Authors: Peter Blauner
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled
Slow Motion Riot
Slow Motion
Riot
Peter
Blauner
Contents
This is a work of fiction about
New
York City
. Though most of the settings, institutions,
and agencies represented are real, the characters and events are not. Any
resemblance to actual persons is coincidental.
I would like to give thanks to the
following people: Gerald Migliore, Kevin T. Smyley, Arthur Hudson, God
Shammgod, Michael McGuinness, Jane Meara, Liza Dawson, Jim Landis, Bob Mecoy,
Clare Alexander, Henry Eisig, Miguel Ibarra, Fran Lubow, Pat McFadden, Todd
Siegal, Lovable Dupreme Akbar Physics, Ed Kosner, Troy, Donald Goines, Mark
Rosenthal, Brian Walls, Bill Clark, Bob Losada, Reginald Morgan, Vanessa Grant,
Mary Anne Sally, Floyd Simmons, Ava Elwort, Lou Shimpkin, Skeeter, Peter
Herbst, Father Devine, Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Greg Cox, Joanne Gruber,
Charlie, Richard Mayronne, Frances Kessler, Michael Lynne, Wallace Cheat-ham,
Joe Lopez, Thaddeus, and everyone else in or on probation who helped me.
I would also like to give special
thanks to Arthur Pine and Lori Andiman for their support and guidance, and most
of all to Richard Pine, without whom this book would not be between two covers.
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have
no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious
whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on,
or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we
may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our
country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything,
the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave,
is upon us: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next
time!"
JAMES BALDWIN, 1962
What crime and poverty have created is a riot in slow
motion.
JOHN V. LINDSAY, 1990
Now that the baby was two months
old, she seemed to be waking up at least twice a night. But since he was doing
a four-to-midnight tour in the city today, the cop named Frankie Page could
afford to sleep in a little. He woke up around
noon
with his dick as hard as a rock. His wife had already gone to work, though, so
there was nothing to do, except wait for it to go away and maybe feed the baby again.
It was just after three in the
afternoon when the man with the dreadlocks came into the boy's bedroom. All the
lights were out and the floor was strewn with fierce-looking toys called Gobots
and Decepticons. The boy, whose name was Darryl King, was lying on the bed with
one arm thrown over his face.
The man with the dreadlocks knelt
over him and put the gun on his chest.
"It's time," he said.
Page liked a lot of things about
driving to work on these cold winter afternoons. The stillness of the air and
the silence of the other houses as he pulled out of the driveway. The snow on
the front lawns. The cars going the opposite direction on the Long Island
Expressway. The Christmas decorations outside the
Manhattan
stores as he drove north from the Midtown Tunnel. The only thing that remained
unchanged by the holiday was his precinct in
Harlem
. But
nothing ever seemed to leave much of an impression there anyway.
Darryl King, the boy with the gun,
didn't go straight to the job. It was too early anyway. Instead, he went
downtown and found some friends at the Playland video game arcade in
Times
Square
. A couple of them wanted to catch a sex show at one of the
nearby theaters, but Darryl, who was seventeen and good-looking in a blunt way,
wasn't interested. He went to the back of the arcade and stood by the machine
that simulated car crashes. After a couple of minutes, the others came back to
see what he had.
"Thirty-eight-caliber
revolver," said Darryl, lifting his coat flap and showing it to them.
"Just like the cops carry."
"Damn," one of the others
said.
Why would a wife need an order of
protection against her own husband, Frankie Page wondered as he sat in the
patrol car parked outside a short brown building on
128th
Street
that night. To need someone guarding your
front door against the man you married. Snowflakes fell slowly, changing shades
as they flitted in and out of the street light. They landed on the windshield
and melted before his eyes. A family should be together for the holidays, he
thought. He hoped he wouldn't be on call on Christmas Day in two weeks. Though
the overtime would help pay for the wife's present. They'd already sunk a
fortune into the baby's room. He was going to need that promotion to sergeant
next year and the raise that went with it.
He didn't notice Darryl King and
his two friends coming up on the opposite side of the street. It was after
eleven o'clock
and below fifteen degrees. The
only other people who were out now were the truly hardy hookers and crack
dealers, and they were all down the block, over on
Lenox
Avenue
.
Darryl walked briskly, a couple of
steps ahead of his friends. Smoke streamed out of his mouth and the gun rode
high in the waistband under his coat. The police car was only half a block away
now, just out of the range of the streetlight.
"You're not gonna do it,"
the bigger of Darryl's two friends taunted him. "You ain't got the
heart."
"Watch me," Darryl King
said.
The car's heater was starting to
make Page feel nauseated, so he turned it down a little and put his hat on.
There was a rap on the window and he looked up. A skinny young black kid with a
flattop hairdo and a harelip was staring at him and saying something. Page
rolled down the window to hear him.
"Yo," the kid said.
"What's up?" Page asked
him.
While they were talking, Darryl
King sneaked around the other side of the car. He steadied himself against the
doorframe and aimed the gun. Each time he pulled the trigger, the car lit up
like a furnace in the snow.
Later on that night, Darryl told
his family what happened while they sat around watching a TV ad for an album of
Yuletide standards.
"His hat flew off, like 'bing'
the first time I shot him," Darryl said. "And Aaron say his eyes got
real wide. You know what I'm saying? Aaron was like, 'Oh shit, I seen his hair
go up. I seen his blond hair.' "
Darryl's older sister, Joanna,
turned slowly to look at him. "Blond?" she said.
Darryl sat up. "Yeah, 'blond
hair's what he said."
"But, Darryl, that cop who was
ripping off our crack house had like dark hair."
It took a couple of seconds for the
news to sink in. Darryl looked up at the ceiling with his mouth open a little.
"Shit," he said. "That's fucked up."
"That's right," his
sister said, shaking her head and standing up.
"How'd that happen?"
"I don't know," his
sister told him. "But you better get some sleep now. Tomorrow's another
day."
Some mornings at the New York City
Department of Probation, I like to play a little game called What's My Crime?
The idea is to try to guess the crime my client has committed just by looking
at the Polaroid clipped to the outside of his file folder. It's one of my ways
of relieving the tension and reassuring myself that I don't give a shit anymore.
Delilah, the heavyset black
secretary behind the reception desk, puts down the Jehovah's Witness magazine
and holds up the first picture.
It's of a Hispanic guy in his early
twenties, with a friendly smile and a dreamy warmth in his eyes. His hair is
long on the sides and he keeps his chin low, like he was trying to sweet-talk a
girl when the shot was taken.
"He looks like a nice
guy," I say.
Delilah slips the Polaroid across
the desk so I can give it a better look. "I dunno," I say finally.
"Forgery or something like that?"
Delilah is already frowning at the
file opened on her lap. "This boy's a crack-smoking schizophrenic,"
she says. "He blew his landlord's head off with a shotgun."
"Oh shit," I say.
Now I have to make space in my life
to see this guy. I could have him come by after Maria Sanchez on Friday. But
Maria always leaves me feeling wrung out, so I figure I better put him off
until Monday.
My union rep walks by. "Mr.
Jack Pirone," I say, which is the way I always say hello to people in the
morning.
"Mr. Steven Baum," he
says to me.
Big Jack.
Two hundred and fifty pounds of
interdepartmental wisdom and sheer aggravation in a fedora and a white polo
shirt. Before he was my union rep, Jack Pirone was my training instructor. His
great line then was "Everytime you reach for a new assignment at
probation, you're reaching for your passport to adventure."
He always looks out for me, when he
isn't giving me a big pain.
"How you doing this morning,
Mr. Baum?"
"Laughing on the outside,
crying on the inside," I say.
"Try the other way
around," he says, slapping me on the shoulder and ambling on down the
hall. "You'll live longer."
The clock on the wall has thin
steel bars crisscrossing it, as if they expected somebody to try stealing the
hands. Almost nine o'clock. Behind me I hear the waiting room full of probation
clients grumbling at each other. I take a quick look over my shoulder and see a
bunch of them sprawled out on the wooden benches, like a wayward congregation
spilling out of the church pews. The air conditioner is broken, so there's no
relief from the June heat in here. The air is dank and it smells of stale
smoke. The walls are painted a deep, intense orange. You'd think they would've
chosen something a little more calming, like pale blue or ocean green. Instead,
this orange is disturbing, maybe even inciting. It's like a "GO" sign
for the mentally ill.
One woman is standing up and
throwing pieces of a Styrofoam coffee cup around the room. She's probably
getting in the mood to see her probation officer. I hope she's not one of mine.
Delilah hands me the last file.
"This one don't have a photo," she says.
Instead, it has a sticky yellow
note from my supervisor, Emma Lang, on the front. "Special!" it says.
"Attention must be paid! Watch this guy." The new client is named
Darryl King.
I check the sign-in sheet to make
sure he isn't here yet, and then look once more across the smoky civil service
purgatory where people are waiting. That woman has finally stopped throwing
Styrofoam around. The bleary fluorescent light gives everyone a slightly greenish
tint, and there are piles of cigarette butts and suspicious-looking puddles on
the linoleum floor. Half the clients look dead this morning, with their eyes
closed, and their legs in stone-washed jeans extended stiffly over the sides of
the benches. And with my hangover I'm not feeling so great either.
The one thing that picks me up is
the hairstyles on the younger guys here. It's been an excellent summer for hair
so far. I see one guy has his shaped like an upside-down bottle-cap—a new one
on me. I know all about the Fade: that's the flattop with lightly shaved sides.
Then there's the Wave, a lopsided ski jump of hair sloping up on one side. And
of course, my favorite is the Cameo, a high ebony tower of hair that looks like
an Egyptian headdress. I wonder if the bottle cap has a name yet. In a year
white kids will be wearing it, which suddenly strikes me as hysterically funny.
Six expressionless eyes turn to
stare at me. They belong to three teenage boys with big white sneakers and
eerily dulled-out eyes. The term Jack would use is "lacking in affect."
Not that they'd be real intimidated
by me anyway. They look at me and see a tall skinny Jew in his late twenties
with curly hair and glasses. The free weights are starting to give me broader
shoulders and my hands are unusually big, but you wouldn't look twice at me on
the beach, I don't think. I guess what they mainly see is just another white
authority figure who's got nothing to do with their lives, trying to tell them
what to do.
Just then, somebody catches my eye
over near reception. An emaciated black teenage girl, with a purple scarf and a
gold front tooth. She's squinting at the guard's tiny black-and-white TV. I
can't quite tell if she's one of mine. I've got 250 people on my caseload, and
I know about half of them by sight. Two small boys are next to her on the
bench. One is about five. The other is about a year old. The older one wears
thick brown glasses and has big gaps between his teeth. When he thinks no one
is looking, he pulls his little brother close and kisses him on the forehead.
I reach into the pocket of my
windbreaker to see if I have a piece of candy to give him. Usually I carry my
whole life around in the pocket: keys, change, pens, scraps of paper, food.
Today I've got no candy, so I just give him a little wink.
The two boys look remarkably
similar, except for some ugly scabs and bruises on the older one's face. He
clings to his baby brother like he's trying to protect a smaller, unspoiled
version of himself. Their teenaged mother suddenly turns and sees the older boy
with his arm around the sleeping baby. She slaps him hard with an open hand
across his cheek.
"Travis, don't you touch
him," she barks.
Travis looks scared and takes his
hand off his little brother. The baby wakes up and starts crying.
"You know, he wasn't doing
anything," I tell her.
She ignores me and picks at her
thumbnail.
"You shouldn't hit him like
that," I say.
"Mind your own fucking
business," she tells me.
She goes back to watching the television.
The baby keeps crying. Travis, the five year old, tightens his body and stares
down at his folded hands in his lap. Another client in the making.
I should just forget about it and
go look for aspirin. But for some reason, the look on Travis's face sort of
gets to me. "What's your name?" I ask the girl.
"Parker," she mumbles.
Definitely not one of mine.
"Who's your probation officer?"
"Rodriguez," she says,
sucking in one cheek.
A voice in my head is saying,
"Forget about it, man, it's not even your case." But my feet take me
down the musty marble hall and over to the rickety mailboxes, where I write P.
O. Rodriguez a short note. "Dear Mr. Rodriguez, does your client Parker
have any outstanding child abuse complaints? If not, she will soon. Check it out.
Yours, S. Baum." I drop it in his box and head to my own office.
"Delilah," I say as I
pass by the reception desk again, "when are you gonna ditch that husband
of yours with the big feet and come slam-dancing with me and my friend Terry at
CBGB's?"
She giggles like a flirty
schoolgirl. "You too much, Mr. Baum," she says.
"Or not enough."
I start reading the Darryl King
file as I walk down the hall. This part of the morning reminds me of descending
into an catacomb, probably because of the darkness at the end of the corridor,
where nobody's replaced the light bulb that burned out months ago. I pass rows
and rows of file cabinets the color of turtles, and peer into the archive
office on the right where stooped-over clerks in dust masks are sorting through
ancient records of long-forgotten crimes.
Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called
to Say I Love You" plays on somebody's radio and a breeze comes from
nowhere, rustling the time sheets tacked to the wall.
The information inside the Darryl
King file is skimpy. He's on probation for robbing a gas station on
East
Ninety-sixth Street
, but he has an unusually long
adult arrest record for an eighteen year old. In the last year alone he's been
charged with numerous muggings, burglaries, and assaults, as well as
"acting in concert." At one point he was accused of being part of a
gang that beat a transit worker with a hammer. Up until the gas station
robbery, though, he'd never been found guilty, perhaps because witnesses are
reluctant to testify against him. The real danger signal is in the presentence
investigation, written by Tommy Markham.
Tommy, a briny little guy, who
spent most of his life in the merchant marines, is a soft touch. He recommends
almost everyone get probation. This time, he didn't.
He describes Darryl King as
intelligent but says Darryl was uncooperative during his intake interview and
kept snatching things off the desk. "The defendant seemed to be making a
deliberate attempt to intimidate this officer," writes Tommy, who
routinely calls vicious mob hit men and drug dealers "misunderstood."
There isn't much family or school background in the report. Tommy notes that
Darryl showed no remorse about the robbery, saying he only pleaded guilty at
his lawyer's urging.
In his evaluative statement, Tommy
Markham writes, "The prognosis for his future social adjustment is not
favorable." Coming from Tommy, that's like saying, "This guy is
definitely going to kill somebody."
I've reached the darkest part of
the hallway, so I can't read anymore. Now I know why Ms. Lang put a flag on the
assignment. Two months ago a guy on probation killed a young doctor, and the
department wants to avoid further mistakes. Ms. Lang thinks Darryl King is a
significant risk, and I'm inclined to agree.
Here's the thing about Darryl:
Everyone's always bitching about guys like him getting probation instead of
going to prison. And my response is usually to shrug and say I don't decide who
goes free. Which is true. Then I explain the system doesn't have enough jail
space for these criminals, so it's up to people like me to play lion tamer and
keep them in line. Also true.
But here's the secret, which I
almost never say out loud: Every once in a while, you just might turn one of
these guys around.
I notice that the note attached to
the file does not say what time Darryl King will show up at the office. Just
"soon."
As it is, I have more than a full
schedule for today with Richard Silver finally coming in.
Silver is one I've really been
looking forward to. He used to be one of the big power brokers in the city, a
gontser macher as they used to say around my family. He's been ducking his
appointment with me for weeks. I had to bombard him and his lawyer with dozens
of threatening phone calls and letters before I got any response. Already I
have a problem with the guy. Approaching my cubicle, I square my shoulders and
throw punches at the air, like a boxer on his way to the ring.
I stop short when I see someone
waiting for me by my door. A Puerto Rican kid who looks about twelve with a
chipped front tooth and glassy eyes. His dark hair leaps like a flame from the
top of his head, crests into a pompadour, and then falls backward slickly.
Splotches cover the front of his brown T-shirt and his jeans are too tight. He
looks at me and shifts anxiously.
"Can I help you?" I ask.
The kid grunts and hands me a
folder. I wonder if he can speak. "What's this?" I ask.
He grunts again and looks down at
his sneakers. "They say give you this," he says in a small, hoarse
voice.
I open the door and go in. The kid
doesn't move. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. There's something lost
and untamed about him. Like the boy in a French movie I once saw who grew up in
the woods. Except in the movie, they had five years to educate the boy about
civilization, and I've got five minutes for this kid. I gesture for him to come
in and sit down.
"Mr. Ricky Velez," I say,
sitting behind the desk and opening his file. "Says here you're sixteen.
That right?"
Ricky grunts again and nods shyly.
In the cubicle across the hall, "the Screamer," an older female
probation officer whose name I can never pronounce, is yelling, "WHAT AM I
GONNA TELL THE JUDGE!!" at some hapless probationer.
An overhead fan just pushes the
humid air around instead of cooling things off.
Ricky squirms around in the chair
but can't get comfortable.
The seat's deliberately too hard,
because no one's supposed to stay here too long. In the past I've tried to make
this cubicle seem more my own, even as I keep telling myself this is my job,
not my life. I've brought in plants, cushions, and books, but the place still
looks cheap and institutional with those insane orange walls and scuffed-up
floors. So now I leave it pretty much the way it was. I don't have my master's
degree from Fordham on the walls. It was required for the job—along with two
weeks of perfunctory in-house training—but my clients don't need to see it.
Instead, I put up two small posters right above my desk: one of Bob Dylan and
the other of a defunct theme park called Freedomland. On the other wall, I have
the Times's "Help Wanted" section—for my clients, of course, not for
me—and a bank calendar that has a color photo of a sandy beach with foamy
waves. It seems like a beautiful place where nothing ever happens. And, of
course, there's a blackboard in the corner.