Photo by Jim Coit

For the first time in his memory, Derek experienced raw hatred; he longed to kill the man.

When Derek was in college, he and his friends talked a lot about guns and karma. They were very sure of themselves when they postulated that violence attracts violence; that the people who like guns and have them around in the first place arc the ones who invariably end up being shot. In many ways. Derek hasn’t changed much since then. He still projects a gentleness that was shaped by his great size; he learned early the imperative of controlling his strength. He still can’t seem to say anything without the quick, iconoclastic humor slipping in. But these days Derek talks a lot about buying a gun. He yearns for a weapon that will kill with a single deadly shot.

Word had spread at Big Bear about how big, strong Derek had hid under the desk.

Photo by Jim Coit

Like an episode in the old Dragnet television scries, all the details in this story are true. Only the names of the people have been changed to protect the innocent. And Derek was certainly innocent on the night of last September 11 at the Big Bear Market on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard just a few blocks west of Highway 805. It’s a small, well-kept store, and it dominates the tiny shopping plaza which it shares with Monique’s Boutique, Continental Cleaners, a Red Carpet realty office, and a few other small businesses. A Taco Bell and a liquor store flank the side of the plaza adjacent to the boulevard, the modern equivalent of the stone lions which might guard some European square. The neighborhood is undistinguished; the only notable features are the anonymous apartment complexes lined up on the main thoroughfare, lifeless and endless.

On the day of the incident that altered Derek’s perspective on violence, he had been working as a boxboy at the grocery store for only three weeks. He had taken the job with misgivings which centered, as always, around the question of why a healthy, intelligent, twenty-five-year-old man with a bachelor ol arts degree in psychology from San Diego State University couldn't seem to find better work. Still, $3.75 an hour was better than nothing, and Derek had assuaged his own doubts and assured friends that a job which didn't start until 4:30 in the afternoon left him the best part of each day to search for something good. He hadn't searched for anything this day, but he excused himself; it was Monday. By the time he pulled into the Big Bear parking lot. his mind had already kicked into the neutral gear that would allow him to coast through five hours of tedium.

The time dragged; only the succession of brown paper sacks seemed to mark it: replenish the supply of the big ones at register number three, fill up seven shopper’s bags at register number six. move on to the next counter, then help the tired old lady with her two light parcels. The most exciting thing that had happened to Derek on the job so far had occurred in the parking lot a week before, when a woman had locked her infant grandchild, groceries, and car keys in her brand new BMW. Derek had felt bad when he’d scratched the red paint breaking into it for her. Now he gathered up eight Big Bear shopping carts scattered among the three rows of parking and noticed the Evening Tribune's headline in the newspaper machine next to the store entrance: “NUDE BEACH BALLOT FAILS.” He reflected that he hadn’t made a single pilgrimage to Black’s during the entire summer; he still hadn’t managed to break down the reserve of Sally. his wife of one year. At the second register, he traded insults with Moishe, the skinny checker with the nasal voice who acted as if checking groceries for Big Bear was a sacred calling. Then, Derek caught the furtive signal from Marshall, another of the boxboys; he turned just in time to ogle a petite blond shopper in a see-through blouse.

The hours rolled by. The crowd of shoppers thinned out. One by one the clerks punched their time cards and left. By 8:55 there remained only Derek, William — another checker — and Harrison — the manager. Mercifully, no customers rushed in at the last minute to do a week’s shopping, and Harrison locked the front doors promptly on the hour. Derek began to count on escaping by 9:30. Harrison was good at not requiring free overtime from the clerk and boxboy. Three of the other employees who’d gotten off earlier in the evening had gone together to do some nighttime scuba diving, but Derek figured he’d head straight home unless Harrison offered to share a six-pack in the parking lot. Silence filled the grocery store when Harrison turned off the Muzak; Derek listened to his own quick footsteps as he bustled to perform the daily closing chores.

He dashed into the produce section, grabbed the long hose, splashed water on the counters full of vegetables, then slapped the hose back in its place. Back in the storage room, he tossed the day’s empty boxes into the baler, turned on the machine, fed the wire in to bundle the crushed mass, then transferred the compact parcel to the loading dock outside. Up in the front of the store. Harrison tidied up the cash in the registers and deposited receipts in the safe housed in the wooden cabinet next to the front door. Derek returned to the front of the store, passing William, who was re-stocking the shelves. Derek emptied the trash baskets and swept up at each checkstand, sprayed Formula 409 on each of the counters and scrubbed hurriedly at the dried pools of animal blood and the mashed vegetable crumbs.

By 9:28 the three men had finished. Derek had tossed off his sweaty orange jacket in the produce room and removed his tie. He followed William up the aisle through the produce department toward the front of the store, and Harrison in turn trailed at Derek's heels. Halfway up the aisle, an apparition flashed into the periphery of Derek's vision: he saw a male figure charging like a madman, coming at them from out of the rear storage room.

Time froze. Derek felt the grocery store dropping like an elevator out of control, as if the ground had suddenly been cut out beneath it. It seemed as if he had taken a hallucinogen and the drug was suddenly taking command of his senses. He saw the intruder as clearly and dispassionately as he saw the stacks of apples — the man’s dark blue ski mask concealing all of the head but the eyes, the left hand which supported the right hand clenching the gun. the hysterical shouts, “Don’t move! I’ve got a gun and I’ll use it!’’ — yet at the same time details ballooned out grotesquely from the scene. The six-inch blue steel revolver looked enormous: Derek’s gaze felt locked onto its deathly black cavity. A friend was playing a joke on them all. he immediately thought, or maybe this was a candid scene being shot for some movie.

Then fear rolled in and swept away his jumble of thoughts. For an instant it threatened to engulf him. but Derek forced calm upon himself. “He’s not going to hurt us if we cooperate. He only wants the money. He’ll take the money and leave and we’ll be all right.“ The thought played like a mechanical tape in his head. Slowly, he wheeled around to look at Harrison in back of him, and panic rose in his throat. Harrison, who had the key and who was the only one who knew the combination to the safe, had vanished.

“WHERE IS HE?’’ the robber screamed. "Harrison get your ass out here or I’m going to blow their motherfucking heads off!” Vaguely. Derek wondered how the intruder knew the store manager's name. The next instant, the gunman grabbed William's arm with his left hand. Gesturing with the gun. he waved Derek toward the front of the store. “C’mon. c'mon, let’s go. Harrison, get out here, you fucker. I’m warning you.''

Obediently, Derek broke into a trot, and the gunman, dragging William, followed. Derek felt an overwhelming desire to soothe the robber; he thrust his hands into the air, without thinking, and he cringed a second later when the man in the ski mask cried through clenched teeth, “Get those hands down!” “Okay, okay, man. Whatever you want. Be cool, be cool,” Derek babbled, thinking only then of the big glass windows at the front of the store. At the head of the aisle they wheeled around and the gunman herded the two hostages back through aisle nine, past the coffee and the children's books, past the Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies and the Carnation Instant Hot Cocoa mix. All three voices mingled and rose together in a weird, plaintive chorus. “Harrison, where are you?” “Harrison, you bastard, get out here!” “Harrison. Harrison.” Only silence echoed back.

A second time, the trio ran to the front of the store, and when the robber paused momentarily, Derek watched in disbelief as William tried to displace the intruder’s grip from his arm to Derek's. Derek stared as William seemed to make faces at him. and then he guessed that William wanted him to help take the guy. But in that split second of hesitation, the robber recoiled. He hissed at Derek to move to the back of the store again. Once again they loped past rice, beans, soup, spaghetti sauce, then together they halted, breathing hard. They stood in the long aisle at the back of the store, between the meat counter and the rack holding the bright orange and yellow bags of Doritos.

“Maybe now is the time to jump him.” Derek thought, and he made a mental effort to keep his face blank, but he couldn't take his eyes from the steely gaze of the revolver. The robber wore tennis shoes, faded blue jeans, a blue sweatshirt, and his bare hands revealed his race: Caucasian. The gun and ski mask seemed to strip him of humanity. To Derek, he seemed like a machine, an impersonal alien presence. “He’s about three inches shorter than I am." Derek noted to himself.

Images of a dozen television shows flashed into his mind — snippets of James Gamer and Sean Connery and Mannix wresting away guns — and became spliced into the surreal flow of the moment. Derek wondered if the gun would go off accidentally if he tried for it, and where the bullet would go, and if the man was bluffing, and whether William would run away. Most of all, he wanted the drama to be over. He yearned to be away in some safe place, to be driving home in his truck, anywhere but here, any time but now. Irrationally, he had a vision of himself, reaching out to get a bag of taco chips, and strolling out the front door munching on them, walking away from this insanity.

The robber released William and screamed once again, hoarse with agitation, “Harrison, if you don’t get out here in five seconds I’m gonna blow this asshole away!” Incredulously, Derek watched the man take the two steps over to him with the weapon, and thrust the hard metal prod into his belly. “Harrison, please come out,” Derek added his own shaky supplication to the robber’s. Then he, too, cursed, “Harrison, goddamn you, you fucking son of a bitch! Get out here!”

He wanted to seize the gun from where it nuzzled his stomach, and track down and shoot Harrison himself. Derek stared at the instrument, and wondered again if the man holding it was bluffing. “Five, four, three . . . .” Oh God. He flashed on what he’d heard about how bullets feel when they hit you. Terror clawed at his insides, and he had a sudden image of himself soaked in blood and maimed for life, and shit I’m going to die, and will it hurt?

With a start, he realized that the man had stopped counting and was hustling him and William into the produce room. It had been a bluff, he understood then. The guy had lost his nerve. In the storeroom, however, the robber ordered Derek and the clerk to lie face down, hands over their heads, execution style. Derek thought about his family; his brain screamed out for survival. He felt a bit calmer, but he felt more vulnerable, prey to the will of the other man. If he had had a chance to resist, it was now past. His face kissed the concrete and he breathed the word “Christ.” It was a prayer, not a profanity.

“Don’t either of you move a muscle or I’ll kill you!” the gunman barked, then bounded out of the room. Not more than five seconds later, William started to ease up from the floor. The robber burst into the room again. “Get down!” he yelled, kicking the clerk back into place. Out of the corner of his eye, Derek could see William lay still for a moment after their tormentor’s second exit and then jump up and hide behind a pile of boxes. “Oh shit,” Derek thought numbly. "Now what do I do?” Miraculously, the answer came in the form of the slowly opening door to the office in the storeroom, just a few feet away from him. Derek heard the whispered voice of the hiding store manager; it seemed to come from a great distance but it galvanized him into action. He rocketed across the dim room and flung himself into the refuge.

Harrison firmly pulled the door shut and demanded. “Where is he now?”

“He’s still out there.” Derek exhaled, slumping with the sudden release.

“Where’s William?”

“He’s out there too, hiding.”

“Call the police,” the manager ordered. As the words registered. Derek once again felt anxiety tiptoe up his spine. It seemed like an eternity had passed, but Harrison hadn't called the police yet. Derek pawed at the phone; he caught Harrison signaling to him and interpreted the gesture as an order to get down. With the phone in his hands, he tried to wedge his six-foot, three-inch frame into the cavity beneath the manager’s desk. As he dialed “O” and waited for the response, he allowed himself to sigh once more with relief; he figured any shots through the door might clip him in the rear end or the legs, but he probably would live.

Blessedly, the transfer came through quickly; the police dispatcher’s voice was an unruffled monotone. When she asked for the store address, Derek had to scramble up and look for it on the desk. He spoke in a whisper. Time was accelerating now. like a ball rolling away from some horrid precipice.

Then William’s voice broke the silence.

It boomed out over the public address system. “It’s all right, you guys. The guy’s gone and the police are here.“ In the front of the store. Derek and Harrison found William talking to a uniformed policeman and standing next to shattered glass from the broken front door. Witnesses from the Taco Bell were already gathering. Derek answered the routine questions and listened to the other witnesses, but he allowed himself a moment free from thought, like a person letting his mind go blank as he stares at a cop show on TV.

It seemed just moments later that the word came of the arrest; the policeman chauffeured Derek, the clerk, and the manager to the 4500 block of Genesee. There two cops stood next to a 1968 Ford Mustang with mag wheels and a jacked up rear end. They were talking with two men. both deeply tanned and wearing thick, collar-length wavy blond hair. One was sweating profusely; he wore blue trunks and a multicolored sweater and blood was seeping from a cut on his leg. The driver wore blue pants and a green striped sweater. Derek stared at them eagerly, but the only person he could identify was one of the arresting officers, a fellow high school alumnus from Saint Augustine’s. The policemen seemed vaguely irritated at his inability to finger the robber, and Derek eyed the sweating man again obligingly. But the clothes were different and the face had been concealed; all Derek could feel sure about was the height.

Finally, the police dismissed him. and after he had stopped to buy a six-pack of Coors, anger began to course through him at last. The first of innumerable replays began screening in his mind. He felt emasculated, used. The sense of helplessness, of failure, overwhelmed him. “He used my life to try and get money,” Derek seethed. He drove south on Highway 805 to Normal Heights and for the first time in his memory, he experienced raw hatred; he longed to kill the man. In the shelter of his parents’ living room, he wanted his family to sympathize with that outrage. His parents were upset at what he had undergone; his wife, Sally, seemed calm, but Derek could tell that she, too, was concerned about him. But he knew that they didn’t understand the profoundness of his anger. He wanted them to share this tearing thirst for vengeance, yet he knew that they didn’t, and as the night deepened, he felt immensely alienated. Before sleeping, he drank all six of the beers, and he burned to make love to Sally, to be held, to feel close to someone.

Today Derek says that one of the first things that helped him to put the incident in perspective was the account of the robbery that he read in the Evening Tribune. The reporter presented the scene at the grocery as a comedy, a farce, describing how the intruder had not only failed to make off with the cash, but had lost a tennis shoe when he raced off to the getaway car. The story startled Derek in a way, yet he could see that it was funny. It was funny even though it had been his life flickering at the end of that gun barrel.

The reception at the Big Bear when Derek reported for work the next day helped to deflate his sense of having been violated, helped cool his simmering rage. Word had spread about how big, strong Derek had hid under the desk; a few of the men told him how they would have disarmed the robber. The jokes irked Derek, but he joined in the laughter. Big Bear’s only response was to bestow a new duty upon the box boy: henceforth, Derek was to check the back rooms at closing time, he was told. Swallowing his resentment, he complied for a few weeks. Every night; he would grab a hammer or meat cleaver and as he inspected the shadowy room, thoughts of how he would hack at anyone hiding churned through his mind. When he eventually began fantasizing about joining forces with any potential robbers against the firm which had cared so little about him, he decided it was time to quit the job.

The subpoena to appear at the preliminary hearing came with surprising swiftness. On September 27 Derek showed up at the county courthouse. Although he barely admitted it to himself, he approved of the proceeding; this was American justice, rolling forward as it was supposed to. Derek’s testimony went without a hitch. Since he, as a witness, was barred from the courtroom except to testify, Sally later described to him the district attorney’s case against the two blond residents of Leucadia. A witness had positively identified the green Mustang as the same car which sped away from the Big Bear parking lot; and the police had found a faded and bloodstained pair of blue jeans in the back seat along with a sack containing two beer cans and a Big Bear receipt. The driver of the car worked as a janitor for the Big Bear in Del Mar. The men were bound over for trial, and Derek marked the date on his calendar. But there were delays and finally he learned that the two had made a deal with the district attorney and admitted their guilt after plea bargaining.

Derek hoped for justice regardless; he looked forward to the sentencing. Throughout the first four months of this year, he periodically called to ask if anything had happened yet to the guilty men. Then finally, one day in May, the clerk came back with a positive response. Derek says she sounded apologetic. Judge Earl Gilliam had placed the armed robber on probation for three years, plus he had sentenced him to 270 days in jail. Because the man had already served eighty-one days and gotten “credit” for an extra forty, that left him with about four months to serve. The clerk didn’t mention to Derek that the driver of the getaway car escaped with only three years probation. Big Bear got $240 for its broken glass door.

Derek doesn’t know that last year 1610 armed robberies occurred in San Diego, but he does realize that such things happen all the time. In fact, he sometimes looks upon the experience as one of life’s little peaks that tend to look inconsequential or funny in retrospect: being confirmed or Bar Mitzvahed, losing one’s virginity, being held as a hostage in a robbery. He tells himself than he shouldn’t blow the whole thing out of proportion.

But the experience has left marks upon him that haven’t been erased as the last ten months have passed. His attitude toward the police has changed for one thing, softened dramatically since the days when he lived in Haight Ashbury and vehemently defended passivism. “Everyone talks about police brutality. But I can see how it would be easy to be brutal when someone’s shooting at you,” he commented recently, sitting in the Springfield Wagonworks bar in El Cajon and sipping on Southern Comfort, “Fear is irrational and it’s reflexive.” Now he takes a different attitude toward the justice system. “They says jails are lousy, and I know prisons are lousy. I know about the homosexuality and rape; that people become animals in prison, but to me . . .” his voice trails off. “Our own Governor Brown, liberal Governor Brown, just came out and said that sentencing is not for rehabilitation; it’s for punishment.” Derek thinks an armed robber should have to serve five years at least. “They oughta serve some time. They ought to have their freedom taken away,” he says with a bitterness which still seems foreign to him.

His first reaction to the experience hasn’t faded. He still would like to own a gun. “I don’t know how I would handle it. But the kind of gun that I would buy would be the kind of gun that would maim quickly,” he states matter-of-factly. “I wouldn't want to go and buy a little .22; I would have something with a large caliber. People I know who own guns say that’s ridiculous, that anyone who’s going to intrude will always have the drop on you. It’s a difficult solution. But the question is how do you protect yourself in our society?”

Derek says that people talk about going into combat for the first time; they say the second time is never as bad. “I’ve been baptized. The next time. I’ll keep a clear head. I’ll try to have my senses about me. That’s why I’d like to have a weapon. ” He takes a long, silent sip on his drink. “I think your natural reaction is to have a firearm, and the police say that it doesn’t work, it’s unsafe. You think about children playing with handguns. You think of all those things, but the other side of the coin is that you think. 'What happens if a crazy comes again?’ If I have a gun at least I might have a chance.”

For a while Derek considered going out on a crusade for victims. “Nobody gives a damn about the victim. Nobody calls you. Nobody tells you what’s happening.” You tell your story at parties, people ooh and ah. but nobody even really wants to hear about it. Derek says eventually you get conditioned to the fact that you’re a nobody; it starts the moment the police arrive. He says he. too, got conditioned over the course of the last year. So it happened to him. Big deal. So what?