Slow Motion Riot (30 page)

Darryl had been smoking crack and
arguing with his mother steadily for two days. Now she was passed out in the
other room and he was almost ready to crash.

He looked out the window in the
kitchen.

The action was picking up on First
Avenue. A man with hair like a bunch of corkscrews was pacing back and forth,
steering people into a building that Darryl knew was a rival crack house. Many
of the customers did not go far after leaving the brownstone. They just stopped
in a doorway, took out their vials and pipes, and began flicking their lighters.

Darryl King could see the points of
light going on and off, like fireflies in the night.

At about the same time, a woman
named Thelma McDonald had a much closer perspective. She lived on the top floor
of the brownstone and she could see the crackheads on the street directly under
her window. Her two small boys, in first and second grades, had to walk past by
them every day on their way home from school. But this night, there seemed to
be more of them than usual. McDonald, a thirty-four-year-old bus dispatcher,
called her local police precinct and asked them to send a car by.

Darryl King got hold of Bobby
"House" Kirk and told him to take care of the problem. Bobby rounded
up a few of his friends right away and they chased the steerer off the block
with knives and baseball bats. They directed the remaining customers diagonally
across the street to the Fortress, where the King family's dealers were
operating.

An hour later, the police car that
Thelma McDonald had requested stopped by outside the brownstone. By then, the
street was nearly empty and the cops did not notice anything unusual. They
drove off.

By nine o'clock, Darryl started
feeling hungry again. For what, he wasn't sure. He went into the back bedroom
to ask his mother to fix him something, but she was still facedown on the
pillow and she wasn't getting up anytime soon.

He started pacing back and forth in
the kitchen. Getting more and more useless and angry by the minute, the way he
used to in the foster home. It was her fault for letting him go anyway. And now
that she had him back, she expected him to act like it was all okay and
everything in between didn't happen.

He opened up the refrigerator and
looked through it. The old people who'd lived here before had kept it well
stocked. They had greens, milk, catsup, cider, chicken, and macaroni and cheese
in a round plastic container. But they'd been gone for weeks now and most of
the food was spoiled.

He shut the door so the smell
wouldn't be so bad and he started going through the cupboards. Nothing much was
there either. Spices, tea bags, syrup. Then he saw the familiar orange box that
had the picture of the old black guy with the white hair. Uncle Ben. He looked
a little like the old guy who used to live in this apartment. Darryl took the
orange box out and shook it. It sounded like it was still halfway full of rice.

He listened for his mother stirring
in the other room. But she was just talking in her sleep a little. Maybe she'd
be hungry by the time she got up. And maybe if he had a hot plate of rice ready
for her, she wouldn't give him so much shit. It was hard living close with
somebody this way.

He stood there for a minute, trying
to remember how they used to do it at the foster home. It didn't seem so hard.
All you needed was a stove, some water and salt, and then it was almost as easy
as making crack.

He rummaged around in the cabinets
and found a big steel pot and filled it with water. A pigeon landed on the
windowsill outside and looked at him suspiciously. He turned on the stove and
set down the pot of water. Now came the ingredients. He emptied the box of
Uncle Ben's rice into the pot and then found a salt shaker and poured that in
for a while. The pigeon cooed like it was trying to warn him about something.
Rice tasted kind of bland, he remembered. All of a sudden he wished he could've
had something sweet instead. His mother always preferred eating candy bars. But
they didn't even have cookies here.

It still didn't seem like enough
for a whole meal. He went back to the refrigerator and opened up the freezer.
There were a couple of white packages. He took one of them out and unwrapped
it. Pork chops, frozen solid. He found a roasting pan in the cabinet and put
them in. This part he wasn't as sure about, but it was worth a try. He turned
on the oven and shoved in the pork chops.

The pigeon seemed to be nodding at
him now. He sat down on an old wooden chair by the kitchen table so he could
watch the stove. When he lowered his head a little, he could see the burner's
blue and orange flames dancing off the bottom of the pot with the rice in it.

They were trying to hypnotize him,
those flames. He felt himself getting pulled back into that dream again. The
one where he was driving along in the Jeep through the middle of nowhere. No
buildings, no streets, no sky. That's when a girl came up to him on the
passenger's side of the car. She was really fine, like the girls in the M. C.
Hammer video, with their flat little stomachs and their bouncing titties. So
she got in beside him and before he knew it, she'd unzipped his fly and she was
busy sucking his dick. It was really nice.

But then she did something really
fucked up. She bit down on it. And then she lifted her head and it was still in
her mouth. He got very scared, even though it didn't hurt yet. And here was
something even more fucked up: When the girl spoke, she had his mother's voice.
She said, "Darryl, what the hell you doing?"

He was about to start crying, but
that made her angrier. "Darryl, what's up with this shit?" she
shouted. "You trying to kill us all?" This time, the voice didn't
sound like it was coming from a dream. It sounded real.

He slowly opened his eyes. There
was smoke everywhere. He looked over at the pot on the stove. Streams of
whitish gunk were coming down the sides and the lid was rattling a little. Most
of the actual smoke was coming out of the oven. It smelled like a body was
burning in there. He had no idea how long he'd been sleeping, but it was even
darker than before outside now.

He rubbed his eyes and coughed a
couple of times. Through the smoke, he could see his mother turning off the
stove and throwing open the window. She was mad again.

"The fuck's the matter with
you?" she said.

"Damn, that's a lot of
smoke," Darryl grumbled. He still could barely see anything.

"It's a good thing them smoke
detectors don't work in here."

"Why?"

She put her hands on her hips and
hollered, "Because then they bring fuckin' fire department up here, and
they'd find us and take us all away!"

"All right, all right,"
Darryl said, twisting in his seat, so he wouldn't be facing her voice.
"Fuck you all. I'm never cooking again."

The disintegration continues.

After the episode with the
shoe-obsessed informant and a couple of more routine field visits, Bill and
Angel drop me off in Chelsea so I can look in on one of my other old clients:
Ricky Velez, the little token sucker, who's attending an Alternative to Prison
facility in the neighborhood.

They're supposed to be helping him
with his reading, but instead they've got him finger painting and lip syncing
to rap records at a talent show.

When I walk in, one of the bearded
counselors is up on the stage, strumming a guitar and braying "Blowin' in
the Wind" while dozens of bored young felons yell at him and throw things
at each other. It's like a gruesome parody of what probation was supposed to
be. After one of the little hoods gets up and starts doing a rap number about
the importance of not missing your day in court and the excellence of Darryl
King's marksmanship, I grab Ricky and drag him out of there.

I don't know if it's Darryl who put
me off social work. I just know since I ran into him, things haven't been quite
the same.

Just to end the day right, I get
mugged coming in my building by a Hispanic crackhead with the sniffles. I don't
see him waiting for me in the shadows. He just shoves me against the tiled wall
and punches me in the nose before I know what's happening. I'm so busy holding
my face that I don't get a good look at him as he takes my wallet and bounds
down the front steps, almost jauntily.

Luckily, my nose isn't broken and
the swelling isn't so bad, but I have this funny feeling inside. It's not that
I'm angry or sad. I just feel different. And it isn't the mugging or the
beating that did it. I think it was the sight of that pathetic bearded guy up
with his guitar in front of the uninterested kids.

What's the point anymore? Fuck
these people.

I fill out violation forms against
Charlie Simms and Maria Sanchez.

"Are you sure you want to do
this?" Ms. Lang asks me when I give her the papers the next morning.

"Why not?"

"I thought these were two of
your favorite clients." She looks over her half glasses to peer at me.

"Used to be," I say,
feeling the vinegar in my veins.

I take a good look around her
office. It's not much bigger than my old cubicle, but she has all her degrees
and graduation pictures up on the wall. I notice how young and pretty she was
in her cap and gown. It's sad to see her sitting at the desk now, looking
worn-down and defeated.

"So what happened with these
people?" Ms. Lang asks, putting my papers into a wooden tray marked
"Out."

"They fucked up."

She plucks the papers out of the tray
and examines them again with her eyes narrowed. "You know, I think
something happens sometimes to people who work here too long or too hard,"
she says in a slow, reflective voice. "They forget what they're supposed
to be doing here and they take their frustration out on the clients. They see
the symptoms, but they forget about the cause."

"What do you mean?" I say
a little sullenly.

"Oh, they don't see the racism
in the system," she says as though it's something she's thought about so
often that she doesn't get worked up about it anymore. "They don't see how
our young black children go into schools that have nothing to teach them about
their own people. They don't learn about Marcus Garvey or Crispus Attucks
..."

I shift my weight from one foot to
the other, feeling like I've been called into the principal's office. I'm in no
mood for being lectured to. "Does all this go for Darryl King too?" I
say with some impatience.

"Maybe. Maybe he'd be a
different kind of person in another zip code."

"I doubt it."

"Well, I don't think anyone
could say for sure," she says tolerantly.

This is all making me wince, which
in turn makes my nose sting where the guy hit me. "So do you or don't you
have a problem with the way I did my violations?" I say finally, stepping
forward. "Because if you have a complaint, I'd like to hear it."

"No." She sighs, putting
the papers down in the tray again and taking off her glasses. "I'm not
accusing you of anything. I just hope you're not settling any scores
here."

"Of course not."

"Good," she says.
"There are too few good guys left. I'd hate to see you go over to the
other side."

As the hour got later, the cars
from New Jersey started coming in over the George Washington Bridge and driving
up to the curb near the Fortress.

Two white guys in a black Trans Am
pulled up behind a brand-new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that was being washed
by a crazy-looking black guy with a rat's nest of hair and a tangled beard.

The white guy who'd been driving
the Trans Am got out and hitched up his chinos. He looked around nervously and
then walked up to the crazy old man who was washing the Cutlass.

"Yo, mistah," said the
white guy in chinos, who had a brush cut hairdo and wore a red New Jersey
Devils hockey jersey. "You know where we can go cop around here?"

"Wha?" the crazy black
guy sounded like he had rocks in his mouth. His eyes were clouded over and he
was sweating profusely. He carried himself like something was broken inside of
him, but he wasn't as old as he had first looked. At most, he was forty-three.

The other white guy had gotten out
of the Trans Am and was standing next to his friend and the black guy. "We
wanna catch a buzz, man," said the second white guy, who wore distressed
jeans and Gucci loafers. "Where do we go around here?"

The crazy black guy looked scared
and waved his squeegee at them. He was saying something that was hard to
understand in his dull roar of a voice.

"What's he saying?" the
white guy in the distressed jeans asked his friend.

"Sounds like 'blow dead
bears,' " said the one in the Devils jersey.

"Your mother blows dead
bears," said the one in the distressed jeans.

The black guy repeated what he'd
been saying and pointed with his squeegee at the building's entrance. This
time, the white guys understood him.

"He means, 'go in there,'
" said the one in the Devils jersey. "You scared?"

"No way, man."

They thanked the car washer and
walked into the building. They found a thirteen-year-old boy wearing a red
terry-cloth Kangol hat leaning against the wall. Clearly the man in charge. The
white guy in the Devils jersey negotiated with him for a few seconds and then
slipped him three twenties. The kid sauntered off to a nearby stairwell, as if
he'd suddenly lost interest in the white guys. They stood there side by side
for a few seconds in the lobby, not even daring to look at each other.

The one in the distressed jeans
began staring at the tangled yowls of graffiti on the walls by the elevators.
" 'D.K. All the Way,'" he read. "What's that mean?"

"I dunno," his friend
told him.

By now the kid in the red Kangol
had returned. He looked around and discreetly handed the guy in the red jersey
a plastic bag with six vials of crack in it. "You all best get
going," he told both white guys. "There's some dangerous types around
here, man."

The two white guys walked quickly
from the building and got back into their black Trans Am. As they started to
pull away, the one in the Devils jersey leaned out the window and handed a
five-dollar bill to the black guy who'd been washing the Cutlass.

"Thanks, dude."

The guy took the bill without a
sound and they cruised up to the traffic light on the corner. "Were you
scared in there?" said the one in the distressed jeans.

"No," said his friend in
the hockey jersey. "Were you?"

"No way, man. That was
fun."

"Yeah, let's come back again
soon."

The one in the Devils jersey
slipped a Bruce Springsteen cassette into the tape player. "Definitely,
man. Definitely."

Back at the curb, the black guy
who'd been washing the Cutlass put down his squeegee. He glanced after the New
Jersey car's glowing taillights and stared up at the sky to make sure no one
was watching him. Then he slowly took out the five-dollar bill he'd just been
handed and gave it a good sniff.

Back upstairs at the Fortress
apartment in the Charles J. Stone Houses, Darryl King was starting to get
restless.

Hip-hop music was pounding out of
the speakers in the living room and the sweet crack smell filled the air. The
occasion was Winston's going-away party. The Jamaican was going to be taking
Joanna to Miami to spend a week in the sun and pick up a shipment, leaving the
kids with their grandmother at the Fortress.

Two dozen people floated around the
apartment. Winston was whirling around barefoot to the music, with his dreadlocks
flying through the air. Bobby "House" Kirk walked in and headed for
the kitchen, muttering, "Everybody is on my dick," as he grabbed his
own crotch. He'd just had a second letter H carved on the other side of his
scalp and he was annoyed that nobody had complimented him on it. A damp, naked
woman wandered in from another room. She'd been having sex with two dealers who
refused to give her any more crack. She stood right in front of Bobby and pleaded.

"You want it, get busy,
bitch," he said, unzipping his fly. She blew him for twenty seconds and
then he gave her a crack pipe.

Nobody took much notice of Darryl,
growing angry and intense, by the window. He'd been steadily losing sleep and
weight over the past few days. "What I wanna know," he said very loudly,
"is when do you all get going?"

"'S what I'm saying,"
Aaron Williams lisped. With his broadening shoulders and hips, he was getting
to be the same size as Darryl.

"And I'm telling you. P.O. or
no P.O. I want that probation officer to go down!" He made a big sweeping
arc with his arm and pointed down. "You understand what I'm saying?"

Darryl had not been outside since
he'd moved into the apartment with his mother a couple of weeks before. The
claustrophobia was making him crazy, and the twenty-five vials of crack he was
smoking every day were not helping. He kept talking about the same things over
and over again.

One was breaking off from the
family and starting his own business. He'd said a lot of things to Bobby and
Aaron about getting a new van, a shipment of Uzis, and some Israeli listening
devices once he was free to move around. But what truly consumed him was the
idea of his probation officer.

He could still hear Mr. Bomb's
voice telling him, "I'm gonna personally send you to jail," and
calling him "Dooky." But he was still having trouble remembering Mr.
Bomb's face.

For weeks he'd been wrestling with
the problem; breaking it down, reaching for its heart, tearing it out. He got
rid of what other people called "common sense"; he knew that was just
a distraction. Now he was dealing straight up with the truth. And the truth was
that his probation officer was the reason he was confined. So Mr. Bomb had to
die before Darryl could be free. Otherwise, he would just stay in Darryl's
head, ticking away until he blew everything up.

"You wanna beer, D.?"
Aaron asked, heading for the refrigerator.

"No, man, I ain't with
that," Darryl told him. "I got too much shit on my mind
already."

He was about to say something else
about the P.O. when he turned around and saw Ernie Thompson, the guy who washed
his car, staring at him with the squeegee still wet in his hand.

What Ernie wanted to say to him was
simply, "When are you going to pay me?" But with his terrible speech
impediment, it just sounded like he was imitating a garbage disposal and Darryl
ignored him. "Atomic Dog" was playing on the stereo now and even more
people were dancing.

When Ernie tried a second time to
make himself understood, Darryl whipped around like he was about to hit him.
"Man, get this motherfucker away from me," he said to no one in
particular. "I can't stand being around people that are ill."

Ernie Thompson hadn't always been
this way. When he was young, he appeared to be moving toward his destiny with
the certainty of an arrow finding its target. He zoomed through the Head Start
school programs in the sixties and four Ivy League universities had offered him
full scholarships. He was on his way to becoming an engineer and a teacher, and
his diabetes hardly seemed like an obstacle. But just before Christmas in his
senior year, he'd run into some old friends and they convinced him to try
shooting heroin. Since they were all junkies anyway, they barely noticed when
he still hadn't woken up twelve hours later.

After he'd been in a coma for three
days in the hospital, the doctors began to talk about what kind of brain damage
he might have sustained. Most of his major motor reflexes were impaired in some
way and his speech would never be the same. For the rest of his life, his basic
intelligence was trapped in a mentally retarded man's body. Out of shame, he
hid in his mother's house for the next twenty years or so, refusing to see or
talk to old friends. It was only after his mother died a few months before that
he was forced to leave home and get a job washing Darryl King's car for a
hundred dollars a day.

Now, it was a week since he'd been
paid and he was getting upset. Working for a drug dealer was hard enough on his
pride, but having to beg for his proper pay was almost more than he could bear.
He started tapping furiously on Darryl's shoulder, trying to get his attention.
This time Darryl didn't hesitate. He spun around and in one quick motion hit
Ernie just below the chin with his balled-up left hand.

Ernie went down with a loud gulp
and for a moment, the party stopped and everyone looked over to see if he'd
swallowed his tongue or something. Darryl was standing over him, like he was
going to kick him in the stomach for good measure.

"Want some more?" Darryl
said. "You want some more?"

As he lay there in a fetal
position, Ernie kept burbling something over and over again that sounded like,
"I can't find a land." But everyone knew that couldn't be what he
meant.

"Dog-ass motherfucker,"
said Darryl.

Aaron helped Ernie get back up to
his feet before he threw him out of the apartment. As he left, his voice was
still saying that same thing. Darryl turned back to the window and looked down
at the street, as if he expected his probation officer to come strolling up the
block at any minute.

The music came on again. Aaron had
returned and was standing beside him. "Hey," Darryl said to him.
"What was the guy saying before?"

Aaron looked at him anxiously.
"He say, 'You can't do that to a man.'"

"Oh." Darryl considered
this for a second and then let it go. "Yes, I can," he said sadly.