Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  All at once, the voices on the other end stopped talking and it was just him and Darryl again.

  “All right,” Darryl told him. “What I want is a key.”

  “A key to what?”

  “Make it two keys, and I want my Olds …”

  “Wait a second.” Lawrence took off his cap for a second and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Are we talking about two kilos of cocaine here?”

  “’S right,” said Darryl. “It’s a business.” Lawrence couldn’t tell if the kid was crazy or kidding. “And I want a helicopter so I can fly the shit to Cali,” Darryl went on.

  “Cali in Colombia?”

  “Cali is California, man,” said Darryl. “I know some people there, who can set it up right. So you get me the two keys and the copter and you bring my Cutlass around front so my man Aaron can drive it out west.”

  He was acting like this hostage situation was an investment opportunity. Lawrence wondered if the kid had thought about any of this or if he was making it all up off the top of his head. “Is that it?” he asked Darryl.

  “Yeah, man, and you get together about a half million in cash and then we’ll talk. You got until midnight, man.”

  Lieutenant Lawrence covered the phone with his hand and said, “Bullshit,” to everyone else in the room.

  There had to be thirty people jammed into this small space. It was like the circus clowns all trying to get in the car. Half of them were like that stooge McCullough and didn’t have any business being there. Lawrence closed his eyes and pretended all of them were going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

  Somewhere, on one of the rooftops outside, there was a cop holding a high-powered rifle and smoking a cigarette. The designated shooter. He’d be the one to end it all, if it came to that. Until then, it was Lawrence’s ball game.

  “All right,” he said to Darryl. “Let’s get serious now.”

  “We are serious,” Darryl said in a hoarse, enraged voice. “We prepared to die here.”

  The words brought Lawrence back to Attica. He remembered the inmates on television chanting the same thing and refusing to compromise on any of their demands. Unconditional amnesty with flights to “nonimperialist” countries for the inmates who wanted it. His friend John’s brother had said, “They think they’re gonna get out of this, but they won’t.” He didn’t know the half of it. Four days later, the governor ordered in the State Police with their guns and riot gear. Twenty-nine inmates died that day.

  What nobody expected was that his friend John and nine of the other hostages would get killed too. Who could’ve predicted they’d get shot by the State Police when they moved in? But that’s what happened when you did these kinds of big operations with a lot of confusion and bullets flying around. The wrong people got hurt.

  He hoped the same thing wouldn’t happen now with the probation officer, but he’d given up looking for guarantees in life that day at Attica.

  “I’ll call you back later and see if you’re ready to talk sense,” he told Darryl.

  73

  OUTSIDE THE LIVING ROOM window, the sun is going down and the TV klieg lights are coming up. Long shadows appear on the apartment’s walls and ceilings.

  Assuming this is the last place I’ll ever see, I take a good look around. Whoever lived here before did try to make it into a respectable middle-class home, with slipcovers on the couches and chairs and a white lace cloth on the dining room table. They even have two elaborate candelabras.

  In the corner, I notice a five-foot-high wooden cabinet with glass windows in the corner. Its shelves are lined with copies of the Old and New Testaments, books of religious songs, and figures of Jesus. Several eight-by-ten photos are arranged on a shelf underneath the books. The people in the pictures must’ve lived here before, and Darryl and the others must’ve chased them out.

  I squint to get a better look at the photos through the glass. They’re arranged in chronological order, like a little history lesson. In the oldest picture, a determined-looking black man is dressed in a World War II private’s uniform. In another shot from the 1940s, a woman is standing in what looks like an armaments factory with her co-workers. Later pictures from the 1950s have the man dressed as a bus driver, and the’ woman dressed as a nurse. As the progression goes on, a young woman, who must be their daughter, starts appearing in many of the pictures with them. As the photos change from grainy black-and-white to glossy color, I watch her growing up: from a high school graduation, to a wedding, to a beach holiday. But the pictures of her seem to stop a couple of years ago, when she’s about thirty-three. I wonder if she died or something.

  The last photo on the shelf is the most recent and the most touching. It shows the bus driver and the nurse as an old couple, in their best Sunday clothes, standing on either side of a young boy with a bright toothy smile, who’s obviously their grandson. They’re proud people who’ve spent their whole lives working hard and wound up in this shitty housing project built by someone like Robert Moses or Richard Silver and overseen by bureaucrats like me. The boy is their hope for the future.

  Now they’re all gone and Darryl King and his friends are left in their place. The glass in the cabinet is cracked, the couch slipcovers are ripped, and the lace cloth is stained with what I first thought was red paint, and I now realize is blood. There’s a window-sized hole in the wall, opening out on the kitchen. I can see scales, piles of money, bags of crack vials, and ether tanks spread around. The dining room table is covered with Uzis, .45s, and various other automatics and semiautomatics. The door to the back bedroom has been removed and instead there’s a white sheet hanging there, so the place looks like a real den of iniquity.

  I notice a white telephone cord stretched around the sheet and into the back bedroom, where Darryl’s been negotiating with the cop for a few minutes. I can only make out bits and pieces of what he’s been saying. There was one hopeful part where he sounded all blustery and entrepreneurial, but then I hear him say, “We prepared to die here,” and a long silence passes. After a couple of more minutes, the phone cord draws up and Darryl walks out, grinding his teeth again.

  “So what’d he say?” I ask him as he starts to walk by me on the way to the kitchen.

  He gives me the kind of look a woman would give her ex-husband during a divorce proceeding. Like it’s inappropriate for us to be talking to each other.

  It’s been like this for hours, with hardly anyone talking to me. If it wasn’t for the sun, I’d completely lose track of time. They’ve gotten much more militant about everything; taking shifts holding the gun on me and even putting a blindfold on me a couple of times, for no particular reason other than it’s what one seems to do when hostages are around. Eventually they decide to leave it off.

  Across the room, by the glass cabinets, I see three girls teaching each other a new dance step and two boys practicing paramilitary maneuvers with their Uzis. It’s hard to tell if they got all this from old film clips of the Black Panthers or Rambo.

  I’m bored, my head aches, and I’m dying for a cigarette. I hope nobody asks me to stand up quickly, because after sitting here all day, I don’t think my legs will hold up. And worst of all, my bladder is about ready to burst.

  I look over at the couch near the television. A really pretty little girl, about four or five, with pigtails and a gap in her teeth, is sitting between the old lady who’s trying to do some knitting and a little boy of about six who’s sliding some Sesame Street toys across one of the armrests. The three of them have been around the periphery of my attention all day. The little girl keeps looking back and forth, like she can’t decide which is more exciting, the toys or the knitting. It seems like they all wandered into the wrong apartment.

  In my isolation and mind fog, I start to have strange thoughts.

  Like about black people. I start remembering how my father always said black people were coming to get us when I was growing up. But then as I got older, the black people I met weren’t like that. S
o I guess in some way I’ve always thought these weren’t the black people my father was talking about.

  In one of the other rooms, somebody is listening to a radio broadcast of a Black Muslim minister preaching his doctrine about the races.

  I wonder if somebody told Darryl about white people coming to get him when he was growing up. What do Black Muslims call us? Devils. I guess if somebody grabbed my people, threw them into chains, and shipped them as slaves to a strange, unfriendly land, I might think they were devils too. It’s certainly the kind of thing the Devil would do.

  In the other room, the Black Muslim minister on the radio is saying the white man’s time on earth is almost up.

  I start to imagine the building we’re in is a gigantic skull and I’m trapped inside it and not allowed to communicate with anybody on the outside. So the thoughts inside are getting into a rage, knocking me around and building up pressure. If they aren’t let out soon, the whole skull will explode.

  After a while, I notice Darryl and the others are going around the apartment, collecting spray cans and lighters. Maybe they’ve hit on some new way of smoking crack. Once every few minutes one of them says something loud, angry, and not completely sensible. I start getting worried that the drug is making them too crazy. I hope they don’t just decide to shoot me without regard to the consequences.

  The only one who doesn’t seem ready to detonate any moment is the small old woman knitting next to the kids on the couch. She wears a sagging gray cardigan, brown slacks, and plastic-rimmed glasses with silvery wings. Her hair is a wiry mass of gray and black strands dyed at random. She was probably quite beautiful once, but now her face is well-mapped with deep wrinkles receding toward her small flat chin.

  She gives me what seems to be a sympathetic look. Next to her, several of Darryl’s teenage lieutenants are fingering their guns and watching a cop show on television like it’s an instructional film. I smile at the old woman, but Aaron, who’s guarding me with an Uzi, catches the look.

  “What’re you smiling at?” he says.

  I’m so surprised at being spoken to that I sputter before answering, “I’m just a stupid asshole.”

  The answer seems to satisfy Aaron for the moment. The phone rings and more voices blare from the megaphones outside. I can hear Darryl arguing with his mother in the kitchen. More crack is burning and everyone’s sounding much too excited. More police sirens wail outside. I hear somebody mention a midnight deadline and my palms start to sweat.

  In all the confusion, the old woman on the couch pushes herself to her feet and comes over to me. Aaron, sitting on a wooden chair a yard away, hardly looks at her.

  “How you doing?” she asks in an odd, high-pitched voice that strikes a chord in my head.

  Her right hand flutters like a paper caught in a sudden updraft and her fingers come to a rest on her brittle-looking collarbone. She must be Darryl King’s great-grandmother, who I spoke to on the phone just before that day in court. I remember the desperate note she wrote to me and decide it’s safer for us not to acknowledge that we’ve spoken before. An ally. Maybe.

  She puts her hands behind her back and looks down at me like I’m an old friend she just spotted on a park bench.

  “Lovely night,” she says pleasantly.

  Behind her, I see a thirteen-year-old kid in a red Kangol hat trying to jam his gun into another boy’s mouth. After a couple of seconds, he takes it out and points it at the ceiling. If he fires it now, all the cops will probably come crashing in, shooting, and we’ll all get killed.

  I try to contain my voice and insides. “Lovely,” I say as the boy finally lowers his gun. “Will you be getting outside at all?” I mean, would you help me escape?

  “Well,” she says. “No, I don’t think so.” It occurs to me that she’s not allowed to come and go as she pleases either.

  Someone outside keeps chanting Darryl’s name over and over on the megaphone and a searchlight swings through the windows. Darryl’s great-grandmother—whose name is Ethel McDaniels, I recall—continues to act as though nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

  Time is running out. My kidneys are killing me. It feels like someone’s trying to blow up a parade float in there. The kid in the red Kangol hat is sipping a beer and flicking a straw at me. Little droplets land on my face. It’s his homemade torture. I look at the guns on the kitchen table and think about using one to shoot him and then Mrs. McDaniels’s great-grandson, Darryl.

  I watch the little boy and little girl chase each other out of a back bedroom, yelling, “Yiii, yiii!!” as they go. They disappear into the bathroom and my bladder feels like it’s getting swollen to about twice its normal size.

  “Who are those kids?” I ask the old woman, trying to get my mind off the pain.

  “They belong to Darryl’s sister,” she says in that voice that makes everything sound either cheerful or completely devastating. “LaToya and Howard.”

  Aaron is resting his Uzi on his knee and looking at me impassively through narrowed eyes.

  “So what the hell are they doing here?”

  “Oh, they was just left,” she says. She looks kind of sad about it. “You know the family wasn’t always like this,” she tells me. “Not back home. Because we didn’t always live in New York, you know. The McDanielses, they come from Lee County in Arkansas. The boy’s great-granddaddy was a …” She smiles to herself. “Oh he was a very articulate man.” From the way her face lights up, you can tell she admired him for more than just the way he spoke. They must’ve been happy together.

  “He was gonna be the first engineer in Lee County,” she says, “except they didn’t hire colored folks for engineers then … So that’s why we had to come to New York.”

  It almost sounds like she’s trying to defend the family reputation against what’s going on right here in the apartment. “But what it was, was we thought we had ourselves a house in Brooklyn,” she says. “It was gonna be near the good schools, because it was gonna be an integrated neighborhood. You know what I’m saying? They’d pick up people’s trash in the streets. And then, what happened is they went and didn’t build those houses.”

  She looks around at the mess here like it’s the direct result. I wonder if the place she’s talking about is the Sullivan Houses, the low-income project in Brooklyn that Richard Silver backed out of in the 1970s. A few weeks ago, I would’ve blamed him for all this; I mean, what can you expect if you have people living apart from everyone else, in poverty? But I don’t have the time or the inclination to think that way anymore. I wouldn’t want Darryl King growing up next door to me either.

  “Yes sir,” Mrs. McDaniels is saying, “the trouble started with the boy’s mother. She just got bored being poor all the time. She had to be that star, runnin’ in the streets.”

  Darryl walks into the room, waving his arms and jabbering half coherently. I try to ignore him. But I need to piss so badly that tears are forming in my eyes.

  “Listen,” I say to Aaron. “Will you please just let me go to the can this once?”

  Darryl happens to hear me as he walks by. “You want permission?” he demands. His eyes look tired and there’s a thick white crust around his mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “Permission denied,” Darryl says, taking control amidst all the confusion. “Shit in the chair… And if you get any on the seat, I kill you.”

  All this rage breaks loose in my mind. Before I can get a grip, I hear myself saying, “How about I just piss on you?”

  As casually as a tennis pro approaching the net, he steps forward and backhands me across the mouth. I go falling over sideways while he heads off to the kitchen. As I lie there on the floor, bloody and humiliated, I realize I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate Darryl right at this moment. It’s a primal, consuming fury unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. I can’t hear anything except a sound like a subway train going right by my ears.

  The kid with the straw keeps flicking droplets of his spit on
my face.

  I let out a howl. Everything from before means nothing now. I only care about one thing. I want to blow Darryl King’s head off. And I pray that I’ll live long enough to do it.

  I get back up on the chair, but within two minutes I’m on the verge of losing all control of my bladder. Just then, Darryl’s great-grandmother turns to Aaron.

  “Let him go to the bathroom,” she says abruptly.

  “No way,” Aaron tells her, a gold tooth peeking through his harelip and wispy mustache. “I got my orders.”

  “Oh, Aaron, stop this foolishness. Take the man where he wants to go.”

  Aaron shakes his head emphatically. “Darryl said no.”

  “I’ll talk to Darryl,” Mrs. McDaniels says, pointing a bony finger at Aaron.

  The boy is weakening. “Why you care about him?” Aaron asks, looking at me.

  “Just do it,” she says.

  Reluctantly, Aaron hoists me up by the elbow. After sitting down the whole day, I get dizzy from standing up so fast and my legs nearly give way under me. I steady myself on the slim boy’s shoulder and allow myself to be led to the bathroom, too bound up to even look back in gratitude at Darryl’s great-grandmother.

  I have my fly open before I actually enter the room. I put my hand against the wall as I lean over the toilet. The piss shoots out of me like a flame, gas follows, and I moan out loud with relief. I keep a powerful stream going for at least three minutes while Aaron presses the Uzi against the base of my skull. As I continue to empty myself, I notice a pair of cockroaches racing down the bathroom wall.

  Then I smell something awful coming from another part of the bathroom. I turn my head slowly with the gun following it. The bathtub is full of feces.

  “Oh Jesus,” I say, ready to throw up.

  “Looks bad, huh?” says Aaron.

  The two small children come running in. They’re both cute kids with round, shiny faces and high-pitched giggles. Their clothes are soiled and smelly, though. The boy wears shit-stained jeans and a red shirt that looks like he hasn’t taken it off for days. The little girl, LaToya, has on a pair of blue pajamas with smiling gray elephants and a wide yellow stain on the front. Her little legs are like matchsticks.