Looking back, I suppose I should have just run away. I could have run out the front door into the street, or the back door onto the patio, or the side door off the kitchen into the alley, or even through the door into the garage — where I could have dived through the dog door cut into the garage and made my caninelike escape.
But here’s the salt of the thing: though I cannot be certain, I believe that I was making my way toward the front door — after all, the front door was the only place in my house where I could be positive that my intruder was not waiting. But in order to get from my office to the front door, I had to walk past the basement door. And as I walked past the basement door, I spotted the baseball bat.
It wasn’t my baseball bat. Now, when one thinks of baseball bats, one conjures images of huge slabs of ash wielded by steroid-fueled freaks. But that particular bat belonged to my ten-year-old son. It was a Little League bat, so it was comically small. I could easily swing it with one hand and had, in fact, often swung it one-handed as I hit practice grounders to the little second baseman of my heart, my son, my Maximilian, my Max. Yes, I am a father. And a husband. That is information you need to know. My wife, Wendy, and my son were not in the house. To give me the space and time I needed to finish editing the film, my wife had taken our son to visit her mother and father in Chicago; they’d been gone for one week and would be gone for another. So, to be truthful, I was in no sense being forced to defend my family, and I’d never been the kind of man to defend his home, his property, his shit. In fact, I’d often laughed at the news footage of silly men armed with garden hoses as they tried to defend their homes from wildfires. I always figured those men would die, go to hell, and spend the rest of eternity having squirt-gun fights with demons.
So with all that information in mind, why did I grab my son’s baseball bat and open the basement door? Why did I creep down the stairs? Trust me, I’ve spent many long nights awake, asking myself those questions. There are no easy answers. Of course, there are many men — and more than a few women — who believe I was fully within my rights to head down those stairs and confront my intruder. There are laws that define — that frankly encourage — the art of self-defense. But since I wasn’t interested in defending my property, and since my family and I were not being directly threatened, what part of my self could I have possibly been defending?
In the end, I think I wasn’t defending anything at all. I’m an editor — an artist — and I like to make connections; I am paid to make connections. And so I wonder. Did I walk down those stairs because I was curious? Because a question had been asked (Who owned the feet that landed on my basement floor?) and I, the editor, wanted to discover the answer?
So, yes, slowly I made my way down the stairs and through the dark hallway and turned the corner into our downstairs family room — the man cave, really, with the big television and the pool table — and saw a teenaged burglar. I stood still and silent. Standing with his back to me, obsessed with the task — the crime — at hand, he hadn’t yet realized that I was in the room with him.
Let me get something straight. Up until that point I hadn’t made any guesses as to the identity of my intruder. I mean, yes, I live in a black neighborhood — and I’m not black — and there had been news of a series of local burglaries perpetrated by black teenagers, but I swear none of that entered my mind. And when I saw him, the burglar, rifling through my DVD collection and shoving selected titles into his backpack — he was a felon with cinematic taste, I guess, and that was a strangely pleasing observation — I didn’t think, There’s a black teenager stealing from me. I only remember being afraid and wanting to make my fear go away.
“Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed. “You fucking fucker!”
The black kid was so startled that he staggered into my television — cracking the screen — and nearly fell before he caught his balance and ran for the broken window. I could have — would have — let him make his escape, but he stopped and turned back toward me. Why did he do that? I don’t know. He was young and scared and made an irrational decision. Or maybe it wasn’t irrational at all. He’d slashed his right hand when he crawled through the broken window, so he must have decided the opening with its jagged glass edges was not a valid or safe exit — who’d ever think a broken window was a proper entry or exit — so he searched for a door. But the door was behind me. He paused, weighed his options, and sprinted toward me. He was going to bulldoze me. Once again, I could have made the decision to avoid conflict and step aside. But I didn’t. As that kid ran toward me I swung the baseball bat with one hand.
I often wonder what would have happened if that bat had been made of wood. When Max and I had gone shopping for bats, I’d tried to convince him to let me buy him a wooden one, an old-fashioned slugger, the type I’d used when I was a Little Leaguer. I’ve always been a nostalgic guy. But my son recognized that a ten-dollar wooden bat purchased at Target was not a good investment.
“That wood one will break easy,” Max had said. “I want the lum-a-lum one.”
Of course, he’d meant to say aluminum; we’d both laughed at his mispronunciation. And I’d purchased the lum-a-lum bat.
So it was a metal bat that I swung one-handed at the black teenager’s head. If it had been cheap and wooden, perhaps the bat would have snapped upon contact and dissipated the force. Perhaps. But this bat did not snap. It was strong and sure, so when it made full contact with the kid’s temple, he dropped to the floor and did not move.
He was dead. I had killed him.
I fell to my knees next to the kid, dropped my head onto his chest, and wept.
I don’t remember much else about the next few hours, but I called 911, opened the door for the police, and led them to the body. And I answered and asked questions.
“Did he have a gun or knife?”
“I don’t know. No. Well, I didn’t see one.”
“He attacked you first?”
“He ran at me. He was going to run me over.”
“And that’s when you hit him with the bat?”
“Yes. It’s my son’s bat. It’s so small. I can’t believe it’s strong enough to — is he really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“We don’t know yet.”
His name was Elder Briggs. Elder: such an unusual name for anybody, especially a sixteen-year-old kid. He was a junior at Garfield High School, a B student and backup point guard for the basketball team, an average kid. A good kid, by all accounts. He had no criminal record — had never committed even a minor infraction in school, at home, or in the community — so why had this good kid broken into my house? Why had he decided to steal from me? Why had he made all the bad decisions that had led to his death?
The investigation was quick but thorough, and I was not charged with any crime. It was self-defense. But then nothing is ever clear, is it? I was legally innocent, that much is true, but was I morally innocent? I wasn’t sure, and neither were a significant percentage of my fellow citizens. Shortly after the police held the press conference that exonerated me, Elder’s family — his mother, father, older brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and priest — organized a protest. It was small, only forty or fifty people, but how truly small can a protest feel when you are the subject — the object — of that protest?
I watched the live coverage of the event. My wife and son, after briefly returning from Chicago, had only spent a few days with me before they fled back to her parents. We wanted to protect our child from the media. An ironic wish, considering that the media were only interested in me because I’d killed somebody else’s child.