by Craig Birk
Interlude Eight
Roger (20)
In the summer of 1994, just after Curt Cobain blew his head off, Nirvana was, unsurprisingly, rapidly losing influence. It was nearly three years after Guns N’ Roses released the Illusions albums, and there was a lull in any kind of musical leadership. In mid-July, the albums on the top of the charts included Green Day, Soundgarden and Oasis. It created a perfect window for a good, but not great, rock band like Stone Temple Pilots to be considered pretty huge. So Roger was quite enthusiastic about having tenth-row tickets to their show along with three of his buddies whom he worked with at the TGI Friday’s next to the Long Beach State campus.
Roger was in the middle of a three-month self-imposed gambling hiatus and was flush with cash from his bartending job at Friday’s. Therefore, he had splurged on a twelve pack of Corona to share for the pre-party instead of Meister Brau or Natural Light, which were his standard choices purely for fiscal reasons. After finishing two beers each in the parking lot during the opening act, each of the four shoved one of the remaining bottles into the waistbands of their shorts and prepared to enter the arena.
Once inside, and both needing to pee quite badly, Roger and Steve—a nineteen-year-old busboy at Friday’s who happened to be black—headed immediately to the left where a sign indicated the nearest restrooms were located. About halfway there, they encountered a troubling situation. Seven black men in their early twenties had formed a ring around a pretty black girl who looked to be about seventeen and was wearing jeans and a pink GAP sweatshirt. They were shoving her lightly back and forth around the inside of the ring and raining insults on her. Each of her futile efforts to escape was blocked, and she was returned to the middle.
Roger had always felt comfortable around people of all races. He generally found black people to have a good sense of humor, and that summer he counted as many blacks as whites among his better friends. He stopped to try and better understand what was going on.
At this point, the treatment of the girl became markedly rougher. One of the guys in the circle caught the girl on the perimeter, grabbed her shoulders, then spun her around to face inward and wrapped his arms around her tightly. “You should learn to think, you dumb bitch,” he said loudly into her ear before releasing her and pushing her as hard as he could into the open space. She flew forward and was intercepted by another guy on the other side who stepped forward, lowered his shoulder, and drove it into the upper body of the oncoming girl. Outweighed by at least sixty pounds, she dropped to the ground like a quarterback who never saw the hit coming. Once down, her body curled slightly but she did not move much. The circle started to open with a few of the guys bending down and pointing at her, wanting to add one last comment.
Roger instinctively moved in and lifted the girl up, asking her if she was all right. She wrapped an arm around him weakly and began to walk slowly. They had only advanced a few feet when the guy who threw her the last time stepped in front of them.
“Who the fuck are you, bitch?” he demanded of Roger.
“Just leave her alone. She needs some air,” Roger said, at this point still not overly concerned about his own safety.
“She got what she needed. Maybe you should think about what you need, bitch,” the guy said, moving his face closer to Roger’s.
At this point, rage at the whole situation took over Roger’s actions. “Why? Are you tired of beating up girls?” he asked loudly. The comment elicited a round of laughs from the rest of the group. The largest of them was the most audible. He was slightly overweight, very muscular, nearly six and half feet tall, and was wearing a black oversized Dr. Dre tee shirt over Air Jordan shorts. A massive gold chain distracted attention from the rest of the outfit.
“Ah, shit. He clowned you big time, Chris-dog,” the big guy said, laughing.
Chris-dog didn’t think it was very funny. “You think you are some type of hero, bitch? What the fuck do you know? You think you are right and we are just a bunch of dumb niggers? Is that it?”
Roger did not have time for a reply. Chris swung with his right hand. Roger, who was nearly unbeatable at ping-pong, always had quick reflexes. He was able to move away from the girl and block the punch with his arm. Before Chris had a chance to swing again one of the other members of the group came from behind and connected with a roundhouse that landed on the back of Roger’s head and bent him forward. Chris then hit him on the side of the jaw with a weak left that was just enough to send Roger to the ground. The next blow came from the side and was an unhindered kick to the ribs that partially knocked the wind out of Roger and rotated him so he was flat on his back.
From head to toe, fists and shoes began pummeling him from every direction. Roger instinctively curled into a fetal position, using his arms to protect his head. The Corona bottle, still wedged into his pants, stuck into his abdomen and produced a sharp pain before falling to the side and rolling away, unbroken. He wet himself a little. The remainder of the beating only lasted nine seconds, but it seemed much longer.
“That’s enough!” a deep voice boomed from above. The blows immediately ceased. Roger looked up between his elbows to see where this divine intervention came from. It was the biggest of the group, who obviously held authority and had apparently refrained from participating in the beating. It occurred to Roger later that if this man had chosen to join in, or had not stopped things when he did, that he may not have walked away from the incident without serious permanent damage.
No one moved for about ten seconds. Roger looked from the big guy to his friend Steve who stood about fifteen feet away and was completely frozen with a look of shock on his face. Chris-dog saw who Roger was looking at and took a step in Steve’s direction. “What are you looking at, nigger?” he shouted.
At this point, eight concert security guards wearing ridiculous yellow jackets arrived on the scene along with six baton-wielding members of the Los Angeles Police Department. The police shouted for everyone to lie face down on the ground and put their hands behind their back. Their instructions were barely issued when they began using the batons, relying on their training to beat anything black, including Steve, until it was on the ground and motionless. They faced little resistance. Roger watched as two officers beat down the big guy in the Dre shirt who had saved him. The big guy stood as long as he could, his own way of protesting, but he did not hit back. Roger’s thoughts were still overwhelmed by rage and adrenaline and he found himself hoping the police would continue to pound on the other six, but they stopped as soon as all were handcuffed.
Once back in a normal state of mind, it took him five minutes to convince the police to uncuff Steve. He tried and failed to persuade them to also uncuff the big guy, who he told them did not participate in the assault.
Roger refused to see a doctor and insisted to the police that he was all right. Because of the adrenaline, it was not until several hours later that he was able to sum up the extent of his injuries – one black eye, three large bruised bumps on his head, a fat and bloody lip, a loose tooth, a cracked rib, and numerous bruises on his body and legs including a deep blue circle where the Corona had tried to penetrate his stomach.
It took a few weeks for his body to completely erase all signs of the incident, but from that night he would never again live his life among his fellow humans in a color-blind manner. If anything, he became more acutely aware of the extent of the racism in the world and in his country, and more convinced of the ignorance of its roots. But he no longer imagined a world where it would be fully overcome because he realized that in some way it would now always be alive inside him.
