LevkaA chapter from an as yet unpublished book:
* * * * *
Without Result
I've never been shot. I have been shot at, though. It was by the Berkeley police. I didn't like it at all. It was disconcerting, to say the very least. It happened during the so-called "Volleyball Riot," in 1991. It was one of a decades-long series of confrontations about who controls People's Park.
I wasn't actually rioting at the time. I was an innocent bystander who was breaking no law. I lived in Berkeley and had every legal right to be standing on the sidewalk where I was talking on what was then a pay phone on the outside wall of what was then Cody's Books, at the corner of Haste and Telegraph. I was explaining to my friend that I was going to be late for his birthday party because there was a furious riot going on between me and the structure where I my bike was parked. I was going to have to walk the long way around it before I could ride to the party in Oakland and no, I didn't mind missing out on the riot. It was just another Berkeley riot, one of many. Ho hum. They happened a lot during that era. I could always go to the next one. In this case, it would most likely be the following night. My friend's birthday party was only once a year.
I hung up the phone and looked up the street. The cops were coming down Telegraph Avenue in formation and in force. The front row carried shotguns. When they reached the corner of Haste St., the column halted and the front row pivoted, the way Chamberlain's 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment had pivoted at Little Round Top when Evander Law's Alabamians came at them for the last time. It swept the Rebs off the hill like a broom. It's called a "right-wheel forward" maneuver. From above, it looks like a swinging door. It saved the Union's day at Gettysburg. Had it not, Mead would have been flanked and the battle lost. The lessons of history are not to be lost. As a history buff who grew up in the state where it happened, I recognized the maneuver immediately. It looked ominous, especially the shotguns.
Suddenly the cops were bisecting the intersection diagonally. They halted and shouldered their shotguns and pointed them straight at us folks on the sidewalk. They were at point blank range. Having a row of shotguns pointed at you point blank is disconcerting under any circumstances, but here especially. I flashed on the role of shotguns at the original People's Park riot. Roughly two hundred people were shot, almost all of them with shotguns. One of them, a bystander named James Rector, died from his wounds. An artist, Alan Blanchard, lost both his eyes to a load of birdshot directly in his face.
Governor Reagan had said, "If this takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." It's still not over with. There have been decades of resistance to protect People's Park. There will be more. People's Park is an idea that a great many people have felt was worth fighting for. For a few, like Rosebud Denovo, it was worth dying for.
Not me. There's an old chess maxim, never trade men for position. Maneuver is everything. But there I was, decades later, in the same place, in a situation not dissimilar to James Rector's, an innocent observer suddenly "under the gun." I assumed they were about to kill us. I didn't have time to be scared before they fired a volley of so-called "rubber bullets" at us. They're not really rubber. They're wooden dowels coated with rubber. Sometimes they're not wood, they're steel. At that range either can kill. It was not aimed fire. It was a volley in our general direction.
Instructions on the box these so-called “less than lethal” rounds come in says they're supposed to be fired from a hundred yards away, aimed at a point on the ground about fifty yards away, so they ricochet upwards and strike the victim in the crotch. We can debate the relative humanity of such a maneuver, but why bother? Either way, the cops do what they do. What they did was fire a volley at point blank range in the general direction of myself and a number of other innocents on the sidewalk, while the actual rioters were half a block away on Telegraph, retreating behind a hail of rocks and bottles, south towards Dwight Way.
One projectile hit the wall just beside me at the level of my throat, about a foot to my right. A second one simultaneously hit the wall about 18" to my left, also at the level of my throat. Had either round struck my larynx, I wouldn't be here telling this story. It wasn't the nearest near death experience I've ever had in my life, but it certainly ranks. I say that as someone who rode motorcycles in traffic for decades. Near death was all around me everywhere I went. I never got killed, not even once. I broke a few bones, but nothing important. I lived to tell the tale. That’s what counts. But too close for comfort is close enough for me.
We all ran for our lives down Haste St. as fast as our feet could carry us. I have a game knee from an old hit and run, so I run kind of lopsided, but I was making pretty good time for a gimp. Adrenaline is the best drug. For one thing, it's free. Halfway down the first block, a guy who had been watching from the porch of the house next door to Cody's was running to my right. He was just starting to pull ahead of me when the cops fired another volley. I could hear the projectiles whiz past my head. They sounded like bees.
Blood suddenly spattered from this guy's head and he went down face first and lay still. I figured he was a dead man, so there was no point in getting myself killed trying to drag him to safety. I kept running. I didn't slow down till I was well past Shattuck Ave. and didn't stop for breath till I reached Sacramento St. As it turned out later, whatever the round was, it had only nicked this guy's scalp and missed the bone entirely. His skull was still intact. I didn't know that at the time. I thought we were being slaughtered from behind and assumed that he was a casualty. For the moment at least, I was not. Retreat was the frugal option. An inch lower and it would have at the very least given him a TBI if not a toe tag. There are a lot of veins and arteries in the scalp, which accounted for all the blood. He was a very lucky man.
I learned the truth the very next night when I saw this guy out in the street with his head swathed in bandages. Other than that he was alright. He was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore. We both were. We weren’t the only ones, either. This time we didn’t run. We both joined in the rioting because when someone nearly kills you and you do nothing about it, that's nature's way of telling you that you're too stupid to live. I was building a barricade. He was throwing rocks at the cops. How smart any of this was I'll leave for history to decide. He said he figured they had it coming. It was the first time in his life he had ever done such a thing. Repression always inspires resistance.
By then it was the fourth straight night of rioting. Reinforcements were streaming in from the countryside, many of them veterans of the first People's Park riot. Alameda County had exhausted its riot control budget and the state government in Sacramento refused to come to their rescue, so they stood down. We'd won. Cops like us to think they're omnipotent. They aren't. People's Park had proved that once again.
Winston Churchill once said, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." Personally, I have a lot of trouble with how history portrays Churchill. In real life he was a bloodthirsty, racist, war criminal with, as he himself put it, "a bodyguard of lies." But he fought Nazis, so he wasn’t all bad. No one who fights Nazis is all bad. Nazis are always the right ones to fight. They’re not the only ones, but they certainly head the list. Churchill got that right. He got one other thing right, too. To be shot at without result really is exhilarating. I'm not the only one who can attest to this. I'm just one you know about. The adrenaline pumps, the heart quickens, the eyes grow wide and the fact you're alive is never clearer in the mind. Sometimes we forget we're alive. We've become so used to it. Not so when the guns begin to shoot.
I do not, however, think you should do this sort of thing for sport. Quite the contrary, when lacking a strong moral imperative to the contrary, I highly recommend that you avoid getting shot at, whenever, wherever, as often as possible, and as soon as you can possibly manage to start. That does not mean you should ignore moral imperatives. It does mean that when you open that door, you have to deal with whatever comes through. You'll never get out of this world alive. We all die. We never know for sure when that will happen, only that it will. The best we can hope for is to die looking good. That itself is the prime moral imperative.