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Deleted Scene: Getting Stabbed, Version One

(Formerly in Chapter Two)

While I was on my mission we used to teach one of the concepts using a simple object lesson: It’s easy to break one stick all by itself, but it’s almost impossible to break a whole bunch of sticks when they’re bound together. The moral? Go to church and stay active, because there’s strength in numbers.

I realized, that night on 100 South, that this stick principle is true of paper too. (This isn't the kind of thing you need a PhD to figure out – I’d just never thought about it.) One piece of paper is easy to tear, but you can’t very well tear through a book all at once. Likewise, a knife will cut straight through a piece of paper without hardly noticing, but it will only go so far into a book, and then it will stop. Because really, with several hundred pages -- pages that once were wood -- stabbing a book is almost the same thing as stabbing a two-by-four.

I learned this the good old fashioned way: by experience. The book was in-between me and the knife.

I never even saw my attacker before he stabbed me. I was passing the entrance to a parking garage, and looked across the street at a group of teenagers. I turned around and wham, the knife was there. It sliced straight through my suit coat (which makes me mad in retrospect because I can’t really afford a new one—though I didn’t think about it at the time), and three quarters of an inch into the book in my pocket: Self-Defense Made Simple.

The knife entered right between the ‘d’ and ‘e’, sliced through the foreword, written by ex-Green Beret Nick Slate, and through the first and second chapters (which I had ignored because they hadn’t shown how to do any cool judo throws -- they just talked about always being wary of your surroundings, and using your five senses to their fullest potential. Assuming that I get the book back from the FBI forensics team, I’ll read that section thoroughly.) Chapter three, even though it was about blocking and redirection of force, did neither to the knife, and was sliced easily. Finally, the tip of the offending blade came to rest twenty-seven pages into Chapter Four, in a section of glossy diagrams illustrating “The Basic Punch.”

I had a good chance to stare openmouthed at my attacker. He was obviously expecting the knife to perforate my pancreas, or liver, or whatever is on the left front side of the abdomen, and he looked very surprised that I hadn’t bent over in the agony typically produced by a highly-polished, stainless steel Bowie knife. He gaped for a moment until he realized what had happened, and then he tried to stab me again. But, like I said, a book is pretty much a block of wood, cut into tiny slices, and the knife wouldn’t come back out once it was stuck.

He wasn’t going to be on the cover of GQ any time soon. He had a round little splotchy face that appeared to be almost as wide as it was tall, though that isn’t saying much. His upper lip jutted forward at an unnatural angle, displaying a set of teeth so haphazardly installed that I could only guess they’d been on the receiving end of several brass-knuckle punches, and, after being scattered across some bar-room floor, randomly glued back in. His lower lip was chapped and cracked down the middle, and little flakes of skin were feathering away all over the place. His ears stuck straight outwards, as though someone had grabbed each with a pair of pliers, yanked, and the ears hadn’t ever quite gone back to normal. He had a scar across his nose, and I could only hope that it had been acquired in a particularly painful way.

He tugged at that knife for at least a second and a half (which seemed like an eternity at the time) until I finally came to my senses and tried one of the various self-defense moves I had read about. The move I chose is one of the most fundamental motions of Tai Chi, where you throw the attacker’s hands off of your shoulders, and push him away from you. I used that move despite the fact that his hands were not on my shoulders (and also despite the fact that Tai Chi isn’t taught as a combat martial art). Still, it knocked him away, and he lost his grip on the knife. He glowered at me with his beady little eyes, and then scampered away.

The FBI arrived moments later. I was grabbed by the shoulder by a man who was dressed almost exactly like Agent Harrop, and hurried into defensible corner until a car arrived. It only took a few seconds.

My attacker was gone. The FBI agent was yelling into a radio, and other people were yelling back at him. Our car pulled away from the curb, and I tried to start breathing again.

Maybe there was some truth to the rumor.

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