Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!

by Gary Phillips

  The two guys got picked up by the cops a few blocks away. They’d gotten rid of the knife, but one of them had Greaves’s blood on him. It was only about ten minutes after they’d done it.

  Before he died, Greaves told the ambulance men that the guys had asked, “Are you Martin Greaves?” before they attacked him. So the cops want to know why. Tony says the guys don’t know who he is.

  Now it’s Christmas Eve. Earlier tonight I was doing some last-minute shopping, getting some presents—one for Tony, one for my mom. The mall was really busy, lots of people with their kids. It said in the paper that Greaves had a wife and three kids. I wonder what he was like with them. I wonder if they knew what he was like at work.

  I thought about them, but I still couldn’t be sorry. I didn’t think Greaves would get killed—Tony said they’d just kick the shit out of him—but I can’t be sorry about him. The cops said it was “a brutal and cowardly murder,” but I don’t see how it was. Greaves was brutal and cowardly. He thought he could do what he liked because he was in charge, but he was only in charge at the bank. Other people are in charge in other places. But people like Greaves and the cops and the papers only think it’s fair if you do things the same way as they do. And they do things the way that suits them. What I did to Greaves maybe wasn’t right, but it was as fair as what he did to me.

  I’m going to my mom’s for Christmas, then Tony and I are going to his sister’s party at New Year.

  Tony and I have made a New Year’s resolution together. I told him that every job I’ve ever hated would have been a good job if it wasn’t for the shit I had to take from managers. Tony said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. Too bad you can’t get every one of them like you got Greaves.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I said, “Why can’t I?”

  We just looked at each other, and I started to laugh.

  One Dark Berkeley Night

  Tim Wohlforth

  1.

  Berkeley, California, 12:45-12:57 a.m., August 20, 1970: A sliver of a moon hung over lower University Avenue. Faint street lights struggled to penetrate the gloom. A slight breeze off San Francisco Bay scattered the pages of The Berkeley Barb on the sidewalk in front of the Paradise Motel, a by-the-hour establishment. A lone woman with dyed-red hair and wearing a red mini-skirt shivered as she walked down the street, seeking eye contact with the male drivers of the few cars that passed by. A rat stuck its head out of a drain opening, then ran toward the closed Foster’s Freeze store.

  Ron Bradley sped past on his Harley heading toward the Marina. He had his guitar case strapped to his back. Like Dylan. Well, he hoped he didn’t end up in an accident like Dylan. He peered for house numbers on darkened tenements. He was pissed. The numbers were all off. He must have missed the address of the party. He was almost at San Pablo. He wondered if the hippie girl had given him the wrong house number.

  He’d promised to play the guitar. That line usually worked. He was pretty good. Not good enough to earn a living at it and he had no original material of his own. Just some Dylan songs from his acoustic period and a couple of blues he’d borrowed from Dave Van Ronk. Crazy, here he was black, well half black—his mother was Jewish—and he’d learned his blues from a white man. And truth be told he preferred hard rock, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Doors. But you can’t ride around on a motorcycle with an electric guitar plus amp strapped to your back. He had a role to play and he was having a hell of a good time playing it. Until now.

  He’d had one shitty day. His induction notice came in the morning’s mail. Nothing like winning the lottery. He had graduated from Berkeley High a year ago and had yet to find permanent work. His father said he could get him on the “B” list at the docks. Good money but no security. His father had it made as an “A” list man. Good for him. But longshore was not Ron. He wasn’t his dad. Waiting around for the draft had become his excuse to party for awhile before settling down to … he wasn’t sure what. But something. Other than working on the docks. He would leave the future to the future. The government had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He would go over to ’Nam and be the last to die for a lost cause. Fitting in some weird way. It had been one fucked-up year, My Lai in March, Kent State in May.

  Tonight he had planned to forget the future, score some pot, pluck his guitar, and fuck a white chick. No such luck.

  Officer John Yamamoto was having trouble keeping awake as he cruised slowly up University Avenue toward the campus. He looked forward to getting back into the university area. There he felt comfortable. Here he might as well be in Watts. The streets were empty, the stores closed, apartments few. He passed Grand Central Hot Tubs, Happy Days take-out, the ratty Paradise Motel, Foster’s Freeze, H&B’s army surplus, a sari store.

  A streetwalker with dyed-red hair, wearing a red mini-skirt, ambled down the sidewalk. She waved at a passing car. The car didn’t stop. Good. He wasn’t interested in that kind of arrest.

  Tina Perez shivered. Cold mother-fucking night. She wanted to go home, but she couldn’t. She needed one more john. And then she could score and she’d be warm, very warm. Everything would be just fine. But the johns weren’t stopping.

  One lonely horny bastard would stop sooner or later. She had to hold herself together, fight the cold. Who would want to fuck a skinny, shivering bitch? Then a patrol car passed. Shit. But he didn’t stop. Good. Just a little longer and she would get her break. Another car passed. The fucker gave her the finger. It was that kind of fucked-up night.

  Malik Robeson drove a yellow Studebaker down San Pablo heading for University Avenue. He was pissed and high on weed. He turned to his companion, Ishmael Shabazz, and said, “So what did you make of Huey’s speech?”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He dissed us” Malik responded. “Like they’re all these tough motherfuckers and we’re nobodies.”

  “You got that right. Him and Bobby and Eldridge, they’re just blowing it out their asses. They don’t do nothin’. But they’re right, you know.”

  “‘Bout what?”

  “The pigs,” Ishmael said. “The Muslims always talking about the white devils but they don’t do shit about the pigs. Ever since I was a kid the cops hassled us. You remember back in the old hood? Not cuz we did anything. Cuz we’re black.”

  Malik did remember. He and Ishmael had grown up on the same block in West Oakland. Ishmael was the one who always got in trouble. Petty theft, in and out of juvie. Malik had been the good boy, dragged to church on Sunday by his schoolteacher mom, studied hard, tried to keep out of trouble. Which meant keeping away from Ishmael. But the cops didn’t see the difference between the two of them. All they saw was black. And black was trouble.

  One day, when he was sixteen, Ishmael and his gang ran into a convenience store, threatened the owner, grabbed some malt, and took what was in the cash register. But the owner had pressed an alarm button. The cops came. They escaped. As it happened Malik was walking past the place, heading home after school, just as the cops arrived. They beat him. Arrested him. His mother was pissed. Didn’t believe him. Something snapped inside Malik that day. A bitterness transformed him into … Ishmael?

  No, not quite, not yet.

  Malik went to Laney College at nights. Began to hang out with the Black Panther crowd, and reconnected with Ishmael. Malik was bright, but knowledge didn’t seem to matter. All that counted was street smarts and there Ishmael had it over him. Ishmael, who he once had tried to help with his schoolwork, was now his teacher, his mentor.

  “None of them Panther leaders have any balls,” Ishmael said, “’cept maybe Huey. Not that gang of hangers-on. It’s war out here in the streets. And all those dudes do is spout. This damn town would be a lot better off if them Panthers spent more time pumping buckshot into pigs than servin’ breakfasts to kids.”

  “Right on.” Malik pressed harder on the gas pedal.

  John Yamamoto had found that he could keep awake if he kept thinking. But what about? Nancy? No, that didn’t work. Only remi
nded him of why he didn’t like the graveyard shift. He was new to the force or at least he hoped that was the reason he was stuck with it. Could it be because he was a Japanese-American, the first hired by the Berkeley Police Department? Was he being held to a special standard? Resented by both blacks and whites? The blacks thought they had it hard in Berkeley. They should try being Japanese.

  He started to think about his job, his past, his future. So much had changed for him this past year, so many opportunities lay ahead for the two of them. John loved his job. He had security, a future, someday a pension—and his mission. His wife Nancy kept telling him it was only a job, but she wasn’t born in an internment camp. When you’re born in a barracks inside a concentration camp in your own country, you don’t really have roots.

  His father once had roots, had his farm in the Central Valley near Stockton where he grew prunes. Sixty acres, his mother had told him. His father refused to talk about it. Nice spread, hard work, over 105 degrees in the summer. His mother had shown him an old black and white photo of a small ranch home surrounded by eucalyptus trees, white lawn chairs, rose bushes.

  That picture means nothing to me. Could’ve been anybody’s place.

  His father’s roots were torn up when he was forced to move to barracks at Tule Lake. And then they stole his land. His father wouldn’t talk about Tule Lake. Again, his mother had filled him in. It was called a “segregation camp” for “disloyals.” Dad was one of the stubborn ones who refused to sign a loyalty oath to a government that had taken his land and denied him citizenship. The three of them lived in two small rooms in a converted unpainted army barracks with a leaky tarpaper roof, in a muddy compound surrounded by barbed wire.

  At Tule Lake, Dad had worked as a warder helping to distribute food to the detainees. He discovered that the Caucasians were stealing the detainees’ food. He complained and they beat him. Then a riot broke out over the incident. The military rolled in with tanks, machine guns and tear gas. All Dad had wanted was a little justice in an unjust place.

  His father’s heart had left him at Tule Lake. He became a quiet man who rarely spoke. He had nothing left inside for his son. John was like his mother, outgoing, friendly, not interested in fighting anybody over anything. I just want to fit in. Tule Lake was his father’s past. All John took with him from Tule Lake was a vague memory of playing with other kids in a muddy stream that ran through the camp. A happy memory, actually.

  John didn’t even have uprooted roots, but he had Berkeley. He started planting his roots the day he entered Berkeley High. He excelled in all his classes. He had friends, white, black, Asian. That’s where he met Nancy, a white girl from the hills. He loved all of Berkeley, the campus with the anti-war demos, People’s Park, the Telegraph Avenue hippies, the middle class in the hills, the blacks in the flatlands.

  He could have gone on to Cal, become a doctor or engineer, but he needed money to help his family. His parents barely survived on his father’s part-time gardening and his mother’s city clerk paycheck. He wanted a career that dealt with people, where he could see the practical effects of what he did. Then there was Nancy. Why do my thoughts always return to Nancy? He needed bucks for an apartment so they could get married. So he became a cop, a cop with a mission. And that mission wasn’t busting whores or making pot arrests. He wanted to pay back Berkeley, his community.

  Something has gone sour in my town. The college kids were becoming increasingly violent, the university administration increasingly repressive. The police chief had gone public with charges against Tom Hayden and other SDS leaders for fomenting violence against cops. And those crazy Black Panthers were toting guns, screaming about pigs.

  People’s Park was the turning point. It happened a year ago, before he joined the force. Stupid really, on both sides. The university tore down apartments where hippies lived and created a vacant lot. The hippies moved onto the lot, cleaned it up, planted flowers, organic gardens. They sat around, girls in those flowery granny dresses, boys in beards with red bandannas wrapped around their foreheads, playing their guitars, smoking pot. No harm done.

  Then the university fenced the place off, bulldozed everything the kids had built. The hippies and the campus lefties went wild. They battled the cops along Telegraph Avenue throwing metal rods and rocks. The National Guard was sent in and ended up blinding one person and killing another. The world of love, peace and pipe dreams was transformed into open warfare. Berkeley had lost its civility.

  Despite everything that had happened, he had clung to his dream and joined the police department. Why? Perhaps it was hope that in time it would all change. The tolerant Berkeley of his childhood would reemerge. But at the moment the city seemed to be on the road to self-destruction. Maybe Nancy was right, there was nothing one cop by the name of John Yamamoto could do about it. He was not ready to accept that. Not yet.

  I need this town. It’s my home.

  Ron Bradley checked addresses again. Totally out of sequence. Maybe the blond was just leading him on. Couldn’t trust those hippie-dippies. Spooky neighborhood. Fuck it. He’d head home.

  He swung a left, made a u-turn. That’s when he heard the siren, saw the flashing lights in his rearview mirror. His night was ending as his day had begun—fucked.

  Such a quiet evening, John thought. Sliver of a moon. A stray sheet of newspaper drifted by. He spotted a motorcycle heading down University. The bike crossed a meridian clearly marked with a no u-turn sign and started heading up his side of the street. A young guy with a guitar case strapped to his back, afro, black. He turned on his flashing lights, sounded his siren and tailed the Harley. The bike slowed. John came alongside and said, “Pull over to the curb.”

  The rider did as instructed. John stepped out of his patrol car, and with one hand on his holster, walked forward to the motorcyclist.

  “Could I see your license?” The young man complied.

  Fuck, Ron Bradley thought. Is this cop hassling me because I’m black? That inscrutable look on his face. You can never figure out what these Orientals are thinking.

  “What did I do wrong, officer?” Ron asked.

  “Illegal u-turn.”

  “There was no one around.”

  “You’re wrong there” John said. “I was around. The law is the law whether or not anyone else is present.”

  Ron shrugged, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give me a ticket. Had a hell of a day. Got my induction notice this morning.”

  “What’s your hurry? In another block you could’ve made that turn legally.”

  “This damn hippie chick gave me a wrong address.”

  John looked the fellow over. Young kid. Bet he had gone to Berkeley High. And now he was being sent to Vietnam. And to what purpose? Everyone knew the war was lost. All that remained was the killing of more Vietnamese and GIs. John had lucked out with the lottery. So far. He couldn’t do anything about the war, but he could give this kid a break.

  “Take my advice,” John said, “keep away from the hippie girls. They’re nothing but trouble.”

  “Sounds like you know.”

  John smiled. Yes, he knew. But that was ages ago. Before Nancy. He hoped she would be awake when he got home. “Consider this a warning.”

  “Thanks, officer” I finally got a break on this fucked-up day. The one nice cop in all of Berkeley. “Quiet night.”

  “On a night like this I feel like I’m robbing the city by accepting a paycheck.”

  A yellow Studebaker containing two black men with large afros slowed down and pulled up behind Ron and John. The man in the passenger seat got out and walked up to them. He was tall, thin and wore a long black leather coat that reached to the ground. A strange smile formed on his face.

  John turned toward the tall man. Looked like a Panther. He wondered what this fellow wanted. Maybe his car had broken down. “Can I help you?”

  The man didn’t answer. Instead he opened his coat, pulled out a pistol, pointed its barrel directly at John Yamamoto�
�s head, and pulled the trigger. The explosion echoed off the buildings lining the deserted street. As blood spurted from a small hole in the police officer’s forehead, he crumpled at Ron’s feet.

  The tall black man ran back to the Studebaker. As its engine roared and spinning wheels screeched, the car took off, spewing gravel.

  Tina Perez, dyed-red hair now frizzled by the wind, red mini-skirt looking tawdry in the yellow glow of the weak streetlight, walked toward the scene. She spotted a young black kid standing and an older tall black dude running. Maybe one of them wants a blowjob. Tina quickened her pace. Then she saw the bloody body of a cop covered with trash lying at the kid’s feet. She screamed.

  Ron Bradley reached down and felt the cop’s pulse. Nothing. He watched the tall man head back to the Studebaker. No way am I going to confront this dude. He ran to the patrol car and used its radio to call in the murder. The Studebaker sped by. It’s brakes screeched as it swung a u-turn right in front of him. The streetlight illuminated the face of the driver. Young, light-skinned. Looks a bit like me. Terrified. The car careened down the street on the wrong side of the meridian heading back toward San Pablo.

  What a fucking day. What a fucking city. What a fucking country.

  A rat, aroused by the commotion, scurried from the Foster’s Freeze to the safety of the drain opening. Frightened yellow eyes peered out at the corpse.

  A sudden gust of wind off the Bay picked up scattered pages of the Berkeley Barb. They danced for a moment on the sidewalk, then were swept along with a Milky Way wrapper and covered the corpse. The wind had created a shroud for Officer John Yamamoto. Berkeley had found a cruel way to reject his embrace.

  2.

  Berkeley, California, January 2006: Carl Hargrove got up from his seat in his study. He’d heard the doorbell ring. A rare occasion these days. His desk was covered with files of cold cases. Photos and clippings were pinned to a five by eight foot corkboard on the wall behind him. His research, his life since he retired from the Berkeley Police Department. Without these cold cases, he would go mad with boredom. And he knew BPD could use the help. They were hard pressed to fully investigate current cases.