Slow Motion Riot (10 page)

When the firecrackers exploded near
his feet, Pops Osborn dove into the back of his Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He
told his driver to get going and sank down like he was trying to hide his
skinny body between the cushions of the black leather seats. Just as the car
jolted forward, he noticed one of his brown lizard penny loafers was ripped and
he cursed in a high, whiny voice.

"Don't worry, boss," said
the driver, who was called Sunshine. "Those kids just dissing you."

"Just drive around the block
for an hour or so," Pops said.

Pops had been going downhill ever
since Darryl King's posse took a shot at him. He started losing heart a little
bit at a time. First his nerves went. It got so whenever he stepped outside,
he'd start looking around like someone was about to kill him. Eventually he
hired Sunshine, a tall Trinidadian man, for five hundred dollars a week to
drive him around and guard him with an Uzi.

Business was suffering. Brash young
punks were showing up on his corners and in the crack houses he once
controlled. They were know-nothing kids—some as young as fourteen— though they
often had Uzis of their own. They were taken care of easily enough. Pops killed
two of them personally with his 9 mm. But they kept coming. They were like
cockroaches. Every time you got rid of one, there were two others crawling up
your bathroom wall.

The world seemed to go around a
little slower in the old days, the year before, when Pops, then a confident
nineteen year old, took over his small portion of the crack trade from his
uncle Paul "Stewy" Harris. Pops had been brought along the right way,
learning about the trade one day at a time. He didn't get to be a lookout until
he was as old as fifteen. He hung around his high school until it was time for
yearbook pictures. Then Stewy had him call in sick. "You don't wanna make
it too easy for the police to get a picture of you," he told Pops.

The size of the business was steady
back then, four spots around
Harlem
and the Fortress, a
tall redbrick building in a housing complex near the
East River
.
Stewy had inherited the business from a guy named Breeze, who took it over when
it was a heroin racket from someone named Frank, who got it from an old numbers
guy called Morris, who was hooked up with the Genovese crime family in an
operation going back to about World War II.

But the order of succession had
broken down since the crack explosion of the mid-1980s. People lost their
memories and their sense of reason. Old alliances were abandoned. Young kids
blundered onto other people's territory and shot off their automatic weapons
without regard for the consequences. They lived only for the sensation of the
moment, like the customers who bought their crack. Everything happened in the
present tense. The rap song everybody was listening to in their cars one day was
forgotten by the next. The jewelry and clothing that everybody wore Friday
night was thought ugly by Saturday afternoon.

"Even the way they talk,"
Stewy Harris was heard to complain shortly before he was killed. "When
they say, 'I be downtown,' you can't tell if these kids mean now, before, or
later. It's all the same to them."

Because crack was so cheap and easy
to make, everyone was a player. One ounce of cocaine equaled almost four
hundred vials of crack. So any kid with a little coke, a box of baking soda,
and enough balls to squeeze a trigger could go to the corner and sell
five-dollar vials. Anarchic, primitive battles were waged for each small piece
of turf. To gain any real foothold, a crew had to be willing to go anywhere
anytime and kill anyone, whether they were a bystander or a rival, a cop or a
social worker.

From what Pops was hearing, the
crew that took a shot at him was the wildest one yet. But it seemed like nobody
could give him a name to work with. Otherwise, he would go out and kill the
punks himself. Several of his salespeople stopped working for him and one of
his crack houses got boarded up by the city. Now he would not be able to finish
paying for the customized Mercedes and the ranch-style house in
Elmont
,
Long Island
, in time for the fall. And he still wanted
to get married. To whom, he was not sure. One of the women who used to come by
the house would have been all right.

He looked out the backseat window
of his Cutlass as his driver kept circling the block. The Sunday night crowd was
out on the streets. At one of his most profitable locations, near
First
Avenue
, a crew of little kids he'd never seen
before were selling crack to people in cars. The oldest one might have been
twelve. The world was going around faster and faster all the time and Pops felt
his place in it slipping away.

When you're having a lot of doubts
about your job and the way your life is going, the first thing you think to do
isn't to go up to some godforsaken swamp in the Bronx, slap muffs over your ears,
and start firing a .38-caliber revolver at a plastic target.

I mean, if I heard one of my
clients had done that, I'd tell him he wasn't being honest with himself. Or
some bullshit like that. But since I'm getting trained to go into the Field
Service Unit, I have no choice.

It's not so much the trip I mind.
In fact, I sort of like getting out of the office for a little while. And I
think I can handle some bullet-head instructor telling me what a high-powered
rifle can do to your skull. What I don't like is the whole idea of being a cop.

It's not that I have anything
against cops, although I've never met one who felt any loyalty to anyone who
wasn't connected to the department. It's just that I'm doing something
different. I'm supposed to be concerned about all the people the cops arrest
and then forget about. I'm the garbageman whose job it is to recycle these
people. It's not the most respected profession in the world, or the most
popular, but somebody's got to do it and it might as well be me. Besides, if I
was going to be a cop, I'd have gone to the academy years ago.

At least that's what I used to
think. On the other hand, if there are a lot more guys like Darryl King running
around now, who am I to say there shouldn't be more cops? And who's to say that
even some of your social worker types like me shouldn't learn which end of a
gun fires. I'm not saying that I'm ready to walk a beat or anything. I'm just
saying the world's a different place from the nineteenth century when that
bootmaker John Augustus bailed some drunk out of jail in
Boston
and invented probation. You change with the times. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, it turns out that the
Police Department's training facility is in a remote part of the
Bronx
called Rodman's Neck, off the
City
Island
exit on the New England Thruway. To get there, you drive along a twisting
country lane, passing woods, open fields, and little lakes. It's enough to make
you forget that you're still in the city. In fact, it's a bit of a shock to
turn around and see
Co-op
City
on the horizon behind you.

When we first get to the checkpoint
of the police training facility, it looks like a military compound in the
middle of the wilderness. There are armed guards at the front, chain-link
fences everywhere, and a dozen low-slung barracks with aluminum roofs off to the
side. But once we start to walk around, the place seems more like a summer camp
for overage boys.

There's a little hut where the guns
get fixed. Just across a stretch of grass, a set of gray plank steps leads up to
a small bathroom with both doors open, as if the boys inside might need a
counselor's help to zip up their pants. The painted wooden signs hang from
posts with a little burnish around the edges and Boy Scoutish axioms like Be
Professional and Listen to Instructions printed in earnest yellow letters.

The three of us who've been driven
up here from the Probation Department are led into a large barracks where two
dozen young police recruits sit listening to a captain lecturing them from the
front of the room. The captain is a ruddy man in his mid-forties, wearing a
khaki uniform and a green baseball cap. His back is ramrod-straight, but his
stomach hangs over the front of his pants.

Since I've come in late, it's hard
to figure out exactly what he's talking about. He keeps pointing to a white
chart on a nearby easel that says "Post-Entry Level Training or
PELTS," which I always thought was a derogatory term for women. But then
again, these are cops, so you never know.

The young police recruits in the
audience look like soldiers without a war to go to. Most of them are younger
than me. Their faces are pasty and a little unformed. I figure the majority are
from
Rockland
County
or
Long Island
and have never been on a subway before. I
briefly convince myself I have the edge on them because of my experience.

As the captain's lecture goes on, I
still can't get a handle on what he's saying. The one phrase that keeps jumping
out at me is "Avoid reflective action."

Avoid reflective action. Typical
cop talk. Not just grammatically incorrect, but hopelessly blockheaded. Avoid
reflective action. Shoot first and ask questions later. " 'Don't think' is
what they're telling us," I mutter to the guy next to me in the front row.

I find myself resisting the message
and wanting a drink. What the captain is saying goes against everything I've
tried to do at probation. If you don't think about what all this means, how can
you expect to understand the people you're locking up? How can you understand
the community you're supposed to be protecting?

But the fourth or fifth time the
captain uses the phrase, I realize I've had it all wrong. What he's been saying
is "Avoid reflexive action." I sink back in my chair, feeling more
than a little naive.

Over the next few days, they put us
through almost forty hours of tactical training and instruction on the use of
lethal and nonlethal force. The hardest and most intimidating part is a trip to
what they call the "Tactics House."

"The House" is actually a
small airplane hangar about a half mile up the road from the barracks. Inside
it has a stage set that's been made to look just like a
South Bronx
prewar apartment with a "Beware of Dog" sign on the front door, a
busted television in the living room, and a doorway to a dark, mysterious back
bedroom, where anyone could be waiting.

We're told that we'll be playing
cops in a series of training skits, with cops playing the criminals. The
premise is that we'll be given the same amount of information a cop would get
on a radio call, and we are expected to respond appropriately.

I feel a little tightness in my
stomach as my instructor, Sergeant Hammerslough, a heavyset guy wearing chains,
a mustache, and a sweatshirt that's two sizes too small, tells me what to do.

"I want you to pretend this is
real life," he says with a mildly belligerent
Bronx
accent. "Me and the other officers are gonna be citizens in this. Some of
us are gonna be the bad guys, but we're not gonna tell you who beforehand. You
gotta figure it out. All right? You gotta be ready for anything."

The only information I'm given
before my skit is that there's been a call about a domestic dispute and someone
inside the apartment has a weapon. My partner is a twenty-four-year-old
Rockland
County
cowboy named Greg, who has
red hair and buckteeth. Greg immediately establishes his claim as a
high-blood-pressure candidate when he starts banging on the front door and
yelling, "Come on out with your hands up!"

There's a slight rumble of laughter
from the spectator galley above the set, where the twenty or thirty other
recruits are watching us. I start to roll my eyes in embarrassment as the door
swings open and a middle-aged cop, playing a citizen, sticks his head out.
"Oh thank God, you're here," he says with convincing urgency. These
guys really throw themselves into the roles, I notice.

"What seems to be the
problem?" I say, stepping into the apartment and slipping into the old
reliable social worker's tone.

Meanwhile, my partner, Greg, is
standing in the middle of the living room, screaming at three other people:
"Get against the wall! I wanna see you all spread-eagle!"

"Easy, man," I say.
"Let's just find out what's going on from these people."

Greg ignores me and looks toward
the doorway to the back bedroom. A mean-looking Hispanic dude in shades comes
out and snarls at him.

"Don't gimme that!" Greg
screeches hysterically. "Get up against the wall."

"Calm down," I say,
turning to address the Hispanic guy, who's already pointing and cursing me out
in street Spanish. Another guy is shaking his fists at us and raving about how
we've violated his constitutional rights. The testosterone level in the room
has been rising steadily for the last minute. All the guys are shouting at us
and acting fired up. It's like standing in the middle of a bullring with
everybody waving a red cape at you. Even though I know this is just playacting,
my heart is beating faster.

"Sir, we had a report of a
problem here," I say to the Hispanic guy, trying not to lose my head.
"We just wanted to find out what it was."

The Hispanic guy looks me up and
down, as if he's beginning to find all of this a little tiresome. Then he lifts
up his shirt, revealing a gun in his waistband. He pulls it out and fires a
blank at my partner, Greg. Before I even have time to look down at my own gun,
the guy turns and shoots me.

The scene is over and the spectator
galley explodes with laughter.

"You're both dead,"
Sergeant Hammerslough grumbles as he wanders onto the set. I notice the twenty
or thirty other recruits who've been watching us are clapping their hands and
are almost all doubled over from giggling at our incompetence.

"Hell," Greg, the
Rockland
County
cowboy, says.

"Now what did these yo-yos do
wrong?" Sergeant Hammerslough asks the assembled recruits.

"The one with the red hair
shouldn't watch so many Hunter re-runs," someone calls out once the
laughter starts to die down.

"Good point," says
Hammerslough, his arms folded across his chest. "What about this
guy?" He points to me.

"Too laid-back," says one
fat-faced recruit.

"He acted like a social
worker," Greg whines.

"Exactly," Sergeant
Hammerslough says, putting his face right up to mine so I can smell how much
garlic he had at lunch. "You gotta leave that namby-pamby shit at the
office. This is the real world. You make a mistake and a split second later
you're dead. You got that? And for Chrissake, keep your eyes on where
everybody's got their hands."

I step off to the side, feeling
thoroughly humiliated. As other recruits and probation officers go through
their skits, I promise myself that I'll be more alert if I get another chance.

The last phase of our training is
on the outdoor target range. The targets are cartoons of fifty-year-old guys
with square jaws and crew cuts, who look like they ought to be called Sluggo.
Remnants of another era. I've never had a client who looked anything like that.

I step up to a line twenty-five
yards away from the targets. An instructor hands me a pair of earphones and
goggles. It's a good thing I started wearing contact lenses recently; they
wouldn't have fit over my old glasses. Then he gives me the .38-caliber Smith
& Wesson service revolver. I'm not so much surprised by its weight, but the
shape feels pleasing in my hand. I somehow thought it would have rougher edges or
less balance. Instead, it has a certain solidness, a rightness; it reminds me
of the first stone I ever cast into a lake. The instructor shows me how to grip
it and look down its sights.

I know I should reflect on what I'm
about to do. I've spent so much time trying to steer other people away from
violence that I can't believe I'm going to fire this thing. But I'm anxious to
get it over with, the way a boy wants to lose his virginity, just so he can say
he's done it. I raise the gun and stare down the barrel. Out of the corner of
my eye, I see my instructor step away. My hands shake a little. A plane flies
by. The sun is white. I pull the trigger.

It's hard to describe what it feels
like the first time. The gun bucks. It rears back. It revolts against you and
tries to throw you off. And once it's gone, you see dirt getting kicked up
behind the target.

"Try holding it
steadier," says the instructor. "You almost missed the target
completely."

The second time I put my whole body
into it. I stoop and bend a little at the knees, like they told me to. I have a
feeling it makes me look like I'm taking a dump, but it helps my aim. I squeeze
the trigger once more. The power surges up and down my arm and then out of my
hand again. Even with the headphones on, the sound is piercing. But I haven't
heard enough gunshots in my life to automatically think of people getting hurt.

"Straighten it out a
bit," says the instructor, squinting at my target. "And next time
you'll put it right through his heart."