Slow Motion Riot (4 page)

In the ninety seconds between
appointments, I cross the hall and stick my head into Cathy Brody's cubicle.
"You hear somebody making noise outside my room before?" I ask in a
deadpan voice.

Cathy, who has a long pinched face
and bony white knuckles, is always scolding me like a schoolmarm for acting too
friendly with my clients. I've heard that outside of work she's in a
sadomasochistic relationship. When you run into her at parties, she always
seems bored and remote. Like you'd have to let her hit you with a desk lamp
before she'd be interested in what you had to say.

But now she starts getting all
flustered. "No, I didn't hear anybody outside your office," she says,
trying to keep her headband and glasses perched on top of her head. "What
happened?"

Of course I know she was one of the
ones trying to listen in on my conversation with Richard Silver. "I don't
know," I say. "Somebody was trying to spy on me. Maybe it's one of
those union things."

"Why, that's terrible,"
she says.

"I know I can rely on you to
kick their ass if you see them."

"You certainly can,"
Cathy says with a proud, prim look.

When I go back to my own cubicle, I
discover my glasses are gone from my desk. One of my clients must've stolen
them. Which confuses me more than it pisses me off. Who wants a pair of used
prescription glasses? I try to get accustomed to squinting.

The day goes on. Eleven more
regular clients come and go, including a pedophile from Port Authority, a
former used car salesman, and a street peddler from
Senegal
who got in a fight with an American cab driver. It's only
11:15
.

Still no sign of Darryl King,
though. I see five more people and then step out into the hall to clear my
head. As I stand there, smoking a cigarette and listening to the other P.O.s
talking to their clients, I think: If this job were a cartoon, it would be a
hundred men sitting around with tiny hammers trying to break up huge rocks.

My
11:30
appointment is a homeless guy who calls himself Freddie Brooks or James
Stewart, depending on the day he's arrested. By his own admission, Freddie (the
name I prefer) has a "very chronic substance abuse problem." He's
whippet-thin and his head droops like a rag doll's. He wears a dirty red
bandana over his scalp and his eyelids look swollen. He has been arrested
almost continuously for ten years on robbery, assault, and disorderly conduct
charges, but he's still on probation.

"You know, Freddie, we're just
going to recommend they send you to jail next time," I say, balancing his
file on my knees.

"I think that's a good
idea," Freddie says in a sad, sluggish voice as he sinks down in the
chair. "I been to all the clinics for the cocaine and the heroin. But I
ain't rehabilitated."

"I thought things were going
well in the last drug program you were in." I scratch my head with the
bottom of my pen. "You told me it was a good program. Why didn't you stay
with it?"

"I drank."

"You gotta do something about
this substance abuse. I'm worried about you, Freddie."

"I know." Saliva bubbles
gather in the corner of his mouth.

I glance down at his file.
"Why didn't you show up at your last court date?"

"I was in the hospital."
Freddie closes his heavy lids as if for the last time. The records say he's
thirty-three, but he has the face and body of a man in his sixties. His
blue-black skin seems to be peeling off in places, leaving rusty patches
underneath. I smell something a little funny and hope he hasn't wet himself.

"Well, then how did you manage
to get arrested again the very next day?" I ask loudly enough to wake him.

"See, I was standing in front
of a liquor store on
Pitkin Avenue
,
around Stone..."

I lean back in my chair and try to
get a mental picture of the neighborhood.
East New York
.
I was there maybe once. It reminded me of Dickens's descriptions of
nineteenth-century south
London
.
"That's like a really squalid place," I hear myself say.

"Yeah, and it's serious
too," Freddie says with an unexpected burst of energy. "I was standing
in front of a liquor store with my girl and one of her kids knocked over the
sign for the shoe salesman next door. So he comes out and hits my girl in the
head with a hammer. So we all jumped in there on him and he bit my finger..."

I hold up my hand like a stop sign.
"Freddie, all this sounds a little strange. Why did the guy get so upset
about them knocking over a sign?"

Freddie does not have much of an
answer for that, or anything else. His days are dissolving into a haze of bad
drugs and incoherent crimes. His nights are divided between a shelter on the
Lower
East Side
and the floor of Penn Station. There's no point in using
the blackboard or trying to draw up a schedule for him. He's only reliable now
in keeping his appointments with me, probably because he knows I care about him
as much as anybody else in his life does. Which isn't saying a lot, but we do
have a kind of loyalty to each other.

"Freddie," I say, shaking
my head, "you're committing suicide right in front of my face."

"That's correct," Freddie
says with a certain wasted eloquence. "And I know you don't condone
that."

The city doesn't care whether
Freddie is salvageable or not. It just doesn't want him taking up valuable cell
space in a prison with more deserving people waiting. I try to look out for
Freddie, but I refuse to kid myself about what I can do for him.

"The only assurance that he
will not end up in jail is the fact that he will probably die soon," I
write in my report.

I spend the next few minutes trying
to reduce the paper mountain on my desk. I hit Andy Benjamin's file and decide
it's time to call him up and hassle him. He answers on the sixth ring.

"Andy," I say. "You
get a job yet?"

For the next few seconds I hear
what sounds like a dog panting. "No," Andy says a little breathlessly.

"Why the hell not?"

"I'm jerkin' off." More
panting. He really is jerking off.

"If you don't knock it off and
find a job soon, I'm gonna come over to your house myself," I say
impatiently.

He gasps a little. "And do
what?" he asks.

"I'm gonna tell your mother
what you're doing."

As his gasp turns into a cry of
pleasure, I hang up on him.

I use the break to run downstairs
and get a new pack of Marlboros," a bag of potato chips, and a Budweiser
from the deli around the corner on
Worth Street
.
My teeth ache from chewing on pen caps all morning and my back is in knots
again.

When I get back to the office, just
after
12:30
, my supervisor Emma Lang
is waiting. She's a tall, handsome black woman in her mid-thirties, wearing
shiny high heels, a long navy blue skirt, and a blazer with shoulders as thick
as a linebacker's. She always seems to be frowning, but I've never figured out
if that's because she likes me less than I like her or if she's just generally
embittered.

The latter is more likely since
she's worked at the department seven years longer than me, and she makes less
than thirty thousand dollars a year.

She looks around the cubicle and
wrinkles her nose. "Two more weeks and then no more smoking in here,"
she says.

"I know."

She stares intently at my legs like
she's about to complain about my wearing jeans again. "There's probably
going to be some personnel changes in the next month," she says abruptly.

"Because of the
turnover?" I put down the bag with the beer in it and a little damp spot
appears on its outside. My stomach flutters. I'd applied for a supervisor's
post at the
Brooklyn
juvenile program weeks before.
Maybe she's going to tell me if I got the job.

"Eight people gone and
summer's just starting." She leans against the doorframe and studies her
fingernails for a second.

I'm not surprised. A lot of people
burn out early at probation. You can only stand by and watch so many disasters
waiting to happen. The economics of it are enough to drive most people out.
Cops, lawyers, and psychiatrists all make a lot more money and get better
benefits, though probation officers sometimes do all three jobs.

"You're probably going to be
transferred over to the field service unit soon," Ms. Lang says, sounding
more like she's giving an order than making a prediction.

My heart sinks. "What about
that juvenile supervisor's post?"

"I forgot you applied for that
too. Cathy Brody got it. She does have seniority."

I nod patiently, even though I feel
like punching something. "But why am I getting field service?" I
wasn't aware of any vacancies in the unit, which picks up clients who've
violated their probation in some way.

"One of the field guys went
over to parole in February and they're still looking for somebody to replace
him," she says. "I remember you telling me you were interested in
that job before, so I put your name in."

A chill creeps up between my
shoulder blades and I reach for the Silly Putty again. I'd have a cigarette if
she wasn't standing here now.

"I also put in your name
because I think you've done a very good job here," she says.

"I have?"

"Your clients have the lowest
recidivism rate in the borough office."

"Luck of the draw." I
shrug.

"No, you are my best guy
here," she says flatly, like she's looking up a boring fact in the
encyclopedia. "I've monitored your cases and read the reports. I told the
administration that you can be tough, and you know how to tread lightly, like
with this Charlie Simms and Maria Sanchez. You have the gift for
connecting."

"Thanks." I clear my
throat loudly and blow ashes from my ashtray onto my knees. "I wasn't
aware you liked me."

"I don't," she says.
"You're a white boy from
Queens
. Can't like you.
Don't like what you are. Nothing you can do about that, nothing I can do about
that." Her voice drops into a deep Southern register. "You know what
I'm saying. But I am recommending you."

Ms. Lang is not the type to invite
you into her office for a heart-to-heart. Like a lot of the black people I know
in positions of authority, she's constantly rigid with tension, like she's
expecting somebody above her to use any excuse to kick her out. She came from a
poor
Alabama
family and put
herself through
Columbia
's graduate
program in social work. She got rid of her drawl and her doubts along the way.
But when she went into the city government, she hit a brick wall, mainly
because she's black and a woman. Now she lives alone, has hardly any friends,
and keeps her part of the bureaucracy running smoothly. Liked by many, loved by
few, and only hated by the hard-core bigots in the office.

"I can ask for another six
hundred dollars or so for you when you go into the field," she says.

I quickly calculate that with an
extra twelve dollars a week I can just about afford to double the number of
cigarettes I smoke. "That's fine," I tell her. "But what's going
to happen to my caseload?"

"You can hold on to the half
who really need you." She adjusts a flap on one of her blazer's pockets.
"You're not going out into the field full-time right away. I'd like you to
really keep an eye on this Darryl King. We just got a message that he'll be
coming in tomorrow instead of today."

"Okay."

"Tommy Markham is still upset
from talking to him a couple of weeks ago," she says, "so when King
comes in, you might want to lean on him a little. Let him know that he's
expected to be a good boy here. Break him in a little bit for whoever gets him
after you."

"All right," I say.

But what I'm really thinking is
that it'd score me some points if I could turn this guy around myself.
Especially since everybody else assumes this is a hopeless case.

There's a rapping sound and then a
thirtyish white man in a dark business suit, with thinning pale hair and a raw
sunburn appears in the doorway. I recognize him from the hallways outside the
administrative offices. Ms. Lang introduces him as Deputy Commissioner Kenneth
Dawson. For some reason he reminds me of the cartoon character Deputy Dawg and
I have to suppress a smile.

"How do you do?" says
Dawson
,
extending a weak, sweaty hand. "We're so glad to hear you've volunteered
for the field unit."

"Well..." I'm about to
correct him, but then again, why bother? This is all confusing enough already.
I've heard
Dawson
's name in
connection with the department's annual budget report. I didn't know he ever
spoke to regular P.O.s like me.

"You're getting a very special
opportunity," he says.

"I'm looking forward to
it," I answer, for lack of any other inspiration.

"Wonderful."
Dawson
sways back on the heels of his wing tips and laughs through his nose. "By
the way," he says, "when you go out into the field, you know you're
going to be required to carry a sidearm."

"Oh yeah?"

"Guns don't scare you, do
they?"

"Of course not." I notice
that the brown bag containing my beer has turned soggy and is threatening to
dissolve while the two of them are standing here. With a trembling hand, I
reach for what's left of my third cup of coffee this morning.

All three of us smile awkwardly at
each other and then
Dawson
congratulates me once more on the new assignment. "I'm glad you're going
to be part of the magic we do here," he says. It takes me a second to
remember where I've seen a phrase like that recently. "Probation—Be Part
of the Magic." It's that idiotic new slogan on the stickers around the
offices downstairs. Dawson, clearly the man who thought of it, smiles tightly
and departs.