Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

The name is familiar from Darryl King’s file, but I don’t remember the exact details. “Who’s Bobby Kirk?”

  “Bobby the House was one of Darryl’s partners when they robbed that gas station,” Lloyd says in a languorous voice, opening the story up to the group. “They hang out at Playland on Times Square sometimes. Bobby’s what you’d call a mean motherfucker. He’s about six foot four, 280 pounds, and he has a serious attitude, man. He once tore the door of a subway car off its hinges while the train was moving …”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “No one knows,” Lloyd says with a shrug. “All I know is Bobby ‘House’ Kirk’s got his name written in gold across his knuckles, and he once dangled another kid out a window at Spofford. And he’s scared shitless of Darryl King.”

  “So what you’re saying,” I say, “is that Darryl’s gotta be really bad.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  11

  A FEW MINUTES AFTER four o’clock, Darryl King stumbled out of the bedroom in his underwear. His sister’s five-year-old daughter, LaToya, was in the next room, watching a Yogi Bear cartoon on television with the volume turned all the way up.

  “Yo, turn that shit down,” Darryl told her.

  “Mommy said I could watch,” the little girl said, her words whistling through the space in her front teeth.

  “And I said, turn that shit down, I got a headache.” Darryl frowned and sat down in front of the couch. His niece leaned back on his bare legs.

  Paint was coming off the walls in sheets and there were rat-pellets all over the apartment. Wires stuck out from the baseboard where the phone jack used to be and urine seeped in under the front door because someone had taken a piss out in the hall again. There was another puddle in the corner where the ceiling had fallen in the week before. No one from the city had come to fix it, so the King family didn’t care anymore.

  On the television screen, Yogi Bear was giving his protégé Booboo a set of careful instructions about what to do in their next adventure. Yogi then turned and walked right smack into a tree trunk, flattening his entire face.

  “Yo, what’s up with that bear?” Darryl said.

  LaToya squealed with delight and shook her pigtails. She had a sweet gap-toothed smile and a light in her eyes that no one else in the family had. “He funny, Dooky!” she said.

  “He’s not funny,” Darryl said. “He be acting ill.”

  He leaned forward to nuzzle her head affectionately. A clarinet played on the sound track while Yogi sat on the ground watching stars go around his head. Darryl and his niece laughed as the bear jumped in the air and his feet whirled like propellers. The sun was coming through the broken window and an opened pack of Oreos sat on the table. Next to it was the Rolex he’d taken off the Spanish guy in Times Square last night. Only one small dot of blood marred the glass over the dial. He was starting to feel better now.

  LaToya suddenly whipped around to look at him. “Grandma says don’t miss your pointment,” she said in a high voice.

  His face coiled up. “Moms said I got an appointment?”

  “She say be downtown.”

  “For my probation officer?”

  She smiled widely and nodded up and down vigorously. “And what if I don’t wanna go?” he asked her.

  She made an angry face and balled up her fist like she was going to clobber him. “You better.”

  “Shit.” He grabbed her fist and stood up. “You don’t have to tell me nothin’. I’m all ready for my appointment.”

  He hopped around on one leg, doing karate kicks and kung fu chops, like he was warming up for a big fight. LaToya just stared at him. In the bedroom down the hall, something fell over and one of Darryl’s children started crying. Darryl tried to ignore the sound for a minute, turning back to the TV screen.

  Yogi Bear had just run smack into another tree and now he was desperately trying to straighten out his snout again.

  “Bear must be on the pipe,” Darryl said.

  12

  AFTER GETTING ALL WORKED up about Maria, I’m grateful that the next appointment is somebody I don’t know. A skinny kid with hair down to his ass and studded leather wristbands. His name is Gary DeStefano and he plays bass in a heavy metal band called Sodomy and Gomorrah. He’s on probation for breaking a beer bottle over another musician’s head outside a bar.

  “There’s a lot of frustration and anger in our music, you know,” he explains, sinking so far down in his chair that he’s almost looking straight up at the ceiling. His legs are splayed out before him like octopus tentacles.

  “Why’re you so frustrated?”

  “’Cos we’re not too good,” he says after giving it some thought. “People don’t understand how hard it is to play your instrument when you’re wearing eighty to one hundred pounds of fur and armor.”

  “I’ll bet.” I start to take notes.

  “And what’s really like a bitch is moving it around between gigs, you know.”

  “Where do you play?”

  “Around. Wherever. L’Amour’s in Brooklyn and Queens. CBGB’s. You know that place?”

  “Sure.” I smile.

  “The place is a dive, dude,” Gary says. “And we once even opened for a crucifixion.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I put my pen down.

  “Oh yeah,” says Gary, happy to have any kind of audience. “We were playing to a biker club in Bay Ridge and after we were done they decided to have a sacrifice. I guess they really liked us or something. So they got this kid, you know. And they got him to put on a harness and a hood. And they put him up on a cross.”

  “You’re kidding,” I say, trying to keep my mouth from falling open.

  “I’m not. He wanted them to do it too, you know. He was like this really weird dude. Anyhow, they whipped him and put a votive candle up his butt. Which was okay with him, you know. He liked it. And then, you know, they brought him across the street …”

  I can’t decide whether I’m appalled or fascinated “While he was still on the cross?”

  “Oh yeah, absolutely. They carried him on the cross across Fourth Avenue. It was like midnight and there was some traffic, but the cars waited for them to go by. So, anyway, they brought him across the street to the clubhouse and they began the ritual, you know. They started the music and a couple of guys dripped blood into a cup. And they were really gonna do it. They were really gonna like crucify him … But at the last minute they decided to spare his life.”

  “And how did you feel about all of this while it was going on?” I ask, leaning forward in my chair.

  “Wow,” says Gary. “Like I was really glad we didn’t have to follow that act.”

  As the day winds down, I find myself tensing up. I scream over the phone at a car thief who got a job at a parking garage and I take a call from a client’s mother, who says her son is shooting heroin again. What am I supposed to do?

  I’m not sure if it’s the new field assignment or the seven cups of coffee jangling my nerves. My stomach is cramping itself into a ball. I hate these days on the emotional roller coaster, going from angry to sorry to hopeful and then back again. Still the clients keep coming. By 7:30, I’ve speeded myself into a numb blur and I can’t remember what anyone said. My limbs feel heavy and useless from sitting here all day.

  The old anxieties start to creep over me: You’re not helping anyone. You’re wasting time. You’re burning out. Life is passing you by.

  Outside my cubicle, I hear the sounds of briefcases shutting, footsteps in the hall, voices grumbling down by the elevators. I don’t want to stay here much longer, but I’m not quite ready to go back to my cubbyhole on Avenue B. I sit at my desk, staring up at the photograph of the beach landscape, as though I could will myself into the picture.

  Sometimes I don’t think I understand my clients at all. I only see them for a fleeting moment, less than 1 percent of their time. And once they’re out of my sight, they’re going on with their lives while I’m still stuck in here, beati
ng around the inside of my skull. I wonder if the things we talk about in here mean anything to them after they leave. Sometimes I wish I could just break down the walls and find out for myself.

  It’s a little late to be worrying about all that now, though. I clear off my desk and get ready to head out the door when I hear something strange out in the hall.

  At first it’s a faint, high-pitched tone. It gets a little louder and I recognize the sound as violins. The strings begin to swell and a police siren wails. There’s a silence and then the beat kicks in. The joyless, insistent rhythm grows louder and louder outside the cubicle. Somebody is coming for me. A young man’s voice cuts in, ranting in angry rhymes. “Don’t try and outgun me/And this is a threat/There ain’t been a motherfucker who can do that yet.”

  He comes in. A solid-looking black kid with dark eyes that glimmer like precious stones under his heavy brow. I wonder if he dressed specially for the occasion to intimidate his probation officer. He hasn’t just embraced the racist stereotype-he’s perfected it as the ultimate “fuck you.” He wears a black Kangol hat, Guess jeans, ropes of gold chains around his neck as well as rings on his fingers, and a brand-new pair of Nikes with the tongues sticking out at obscene angles. A beeper for phone messages is clipped to his waistband. He cradles a black forty-eight-inch-long Sony radio cassette player in his arms as tenderly as a mother would hold a child. Its silver knobs and panels gleam from loving care and maintenance, and a rapper keeps declaring his virtues from its huge speakers. The rhythm pounds in my ears.

  He glares at me defiantly, but doesn’t say anything at first. An overpowering sweet, musky smell fills the cubicle.

  “What can I do for you?” I say.

  When he still doesn’t answer, I ask for his name.

  “Darryl King,” he says in a small nasal voice.

  “Have a seat, please.”

  I got my work cut out for me, I think, as he throws himself down into the new chair replacing the one Jack Pirone broke. While I search for his file, Darryl mutters along with another rap song, putting special gusto into the line “Sucker-ass nigger I should shoot you in the face.”

  “Yo, where’s this at?” he asks, looking at the picture of the beach landscape on the bank calendar. “You live there?”

  I ignore him and look at his record once more. “I see you’ve got like almost a dozen arrests in the last year or so.”

  He doesn’t respond at all.

  “Would you mind turning that radio down a little?” I say in a reasonably friendly voice. “I’ve got a little bit of a headache.”

  He leaves the radio on and keeps glaring at me.

  “Hey, Darryl, what’s the problem? Turn the radio off. I wanna talk to you.”

  He finally snaps it off. By now, most sensible people are long gone and the lights are dim around the rest of the office. Darryl looks past me and farts powerfully. There’s something strange about this guy. He’s clearly not happy to be here, but he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere else.

  “You know you’re coming in here a little late in the day,” I tell him, trying to maintain an even tone.

  He shakes his head and makes a disgusted ticking sound with his mouth, as if I’d just told some outrageous lie about him. “Man, why you clockin’ me?” he says. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  I find the pink office slip about what time he was supposed to come in and slide it across the desk to him. “What does that say?” I ask.

  Without even looking at it, he shoves the slip right back at me.

  “It says you were supposed to be here yesterday morning,” I say, picking the note up and putting it in his file.

  Darryl becomes very still. At first I’m not sure if he heard what I said. “Fuck that shit,” he says finally.

  “Fuck your shit,” I say. “What’s your excuse?”

  Darryl looks away from me and bursts into hysterical giggles, as though he’s sharing a joke with a small invisible friend in the corner. I write “Inappropriate responses” on his evaluation sheet and make a brief notation that he might have smoked crack before coming in here.

  My instinctive reaction is to be a little nervous. But my job is to try to turn him around. They used to have a saying in my social work program: Everybody likes the easy victims.

  The people you can really feel sorry for, because they haven’t done anything wrong. The little kids with AIDS. The sweet-tempered homeless woman. The forgotten old man in the nursing home. But it’s the hard ones that count for more sometimes. You know the people I’m talking about. The ones who spit in your face and really dare you to give a shit.

  So in spite of all the voices in my head telling me to get away from this guy as fast as I can, I force myself to give him another chance. I look him right in the eye without saying anything for a moment. I remember how Tommy Markham said Darryl had tried to intimidate him during their interview, and I wonder if he might be putting on an act for me too.

  “I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here,” I say, trying to get some warmth into my voice. “I just wanna get some sense of what’s going on in your life now.”

  He draws his head back skeptically and a little fold of skin appears under his chin. “Why?” he asks.

  “So I can find out why you’re doing these things.”

  “What things?”

  “The things that brought you here. You know. Robbing the gas station.” I check his rap sheet. “This arrest for assault with a deadly weapon. Burglary. More robbery …”

  “Arrests.” He hisses the word. “Not convicted.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I say. “The only guilty plea is on the gas station robbery. But you know what I’m talking about, even if you’re not getting caught.”

  His eyes sweep across the ceiling as if he’s barely hearing me, but I go on anyway. “You know, a lot of people would look at your record and say you’re just a bad guy, and they should lock you up,” I tell him. “But it’s not my job to judge you like that, necessarily.”

  Darryl just looks at me. Though he doesn’t say it, the word “sucker” hangs in the air as vividly as a neon sign.

  “You don’t know me,” he says in a slow, belligerent voice. “You don’t know what I can do with my mentality.” He puts a little polish on the last word to show he’s good at picking things up.

  “All right. Let’s get to know each other then.”

  He folds his arms and half closes his eyes.

  “I see you have a Harlem address on your arrest report,” I say. “Do you live with your parents?”

  “My mother.”

  “Your parents divorced?” A form question.

  Darryl smirks. “They were never married.”

  “Where’s your dad now?”

  The smirk disappears. “I dunno,” Darryl King mumbles.

  I light a cigarette and ask for a daytime phone number for his mother.

  “She was here before. You could’ve asked her …”

  “She dropped you off?”

  “She was seeing her officer …” he murmurs.

  “Uh-huh. She’s on probation too?”

  “She was framed, just like me.”

  “What was the charge?”

  “They say she stab Mark,” Darryl says.

  “Is Mark her current boyfriend or something?”

  “No. Mark my friend at the projects. He fifteen.”

  Another note: “Home environment not condusive to rehabilitation.” I correct it to “conducive.” His answers seem to be getting less composed as they go along. I might not have gotten an honest response out of him yet, but the act is definitely slipping. Maybe I can get through to this fucker. “So why would she want to stab your friend?” I ask.

  “Homeboy tried to get bad with me,” he says impatiently.

  “Why?”

  “See, Mark got mad ’cos he say I throw his mother down the steps. Right? He threatened me with violence. So my moms don’t like him.”


  I’m not sure what to believe now. “Let’s back up a second,” I say. “Why did you throw Mark’s mother down the steps?”

  “Bitch say I get her pregnant. She say I threw her down the steps. I don’t. No arrest, no indictment, no grand jury. Nothin’.”

  I give the Silly Putty in my pocket a squeeze and try to stay cool. Jack says that if they see they’ve gotten to you emotionally, you’re no longer an effective probation officer. But if I don’t get myself psyched-up, I don’t see how I’m ever going to reach this guy.

  The beeper goes off on his waistband, but he doesn’t bother checking to see what number is on it. He just starts acting agitated, like he already knows who’s calling him.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “My fuckin’ job, man,” Darryl says absentmindedly.

  “What job?”

  He stops and gives me a disingenuous smile. “I don’t be discussing that. The court didn’t remand me. I’m in your custody for supervision, not investigation,” he says, slipping into the practiced legalese he’s learned through years spent going in and out of the criminal justice system. “You don’t be asking me questions like that. You ain’t no cop. You’re just a social worker, that’s all. I know what time it is.”

  “Oh no? Well I disagree.”

  “Well, suck my dick.”

  He folds his arms across his chest and defiantly puts his feet up on my desk.

  “Would you mind putting your feet down?” I say to him.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I asked you.”

  His feet remain on top of my paper tray. “I’m comfortable,” he tells me.

  It’s time to deal with this guy on his terms. After all, Ms. Lang wanted me to lean on him a little. I reach across the desk, lift his right foot an inch or two, move it over, and drop it over the side. “My house, my rules,” I say.

  I come around the desk and sit on the front of it, leaning forward so my nose is just an inch or two from Darryl’s. His features remain absolutely still. His mouth is closed so tight that it’s hard to believe that it’ll ever open again. His eyes are bloodshot. From the smell of his breath, you’d think a little man had crawled up inside him and died.