Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  “Oh look at this guy,” Bill mutters.

  The big kid starts to amble down the airless, seaweed green hall. Almost all the doors have triple locks, I notice, and are covered with chipped black paint. The same television game show seems to be playing inside several of the apartments. A few crack vials and broken light bulbs lie on the sticky black-and-yellow-checked linoleum floor. Behind the big kid with the chains and the H’s in his hair, a little girl with bare feet lugs what appears to be a bedpost into the incinerator room. It strikes me as an odd way to get rid of an old bed, but then I don’t live here.

  Daniels, a pink-cheeked new guy with the Field Service Unit, keeps stepping on the backs of my sneakers. Since the cops don’t seem to be here, Angel takes three of the other officers around the corner and down another hall looking for them. After a few seconds, I faintly hear Angel’s voice saying, “Not Building D, Building C. You schmucks are in the wrong building,” into the walkie-talkie. I guess it’s going to take that backup unit a while to get here. Just as well. Once they arrive, they’ll take over and make us the backup unit.

  Now it’s just Daniels, Bill, and me.

  “Hey, homeboy,” Bill calls out to the big kid in the chains who’s standing less than fifteen yards away from us. “Where’s da man?”

  I’d shudder if I heard a white cop talking this way. Even coming from a black social worker like Bill, I find it a little unnerving.

  The big kid in the chains gives Bill a blank look. “I said, where’s the man?” Bill repeats. “D.K., homes. Darryl. Where he at, homeboy?”

  The big kid takes a huge step forward and looks at the gun in Bill’s hand. “Who you talkin’ about?” he says unconvincingly.

  “An actor,” Bill says out of the side of his mouth. “That’s very cute. ‘Who you talkin’ about?’”

  “Bill, I don’t think this is our informant,” I tell him. “You better stop fucking around.”

  The guy in the chains takes another step and puts his hands behind his back like he’s had a lot of practice wearing handcuffs.

  “We’re looking for somebody who can tell us about Darryl King,” Daniels, the rookie, asks in a loud, gawky voice.

  I close my eyes in embarrassment. Maybe it’s true, I think. Maybe social workers and probation officers don’t have any business pretending to be cops.

  I hear a door opening behind the big kid in chains, about thirty feet to our right. For a moment, we get distracted by the sound. The kid with the chains takes his hands from behind his back and assumes a shooter’s stance. He’s still pretty far away from us. Even with my contact lenses in, he’s like a figure on a TV screen. In his right hand, he has a gun with a long barrel. He begins firing it.

  The door down at the right end of the hall opened a little more and Darryl King peered out at the gunfire. Then he pushed a fourteen-year-old boy known as “Life Knowledge” out into the hall. “Life Knowledge” was part of a youth gang who called themselves gods and considered themselves to be invincible. His gun, however, was a Raven .25-caliber worth less than seventy dollars. He fired it once and the handle came apart in his hands. A slug from Bill Neill’s .38 service revolver tore through the boy’s forehead and Life Knowledge fell to the floor, dead.

  Behind one of the other apartment doors, a baby cried and a game show audience cheered wildly.

  Daniels, the rookie, turns around and runs down the other end of the hall, shrieking that he’s going to get Angel and the others.

  The big kid with the H’s in his hair continues to fire his 9 mm Browning wildly. Bill and I return the shots and look desperately for cover. One of Bill’s bullets grazes the left side of the big kid’s rib cage and the big kid does a half-turn downward to the floor. He steadies himself with his left hand against the cinder block wall, and with his right hand, he squeezes the trigger of the Browning again.

  Bill falls over backward with blood gushing from a spot near his chin.

  All of a sudden, this whole thing doesn’t seem like it’s happening on TV anymore. It’s sickeningly real. I’ve got my back flat against one of the apartment doors. I start banging on it with my elbow and pleading with the person inside to let me in to safety. I hear the door at the other end of the hall open once more, and the gunfire resumes.

  I bang harder on the door I’m leaning against. “Please let me in, dear God. Please.”

  “It’s not locked,” a weak voice finally tells me from inside.

  But by then I’m so crazed with panic I can’t figure out if the door opens to the outside or the inside. I just keep yanking on the doorknob, because I’m afraid that if I stop long enough to figure it out, someone will come up behind me and shoot me in the head.

  I’m out of bullets. Bill Neill is lying there, bleeding on the floor. And I still can’t get the door open. My breathing sounds so frenzied that for a second I think it’s someone else doing it. Finally, I look right at the metal doorknob. I twist it the wrong way and it doesn’t move at all. I try it the other way and the latch clicks. But before I can press my weight on the door, I feel the presence of someone standing directly behind me.

  I turn and see Darryl King pointing a .45 right at me. If I hadn’t spent so much time looking at his picture over the past few weeks, I wouldn’t have recognized him.

  His appearance is shocking. He’s preternaturally thin now, like a wire sculpture. His sunken skin looks like it’s been melted over his skeleton. His head is completely out of proportion with his once-solid build and his limbs seem elongated and frail. He wears a soiled brown T-shirt and rumpled green velour slacks. I’ve seen a lot of crack addicts, but never anyone so utterly deformed by the habit. Darryl is all bulging eyes and big hands. It’s as if he’s been boiled down to his fiercest essence.

  He puts the barrel of the gun right up to my temple. “You gonna die now,” he says.

  Three other young guys stand behind him, shaking their heads slowly. I can’t believe my life is about to end so abruptly. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not my time. There hasn’t been enough of a build-up. I feel angry and cheated.

  “Hey,” I say.

  But none of them answer and I see Darryl’s about to press down on the trigger. I hold my breath and the blood rushes to my head. I want to pray but I’m too confused.

  “What’s going on, Baum?” I hear Angel asking from the other end of the hall. His tone is meant to be reassuring.

  Darryl grabs me by the arm and turns me roughly so that I’m facing Angel and Darryl is standing behind me with the gun to my head. I smell vomit, crack, and cigarettes on his breath. I start to gag and Darryl digs his nails into my arm.

  “Okay, everybody should just chill the fuck out a minute,” Angel says firmly.

  “FUCK YOU, MAN!” Darryl King screams. “I AM RELAXED!”

  With the halt in the shooting, people are beginning to peek cautiously out of the doorways up and down the hall. I can see how terrified they are, but my insides feel bound up in catgut and thorns. The short hairs of my left temple catch on something at the end of Darryl’s gun barrel and I wince as a couple of them get pulled out.

  “WHAT’RE YOU MAKIN’ A FACE FOR, MAN!” Darryl screams senselessly at me. “YOU THINK THIS IS SOME KINDA FUCKIN’ JOKE?! I BLOW YOUR FUCKIN’ HEAD OFF!!!”

  “All right, let’s take it easy now,” Angel says, taking tiny steps forward. “Let’s chill, people …”

  “FUCK YOU! I KILL HIM IN THE FUCKIN’ HEAD, MAN!!”

  Angel and the three other field service guys have their guns trained on Darryl and his gang. Darryl’s men are looking at him strangely, as though they’re afraid he might actually pull the trigger on the spot and get them all killed.

  “Darryl, don’t you do nothing stupid,” a woman’s voice calls from down the hall behind where we’re standing.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP, MOMS!” Darryl yells. “ELSE I KILL YOU NEXT!”

  I hear Darryl’s mother complaining to somebody else in the apartment about her son’s lack of respect. A
ngel makes a deliberate show of moving back the safety catch on his gun. The other officers follow his example. “So let’s work this out,” Angel says, advancing a few more steps toward Darryl.

  “Back up, chump,” says the skinny fourteen-year-old kid with the flattop and the harelip who I saw before in the lobby. Only now he’s carrying an Uzi.

  “Come on, man.” Angel holds out his free hand like a peace offering. “Let him go.”

  Now I see what a fearless motherfucker he must’ve been in his street gang days.

  “I’M GIVIN’ THE ORDERS,” Darryl King says, banging the side of my head for emphasis. “YOU TAKE ’EM.”

  A single dingy light bulb hangs from a loose ceiling wire just a few inches in front of my face. From somewhere to my left, I hear Bill Neill making gurgling noises. I hope he’s not dying. I can’t even look down at him on the floor because Darryl still has the gun to my head. No one’s paying much attention to the kid in the Life Knowledge T-shirt who came out of the apartment with the shitty little gun. I happen to catch a single glimpse of him as Darryl swings me around. He’s lying facedown in a widening puddle of blood.

  Angel asks Darryl if he’ll at least back up a few steps so they can reach Bill’s body and get him emergency medical treatment. Darryl remains unmoved. “This here is our prisoner,” he says, lowering his gun to my jaw.

  “Prisoner of war,” says the big kid with all the chains and the H’s in his hair. He’s clutching his side where Bill’s shot must’ve just grazed him.

  “Prisoner of the crack wars,” someone else says. One or two people laugh.

  Darryl wraps his free hand around my neck and begins pulling me backward toward the apartment he emerged from. The bile rises in my throat as my black sneakers squeak on the floor tiles.

  “Hey, man, where you taking him?” Angel calls out. “Don’t make it hard on everyone, Darryl …”

  I feel like I’m getting dragged down to hell, far away from the world of the living. Everybody in the hall is yelling at each other. Their voices blend together in my ears and their words are indistinct—except somebody keeps saying, “Take no prisoners,” loud and clear. Darryl tightens his stranglehold and my eyes roll back into my head. I black out for a moment.

  When I come to, I realize I’ve been pulled back into the apartment at the south end of the hall. I’m dropped on the carpet and somebody puts a knee on my chest.

  “STEP OFF, MAN!!!” I hear Darryl shouting. “STAY BACK!!! WE KILL THE FUCKIN’ HOSTAGE RIGHT HERE ON THE RUG!!!”

  “Whatever you say, man,” Angel’s voice says from somewhere out in the hall. “Let’s not do anything we’ll be sorry about.”

  “No, I won’t,” Darryl says with sudden calm.

  There’s a protracted silence and then a long fusillade of automatic weapons firing from the apartment out into the hall. When the shots finally cease, I hear the voices of Angel and the other Field Service guys fading and the scuff of their sneakers getting lighter as they retreat down the hall floor.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” says the big kid with the chains and the H’s in his hair, lowering himself into a large chair and trying to pull his bloodied shirt off. “Run away, faggots.”

  “Chicken,” somebody else says.

  Still lying on my back, I look up and see two women’s faces. One appears to be in her seventies; she wears heavy glasses and has a sad, wrinkled mouth. The other woman I recognize from court as Darryl’s mother. She appears uninterested in anything going on around her.

  “This is my probation officer, Moms,” Darryl says.

  “He behind enemy lines,” adds the big kid with the chains and the H’s, who’s having some trouble breathing.

  “Yeah,” Darryl’s mother says to me. “You in another country now.”

  69

  RICHARD SILVER WAS LYING on his back in the Connecticut house.

  The place was beautiful, he had to admit that. There were vistas almost everywhere you looked. A skylight overhead revealed a bright sun and a cloud formation that looked like the Hindenberg. The window on the right led your eye to the swimming pool. The window on the left opened onto the woods. Something was stirring behind the trees.

  Richard Silver rolled to his side. The problem with being able to see everything was that then you didn’t feel like going anywhere.

  This is what life was for, Jimmy Rose used to say. You made money so you could get away from all the things you hated in the city. The noise. The pollution. The guy coughing phlegm all over you on the subway. The half hour wait for a table at The Palm. The hoodlums on the street. The indictments. The probation officer who he’d been talking to. The investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago who Larry said were going around asking questions the last week or so.

  Somebody was talking.

  Better not to think about all that now. What was the point of coming up to a place like this on a weekday unless you were going to relax? Through the window on the left, he could see that something definitely was moving behind the trees. Maybe a deer. He started feeling hot. The skylight above him was a magnifying glass on the sun. Why didn’t anybody think of that when it was put in?

  He opened another button on his blue Paul Stuart shirt. It was funny the way they made these things without buttons on the wings of the collar. He remembered the blue cotton oxfords from Brooks Brothers he used to wear in the sixties. There was something kind of earnest and preppy about them, but they had a slightly rougher texture, which made them look good with jeans. You could honorably wear one to a community meeting in Harlem and then grab a tie out of the glove compartment and go to City Hall if you had to. A Bobby Kennedy kind of thing to do. Bobby was always good with the “out in the streets” bullshit. You had to give him that. And the girls.

  He remembered wearing a shirt like that when he walked the streets over the long, hot summers in Harlem. He could still feel the fabric sticking to his back when he got all tired and sweaty. Of course in those days, when he tucked his shirt in, it was like a bed sheet stretched tight over the firm flat expanse of his stomach. Now it was more like a ship’s sail billowing in the wind. He had to get back to the gym soon.

  He hadn’t worn a shirt like that since he threw his lot in with Jimmy Rose on the Sullivan Houses deal in Brooklyn. Lose the Young Democrats look, Jimmy told him, you make me nervous. Get yourself some wing tips and a manicure.

  It’d been years since he’d thought about any of that. The Hindenberg cloud moved on and the sun got stronger. He heard something rustling outside again. This time he stood up to see what was coming through the trees. Twigs snapped and branches parted. It was the guys coming to clean the pool. Suburban scum in T-shirts and jeans. One of them was carrying the long pole with the net on it. The other was dragging that filtering machine that made all the noise. He’d forgotten this was their day to come in. He wouldn’t have bothered driving up if he’d remembered.

  Richard Silver decided he might as well turn on the television again and find out what was going on in the city. He was never going to get any peace now anyway.

  70

  “ALL RIGHT, SPREAD ’EM!” says Darryl King.

  “Open his mouth! SOMEBODY get his mouth open!”

  At least four pairs of hands are frisking me now as I lie down flat on the floor, hands behind my head. Only people who’ve been arrested and slapped around by police all their lives could have this much enthusiasm about playing cops.

  “You have the right to an attorney,” says one of them.

  “Somebody please open his mouth,” says Bobby, the big one with the H’s in his hair, who’s standing right by my head. A little bit of blood is leaking through the side of the shirt he just put on. Now he’s furious and waving a gun at me like he knows just where he’d like to put it.

  The rest of them ignore him and take my gun, cigarettes, Silly Putty, and my bulletproof vest. I happen to look over and see a bunch of other people sitting over on the couch, watching television, like what’s go
ing on here couldn’t possibly be as interesting.

  Darryl is crouching over me, pointing my gun right in my face. And as he holds the power to end my life in his hands, what he says to me is: “Yo, blood clot, what’s up?”

  I used to have a very immature idea of what death would be like. Somehow, I thought that all the people who’d mistreated me in life would jam into a great synagogue somewhere, bow their heads in unison, and say how sorry they were that I was gone.

  I never dreamed it would end in a poorly maintained Harlem housing project, with a group of bored-looking black people sitting around watching white people do aerobics on TV while a belligerent crackhead grinds his broken yellow teeth in my face.

  I suddenly have a vision of myself lying facedown on the green carpet with a bullet in the back of my head and a spreading stain where I’ve lost control of my bladder. One of those forsaken corpses you read about sometimes in the newspapers. Darryl steadies his aim with the gun and I start to get really scared.

  My throat feels dry and my contact lenses are poking me again. I dearly don’t want to die. But I know that if I show any emotion, I’ll lose all control.

  “Over here,” someone says.

  They bring me over to a chair in the middle of the room and surround me. I guess they want to make sure nobody can take a shot at any of them without the risk of hitting me, but they need me close enough to the window so the outside world can see I’m in immediate danger.

  A heavy mingled aroma like burned meat and crack hangs in the air. So far, I’ve counted about a dozen people floating from room to room here. Most of them still aren’t paying much attention to me. One of them gets up and changes the TV channel to The Price Is Right. A couple of the others stare listlessly out the windows, like the people in a mental health commercial. Two small children are roughhousing in one of the back bedrooms.

  A couple of quieter minutes pass and I start to wonder what they’re doing outside. The last thing I heard was something that sounded like bodies being dragged away in the hall. I hope Bill’s not dead. It gets me thinking about the way he looked lying on the floor with the gunshot wound, and my features start moving around my face. I have no idea what it looks like to anyone else, but Darryl clearly doesn’t like it.