“Is that so?” asked Winston.
“I should know,” said Darryl’s mother proudly. “I was the prime testee on my block.”
“Damn.” Darryl gave his mother a stern look.
“Back when I was your age, Darryl, I was shootin’ up heroin for five years,” she told him. “We didn’t have it as easy as you all. Drugs cost more, they was harder to get, and they was harder to take. You understand what I’m saying? That’s the problem with this country now. The youth have it too easy.”
In the meantime, Winston was trying to demonstrate to Darryl and the others how to stuff the crack into the small glass vials and put rubber caps on them. He did a dozen vials himself and then he told Aaron to try.
“Very good,” Winston said. “Aaron is a good factory worker. This is our factory now, and we are a corporation.”
Winston explained that while he was busy dealing with his suppliers in Miami and the Kennedy Airport area, the posse should have somebody making crack twenty-four hours a day in the small apartment. He designated Darryl King’s mother to be the financial comptroller at the factory, paying workers five hundred dollars a week. He gave his girlfriend, Joanna, responsibility for overseeing the street peddlers, who made roughly one thousand dollars each. The more industrious ones could make ten times that amount in a week. Winston told Joanna to be wary of ambitious young dealers trying to slice off a piece of the territory for themselves.
“Only give it to them on consignment,” he said. “At the very, very most, a hundred and fifty capsules at a time. We don’t want them to run away on us.”
“What about me?” Darryl said. “After what I did, I should get to be more than just enforcer.”
“Darryl,” said Winston Murvin. “You are our first and most loyal customer.”
28
I TAKE TIME OFF around lunchtime to finish some of the paperwork for the Darryl King violation. I call Judge Bernstein’s chambers to set up a court date and then slowly type a second letter to Darryl, whiting out all the words I misspell along the way. He didn’t respond to the first one I sent, so there’s no reason to expect he’ll answer this one either, but I don’t mind the extra work. If I don’t cover myself now, the judge will find the hole in my case later and throw me in it.
“Make sure you touch all the bases,” Jack Pirone used to say in our training sessions. “The system can afford to fuck up; you can’t.” I find Darryl’s home phone number in my file and dial it. I don’t particularly want to speak to him again, but there’s a regulation that says I have to make every possible effort to reach him before the date of the violation hearing.
The line has a tinny, unnerving buzz. I let it ring nearly a dozen times before somebody picks up. Then it’s another thirty seconds before I hear anyone speak.
“Hello?” says a meek, high-pitched voice.
“Ah hi,” I say. “Is Darryl King there?”
“I don’t know.” She sounds like a sweet, older woman. She doesn’t say anything for a moment. From her steady breathing, I can tell she has not moved an inch away from the phone.
“Hello,” I say. “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Can you please check if Darryl is there for me, ma’am?”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry.” She makes her voice even smaller and wispier. “Darryl … Darryl … Darl…”
She’s just holding the phone a little ways from her mouth and whispering to herself. Darryl King could only hear her if he was three inches high and standing on her shoulder. She clearly doesn’t want to find Darryl even if he is there.
“I’m sorry,” she says in a voice that’s said “sorry” more than any other word over the course of a lifetime. “He doesn’t seem to be here right now.”
I explain who I am and why I’m calling.
She keeps saying “uh-huh” in a happy, agreeable tone. Anyone listening to her end of the conversation would think she was being offered a free magazine subscription and a weekend in the Bahamas.
I ask her if she’s Darryl King’s mother.
“I’m Darryl’s great-grandma, Ethel.”
“Um, I don’t like having to do this, Mrs… . uh, ma’am,” I say. “But you must tell Darryl it’s very important for him to come to court on the date I gave you. Otherwise, he’s going to be in even more trouble than he is right now.”
“I understand.”
“See, because …”
“Darryl is a good boy,” she says suddenly. “He is actually a very nice person … He just do have … his little moods sometimes.”
“What kind of moods?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Does he have moods from taking drugs?” I ask.
Still nothing.
“What does he do when he’s in these moods? Does he break things? Ma’am? Does he steal things? Does he hurt anybody?”
She seems to realize I’m trying to gather evidence against her great-grandson because she maintains her silence. A fly buzzes around my cubicle and lands on my desk directly in front of me. I go to swat it, but the fly jumps off quickly and I bang my hand on the edge. It takes several seconds for the pain to subside.
“Well, Darryl isn’t in right now,” she says. “I believe he’s gone downtown to see his friends at the video arcade.”
“Is that right?” She must be talking about Playland, the place on Times Square that Lloyd told me about.
“Maybe I should have Darryl call you,” his great-grandmother finally says in her smallest voice. “Could I have your number please?”
I give it to her and then she does something unusual. She asks me to give her my office address. “Thank you very, very, very much, Mr. Baum,” she says. “You take care.”
Normally, that would be enough. But this time, Ms. Lang comes marching right back into my cubicle with the “violation of probation” papers I’d just dropped on her desk.
“You touch all the bases?” she says. “You talk to Darryl?”
“I called his house, but he wasn’t there,” I tell her.
“Did they say where he was?”
“Well … sort of.”
The Playland video arcade is next to a television studio and a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Times Square. In its windows, there are monster masks and signs advertising that photo IDs and authentic military dog tags are available here. Just standing on the sidewalk outside, you can hear it’s a noisy place, but when you walk in, it’s like entering a fire zone in Beirut. The air is thick with electronically produced sounds of gunfire, car crashes, and women screaming.
I glance around and take in the names of the video games making this racket: Street Fighters. Shadow Warrior. Operation Wolf. Two Crude. Ninja Star. Castle of the Dragon. Crime City. Basket Brawl. The titles alone are an assault on the senses. A sad-eyed girl with a ring through her nose slouches against a machine called Forgotten Worlds. Next to her a bullnecked boy in a backward baseball cap is ignoring her and holding on to a loud game called RoboCop. He’s so riveted to the screen that you’d think it’s giving him electroshock therapy. In fact, the whole atmosphere of the arcade is so intense and obsessive that it’s easy to forget there’s actually daylight outside.
“Happy Motherfucker’s Day,” someone walking by me mumbles.
On the whole, I’d rather have piano wire wrapped around my neck than be here, but I have no choice. Ms. Lang wants to take special care with this case, so she won’t let me file Darryl’s violation unless I’ve actually made contact with him before the court date.
After a couple of minutes of searching, I spot Darryl King near the back of the place. He’s wearing a couple less chains than the last time I saw him and a pair of jeans that look just a little loose on him. The game he’s playing is called Devastators. Just standing behind him, I can see he’s very good at it. The game is essentially a cartoon version of the movie Rambo: A burly Sylvester Stallone-type figure stands at the bottom of the screen, waiting to be attacked by an army of men in gray
uniforms. Using a lever and two buttons, Darryl maneuvers the Stallone figure with great skill, deftly evading half the men in gray and killing the rest by stabbing them and shooting them. Eventually, the Stallone figure reaches the top of the screen and blows up the gray army’s ammo dump. The whole screen explodes in celebration and flashes Darryl’s score of fifteen thousand points over and over.
“Well, all right,” says Darryl.
He almost steps on my foot backing away from the machine and then turns around abruptly.
“Remember me?” I say.
For a split second, his features come together in the middle of his face, like he’s about to get mad and punch me out right now. I remind myself that we’re still on neutral territory here, halfway between my office and Darryl’s home, so I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
“I’m Steve Baum,” I remind him. “Your probation officer.”
A few more seconds pass while he decides how to react. The Pac-Man machine behind him plays a cheerful ditty and an old guy with smelly hair walks by pushing a broom over the blue-and-white checked floor. Whitney Houston smiles at me from a poster on the wall. Slowly, Darryl begins to smile too.
“Yeah, I know you,” he says to me. “You my nigger.”
Now I’m sure he’s confused, but he sidles up next to me like we’re old friends who haven’t seen each other since high school. I notice for the first time that we’re about the same height, though his forearms are about twice the size of mine.
“What’s up, Mr. Bomb?” he asks. “I didn’t know you was coming here.”
He says this like he would’ve prepared hors d’oeuvres if he’d been alerted. When he’s grinning this way, his face has an open, boyish quality. If I was just meeting him now, I’d take an instant liking to him. He seems like a charming, normal kid. I have to force myself to remember what he was like that night he came into my office.
“You know you’ve missed a couple of your appointments,” I tell him.
He looks abashed, like a child confronted with a toy he’s just broken. “I know,” he says. “I was ill.”
“You were ill?”
A machine called Elvira screams and a dumpy, effeminate man brushes by me on his way to the fake jewelry counter on the south side of the arcade. Darryl looks me right in the eye for a moment and then dips his head shyly. “I’m sorry,” he says in a quiet voice.
I figure this is a guy who’s been through the criminal justice system enough times to know when he’s supposed to put on a good boy act. So the surprise isn’t so much that he’s behaving himself now, but that he acted so violent when he was in my office before.
“You know we still have some unfinished business to discuss,” I tell him. “Our first appointment was not what I’d call very satisfactory.”
He nods as though he’d been thinking the exact same thing and it’d been keeping him up at night. “Can I speak with you?” he says, putting a light hand on my arm and leading me toward a quiet corner of the arcade. At that moment, his touch is so gentle and his tone is so reassuring that the idea flashes into my mind that maybe all of this has been a terrible misunderstanding and he is just a victim of circumstance after all. I wonder if it’s possible that I judged him too quickly. I think of the thing I saw in his file about him being raised in a foster home.
But then we pass a skinny boy with a harelip and a flattop and he looks at Darryl like he’s waiting for some kind of signal. I get a peculiar tightness in my gut that reminds me of the training session I had at Rodman’s Neck. I wonder if I’m about to get jumped here. From Darryl’s arrest record, I remember he’s got plenty of experience with assaults. The front door is only about thirty yards away, but with all these machines and all the noise they’re making, it’s doubtful that anyone would see me or hear me if anything bad happened back here.
Darryl is standing in front of a video game called Gang Wars. He fishes around in his pants pockets and then pulls out two quarters and puts them into the machine. Without taking his eyes off me, he pushes the button allowing two people to play the game.
“So now you’ve got yourself in all this trouble,” I tell Darryl. “Why’ve you been fucking up so much?”
“I got so much confusion on my mind,” he says.
On the Gang Wars video screen behind him, a narrative is unfolding. Yellow letters appear against a black background, saying: “New York. The 21st Century. A girl is kidnapped by someone unknown.” The letters fade and an animated street scene appears. A run-down cityscape of abandoned tenement buildings, craggy sidewalks, and sinister garages. Another Rambo-type guy in a tank top and a headband walks across the screen. Darryl turns and starts controlling his movements with the lever and buttons on the machine.
Darryl keeps talking even as he’s playing the game. “See, what I need to do is get some place where I can get all the shit out of my head. You know what I’m saying? ’Cos like, see, what I wanna do is try to get my own self into a position to take advantage of the opportunities in the marketplace.”
What the fuck is he talking about? It sounds as though he’s been reading up on those business training schools on the matchbook covers.
On the screen, the Rambo guy is being set upon by three or four other steroid cases. The object of the game seems to be punching them and kicking them senseless so you can reach the kidnapped girl. I notice that Darryl is very good at having his Rambo guy beat people up, but he doesn’t seem to be making much progress in finding the kidnapped girl.
“Like I know I’m fucked up,” Darryl is saying. “But I got shit I wanna do. You know what I’m saying? It takes money to make money … work. I wanna expand. You know. Make contacts. I just need time to work it out, and then I’d have my shit together. Right? But now you come by my crib and that fucks me up all over again.”
“Well, the problem is not that I came by your crib,” I tell him as he continues to beat the crap out of people on the screen. “In fact, this isn’t your crib, it’s a public place. The problem is that you didn’t show up for your appointments, and when you did show up, you were acting out. So what am I supposed to do?”
He pushes a button and the Rambo guy on the screen punches someone twice his size in the face and kicks him in the nuts. “’S what I’m saying.” Darryl steps away from the machine as it flashes his score. “So step off, all right?”
“Step off?”
He waves his hands at me. “Gimme a break.”
“You got a break, and you went out and tried to steal a car.”
He makes this little ticking sound with his mouth and looks ever so slightly annoyed with me. I can tell he’s trying to hide his anger. A couple of other kids who seem to be friends of his are hovering nearby. I tell myself once more that I have nothing to be afraid of.
“So you got my letter, right?” I say.
“What?”
“The letter I sent you about the judge. You have a violation hearing in court next week. You know that, right?”
“Right,” he says. “It’s your turn.”
“What?”
He points to the video game. The Rambo guy is standing in the middle of the screen, waiting to be directed. A couple of his pumped-up enemies are approaching. One of them looks a little like the cartoon character Thor, with his flowing blond hair and huge hammer.
“Listen, Darryl, I don’t have time for this. I gotta get back to the office.”
“Still your turn,” he says, eyeing the game.
I halfheartedly put my hand on the lever and glance at the screen. My Rambo guy moves toward Thor and his hammer. Almost reflexively, I touch one of the buttons and my guy punches out Thor.
I turn back to Darryl. “So you got all that, right? You know you’re supposed to be in court next week. You should make sure you have a lawyer.”
“See, I was meaning to speak with you on that,” he says with a small smile.
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking maybe you could talk to the judge.”
<
br /> “I can’t do that. It’s out of my hands now.”
“Who give the papers to the judge?” he asks.
“I did.”
“Then it’s not out your hands.”
I happen to look down at the screen and see a man in a turban about to smash my Rambo guy over the head with a rock. I push a button labeled “jump” and my guy gets out of the way just in time.
“See, you took things out of my hands when you tried to steal that car,” I tell Darryl. “You broke the rules at probation and now you’re gonna have to pay the price. And if you get violated, it’s gonna be twice as bad as it would’ve been if stealing the car was your first offense.”
“So it’s like that,” he says. “Huh.”
There’s something disturbingly cold about the way he says the words. I recognize the tone. It’s the same one he used when he first came into my office. Before he started ranting. Like it wouldn’t bother him if I burst into flames now and burned to a cinder right in front of him. It’s like that. After all the nodding and smiling he’s been doing today, it’s as if the curtain has finally gone up, revealing the real guy who’s been standing up there all along.
“It’s like that,” I say.
He takes a deep breath and shakes his head. A white guy who looks like he could be a cop starts playing the machine next to me called Special Criminal Investigation. For a second, I get bold and say something to Darryl I almost immediately want to take back. “Of course things might be different if you were going to tell me about those guys who got done across the street.”
“Where?” he asks.
“From where you tried to steal the car. Those two crack guys who got killed across the street. If you were going to tell me something about that, I might be able to talk to the judge.”
The long pause in our conversation quickly gets filled up by beeps and screeches from the nearby machines. Darryl just looks at me. Once again I can’t read his expression. He might be thinking anything. He could be bored. He could be hungry. He could be in a homicidal rage. Looking at him is like staring into a deep, dark cave.
“I guess I see you in court,” he says.
Slow Motion Riot Page 15
