Piecework

This is the moment that helps explain the intensity of the public response to the Goetz story. It is one thing to read with detached amusement about Jean Harris or Claus von Bulow; such tabloid soap operas have little to do with our lives. But for millions of New Yorkers, what happened to Goetz is a very real possibility. Being trapped on the subway by four bad guys demanding not a dime or a quarter but five dollars is similar to the nocturne about the burglar beside the bed in the dark. A quarter is panhandling; five dollars is robbery. Such scenarios don’t often happen, but you wonder what you would do if they did. For Goetz, it happened.

GOETZ: One of the other fellows, he had in his fur coat, he had his hand or something like this and he put a bulge… And even that isn’t a threat. Because the people, you see, they, they know the rules of the game, the rules of the game in New York. And you know, they’re very serious about the rules… You see you don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side of violence. It’s, it’s like a picture. When it happens to you, you see, you see it. … People have the craziest image; they see, like Captain Kirk or someone like that, getting attacked by several guys and boom, boom, boom, he beats ’em up and — and two minutes later, he’s walking arm and arm in, with a beautiful woman or something like that. And that’s not what it is.…

Goetz was not Captain Kirk. He was a frail bespectacled young man living in New York and he had learned the rules of the game. He knew what was meant when one of four young black men told him he wanted five dollars.

GOETZ: I looked at his face, and, you know, his eyes were shiny, you know. He, he, he was, if you can believe that, his eyes were shiny, he was enjoying himself… I know in my mind what they wanted to do was play with me.…You know, it’s kind of like a cat plays with a mouse before, you know…

After you got that impression, what did you wind up doing?

GOETZ: That’s not an impression, that’s not an impression.…

Throughout the confession, Goetz struggles with what he clearly believes is an impossible task: to explain to his rural auditors the terrors of New York.

GOETZ: …You have to think in a cold-blooded way in New York. … If you don’t …think in what society’s going to brand it, as being you know, cold-blooded and murderous and savage and monstrous … I feel it’s irresponsible. …How can you understand that here in New Hampshire? How, how, how can you?

He explains to the two New Hampshire cops that he began, in his mind, to lay down “my pattern of fire.” He would shoot from left to right. That was the only thing he could do, he insists, because this act wasn’t premeditated: “I never knew those guys were on the train, you know, and like I said, I’m, I’m no good guy or anything like that. But if they had acted a little differently, if they hadn’t cornered me…” Clearly what he feared most from them was humiliation. And so he decided to shoot them with the unregistered nickle-plated featherweight .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Special that he had shoved inside his pants.

DOMIAN: Your, your intention was to shoot these people?

GOETZ: My intention, at that moment, let me explain: when I saw what they intended for me, my intention was, was worse than shooting.

DOMIAN: Okay. Was it your intention to kill these people?

GOETZ: My intention was to do anything I could do to hurt them. My intention — you know, I know this sounds horrible — but my intention was to murder them, to hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible.

No, he explained, he didn’t have a pistol permit, because the New York police department had turned him down. And then, recalling all this to the cops in New Hampshire, the core of his rage began to burn. The reason he wanted a pistol permit was because he had been attacked three years before and was left with permanent damage to his knee. The cops caught the man who did it, Goetz said, and two hours and 35 minutes after his arrest, he was back on the street without bail, charged with malicious mischief; Goetz himself claimed he spent six hours and five minutes filing the charges and talking to the bureaucrats in the victim aid program.

“That incident was an education,” he said, his voice beginning to tremble. “It taught me that, that the city doesn’t care what happens to you. You see, you don’t know what it’s like to be a victim inside.”

And he began to explain what it’s like to live in an almost permanent state of fear. This can’t be sneered away; thousands, perhaps millions of New Yorkers live with this most corrosive emotion. Most of us have adjusted to the state of siege. We are tense, wary, guarded; but most of us function and do not explode. Goetz was different.