Sure enough, one night somebody said to me, “Richie, there’s a guy out there with a tape recorder.” A well-dressed man with a beautiful woman.

At the end of the show I said to the guy, “You have a tape recorder. You taping this a part of the show?”

He said, yes. I said, “Well, why don’t you listen? I’m going to make it nice and easy. Take the tape out. You hand it to me.You go home. Nobody gets hurt. OK?”

He said, “I’m not going to do that.”

I said, “Let me tell you what’s going to happen. Before you leave here, I will have the tape in my pocket. That’s the bottom line. There’s nothing you can say or do that going to change that.”

“You tell him, Richie!” My comic friends all behind me.

He goes, “That’s not going to happen.”

I said, “I don’t want to embarrass you in front of your nice lady here. I have six comic friends behind me.”

He goes, “What are you going to do? Rough me up?”

I said, “No, they’re not going to do anything. I’m going to get the tape. I’m going to ask you one more time, and then it’s going to get hell. I don’t want to use bad language. You’ve got a nice lady here. You better give me the fucking tape, or I’ll…”

He said, “No!”

“Oh,yeah!” I hit the guy, pop him. I wrestled him down to the ground, I’m grabbing his tape recorder.

He goes, “Gimme that tape!”

I go, “You’re not getting it!”

He goes, “I’m a psychiatrist! One of your comedians is my patient!”

“Oh no!”

“Yeah!”

I get up and go, “Aw, I’m really sorry.”

One got off in front of me, threw himself down on the ground, and then rose screaming that I had pushed him. A fight ensued. They were all trying to attack me. As the big guy got ready to throw a punch, the other two smaller guys got ready, too, in a half-hearted way. I had been boxing at the time–so I just kept stepping to the left and counter-punching each time the big guy threw a jab. As long as he didn’t land a punch and stagger me, these other two wouldn’t do anything. They were weasels.

Ultimately the big guy – who must have been on coke or something – got frustrated and ran off screaming to harass somebody else.

We left, getting to the corner of Haight and Ashbury under the light, when I heard him coming up screaming behind me. I turned around. He threw a hook, and I blocked it. But it felt like an awfully strong blow. When I stood back I realized with a chill that he had a bloody knife in his hand. And then he just ran away.

I walked down the street high on adrenaline ,going, “Oh, my god!” My girlfriend was terrified. I took a look. I wasn’t sure I had been stabbed. I just saw this ugly welt across my side and thought, “You know, maybe he missed me.”

But when I reached around further, my hands came up with blood. It really is a nightmare. You don’t know what’s happening, but you keep walking and getting weaker.

I walked into a record store, asked for help, then sat down on the ashtray and fell on the floor, and couldn’t breath, and ended up crawling like a rat, trying to hide myself behind the counter. It was ugly.

The medics got there, said my blood pressure was OK and gave me a little oxygen, and I perked up. What had saved me was the twisting. In boxing if someone’s throwing a hook, you’ll turn and drop your elbow. That motion drew the blade. It went in about three inches, between my organs and the outer wall, and made a nasty gash. But I wasn’t severely wounded, just having a normal faint reaction and feeling terrible.

In the emergency room it seemed ironic that there I was, a police and a crime statistician-analyst–a victim of violent crime. Once the emergency crew knew it wasn’t critical, we all had a giddy chuckle.