Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Camacho.” That was the way he always answered. Why waste time with all the rest of it?

  “Nestor…” It was a Latin voice. It didn’t say “Nes-ter.” “This is Jorge Hernandez—Sergeant Hernandez.”

  “Sarge…”

  “I know it’s early,” said the Sergeant, “and I probably woke you up, but you’ll want to know about this.”

  That snapped Nestor fully awake. He racked his brain, trying to figure out what innanameagod he might want to know about in the dead of the night. He was speechless.

  The Sergeant continued. “You gotta get up and get online. Go to YouTube!”

  “YouTube?”

  “You know Mano Perez, in Homicide? He calls me about a minute ago, and he’s gotten hold of this newspaper that’s coming out today—and he says, ‘You’re on YouTube! You and Camacho!’ I about fell out of the goddamned bed! So I go to YouTube—and it’s true! The goddamned thing’s about me!… and you, Nestor.”

  Nestor felt volts going through his brainpan. “You’re kidding!” In the hypnopompic fog he felt stupid immediately. Sergeant Hernandez calling him at 4:45 a.m. to kid around?… couldn’t happen. “You and me, Sarge? What about us?”

  “Its about that big comemierda negro we arrested at that comemierda crack house in Overtown. Well, some asshole there had a cell phone and took some fucking video. You can tell it’s a cell phone because it’s all jumpy and kinda blurry. But you can see me and you all right, the fuckers! It’s got a guy’s voice goes along with it, to make sure you get our names and what a coupla mean Cuban bastards we are, torturing this poor negro who’s lying on the floor with his face all twisted up in pain and me and you, we’ve hog-tied this jungle bunny so he can’t move a muscle—”

  ::::::Jesus Christ, Sarge, I hope to hell they don’t have you on video saying “jungle bunny.”::::::

  “—I mean he’s just lying there and they got you yelling into the fucking guy’s ear, ‘Say what, bitch? Say what? Say what, you filthy little bitch?’ Then they got me saying, ‘Nestor, for Christ’s sake, that’s enough!’ They make it sound like you’re torturing him and I’m keeping you from killing him. Then they go on about women and children being in this ‘supposed crack house’ when really it’s a day care center. I mean, shit—and you never see the fucker who’s saying all this.”

  Guilt… a wave of guilt swept over Nestor. Remembering that moment—feeling… the terrible emotion—the desire to kill—the madness! Kill!… He couldn’t think of the circumstances in any rational way… only the guilt…

  “—and then they got me saying,” the Sergeant continued, “they got me saying, ‘He’s a hothead, and he’s a big dick jigaboo who ain’t gonna take no shit off nobody, noway, nohow.’ The pussy fuck calls that a ‘crude and slanderous’ attempt to mimic a black accent—crude and slanderous!—and I’m implying that black people are ignorant primitives. Jesus! That’s the least of it! The big bastard just tried to kill me! He had both hands around my fucking neck and was trying to crush my windpipe. I already had my gun out when you jumped him. That’s supposed to mean I was ready to kill him in cold blood when you distracted me—distracted me!—plus, I’d called him a jigaboo. What’s the big deal? I was talking to you, not him, and there’s no way he could’ve heard me. And jigaboo means—I don’t know what the fuck it means. It’s just a word. It wasn’t like I was cursing at him and calling him a shitball, which is what he is.”

  ::::::Sarge, you still don’t get it, do you. You’ve got to knock it all off—shitballs, macaques, and every other name you have for los negros. Don’t even think about it!—much less say it out loud, even to me.:::::: But what Nestor said was “The guy tried to strangle you, Sarge! Whatta they say about all that?”

  “They don’t show any a that! They don’t even say like maybe there’s some reason this huge black bull wound up flat on his back like that in the custody of two cops, except that the two cops are Cubans. You’re supposed to figure the only reason is Cubans are cruel bastards who live for pushing los negros around and abusing them and dissing them and calling them monkeys and pieces a shit and then treating them like monkeys and pieces a shit. And there’s no use trying to tell people they have to put themselves in our shoes because they can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like rolling in the dirt with one a these huge gorillas. I’m telling you, Nestor, we’re gonna be knee-deep in this shit by daybreak and waist-high by noon…”

  “Sarge, you gotta stop talking that way, even to me, because later on it comes popping outta your mouth and you’re in deep shit. We’re in deep shit.”

  “I know. You’re right. It’s like fucking gargling with cyanide… but right now we gotta think a something. We need a PR man. How the fuck do you even find a PR man?… even if you can pay a PR man, which I can’t. I don’t know about you.”

  “Whyn’t we go straight to the Chief?” said Nestor.

  “That’s not funny, Nestor.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny, Sarge. He’s not a bad guy; I spent maybe half an hour with him when they transferred me from Marine Patrol to CST.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Saint Francis himself. What’s he gonna do? He’s un negro, Nestor! Why do you think they made him chief?… So the brothers could say, ‘Yo, we got the muh-fuckin’ Chief a Po-lice now, baby. Now he be on our side! He be lookin’ out for us!’ ”

  ::::::Jesus! All this shit Sarge is saying! Talk about dissolving… He’s determined to dissolve himself!:::::: Out loud he said, “Whyn’t we just go undercover, Sarge?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Camacho?!”

  “That way they won’t see us, Sarge. That way we dissolve ourselves.”

  “Don’t you get—”

  “I’m just kidding, Sarge, I’m just kidding. Where you want to meet?”

  “Uhhh…” Long pause… “Shit… come on down to headquarters, as usual, and we’ll talk in the car. And look behind you. Nobody’s got your back on this one. You won’t feel like kidding around, after the sun comes up.”

  Nestor thumbed the END button and remained propped up on one elbow on the mattress. He felt catatonic. His eyes focused on a nonexistent point in thin air. ::::::I’m slipping through a crack… into a parallel universe! Oh, come off it, Nestor.:::::: Parallel universe was a phrase he had heard on one of those heavy Dread Purple Dimension spook dramas on television. Parallel me no dread purple dimensions, Camacho. He was shocked and afraid, to tell the simple truth.

  YouTube YouTube YouTube YouTube… the frightened part of him didn’t even want to look at the goddamn thing… but the rest of him yanked him up off the mattress and dragged him three feet across the floor through the dirty clothes and dirty towels and miscellaneous empty boxes and dust and hairballs… to his laptop. He sat down on the floor and propped his back up against the wall… and my God, right on the home page… there he is, in the crack house. He’s spellbound by the sight of himself on that little screen… Nestor victorious!! The big brute’s hulk is lying facedown on the floor. ::::::Look at that! The brute is twice my size, but I’m the victor! I’m straddling his back… Look! I’ve got him locked in the full nelson and the figure four. My hands are interlaced behind his neck, and I’m mashing his face into the floor with all my might. My God!::::::

  His muscles had already been pumped up, gorged with blood, from wrestling the brute. Now, right there on that little laptop screen, he’s marshaling every last ounce of strength he has to driving the brute’s head into the floor, mashing his face flat for him. ::::::I’m… pumped!:::::: The enormous pressure of the full nelson has bent the brute’s neck forward to the point where he, Nestor, could have broken it, if he really wanted to. You can tell that even on this little laptop screen; the brute’s face is twisted beyond recognition—from the pain! His mouth is open. He wants to scream. But he wants oxygen more. The only sound that escapes his terrified 275-pound body is “Urrrrrrrunhhh… urrrrrrruhunhhh… urrrrrrrrunhhh!” Sounds like a dying duck. Yeah! A duck croaking. A
nother thirty seconds of maximum pressure—that’s all it would have taken! Stone-cold dead, O black brute! Nestor is mesmerized, watching his triumph on that little screen. Awesome! Nestor hadn’t been aware of the expression on his own face when it was actually happening. ::::::My God! Did I really bare my teeth like that? Did I really put on such a hideous, malevolent grin?::::::

  Positively enchanted, Nestor can’t take his eyes off himself on the screen. He watches—and hears—Nestor Camacho remonstrating uhhh uhhh uhhh. He’s out of breath himself uhhh uhhh uhhh humiliating the giant as loudly as he can: “Okay, you uhhh unhhh stu-pid uhhh uhhh uhhh pussy!” He remembers wanting the whole room to know that he had utterly crushed the brute. He watches himself lean over until he’s two or three inches from the beast’s ear and shouts directly into it, “Say what, bitch? Say what?”

  With that, Nestor’s morale sinks. He wants to click the window closed… From now on it only gets worse, doesn’t it!… What has he done?… He knows what’s next… and here it comes… The epithets, his own, the Sergeant’s, start piling on top of the bone heap at a furious red-mad rate—and the heap catches fire. Into the charnel pyre Nestor throws “Say what, you filthy little bitch?”

  Only then, looking at the laptop screen, does Nestor fully get it. Only then does he comprehend, in so many words, how bad this all is… this YouTube introduction of Nestor Camacho to the world!

  And what does the world see in this video? Where does the YouTube story begin? The world sees a black prisoner lying facedown, inert, helpless, racked with pain, struggling just to take the next breath, moaning in a way urrrrrrrunh no human being ever moaned before, under arrest at the mercy of two Cuban cops. One of them is mounted on the prisoner’s back, flashing a cruel thirty-two-tooth grin as he delights in the prospect of breaking his prisoner’s very neck with a full nelson. The other one is crouched barely two feet from him, ready to blow his brains out with a .44-caliber revolver. Both of them are humiliating their black prisoner, mocking his manhood, calling him a subhuman moron. Is there no limit to how abusive these two Cuban cops are willing to be toward a black man who, so far as the viewer knows, has done nothing?… And that is the way the YouTube version begins… and, very likely, ends.

  No indication whatsoever of the life-or-death crisis that precipitated this vile “abuse,” not so much as a hint that this put-upon black man is in fact a powerful 250-pound young crack house thug, nothing to make it at all credible that he might have touched off the whole thing by wrapping his huge hands around the Sergeant’s neck, that he was within one second of murdering him by crushing his windpipe, that his life was saved only by the immediate reaction of Officer Camacho, who threw himself onto the brute’s back and, weighing only 160 pounds, clamped a couple of wrestling holds onto 275 pounds of crack house thug and rolled in the dirt and the dirtballs with him until the brute became utterly depleted in breath, power, willpower, heart, and manhood… and gave up… like a pussy. How could any man pretend not to realize that, faced with death, even a cop experiences an adrenal rush immensely more powerful than all chains of polite conversation and immediately seeks to smother his would-be killer with whatever vile revulsion comes surging up his brain stem from the deepest, darkest, most twisted bowels of hatred? How could any man, even the mildest and most sedentary, fail to understand?!

  But nothing on YouTube could possibly let that man know the first half of the story, the crucial half… Nothing! And without that first half, the second half becomes fiction! A lie!

  I’m telling you, Nestor, we’re gonna be knee-deep in this shit by daybreak and waist-high by noon. For it is already rising, and it is still dark outside.

  And it was still dark outside at 6:00 a.m., when the Chief, an early riser, took a call on his personal line from Jorge Guba, one of Dio’s boy Fridays, saying the Mayor wanted him at City Hall in an hour and a half for a meeting. Seven-thirty? Yes. Had the Chief seen YouTube yet?

  So the Chief took a look at YouTube. In fact, he watched it three times. Then he shut his eyes and lowered his head and massaged his temples with one hand… his thumb pressing one temple and his middle and ring fingers the other. Then he said aloud, under his breath:

  “Like I really need this, don’t I.”

  Grumpily he roused his driver, Sanchez, and told him to have the car ready. When they entered the circular drive in front of the little Pan Am–leftover City Hall at 7:20—one look, and he immediately grew grumpier. Waiting for him, and whomever else, in front of the City Hall entrance, was a platoon of the so-called media, about a dozen of them, dressed like the homeless but lent gravity by all the microphones and notepads in their hands and, above all, by two trucks with telescoping satellite transmitters extended a full twenty feet up in the air for live broadcast. The Chief was not so jolly this time as he got out of the big black Escalade. Hell, he wasn’t even able to take a deep breath and expand his massive black chief chest to the max before the so-called media were swarming over him like mosquitoes. Police abuse and racist slurs were the two terms they kept biting him with in their whining mosquito buzz as he bulled his way through them, without a word, and into City Hall.

  Like he really needed this, didn’t he.

  The Mayor’s men’s-gym lounge of a conference room was heavily populated with more of his boys Friday: his flack, Portuondo, and his city manager, Bosch, as before… plus Hector Carbonell, the district attorney ::::::district attorney?:::::: and his two gray eminences, Alfredo Cabrillo and Jacque Díaz, both lawyers Dio had known since law school and frequently called upon when confronted by big decisions ::::::big decisions?:::::: And the Mayor made six. The whole platoon was Cuban.

  Dio was his usual exuberant self as the Chief entered the room. Big smile and “Aaaaay. Chief! Come in! Have a seat!” He pointed at an easy chair. “I think you know everybody in the room… Right?” The other five Cubans gave the chief little thirty-three-degree smiles. When they all sat down in the room’s jumble of easy chairs and armchairs, the Chief had an odd feeling. Then he realized the Mayor and the boys Friday were arranged in a horseshoe pattern… a sloppy horseshoe, but a horseshoe… and he was seated midway between the horseshoe’s prongs… with a big space between him and the nearest seat on either side. The Mayor was directly opposite him in a straight-back armchair at the crest of the horseshoe’s curve. The Chief’s chair must have been suffering from spring failure, because his bottom sank down so far, he could barely see over his kneecaps. Dio, in his armchair, appeared to be looking down at him. The choir had some chilly looks on their mugs… no smiles at all. The Chief had the sensation of being in a sunken dock, facing the grim visages of a jury.

  “I think everybody knows why we’re here?”… The Mayor scanned his platoon… lots of yes nods… then looked straight at the Chief.

  “What is it with your boy Camacho?” he said. “The kid’s a one-man race riot.” He was not joking. “Who’s he got left to shit on? The Haitians, maybe? And it’s not as if he’s a deputy chief or even a captain. He’s just a cop, for Christ’s sake, a twenty-five-year-old cop with a proven ability to piss people off in gross numbers.”

  The Chief knew what was coming next. Dio was going to demand that he can him. The Chief didn’t have this feeling often… of not being sure of himself… On his good days his confidence and charisma kept Dio and his whole Cuban gang off-balance. He had been in gun battles, real shootouts. He had risked his life to save cops under his command, including Cuban cops, God knows. He had two medals for valor. He had presence. In this room it would take two Cubans standing side by side to have shoulders as wide as his… three of them to come up with a neck as wide as his… forty of them, or maybe four hundred, to have his willingness to risk his own hide for what was right… He really did jump off that six-story roof onto a mattress that looked the size of a playing card from up there. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he was a man… and nobody else in this room was. His confidence, his vitality, that certain look he had in his eyes. In this arena
it didn’t matter what color he was. He radiated that rarest and most radiant of all auras… no one could help but behold… the Man! At this moment that wasn’t the way they regarded him, however… He could tell. At this moment they saw only un negro… and that damned negro was on the spot, because if that negro weren’t un negro, nuestro negro, our negro, doing what we tell him to do, he wouldn’t even rate being in this room… None of Dio’s boys had dared so much as twitch an eyebrow… even Dio… but he knew what they thought they were now looking at… just another black hambone in a costume.

  That got the Chief’s back up. “What is it with Camacho?” he said, giving the Mayor a 300-watt stare in the eyeballs. “Since you’ve asked”—in the choir many eyebrows now twitched; they had never heard the Chief speak sarcastically to the Mayor before—“the short answer and the long answer and the in-between answer is, he’s a damned good cop.”

  The room went silent. Then the Mayor said, “Okay, Cy, he’s a damned good cop. I guess we have to take your word for that. After all, you’re the top cop in this town; you’re the commander in chief. So what’s the problem here? We’ve got your damned good cop, and he and another cop are caught on YouTube abusing a citizen of our African American community, calling him an animal and a jigaboo and a subhuman moron with shit for brains—”

  “He’s a drug dealer, Dio!” The Chief’s voice rose and hit a couple of not very commanding notes.

  “And that makes it okay for Camacho to address this suspect—this African American suspect—as if he’s a member of a race of subhumans, a bunch of animals? I hope that isn’t what you’re telling me, Cy.”