Sensibility warning: This post includes profanity, repeated use of the F word. If this will offend you, DO NOT READ.

As I have said in previous posts, I have the basic male DNA that strives to be the good guy doing  heroic things. If there’s a burning building with a child trapped inside, the good guy is supposed to charge in, find, sweep up and carry the endangered child to safety. If there’s a bad guy doing bad things, it is incumbent on any good guy to bring those bad things to a halt. I had always believed I could and would do the heroic good guy thing if life ever put me into that spot — especially when it came to a rapist. I know several women who have been raped, including two very dear to me, and as a young man I had sworn to myself that if I ever encountered a rapist, police would not be necessary because I would beat the rapist to his deserved death with my bare fists. (Yeah, big tough guy me, right?) So I have never forgiven myself for not doing so when that very opportunity arrived.

It was a sunny early afternoon in the college town of Bellingham, Washington, and I was walking up Garden Street with perhaps a quarter-mile to go to reach the Western Washington University campus. I wasn’t a student. I was a 27-year-old  reporter at the Bellingham Herald, but once a week I made my way up to the campus for my volunteer gig as a disc jockey on KUGS, WWU’s radio station, on which my hour-long “Wonder Warthog” show primarily featured music by obscure artists I happened to enjoy.

That was why I happened to be walking up  Garden Street when I heard the scream.

It came  from somewhere further ahead.  I knew in an instant this was a real scream of distress, and it continued as  my leisurely gait became a dead run up the sidewalk.

I reached a small apartment building that I recognized from having previously dated a girl who had lived there at the time. It was a two-level place,  housing  just four apartments, two lower and two upper, bisected by a stairwell in the middle.

As I reached the building, I saw the screamer, a young woman standing on the second-floor landing of the stairwell, and I saw a man, nearly my height but  a good 40 pounds burlier than me,  walking on the sidewalk that led from the stairwell to the street sidewalk I was on. As soon as the woman saw me, her scream changed from wordless wail to “Rape! Stop him!”

Assuming that she was referring to the guy who was now just eight feet from me, I immediately stepped into his path and, assuming an aggressive stance, said firmly to him, “You’re not going anywhere.”

He pulled out a large handgun -- the detectives I described it to later told me it sounded like a .44 -- and said, “motherfucker, I will blow you away!”

The next several  seconds felt very strange, as if I was in a dream sequence, not on a sidewalk in the middle of a sunny day. I continued to block his exit and he turned away, but into the yard in a direction that looked as if he was heading to the front door of the next house over, which seemed to me to be quite crazy for a man trying to get away.

The screamer was still screaming “Rape! Stop him!”

I scurried after the man and made it clear I was going to stay on him so he pulled out the gun and pointed it at my torso again, saying more urgently this time, “I mean it motherfucker I will blow you away!” Between the weirdness of having a gun pointed at me and the loud screaming, reality continued to drain away into this dream sequence. The man changed direction again and began to head down the sloping yard between the apartment building and its garage to the back alley below, me hot on his heels.

As he neared the alley, the incessant “Stop him!” screams whipped me like a mule pulling a wagon and I rushed the man again, intending to take him down and beat him into unconsciousness, gun or no gun, but when I reached him he whirled around, jammed the barrel of the gun hard into my solar plexus and growled “motherfucker, you’re DEAD!” That I had stopped when he whirled back instead of just tearing into him made me feel like an absolute failure in that moment, a coward who was not going to be able to get past my fear of him shooting me. In that moment of despair I said to him, “Well, go ahead and shoot me then, if that’s what you’re going to do.”

He stared at me as if I was crazy and I was once again immersed in the continued “Stop Him!” screaming, which was now even louder as I was so much closer to the stairwell than I had been before.

The bad guy began walking on the alley in a direction that would take him past the garage, cowardly me right behind him again, and about that moment another young man came running like the cavalry to the rescue in response to the screams, and as he came up behind us I said to him in a dreamlike calm voice, “Be careful, he has a gun,” at which point the bad guy turned and pointed his gun again and the cavalry ducked behind the garage, a response I completely understood, having initially wanted to hide from the gun myself.

The cavalry then joined me in this ridiculously slow-motion pursuit of

The bad guy past the garage to the car waiting on the other side. At this point I had pretty much decided the bad guy’s gun was either not real or not loaded, since “Motherfucker, you’re DEAD!” had not resulted in my death, so when the bad guy opened the trunk of the waiting car, I immediately thought, OK, now he’s getting the REAL gun. I stepped in front of the car, ostensibly to block his getaway but really to keep the car between him and me if indeed he was now holding the real gun with which he would shoot me.

Clearly, he didn’t shoot me with any real gun and, much to the dismay of both the cavalry and myself, the bad guy got in the car and drove away. Seeing the car reach the end of the alley and turn uphill onto Holly Street made me wish he HAD shot me. I had failed. The bad guy had gotten away, and it was my fault.

The detectives who interviewed me soon after this were focused on whether I had seen his face, and I was sure I had, in those first few seconds before he pulled out his gun. After that, I had not seen it again, because he had had a bandana wrapped around his neck and after encountering me at the street sidewalk had pulled it up over his face. But I knew I’d seen his face for a couple seconds — hadn’t I? — though I could not remember it, because in those first two seconds when I was blocking the path of the person I knew to be the bad guy, my focus had not been on burning the image of his face into my brain but rather on the fight that was about to ensue, wondering how was I going to get this burly guy onto the ground. And try as I might, I couldn’t recall his face. I became obsessed with doing so because the detectives were convinced that this guy was a serial rapist who had assaulted several other women, always with his face covered, and there had never been a witness who could identify him. Now here was this guy -- me -- who was sure he’d seen the rapist’s face but couldn’t remember it to describe it to a police artist. I spent much of the next week at the police station, being interviewed by earnest detectives and poring through countless mug shots. I even went to a clinical hypnotist to see if that might help me recall the rapist’s face, but it did not. My obsession with finding this bad guy became so all-consuming that once when I was driving and saw a car that reminded me of the bad guy’s car I pulled a U-turn  and followed it for miles until I succeeded only in scaring the hell out of the poor old guy driving it.