Held Up in Dallas

In August of 1990 I moved to Dallas, Texas from my small hometown of Hamilton, Michigan. I was looking to start a new life. Since graduating high school I had worked in a factory and after several years grew incredibly bored with the job and its prospects. After the untimely death of my father I decided life was too short to continue along the path I was on, so I quit the job and the next day signed up for a full-time college schedule. A short time later my uncle and his wife invited me to live with them in Dallas and suggested I go to college in Texas because it was so much cheaper than colleges in Michigan. It took me a while to commit but I eventually took them up on their offer, and to make the move I traded my four-wheel-drive for a car with air conditioning, a shiny silver Dodge Daytona Turbo Z. It was a beautiful and fast car, and when it was clean the bright silver paint job just glowed.

About the time I moved to Dallas the city hit 365 murders for that year. It was a bad milestone because it had never hit 365 murders in a year before, but in 1990 the number was reached in August. So Dallas wasn't necessarily the safest place to be, but in a city of millions I figured the odds were still in my favor.

I lived at my uncle's house in Red Oak, just outside of Dallas. He sometimes subbed for one of his friends on a newspaper route for the Dallas Morning News. He'd pick the papers up from the press at about midnight and deliver the bundles to the Waco area paperboys. I sometimes went with him, and while we were waiting for the papers to be printed I would walk around downtown by myself. Despite my sense that life was too short, I was still young enough to be invincible and didn't think anything of exploring some of the dark Dallas streets in what was a rougher part of town. Nothing ever happened and those overnight trips were fun, and it was nice to help my uncle earn some extra money because he wasn't charging me rent.

I started taking classes at Mountain View College and my aunt helped me get a job at the Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital. At the hospital I was what they called a Mental Health Worker. I had to go through training to be qualified, and in essence what I did was work with the patients in the hospital. I'd take their vital signs or talk with them or take part in group therapy, fill out charts and things like that. The most exciting part of the job was the Code Cs. A Code C was called when a patient needed to be restrained because they were a threat to themselves or to others. All available staff was to run to the appropriate unit and help restrain the patient—and you never knew if the patient would be calm or would be fighting violently. Sometimes we would go days without having a single code called, and sometimes there would be six in one shift. The adrenaline rush was incredible.

My job was unique in that I worked at whatever unit the hospital needed me. If somebody called in sick on the adolescent boys unit, that's where I worked. The hospital had all kinds of units spread out like a college campus, from adolescent boys and girls to substance abuse to functioning professionals to young children to people with varying degrees of problems. Because I could be working anywhere, I had keys to the entire hospital. They made it very clear that we weren't to lose our keys. Doing so meant changing the locks, and losing my keys meant changing all the locks.

My nickname at the hospital was Jesus. My hair was long and wavy and I had a neatly trimmed beard and most people thought I strongly resembled the American version of Jesus represented in most paintings and such. One patient who was at the hospital for depression after his wife died looked like Charles Manson. He was actually one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and we would get into great conversations. When I escorted him to the dining hall people thought it funny seeing Charles Manson and Jesus in a deep conversation walking along the sidewalk. Though it never happened, the staff and I were always wary that one day there would be a patient who believed he really was Jesus. We weren't sure if seeing me would be a good thing or a bad thing.

After working at the hospital for several months I was able to afford my own apartment. In the oil boom times in Texas, investors built apartment buildings at an amazing pace. When the oil boom dried up, people left the state and in the process left a lot of empty apartments. It was in that market that I was able to find a great studio apartment with a fireplace and a balcony for $145 a month. I had no furniture other than a bed, a dresser, and a desk, but it was great getting into my own place again. I moved in on January 1st, 1991, celebrated with a beer, and then, I hate to say it, went to work on the substance abuse unit.

All the pollution in Dallas puts a layer of soot on everything. Any rain made pavement as slick as Michigan ice. That soot got on the cars as well. My shiny silver Daytona Turbo Z had turned a dull grey because it hadn't been washed in a while. I still remember having a weekend off in early February, a couple days with no commitments, and so I cleaned my car really well. It absolutely glowed again sitting in the parking lot at my apartment, and a clean car is just a lot more fun to drive. Life was good. I had a cool car, I had a cool job, I was in a nice apartment, and I was taking some great classes at the college.

It was with the thrill of that richness of life that I drove home from the hospital on February 15, 1991. I stayed late because a patient was talking to me about a particular problem. It felt good to be useful to somebody in need.

I pulled my shiny car into my usual parking place and walked over to the mailboxes to check my mail before going to my apartment. As I walked away from the mailboxes, a good-looking, well-dressed man walked past me. We made eye contact and nodded to each other, and then I heard him say, "Come over here." It didn't quite calculate at first. Was he selling drugs? I looked back at the man and he said it again. "Come over here," and he pulled open his sport jacket to reveal a black handgun tucked in his pants. "Get over here or I'm going to shoot your ass!"

I obviously didn't want to get near this guy, so I started walking backwards away from him and said, "Look, I don't have anything worth your while." He repeated it more seriously: "Get over here or I'm gonna shoot your ass!"

Across the drive I saw a woman walking on a sidewalk and I thought that if I could just get by her he would have to leave me alone, so I ran over to her in a bit of a panic. She was wearing a security guard jacket and she was huge—probably 350 pounds. I ran up to her and she opened her jacket, pulled out her silver handgun and pointed it at me, and about that time the man came up behind me. They were together. I remember the mental sensation of realizing the odds of that happening, and I remember the distinct sensation of knowing exactly where the gun would hit me at any given moment. I could feel its aim as if somebody were dragging a tickly feather across my chest and stomach.

A hundred feet away were the dumpsters for the apartments enclosed in high wooden fence. The two gunmen made me walk toward those dumpsters. All the while cars were driving by in the well-lit parking lot, and I was looking at them in disbelief that nobody could see what was going on. The man yelled at me, "Stop looking at cars; don't look around!" The woman, as big as she was, moved like a linebacker—she was amazingly agile.

When we got to the dumpsters he said, "I want the car." I didn't really comprehend what he meant and I said "What?" "I want the car! Give me the keys!" Then I got it. My car. The car that didn't have the annoying horn blowing every time I locked it like everybody else's did. The car that didn't have an alarm because I thought, "What good is a blowing car alarm horn when everybody ignores it anyway?" But what I really got was that my world wasn't safe and I wasn't invincible, and I didn't want to hang out in this parking lot while I figured out how to get into my apartment.

"Can I at least keep my apartment key?" I asked. He agreed. I pulled out my keys and there were more than a dozen keys to the hospital. I couldn't let him get those so I started taking the car key off the key ring. He yelled at me: "What are you doing?" The key to the car popped off the ring and I handed it to him. "This is the only key you need."

The woman grabbed me by the arm and forced me in the direction of the car. He asked if it had an alarm. She held onto me while he got in the car and started it just to be sure it would go. Once the car was started she asked me where my apartment was. I pointed off to a vague "otherly" direction and she told me to get out of there. I started walking away and turned my head, and watched my shiny silver Dodge Daytona Turbo Z drive away. There was nothing left to do but run to my apartment and dial 9-1-1. The police came and wrote a report, told me how many cars were stolen in Dallas every day and said I would likely never see the car again.

I had to work the next afternoon, but for the hours before I went in I couldn't help but watch my parking space from my kitchen window like a tongue looking for a missing tooth. Except somebody else's tooth was in my space. I kept expecting to see my car pull into the driveway. "We're sorry. Big mistake. We took the wrong car. Filled it up for your trouble." The car never showed.

Later I found a ride to the hospital with a coworker. The story of how I kept the keys to the hospital was the talk of the day. To some I was a hero—Where did you find the nerve to argue with them about the keys; to others I was an idiot—I would have thrown the keys at them and ran. To a couple of drug-addicted teenagers in the substance abuse unit I was suddenly the face and personality behind countless stolen items used to buy drugs. I could actually see the transformation as they got it, that the things they had stolen they had stolen from people, real people that they could know and like.

But what troubled me more than anything aside from the trauma of the robbery itself was the first question everybody asked me. "What color were they?" Even black people asked. I gave the gunmen's color as part of the detailed description to the police, but to me the relevant detail in the story was that they had guns—it didn't seem to matter the color of the finger on the trigger. The man was nice looking and the woman was huge…but what color were they? When I gave the one-word answer, the response was a nod of the head with an "mmmhmm." The second question was, "Did you report it?" Does anybody not report their car stolen—at gunpoint?

The police were right; I never saw the car again. I heard later that the same two people were using it as the getaway car in a string of jewelry store robberies. Some time after that my uncle thought he saw it sitting along the highway while he was delivering the Dallas Morning News. In Dallas a rusty Ford Maverick will get stripped within hours of being parked along the highway. Our theory is that my car was parked there with the key in it to get rid of the evidence linking them to the jewelry store robberies, and so the first person that came to take something from it would take the whole car.

A month after my car was stolen I was in a new apartment in a safer part of Dallas. My world had changed. I drove with my doors locked. When I came home at night I would sweep the parking lot with my headlights so I could look for people. A couple weeks after moving into my new apartment, a couple guys tried to break into it knowing that I was inside. A couple weeks after that one of my neighbors was murdered inside her apartment. It was April and the weather was gorgeous, but Dallas had already hit 365 murders. It was all too much, too quick. I decided Texas didn't want me and it was time to go home, and I returned to Michigan in a nice, but soot-covered, Mazda 626 GT that I liked even better than the Daytona.