“Yo, mistah,” said the white guy in chinos, who had a brush cut hairdo and wore a red New Jersey Devils hockey jersey. “You know where we can go cop around here?”
“Wha?” the crazy black guy sounded like he had rocks in his mouth. His eyes were clouded over and he was sweating profusely. He carried himself like something was broken inside of him, but he wasn’t as old as he had first looked. At most, he was forty-three.
The other white guy had gotten out of the Trans Am and was standing next to his friend and the black guy. “We wanna catch a buzz, man,” said the second white guy, who wore distressed jeans and Gucci loafers. “Where do we go around here?”
The crazy black guy looked scared and waved his squeegee at them. He was saying something that was hard to understand in his dull roar of a voice.
“What’s he saying?” the white guy in the distressed jeans asked his friend.
“Sounds like ‘blow dead bears,’” said the one in the Devils jersey.
“Your mother blows dead bears,” said the one in the distressed jeans.
The black guy repeated what he’d been saying and pointed with his squeegee at the building’s entrance. This time, the white guys understood him.
“He means, ‘go in there,’” said the one in the Devils jersey. “You scared?”
“No way, man.”
They thanked the car washer and walked into the building. They found a thirteen-year-old boy wearing a red terry-cloth Kangol hat leaning against the wall. Clearly the man in charge. The white guy in the Devils jersey negotiated with him for a few seconds and then slipped him three twenties. The kid sauntered off to a nearby stairwell, as if he’d suddenly lost interest in the white guys. They stood there side by side for a few seconds in the lobby, not even daring to look at each other.
The one in the distressed jeans began staring at the tangled yowls of graffiti on the walls by the elevators. ‘“D.K. All the Way,”’ he read. “What’s that mean?”
“I dunno,” his friend told him.
By now the kid in the red Kangol had returned. He looked around and discreetly handed the guy in the red jersey a plastic bag with six vials of crack in it. “You all best get going,” he told both white guys. “There’s some dangerous types around here, man.”
The two white guys walked quickly from the building and got back into their black Trans Am. As they started to pull away, the one in the Devils jersey leaned out the window and handed a five-dollar bill to the black guy who’d been washing the Cutlass.
“Thanks, dude.”
The guy took the bill without a sound and they cruised up to the traffic light on the corner. “Were you scared in there?” said the one in the distressed jeans.
“No,” said his friend in the hockey jersey. “Were you?”
“No way, man. That was fun.”
“Yeah, let’s come back again soon.”
The one in the Devils jersey slipped a Bruce Springsteen cassette into the tape player. “Definitely, man. Definitely.”
Back at the curb, the black guy who’d been washing the Cutlass put down his squeegee. He glanced after the New Jersey car’s glowing taillights and stared up at the sky to make sure no one was watching him. Then he slowly took out the five-dollar bill he’d just been handed and gave it a good sniff.
Back upstairs at the Fortress apartment in the Charles J. Stone Houses, Darryl King was starting to get restless.
Hip-hop music was pounding out of the speakers in the living room and the sweet crack smell filled the air. The occasion was Winston’s going-away party. The Jamaican was going to be taking Joanna to Miami to spend a week in the sun and pick up a shipment, leaving the kids with their grandmother at the Fortress.
Two dozen people floated around the apartment. Winston was whirling around barefoot to the music, with his dreadlocks flying through the air. Bobby “House” Kirk walked in and headed for the kitchen, muttering, “Everybody is on my dick,” as he grabbed his own crotch. He’d just had a second letter H carved on the other side of his scalp and he was annoyed that nobody had complimented him on it. A damp, naked woman wandered in from another room. She’d been having sex with two dealers who refused to give her any more crack. She stood right in front of Bobby and pleaded.
“You want it, get busy, bitch,” he said, unzipping his fly. She blew him for twenty seconds and then he gave her a crack pipe.
Nobody took much notice of Darryl, growing angry and intense, by the window. He’d been steadily losing sleep and weight over the past few days. “What I wanna know,” he said very loudly, “is when do you all get going?”
“’S what I’m saying,” Aaron Williams lisped. With his broadening shoulders and hips, he was getting to be the same size as Darryl.
“And I’m telling you. P.O. or no P.O. I want that probation officer to go down!” He made a big sweeping arc with his arm and pointed down. “You understand what I’m saying?”
Darryl had not been outside since he’d moved into the apartment with his mother a couple of weeks before. The claustrophobia was making him crazy, and the twenty-five vials of crack he was smoking every day were not helping. He kept talking about the same things over and over again.
One was breaking off from the family and starting his own business. He’d said a lot of things to Bobby and Aaron about getting a new van, a shipment of Uzis, and some Israeli listening devices once he was free to move around. But what truly consumed him was the idea of his probation officer.
He could still hear Mr. Bomb’s voice telling him, “I’m gonna personally send you to jail,” and calling him “Dooky.” But he was still having trouble remembering Mr. Bomb’s face.
For weeks he’d been wrestling with the problem; breaking it down, reaching for its heart, tearing it out. He got rid of what other people called “common sense”; he knew that was just a distraction. Now he was dealing straight up with the truth. And the truth was that his probation officer was the reason he was confined. So Mr. Bomb had to die before Darryl could be free. Otherwise, he would just stay in Darryl’s head, ticking away until he blew everything up.
“You wanna beer, D.?” Aaron asked, heading for the refrigerator.
“No, man, I ain’t with that,” Darryl told him. “I got too much shit on my mind already.”
He was about to say something else about the P.O. when he turned around and saw Ernie Thompson, the guy who washed his car, staring at him with the squeegee still wet in his hand.
What Ernie wanted to say to him was simply, “When are you going to pay me?” But with his terrible speech impediment, it just sounded like he was imitating a garbage disposal and Darryl ignored him. “Atomic Dog” was playing on the stereo now and even more people were dancing.
When Ernie tried a second time to make himself understood, Darryl whipped around like he was about to hit him. “Man, get this motherfucker away from me,” he said to no one in particular. “I can’t stand being around people that are ill.”
Ernie Thompson hadn’t always been this way. When he was young, he appeared to be moving toward his destiny with the certainty of an arrow finding its target. He zoomed through the Head Start school programs in the sixties and four Ivy League universities had offered him full scholarships. He was on his way to becoming an engineer and a teacher, and his diabetes hardly seemed like an obstacle. But just before Christmas in his senior year, he’d run into some old friends and they convinced him to try shooting heroin. Since they were all junkies anyway, they barely noticed when he still hadn’t woken up twelve hours later.
After he’d been in a coma for three days in the hospital, the doctors began to talk about what kind of brain damage he might have sustained. Most of his major motor reflexes were impaired in some way and his speech would never be the same. For the rest of his life, his basic intelligence was trapped in a mentally retarded man’s body. Out of shame, he hid in his mother’s house for the next twenty years or so, refusing to see or talk to old friends. It was only after his mother died a
few months before that he was forced to leave home and get a job washing Darryl King’s car for a hundred dollars a day.
Now, it was a week since he’d been paid and he was getting upset. Working for a drug dealer was hard enough on his pride, but having to beg for his proper pay was almost more than he could bear. He started tapping furiously on Darryl’s shoulder, trying to get his attention. This time Darryl didn’t hesitate. He spun around and in one quick motion hit Ernie just below the chin with his balled-up left hand.
Ernie went down with a loud gulp and for a moment, the party stopped and everyone looked over to see if he’d swallowed his tongue or something. Darryl was standing over him, like he was going to kick him in the stomach for good measure.
“Want some more?” Darryl said. “You want some more?”
As he lay there in a fetal position, Ernie kept burbling something over and over again that sounded like, “I can’t find a land.” But everyone knew that couldn’t be what he meant.
“Dog-ass motherfucker,” said Darryl.
Aaron helped Ernie get back up to his feet before he threw him out of the apartment. As he left, his voice was still saying that same thing. Darryl turned back to the window and looked down at the street, as if he expected his probation officer to come strolling up the block at any minute.
The music came on again. Aaron had returned and was standing beside him. “Hey,” Darryl said to him. “What was the guy saying before?”
Aaron looked at him anxiously. “He say, ‘You can’t do that to a man.’”
“Oh.” Darryl considered this for a second and then let it go. “Yes, I can,” he said sadly.
62
“SO DID I TELL you about the one we had today?”
“No,” says Andrea. “What was it?”
“Another informant … Snake Man. We came to his apartment at noon and he was already drunk and slithering around on the floor in a trail of his own slime. He’s only got one leg, I think. Bill was the one who wanted to call him Snake Man…”
We’re sitting at the bar at a high-priced midtown hotel waiting for her parents to arrive. In the background, there’s a murmur of low-key conversation and a Cole Porter song playing on the piano.
“Oh, why don’t you just give up?” Andrea says.
I look in the mirror behind the counter. My hair’s falling all over my forehead. I try to sweep it back, so I’ll look presentable. My nose is still a little sore and one of my eyelids is sagging. As I close in on thirty, I’m starting to look more and more like my father. In the rest of the reflection, I see the bottles lit from behind and the way Andrea is looking at me. I hope we can get home early and make love tonight. Those have been the only times lately that I’ve felt anything at all. She runs her fingers up and down my arm and smiles at me. The piano player segues nicely into “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.” Maybe I could enjoy moments like this a little more if I wasn’t thinking about Darryl King all the time.
“I think we’re getting closer,” I say.
She looks askance and smooths her black silk dress. “Snake Man,” she says, as if the very thought of him makes her unhappy.
“That’s my guy.”
“You know you’re starting to get a little weird yourself, Baum.”
The bartender, wearing a starched white shirt and a black bow tie, asks me if I need another beer and I nod.
“Isn’t it up to the cops to find Darryl?” she asks.
“Yeah, but I was the one who put all the work into the case.”
She gives me an exasperated look but then decides not to pursue it. Just as well. It’s too hard to explain to anybody. I notice a gold-plated cigarette lighter has been left on the counter. I flip the top and light my cigarette with the open flame. When Andrea looks away again, I drop it into my pocket.
“So what’re you doing at work?” I ask her between drags.
“Nothing.” She curls her fingers around a wineglass. “Just filing V.O.P. papers, talking to people. You know, finishing things off.”
“That’s right, you’re going back to school … In a couple of weeks, right?”
“So that’s another reason you oughta spend a little more time back at the office.”
The bartender brings me a mug of beer and I drink about half of it on the first gulp. Across the room, the piano player is finishing the Duke Ellington song and going into the old Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da [Life Goes On].” I wonder if he knows “Helter-Skelter.” It might clear the bar, but it would make a lot more sense to me after the last few weeks.
That starts me thinking about the things that’ve been going on in the field lately, and as I’m sitting here, I find I just have to let out a little bit of steam. “I know you think it’s stupid with Snake Man and all, but we are getting closer to Darryl,” I say abruptly. “The informant who we’re going to see tomorrow sounds dynamite.”
“Oh, did you speak to him?”
“No, Angel did. We’re seeing the guy in the morning at the Charles J. Stone Houses over by the river. Angel said the guy sounded great … when you could understand what he was saying. He had some kind of speech impediment, I think.”
“And what makes this one so wonderful? Is he into oat bran or cactuses or something? You’ve talked to every other freak in the city. What’s this one’s specialty?”
“I don’t know.” I hear myself sounding grumpy and defensive about our little tipster. “This guy says he’s actually seen Darryl and talked to him lately.”
“Oh how interesting,” she replies with a sardonic edge. “And what’s been on Darryl’s mind lately?”
“The guy says Darryl’s been talking about his probation officer a lot …”
She laughs a little incredulously. “It’s a good thing this doesn’t feed into your vanity or anything,” she says.
“Go ahead,” I tell her, noticing I have a little grit on one of my contact lenses. “Act like it’s a joke. I don’t know why I bothered to tell you.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s a joke,” Andrea says with a sigh. “I think it’s dangerous and I don’t understand why you won’t just let it drop.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I look down the length of the bar and see a couple of older women on the way in, both wearing a lot of jewelry and makeup. “You wouldn’t understand,” I say, keeping my voice low.
“Try me.”
“I don’t know.” For the first time in weeks, I start reaching down into myself and trying to figure out what’s there. “It’s like Darryl and I have this thing going on between us. And it’s been going on all summer long.”
“What’s been going on all summer?”
I put the cigarette down and just watch it smolder for a while. “You know,” I say, “before I met Darryl, I never used to get scared … I’m not talking about physical fear. I mean, scared because I used to be so sure I was doing the right thing with my life. But I don’t feel that way anymore. I look around and I see everyone who I tried to help is going right down the drain like we never met. And that scares me.”
“But there’s only so much you can do for people, Baum,” Andrea says, shaking her head. “You said so yourself. You can’t expect them to change just because you want them to …”
“I know,” I say, putting out the cigarette and gulping down my beer. “But what I worry about is what it’s doing up here.”
I put my finger up to my temple, like I’m pointing a gun at it. So much confusion whirling around up there. I try to douse it with the rest of my beer. Andrea’s giving me the kind of look a security guard would give a suspicious package left alone at an airport.
“It’s like … I’m turning hard inside,” I tell her. “You know? I get so angry with them.” I shake my fist in frustration.
I know people on the nearby barstools are turning to look at me, but I’m on a roll now and I can’t stop. “I don’t wanna be like that,” I say. “But I’m in the middle of all this shit and what
it’s doing is changing me. You know? I went in there to change them and instead they’re changing me.”
She looks over my shoulder at a large well-dressed black man and a slim blond woman in a bolero jacket coming into the bar.
“I wanna tell you something,” I say softly, staring straight ahead at my empty beer mug. “The other day, I went to see one of my old people. Charlie Simms, the one I told you about. And he starts saying this shit about Darryl and Jews and black people. And I don’t know what happened … I just snapped.”
“It’s all right,” she says, touching my cheek and looking back at the black man and the white woman who’ve stopped to talk to somebody at one of the nearby tables.
“It wasn’t all right,” I say, hitting the counter with my fist. “I started yelling at him. He yelled back at me and we got into it… And the things I was saying to him …” I just stop short of telling her I almost called him nigger. “I mean, I really lost control there for a minute. I mean, I slammed him against the wall. I wanted to fuck him up. You know? I really wanted to hurt him … That’s what was in my mind.”
I sit back on the stool and shake my head. Andrea is looking bewildered, as if to say, where did all of this come from? I’m not sure myself.
“It’s just these … bad thoughts,” I tell her a little more calmly. “It’s like I’ve been on this weird trip with Darryl. And I just want it to be over. I wanna settle things between him and me so I’ll know where I am. And that way I can go on with the rest of my life.”
She holds my hand, but I don’t quite feel it. Mentally I’m in another place.
“Well,” Andrea says, looking sympathetic and a little overwhelmed at the same time, “it certainly sounds like you need to get your shit together.”
“Yeah, I suppose one way or the other, either Darryl or me will wind up getting our fucking head blown off and that’ll be the end of it.”
I feel a heavy hand on my shoulder and I almost jump off the stool. The black man and the white woman are standing behind me, giving me knowing smiles.
“Steven,” Andrea says. “I want you to meet my parents.”
Slow Motion Riot Page 32
