“Serious?”
“That’s the world he knows. That’s what he aspires to. And you and I are not changing that in a semester.”
“But what if they see that I care about them? I’ll bring them a dozen donuts. We’ll get started on better footing, they’ll see I’m a nice guy.”
Donuts!
“Lionel, they know you’re a nice guy. That’s why they’re doing this to you.”
You have success, happiness, joy, privilege written so loudly on you, Lionel, they can’t take it. They can’t take you ambling up Edgewood, whistling. Whistling classical music at that.
The quest for understanding. The clearly marked trail of knowledge. It had been a way of life for Lionel, a unifying theme. But here, there was no understanding. That was darkness’s creed, the wild steed it rode, its trusty companion, part and parcel of its power. No understanding. Blunt irrationality. Comprehensive incomprehension.
Officer Perez was right about everything, I was sure. But he turned out to be wrong about the use of weapons.
The next time it happened to Lionel, there was a knife.
The knife changed everything.
But not in the way you think.
Not in the way any of us thought.
Same three kids. And feeling thrilled, victorious, adrenalized, invincible from the success of their previous encounter, no surprise, they were not done with Lionel.
Same cops — Landry and Perez. I’m glad they happened to be on duty that day, to come around to our Edgewood house again, to be there to experience the same disbelief that we all did. The same intersection of Yale and Edgewood. The same sobering result. The same rethinking of all our assumptions.
Because with the unfolding of that knife, the flash of its blade, something else unfolded and flashed in Lionel Patton. Some new edge was suddenly exposed.
The appearance of that knife, gleaming there in the afternoon sunlight — an expression of Edgewood itself?... of accelerating events?... bringing them literally and figuratively to a point? — the appearance of the knife changed the calculus. As it always does.
Held there, inches from his chest, arrogantly — creating pure power, pure powerlessness. Generating in Lionel a sudden complex math of threat, insult, terror, instinct, rage, memory, confusion, the formula’s coefficients arranging and rearranging themselves in milliseconds.
If you’ve ever had a knife held at you (and at that moment in time, New Haven, 1976, many of us had), then you know how it alters the moment.
And oh, it altered the moment for Lionel.
His French horn — his trusty French horn — unexpectedly, from stage right — swung into action. Twenty mighty, unexpected, highly effective pounds of defense — and offense, as it turned out.
He knew his weapon intimately, after all. He’d swung it onto buses, under desks, into car backseats, balanced it on bicycles, lugged it since the age of seven. He had total control of it. He could wield it. Hefting twenty pounds for over twelve years, your carrying arm and hand get strong. Unexpectedly, acutely strong. Uncannily precise. He was at one with it.
He punched the French horn case at the knife and knocked it out of the first kid’s fist with such force, and to such stunned surprise, that the knife tumbled to the sidewalk.
Clearly, three armed teenage thugs on Edgewood Avenue were not expecting the attack of a French horn.
And when the kid bent down to retrieve it, the instrument swung with equal force and violence at his head. He was literally dumbstruck.
And when the other two kids came at Lionel in blind, unthinking retaliation, he karate-kicked the first one — perfectly, effectively, in the gut — then swung the horn at the second, its twenty pounds catching him solidly in the lower back, sending him to the sidewalk doubled up in pain.
Like I said: French horn, All-Ivy.
Amid all the music and golf and chess and skating lessons back in Lincoln, Nebraska, Lionel had years of martial arts lessons as well, and had been sternly and repeatedly instructed never to deploy what he had learned; it was an art and a discipline, and such stern instruction it must have been, because his teachers could not imagine a circumstance in which Lionel Patton, bright-eyed, cheerful, upbeat, friendly Nebraska farmer’s son, would ever have to actually use it. But fortunately, into that meticulously developed cerebral cortex of his at that moment came a neural signal that perhaps this was the appropriate deployment of those long-honed martial skills. And maybe in the end that was fortuitous. Because it added the element of surprise — for Lionel himself, and therefore for his adversaries.
Like I said: lessons in everything.
A symphony of violence, with a French horn solo. You can hear the solo, can’t you? Heraldic sounding — but only in our imaginations. In reality, a solo of thumps and thuds.
And then, a final flourish, and a predictable one, as it turned out.
As the kids backed away, stunned — holding their heads, doubled up in pain, unsure what to do next — Lionel grabbed the knife off the sidewalk.
Did he hold it to their chests? To their throats? Turn the tables on them? Show them how it feels to have a knife held inches from you?
No, Lionel reverted suddenly to Lionel.
“I told them they should not be carrying something like this around and threatening people. I told them it’s wrong. And I confiscated it.”
Confiscated it. Good Christ.
And knife in one hand and French horn in the other, Lionel continued up Edgewood Avenue.
Those are the details of that afternoon, related first to us, and shortly thereafter to the astonished cops. With one notable difference.
“So what happened to the knife?” Perez asked him.
“I don’t know,” said Lionel.
That straightforward, honest Midwestern face. That do-gooder Boy Scout demeanor. “Things were happening so fast, I didn’t notice.”
“Too bad. It would make prosecuting this a slam dunk.”
“My testimony’s not enough?”
Perez looked at that big, honest face. A Midwestern French horn — playing Yalie. Assaulted by three black kids. And there were no actual stab wounds, anyway, thank God, so the knife was not crucial evidence anyway.
“Yeah, your testimony is probably enough.”
And it was.
Two of the three kids went straight into juvie. Their first port of call, their entry at last, into the criminal justice system. Where they no doubt turned from rambunctious, chaotic, delinquent fifteen-year-olds to angry, hate-filled, avenging adults. Where, as the overwhelming odds and statistics predict, they learned more violence. Committed more crimes. Graduated from menace to full-fledged criminals. Edgewood started them on their path. But Lionel Patton hurried them along it. Pushed them into the system, started their formal criminal educations.
The French horn case was permanently dented. The horn inside survived unscathed. I went to see Lionel performing Mahler’s Fifth.
It’s got a French horn solo.
The solo he’d been practicing incessantly. The solo he’d been whistling.
Lionel performed it with passion. With beauty.
He had walked to the performance. Walked Edgewood.
So I knew he had the knife onstage with him in magnificent Woolsey Hall.
A few weeks later, in the process of buying another dime bag, Roger and I were surprised to be invited into Keneisha’s apartment.
It was quiet, warm, a refuge from Edgewood Avenue, and a heartbreaking display of middle-class aspiration. Comfy couch. Big TV. Big stereo speakers. A song of consumerism. Not knowing anything else. Not aspiring to anything else. A living room filled with objects. Filled with want.