Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  “You must’ve been the one nearest the door,” the fireman holding the can says as he moves to help his partner and the others.

  “I must’ve.”

  I start coughing again. It feels like I’m about to spit up a lung. The skin exposed on my arms and legs looks charred and blackened in the places where it isn’t red and swollen. My face feels numb and the inside of my chest is seared, but I am alive. And in that moment, I know that I am truly my father’s son. I wonder if I will ever stop hating myself.

  76

  WITH THE CAR IN the shop and the time running late, Richard Silver and Jessica first tried to catch a cab going downtown. But it was snowing hard and traffic was bad, so for the first time in more than twenty years, Richard announced he was going to take the subway.

  “Why the hell not?” he said. “I practically helped build the fucking thing. Aren’t I entitled to something on a day like this?”

  The line for the token booth at the Eighty-sixth Street station was much too long, though, and he had to buy a couple from a desolate-looking guy with swollen lips standing by the turnstiles.

  “Bet he doesn’t pay taxes,” Richard Silver said, pushing through.

  “Good,” Jessica replied. “Maybe it’d be a good job for you when you get out.”

  They walked down a flight of stairs to the platform where the express train was supposed to pull in. The shopgirls and secretaries were standing around the steel pillars. A guy in a long moth-eaten old coat was asleep on the wooden bench. The man next to him was picking his nose and reading the Racing Form. The graffiti above their heads said: “Jesus Died for Your Sins, What Have You Done FOR HIM Lately?”

  “Some life,” Richard Silver said. “You know I helped them fix up this station when they had Gimbel’s here.”

  “I still can’t believe they gave you three years for money laundering,” Jessica told him.

  The local train went by upstairs and he didn’t say anything.

  “Why did Larry’s cousin set you up like that?” she said. “You didn’t do anything to hurt him, did you? You just offered him a deal.”

  “Ah, he was just a lousy bank manager,” Richard Silver told her with a wave of his hand. “He’s got his own problems. It was that probation thing that killed me. If I hadn’t had that violation and that prick Baum hanging over my head, I would’ve had a shot at working out a deal with the feds.”

  “Is that what your new lawyer said?”

  He grunted and undid two of the buttons on his gray cashmere overcoat. “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you something about that guy Baum. I had him about this far from making a trip to the Cayman Islands for me.” He showed her the distance with his thumb and index finger.

  “He didn’t go for it?”

  “What do you want, he’s a social worker,” he said, shrugging in exasperation. “Anyway, it’s no wonder he cares so much about the blacks. He’s starting to look like one of them. I think he was in a fire or something.”

  Richard Silver noticed a broad-shouldered black man in a business suit staring at him and realized he’d been talking much too loud. “You should watch it,” Jessica said.

  A beam of light appeared from the end of the tracks and began to grow larger. The distant rumble soon turned into a metallic roar and when the train pulled into the station, people’s faces were pressed almost right against the windows.

  “It’s too crowded,” said Richard Silver. “Let’s wait for the next one.”

  Jessica looked down at her watch. “You’re due at the marshal’s office in fifteen minutes. We better not.”

  They shoved their way onto the train and the closing doors caught the back of Richard’s coat. He turned around and got a face full of garlic breath from the Puerto Rican man with greasy hair and intelligent eyes, who was standing next to him. To his left, a fiftyish black woman with her hair in curlers was giving him the kind of angry look he’d come to expect from people who’d seen his picture in the newspapers lately. The car was a hellish sweatbox.

  “Can I get some room here?” he said.

  No one budged. Everywhere he looked people were packed up right against each other. Jessica was nowhere to be seen. He tried to elbow his way in a little farther, but he first felt some slight resistance and then a rough shove that almost put him on the floor. To steady himself as the train heaved forward, he reached up and grabbed an overhead strap. Somebody behind him poked him in the ass with something long and stiff.

  He hoped prison would be a little bit better than this. But as the train continued its inevitable journey going down, he knew it wouldn’t. By the time they’d passed the Bloomingdale’s stop, he’d even given up hope of finding a seat. He’d just stand there, numb and tired on his feet, like everybody else in New York.

  77

  SOMETIMES, WHEN I’M STANDING in the checkout line at the local Grand Union, I still get strange looks from the housewives because of the patches of seared, discolored skin on my ears, neck, and forehead. But I’m getting used to that, and it doesn’t bother me so much.

  My life is quite different from the way it once was. I live on the second floor of a small, but cozy wooden house just outside Camden, New Jersey, where I attend Rutgers University Law School. I often spend part of the weekend working on the garden in the back, and I plan to put in a row of tomatoes in the spring. At night I go to sleep to the sound of cicadas and crickets rather than crackheads and M-80s exploding down the street.

  Overall, I would have to say I am grateful for my new life. After all the turmoil and violence in the city, I appreciate the subtle nuances more: a cup of coffee in the morning, a mildly amusing story in the newspaper, strands of my hair on the brush in the bathroom. With the ninety-seven-thousand-dollar settlement I got from the city after the fire, I have relatively few money worries.

  Still, there are times when I feel a sadness lurking underneath and an emptiness inside. The other week I went to my cousin Jerry’s wedding in Hackensack and one particular part of the vows kept tolling over and over in my head. Forsaking all others. In some sense, I believe I have forsaken all others by leaving Probation and New York City.

  The last time I stopped by the office to pick up some papers, I ran into Jack, my old union rep. As a favor, he looked up how some of my old clients were doing. Ricky Velez, the ex-token sucker, got a job bagging groceries at a neighborhood Food Emporium and eventually moved up to assistant manager. Not a major accomplishment, I suppose, but something. On the other hand, Charlie Simms stayed addicted to crack and Maria Sanchez remained with her family. So they both wound up in jail.

  “Do you see that girl anymore?” Jack asked me as I was on my way out.

  I stopped and started to say yes, but then I caught myself and realized he was talking about Andrea, the law student I’d been seeing that summer. In fact, I don’t see Andrea anymore. It became very difficult for me to be around anybody in the months after I got out of the hospital. But I am still seeing the other girl. The one I neglected to save that day in the fire.

  In the middle of the night sometimes I’ll see her face and I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll rise from bed and fix myself two or three stiff drinks. When that doesn’t work, I get in the car and drive aimlessly for hours with a beer in my hand and the radio on at full blast. Going seventy-five miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike, I feel free and lost in a way I never thought was possible from growing up in the city. But I can’t get the girl out of my mind.

  One night just before Christmas, I find myself driving drunkenly through Weehawken, a small industrial town near the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. As I cruise up a street called Boulevard East, past rows of one-family brick houses and modernized Victorian homes, I take careful note of all the dependable old American cars with names like Mercury and Ford sitting out front. Just then, the road turns steep and crooked, as though it’s about to reveal something surprising. When it does, it’s enough to make me stop the car and get out.

  What it is is a view of the city t
hat I’ve never seen before. Across the river, the Manhattan skyline is shining like a string of Christmas lights in the night. It takes my breath away. I see the old piers thrusting out at the water and the top of the Empire State Building reaching for the starless sky. The World Trade Center towers rise from the south end of the island and the anonymous projects are fading off to the north. Huge new glass-and-steel towers are blocking out other old familiar parts of the horizon.

  Just to get a better look, I walk past a shady park and wander into a small concrete plaza area overlooking a marina. I think I remember reading once that Alexander Hamilton got shot around here, but at the moment all I see is a couple of stone memorials to veterans of foreign wars in the middle of the plaza. An American flag hangs from the porch of a house behind me, even though the sun went down hours ago. Somebody must’ve had to get out of town in a hurry and just left it up there.

  I stumble once or twice in the dark and make my way over to the fence at the outer edge of the plaza. I look down once and start to get dizzy. This whole thing seems to be set on top of a high stone wall, towering over the shoreline, like an ancient barrier designed to repel hostile forces arriving by water. I find myself leaning against some kind of metal contraption just to get my balance. It’s one of those old-fashioned viewing machines, with the steel mask on top that you look through. Its sad impassive eyes are pointing toward Manhattan. The sign underneath them says: “25 cents. BRING DISTANT POINTS OF INTEREST WITHIN CLOSE RANGE WITH THE USE OF THIS MACHINE.”

  I finish my beer and check my pockets, but I don’t have a quarter. I squint once more at the skyline. During the day there are ferries from here, but right now, it seems like it’s a world away. Somewhere across the water, somebody is getting laid, somebody else is getting shot, somebody’s getting ripped off, and somebody’s getting high. The city is a slow motion riot, destroying itself piece by piece, and I don’t have a place in it anymore. It’s like looking at a family portrait of people I’ll never see again.

  A dark cloud passes in front of the moon and an airplane glows like an ember falling from the sky. The world keeps going around faster all the time. A chilling wind whips through the air, rustling the trees and the American flag behind me.

  A Biography of Peter Blauner

  Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”

  Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”

  After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at New York magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wise Guy and screenwriter of the film Goodfellas. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”

  He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel, Slow Motion Riot, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the Times Literary Supplement by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”

  Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel, Casino Moon, was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching Casino Moon, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research The Intruder, which was published in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. For his next novel, Man of the Hour, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote The Last Good Day, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.

  Blauner’s most recent novel, Slipping Into Darkness (2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.

  More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the Law & Order franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery collection and on NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book The Trouble With Boys, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.

  Blauner grew up in the New York City of the 1970s and started writing fiction while a student at the Collegiate School for Boys. “I became a writer right before Mother’s Day when I was fifteen: I saw a little girl at Gimbel’s Department Store trying to pull her dress down, and heard her nanny say, ‘Stop that, you’re as bad as your mother.’”

  For his first novel, Slow Motion Riot, Blauner immersed himself in research, spending six months as a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation.

  For his fourth novel, Man of the Hour, Blauner traveled Jerusalem and the West Bank to get a sense of his characters’ background stories. This photograph was taken by a shepherd at the sheep market outside of Bethlehem.

  Since 1989, Blauner has been married to bestselling author Peg Tyre (The Trouble with Boys, The Good School). They have two sons.

  In recent years, Blauner has been working in television, as a writer and producer for the Law & Order franchise.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS A WORK of fiction about New York City. Though most of the settings, institutions, and agencies represented are real, the characters and events are not. Any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental.

  I would like to give thanks to the following people: Gerald Migliore, Kevin T. Smyley, Arthur Hudson, God Shammgod, Michael McGuinness, Jane Meara, Liza Dawson, Jim Landis, Bob Mecoy, Clare Alexander, Henry Eisig, Miguel Ibarra, Fran Lubow, Pat McFadden, Todd Siegal, Lovable Dupreme Akbar Physics, Ed Kosner, Troy, Donald Goines, Mark Rosenthal, Brian Walls, Bill Clark, Bob Losada, Reginald Morgan, Vanessa Grant, Mary Anne Sally, Floyd Simmons, Ava Elwort, Lou Shimpkin, Skeeter, Peter Herbst, Father Devine, Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Greg Cox, Joanne Gruber, Charlie, Richard Mayronne, Frances Kessler, Michael Lynne, Wallace Cheatham, Joe Lopez, Thaddeus, and eve
ryone else in or on probation who helped me.

  I would also like to give special thanks to Arthur Pine and Lori Andiman for their support and guidance, and most of all to Richard Pine, without whom this book would not be between two covers.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Put the Blame on Mame” by Alan Roberts and Doris Fisher. Copyright © 1946. Used by permission of Doris Fisher Music Corp. and Alan Roberts Music Corp.

  copyright © 1991 by Peter Blauner

  cover design by Karen Horton

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1528-9

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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