I had never been a victim, and you don’t think much about it when you’re out doing something. Sure, you see a lot of crime on the news and online, and you hope that it will never happen to you.
On a recent Thursday night I visited The Improv comedy club on Melrose and then went to the Laugh Factory to watch some comics.
When I left the Laugh Factory, I walked across the street to CVS and to Trader Joe’s before they closed. My night was uneventful until I got back to my car on the street. As I was pulling out my car keys, I saw a speeding car coming off of Sunset Boulevard.
It was a white Tesla with dark tinted windows blaring loud music and with the back passenger window on the driver’s side all the way down.
Suddenly I felt a gun blast. I wasn’t sure what the hell it was, and I had two shopping bags in my hand.
Was I really being shot right now? Was this buckshot or gravel? It felt like a lot of hard gravel had rapidly hit my abdomen, and I quickly turned away because I was afraid it would strike me in my eyes.
I had never been a victim, and you don’t think much about it when you’re out doing something. Sure, you see a lot of crime on the news and online, and you hope that it will never happen to you.
So many things are going through your head that you don’t have any of the kind of response like you think you would have. It was shocking as I tried to gather my wits that I couldn’t believe that this had just happened to me. It’s not like a TV show where I could hop in my car and turn my car around and chase them down.
Even if I did something like that, how many people would be in that car to kick my ass? So my quickest reaction was to get into my car and get out of that area and drive home to my apartment.
The next day I filed a police report because I believe whoever these people were, thats I wasn’t the only person they decided to do this to.
When something like this happens, you start to think: should I not go out anymore? Should I be afraid? But then I thought, no, I should have the exact opposite reaction. I should go out even more at nighttime and do even more things now.
No one wants to be a victim, and no one wants to have their life marginalized by being afraid of living because of something like this happening to them.
Years ago, in the early 90s I was taking an improv class at The Groundlings on Melrose Avenue, and it was a warm night when we got outside with our teacher Mindy Sterling.
Suddenly some kids drove by, yelling as they threw an egg really hard, hitting me in the chest and splattering all over me. And the only thing I could think of doing was to pull my T-shirt off, which I did.
An egg is a prank. What I experienced from the Tesla is not.
Jerome Cleary is a columnist for the LA Independent and lives in West Hollywood. He can be reached at jeromecleary@aol.com.
