Sitting on a NYC stoop, he became an unexpected hero
Like most people, I hear plenty of TV newscasts where the reporter tells an interviewee that they’re a “hero” for having done something courageous in an unplanned way.
Typically, these “heroes” are people going about their normal lives until they find themselves suddenly facing a situation with a stranger in serious trouble. Right away, and without a hint of ceremony or smugness, they do something — often putting themselves at risk — to rescue strangers from grave injury.
That’s different from classic literature’s notion of a “hero,” which is typically a chest-beating figure from mythology, brimming with confidence and endowed with the strength to perform superhuman deeds.
Today, the term is used to represent an almost kneejerk response that pretty much everyone is capable of. It’s an instinct that deserves public respect as well as admiration.
However, for various reasons, not everyone is able or willing to act on that impulse. Even you don’t know whether or not you will display it until you’re put to the test.
My own test came in the summer of 1975 when I moved to New York City.
I didn’t have a place to stay when I arrived. So I imposed on a couple of college classmates who were, at the time, living in a tenement apartment just east of Little Italy in an area of lower Manhattan sometimes known as The Bowery. When I initially arrived at their place, they were both away at work, so I sat on their front stoop waiting for them to get back home.
Back then, The Bowery was best known as New York’s Skid Row — a hangout for vagrants and homeless alcoholics — and it lived up to its reputation. Many commercial building owners in the area had installed spike strips around the perimeter of their properties to drive away derelicts who try to lie down and sleep there after passing out. But even though the area had become inhospitable to these men (they were almost all men), they would find their way to The Bowery and drink cheap wine until passing out.
I sat waiting on my classmates’ doorstep for quite a while that day, quietly taking in the scene, when one of the Bowery bums, as they were referred to at the time, stumbled and fell into the gutter by the curb in front of me.
Back then, as now, parking in Manhattan was scarce, and when the driver of a passing car saw what appeared to be an empty space in front of me, he started backing in. The problem was, that’s where the drunken man was lying, and the driver would have ended up crushing the guy without ever seeing him.
So I jumped up, ran behind the car, and started banging on its trunk lid to catch the driver’s attention. It worked, but the drunk was still lying in the gutter, so I grabbed his arms and started pulling him back onto the sidewalk. As I did, a stranger came over and, without my even asking, grabbed the guy’s feet so he could be lifted more easily out of harm’s way. Then we laid him down on the sidewalk as the car resumed its parking.
The man was so drunk that he showed no awareness of what had just happened or of how close he had come to dying. And, of course, I have no idea what eventually became of him. I wasn’t optimistic about his long-range prospects.
Today, the district we used to call The Bowery is known as Little Saigon, Two Bridges or Fourth Avenue South. It has become gentrified, registered as a historic site and expunged of the flophouses that once catered to its vagrant guests. The city’s homeless men, I assume, have moved on to other parts of town.
Nevertheless, I once saved somebody’s life there, spontaneously and without any prompting. Of course, there were no TV news crews in the neighborhood back then to document the drunk’s near-death encounter and no doorbell cameras there to record it.
There were no reporters on hand to shower me with bogus acclaim, bestow me with the title of hero, or coax me to modestly respond with words like, “Aw shucks, I just did what anyone would do.”
The drunk never recognized that he had just been snatched from almost certain death. But even if he had, he may not have felt gratitude for having been rescued from what I surmise was a pretty wretched life.
Even so, to this day, I feel a sense of satisfaction about my part in what took place back then — and of how the accidental hero acclaim you see on local television could unexpectedly apply to just about anyone.