“I’m Duran from Hollenbeck Juvenile,” said Serge.
“Okay, boy, what’re your initials?” asked the lieutenant.
“S,” said Serge.
“Serial number?”
“One o five eight three.”
“Hollenbeck Juvenile, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, you’ll be known as Twelve-Adam-Forty-five. You’ll team up with Jenkins from Harbor and Peters from Central. They should be out in the parking lot.”
“Three-man cars?”
“You’ll wish it was six,” said the lieutenant, making an entry in a logbook. “Pick up two boxes of thirty-eight ammo from the sergeant out by the jail. Make sure there’s one shotgun in your car and an extra box of shotgun rounds. What division are you from, boy?” said the lieutenant to the small policeman in an oversized helmet who came in behind him. Serge then recognized him as Gus Plebesly from his academy class. He hadn’t seen Plebesly in perhaps a year, but he didn’t stop. Plebesly’s eyes were round and blue as ever. Serge wondered if he looked as frightened as Plebesly.
“You drive,” said Serge. “I don’t know the division.”
“Neither do I,” said Jenkins. He had a bobbing Adam’s apple and blinked his eyes often. Serge could see that he was not the only one who wished he were somewhere else.
“Do you know Peters?” asked Serge.
“Just met him,” said Jenkins. “He ran inside to take a crap.”
“Let’s let him drive,” said Serge.
“Suits me. You want the shotgun?”
“You can have it.”
“I’d rather have my blanket and teddy bear right now,” said Jenkins.
“This him?” asked Serge, pointing at the tall, loose-jointed man striding toward them. He seemed too long for his uniform pants which stopped three inches above the shoes, and the shirt cuffs were too short. He was pretty well built and Serge was glad. Jenkins didn’t seem too impressive and they’d probably need lots of muscle before this tour of duty ended.
Serge and Peters shook hands and Serge said, “We’ve elected you driver, okay?”
“Okay,” said Peters, who had two service stripes on his sleeve, making him senior officer in the car. “Either of you guys know the division?”
“Neither of us,” said Jenkins.
“That makes it unanimous,” said Peters. “Let’s go before I talk myself into another bowel movement. I got eleven years on this job but I never saw what I saw here last night. Either of you here last night?”
“Not me,” said Serge.
“I was on station defense at Harbor Station,” said Jenkins, shaking his head.
“Well pucker up your asshole and get a good grip on the seat because I’m telling you you aren’t going to believe this is America. I saw this in Korea, sure, but this is America.”
“Cut it out, or you’ll be loosening up my bowels,” said Jenkins, laughing nervously.
“You’ll be able to shit through a screen door without hitting the wire, before too long,” said Peters.
Before driving three blocks south on Broadway, which was lined on both sides by roving crowds, a two-pound chunk of concrete crashed through the rear window of the car and thudded against the back of the front seat cushion. A cheer went up from forty or more people who were spilling from the corner of Eighty-first and Broadway as the Communications operator screamed; “Officer needs help, Manchester and Broadway! Officer needs assistance, One O Three and Grape! Officer needs assistance Avalon and Imperial!” And then it became difficult to become greatly concerned by the urgent calls that burst over the radio every few seconds, because when you sped toward one call another came out in the opposite direction. It seemed to Serge they were chasing in a mad S-shape configuration through Watts and back toward Manchester never accomplishing anything but making their car a target for rioters who pelted it three times with rocks and once with a bottle. It was incredible, and when Serge looked at the unbelieving stare of Jenkins he realized what he must look like. Nothing was said during the first forty-five minutes of chaotic driving through the littered streets which were filled with surging chanting crowds and careening fire engines. Thousands of felonies were being committed with impunity and the three of them stared and only once or twice did Peters slow the car down as a group of looters were busy at work smashing windows. Jenkins aimed the shotgun out the window, and as soon as the groups of Negroes broke from the path of the riot gun, Peters would accelerate and drive to another location.
“What the hell are we doing?” asked Serge finally, at the end of the first hour in which few words were spoken. Each man seemed to be mastering his fear and incredulity at the bedlam in the streets and at the few, very few police cars they actually saw in the area.
“We’re staying out of trouble until the National Guard gets here, that’s what,” said Peters. “This is nothing yet. Wait till tonight. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“Maybe we should do something,” said Jenkins. “We’re just driving around.”
“Well, let’s stop at a Hundred and Third,” said Peters angrily. “I’ll let you two out and you can try and stop five hundred niggers from carrying away the stores. You want to go down there? How about up on Central Avenue? Want to get out of the car up there? You saw it. How about on Broadway? We can clear the intersection at Manchester. There’s not much looting there. They’re only chucking rocks at every black and white that drives by. I’ll let you boys clear the intersection there with your shotgun. But just watch out they don’t stick that gun up your ass and fire all five rounds.”
“Want to take a rest and let me drive?” asked Serge quietly.
“Sure, you can drive if you want to. Just wait till it gets dark. You’ll get action soon enough.”
When Serge took the wheel he checked his watch and saw it was ten minutes until 6:00 P.M. The sun was still high enough to intensify the heat that hung over the city from the fires which seemed to be surrounding them on the south and east but which Peters had avoided. Roving bands of Negroes, men, women, and children, screamed and jeered and looted as they drove past. It was utterly useless, Serge thought, to attempt to answer calls on the radio which were being repeated by babbling female Communications operators, some of whom were choked with sobs and impossible to understand.
It was apparent that most of the activity was in Watts proper, and Serge headed for One Hundred and Third Street feeling an overwhelming desire to create some order. He had never felt he was a leader but if he could only gather a few pliable men like Jenkins who seemed willing to obey, and Peters who would submit to more apparent courage, Serge felt he could do something. Someone had to do something. They passed another careening police car every five minutes or so, manned by three helmeted officers who all seemed as disorganized and bewildered as themselves. If they were not pulled together soon, it could not be stopped at all, Serge thought. He sped south on Central Avenue and east to Watts substation where he found what he craved more than he had ever craved for a woman—a semblance of order.
“Let’s join that group,” said Serge, pointing to a squad of ten men who were milling around the entrance of the hotel two doors from the station. Serge saw there was a sergeant talking to them and his stomach uncoiled a little. Now he could abandon the wild scheme he was formulating which called for a grouping of men which he was somehow going to accomplish through sheer bravado because goddammit, someone had to do something. But they had a sergeant, and he could follow. He was glad.
“Need some help?” asked Jenkins as they joined the group.
The sergeant turned and Serge saw a two-inch gash on his left cheekbone caked with dust and coagulation but there was no fear in his eyes. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, showing massive forearms and on closer examination Serge saw fury in the green eyes of the sergeant. He looked like he could do something.
“See what’s left of those stores on the south side?” said the sergeant, whose voice was raspy, Serge thought, from sc
reaming orders in the face of this black hurricane which must be repelled.
“See those fucking stores that aren’t burning?” the sergeant repeated. “Well they’re full of looters. I just drove past and lost every window in my fucking car before I reached Compton Avenue. I think there’s about sixty looters or more in those three fucking stores on the south and I think there’s at least a hundred in the back because they drove a truck right through the fucking rear walls and they’re carrying the places away.”
“What the hell can we do about it?” asked Peters, as Serge watched the building on the north side three blocks east burning to the ground while the firemen waited near the station apparently unable to go in because of sniper fire.
“I’m not ordering nobody to do nothing,” said the sergeant, and Serge saw he was much older than he first appeared, but he was not afraid and he was a sergeant. “If you want to come with me, let’s go in those stores and clean them out. Nobody’s challenged these motherfuckers here today. I tell you nobody’s stood up to them. They been having it their own way.”
“It might be ten to one in there,” said Peters, and Serge felt his stomach writhing again, and deliberately starting to coil.
“Well I’m going in,” said the sergeant. “You guys can suit yourselves.”
They all followed dumbly, even Peters, and the sergeant started out at a walk, but soon they found themselves trotting and they would have run blindly if the sergeant had, but he was smart enough to keep the pace at a reasonably ordered trot to conserve energy. They advanced on the stores and a dozen looters struggled with the removal of heavy appliances through the shattered front windows and didn’t even notice them coming.
The sergeant shattered his baton on the first swing at a looter, and the others watched for an instant as he dove through the store window, kicking a sweat-soaked shirtless teenager who was straining at the foot of a king-sized bed which he and another boy were attempting to carry away headboard and all. Then the ten policemen were among them swinging batons and shouting. As Serge was pushed to the glass-littered floor of the store by a huge mulatto in a bloody undershirt he saw perhaps ten men run in the rear door of the store hurling bottles as they ran, and Serge, as he lay in the litter of broken glass which was lacerating his hands, wondered about the volume of alcoholic beverage bottles which seemed to supply the mighty arsenal of missiles that seemed to be at the fingertips of every Negro in Watts. In that insane moment he thought that Mexicans do not drink so much and there wouldn’t be this many bottles lying around Hollenbeck. Then a shot rang out and the mulatto who was by now on his feet began running and Jenkins shouldered the riot gun and fired four rounds toward the rear of the store. When Serge looked up, deafened from the explosions twelve inches from his ear, he saw the black reinforcements, all ten lying on the floor, but then one stood up and then another and another, and within a few seconds nine of them were streaking across the devastated parking lot. The looters in the street were shouting and dropping their booty and running.
“I must have shot high,” said Jenkins and Serge saw the pellet pattern seven feet up on the rear wall. They heard screaming and saw a white-haired toothless Negro clutching his ankle which was bleeding freely. He tried to rise, fell, and crawled to a mutilated queen-sized gilded bed. He crawled under it and curled his feet under him.
“They’re gone,” said the sergeant in wonder. “One minute they were crawling over us like ants and now they’re gone!”
“I didn’t mean to shoot,” said Jenkins. “One of them fired first. I saw the flash and I heard it. I just started shooting back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the sergeant. “Goddamn! They’re gone. Why the hell didn’t we start shooting two nights ago? Goddamn! It really works!”
In ten minutes they were on their way to General Hospital and the moans of the old Negro were getting on Serge’s nerves. He looked at Peters who was sitting against the door of the car, his helmet on the seat beside him, his thinning hair plastered down with sweat as he stared at the radio which had increased in intensity as they sped northbound on the Harbor Freeway. The sky was black now on three sides as the fires were leaping over farther north.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” said Serge. “Can’t you stop groaning for a while?”
“Lord, it hurts,” said the old man who rocked and squeezed the knee six inches above the wet wound which Jenkins seemed unwilling to look at.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” said Serge, and he was glad it was Jenkins who had shot him, because Jenkins was his partner and now they would book him at the prison ward of General Hospital and that meant they could leave the streets for an hour or two. He felt the need to escape and order his thinking which had begun to worry him because blind fury could certainly get him killed out there.
“Must have hit him with one pellet,” said Peters dully. “Five rounds. Sixty pellets of double ought buck and one looter gets hit in the ankle by one little pellet. But I’ll bet before this night’s over some cop will get it from a single shot from a handgun fired at two hundred yards by some asshole that never shot a gun before. Some cop’ll get it tonight. Maybe more than just one.”
How did I get stuck with someone like him? Serge thought. I needed two strong partners today and look what I got.
Jenkins held the elbow of the scrawny old man as he limped into the hospital and up the elevator to the prison ward. After booking the prisoner they stopped at the emergency entrance where Serge had his cut hands treated and after they were washed he saw that the cuts were very superficial and a few Band-Aids did the trick. At nine o’clock they were driving slowly south on the Harbor Freeway and the Communications operators were reciting the calls perfunctorily—calls which, before this madness, would have sent a dozen police cars speeding from all directions but now had become as routine as a family dispute call. “Officer needs help! Four Nine and Central!” said the operator. “Officer needs help, Vernon and Central! Officer needs assistance, Vernon and Avalon! Officer needs assistance, One one five and Avalon! Looting, Vernon and Broadway! Looting, Five eight and Hoover! Looters, Four three and Main!” Then another operator would cut in and recite her list of emergencies which they had given up trying to assign to specific cars because it was obvious now to everyone that there weren’t enough cars to even protect each other, let alone quell the looting and burning and sniping.
Serge blundered into a sniper’s line of fire on Central Avenue, which was badly burned. They had to park across from a flaming two-story brick building and hide behind their car because two fire trucks had come in behind them and blocked the street and had then been abandoned when the sniping started. The sniping, for all but the combat veterans of Korea and World War II, was a terrible new experience. As Serge hid for forty minutes behind his car and fired a few wild shots at the windows of a sinister yellow apartment building where someone said the snipers were hiding, he thought this the most frightening part of all. He wondered if a police force could cope with snipers and remain a police force. He began thinking that something was going on here in this riot, something monumental for all the nation, perhaps an end of something. But he had better keep his wits about him and concentrate on that yellow building. Then the word was passed by a grimy young policeman in a torn uniform who crawled to their position on his stomach that the National Guard had arrived.
At five past midnight they responded to a help call at a furniture store on south Broadway where three officers had an unknown number of looters trapped inside. One officer swore that when a lookout had ducked inside after the police car drove up, he had seen a rifle in the looter’s hands, and another policeman who worked this area said that the office of this particular furniture store contained a small arsenal because the owner was a nervous white man who had been robbed a dozen times.
Serge, without thinking, ordered Peters and one of the policemen from the other teams to the rear of the store where a blue-clad white helmeted figure was already crouched in the s
hadows, his shotgun leveled at the back door. They went without question, and then Serge realized he was giving commands and thought wryly, at last you are a leader of men and will probably get a slug in your big ass for your trouble. He looked around and several blocks south on Broadway he saw an overturned car still smoldering and the incessant crackling of pistol fire echoed through the night, but for five hundred yards in each direction it was surprisingly quiet. He felt that if he could do something in this gutted skeleton of a furniture store, then a vestige of sanity would be preserved and then he thought that that in itself was insane thinking.
“Well, what’s next, Captain?” said the wrinkled grinning policeman who knelt next to him behind the cover of Serge’s radio car. Jenkins had the riot gun resting across the deck lid of the car pointed at the store front with its gaping jagged opening where plate glass used to be.
“I guess I am giving orders,” Serge smiled. “You can do what you want, of course, but somebody ought to take charge. And I make the biggest target.”
“That’s a good enough reason,” said the policeman. “What do you want to do?”
“How many you think are in there?”
“A dozen, maybe.”
“Maybe we should wait for more help.”
“We’ve had them trapped for twenty minutes, and we put in maybe five requests for help. You guys are the only ones we’ve seen. I’d say offhand there isn’t any help around right now.”
“I think we ought to arrest everyone in that store,” said Serge. “We’ve been racing around all night getting shot at and clubbing people and mostly chasing them from one store to another and one street to another. I think we ought to arrest everyone in that store right now.”
“Good idea,” said the wrinkled policeman. “I haven’t actually made a pinch all night. I just been acting like a goddamn infantryman, crawling and running and sniping. This is Los Angeles not Iwo Jima.”
The New Centurions Page 35