Slow Motion Riot (16 page)

"Listen, Darryl, I don't have
time for this. I gotta get back to the office."

"Still your turn," he
says, eyeing the game.

I halfheartedly put my hand on the
lever and glance at the screen. My Rambo guy moves toward Thor and his hammer.
Almost reflexively, I touch one of the buttons and my guy punches out Thor.

I turn back to Darryl. "So you
got all that, right? You know you're supposed to be in court next week. You
should make sure you have a lawyer."

"See, I was meaning to speak
with you on that," he says with a small smile.

"Yeah?"

"I was thinking maybe you
could talk to the judge."

"I can't do that. It's out of
my hands now."

"Who give the papers to the
judge?" he asks.

"I did."

"Then it's not out your
hands."

I happen to look down at the screen
and see a man in a turban about to smash my Rambo guy over the head with a
rock. I push a button labeled "jump" and my guy gets out of the way
just in time.

"See, you took things out of
my hands when you tried to steal that car," I tell Darryl. "You broke
the rules at probation and now you're gonna have to pay the price. And if you
get violated, it's gonna be twice as bad as it would've been if stealing the
car was your first offense."

"So it's like that," he
says. "Huh."

There's something disturbingly cold
about the way he says the words. I recognize the tone. It's the same one he
used when he first came into my office. Before he started ranting. Like it
wouldn't bother him if I burst into flames now and burned to a cinder right in
front of him. It's like that. After all the nodding and smiling he's been doing
today, it's as if the curtain has finally gone up, revealing the real guy who's
been standing up there all along.

"It's like that," I say.

He takes a deep breath and shakes
his head. A white guy who looks like he could be a cop starts playing the
machine next to me called Special Criminal Investigation. For a second, I get
bold and say something to Darryl I almost immediately want to take back.
"Of course things might be different if you were going to tell me about
those guys who got done across the street.''

"Where?" he asks.

"From where you tried to steal
the car. Those two crack guys who got killed across the street. If you were
going to tell me something about that, I might be able to talk to the
judge."

The long pause in our conversation
quickly gets filled up by beeps and screeches from the nearby machines. Darryl
just looks at me. Once again I can't read his expression. He might be thinking
anything. He could be bored. He could be hungry. He could be in a homicidal
rage. Looking at him is like staring into a deep, dark cave.

"I guess I see you in
court," he says.

Just then, I hear a man's voice
shouting. I whirl around looking for the source, and then realize the sound
must've come from the video screen. My Rambo guy is under attack again and he's
crying out for help. This time he's surrounded by three ferocious-looking guys
with Mohawk haircuts. I look up to say something else to Darryl, but he's
already walking away from me. His left hand is jumping and jerking at his side,
as though it has a mind of its own.

No point in going after him. I've
done my job here, which was to inform him personally about his court date. Now
it's up to him to show up. I turn back to the game. Two of the three Mo-hawked
guys have disappeared, and the one remaining is now locked in a mortal struggle
with my Rambo guy. I push a button and pull the lever. The two figures on the
screen tumble over each other, punching and kicking. After a couple of seconds
of fighting, they stop and just lie there facedown on the animated
New
York
sidewalk. Nothing happens for a few moments.
Then, little animated bloodstains slowly appear on each figure's back. Somehow,
they've managed to kill each other.

Two days later, I'm looking through
my mailbox when I find an old torn envelope with my name on it among the
interdepartmental memos, notices for union dues, and new case files. The letter
inside is written in spidery black ink on dirty blue-lined paper with a laundry
list on the back. On first glance, it looks like it's from a child. But when I
read it, I realize it's from Darryl's great-grandmother, who I'd spoken to on
the phone the other day. Any doubts I'd had about violating Darryl evaporate.
It says:

"I, Ethel McDaniels, the
great-grandmother of Darryl King is a seventy-six-year-old individual who
cannot continue to live with my great-grandson Darryl who have been making My
Life a living Hell Due to his crack abuse and cryme. Will the Court please help
me. I give this letter to Probation Officer Steven Baum."

"P.S. Please do not tell
Darryl I wrote you."

Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough
got gas pains every time he looked at the file for the Pops Osborn homicide.
This guy was a piece of shit when he was alive and he was a piece of shit dead.
Whoever killed him did the world a service, except that McCullough now had to
fill out another DD5 Supplementary Complaint Report, giving an update on the
investigation.

Everything in the New York City
Police Department was a fucking ritual. Filling out forms. Going to promotion
ceremonies. Talking to inspectors. Attending mass and the Holy Name Society.
Getting drunk at parties. If they made it a ritual to give the assistant chief
a blowjob, he'd have to do that every week too. Maybe there was a piece in it,
but probably not for a family newspaper.

A better piece might be something
like "Why the Police Department Is Like the Church" with all these
fucking rituals. If only the department had a ritual for resurrecting the dead.
Then this Osborn motherfucker could tell McCullough who killed him and he could
close out the case. But then this Osborn would be walking around again and
somebody else would have to arrest him as a drug dealer and they'd have even
more paperwork.

"Efforts to interview reltives
of the decedent were met with negtive results," McCullough typed with his
index fingers on the old gray Royal manual. "Recnvss of the plce of
occurrence ws lso negtive."

He read it over and grumbled,
"Oh, fuck me royally," when he realized the a key was sticking on his
typewriter and he'd have to fix the report with liquid Wite-out and a pen.

The only reason he was having to
write this thing up was because that blue-eyed jerk from Narcotics was
bothering him. The one who kept saying, "If you're Captain Willie's boy,
you gotta be all right."

Fuck him. If that lazy Narcotics
hump didn't need the statistics so badly just to look like he was doing
something in front of his chief, he would never have bothered McCullough about
this. And McCullough was backed up enough with work anyway. That poor old lady
strangled with her own bridgework shoved down her throat, that robbery at the
Citibank on Second Avenue, that forty-year-old guy who got blown away with a 9
mm because he stepped on some thirteen-year-old's red suede sneakers.

Not that he was going to make
lieutenant off any of these cases. It would just be nice to clear some of the
dead wood away.

What a thing this job was. Day
after day, seeing people at their most wretched and vulnerable. Confronting
them with their despicable and intimate secrets. Where were you last night
anyway? Who were you with? Why'd you beat your kid up like that? Why'd you kill
your wife?

The worst part was looking through
homicide victims' apartments. You always ended up seeing things they'd never
shown anybody while they were alive. Their diaries. Their unmailed love letters.
Their intestines splattered against the walls. What a thing it was to find out
so much about these people, and then to come home and not be able to tell the
wife where you wanted her to touch you.

It got him thinking about the girl
on cable television.

Even as he sat there with the
phones ringing and the detective at the next desk talking to somebody, he could
picture her curled up, with her luminous white ass in the air, licking her
rouged red lips and saying those dirty things that she promised to put into
writing: "First there was Harry—I slam-fucked him and wrote him a letter.
Then there was Sam, I sucked his cock, Roto-Rootered his ass, and wrote him a
letter. Then there was Bob ..."

He felt like calling her right now.
Right here in the precinct. He wanted her to say those things to him. Right
here in front of everybody. He had the number. Who was going to know? As far as
the guy at the next desk was concerned, he could be talking to his wife or the
Crime Scene people.

He dialed the number and waited.
After the fifth ring, her voice started, "Hi, big boy, why don't you take
off your clothes and get comfortable right now? I wanna suck your big, hard
throbbing dick.

Under his desk top, he was getting
a massive hard-on. It was a good thing no one was watching him. "I'm
getting all wet just thinking about it," the girl on the phone was saying.
"I just want you to fuck me harder..."

His hard-on was demanding his
attention now. It was threatening to burst through his desk top unless he gave
it a light petting. Who was going to see it? As the girl on the phone declared
she'd never been so horny in her life, he began to reach down.

"Come on," the girl on
the phone said. "Give me every inch."

At that moment, he felt a tap on
his shoulder. He looked up and saw a beautiful young woman staring at him. She
was like his fantasy made real, except she was black, carrying a briefcase, and
looking impatient.

"Detective, I'm Andrea Clinton
from the Probation Department," she said, holding out her hand like he was
supposed to shake it instead of using it to jerk off. "I'd like to talk to
you about the Pops Osborn case and Darryl King."

He tried not to panic or come on
the spot. He covered the receiver and calmly said, "Can you wait over
there a second? I'm talking to the captain."

She nodded and he was about to make
up something about sending a sector car around, when he took his hand off the
receiver and the girl on the phone let out an orgasmic cry that everyone within
ten feet of his desk could hear.

"You're too much, big
boy," she moaned. "Fuck me again?"

"I don't know about that
detective," Andrea is saying. "He got this weird look when I walked
in."

"Did he tell you anything
about Darryl?" I ask.

"No, he wasn't too anxious to
tell me much of anything," she says, stepping around a pile of books on
the sidewalk.

We're walking through the East
Village after spending most of Saturday afternoon at the office working on the
Darryl King violation.

This is the neighborhood where I
always wanted to live when I was growing up. I used to take the train in from
Flushing every weekend, just so I could wander up and down St. Marks Place,
looking at the freaks, the punks, and the girls dressed in black. I guess that
wasn't much more than a dozen years ago, but the place seemed so much stranger
and more romantic then. I remember how even the air seemed headier and more
intoxicating than it was in Queens. My favorite thing then was to buy pot from
the hippies around the Third Avenue Gem Spa, get stoned, and gawk at the drag
queens and punk girls outside the Trash and Vaudeville Boutique.

Now about half the village is
gentrified, all the drag queens are dead from AIDS, the pushers are
shady-looking guys chanting, "Crack-it-up" from the doorways, and the
only punk girls left are way too young from me. Still, I like living here.

There's no other place in this city
where you can feel so much a part of all the people who aren't part of
anything.

"WHITE FOLKS!!!! HER! HER!
HER! HER!"

This wild-eyed, skinny black guy
with a scraggly, devilish beard keeps sneaking up behind us and yelling,
"WHITE FOLKS!!" as though it were an embarrassing accusation.

"I'd tell him he's only
three-quarters right in our case," Andrea says as we cross Third Avenue,
"but what's the point?"

The energy on the street tonight
seems a little different to me. It's up over ninety degrees again. Everyone's
walking a little too fast and talking a little too loud. It's like all sense of
distance and civility have evaporated in the humidity. Car horns are honking
and arguments are breaking out on the sidewalks for no reason. Dogs lunge at
each other's throats. A punk kid spits at a lady in pink jogging shorts going
by.

Just ahead of us, a short Oriental
man and a big blond Swedish guy are walking with their arms around each other,
oblivious to the orchestra of bad vibes surrounding them. Rounding the corner
of Third Avenue and heading down St. Marks Place, they trip and stumble into
the pack of sidewalk vendors selling bottles of incense and back issues of Stud
magazine.

The wild-eyed black guy, who was
taunting us, sneaks up on the big Swede and his Oriental friend. "WHITE
FOLKS!!! YEEEEEAHHHHH!!!!"

The two men shuffle away with
guilty expressions. "Come on," I tell Andrea. "All this
tension's making me hungry."

We find a loud, dim restaurant with
vague Tex-Mex overtones. The lighting is indirect and so is most of the
conversation here. The couples seem more interested in their food than each
other. The front window looks out on an entrance to Tompkins Square Park, where
a crowd is beginning to gather.

As she stares out at the street, I
notice that Andrea looks even younger than twenty-four tonight, with her
"Be-Bop Cafe" T-shirt and her halo of curly hair tied back in a
ponytail again.

"Is that some kind of protest
starting?" she asks.

"I'm not sure," I say.
"I heard something about a neighborhood demonstration. Something to do
with the yuppie condo and a curfew to keep the homeless out of the park."

"That's the kind of thing I
wanted to be involved in this summer," she says with some mild
disappointment. "I was trying to get an internship with one of the
tenants' rights groups down here, but I applied too late."

"Is that how you ended up at
Probation?"

"No, I was interested in that
too," she replies, maybe just a little defensively.

"But it's not the kind of
thing you want to do when you get out of school, right?"

"I'm not sure." She
shrugs. "I've got offers from a couple of the big firms already, but I
want to make sure they'll let me do some pro bono work if I join them."

Pro bono. I wonder if that's
actually Latin for "this isn't what I really do for a living."
Andrea's a lot more middle-class than I am, it turns out, which embarrasses me
a little. She's from Princeton, New Jersey, where her father is vice president
of a software company and her mother teaches art history at the university. She
looks very serious when she talks about them.

"You get along with them
okay?" I ask. "You like your parents?"

"They're fine," she says
with a warm smile.

Through close questioning I find
out she majored in English at Yale and spent half her time getting involved in
politically correct causes and the rest having affairs with people she didn't
particularly like. "I had two long-term, serious relationships with guys,
and a short one with a woman," she says, laughing. "Why do I feel
comfortable telling you this?" I shrug and she takes a sip of her beer.

"It's because you're a good
listener, right?"

"I practice at home in front
of the mirror," I tell her.

As she orders the house wine, I
notice she's wearing an ebony bracelet and a gold necklace. Not a spoiled girl,
exactly, just used to the good things in life. I fire a dozen more questions at
her and what started as a slight shaking around her shoulders soon erupts into a
full-throated roar of laughter. She slaps the table as she rocks back and forth.

"What's the big joke?"

"Nothing," she says,
taking a deep breath and still smiling. "You're just so... so...
so..." She beats the table with her fist a couple of times. "Intense
is the word, I guess. You're acting like you're my probation officer."

"I'm sorry." I look down
at my beer. "I just get so used to talking to people that way..."

"I didn't mean to make you
self-conscious," she says, reaching across the table and brushing my hand.
"I just thought you were being funny, that's all."

She is truly a knockout, I tell
myself for about the hundred and second time since I met her.

She orders the chicken fajitas and
I ask the waitress to bring me another beer. "So I was sorry I gave you
such a hard time the other day before I read Darryl's file," she says.

"It's okay, I'm used to it.
It's just that after a while, I think you just get to be a little more careful
about your sympathies. Otherwise, your heart gets broken too often and it
doesn't work as well..."

This strikes a bum note and she
gives me a suspicious look.

"That's a great excuse for
giving up," she says. "Is that why you're going into this field
unit?"

"No, it is not," I say,
tapping the table for emphasis. "I'm doing it because it's an assignment.
I still have plenty of good clients who I care about."

While an old Neil Young song plays
on the jukebox, I start to tell her about Maria Sanchez. But then I remember
that I tried to take Maria out on a date the other night and I decide that's
not such a good example. Instead, I tell her about Charlie Simms.

Charlie's remarkable, I tell her,
the closest thing I've got to a complete success story so far. I met him a
couple of years ago when I was just starting off at Probation and he was just
starting off as a thief. Neither of us knew what we were doing. He'd been
arrested for trying to steal a radio from an off-duty cop's Buick when the cop
was standing a few feet away. I was still trying to figure out the difference
between a felony and misdemeanor.

Charlie first came into my cubicle
wearing a Confederate army cap and a giant watch around his neck. Right away,
we started talking about how the only role models in his neighborhood were the
guys who had the best cars. I tried using social work bromides to convince him
that the problem wasn't that he'd gotten caught trying to steal the radio, but
that he'd broken the law.

Over the last couple of years,
Charlie and I have done a lot of growing up together, I tell her. He's taught
me something about the street and I've helped him in the straight world. He
tells me the new drugs on his block and I give him books by Claude Brown and
Malcolm X so he can get a better sense of his own people's history. Now he
wears leather Back to Africa medallions, he's almost done with school, and he's
planning to marry the girl who had his baby last month. He's also out looking
for a job. Though it's too condescending to say out loud, I'm proud of Charlie.
His progress is a measure of how far I've come in doing my job.

"If I spent all my time trying
to turn around hopeless cases like Darryl King, I wouldn't have any energy left
for people like Charlie," I tell her as Neil Young keens about a friend
who died from a drug overdose and beer sloshes around in my mug.

"I wasn't defending
Darryl," she says, leaning forward on her elbow. "I just wonder if
you're finding excuses not to care anymore."

"That's not true!" I say
loud enough to be heard over the music. When I see people at the nearby tables
are looking at me funny, I lower my voice a little. "I really get into it
with some of these people," I say. "Like this kid came in the other
day, Ricky Velez. He's a token sucker. But I noticed that he couldn't really
read what I had on my blackboard. Like he had a reading problem. Just like me.
I pick up on these things because I'm dyslexic."

"Really?" She looks up.

"Yeah, sure. I know what it's
like to be on the outside looking in."

She seems a little skeptical.

"I've been through the same
kind of rejections my clients have been through."

"You have, have you?" She
still isn't convinced.

"I mean, you could look at
these people and you could look at me and say nobody could be further apart.
But I'm just like a lot of these people," I say, touching my chest with my
fist. "I'm just like them."

"No, you're not," Andrea
says firmly. "You're white."

I feel like somebody just slapped
me across the face. I look down, feeling stupid and gravely embarrassed.
"Yes, of course, you're right," I mumble.

She stares at me for a long time,
her eyes at exactly the same level as mine. Her expression seems to say, I know
what it's like, you never will. I hope she isn't about to get up and walk away
in disgust.

Instead, she lets a couple of
silent seconds pass and then changes the subject. "You know you still
never told me why you became a probation officer," she says.

"You really wanna know?"

"That's why I asked."

I don't answer right away for fear
of saying something else foolish. "It's kind of hard to say." I put
my chin on my fist and try to force the idea into a coherent shape. It's
strange, but hardly anyone has asked me this so directly before. "I guess
I started off like I wanted to help people. You know. Other people join the
Peace Corps, but I don't like to travel..."

She shakes her head like she
doesn't quite believe me. "There must've been another reason..."

"Yeah. There must."

It's hard to recall how I ended up
where I am. I guess it started off as a process of elimination. I didn't want
to go into business. I didn't want to work out at the airport as an engineer or
anything. But I guess the biggest thing was that I didn't want to be someone
like my father. So I did the thing that I thought would displease him the most.
I tell Andrea most of this, but I leave out the fact that the old man would
probably have a heart attack if he saw me trying to make time with this
beautiful black woman.

"You know what I like?"
she says suddenly, sitting up straight.

"No, what?"

"I liked what you said to me
before about giving people a break."

I'm caught a little off guard.
"What'd I say?" I ask as the Ray Charles song with the same name
starts playing on the jukebox.

"You said I should give you a
break," she tells me. "Because every day you give somebody upstairs a
break. And I thought to myself, this is a nice man."

I slug down the rest of my beer,
feeling a little bit like a fraud. Outside the front window, the crowd near the
park's entrance is growing steadily. Pale skinheads and punks in heavy black
boots, old bearded hippies, stocky Puerto Rican women in tank tops, elderly
Ukrainians, and various people without clear connections to each other or
anyone else. Signs say things like Die Yuppie Scum! and Fuck Tha Police! A
dozen or so cops stand around the park entrance. Something's definitely about
to happen.

"So I was going over a couple
of your cases who needed to be violated the other day," Andrea is saying.

"Who?"

"Oh. This guy, I think his
name is Freddie Brooks or something..."

"Oh no." I frown.
"Don't violate Freddie."

"Why not? He just got arrested
for disorderly conduct."

"Yeah, but that's
bullshit." I lean across the table to her. "Freddie gets into fights
all the time. He lives in Grand Central. If you look at the arrest report,
you'll see the complainant is probably another homeless person. That's what
they do. They fight each other over space. It's terrible, but you shouldn't
violate him for it. Freddie's a good guy."

Andrea looks amazed. "You
really like these people?"

"Yeah! That's what I said
before. They have a lot of... I guess, variety in their lives. Not like yuppies
or anything."

"I guess not."

"Don't send Freddie to
jail," I say. "He just wants to get drunk and ding people for
quarters. He doesn't want to hurt anybody. He's a sweet guy."

She seems simultaneously amused and
touched. "And he likes you too?"

"Sure," I tell her.
"I mean, I guess so. We're friends. There's plenty of other people you
could violate instead."