Midnight

by Odie Hawkins

  “What’s this shit with ‘fast foods’ in our communities?! It’s like we don’t have time to sit down ’n eat. Most of us ain’t got nothin’ but time; we ain’t got no jobs to rush to.

  “Isn’t that interesting? The white boy is dead on the go, phone in the car, ready to go, but you don’t see him grabbing those killer burgers and loading up on junk food. We spend the same money he spends, buying synthetic shit that don’t do nothing but make you have a cravin’.

  “Check it out, youngblood. Put enough sugar in your tank and it won’t run. You’ll think it’s runnin’ but it’s just an illusion. Everything they push in our communities is sweet, I think it’s a clever way to get us to swallow some bitter shit. I had a couple junkie chumps give me some sweet gin one time. You believe that?”

  Bop tried to argue the point a few times but gave up; Chester’s logic was tight.

  “I ain’t got nothing against eating meat; it’s what you’re eating in the meat that fucks me up. It’s got to be some powerful chemicals they’re using to blow a damn cow up to adult size in four months. Or is it three?

  “And I’m not one of these funky chumps who believes that vegetables don’t scream ’n cry when we cut and kill them too. It’s just a matter of biology; I’d rather kill a tomato, which doesn’t have a heart like mine or a liver, or a dick, than kill a cow.”

  Chester ate seafood when it was available (either legally or illegally) and vegetables (undercooked by demand) and only smoked marijuana for his holidays.

  “That firewater ain’t nothing but some chemicals them bastards done stirred up in a vat. Herb is from Mother Earth.”

  Chester L. Simmons was the man who made him understand that white bread wasn’t really wonderful and that he ought to pay the Motherland a visit.

  Bop sprawled in front of the television, finishing off the last Beck’s and smoking a joint, marijuana sheen in his eyes, fascinated by the Watts Riot of ’92. Uncle David and Aunt Lu had watched an hour of it after dinner and decided to watch the TV in their bedroom.

  “Ain’t no doubt in my mind how this shit is gon’ come out. Niggers gon’ lose again.”

  Bop opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the yard. He felt the veins in his forehead throbbing. The brothers were firing it up. He could hear distant sirens and imagined that he could smell smoke.

  That’s for Rodney King, Benny Powell, Clarence Chance, Latasha Hawlins, the racist pre-New Year’s sweeps through the project to arrest the brothers the police thought would fire their pistols on New Year’s, for flooding South Central L.A. with crack, for making men lie on the ground, their initiation into humiliation, for no jobs, for hopelessness, for the secret promotion of gang warfare by the Los Angeles Police Department, for sheer racism.

  Bop felt a level of agreement with his uncle concerning the Korean merchant burnout.

  “I don’t see why they burnin’ up their stores.”

  “’Cause they’re nasty, disrespectful, and rude.”

  “Then why shop in their stores? Shit, if you didn’t shop in their damn stores for a week, they’d become very respectful and courteous. Or else they’d go somewhere else quick!”

  He took a final hit on the joint and popped the roach into his mouth, gulped it down with a swallow of beer.

  Bone had called back twice.

  “Bop, you should be down in the ’hood now; home, these motherfuckers is loadin’ up on shit!”

  Skateboard tried to lure him down into it with promises.… “I promise you this, man; if you tripped through here right now, you could pick up VCRs, booze, anything you want. I promise you mo’ shit than you ever had.…”

  He was tempted but didn’t feel compelled. This is a fucking setup. Once the fire dies down, niggers is gon’ pay for this and I’m gon’ be in Ghana, West Africa.

  He stutter-stepped back into the living room. The analysts were analyzing the analysts; the pundits were punditing; the sociologists were sociologizing; the urbanologists were making money; people were being interviewed.

  A young black man with his Raiders cap on sideways summed it up. “If you have to ask me why this happened ’cause you really don’t know, then my daddy was right, white folks is a bunch o’ dumb motherfuckers!”

  It came as close to being live television as it would ever be. Profane statements skipped past the censors, and the media’s desperate need to be first with the latest tragedy gave a party atmosphere to the news.

  “Tom, what’s that burning over there?”

  “Well, Jerry, that’s the warehouse that we pointed out to you earlier. The fire department hasn’t been able to get to it yet.”

  He remoted the television off, after having learned that most of the television newscasters were racist-thinking (“They’re savages. Who would do this to a city?”) and that the city was likely to be placed under a curfew and that the National Guard might be sent in.

  Bop staggered up the hall to his bedroom, flopped across the bed for a few minutes. Damn! I hope this don’t fuck with my shit!

  He slid off the bed and fumbled through the top drawer of his bedside night table. He pulled the miniature briefcase from underneath a pile of socks and shorts, stared at the briefcase for a moment, and finally opened it.

  My yellow-fever card, my passport, my plane ticket, my trip to Africa, with a thousand ol’ nasty drug-saved dollars to spend.

  He opened the yellow-fever card and studied the entry—this is the one that made me feel like I had the flu for a week.

  “Now, I have to explain, Mr. Johnson; about seven to ten days from now, you’ll begin to experience yellow fever symptoms. Don’t be alarmed. That is what this shot is all about.”

  He flipped the passport open and studied his picture. What the fuck would you call a motherfucker who looked like this?

  He stumbled over to the dresser, to stare at himself. Well, I ain’t ugly. But I ain’t pretty neither. He pulled his T-shirt off and studied his top half. Pumping iron had put a physique on his five-foot-eight-inch frame. He had stopped pumping iron after his first year in Chino, upon the advice of Brother Simmons.

  “Ain’t no need to try to look like a gorilla, Bop, unless you intend to spend the rest of your life guarding your asshole in jail. Look around you; look at the dudes with the lats ’n pecs. Most of ’em are so musclebound they can’t even turn their heads unless they turn their shoulders. If that ain’t bad enough, there are two other downsides; number one, all that excess mass is gonna turn to flab unless you pump for the rest of your life. Number two, the police are gonna harass your ass all over South Central “EL-A” and beyond ’cause they can tell, just from looking at you all buffed up, that you just got outta jail.”

  Bop’s attention was drawn to the large, neatly rounded keloid in his left side. “The bullet could’ve caused a lot of damage, a lot of damage. You could’ve suffered a spinal cord injury. You’re lucky, young man, don’t push it.”

  Twenty-one years old, been seriously shot once, been beaten and left for dead once, skull fractured, right ankle fractured by a baseball bat, in and out of some kind of penal institution for the past eleven years. Ex-drug-addict/pusher, ex-war-lord counselor of the Bricks, one of the biggest, best organized, and most brutal of the “EL-A” gangs.

  Bop threw the gang sign at himself in the minor—a Brick! How many could say that they had “retired” from the Bricks?

  He closed the passport and flopped back on the bed to stare up at the light in the ceiling. Retired. Going to Africa. It didn’t seem real.

  How can I be a “retired” Brick? What the hell am I going to Africa for?

  The two people closest to him, Uncle David and Aunt Lulu, couldn’t really figure it out either, the part about him going to Africa. They put it in the same category as noodle-and-wheat-germ eating.

  Uncle David: “Well, Bop, I tell you the way I feel about it. It’s your life and you can do what you want with it. But, for my money, I wouldn’t be going nowhere as fucked up as Africa is.
”

  “Unc, Ghana is just one country in Africa, you can’t condemn the whole continent.”

  “Tell me something, Bop …?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How many of those countries over there—’sides South Africa, and we know how fucked that was, and still is to a certain extent—how many of those countries are completely self supporting?”

  “Unc, that ain’t really the point.”

  “Well, what’s the point?”

  “Now, Dave, don’t be so hard on the boy. Bop, you want to go to Africa. What’re you gon’ do over there?”

  What’re you gonna do over there? What’re you gonna do over there? What’re you gonna do over there? What …? OK, Chester, answer that one for me. You told me why I should go and what I would find but you supply the answer to that one. What’re you gonna do over there?

  “Bop, listen to me, I been around the world three times, done had six bitches, three wives, and half a dozen children. I’ve shot dope, drank all the firewater I could, overextended my spiritual credit card, felt every emotion a funky chump could feel. I have only one regret.”

  “Chester, you have a regret? Hold on a minute, let me put this fuckin’ barbell down. Chester Simmons regrets something?”

  “That’s right. I went to Ghana right after Nkrumah came to power.…”

  Chester was always dropping funny names on his head.… Nkrumah, Lumumba, Fanon, Mao, Che Guevara, Nasser, Jung, Hannibal, Nzingha, Langston Hughes, Chano Pozo, Duke Ellington, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, L’Ouverture, Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, Bird, Lady Day.…

  “I had the money from a game that I had just run and I couldn’t think of anything better to do than go check my roots. Ghana had an ancestral pull on me, you know what I mean?”

  Bop nodded. What else was there to do?

  “I don’t want to take you through the political scene; that was weird. What I discovered was our people, or rather I should say, the essence of our people. It would be like going to the moon and finding out that you belonged there. I had always been led to believe that the African at home was a savage motherfucker with a bone in his nose, standing around a big pot with some missionaries in it, waiting for them to boil. Lots of crazy shit like that.”

  “Where’s the regret part? That’s what I wanna hear.”

  “I regret that I didn’t stay over there; if I had I wouldn’t be doin’ time right now.”

  They often talked about Africa after that, about the politics, about the customs, but it always came back down to the people.

  “They’re the best human beings, pound for pound, that I’ve ever known, Bop Daddy, the best. You oughta go check ’em out before you get your ass slaughtered out there in them mean streets.”

  Yeahh, Chester, you told me to go and how to get there, but what am I gonna do over there?

  Fuck it, I’ll decide that when I get there. I got eight grand to blow, I can do anything.

  2

  He woke up at daybreak, stared at the gleaming light bulb for a few minutes, and went back to sleep.

  9.00 A.M., the phone ringing. Awwww shit! Just when I was about to get into that third dream. He stumbled out of bed, going to the phone, pulling the cake from his crotch.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bop?”

  “Yeah, what’s happenin’?”

  “Wake up, man, this is Greg.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah, I know who it is; what’s going on?”

  “Over here, everything.… Watch that, motherfucker!”

  Bop could clearly hear sirens in the distance beyond their conversation and a commotion closer up.

  “Greg?”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Fuck you callin’ me for, man?”

  “Aw, it’s happening, man, it’s happenin’; you can get what you want just by walkin’ in and pickin’ it up. It’s happenin’.”

  Bop could tell that Greg was drugged and drunk. He was always drugged and drunk, but he’d do anything for a fellow Brick.

  “So, you got all the goodies, huh?”

  “Whatever you want, brother, I got it; OK, home?”

  “Yeah, Greg, I hear you. Be talking to you, later.”

  He hung up the phone and did a stretch-yawn. Uncle and Aunt gone since 6:00 A.M.; he had the whole day to drink beer and smoke herb. What do I want to do today?

  Maybe I’ll call Justine up and have her to come over here ’n play with my jones for a couple hours. Nawww, she’ll be in my face for two days if I give her a couple hours.

  He strolled to the fridge for a sandwich and a glass of Pepsi. Fuck you, Chester.… Man does not like wheat germ alone. He made a ham sandwich and filled up one of Uncle David’s Jolly Giant plastic glasses with Pepsi and ice.

  He sat at the kitchen table munching on his sandwich and staring out of the window. The section of Torrance that they lived in was like a dead city. People drove up, popped out of their cars, mowed their lawns on Saturday mornings, and kept extremely low profiles. The whites in the neighborhood were showing some signs of anxiety about the recent trickle of Koreans, but there were no overt jitters.

  Wonder what Ghana is gonna be like? Nothing like this, I hope.

  He had two large bags fully packed and an L.A. Gear gym bag set to go. May 4th, 1992, 8:45 P.M. was git-off time.

  He took a full swallow of the soda, enjoying the carbonated buzz, feeding on the residual high from last night’s herb.

  Got to get some more of that.

  May 2nd, two more days before I leave.…

  Stupid assholes! Why in the fuck would they have to shoot two babies? He had lost count of the number of older children who had lost their lives in the crossfires of the war between the Bricks and the Keymen, the Bricks’ major rivals for a drug turf that overlapped.

  He stared at the anorexic white woman who seemed to jog around the neighborhood night and day, dumb bitch.

  Yeahh, that’s what did it, the babies being killed. It touched a chord in him that he hadn’t know about before. He called a Brick session to get to the bottom of matters.

  “Who shot the babies? If it was a Brick, he’s gon’ get a major-league Brick ass-kickin’ and we’ll take a vote to push him off a four-story buildin’. Who shot the babies?!”

  All of the members denied being guilty; no one wanted to take the blame for killing a one-year-old and an eighteen-month-old, but he realized, from the odd looks that many of the Bricks gave him, that they thought he was showing a sign of weakness to be voicing concern about innocent bystanders being blown away.

  Skateboard put a few words in his ear about the situation. “Uhhh lookahere, Bop, everybody feel bad about the two babies gettin’ killed ’n shit, but we feel even worse about Lil Looie and Bim Bam gettin’ shot up ’n shit. What we gon’ do about that?”

  Chester was right.… “Go on back out there and get into it if you want to, Bop. Just remember, it’s an endless fuckin’ cycle. They got tribes in the Amazon who’ve made peace after centuries of feuding to join forces against the European invasion. What you youngbloods oughta be doin’ is making peace and not war, ’cause the police is your European invasion.”

  An endless fuckin’ cycle. A Keyman for a Brick, a Brick for a Keyman. The prize was many city blocks of drug-addict territory.

  Bop smiled, thinking about the story he had heard from an elder Brick (thirty-two years old) about how the Bricks got started “The brother who started us up was a dude named Tojo; his father was a contractor—this was way back in the seventies—so he decided that the ‘Bricks’ would be a good name for us. Some rogue Keymen got hold of Tojo one night and ran some cars over his head, smashed his head flat as a pancake. That was the thang that took us up against the Keymen, and then, you know, when we started building our drug scene, it got even more intense.”

  An endless fuckin’ cycle.

  The wall telephone behind him rang once, twice, five times. Probably them fools running round down there in the ’hood actin’ craz
y.

  The thought of the riot forced him away from day-dreaming at the kitchen table.

  “We’re looking at fresh fires being set here every hour. Looting, as you can see, is taking place in the Thrifty store right behind me.”

  “Jerry, you think you could talk to one of the people looting that store and ask him a few questions.”

  “Sure; uhhh, young man! Young man! How’re you going to feel tomorrow …?”

  “Feel tomorrow …?

  “I don’t know how to say it in Spanish.…”

  “I speak Ingles.”

  “Good, my question is, how’re you going to feel tomorrow about what you’re doing today?”

  “Whot’s tomorrow got to do wid eet?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whot’s wrong, meester, you on television ’n you don’t speak Ingles?”

  “Thank you for your comments, sir. As you just saw Pam, Bob, that’s the prevailing sentiment here. Loot today and devil take tomorrow. Back to you in the studio.”

  Bop frowned at the white people making glib racist commentary and remoted a channel change. Dirty-racist-dog-motherfuckers. Let’s see what these other assholes are talking about.

  Channel 7. “The mayor has declared a ten P.M. ’til six A.M. curfew for the following areas; please take note.”

  He was surprised to see Beverly Hills listed. Uhh huh, I see what the game is. Just in case the brothers happen to stumble through, they can jack us up on the curfew.

  “The National Guard has been called in and they are taking up positions in key sectors of the city. The city’s police chief, Daryl Gates.…”

  Bop flicked to another channel.

  “Now let me clearly understand you on this point, Mr. Robinson; you’re saying that the chief of police, Daryl Gates, deliberately allowed this situation to get out of hand in order to embarrass the mayor. Seems to me that’s making political capital out of a situation that.…”

  Flick.

  “What the power infrastructure of this city has to understand is that this situation was not triggered by the beating of Rodney King alone; that’s something that’s been taking place over a long time.…”