Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  He went to the head of the car where the guy was and started staring out the front window. The green and red track lights ahead were like stars floating in outer space. He half closed his eyes and imagined he was plunging deeper and deeper toward some distant point without ever really getting there.

  8

  STANDING ON THE CHECKOUT line, I count the items my father just put in the shopping cart.

  Seven green-and-red cans of Del Monte sliced peaches. A half dozen cans of Bumblebee tuna in water. Four quart bottles of Mott’s apple juice. Eleven jars of Planters peanuts. Five boxes of Band-Aids. Two cartons of Pall Malls.

  “What’re you doing, having a party?” I ask. I didn’t know he had that many friends left.

  “Never mind,” the old man says with a harsh Eastern European accent that makes the Korean girl at the cash register look up.

  I decide to wait a while before I ask him again why he wants all this food. My father is getting more and more eccentric with the passing years, and I ought to try to be as patient with him as I’d be with a client.

  When the Korean girl rings up a total of $97.65 for his groceries, he gives her a look of pure loathing.

  “You need some cash?” I ask, reaching for my wallet.

  “Go away,” says my father.

  With trembling, liver-spotted hands, he fumbles through the pockets of his blue windbreaker. After a minute, he starts taking out scads of tattered discount coupons clipped from newspapers and magazines. People in the growing line behind us groan loudly. I turn around and smile apologetically.

  Fifteen minutes later, my father and I leave the Key Food supermarket on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing and head back to his house. It’s half past seven and the sun is just starting to go down.

  My father is walking with an exaggerated stoop and a slight limp as we walk down the hill toward Main Street. He has his jacket zipper all the way up, so his stomach pushes out the front of it. His broad rump is bursting through the seams of his gray pants. He’s sixty-five, but he looks at least ten years older. His chins dangle before his throat and a small scrub brush of white hair sits on the barren plain of his scalp. His eyelids sag heavily, giving him a look you might take for permanent sadness, if you didn’t know him better.

  “You got something on your mouth,” I tell him.

  The old man wipes at it with his jacket sleeve. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s gone now.”

  Though his arms are still strong, he seems to be struggling with the one light brown paper bag he’s carrying. I take it from him and try to balance it with the four heavy bags of groceries I have in my arms. “You wouldn’t consider a cab, would you?” I ask.

  “It’s just a few blocks,” he says. “What are you? Weak?”

  I shrug and try to enjoy the rest of the walk.

  Here are the streets where I grew up. The rows of identically quaint red brick houses always give me a feeling that’s half warm nostalgia and half nausea. Most of the other familiar landmarks are still here. The orange school crossing sign. The temple across the street and the church down the block. McGaskill’s Pub on the corner with the woozy neon sign outside. The screech of jets leaving LaGuardia overhead. The smell from the Taystee Bread plant. The way the sky turns to purple and orange at dusk. If you go down a couple of blocks, you can see the giant silver Unisphere on the World’s Fair grounds in the distance and just a little bit to the right, the rim of Shea Stadium.

  “So you been watching the Mets fall apart this year?” I ask my father.

  “What do you want?” the old man says. “They still got that lazy schvartze in right field.”

  “Very nice.” I sigh and close my eyes for a moment.

  Actually, the neighborhood’s changed in a lot of ways, I notice as we continue down Main Street. Every other store on this strip is now owned by either Chinese or Korean immigrants. All the newsstands, produce markets, discount shops, and dry cleaners look the same as they did when I was growing up, except they all have signs with Asian letters out front. The faces on the street are different too. Not just the Chinese and the Koreans, but more blacks, Indians, and Hispanics than I remember from before. Of course, they’re getting the same old dirty looks from the same older immigrants like my father, who came to this area to avoid these people in the first place.

  “Okay,” he says as we turn and make our way down Blossom Avenue. “You can stop with the complaining. We made it home.”

  Here is the house I couldn’t wait to get away from. The chain-link fence around the front yard. The steel gates on all the windows. The blue-and-red stickers on the front door saying the house is protected by security patrols and electronic devices. The old brown rug and the musty, ancient smell in the hallway that I could never quite put a name to. The oppressive stillness of the air. At the end of the hall, the drab, gray light filtering into the kitchen through the raggedy curtains. To the left, in the living room, the rabbit-earred antenna on top of the old Zenith black-and-white television. And the orderly stacks of the New York Post and the Jewish Press surrounding the green couch as though it were a fortress of conservative opinion under siege.

  “Where do you want these, Pops?” I ask. My arms ache from carrying all these groceries.

  “Put them down a second,” my father says. “If you have to.” He’s at the other end of the hall already, opening the door to the basement.

  I put the bags down by the front door. As I stand up, I notice a thirty-two-ounce Louisville Slugger baseball bat in the umbrella stand. I pick it up and feel its weight in my hands. It’s signed by Dave Winfield.

  “Hey, Pops,” I shout down the hall. “What’s this for?”

  My father comes toward me slowly as the last rays of the sun stream through the little window in the front door. At first he doesn’t seem to grasp my question.

  “What’s this for?” I ask, slapping the head of the bat into my palm.

  “This,” says my father, grabbing the handle of the bat with his left hand, “is for them.” He points out the window with his right hand.

  I look where he’s pointing. “It’s for the trees?” I say. “You’re gonna use a baseball bat to beat up the trees?”

  My father doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem to have enough lips left for a happy expression anyway. “For the schvartzes,” he says.

  I frown and look away from him. “Come on, Pops, get real,” I say, turning on the hall light. My mother’s old fixture on the ceiling is so thick and dirty that hardly any light comes through. “You think black people are coming to get you?”

  “They’re here already.” My father looks uncomfortable and moves down the hallway using the bat like a cane. “Didn’t you see? From the Bronx I moved you and your mother to get away from them. Now they’re in Flushing.”

  “It’s a free country, Pops.”

  “Hah.” My father gives a hacking cough that makes his throat sound like a handball court. “Free for them. Not for me.”

  “These are middle-class people in this neighborhood. They’re not gonna bother you.”

  “What do you know?” he says sharply.

  “You’re just being crazy again,” I say, prodding one of the grocery bags with my foot. “Anyway, even if they were coming to get you, your setup here is stupid. You’ve got a baseball bat by the front door. Why couldn’t they just grab the bat and go down the hall and beat your brains out while you’re sleeping?”

  “I got another bat in the bedroom.”

  “Brilliant.” I snort a small laugh as I follow my father down the hall. “I can’t talk to you about this. This is nuts.”

  He stops in the doorway and moves toward me suddenly. “A man does what he does to survive,” he says, shaking the bat at me.

  I throw up my hands. “Don’t gimme that again, please.”

  “It’s true,” my father says forcefully.

  “You know something?”

  The old man ignores me and keeps talking. “Someday, you’ll
know it’s true,” he says loudly.

  “Hey, you know something …”

  “Because one day, you’ll do what I had to do …”

  “Hey, you know what?” I say, touching his shoulder. “I agree with you. What you’re saying makes sense—but only if you’re in Auschwitz!”

  My father slams the bat against the doorway. “Don’t make a joke …”

  “I’m not making a joke. You’re not in Auschwitz anymore. This is America. Okay? The same rules don’t apply.”

  The argument is always the same and it always leaves me pissed-off and downhearted. It’s true that my father has had a hard life, and that at times he had to be ruthless and completely selfish just to stay alive. When I was young, he told me how he almost killed another prisoner over a couple of scraps of bread, and the story has haunted me ever since.

  The problem is that my father has applied the exact same logic to life after the camps and he’s still paranoid, bitter, and absolutely indifferent to the suffering of the rest of the world. He’s ruined his own life and my mother’s with his compulsions, and now he’s almost done closing himself off.

  I’d like to think my own life is the opposite. Even on my worst days at probation, I figure I must be all right since my father disapproves of what I’m doing.

  “One day you’ll know what I’m talking about,” he says wearily as he props the baseball bat up against the wall and begins shuffling toward the groceries by the front door. “You’re just like me, you just don’t know it.”

  “Total bullshit,” I say. “I’m not like you. I’m normal.”

  “Oy,” my father says.

  “Look, I’m very sorry about what happened to you and to all those other Jews, but I’m not gonna spend my life running scared about something that happened to somebody else forty-five years ago.”

  My father cries out like he’s been stabbed.

  “Well, I don’t really expect you to go along with that,” I tell him. “But I’ve got my own life. Okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.” My father is trying to lift the bags at the other end of the hall. “I got my life too.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I exhale deeply and slap my hands together, ready to move on.

  I wish there was another subject I could talk about with him. Cars, sports, women. Just things we could laugh about over a beer the way other fathers and sons do. But then we’ve never been like other fathers and sons. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother coming by the house at all. My father has driven everyone else away. And he doesn’t seem to really appreciate my visits. But I still have a vague, hungry feeling, like I’m expecting to find something I want here.

  My throat feels dry. I could use a drink now, but my father probably doesn’t have anything in the house, except Mogen David grape wine. Maybe I can pop around the corner to the Irish bar later.

  “So you want me to give you a hand with those groceries?” I ask him.

  The old man throws back his shoulders and draws up his thick, barbed eyebrows. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  I lumber down to where my father is and begin picking up the bags. “So you never told me what you got all this for anyway. Are you actually having somebody over?”

  “Not like that,” he mutters, pushing one of the bags with his foot toward the door to the basement.

  “Let me guess,” I say as I walk down the hall with the bags, steadying myself against the wall. “When those invading schvartzes come through the front door, you want to give them something to nosh on before you clobber them with your Louisville Slugger.”

  “You’re very funny,” my father says in a dead voice.

  I hoist the bags up and follow the old man down the stairs to the basement. Each step creaks and threatens to snap right out from under me. The hallway smell is here too, though much stronger. There’s no light at all. The only reason I don’t trip and fall is that I grew up going up and down these steps. When I get to the bottom, I put the bags down and windmill my arms in relief.

  My father finally turns on the light. It’s a moment before I get my bearings.

  I take a good look around and begin to shake my head. What my father has done down here is extraordinary—in fact, it’s the most orderly, sustained act of madness of his largely irrational life.

  There’s a tall stack of Del Monte sliced peaches against one wall. Dozens of saltine cracker boxes are piled against the adjacent wall. In the dim light of one bare yellowish bulb, I can’t see all the Bumblebee tuna cans lined up against the boiler, but there are at least one hundred of them. On the other side of the basement, there are rows of Gatorade and Mott’s apple juice bottles. It’s like he’s built himself a kind of fallout shelter in case race war breaks out in Queens.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask him.

  “I just have to,” my father says. “I just have to.”

  I try to think of something to say, but no words come to me. A steady drizzle of dust falls from the ceiling and the old pipes make wrenching sounds. I bow my head, turn back to the stairway, and slowly head upstairs toward the faint light.

  9

  “LET ME ASK YOU something,” Richard Silver said. “I was sitting in here before and I was looking around—and it’s a very nice bathroom, I admit. I paid a lot of money for it. And there’s mirrors on the ceiling and there’s mirrors on all the walls. Right? There’s mirrors everywhere you look. Right?”

  Both he and Jessica Riley looked up at their reflections on the ceiling.

  “Right,” she said.

  “So why do I wanna watch myself take a crap?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either.” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “I see myself sitting on the toilet and I think of death.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I look fat sitting on the toilet. I look like Elvis Presley just before he died.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “I’m the same age as Elvis Presley.”

  “No, you’re not,” Jessica said. “Elvis was forty-two. You’re forty-eight.”

  “I’m forty-nine. Thanks a lot.”

  “What’re you wearing tonight?”

  “Green Armani suit, red tie, black shoes I just picked up at Church’s.” He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. “Maybe I don’t mean like Elvis Presley. Maybe I mean like a Roman senator about to expire in the baths. You know?” He looked at her. “What’re you making that face for?”

  “You’re thinking about death a lot.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m thinking about the value of things.”

  “What?”

  “Look at this,” he said, taking a gold-backed toothbrush out of the medicine cabinet. “My secretary got this for me the other day as a birthday present from Hammacher Schlemmer.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So look at it. Half the bristles are gone already.”

  “But, Richard,” she said with a sigh. “This is a joke. This isn’t a real toothbrush. She got you this as a joke.”

  “Yes, it was a joke, but there’s a serious point underneath.”

  She waited three beats before she asked what it was.

  “Society is falling apart from the bottom up,” he said. “We can’t even make a toothbrush with bristles that stay on and people expect us to maintain the infrastructure of the greatest city on earth. It’s madness. The fabric that holds society together is tearing.”

  “You are in a bad mood.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” He shrugged. “Get outta here a second, will you. I gotta take a leak.”

  She stepped outside and let him close the door. She paused at a mirror and pulled down the top of her terry cloth robe to see if her shoulders got tanned. There were faint white stripes where the bikini straps had been. Inside, the sound of his piss hitting the porcelain was like a xylophone solo echoing through the bathroom.

  “So how’d things go with that guy downtown today?” she asked.

  “That’s just
what I was talking about.”

  Jessica stepped back into the bathroom. “What?”

  He shook his head. “This kid at probation. I go down there. And it’s the bizarro universe, I swear. Twenty years ago I would’ve had somebody like this guy getting me coffee. Now he’s telling me what to do. Like I said, society’s coming apart. I gotta get an angle on this guy, though. He’s power-mad.”

  “What does Larry say?”

  “Larry says I gotta deal with the guy, otherwise we’re gonna have problems.” He finished buttoning his shirt and his shoulders heaved in resignation. “Speaking of Larry, he still didn’t close that Long Island deal. I’m gonna be an old man before I see any money off it. Jimmy Rose would’ve never let this thing drag on so long.”

  “Is that what’s been bothering you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “That Jimmy isn’t around anymore.”

  He looked hard in the medicine cabinet mirror as though he thought he’d find the answer there. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “There’s just some days …”

  “Some days what?”

  He turned sideways and looked at his stomach in the mirror. “There’s just some days I believe life is not what it was.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “You worried about getting old?”

  There was a long silence. He loosened the belt of her robe and reached inside. “You know something,” Richard Silver said. “If I wasn’t making a lot of money and getting laid regular, I sometimes think I’d be a miserable sonovabitch.”

  10

  THE SOUND COMES FROM very far away, moving slowly toward the edge of hearing. A deep, resonant voice describing terrible, nightmarish things. A house on fire. Children with guns. Blacks and whites at each other’s throats.

  Another cop shot, the radio newscaster says. The mayor announcing a new budget problem. A water main explosion on the East Side. A Brazilian tourist slashed in a Times Square mugging. A real estate magnate’s tax evasion trial. A mother of two in the Bronx killed in the cross fire between two drug dealers. Dow Jones down seventy-five points. A wealthy businessman calling for the death penalty and a tax break. A shooting spree at a midtown disco. A famous fashion designer dead from AIDS. The Mets losing to the Cubs,