A History of Violence
Thoughts on a carjacking, 15 years later.
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Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when everything changed. Sometimes what you think is a small decision turns out to have large and unexpected consequences. Sometimes you meet someone and can only see years later how having that exact person enter your life at that exact time sent everything careening in a slightly different direction than you ever could have imagined. But sometimes something happens, something so significant and sudden, that there’s only before and after — or, at least, that’s how it feels at the time. Yet sometimes, with distance, you can see that it both changed everything and nothing at all, and you don’t really know how to feel about that. Is that all there is to your trauma?
On Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, I was carjacked in the Cooper-Young neighborhood of Memphis. It was around 8 p.m., and I had just eaten dinner down the block at Beauty Shop. I was emptying my glass recycling in a bin in a church parking lot, because I was a good person and Oxford didn’t have glass recycling, so I saved up bottles until I needed to go run errands in Memphis. My plan was to go to Target after this, maybe Whole Foods too — it’s a little blurry 15 years later. But there were things I needed to bake a king cake the next day for a Super Bowl party, and the Kroger in Oxford didn’t have them. The Saints were playing, and as much I hated them, I loved my Mississippi friends more. Also, I had gotten my first Kitchen-Aid mixer for Christmas, and I wanted to use it.
The attack was random, an opportunity of circumstance. A guy walked down the street, saw me dumping bottles, turned around and walked back, then beat me up and stole my car. And for 15 years I haven’t been able to write much more than what I wrote in the days immediately following.
I always thought when my life flashed before my eyes it wouldn’t seem so, you know, shallow.
Actually, what I should say is that I always thought when my life flashed before my eyes that my life would … actually flash before my eyes. Having never had it happen, I had no idea if, when my life did flash before my eyes, it would be in chronological order or not. I always wondered if this encapsulated version of my life would be more like a Greatest Hits CD or like a lame clip show episode of a television sitcom. I wondered if I would regret the things I never did, or if I’d only remember the best of times.
But I was sure of one thing — I knew that on the verge of sure death (the sudden and unexpected, possibly violent, possibly accidental kind, not the gently-going-into-that-good-night, with your progeny surrounding your bed), I was bound to think one thought above all else: