BY THE TIME I was 11 years old, I’d already seen a lot of movies with fistfights and bloodshed, but none had ever shocked me or even felt real. The actors reminded me of my neighbor’s kids — boys who would chase after each other with fingers cocked in the “gun position” as they rode on their imaginary horses and “killed” each other. Then a bad guy who had been killed would miraculously stand up and give chase to a new bad guy. That’s how I saw Hollywood gun-fight movies.

So I wasn’t prepared for what I saw one day as I was walking toward our apartment on 14th Street near Kings Highway in Brooklyn. Even now, at 77, I still remember the feeling that came over me all those years ago as I saw two young men parked in a bright yellow convertible at the corner of 14th Street. I noticed them because they frightened me. They were handsome and well dressed, but there was something menacing about them that gave me a knot in my stomach.

I quickened my pace to our building and ran up the stairs.

My brothers’ room faced the front of the building. There was a fire escape at their window that always had been a good place to watch what was going on downstairs. So many times, I called to my mother as she sat downstairs visiting with the neighbors, who all congregated on chairs on the sidewalk while waiting for children and husbands to come home as dinner cooked on the stove or in the oven. I would call my mother to tell her that I thought the roast or the potatoes were done, and she would come upstairs and continue preparing dinner.

On this day, I went to the window with foreboding in my heart. As I approached the window, I heard a commotion in the street. A woman was screaming and crying out and a man was yelling “Punks!”

The two young men I had seen earlier had moved their car close to my building and deliberately blocked the way of the couple’s car. I watched as they emerged from the convertible with their fists ready to punch the man who had insulted them. They pounced on him, and for the first time in my life I heard real punches. “Not like in the movies,” I thought as I watched in horror at the bleeding man and the hysterical woman and heard the punches hitting — knuckles on skin, knuckles on bone — over and over again.

Someone had called the police and soon an ambulance arrived. The bleeding man was put inside the ambulance and the woman who had fallen to the ground screaming, “Oh my God, my husband, my husband,” was given an injection and also put inside the ambulance. A gathering crowd watched, shaking their heads in disbelief. Immediately after the couple had been placed inside the ambulance, it took off quickly, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

The policemen who had arrived at the scene arrested the two young men, putting them in handcuffs. They kicked and cursed. The officers used clubs to silence them, pushed them into the squad car and drove away, lights flashing.

I sat at the window of my brothers’ room for a long time. No one else was home. I kept sitting there a long time, perched on the windowsill, thinking about what had just happened. I heard the neighbors downstairs talking about the “hoodlums” and “punks”; one woman who was being consoled by a neighbor explained that the couple were members of her family who had come for a visit on a weekend day.

“So this was real,” I thought to myself. This is what real fighting and pain is like.

It seemed to have become a part of me, and it was very frightening.

I couldn’t believe how horrible those sounds had been — how red the blood was — how limp and hurt the man became and how piercing and hopeless the woman’s screams had sounded.

“This,” I thought again, processing it, “is what real fighting and pain sounds like.”

I knew, at least, that the reality of what I’d seen and heard was something I had never experienced before.

My life has been pretty sheltered, because I never did experience anything like that again, but I have never forgotten how shocking and different the reality was from anything I had ever seen or known about. It had such a profound effect upon me that the experience has always stayed somewhere deep inside my soul.

And now, when I read or hear about drive-by shootings — when I heard about Trayvon Martin being killed — when I see riots on TV and scenes from wars in the Mideast, I have a visceral feeling and a deep compassion for the people who are experiencing those things.

Not, of course, because I think I really know what those things feel like. Not because I can relate to the little boy who was hit by a stray bullet in Oakland as he played the piano and who will never walk again.

Not because I can feel the deep loss of Trayvon Martin’s parents or of the parents of so many young people who get killed or who go somewhere and never come back.

I can’t know what it’s like for a parent to bury a child. I know it’s wrong and that it goes against the natural order of things, but I don’t understand the pain because I never actually experienced it.

I do know, though, what “real” is because I saw and heard the screams and the pounding and saw the real blood and heard the hopeless cries of that woman on that street, years ago.

I know deep down what that kind of real is, and I will never forget it.

Judy Goldsmith is a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who has adopted Benicia as her second hometown. She lives in Southampton with her cat Louie.