown up just because they happen to have been in that house.”
If I’d thought to have said that, Grace would have said, “Of course.”
And if I’d said, “And it’s also what the people who saw violent and gratuitous death and mutilation this year in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone through,” Grace would have said, “Yes, them too.”
This death and that death
The carnage in Santa Monica that day—ten dead and sixty-eight injured—was caused by an 86-year-old man who got confused and hit the gas pedal when he meant to hit the brake. The carnage in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Iraq and all those other places is caused by intelligent, competent, thoughtful, righteous people who, after serious thought and consideration, find such carnage acceptable and useful.
The Palestinian who blows him- or herself up, along with a bus or dance hall full of Israelis has done the arithmetic and found the carnage acceptable and useful. The Israeli tank commander who blows up a house or a village or the bulldozer operator who rips from the earth olive trees that took generations to grow finds such violence acceptable and useful. The American pilots who fire their missiles into vehicle convoys and buildings and villages find their actions acceptable and useful. Donald Rumsfeld found the deaths and dismemberments accruing therefrom acceptable and useful. Tony Blair found the deaths and dismemberments accruing therefrom acceptable and useful. George W. Bush found the deaths and dismemberments accruing therefrom acceptable and useful. Osama bin Laden found the deaths and dismemberments he underwrites acceptable and useful.
That’s them. I keep thinking of that Santa Monica policeman, walking very fast but knowing he will never be fast enough, doing mouth-to-mouth on the three-year-old girl he knew was dead. I keep thinking of the mother and father of that three-year-old girl, whose name was Cindy Palacios Valladares. I keep thinking of George Russell Weller, that 86-year-old pathetic man who forgot which pedal was which in his dark-red Buick LeSabre, a man who, according to everyone in his life who has known him and who has been found by the press, would never knowingly and intentionally have hurt anybody in this world.
What does intention have to do with anything? The meaning of what happened in Santa Monica is that it doesn’t have any meaning. None at all. Something stupid happened; people died.
From the point of view of the dead and the people to whom they mattered, all the deaths are like that. Palestinians and Jews and Iraqis and Americans and Russians and Somalis and Rwandans—all the deaths are like that.
Grace was right. It’s all the same. It’s horrible, it’s awful, and the explanations and justifications explain and justify nothing. From the point of view of the dead and the people who loved them, there is no difference between “My foot fell on the wrong pedal” and “God wants me to do this.” The reasons offered by terrorists of whatever stripe, whether underground or ensconced in the finest houses of state, matter not one iota to the dead and those who loved them. Love and life and death are, finally, what matters. The rest is just politics, just talk.
Thursday noon
The yellow police tapes were still up at noon on Thursday. At the intersection of Arizona and Third a very officious traffic officer was telling people they could walk on the sidewalk but not in the street. A few people asked her if they could just cross over and she said, “If you want to cross go up to Fourth Street and cross there.” She gave no explanation, just said the same thing over and over again. She didn’t seem to be making eye contact with the people who asked the question: she just looked up the Promenade toward Wilshire and said it, “If you want to cross go up to Fourth Street and cross there.” One woman asked if Second street was open, if she could go that way. “If you want to cross go up to Fourth Street and cross there,” the traffic officer said.
She was protecting nothing but an empty street. Everything was gone. All the dead and damaged bodies, tarpaulins, spilled fruits and vegetables, emergency vehicles, awnings, strollers, shopping carts—all were gone. It was the cleanest street in Santa Monica. Nothing, other than the traffic officer, was in Arizona two blocks to the right to Ocean or one block to the left to Fourth.
She kept saying that one thing over and over to anyone who spoke to her. I thought at first she was nasty but then decided she wasn’t saying any more because she had no more idea why crossing was prohibited than any of the rest of us did. She knew it was an empty street and that there was no more police work to be done there. But she had been told to stand in that place and tell people they couldn’t cross and that was what she was doing. She was doing her job.
She wasn’t the only one. Two teams of tv reporters were interviewing people on Third Street. They were the next day’s tourists, not people who had been there the day before when the dark red Buick had gone through, so the questions were, “What do you think about what happened?” and “What do you think is the meaning of this?”
News station helicopters hovered a few hundred feet in the air at a few hundred yards to the west and east of that three-block strip of Arizona Avenue. What were they photographing? What was there to see, the day after, when the dead were gone and nothing was left except that traffic control officer telling people they had to go up to Fourth Street if they wanted to get over to the other side of the street and the two teams of tv reporters asking people what they thought about what had happened and what it meant?
I went into Hennessey + Ingalls and looked at the photography books and magazines, then spent some time in the typography and design sections. By the time I was back on the street, maybe 45 minutes later, the yellow police tape and the traffic control officer were gone. Cars were moving normally on Arizona again. One tv crew was there, but they weren’t talking to anybody. A man who looked like a tv reporter was holding a microphone and looking at some notes while the cameraman stood by his tripod. I assumed he was getting ready to give an on-the-scene report that would air on the early evening news. Several bunches of flowers and a sign were neatly arranged at the end of the island in the middle of the street, a small shrine of the type that is now found at nearly all scenes of violent death in America.
A dark place
A week or two later, Diane Christian and I were having dinner at the home of a vascular surgeon and his wife. The other three couples were all physicians. The politics ranged from Bush-right to Chomsky-left. Every so often the conversation got political, rhetoric flared and flourished, then someone brought up HMOs and everyone (other than us) allied against a common enemy or someone else brought up a movie or book the rest of us had or hadn’t seen or read and the conversation followed that trail for a while. The room was lit primarily by candles.
It was an evening we’d done many times before and would do many times again.
Then darkness and weight descended, and I sensed a profound vacancy. It was as if the light generated by the candles had been obscured by a thick filter, and everything moved more slowly than it had only moments earlier. Something got in the way of the words: I heard the sounds of my friends talking but it was all bits and pieces, fragmented words and phrases that never coalesced into a sentence or paragraph, and the responses were every bit as random as pointless as the utterances they followed.
There came a point when dinner plates were collected and replaced with salad plates. The hostess commented that I hadn’t eaten anything and I said, “I’m all right.”
“Then why didn’t you eat anything?” one of the physicians said. “What’s wrong?”
“I saw something when I was in Los Angeles last week.” I told them, very briefly, what I tried to describe above.
“Maybe it’s low blood sugar,” one of them said.
“Does this ever happen when you have low blood sugar?” another one said.
“It’s never happened.”
“He doesn’t have low blood sugar,” another one said, pointing to my wine glass which, like theirs, had been refilled at least twice since we’d sat down.
They talked it around for a bit, then got on to something else, then the salad came, and then the dessert, and after a while we all went home.
Later, I thought of these lines from the beginning of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs”:
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
I knew by then the source of the darkness and the weight. It was two images: shoes on top of a red car and rain outside my window while helicopters passed by again and again and again. No, not the two images: what the two images signaled. What I’d seen earlier that day on Arizona, and my impotence in the face of it, my inability to fix or undo anything, both reminding me of that thing we all know and nearly always suppress: that in an instant, in the dark of night or in the clear light of a perfect afternoon, absolute and total chaos and loss can, and sometimes do, take over everything. You can spend your life looking for the cause but you won’t find it, and even if you did it wouldn’t fix anything, undo anything.
xxx
The darkness and weight came several more times, and then in time diminished. But every so often, while looking up this or that on the web, I came across a newspaper photo of those shoes on the top of the red car, and if I didn’t come across it I’d just remember it. Something would trigger the memory. I never figured out what. Something.
I told a good friend who had done two tours in Vietnam and had gone through some bad times after his return about the dinner with the doctors and the diminishing recurrent moments of darkness and weight. “In the parlance of post-traumatic stress disorder,” he wrote, “which you know is not limited to combat stressors, you experienced an ‘intrusive thought’: something so indelibly scorched into your psyche that the slightest hint of recollection can immerse one in that ‘thing on Henry’s heart.”
Moving on
Two years after an earlier version of this chapter appeared in Counterpunch, I heard from a woman in California, Sandra Ellen Bacal. She thanked me for writing the essay. She enclosed two photos and something she wrote. One of the photos showed her strapped to a stretcher, surrounded by Santa Monica firemen. The other was a photo of two shoes and a lemon atop the dented roof of the car. There were two shoes and a lemon. The caption read, “A pair of women’s shoes landed on top of the suspect’s car.” But the shoes obviously weren’t a pair. Sandra Ellcn Bacal told me the shoe on the left was hers.
This is what she wrote about that day in Santa Monica:
Requiem for all between Earth and Sky
How do we speak the language of both blood and spirit? How do we utter words of life and death in the same breath? I am laying on my back on Arizona Street looking up at the clouds, watching the spirits of the dead ascend into the sky. The news choppers high above in the air zoom in with their lenses, recording the suffering on the earth—the carnage of humanity, a painting in blood on concrete.
Two bystanders are helping me, bless them. There are many dead and injured around me, and I pray for them. I try and breathe deep and meditate. I remember the words of Thich Nhat Hanh: “Breathing in I calm my body… the earth entrusts herself to me, I entrust myself to the earth. Life is both dreadful and wonderful.”
“What is your name?” asks the bystander.
“Sandra Ellen Bacal,” I answer.
“Where are you?”
“I am at the Farmers’ Market,” I reply.
“Can you move your legs?”
“Yes.”
I move my legs. My left foot is oozing blood. My left arm is broken, I realize immediately. I am conscious. I am alive in shock.
I review in my mind what happened.
I hear the sound of an explosion. I turn around. There is a car traveling at the speed of darkness 30 feet away, bearing down on me, its right headlight aimed toward my gut. The motor receptors of my eyes capture the fruit stands buckling like a house of cards, tent poles, smells of destruction mixed with my bag of white nectarines, bodies flying. When in the face of death, is there more than the human reaction of the flight or fright syndrome?
Four days ago I had a surf lesson near Malibu lagoon. The instructor, Carolyn, taught me that if a wave is coming at you, and you can’t surf it, if it is going to take you down, remember to relax. Relax and you’ll live.
A great wave of humanity, of life and death is coming right at me. I take one step to the left, I am no longer a deer peering into a headlight. I close my eyes. Something hits the bottom of my feet like a surfboard. I relax. My body slams into the concrete.
I open my eyes and dream. In shock, the body slows down for protection. I breathe slow, deeply. My thoughts meander.
They say we breathe 25,000 breaths every day we live. How many of the 25,000 are breaths of wisdom? In two seconds, the amount of time for a human breath, nine lives have left the earth.
Across the island from Maui, there was once a barren island. Nothing grew on that island. A missionary came to the island and climbed to the top of its mountain. He saw how the mountains on the other islands captured the clouds. The clouds would hover on the mountain peaks, rain down on the earth, and give great fruits and joy. But the mountain peak on the missionary’s island was not tall enough to capture the clouds. He planted Norfolk Island pines on the mountain peak. Overtime the trees grew tall, and one day the mountain became tall enough to capture the clouds. Blessed with rain, the island became a tropical paradise on earth.
Later in the day, as I lay on the red tarp of the triage center on Arizona Street, the rain began to fall on us. An emergency worker came over and carefully began to put a tarp above me to shelter me from the rain.
“No thank you, please, the rain is good. It is healing. I need to feel the sky.” I kept watch of the souls of the dead ascending, flying like eagles. I gave thanks to the healing waters falling from the sky.
Thank you angels, survivors, emergency workers, bystanders, farmers, and surf teacher.