Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  I guess part of what’s exceptional about this case is that the kid was only wounded, instead of being killed like a lot of the other black youths over the past few years. That’s a good thing in the long run, of course, but what’s funny is that the day after his shooting I start noticing that the myth of Darryl King is getting out of hand. In the beginning, it’s just a couple of pieces of graffiti around town saying things like Darryl K. All the Way and Free Darryl King (though there’s no way to free Darryl King since he’s not in prison). Then I get home, turn on the radio, and hear a black college station dedicating Public Enemy’s rap song, “Don’t Believe the Hype” to Darryl and wishing him Godspeed from Allah.

  I suppose I can understand this in a way. People are upset about that Perkins kid getting hurt, and given the history of the criminal justice system in this town, they don’t expect a cop to be convicted for shooting a black youth. So they figure Darryl was just evening the score ahead of time. But if you really think about that, it doesn’t make sense; Darryl didn’t know that kid and he didn’t shoot those cops out of any sense of justice. He did it because he didn’t want to get locked up.

  But at the moment, you can’t tell that to anybody. Despite their offer of a ten-thousand-dollar reward, the cops aren’t getting much cooperation from the community in their search. Everybody’s too busy going to rallies and marches for Jamal Perkins and protesting the Manhattan D.A.’s reluctance to press for an attempted murder indictment against that bone-head cop who shot him. Now there’s a rumor going around that Darryl is getting shelter and food from strangers in Harlem and Brooklyn.

  As for me, I’ve been keeping my head down, hoping no one will remember that Darryl was my client. I’ve gotten a couple of decidedly cool looks in the locker room in the morning, but other than that, nothing. Andrea didn’t even mention it when I saw her in the hall the other day, but then again, things have been a little strained between us and a lot’s been left unsaid.

  Out in the field, though, we’ve been hearing about Darryl all the time. One decrepit apartment on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is like a shrine to him, with his black-and-white mug shots from the newspaper up on the walls next to the headlines. A shot of that kid Jamal Perkins is taped to one of the other walls, and looking at it, I’m glad the kid’s going to be all right. The guy we’re looking for isn’t here, but we stick around to watch the beginning of the noon newscast on Channel 2. As soon as the announcer says a story is coming up about Darryl King and the police, the two eight-year-old boys watching the show in the apartment give each other high-fives.

  “He smoked their shoes,” one says to the other excitedly.

  “Fuck the police!” says his little friend.

  It doesn’t do any good to yell at them. These days Darryl gets respect. “The only thing black folks hate more than drug dealers is cops,” Bill tells me later in the car. “And your boy Darryl done shot both of them.”

  This whole notion makes me distinctly uncomfortable. I wish I could tell people what Darryl was really like the times I’ve met him. But I wonder if it would do any good. “I guess people have their own reasons for identifying with Darryl,” I say, working out a backseat rationalization as a bus steers by us. “I’d be pretty upset about the cop shooting that Perkins kid.”

  “Why?” Bill asks with a completely straight face.

  “The kid didn’t have a gun.”

  “What would you have done?” Bill says irritably. “You’re standing in a dark hallway and homeboy reaches in like he’s packing an Uzi or something. You got one second to decide if you wanna live or not. I know what I’d do.”

  “That wasn’t a bad kid, Bill.”

  “Never a doubt, Baum,” he says. “Never a doubt.”

  I keep expecting him to turn around and tell me this is all a put-on or a litmus test to see how I’ll react. But he doesn’t. He just gives me that same look my father gives me when he talks about how he survived the Holocaust. Like I just don’t know anything. I start squirming around and trying to find a way to change the subject.

  Fortunately, Angel does that for me. “I know somebody who’s talked to the cop who shot the Perkins kid over at Psych Services,” he tells us. “She says he may have a narcissistic personality disorder.”

  “What a crock of shit,” Bill says to him. “The guy’s got kitty litter for brains.”

  They both laugh. As the afternoon sun burns on, Angel steers the car east on 125th Street past the Apollo and the State Office Building, a sheer slab of concrete and glass stubbed down haphazardly in the middle of Harlem. Bill turns and asks him if he’s going to stop by the house over the weekend for a cookout. The Four Seasons song “Let’s Hang On (to What We Got)” plays on the radio. Bill, the black Vietnam veteran, and Angel, the Puerto Rican ex-gang member, sing along with the old white group’s hit record.

  For a moment, I feel kind of left out. Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve developed real affection for these guys. They’ve taught me how to get myself in and out of dangerous situations and treated me almost like a baby brother. I wouldn’t mind seeing them outside of work, but now I’m beginning to realize there are too many barriers. They’re black and Hispanic; I’m white. They live in the suburbs; I’m in the city. They came of age in the 1960s; I’m still learning. They’re both married with families; I’m on my own. I guess it’s unlikely that we’ll ever really be friends.

  Just to make conversation, I ask Bill how he thought people would react if the cops Darryl shot had died.

  “They’d have a statue for Darryl up by tonight,” Bill says, lighting a fresh cigar and propping up his injured leg on the dashboard.

  They nod and give each other knowing looks. I feel more white and ignorant than usual.

  It happens that on this day, we actually have an assignment at a housing project near the one where that Perkins kid got shot. A guy called Bill Blass was arrested for possessing a small quantity of marijuana there last week and was let go. But since he’s already on probation for a robbery, we get to pick him up as a violator.

  There are signs of trouble almost as soon as we park the car. From the backseat, I can see a bed sheet hanging out the window of the front building with “Darryl K. ALL THE WAY” scrawled on it. It reminds me a little of the old Banner Nights at Shea Stadium.

  The three of us get out of the car. “This skell’s in the building at the back,” says Bill, pausing on the sidewalk to put out his cigar and double-check the file.

  The project is made up of six five-story buildings that started off red brick, but have been turned almost gray by the New York City air. Some municipal architecture genius has arranged them into an odd, cluttered hexagonal configuration, so that we have to walk through a courtyard past the five other buildings to get to the one in the back. Something about the courtyard tile under our feet and the baking sun overhead makes me think of a giant oven.

  Bill points out the building we’re going to and I lead the way. As I pass the first building, I see “JustICE for JAmal” drawn in chalk under a window and I hear a man calling out something to us. At first, I think it’s “go away please” that he’s saying. But then his words get more distinct.

  “GO AWAY, POLICE!”

  “He thinks we’re cops,” Angel says with a weary smile.

  A bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties comes flying out of nowhere and smashes into 114 pieces near my feet.

  “Watch it!” Bill stops walking and looks up, as if he’s expecting to stare down any of the five buildings the bottle might’ve come from. “Who did that?” he calls out.

  “Fuck you, Uncle Tom!” a voice calls out from a high window behind us.

  We’re almost in the middle of the courtyard now, equidistant from each building and the street. I look up and see dozens of people hanging out the windows of all the buildings. We’re surrounded by hostile faces. Boys. Girls. Old ladies in curlers and floral gowns. Chunky guys in sleeveless shirts, drinking beer. It’s just after noontime. What’s everyb
ody doing home? Before I can say anything to Angel or Bill, I hear a low grumbling sound that gradually gets louder and louder. People are chanting something in Spanish.

  “MAMÓN! MAMÓN! MAMÓN!” it sounds like.

  I’ve got to ask Angel what that means when I get a chance. Somebody hurls a beer can at us and it wings me on the knee. I look around again and see people ahead of us, behind us, beside us, and above us are leaning out their windows, yelling at us and giving us the finger. Their chanting is a wall of sound that completely surrounds us; it’s like we’re in the middle of a Roman gladiator arena.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge,” says Bill as somebody else narrowly misses us with the smelly garbage they’re throwing out the window.

  We make a run for it back to the car and manage to get away after being pelted with only rotten eggs and fruit. The odor is awful when it’s mingled with our sweat, and for once I ask Bill if he’ll light up a cigar.

  “To hell with ’em,” Angel says as he starts the car and pulls away. “We’ll have to call the office and tell them they gotta send somebody out here much earlier in the day to pick that guy up.”

  “Yeah, but, Angel, what the fuck was that about?” I ask.

  “People be pissed off, Baum,” Angel replies, breaking off from his usual social-work-speak to give me some straight street talk.

  “About what? The Perkins kid?”

  “Not just that,” Angel says, barely avoiding a mover’s truck that comes barreling through an intersection. “They be angry about their air conditioner not working and the paint coming off the walls and how nine-one-one don’t come when they sick and the school’s no good and they can’t get a bigger apartment with the kids …”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say. “But we’re here to help. Why are they picking on us?”

  “Why are they picking on us?” Bill slowly repeats with an incredulous smile. “Because we’re here.”

  43

  THE RAIN WAS COMING down in sheets on the first Sunday that Richard Silver decided to go up to the country.

  “I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” his girlfriend, Jessica, said loudly as she opened up the back of the car to put their bags in. “Couldn’t we have waited until next weekend?”

  She was getting soaked in the downpour and her blouse was sticking to her back. She looked like a bird drowning in the middle of Park Avenue. Richard Silver closed his umbrella and got in on the driver’s side. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger’s side door for her.

  “We have to go up this weekend,” he told her as she got in. “Otherwise, we’ll waste all of next weekend opening the house up. And if it’s nice out, we won’t want to lose the day. And I’ll have Leonard …”

  “I thought you didn’t like going to Greenwich,” she said. “Wasn’t part of the settlement that Gloria got to be there every other weekend?”

  He winked and grinned as he turned the key in the ignition. “Larry got an injunction against her,” he said.

  The rain beat steadily on the windshield as they drove north across Eighty-sixth Street. A cloud of steam rose from a hole in the street, like an explosion was building underground.

  “So what do you hear from your friends in Chicago?” Jessica asked.

  “Still very nervous,” Richard Silver told her. “They’re talking about a lot of investigations with these savings and loan associations, you know. But to tell you the truth, I don’t think anything’s really doing with it.”

  “So let me ask you something, Richard,” she said. “Why don’t these savings and loan people use someone they know in Chicago to wash their money for them?”

  He let out a long breath and the dark circles under his eyes seemed to get a little bigger. “They can’t do that,” he said. “It’s too much of a straight line. They need somebody who’s a little bit out of their circuit to set some of that up.”

  She pushed back her wet hair with both hands. “So why do they come to you? Everybody knows about you already.”

  “Yeah, well, we gotta watch out for that too,” he said. “In fact, one of these days, we’re gonna have to find somebody to make a trip to the Caymans for us.”

  He told her to turn on the radio so they could hear a traffic report. But all they could get were Madonna songs and news updates. The latest one said that the Perkins kid who’d been shot by the cop was going to pull through and get out of intensive care, but there were still plans for community protests. In the meantime, there was no sign of Darryl King turning up.

  “Another long, hot summer,” Richard Silver said sardonically, as if reciting some old piece of verse he’d been forced to memorize as a kid.

  The cars directly in front of them seemed to have come to a dead halt. Richard put on his left-hand signal and tried to switch lanes, but a maroon Le Baron cut him off. He honked his horn in frustration and then moved over. But by then the light had turned red and he found himself stuck halfway in the crosswalk. An old lady, trying to walk past the front of his car, struck his hood with her cane.

  “Do you think there’re going to be riots?” Jessica asked.

  Her question caught him off guard and he blinked like he’d just been awakened from a sound sleep. “What?”

  “Do you think they’ll have riots?” she said.

  “Well.” He cleared his throat. “You know, I have a theory about that,” he said.

  “Just a second.”

  Jessica turned up the radio and began singing along with Madonna. Even with her hair all wet and her face red, she was lovely. But Richard had heard cats in the rain making nicer sounds. He turned right on Ninety-sixth Street and headed toward the entrance to FDR Drive.

  “See, people only riot when they want the attention of the institutions,” he told her, “because they think that’s how things get changed. But most people in the ghettos here don’t believe in the institutions anymore.”

  They were going north toward the Willis Avenue Bridge. Traffic had lightened up, but the road was still slick and the gray curtain of rain coming down on the East River was so thick that Ward’s Island was invisible on the other side.

  “So you think it won’t be as bad this time?” Jessica asked.

  “No, I think it’ll be much worse,” he said. “With the riots everybody got angry all at once and got it over with. Now things get broken down a little bit at a time. Instead of one big riot, people are angry all the time. And since they figure they got nothing to lose, they might as well burn the city down block by block.”

  They made the turn and headed across the Willis Avenue Bridge, a humpbacked metal beast reaching across the river. The road was pockmarked and bumpy. On the left, a cigarette company’s clock said it was 1:02 and seventy-four degrees. Richard Silver glanced over to his right at the useless smokestacks and abandoned factories, where generation after generation of immigrants had held down their first jobs. It didn’t matter if you even spoke the language. Of course, his own father hadn’t done anything of the kind, but there were millions of others who had. All that was gone now anyway. He made the turn off Bruckner Boulevard and got on the expressway. Off to the side, old tenement buildings and housing projects stood like forgotten sentries in the rain.

  “So what can anybody do?” Jessica asked.

  “What do you do?” Richard felt around in his pockets for change to pay the first toll. “What you do is get a nice house in Connecticut so you can get out of town and not have to look at this mess.”

  44

  SLOWLY, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA began to concentrate on finding out how Darryl King had managed to slip through the cracks in the system.

  For the first few days after the shoot-out with the police, Judge Philip Bernstein took most of the blame. He had, after all, decided to release Darryl on his own recognizance after a violation of probation hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court. The headlines about Bernstein went on for two days and the uproar was such that the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, who was nor
mally too much of a snob to talk to anybody except The New York Times and TV reporters, actually had a press conference to denounce the judge and call on the governor to take disciplinary action.

  When stirrings and rumblings began to be reported in Albany, the judge, who’d maintained a stony silence in the face of all the criticism, finally went on the offensive. As a former head of the district attorney’s rackets bureau, he was shrewd about the press, and particularly sensitive to the needs of reporters on deadline. He waited until after five o’clock on a slow news day and then picked up the phone in his chambers to call a reporter he knew at one of the city’s major tabloids.

  Speaking with a confidence honed from years of courtroom experience and back room wheedling, he spent fifteen minutes ripping into the Probation Department and blaming its officials for Darryl King’s release.

  “If I had to single out any one factor, I’d say it was the probation officer who presented the violation in my courtroom,” he told the reporter. “Never in forty years in the criminal justice system have I heard anything so sloppy and self-serving! He neglected to give me any of the facts that would’ve allowed me to make an informed decision about the defendant. My hands were tied! What am I supposed to do if I don’t have the facts?”

  When there was a long silence on the other end of the phone, the judge asked if he was talking too fast again. The reporter said no, it was fine, he was keeping up with him. The judge went on to say that if he’d still been at the D.A.’s office and the probation officer Baum had been on his staff, he would’ve been fired immediately for incompetence. He then broadened his attack to include the entire Probation Department and even suggested the mayor was at fault for allowing such mismanagement.