I was about 13 at the time. It must have been a Saturday night and I was walking down Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens. The sidewalks were thronged with barhoppers, the traffic stiff with cars, the crosswalks crowded, parking spots few. My sister Ann was with me. So was Peggy, a friend of Ann’s, and Margaret, a friend of mine.
Later, when the cops came, no one could say what started it. Perhaps, someone suggested, the old man in the blue compact had cut off the two guys in the Trans Am. Rocking to and fro, looking as if the weight of his own body might pull him to the ground, the old man, now wearing blood on his shirt, told the police he had no idea why he was attacked.
I was standing on the corner across the street when it happened. Tires must have screeched or maybe someone shouted, because I felt that awful rush one gets when, nearby, civility is being torn at the seams. The traffic light turned green, and as the blue compact took a right off of Bell onto 41st Avenue, the Trans Am, horn blaring, lurched toward its rear. Then both cars stopped.
The guys in the Trans Am jumped out — they were tall, muscular, in their late twenties, wearing tight designer jeans — and began banging on the roof of the blue compact. The old man rolled down the window to see what they wanted, and that’s when they started hitting him. Even with the window open, there wasn’t enough room for two men to punch the driver at the same time. So while one worked over the old man, still in his car and trying his best to stay out of reach without letting go of the door lock, the other guy walked over to the sidewalk and tried to extricate a trashcan from its city-built frame.
Soon the old man lost the battle over the door lock. A person inside a car all balled up for protection is harder to injure than a person pinned against a car, his body exposed. The young man pulled the driver out. Several blows to the head and upper body later, the second guy made his way back, holding the trashcan triumphantly aloft.
Where was I when the trashcan came down over the old man’s head? Across the street, one in a crowd of hundreds. Where was I when they removed the trashcan for another round of belting? Across the street. Where was I when they pushed him back into the car and emptied the dregs from the trashcan onto him, sprawled across the front seat? Just there, across the street, standing next to Ann, Margaret, and Peggy, incredulous that no one had stepped in yet; astounded that people were, in fact, cheering at the sight of a man in his sixties getting bludgeoned by two muscular six-foot guys in their twenties.
It seemed obvious that if one person, especially someone young like me, were to place himself bodily in the cramped and violent space where the fists were falling, it would all somehow stop. True, such an intervention might make things worse. But a braver person — my father, for instance — would’ve been ready to take that risk. I and the rest of us there that night were more afraid of what might happen if we stepped in than of what would definitely happen if no one stepped in. Only after the beating had gone on for several minutes and the crowd had grown to hundreds, with a police siren calling in the distance and getting closer, did it seem that a couple of bystanders were ready to break it up. The brutes got back in their Trans Am and drove off.
I thought of this incident recently while watching Fight Club, a movie about large groups of young men who take to bludgeoning each other in a half-cocked effort to reclaim their masculine identity from America’s commercialized and corporate culture. Not having read the novel on which the movie is based, I expected some sort of treatment, probably ironic, of young men’s struggle to rediscover courage in what has been called “a nation of cowards.” Maybe Fight Club would defy the logic of TV movies in which the good guy is told, “Don’t do it. You’ll only lower yourself to his level” — the pacifist logic that attaches greater importance to preserving one’s own virtue (and skin) than to preserving another’s life.
Instead, the movie trots out the liberal verities. Violence is a byproduct of psychological disintegration; thus, all violence is pathological. So great is the moral compromise brought on by the characters’ participation in violence that they degenerate into fascists. Conveniently, this standard critique excuses us if no one stands up for the helpless — the proverbial widow, the orphan, and the old schmuck in the blue compact who, for a reason he doesn’t understand, is getting the stuffing kicked out of him.
DAVID SKINNER
