The crowbar was tucked like a pistol into the waistline of his jeans, and at the moment he raised his shirt front to reveal that weapon, the older man standing behind him, the guy with the pig face and acne, told me to hand over my wallet. My mistake was looking up from the crowbar into the younger man’s eyes, so large and brown and childlike, and something in those eyes, combined with the tequila I’d just consumed, made me horribly unafraid. The kid with the crowbar looked like Jesus, or at least the Jesus I’d been raised on in Mississippi, Zig Zag Man Jesus, the hippie I’d flipped off in the rearview when I’d crossed the Arkansas line to go to college.
They say what you don’t know can kill you. What I didn’t know that evening could fill a book. I didn’t know I wasn’t tough. I didn’t know I was mortal. I didn’t know that the three muggers blocking my path had just that morning been released from the penitentiary in Russellville. I didn’t know they’d already mugged two other people that evening, both of whom had the sense to hand over their wallets and therefore did not end up in the hospital. Had I been sober, had one of my muggers not so resembled Zig Zag Jesus, I might have handed over my wallet by the railroad track outside George’s Imperial Lounge on Dickson Street on the night of September 22, 1984. Stupidity only makes sense in the moment but suffice to say I did not hand over my wallet and instead muttered fuck y’all and tried to push my way through their scrum, and it was only after they had closed in on me, a large hand suddenly gripping my shirt collar, that I felt the first stab of real fear. My shirt ripped and tailed behind me as I broke free and ran.
I wasn’t a fighter or tough guy, but at twenty-three and bone-thin, I could run really fast. Even drunk I could have dusted those three hoods. But after I’d broken free, I suddenly stopped sprinting after about twenty feet. Again, I’m not sure why. I think it was mostly due to the surreal nature of what was happening, how where the mugging was taking place on familiar territory on the main drag, a stone’s throw from campus, under a streetlight next to traffic, not late, an autumn night, temperate, lots of stars. For whatever reason I stopped running to look behind me, and what I saw was a pig face eclipsed by a fist. Then my head hit cement.
When I came to, the three men had picked me up, each grabbing an arm or leg, and were toting me down the train tracks into darkness, my face turned upward toward the joggling stars as I was swept downstream. A couple minutes later they dropped me onto the tracks, my head hitting one of the rails, and began to beat the crap out of me, the pig-faced guy pushing a serrated kitchen knife against my jugular and screaming the same question over and over into my face: “You think you’re tough now, punk, huh? HUH?” huh? HUH?”
This was, I knew by then, a rhetorical question, rhetorical being a word I’d recently learned as an English major undergrad. The answer to his question was all too obvious, for I was simply receiving the beating without fighting back—a tactic sometimes employed by chimpanzees in the wild when captured by rival packs. The act of surrender is primal, after all, but as a tactic in the modern world, it can backfire horribly. The pig-faced man pushed the knife deeper into my throat every time he shouted the word huh: You think you’re tough now, punk, huh? HUH? huh? HUH? Other hands were going through my pockets, and I felt my wallet being withdrawn. There was a pause, a type of drum roll, the knife blade lessening against my windpipe, then a voice choked with outrage shouted, “Five dollars! Five fucking dollars!” The real beating began after my wallet was thrown into my face, followed by my car keys and my asthma inhaler. With the knife reapplied, I shut my eyes and accepted I was about to die.
Interestingly, I did not pray. Only recently had I started telling my older older graduate school friends, the ones I’d just been drinking margaritas with minutes earlier inside Jose’s Bandito Lounge, that I was an atheist—more a fashion statement than a conviction. So it was ironical (another word I’d latched on to of late) that the prayer I did not utter was immediately answered.
Some noise sounded offstage—I didn’t hear it, but one of my muggers did, or pretended to.
“Somebody’s coming,” Crowbar Jesus hissed.
That quick, the three muggers vanished inside a great crunching of gravel, and a moment later I opened my eyes to find myself remarkably alive with my head resting on an iron rail, an indescribably joyous moment in which the stars took pulse and revealed themselves to be living entities. Everything felt wildly animate and I could feel the stars reading my mind and responding. Turns out you are never more alive than when you are not dead. Relishing each breath, I lay there for another ten minutes that passed in a montage of photographs and dreams, like in a near-death experience. I’d never felt happier, and perhaps I had never even understood happiness until that moment. Then I heard gravel stomps coming back toward me and I stopped being happy.
When the crunching stopped, Crowbar Jesus was staring down at me. He had stringy black hair and a chintzy moustache, a kid, maybe even younger than me. His name was Lloyd Eugene Dobbs, and he’d be dead by morning.
“Man, I gotta hide you,” he said. “Those guys just decided to come back and kill you.”
He worked his arms under me, carried me about ten yards to a border of red-berried thorn bushes landscaped alongside the train tracks, dumped me inside one such bush, and then vanished into darkness. I stayed inside that womb of thorns about fifteen minutes, I think. I don’t know if the other muggers came back to kill me or not as I slipped in and out of consciousness. Eventually, without making a decision to do so, I fell out of the bush, struggled to my feet, then limped back to Dickson Street, where I stood like the town drunk under the streetlight where I’d been accosted until I made the decision to limp back uphill to the Bandito Lounge, where my older friends in the creative writing department were still drinking margaritas.
Staring with the bouncer, who stepped aside, everyone in the bar stared at me as I entered and walked across the floor with my shirt hanging off me and my skinny torso bleeding from gashes, pricks, cuts, bruises. My face meated, my neck seamed, I slid into the black vinyl booth, let my friends digest my condition (I was enjoying this part); then I smiled upward at them and said, “Y’all are not gonna believe what just happened to me.”
My friends heard me out, believed me, and decided we should chase down my muggers and teach them a damn lesson. This caught me off guard because my friends were even less intimidating than me except for one poet named Floyd who I think had once boxed or something and considered himself a martial artist. The other friends were rather noteworthily obese. Rallied by Floyd the poet, they stood up and waddled outside to wreak havoc on my assailants. Still groggy, I reluctantly followed from a distance. Luckily for all of us, we immediately ran into a cop, who informed us that my assailants had already been arrested. He also told us that the three men were all ex-cons who’d been released from prison earlier that day and had already robbed three other people that evening—all of whom had the sense to hand over their money.
“Take him to the hospital,” the cop said, then looked at me and added, “You need to come by the police station first thing tomorrow.”
At the emergency room I was pronounced ass-kicked and given a shot and a pain-pill prescription. Afterward, with the drugs kicking in, we returned to the train tracks and searched along the iron rails until we found my keys, wallet, and inhaler. The next thing I remember is waking up in the morning. After taking my pills, I hobbled into the police station. The first cop who saw me laughed in my face, which had purpled and reddened overnight. He guided me into an office and took out some laminated sheets of desolate mug shots.
The first guy I fingered was Crowbar Jesus. When I did, the cop chuckled and said, “Well, you ain’t gotta worry about him no more. Done had an accident in jail last night. Hung hisself with his own damn underwear.”
I remember very much hating that cop while trying to tell him what had happened, how the kid had come back to maybe save my life. His bemused expression never left even when I wondered out loud if the kid would be alive now if I’d kept running.
The notoriety over the mugging made me a sudden celebrity with the faculty in the creative writing program. It was the kind of story the professors there loved: testosterone-driven, with elements of the spiritual. Back then, the University of Arkansas was an assembly line for White male writers of the Southern overcompensating variety. Whiskey writers, they called themselves.
As things turned out, I wasn’t done getting my ass kicked in Arkansas—not by a long shot. On a figurative level I would keep getting my ass kicked in the graduate workshops that I was allowed to attend by a professor named William Harrison. Equal parts wily and cruel, always sprightly, famous for having penned the short story that inspired the movie Rollerball, Harrison (or Dollar Bill, as we called him) seemed to enjoy destroying within any ninety-minute class whatever self-esteem a young writer had mustered over a lifetime. He once pretended to wipe his ass with one of my short stories. He threw other stories out the window. He was a handsome man with California aspirations, and he smiled grandly and called everyone whose name he couldn’t remember babe. You had to graduate into having a name, and even then you could be demoted back to babe.
Harrison, the best workshop teacher I’ve ever had, and a teacher who still occupies a lobe of my brain, labored under the philosophy that each time he convinced a young writer to abandon his craft forever he was saving the world a suicide—a creed he adopted after the Arkansas program lost to suicide its most talented charge, the poet Frank Stanford, an undergraduate who shot himself three times in the heart with a .22-caliber pistol.
“If I can make you quit,” Harrison once told me, “you’d never have made it anyway.”
If Harrison saw himself as one of the wind gods on an old map, the opposite god was Big Jim Whitehead, a bearish, gruff, yet childlike man obsessed with the inner workings of meter. Whitehead had authored one massive tomb, a novel called Joiner, which concerns a football player, and all he’d published in the decades since were a few chapbooks of very fine, very formal poetry. Both men were psychotically competitive and hated and loved each other—they had both originally studied in divinity school—but the rule of the land was a young writer could be adopted by only one of the wind gods, at which point the opposing god would despise you.
From Jim Whitehead, who despised me, I learned the invaluable art of literary explication, the New Criticism method of isolating meter and technique to extract knowledge of authorial intent within a work of art and therefore render judgement on it in Old Testament fashion. While explicating one of Frost’s poems, Whitehead also taught me about design theory. Though much maligned today, design theory was originally a cutting-edge heretical argument that the existence of God should be provable via a process similar to dismantling a clock, the hand of the artist being self-evident (or not) within the details of the invention, an idea that blurred inside my provincial brain with the concept of authorial intent inside the art of literary explication.
It will tell you a lot about Big Jim that he was impressed I had refused to hand over my wallet that night on the tracks. That was the mindset at Arkansas, the Hemingwayesque overcompensation of men who have adopted a feminine craft. In one way or another we were all posing with gut-shot lions. Typically Whitehead detested me not only because I was Harrison’s charge but because he considered me a druggy. Big Jim loved whiskey and pills but hated the bohemian element of recreational drugs. When a friend of mine—a brilliant and bipolar grad student named Jon Lapland, considered one of the rising stars of the program, was arrested and shipped to the nuthouse following a monthlong binge on magic mushrooms, Whitehead started hollering at me inside a gathering of concerned teachers and students.
“Quit selling Jon drugs, goddammit, Durkee!” he bellowed.
Well, I’d never sold anyone drugs, but all that mattered to Big Jim was his poet’s intuition.
Prior to going boo-boo, as we called it, Jon Lapland had been an affable chain-smoking grad student who’d once published a short story in an academic journal he enjoyed showing off to easily awed kids like me. Jon had an oblong face, too large for his body, which made him resemble a Don Martin cartoon lost inside a fog bank of cigarette smoke. The epic novel he was writing, of which I heard much and read little, was called i, the small-case letter, he explained, that best represented humanity: the shaft with the ejaculated sperm poised above it. The main character’s name was also i, and this many decades later that’s all I can remember about Jon’s novel, except that it was Borgesian. Borges and Shakespeare, Lapland once confided to me (while seeming to smoke three cigarettes at once) were the only writers who intimidated him “just a little.”
Jon lived across the street from me throughout that yellow Arkansas summer he turned into Oblong Ciggy Jesus, a transcendence complete when he crawled through a bathroom window to steal a five-pound bag of magic mushrooms from the drug dealer who was not me. Four weeks later, the bag almost empty, Jon began his march down the highway toward the gigantic statue called Christ of the Ozarks they’d resurrected in His honor in Eureka Springs. It was a forty-mile pilgrimage, and Jon was halfway to Eureka when the cops busted him for being Jesus and threw him into the funny house. It took three weeks to quit him of being Jesus before they felt safe loosing him upon society.
It was Big Jim who drove me to the facility outside town to visit Jon. None of Jon’s other friends were visiting him because he had been a really annoying Jesus. Absent bragging, Jon didn’t have much to say for himself that day and seemed humiliated by our visit. Afterwards, Whitehead dropped me off at my apartment, then barked my name out the window of his Ambassador. I turned around to face him.
“You’re a good friend, Durkee,” he yelled, the only nice thing he said to me during my years at Arkansas.
Because of excellent teachers like Whitehead and Harrison, I improved as a writer and received a fellowship to the creative writing program at Syracuse. One day my hero Tobias Wolff phoned me up to offer me that fellowship. That call felt like a miracle—either that or the cruelest of practical jokes. I remember staring at the phone afterwards and wondering, “Did that really just happen . . . or have I made an enemy that evil?”
The night before leaving for Syracuse, I exited Jose’s Bandito Lounge again where I’d been drinking with the same friends, and on my walk home stopped by at the train tracks where I’d been mugged. It was late, I was drunk, and for fifteen minutes I stood under the same streetlight gazing into the dark and thinking about the kid who’d hanged himself and wondering if he’d still be alive if I’d handed over my five bucks. I was still trying to make sense of it all when a cherry-red pickup skidded to a stop beside me and a very attractive, very drunk older woman framed in the rolled-down window asked, “Hey, hon, you want a ride?”
Her flannel shirt was unbuttoned to a remarkable degree, and I got inside the truck without even bothering to notice who was driving. You pose a question, the universe starts to answer it, and you don’t interrupt that cosmic reply, you get inside and see where it takes you, right?
The truck was being driven by the woman’s cousin, a young man we will call Kyle. Kyle looked like Meth Lab Jesus. Whatever he was on, he was hooting out the window and thrilled to be alive and blaring Skynyrd and kept asking me, “What the fuck is up, brotherman?” Ignoring my directions, he floored the truck and began undressing his cousin, who was sitting between us in the cab. “Hey, man, you ever seen tits like these? Shit, man, lookit them—damn, son! Feel them things, man.”
In this manner Kyle sped us pell-mell along back roads while continuing to molest the woman he’d just introduced as his cousin. “I can’t fuck her, but you can,” he kept reminding me as we drove deeper into the night. Whenever we took a sharp turn, the half-naked woman lolled against me laughing and grabbed my thigh for balance.
Now I would like to be the person you want me to be and tell you I was in no way aroused by this, but I was a young man almost but not quite a virgin and it was horribly arousing in a claustrophobic, terrifying way. Eventually we arrived at my apartment and parked outside my front door next to the U-Haul I’d rented to flee Arkansas. Kyle wanted to know can we come inside, man, can we come inside and party? “She’s my cousin, but she ain’t yours.”
I hesitated—then, because wisdom must start somewhere—I thanked him for the ride, got out, marched inside, locked the door, and it was only then I realized that Kyle would have cut my throat the moment we stepped inside together.
Or maybe he wouldn’t have cut my throat. Who knows, right? Maybe he was just a pimp or pervert or a really bad cousin. As I drove that U-Haul toward Syracuse over the next two days, I kept pondering Kyle and his cousin and trying to superimpose that manic ride over the tragic mugging instigated at the exact same point on the globe, but the more I dissected what had happened, the more I came to realize that if there were some poetic design connecting those two events, some evidence of a god in the machine, then it was beyond my invention to decipher. 
Lee Durkee is the author of the novel The Last Taxi Driver, named a Book of the Year by Kirkus Review, the Irish Times, and Le Monde, and the memoir Stalking Shakespeare. He lives in Taylor, Mississippi.
Illustration: Andrew Blanchard
