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Nameless Moroccan
12 Stories Up

Harold Jaffe

In this city renowned for its bad guys and bad news, something good happened Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles.
     As a crowd stood transfixed, Johnny Childress, bailiff, morphed into Johnny Childress, hero, talking a suicidal man off a 12th-story ledge.
     The drama, which began to unreel at about 1l:40 a.m. and ended with the man being committed to psychiatric care, brought the busy lunchtime sidewalks to a standstill for more than an hour around the Los Angeles County Courthouse at First and Hill Streets.
     On a deeper level, it also offered a case study in how real people respond to a real crisis.
     Los Angeles County bailiff Johnny Childress was patrolling the first floor of the courthouse when he was radioed up to the twelfth floor, where the cafeteria was located.
     Someone, he was told, had thrown a pair of old pants from the cafeteria balcony.
     Childress figured it was probably a homeless man. The homeless tend to do unpredictable things.
     But when Childress got to the 12th-floor balcony he found a Moroccan with skinny, hairy legs, wearing dirty jockeys, a Snoop Doggy Dog T-shirt, and a Dodgers baseball cap turned back to front.
     He also wore outmoded Keds-brand black and white high-top sneakers, which looked comical with his skinny, hairy legs and jockeys.
     He looked about 30 but could have been five years younger or ten years older.
     He was standing, arms outstretched, on the lip of the concrete ledge.
     "I said, 'Hey, bro. What's goin' down?'" Childress recalled.
     "I figured I'd just order him off the ledge and that'd be it."
     Instead the dark-skinned Moroccan turned and stared at the bailiff, his black eyes raw with tears.
     "Don't come any closer," he pleaded.
     Far below, a crowd had gathered.
     Five fire engines rumbled to a stop, lights flashing.
     Twelve LAPD cars, sirens whining and burping, screeched to a halt.
     News helicopters, each with its network affiliate logo displayed, buzzed overhead.
     On the courthouse steps a homeless man, who called himself Shabazz, offered regular updates to passersby.
     "Yawl think he homeless.
     "He ain't homeless," Shabazz the homeless man informed bystanders, as he rattled a Styrofoam cup for spare change.
     "But don't make no dif neither way.
     "He doomed.
     "Cuz Lord say a soul ain't your own to take away."
     At bailiff headquarters, Childress's bosses tried to summon the county sheriff's regular crisis negotiators, only to be told that they were attending a day-long retreat in Santa Monica, sponsored by Ruger International.
     After the sheriff and deputies had contracted to use the Ruger 9mm semi-automatic as their official sidearm, Ruger convened retreats twice-yearly.
     What do folks do at the retreat? I don't know and I'm not sure I want to know.
     Meanwhile, valuable time was passing.
     With each second it became clear that Childress was the only soul to whom the deranged Moroccan would communicate.
     At the man's insistence, three firefighters were ordered to back away from the ledge, leaving only Johnny Childress on the balcony.
     With two video cameramen skulking in the doorway.
     "I said, 'You don't want to do this,'" Childress recalled.
     But the Moroccan was a font of despair.
     He had lost the people he loved.
     He was alone.
     He was very tired.
     He was scared.
     In a rush of sorrow, he narrowed his eyes and murmured a prayer, or chant, in a strange language.
     Then he dangled one sneakered foot over the edge.
     "Get your foot back where it was!" Childress commanded.
     "Get it back.
     "Right now."
     Startled, the man stopped short while Childress, thinking fast, peppered him with questions:
     Did he have a family?
     Did he root for the Dodgers?
     Did he surf the Net?
     Did he like hot dogs?
     The Moroccan thought Childress meant actual dogs.
     "I don't like dogs," the man answered.
     "I like cats."
     "I have a real nice cat," Childress told him.
     "Sleeps with my dog."
     Childress described the cat: a black, white and grey short hair with white boots, a white stripe on its nose and long white whiskers...
     Childress talked rapidly, because at every pause the Moroccan would seem to remember his despondency, narrow his eyes and announce:
     "This is it."
     In the background, the two video cameramen inched ever closer.
     The LA sun was now directly overhead.
     You could sense it through the smog but you could not see it.
     In the noonday heat, the man took off his Dodgers baseball cap and dangled it over the side.
     Childress asked: "Do you believe in God?"
     The Moroccan did not respond.
     Far below, in the courtyard of the William Randolph Hearst Pavilion, a crowd of city workers was setting up balloon-bedecked booths for a ride-share fair.
     Vainly, they tried to promote carpooling while simultaneously gazing at the man on the ledge.
     Among the onlookers a conversation began.
     Not a cynical conversation, as in previously recorded instances where bystanders wagered on whether a person would jump.
     "How sad. To have no hope," a courthouse secretary in her nametag murmured.
     "Maybe he just got fired," a man in his yellow chauffeur uniform said.
     "Or his wife divorced him."
     "Or he couldn't pay his rent."
     "He looks like an Arab."
     "What happened to his pants?"
     "What they oughta do is throw him a big lasso," said a 38-year-old courthouse courier with a cleft palate.
     "What I'd do," a woman with a juror's tag chimed in, "is go up in the building across the street and shoot him with one of those beanbag things, just to knock him back off the edge.
     "Then I'd snatch him."
     "If I could, know what I'd do?" a young man with a shaved head and tongue-stud said.
     "I'd take the balloons off of these booths and loft them to him, then he could just kinda float to the ground."
     Twelve stories above, Johnny Childress gauged the distance between himself and the Moroccan.
     What if he lunged for the guy's knees?
     Would it work?
     Too risky.
     Except as a last resort.
     The man said he was so tired.
     So scared.
     Childress assured him that he didn't have to worry.
     There were deputies around to keep him safe.
     The man met his eyes.
     Could he get that in writing?
     In a "promissory note" from Childress himself?
     So the bailiff pulled out his notebook from his back pocket, licked his fingers and wrote: "I, Johnny Childress, Bailiff, promise to protect you, no matter what."
     He used a capital "B" for Bailiff because he had pride in his work.
     His work was law enforcement. To protect and serve.
     Under the law.
     Johnny Childress tore out the promissory note and held it out to the man, reckoning that if the man reached for it, he would grab his hand and pull him back.
     But the man did not reach for it.
     He kept repeating how afraid he was.
     "I'll stand over your bed and guard you," Childress told the man. "I'll protect you even when you sleep."
     The Moroccan began to weep.
     Then he started to pray hard and fast in his strange language.
     Childress shouted to the man: "You are praying to God.
     "God loves you.
     "But God does not love folks that kill themselves.
     "Suicides.
     "This is the time to come down!
     "I'm going to step toward you and give you my hand.
     "Will you take my hand?"
     On the ground far below, the crowd fell silent as the man stared at Childress without responding.
     Everything appeared to slow up and come into focus.
     Like fine tuning a large-screen TV.
     Or accessing a site on the Internet.
     www.namelesmoro.com
     After what seemed like an ungodly time, the man took a step to the side and, trembling, held out his hand.
     Johnny Childress clasped it with a powerful grip.
     Everyone, except for the two video cameramen, smiled.
     And down below, in Hearst Pavilion, everyone clapped their hands and smiled.
     "Thank God," a woman in a cranberry jumpsuit said.
    "Thank God."

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.