Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  “Don’t be looking that way,” he says. He shoves what used to be my .38-caliber service revolver right in my face. “You remanded,” he says.

  I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be a joke or not. Beyond the sights of the gun, his face is a death mask with its hollow eyes and rictus grin. Looking at it, its hard to believe that this is where I wanted to be. Dealing with Darryl in Darryl’s world on Darryl’s terms. I’d ask myself what I’ve done to deserve this, except that I was the one who insisted on coming here.

  With the hand not holding the gun, Darryl begins to play with himself, fumbling with his genitals in a grim, unconscious kind of way. After a while, he gets tired of it and starts fooling around with an old-fashioned flip-top silver lighter. I think of the lighter I snatched off the bar last night when I was with Andrea. At the time I wasn’t sure why I took it—a momentary larcenous impulse, I guess. But now it reminds me of Andrea and I feel a little ripple inside because I’ll probably never see her again.

  Then I start missing things I never even liked before. Like walking to work from the subway in the morning. I used to hate that walk before, because it took me under that scaffolding with filthy water dripping down. But now I miss that walk like crazy. I wonder what I could’ve done differently. Maybe if I’d kept the window open the night it rained a couple of weeks ago, I might’ve caught a cold and been out sick today.

  Darryl’s voice jolts me back into the present tense.

  “Get your legs under the chair,” he says, putting one of my cigarettes in his mouth and setting it on fire with the lighter.

  “Why?” There’s hardly any room.

  “Just do it,” he says. “My house, my rules.”

  He keeps flicking the gun’s safety catch on and off, finally leaving it off turning the gun sideways to examine its chambers. When he’s satisfied that everything’s where it ought to be, he points it straight ahead so that its muzzle is less than six inches from the bridge of my nose.

  “Darryl, what’re you doing?” his mother asks, like she’d just caught him raiding the refrigerator before dinner.

  “What it look like?”

  “Well, I just hope you don’t think you’re gonna shoot that man right here now …”

  I keep my eyes shut and take deep breaths.

  “Darryl,” his mother repeats. When I open my eyes again, I see she has her hands on her hips. She’s as thin as her son, but she seems drained by heroin, not crack. “Don’t you try and shoot that man …” she says lazily.

  “Why not?”

  “You shoot him, what’s gonna happen to us? You ever stop and think about that?”

  “No,” Darryl says barely acknowledging her.

  “That’s ’cos you stupid, like your sister said.” His mother opens a can of diet Slice orange soda and takes a long drink. Her elbow forms a jagged angle off her body. “The only reason they ain’t come through that door already is ’cos we have a hostage.”

  “I know what time it is.” Darryl’s face contorts and he takes two steps back and punches the wall, leaving a crushed-in mark. The other guys surrounding me with guns look at each other like they’re truly impressed with his ability to express himself.

  “What’s the matter with you?” his mother asks.

  “You called me stupid.”

  She reconsiders. “Well, I don’t think you stupid,” she says with a sigh. “You just smoke too much shit and you don’t think straight sometimes.”

  “Well, all right.”

  Darryl’s mother looks at me. “What’s his name again?” she asks Darryl like she’s inquiring about a new household pet.

  “Mr. Baum.” Mr. Bomb, it sounds like.

  “Is he Jewish or something?”

  “I dunno.” Darryl cocks his head to one side as he looks at me. “Are you Jewish?”

  “Yes,” I say, and immediately regret answering.

  “See?” says Darryl’s mother.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothin’.” She finishes her soda and goes back to the kitchen.

  A single bead of sweat slides down my face and a truck sighs outside. For the first time, I’m aware of people’s voices coming through the windows. There must be hundreds of cops and emergency service people downstairs, making plans and waiting to see what’s going to happen. Darryl shifts the gun over to his right hand and puffs away on my cigarette. It looks like a bomb’s fuse burning down in the corner of his mouth. After three long last drags, he spits it out on the floor and looks after it.

  “Fuckin’ Marlboros, man,” he says. “How can you smoke that shit?”

  71

  DARRYL LEFT AARON TO guard the hostage and went into one of the back bedrooms just as the noon news was starting on television.

  His mother was lying on the charred mattress he’d accidentally set fire to when he fell asleep smoking crack a couple of nights back. With her eyes closed like that, she looked dead, and watching her, he got sad. It started him thinking about the foster home again and how it was being away from her. He kicked at the balled-up newspapers and matchbook covers lying on the floor. Then he noticed she didn’t seem to be breathing and he began to panic. For a couple of seconds, he stopped breathing too.

  His hand went back down into his pants. But nothing much was happening there, so he grabbed the crack pipe off the night table under the window and tried to light it with his propane torch. The spout was broken, though, so he had to use the silver lighter he’d found before. His hands were almost shaking too much to keep the flame steady, but soon the strong blue crack smell filled the room and woke his mother. She rolled her bloodshot eyes from the TV to Darryl taking long hits off the stem.

  “Look like you suck on a glass dick,” she told him.

  One of the TV ladies was on the screen. She was the type that looked fine sometimes, and not too good other times. Today she was okay. She was standing outside by a red brick wall while a posse of kids were jumping around behind her and waving at the camera.

  “’S a long day,” Darryl said.

  His mother sat up slowly and blinked her eyes. She looked so much older all of a sudden. He wondered if just having the probation officer in the apartment had aged her. When Mr. Bomb had first shown up like that this morning it was like a dream coming true. Now it was turning into a nightmare.

  “What time is it?” his mother asked him.

  “I don’t know.” Darryl just looked at her.

  The lady on the television was saying something about a standoff and the police. The sun was hitting one side of her face and a shadow fell over the other side. One of the homeboys jumping around behind her looked like he was about to grab the microphone out of her hands and do his own personal version of the news.

  “I like to change my clothes,” said Darryl’s mother. “I been sleeping in these.”

  Through the doorway, he could hear the sound of the probation officer asking Bobby for something.

  “I don’t even remember the last time I had my hair done,” his mother said, pulling on the lank part in the back.

  Darryl didn’t hear her. He was busy trying to recognize somebody on the television screen. A little kid he’d seen running around the hallway outside. Now the kid was jumping around near the TV lady and the brick wall. He looked again and thought he saw Ernie, the car washer, lingering around the edge of the scene.

  He started watching more closely to find out how Ernie got to hang out with the TV lady. Maybe Ernie dropped a dime on somebody or something. Slowly, he began to recognize the brick wall on television as the one downstairs. They were doing the show right now, right outside the Charles J. Stone Houses.

  “Again, all our information is very preliminary,” said the TV lady, who had on a lot of lipstick and small earrings, “but we understand at least one field officer is being held hostage in the apartment.”

  Darryl’s mother opened her mouth a little. The TV camera swept slowly around the courtyard outside, showing hundreds of cops standing ready. T
hey looked like they were about to go to war in a science fiction movie. Most of them had on riot helmets and carried Plexiglas shields. The TV lady said they were just waiting for the order to go ahead and break down the door of the apartment.

  “Don’t believe the hype,” said Darryl.

  But then the camera began to rise, passing all the people hanging out the windows, and finally pointing up at the roof. More than a dozen guys wearing SWAT team caps and carrying high-powered rifles were scurrying around for position up there.

  “Now look what you done,” said Darryl’s mother.

  “What?”

  “I told you, you should’ve talked to the man who called before to negotiate.”

  “Ah, he was another sucker,” Darryl said.

  He heard another siren going down the street outside. A split second later, the same sound was coming out of the television.

  “We should’ve done Mr. Bomb when we had the chance,” Darryl mumbled, taking another hit off the pipe. He put it down on the table, next to the ether tank he’d been using to get rid of the impurities in cocaine.

  “Then they just come right in and kill us all,” his mother said once more. “Like at Attica.”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about. He had a lot of friends who’d been upstate at Attica Correctional Facility and it didn’t sound any worse than Auburn or Greenhaven or any of the other prisons. It was mainly being locked up. Like he was now. He asked his mother what was so special about Attica.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  He shook his head, but kept his eyes on the television.

  “I guess that was before your time,” she said. “The brothers had themselves a uprising there and took some hostages.”

  “Yeah? So what happened?”

  A cloud seemed to pass in front of her face. “Well, I don’t remember all of it,” she said vaguely. “I think the police went in and killed a whole mess of the brothers. Like, I think your uncle Willie was there.”

  Darryl shrugged. He never even knew he had an uncle Willie.

  “Anyway,” said his mother, sounding more sure of herself now. “After the police went in, they took the rest of them inmates that they didn’t kill and made them strip buck-naked and crawl through the mud.”

  She nodded, relieved she had at least part of it right. Darryl just stared at her.

  “That’s fucked up,” he said.

  “’S why I don’t want that to happen to us,” his mother told him. “I already been to prison.”

  Darryl looked over at the television. They’d cut back to the studio where a guy, wearing a tie and a lump of curly hair on his head, was saying they’d have more on the hostage situation later. He also said there’d be a report about whether that cop was going to get indicted for shooting Jamal Perkins. A commercial came on with a lady in a white headband drinking a cup of tea.

  “That’s all it is, Darryl,” his mother said. “When that man calls back to negotiate, you all better have something to tell him that won’t get us throwed back in jail. Because I cannot stand it.”

  “Fuck, Moms!” He made a move to punch the wall again. “What’m I supposed to do?”

  “Get a holda yourself. I always said your temper was going to get the better of you,” his mother said sharply. “Now get on outta here. My program is coming on. The Young and the Restless. That bitch Nina be doin’ it again.”

  72

  FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, Lieutentant Jerry Lawrence had been one of the lead hostage negotiators for the New York Police Department. In that time, he’d been to every neighborhood in the city and talked to failed bank robbers, husbands who’d kidnapped their ex-wives, crazed mothers grabbing their children in custody disputes, and every other kind of desperate person in a desperate circumstance. But in the end, it all came back to his friend John, who was one of the guards who’d been taken hostage at Attica.

  The two of them had grown up together in Valley Stream and played next to each other on the high school football team. So after Lawrence got back from the Marines in September 1971, he went upstate to visit his old friend, who’d started working at the prison earlier in the year. But instead of being able to hang out and drink beer with his buddy, Lawrence wound up watching television at the house near Attica, as the twelve hundred inmates took over the prison and grabbed his friend John and thirty-seven other hostages.

  Long after all the shooting was over and the bodies were carried out, Lawrence found himself thinking about how everything could’ve been handled differently. They could’ve tried to reopen negotiations and get a new list of demands. The governor could’ve shown up and stood outside the gate. A thousand other scenarios kept playing themselves out in his head over the years. The whole thing stayed with him after he got to be a sergeant in the Brooklyn robbery squad. It was how he wound up talking his way out of a supermarket stickup that’d turned into a hostage situation in East Flatbush.

  His technique had pretty much stayed the same. It always just boiled down to him and the guy on the other end of the phone. All the rest of them—the brass, the zone commanders, the specialized units with their surveillance equipment and backup negotiators, the media, the wandering by crazies—just faded away. “It’s just him and me, like a Clint Eastwood movie,” he’d lie to other cops afterward. His former wife was a little closer to the mark. “It’s like therapy,” she said. “Except you can’t be sure which one’s the nut.”

  What you had to do was get the guy to trust you. Even if it meant staying on the phone or sitting on the other side of a door for nine or ten hours straight. You lost him even for a second, he’d kill them all and it’d be your fault. If he said he saw a little green man in the corner, you’d better not say you did too. Otherwise, he’d know you were full of shit, like the rest of them, so why not end it all? After you’d been talking to him long enough, though, you started to feel like you knew the guy better than his best friend did. Sometimes it wasn’t just feeling sorry for him. You genuinely started to like the guy. Which made it too bad if it came around later where you had to blow him out of his socks, but you tried not to think about that too much.

  At first, the situation with the probation officer and Darryl King didn’t seem too impossible. It was true that King’s people weren’t allowing anybody up to the twelfth floor, where they were holding the hostage, and the tenth and eleventh floors were also out-of-bounds. But there was a makeshift command post set up in one of the apartments downstairs and they were trying to fix up a direct telephone line to the hostage takers, even though the cables around here were old and hard to work with.

  However, the biggest pain at the moment was that Detective Sergeant McCullough from the two-five hanging over his shoulder. The writer. McCullough said he wanted to be there because he’d been wounded by Darryl. But Lawrence figured he just wanted to hang around taking notes, so he could get a movie deal later.

  The previous efforts to get a dialogue going with the hostage takers had failed miserably, so when Lawrence dialed the phone and got Darryl King in the middle of the afternoon, he decided to start off with the soft sell.

  “How’s it going, kid?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just checking in,” Lawrence said casually. He glanced at the red-and-green finger painting hanging on the kitchen wall. There were children’s drawings all over the apartment. “Just making sure everybody’s cool.”

  “Yeah, what’s the matter with you, man? Somebody got a beef?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Because if somebody got a beef, I got my finger on the trigger,” Darryl told him.

  Lawrence recognized the cocaine arrogance with a little bit of fear around the edges. The kid had probably been sitting up there, smoking crack all day. Time to lay down some ground rules.

  “I’d like to make sure the hostage is okay,” Lawrence said calmly, pulling on one of the waxed ends of his mustache and looking at McCullough hovering nearby. “Can I talk to him?”

 
; “Fuck you. No.”

  “Well, maybe I could just hear his voice or something.”

  There were some bumping sounds, like Darryl was walking around with the phone in his hand. “Say something,” he told somebody on his end.

  “Something,” a faint voice said in the background. “What else do you want me to say?” It sounded like a white guy with a bad hangover. Lawrence assumed it was the probation officer, but since he’d never actually talked to the guy, he couldn’t be sure.

  That was about as good as they were going to get at the moment. They could try to use the telescopes a little later to reconfirm the probation officer was okay. For now, the thing was to try to get some demands on the table.

  “Do you have a list of what you want?” Lawrence said once Darryl was back on the phone again.

  “I demand my shit from my old house.”

  The kid honestly didn’t seem to understand that he had them by the balls now. Lawrence kept trying to pin him down on specifics. You were always better off if you had a goal to work toward. Otherwise, it was all just endless vamping until somebody got killed.

  “What do you want in exchange for releasing the hostage?” Lawrence asked patiently, sitting on the kitchen counter and adjusting the bill on his baseball cap.

  A group of voices all started speaking at once on Darryl’s end. It sounded like all of them were giving the kid static.

  “All right, you all shut the fuck up before I decide to shoot somebody,” Darryl was telling them defensively.

  Lawrence tried shouting, “Calm down,” into the receiver. He thought he saw McCullough make a move for the phone, and he got ready to shove him out of the way. McCullough was about five years younger and two inches taller, but he was a little thick around the middle.

  “Let me talk to him,” he said to Lawrence.

  “Get lost,” Lawrence told McCullough, preparing to draw his gun if he had to.