Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  Andrea takes my hand and accompanies me through the big oak doors. The old marble corridor has that peculiar sweaty scent that people give off when they’re desperate.

  Every few yards, variations on the same scene are being played out. The lawyer is almost always an older man wearing a three-piece suit despite the vicious heat. He’s usually talking very fast and gesturing extravagantly as he tries to delineate the plea-bargain procedure to the clients, who are almost all under twenty-five and often have small children with them. Few seem to understand the deals their lawyers have made, but most are resigned to the result. It’s a little like walking down an assembly line at a movie studio. The dialogue and individual characters are all a little different, but the basic scenario rarely changes.

  Andrea and I round the corner to the elevators and almost walk right into Darryl King, his mother, and their lawyer. The confrontation unfolds so suddenly and unexpectedly that I don’t have time to collect my thoughts or react properly.

  Darryl points one finger at me and closes the rest of his hand into the shape of a gun. Something seems to catch fire behind his eyes.

  “Fuck you, man,” he says. “You dead.”

  His words are nothing. They’re banal. Schoolyard stuff. It’s just the way he says them that hits me like a punch in the face.

  The elevator doors open and Andrea pushes me in. “Your next appointment is Friday,” I tell Darryl before the doors close. “Don’t be late … Dooky.”

  33

  “YOU HEAR WHAT THAT motherfucker called me?” Darryl King asked, pushing through the clumps of people standing outside 100 Centre Street, with his mother and lawyer trailing behind him.

  “What?” His mother could barely keep her eyes open.

  “He call me ‘Dooky.’ Man, I ain’t with that. You know what I’m saying? Motherfuckers got killed for saying less.”

  “That’s right,” his mother said.

  “Motherfuckers got killed for saying nothing at all. Like last Christmas …”

  His mother suddenly became alert and gave him a look that said: Stop talking. They kept going along the curve of Centre Street, heading toward the great stone edifices of New York’s federal courthouse and the municipal building. Small Chinese women scurried by them, plucking soda cans out of the steel-mesh garbage receptacles.

  Darryl was still indignant, spitting and clenching his fists, as if he’d lost the case. “Man, he shouldn’t be acting like that,” he said.

  “Who?” his mother asked.

  “Mr. Bomb. He’s supposed to be my P.O. Why’s he all over my shit?”

  Goldfarb, the lawyer, was silently trudging along beside them with his heavy briefcase. Even in the day’s bright sunshine, he seemed gloomy and bewildered, like an old magician who’d accidentally conjured up an unwieldy beast. Now he finally spoke.

  “Excuse me, young man,” he said. “But I would say your probation officer is the least of your troubles.”

  Darryl’s face got tight. “Say what?”

  The lawyer put down his briefcase and smoothed his shock of white hair, like he was preparing to perform one final trick to bring the curtain down. “If you get arrested again, you are going to find yourself having a very hard time raising bail,” he said, wagging a finger at Darryl. “I’ve seen many young men just like you, and the courts will not look kindly on your next appearance. I’m sure your poor mother has already lost hundreds of dollars in bail money because of your prior arrests and it will be very difficult to find another bail bondsman who’ll be willing to stake you.”

  Darryl and his mother had been listening patiently to his sidewalk lecture, but now Darryl put up his hand like he’d heard enough. “’Scuse me, Mr. Goldberg.”

  “Goldfarb…”

  “I know,” Darryl said pointedly. “You best go back and study your book. In New York State, you get all your bail money returned once you go in probation. That don’t have no effect on future bail application.”

  “Is that true?” Goldfarb looked stunned. He scrambled to recover the high ground. “But you know, you still may have trouble getting a bail bondsman.”

  Darryl handed his wallet to his mother. “Show ’im, Moms,” he said.

  She started taking business cards out of the wallet and flashing them at the old lawyer. “Rothman and Sons Bail Bonds,” she read in a droning voice. “Jacobs and Sullivan. Max Miller. Hagen and Seligman Bail Bonds …”

  “Those are my homeboys,” Darryl interrupted. “My credit is good with any of ’em. Is yours?”

  His mother handed him the wallet back and he put it in his pocket. “So don’t you be giving me a lecture too, Goldberg,” he said. “I got enough from my P.O.”

  Passing cars stirred old newspapers and paper cups in the gutter. Darryl and his mother were moving faster now, leaving behind Goldfarb, who was still staggering along with his heavy briefcase. The old lawyer shifted the case from one hand to the other, cleared his throat, and kicked a pigeon out of the way. His shoes seemed to sink into the hot asphalt with each step he took.

  Darryl King and his mother were about one hundred yards ahead of him now. He just barely caught sight of the two of them as they crossed the street and disappeared into the rage of cars, people, and colors around Foley Square.

  34

  MY FIRST DAY WITH the Field Service Unit begins at 4:30 on a Tuesday morning. Something about the way the pinkish-gray sky breaks over Manhattan at that hour always makes me melancholy. And really irritable. Another day is beginning and the fact that I’m up so early means that I didn’t accomplish what I set out to do the night before. Which usually means getting laid or getting obliterated.

  In the shower, I think about Andrea as the mortifyingly cold water streams down my back. I wonder if she’ll ever take me seriously. She’ll probably just find another boyfriend when she goes back to law school in the fall anyway. I dry off and get out the big blue bulletproof vest I was issued yesterday. It looks like an apron for a chef at an industrial barbecue. I fasten the Velcro straps and pull a black T-shirt on over the vest. Then I put on a pair of jeans, black sneakers, and my windbreaker.

  Unfortunately, the train downtown doesn’t have air-conditioning, and I start sweating as soon as I sit down. A homeless woman with a collapsing face stares at me from across the car. The old man beside me babbles on graciously like a guest on a talk show for demented people.

  I arrive at headquarters on Leonard Street just before 5:30. For my first tour, I get two experienced partners.

  Bill Neill is a heavyset, dark-complexioned black guy in his forties, who served with the infantry in Vietnam. He has a thick Brooklyn accent, practically chain-smokes cigars, and votes Republican whenever possible. Because of a bad shrapnel wound in his left knee, he has to elevate the entire leg at a peculiar angle once every ten minutes or so.

  He also has a ridiculously overconfident way of speaking that makes almost everything he says sound instantly suspect. “You know they got a lot of us addicted to monkey tranquilizer in Vietnam,” he tells me within ten minutes of our first meeting. “Just ’cos they ran out of morphine. Now there are over ten thousand monkey tranq addicts in the United States. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  I find Bill slightly intimidating and immensely likable. His partner is a thirty-six-year-old former gang leader named Angel Vasquez. Angel, who has a lean, athletic build and high cheekbones, has boxed professionally and studied developmental psychology. I quickly learned that he is equally at ease quoting Clint Eastwood movies and The Drama of the Gifted Child.

  Bill and him are constantly arguing about politics, but they have an easy, jokey rapport and a long-standing friendship.

  “I been with this unit a year,” Angel says as he shows me to a locker. “And I’m telling you that you’re gonna like being out on the streets, man. You don’t have to mess around so much with other people’s superegos and that family therapy bullshit.”

  “But I don’t know if I’m quite ready to give up being a re
gular probation officer. I still have a lot of paperwork to take care of and people to see …”

  “How long you been with the department, man?” Angel asks.

  “Two years.”

  “You would’ve burned out sooner or later.”

  I think about my recent encounters with Darryl King and shake my head. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess maybe you’re right.”

  “You know it, baby.” Angel slaps me on the back. “It’s real simple in this unit. You don’t have to go through that psychic torture. If we have a warrant for the clients here, that means they had their shot and they blew it and we go out there to lock ’em up. Nobody gives us any static. If they come from a dysfunctional background, it’s not our fault. And the best part is you don’t go home worrying about someone else’s problems.”

  Bill Neill ambles into the locker room a couple of minutes later and presents me with my first department-issued .38-caliber service revolver. He helps me put the gun belt through the loops in my jeans and secures the holster on my hip.

  “Don’t look at it so funny,” Bill tells me. “It’s not gonna bite you.”

  “I know,” I say, touching the handle gingerly.

  “It might blow your balls off, but it definitely won’t bite you.”

  I manage an uneasy smile.

  “What’re you anyway?” Bill suddenly demands.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Are you one of them phony white liberals? Are you one of those types who goes running around telling niggers to feel sorry for themselves because society’s at fault and they aren’t to blame when they do a crime?”

  The way he’s talking is confusing. I can’t tell if it’s a test to see whether I’m a bleeding heart or a racist. Since we’ve just met and he seems pretty conservative, I decide to play it safe.

  “I think I see things for what they are,” I tell Bill.

  “Whatever that means,” he says harshly. “What they let these goddamn kids get away with now. When I was a kid and I wanted a pair of new sneakers, I went out and I worked for ’em. And if you got in trouble, you went to jail or you went into the army.”

  “That’s right,” Angel pipes in.

  “And if you got Article Fifteen’d for insubordination, the sergeant was allowed to hit you in the nuts with a rifle butt,” Bill says. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  Bill slams shut a locker door and looks at me in stunned disbelief. “You didn’t know that?” He glances over at his partner. “Angel, what kind of yo-yo have they assigned us here? Next you’re gonna tell me that you didn’t know Ho Chi Minh went to Bronx Science. You know that, don’t you?”

  I’m beginning to sense I’m being put on. “I’d rather not say right now.”

  “That’s very smart,” Bill says in a gravelly voice as he lifts his leg and places my hand firmly on the gun on my hip. “Congratulations. You are now a peace officer for the City of New York. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  As Bill walks out of the locker room, Angel pulls me aside one last time. “Hey, don’t worry about Bill,” he says. “He may talk tough and he may whack guys around now and then, but deep down he’s just as conflicted as the rest of us.”

  By five to six, we’re in a black Aries K car cruising up toward Harlem. “Brilliant that they give us these cars, right?” says Bill in the front passenger seat. “A black guy, a white guy, and a Puerto Rican guy. People on the street corners make us for cops in about three seconds.”

  The deadening humidity is still in the air. This must be what Calcutta is like in the summertime.

  We follow two other K cars—carrying four more Field Service officers—past the el tracks near La Marqueta. A young woman with puffy eyes and a twisted mouth stands near one of the pillars. She wears high heels, a very short skirt, and torn stockings.

  “Tell her there isn’t any bus that stops here,” Bill says to Angel between drags on his second cigar of the morning. The smoke fills the car and makes me ill.

  “I think she knows already.” Angel taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Business must be slow.”

  “Hey, Baum,” Bill says. “You fuck her, your dick will fall off three days later.”

  Bill chuckles to himself and pulls out his Motorola walkie-talkie. “Hey, Turner,” he says into the radio. “Who the fuck are we going to see first?”

  There’s a blast of static and then Probation Officer Jocelyn Turner, a stout black woman in the car ahead of us, replies, “James Ferguson.”

  “What’s his claim to fame?” Bill asks.

  “Nothing,” Turner says sullenly as though she doesn’t want to bother looking at Ferguson’s file.

  “Nothing?” Bill takes another long drag on his cigar. “Do you mean to tell me that we are going to arrest an innocent person?” he asks.

  “There are no innocent people,” an unidentified voice says over the walkie-talkie.

  Bill and Angel laugh all the way to the first address, an old squat apartment house on 167th Street. If this building was a person, it would be a wino. It seems to rear back from the sidewalk in drunken revulsion. Bill gets out of the car first and heads for the front door without looking back to see if the rest of us are following.

  “First door right on the second floor,” Angel calls out to him after checking the apartment number with Turner. “The guy’s a chain snatch. He’s probably not armed.”

  I trail my two partners into the building with the four other officers coming up behind us. The lobby, decorated with broken marble and mirrors, is silent. This must’ve once been a nice place to live, I think, as I follow Bill and Angel up the cracked staircase. But the landlord let it go to hell. There’s a smell like a bus’s exhaust in the air and dust flies into my contact lenses.

  “The good thing about coming out at this hour is that all the crackheads are still asleep,” Angel whispers over his shoulder to me. “They’ve all been out late partying last night.”

  Bill is already standing on the second-floor landing, nonchalantly cocking his leg in the air like a dog about to relieve himself. “They never live on the first floor,” he says with a grimace.

  “And they hardly ever have working elevators,” Angel adds.

  “Yeah, so let’s fuck ’em up,” Bill says.

  Officer Jocelyn Turner, who moves gracefully and wears her hair in braids, sighs as she joins the rest of us on the landing. “The way you talk,” she says.

  Bill begins hammering the apartment’s front door with a blackjack. The sound is so loud and insistent that I start to get a headache. If they knocked on my door like this at six in the morning, I’d call the cops. There’s a thumping sound from inside like somebody falling out of bed. Then the door creaks open.

  A small, fiftyish Dominican man with a creased face and deep-set eyes peers out. He looks exhausted, frightened, and bewildered.

  “James Ferguson here?” Bill asks gruffly.

  The man just stares at him. He seems unable to speak for a moment. “No,” he says finally in a weary, confused voice. “No hablo …”

  Angel steps forward and says something in Spanish to the man, but Bill is already pushing past him into the apartment. “Yeah, bullshit,” Bill is saying as he takes a flashlight from his belt loops. “We’ll see for ourselves.”

  Angel, Turner, and the others push in after them. I reluctantly follow. The apartment is completely dark. I can’t discern its size or shape. All I can see is what the beam of Bill’s flashlight illuminates. I glimpse the small man who opened the front door. He wears only a pair of old boxers and black socks. I feel embarrassed for him as the light swings away. We bump through a short, narrow corridor into a side room. The flashlight falls toward a bed on the side.

  “Let’s see. What do we got here?” Bill walks over and pulls down the bed sheet. A stocky woman wearing only a hairnet rolls over quickly and tries to hide her breasts. I get queasy like I would reading violent pornography. Bill shines the light under the bed and then c
rosses the room to check the closets.

  “All right, he’s not in here,” he announces to the rest of us. “Let’s see what other rooms they got in the house.”

  As he sweeps the beam around the rest of the room, I manage to briefly catch Angel’s eye. “This is awful,” I murmur.

  “I know,” Angel says as he follows the others out of the room and into the hall. “But you can’t take any chances doing this. If somebody moves, you better know where they’re going.”

  Bill and the others are already in another room down the hall. “Stop fucking around, Baum,” Bill growls. “Get in here already.”

  I arrive in the room to see one officer on his hands and knees looking under a bed while Turner and the others rifle more closets and pull a chest of drawers out from the wall. I hear the whoosh and creak of water pipes overhead. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the slightly better light in the room. Then I notice a six-year-old boy cowering on the bed. He holds an old stuffed gray rabbit with one of its eyes missing. I glance up and see his father, the small man in the boxer shorts and black socks, looking at his boy imploringly from the corner. He seems to be asking his son’s forgiveness for allowing all this to happen.

  James Ferguson is not here or anywhere else in the building. We can’t find anyone who’s even heard of him.

  “Well, what do you think so far?” Bill asks me in the car afterward.

  “It’s not exactly an exercise in civil liberties, is it?”

  “Ah, get over it,” Bill says, lighting another cigar and tossing the next warrant into the backseat where I’m sitting.

  For the rest of the morning, we stop by a dozen different buildings, starting at the northern tip of Manhattan and working our way down. But most of the people we’re looking for are not around. At noontime, we get assigned to check in on a transfer case, a young Italian woman in Queens. She got arrested last year for buying crack and we’re supposed to make a home visit to make sure she’s still living at the same address. We find her sixty-five-year-old father-in-law sitting on the steps outside the two-story house in Forest Hills where he lives with the woman, his son, and their five-year-old daughter.