by Randy Alcorn
Raymond missed L.A., but he didn’t miss the police helicopters ripping through the air. They didn’t use them to fight gangs in Portland. Not yet. The day would come, of course, and when it did, maybe he’d move to Pocatello, Idaho. America would never run out of smaller cities to occupy once the larger ones were too glutted with drugs and gangs and cops to make it all worthwhile.
GC took out his blue notebook. Most of the pages had color photos and newspaper clips, primarily from the L.A. Times and the Oregon Tribune. Several Times articles used his given name, Raymond. Nobody in Portland even knew that name but the cops. Since coming here he’d been arrested for assault in a knife fight, for robbery, and for a murder they couldn’t prove, where he cut a deal for a lesser charge, giving him just a few months in jail. The scrapbook looked like it was kept by an athlete or an author or a politician.
“Why you collectin’ this stuff?” his mama asked. He shrugged his shoulders. Most of his crimes didn’t make the papers with his name next to them, but some did. He valued those, every one of them. He wanted to get the credit, like the guy who catches the winning touchdown wants it. He knew the price of getting the credit publicly—sometimes jail, more often gangland revenge. Still, that was how reps got built, and his rep was already Portland’s biggest.
He looked at a recent Trib article that mentioned a few names, none his own. Jimbo’s name in particular was repeated. He might do the time, but GC had done the crime. Funny, Jimbo had done enough already to get life in prison if cops could just pin him on it. But he’d had nothing to do with this crime. Anyway, that was justice. In the end, you get what’s coming to you, GC thought, applying it to everyone but himself.
“Fools say Jimbo did it, then Jimbo did it.” GC snorted aloud.
GC fondled his old deuce-five auto, with which he’d killed his first Blood at age fourteen. He picked up his Smith and Wesson that he’d used to rob a convenience store after he’d been on the outs just two days. Next he fingered his trey five seven. He used to call the .357 his three hundred fifty-seven homeboys.
Raymond’s mother watched him bring over the young kids, and somehow it struck her as dirty. She knew he wasn’t a pervert, but it felt like that. It felt like he was taking boys into his bedroom to pervert them. And he was, though sex wasn’t the weapon of perversion. It was something else, something just as deep, just as deadly. She’d given up now, and that was the hardest: to have no father for the child and to know she wasn’t enough to control him. She’d lost her boy to the hood. Lost him to the Crips. Lost him from the church. Lost him from Jesus. It made her weep through long lonely nights when her baby prowled the streets.
Raymond didn’t like his mother’s church, Ebenezer. He liked that church in Los Angeles, where Pastor Henly assured them folks were good by nature, that it was only bad circumstances that caused bad behavior, that the fire and brimstone message of the Bible fundamentalists was not from God. Pastor Henly told them that because God was love there couldn’t be a hell. He liked the reassurance of that message. In contrast, Pastor Clancy made him feel uncomfortable.
Raymond loved his mother. He told himself she must be proud of him. She saw his name advertised with blue and red paint alike, revered by Crips, hated by Bloods. He had the rep.
GC turned on loud gangsta rap, immersing himself in the pounding rhythm. He resurrected one of his favorite classics, Ice-T’s Body Count. He listened to the “Cop Killer” song, singing with venom in his voice when it got to the chorus, “Die, die, die pig, die!_______ the police!”
I need my sounds. The beat was as real as angel dust. It put him in a trance. That’s one bad jam. He fingered his old Smith and Wesson, picturing himself placing it against a policeman’s temple. He slowly squeezed the trigger, relishing the moment. What a rush.
He reached for his journal and picked up a pen. Since seeing several gangster memoirs published, he thought maybe he’d write his own. He’d been a decent student once, an honor student, though he’d never admit that to his homies. “Po Po asked me today about a robbery three weeks ago,” he wrote. “I say no. Not stupid. But done so many jacks, can’t remember which was which.” Then his style abruptly changed. “Some days it’s not death that scares me as much as life.”
He looked at what he’d written and liked it. He wasn’t one of those dumb gangsters. He was a ghetto philosopher. Plato of the Crips. He’d once considered Plato for his moniker, but guys kept calling it “Play dough” and “GC” had a better ring, so it stuck. Yeah, A Gangsta’s Memoirs. Some progressive white lady editor somewhere would get him published. He could use the money to get a grenade launcher or something serious.
He looked in the mirror on his wall and ran his finger over the R6C tattoo on his chest.
I got the rep, man. I got the rep.
Clarence wandered past city desk over to the photographer’s corner, where he saw Lynn Carpenter. In her relatively short twelve years of experience, she was the Trib’s most respected photojournalist. Carp was a pit bull who against the odds always came back with the most captivating shot. The type that might pull off a Pulitzer, as when the Trib sent her down to cover the L.A. riots and she caught a smoldering Korean store with the ominous graffiti on the concrete wall behind it, threatening “It’s not over yet.” Almost certainly she would be gobbled up soon by an eastern paper or at least the L.A. Times.
Carp was a loner, a quiet tomboy. Clarence liked something about her— certainly not her politics. They’d struck up an odd sort of friendship. She was upper thirties, about Dani’s age.
“Hey, Carp.”
“Hey, Clarence. Pull another fast one on Harman? Need me to make a blowup for you?” She referred to Clarence and Jake’s series of practical jokes on one of the reporters.
“Nah. After the last one, we’re being nice to Pete. I’m sure it’ll wear off soon, though. What’s up on the photo beat?”
“Not much. Same old stuff. Chasing everywhere. Hoping to stumble onto some human tragedy I can capitalize on.” Carp spoke with the exaggerated cynicism common among seasoned journalists. But Clarence knew it stemmed from her decency, coupled with the regretful irony that most of her award-winning pictures were of crimes, accidents, rescues, and the aftermath of natural disasters.
“Glad you stopped by, Clarence. Read your column on media bias.”
“Yeah? I’m considering doing a follow-up, but Jake thinks I should get a bulletproof vest first.”
Carp laughed. “Sounds like Woods.” She shrugged. “He may be right. Listen, you know how I feel about your political persuasions.”
“Me? Political?”
“Yeah, somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun,” Carp giggled. Clarence liked her giggle. He also liked the fact that as often as they disagreed, he never felt from her that superior liberal contempt.
“Okay, m’lady. I’m not in the mood to argue. I’ve got something to ask you.”
“What’s up? Gonna tell me you’re really a liberal and you need my support to come out of the closet?”
“Not quite. Do you remember a story back in ’87 involving an officer accused of police brutality?”
“I remember a couple. Refresh my memory.”
“This was one where you caught pictures of the arrest in process.”
“That one? How could I forget? AP picked up a couple of my photos. Lucky to get there while the action was still hot.”
“The officer you photographed,” Clarence said, “the one charged with brutality? He’s now a homicide detective. He’s in charge of my sister’s case.”
“No kidding? You think he’s doing a bad job?”
“No, not really. Just heard some stuff about his past, and I’ve been checking into it. Read the old papers in the morgue. I was curious about the pictures.”
“Want me to look them up?”
“Look them up?”
“Yeah. I keep a master file of all my negatives and usually the proof sheets. Want to see them?”
“Great. Never occu
rred to me you’d still have them.”
Clarence looked over her shoulder, noting her files were labeled year by year from 1984 on.
“You said ’87? What time of year?”
“August.”
“Right. It was still muggy, even though it all happened after dark. I remember my sweat dripping on the camera.” She kept rummaging. “Okay, got it. Filed under Officer Chandler/Police Brutality, August 1987. Here’s the clip from the paper…and here’s three proof sheets. I shot three rolls. About a hundred pics.”
Clarence saw the yellowish, file-aged story he’d already looked at in the morgue, then took a look at the proof sheets with their tiny photo images.
“Wow. That’s a lot of photos.”
“It’s like the lottery,” Carp said. “The more tickets you buy, the greater your chance of winning. The more pictures you take, the better your odds at making page one.”
Clarence looked at the pictures the Trib had printed. He was struck again by Ollie’s angry face juxtaposed with the look of helpless terror in the eyes of the man he was beating. It was a side of Ollie he hadn’t seen in person. But pictures didn’t lie. His original hostility toward the detective began to rekindle.
Carp looked over the proof sheets. “Out of the hundred or so shots, maybe fifty were usable, twenty pretty good. Bad lighting, quick action, a few out of focus. The editor decided on three shots. Two facial closeups and the one in the center, where he’s swinging the night stick.”
“Looks like it’s coming down on the guy’s head.”
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”
“Was it?”
“On his head? No. He kept hitting him on the shoulders. It had a dull sound, like soft flesh absorbing the impact, know what I mean? No cracking sound like a hit to the head.”
“Sure looks like it’s going for the head. Not in the other pictures, just this one.” He pointed at the main page-one photo.
Carp shrugged. “It’s the angle. Creates an illusion. You don’t have the depth of field in a two-dimensional medium.”
“So…they just happened to choose the only one that creates the illusion he was hitting him in the head?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am, a little.”
“You’ve never seen a reporter or editor slant a story or headline?”
“Of course I have. But a picture?”
“It’s no different. Happens all the time. Want a magnifying glass? Helps with those little proofs.”
“Thanks.” Holding the glass, Clarence went picture by picture through the thirty-five-millimeter proofs.
“Wait a minute.” Clarence pointed to the proof’s original from which one of the Trib photos had been taken. “On the left side of the picture, this is the other officer. Right?”
“Right.”
“This black cop. He’s waving his nightstick. He looks pretty agitated.”
“Sure. He got in a few licks too. Like I said, it was a tense situation.”
“He’s in your original picture but not in the picture the Trib carried.”
“Story editors cut out words. Photo editors cut out images. It’s called cropping.”
“I know what it’s called. I just don’t think it’s appropriate here. It communicates the wrong message.”
“What message?”
“One white man beating up a black man. Instead of two officers, one black and one white, together dealing with a black man.” Clarence studied the other proof pics. “In fact, several of these pictures are really good, the ones that show the black officer with his night stick. So why wasn’t he included?”
“It wasn’t my call, but I suppose because the story wasn’t about him.”
“So, you’re saying that what constitutes the story isn’t what actually happened but what the Trib wants to do with what happened?”
“Obviously. Isn’t that the nature of journalism, or did I miss something? You want what happened, watch a videotape start to finish. You want the Trib’s take on what happened, read the Trib. That’s our business, Clabern. Better get comfortable with it.”
The more he looked, the more agitated he became. “These pictures of the criminal—in most of them he’s clearly out of control, almost vicious looking. This one’s kind of neutral, hard to interpret. But in this one he looks like a nice guy frightened for his life.”
“That’s the one they printed, right?” She looked at the clipping. “Yep.”
“And the pictures of Ollie—”
“Ollie?”
“Detective Chandler, Officer Chandler. Most of them are pretty calm and in control, don’t you think? A few of them, after the scuffle, I guess, they even look pleasant. Almost jovial.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing how calm he looks, given what was happening. Of course, my job’s just to take the pictures. I never get to choose what they print.”
“But the one they put in, the third picture, the closeup of Ollie, it’s this one.” He pointed to the proof. “It’s the only one where he looks wild-eyed, really angry.”
“I remember that one. He thought I was in too close. He warned me to get back. Told me the guy was going to hurt me.”
“What did you do?”
“What any journalist would do. I ignored him.”
“So…”
“So, he got really mad. Yelled at me to get back. I turned and shot the picture. The flash was way too close. It bleached out his face, changed his features, don’t you think? I was kind of embarrassed they printed this one. It was one of my worst shots.”
“He was mad at you? Did your editor know that?”
“Yeah, I told her. I’m sure I must have.”
Clarence stood up, his face animated. “Let me summarize. Correct me when I’m wrong, okay? Out of a hundred pictures you took, the Trib chooses to use three in its feature story. None of the pictures show the three people involved in the scuffle, only two of them. The one with the black cop edited out also happens to be the only one where Officer Chandler appears to be hitting the perp in the head with the baton, even though he wasn’t. Right?”
“Right.”
“One is a closeup of the criminal—”
“Alleged criminal.”
“Okay, alleged criminal, and it happens to be the best take in the whole bunch, one of just a few, maybe the only one that makes this guy look like a choir boy. Right?”
“Right.”
“And the third is a closeup of the officer—”
“The offending officer.”
“The alleged offending officer—and of all the pictures of him it’s by far the worst, artistically speaking. It’s also by far the most intimidating, the only one that bleaches out his features, makes his eyes look wild, the one that shows anger and hostility. And to top it off, you’re telling me the anger and hostility wasn’t at the criminal but at a photojournalist refusing to back off when he ordered her to?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Right.”
Clarence sat back down dumbfounded, looking over the pictures and shaking his head. “There was a hearing about this whole thing, wasn’t there?”
Carp nodded.
“Well, you were a primary witness, weren’t you? Weren’t you asked to testify?”
“Yeah. But I was at the scene as a member of the press. So I asked to be exempted from testifying. Raylon Berkley stood behind me.”
“Did Berkley ask you what you saw?”
“Yeah, he did. Called me into his office. He asked what evidence of brutality I saw. I told him I wasn’t an expert. It was brutal, but then the guy was screaming every profanity in the book at both cops, wrestling with them, threatening to kill them. I’m no expert. I don’t know if it was brutality or not.”
“What did Berkley say?”
“Just that he had a few phone calk to make and he’d get back to me about whether or not I should have to testify.”
“Who did he call?”
“He didn’t say. The Trib attorneys I suppo
se, maybe a judge or two? He knows everybody.”
Maybe his old friend Norcoast.
“Anyway, bottom line, they excused me from testifying, even though the officer’s attorney was really upset.”
Clarence sat quietly.
“You look like you need some fresh air, Clabern,” Carp said. “But when you feel up to it, you need a short course on photojournalism—what happens on our end of the biz. Words are only part of the story. Pictures are the rest. One picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words.”
Clarence nodded, then walked off, hoping the fresh air would make him feel better about what he did for a living.
“She’s back,” Zeke said to Dani, voice bouncing with enthusiasm. “My little Ruthie, your grandma. Home from her mission. Want to meet her?”
“Yes! Please!”
Zeke and Dani began walking, but Zeke was in a hurry, so he turned a corner in space. That skill was still new to Dani, but with her hand in Zeke’s she turned the comer with him, arriving immediately at a distant place she’d not yet been to, the terrain very different, calling out to be explored, to be painted, to be studied to learn more of Elyon’s character. She made a mental note, adding it to hundreds of other places she wanted to come back to, each filling her with promise and expectation.
Now she saw a white-haired woman, appearing as old as Zeke himself, but she sensed he saw her differently, still as his little girl. Zeke ran toward her and she toward him, arms wide, laughing and longing for embrace. He spun her around, they touched each other’s faces, she whispered words giving a teasing hint of the places she’d been and the tasks she’d done and the wonders she’d witnessed. Zeke grabbed her hand and the two ran over to Dani, as if they were six-year-olds.
“My Dani,” Ruth said, framing Dani’s face with her hands, hands so old and so young, so callused and so soft. “Sorry I couldn’t be there to greet you in the birthin’ room. Elyon had me workin’. I watched you in yo’ mama’s womb, watched you born and growed up. I’s so happy you finally here.”
