This end justifies the means, eh? It's one thing when a guy is in fear of his life. It's another when he pulls a gun on someone for the first time and pulls the trigger. And it's another when a guy who pulls a gun on someone doesn't even know how to do it. In the latter two cases, you probably have an argument to be heard. But it's a bad argument. If you find yourself in a shootout, the only rational position to take is to leave, as quickly and calmly as you can. There are exceptions. If the other guy pulls a gun, then you have the right to defend yourself and retaliate. A lot of innocent lives are taken because people are in fear of their lives, and they act rashly and with emotion. The other cases are more rare than you'd think. There's always the oddball criminal who is more intelligent than a typical thug, but it's an exception. A guy like that is an anomaly. The other scenario is when the gun is pulled on you for the first time, and you don't know what to do. You panic. You freeze, and you freeze in place, hoping that the bad guy doesn't pull the trigger. That's the worst. That's what leads to a lot of bad scenarios. I've watched situations where the guy was begging not to shoot, but the only way to appease him was to pull the trigger anyway. It's brutal and stupid. In the end, you're dead anyway, but your family is still grieving. I'm a huge fan of self-defense classes. I believe that if you prepare yourself in advance, it gives you much more power to defend yourself effectively. It's not as dangerous as doing it on the fly, because you know what you're doing. I believe that we all have our own moments of truth. Life isn't necessarily fair. You can't wait for someone to attack you and then hit him back. That's suicide. You have to look ahead and figure out what to do before you need to do it. ## THE BIG ONE My dad taught me how to fight and to defend myself. He had worked as a bouncer at some rough bars in the Tenderloin District, where some real tough guys hung out. He was always a tough guy, too. The neighborhood was rough and tumble, but he would tell me stories of the bad guys who had come through the club and how they always had a knife or a gun. The way he talked about it, it was like living in The Godfather. I would see a lot of the bad guys around when I was growing up. It was not uncommon to see someone walking down the street with a gun in his pants. There were a lot of drug dealers around the block. I was around twelve when I was doing drugs myself. It was easy to get some pills. I was a little heavy into pot, but not much heavier than a lot of kids. I'd smoke cigarettes and pot. We had a big garden in the back, and we'd get high just for fun. My father used to pick up those crazy things they called PCP—the Angel Dust, but it was also called the Purple Drank, because it turned your eyes purple. He knew people who could make it for you. It was just easier for me to get it from them. I got some pills once or twice. I don't know how I got some of them. There were times when I would say to myself, I need to get high. "I know what we're going to do," Dad would say. "We're going to drive down to the Tenderloin and hang out in a bar." "Do you think the bad guys are going to go into the Tenderloin?" "I don't know, but we will go in there. They are going to be in there." "What are you going to do?" "We'll just hang out." So we would drive over there, and sure enough, they would all be hanging out. Sometimes it would be a bunch of pimps hanging out. "Oh, no," Dad would say, "not those pimps. We're not hanging out with those people." I can tell when Dad was not comfortable around somebody. He knew people in a certain way. For instance, he knew the pimps who hung out at strip clubs. He had friends from San Quentin who would come over to the club, and that was a place where the girls weren't allowed. These men would be just sitting around drinking beers, making jokes with other guys, talking about how they used to work in the yards. They would all have scars from knife wounds and gunshot wounds, and there were many times when they fought with each other. He didn't like these guys very much. He said, "I am going to get out of here." Sometimes I would ask him, "Do you think we're going to go home?" "We're not going home. We are going out to look for other pimps." "Dad, I don't like this place." "You're too young. I am going to leave. I want to go." Sometimes Dad was a little overprotective. He knew people that I didn't like. A lot of them were pretty rough, but it was difficult for me to understand why some people I knew were not nice people. Some of these guys were in jail for life. They had nothing to lose and I was never really that close to them. One guy who used to hang out a lot at my house was an older guy with long gray hair. He looked like a little bit of a wild man. He was always there, and we would smoke pot together. He'd also been in prison, but I don't remember what he had done. I know he had done some hard time. He would always go around bragging about what he had done, like a lot of other guys my dad knew. There was this one guy, this guy who was on Death Row, and he had this pretty girlfriend. This guy always showed up with her, and she was his only visitor. She would come in with him every day, and she would leave and he would wait outside the jail. She'd wait with him. They were always in the parking lot. We would all smoke weed in the backyard, and he was always there. My father knew him a lot better than I did. He was always there. He didn't have a lot of money, but he was a good guy, and he didn't like the other guy. This guy was just doing what everyone else was doing. He had gotten himself on Death Row. He got convicted of murder, but it was all in the papers. He had already done his time. He couldn't do no more. He was on Death Row for something that happened in the 1950s, when we were all about ten years old. There was another guy who was on Death Row that I called the Dirty Old Man. My father would always tell me to stay away from this guy. He was a real old fart, an old geezer who would always have a cigar in his mouth. When I was about ten years old, Dad told me to stay away from that guy. "Stay away from this guy. If he's your uncle or your uncle's brother, stay away from him. This guy is a bad dude. He is not a good guy, you know?" "Okay, okay," I said. One time Dad was at his house, I think he was around forty, and some guys who were older than him and bigger than him were out drinking wine. It was just two guys who were drinking wine. They were having a good time. They came over to my house, and Dad went over to his side of the fence and started throwing rocks at them. He was throwing stones at these two guys. He went over there with a rock in his hand. I knew that he was going to get his ass kicked. So I took the rock out of his hand and threw it at them. I was about thirteen. It was a rock in a bucket that we used for target practice. I put this rock in the bucket, and threw it at them. When I did this, I don't know if Dad understood what I had done. I just knew that I didn't like the idea that I could throw a rock at my dad and he would never talk to me again. He knew who those guys were. They were older than me. I was the youngest in the neighborhood, but I got older and they were two years older than me, too. "Dad," I said, "I don't like it that you are fighting with these guys. It's not good. You have to understand." "Your mom is going to be here in a little while. They are not going to do anything to you. They know my wife is in the house." "Dad, they just started to fight with each other." "We'll see if we can help them. They are going to get hurt." These two guys had some crazy ideas, and they always got together and bragged about it to my dad. One time they saw a guy walk out of the house, so they got on the phone and called their friends and bragged about how they did it. They told all of their friends that