Slow Motion Riot
Peter Blauner
to Peggy
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A Biography of Peter Blauner
Acknowledgments
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
JAMES BALDWIN, 1962
What crime and poverty have created is a riot in slow motion.
JOHN V. LINDSAY, 1990
1
NOW THAT THE BABY was two months old, she seemed to be waking up at least twice a night. But since he was doing a four-to-midnight tour in the city today, the cop named Frankie Page could afford to sleep in a little. He woke up around noon with his dick as hard as a rock. His wife had already gone to work, though, so there was nothing to do, except wait for it to go away and maybe feed the baby again.
It was just after three in the afternoon when the man with the dreadlocks came into the boy’s bedroom. All the lights were out and the floor was strewn with fierce-looking toys called Gobots and Decepticons. The boy, whose name was Darryl King, was lying on the bed with one arm thrown over his face.
The man with the dreadlocks knelt over him and put the gun on his chest.
“It’s time,” he said.
Page liked a lot of things about driving to work on these cold winter afternoons. The stillness of the air and the silence of the other houses as he pulled out of the driveway. The snow on the front lawns. The cars going the opposite direction on the Long Island Expressway. The Christmas decorations outside the Manhattan stores as he drove north from the Midtown Tunnel. The only thing that remained unchanged by the holiday was his precinct in Harlem. But nothing ever seemed to leave much of an impression there anyway.
Darryl King, the boy with the gun, didn’t go straight to the job. It was too early anyway. Instead, he went downtown and found some friends at the Playland video game arcade in Times Square. A couple of them wanted to catch a sex show at one of the nearby theaters, but Darryl, who was seventeen and good-looking in a blunt way, wasn’t interested. He went to the back of the arcade and stood by the machine that simulated car crashes. After a couple of minutes, the others came back to see what he had.
“Thirty-eight-caliber revolver,” said Darryl, lifting his coat flap and showing it to them. “Just like the cops carry.”
“Damn,” one of the others said.
Why would a wife need an order of protection against her own husband, Frankie Page wondered as he sat in the patrol car parked outside a short brown building on 128th Street that night. To need someone guarding your front door against the man you married. Snowflakes fell slowly, changing shades as they flitted in and out of the street light. They landed on the windshield and melted before his eyes. A family should be together for the holidays, he thought. He hoped he wouldn’t be on call on Christmas Day in two weeks. Though the overtime would help pay for the wife’s present. They’d already sunk a fortune into the baby’s room. He was going to need that promotion to sergeant next year and the raise that went with it.
He didn’t notice Darryl King and his two friends coming up on the opposite side of the street. It was after eleven o’clock and below fifteen degrees. The only other people who were out now were the truly hardy hookers and crack dealers, and they were all down the block, over on Lenox Avenue.
Darryl walked briskly, a couple of steps ahead of his friends. Smoke streamed out of his mouth and the gun rode high in the waistband under his coat. The police car was only half a block away now, just out of the range of the streetlight.
“You’re not gonna do it,” the bigger of Darryl’s two friends taunted him. “You ain’t got the heart.”
“Watch me,” Darryl King said.
The car’s heater was starting to make Page feel nauseated, so he turned it down a little and put his hat on. There was a rap on the window and he looked up. A skinny young black kid with a flattop hairdo and a harelip was staring at him and saying something. Page rolled down the window to hear him.
“Yo,” the kid said.
“What’s up?” Page asked him.
While they were talking, Darryl King sneaked around the other side of the car. He steadied himself against the doorframe and aimed the gun. Each time he pulled the trigger, the car lit up like a furnace in the snow.
Later on that night, Darryl told his family what happened while they sat around watching a TV ad for an album of Yuletide standards.
“His hat flew off, like ‘bing’ the first time I shot him,” Darryl said. “And Aaron say his eyes got real wide. You know what I’m saying? Aaron was like, ‘Oh shit, I seen his hair go up. I seen his blond hair.’”
Darryl’s older sister, Joanna, turned slowly to look at him. “Blond?” she said.
Darryl sat up. “Yeah, ‘blond hair’s’ what he said.”
“But, Darryl, that cop who was ripping off our crack house had like dark hair.”
It took a couple of seconds for the news to sink in. Darryl looked up at the ceiling with his mouth open a little. “Shit,” he said. “That’s fucked up.”
“That’s right,” his sister said, shaking her head and standing up.
“How’d that happen?”
“I don’t know,” his sister told him. “But you better get some sleep now. Tomorrow’s another day.”
2
SOME MORNINGS AT THE New York City Department of Probation, I like to play a little game called What’s My Crime? The idea is to try to guess the crime my client has committed just by looking at the Polaroid clipped to the outside of his file folder. It’s one of my ways of relieving the tension and reassuring myself that I don’t give a shit anymore.
Delilah, the heavyset black secretary behind the reception desk, puts down the Jehovah’s Witness magazine and holds up the first picture.
“He looks like a nice guy,” I say.
Delilah slips the Polaroid across the desk so I can give it a better look. “I dunno,” I say finally. “Forgery or something like that?”
Delilah is already frowning at the file opened on her lap. “This boy’s a crack-smoking schizophrenic,” she says. “He blew his landlord’s head off with a shotgun.”
“Oh shit,” I say.
Now I have to make space in my life to see this guy. I could have him come by after Maria Sanchez on Friday. But Maria always leaves me feeling wrung out, so I figure I better put him off until Monday.
My union rep walks by. “Mr. Jack Pirone,” I say, which is the way I always say hello to people in the morning.
“Mr. Steven Baum,” he says to me.
Big Jack.
Two hundred and fifty pounds of interdepartmental wisdom and sheer aggravation in a fedora and a white polo shirt. Before he was my union rep, Jack Pirone was my training instructor. His great line then was “Everytime you reach for a new assignment at probation, you’re reaching for your passport to adventure.”
He always looks out for me, when he isn’t giving me a big pain.
“How you doing this morning, Mr. Baum?”
“Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside,” I say.
“Try the other way around,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder and ambling on down the hall. “You’ll live longer.”
The clock on the wall has thin steel bars crisscrossing it, as if they expected somebody to try stealing the hands. Almost nine o’clock. Behind me I hear the waiting room full of probation clients grumbling at each other. I take a quick look over my shoulder and see a bunch of them sprawled out on the wooden benches, like a wayward congregation spilling out of the church pews. The air conditioner is broken, so there’s no relief from the June heat in here. The air is dank and it smells of stale smoke. The walls are painted a deep, intense orange. You’d think they would’ve chosen something a little more calming, like pale blue or ocean green. Instead, this orange is disturbing, maybe even inciting. It’s like a “GO” sign for the mentally ill.
One woman is standing up and throwing pieces of a Styrofoam coffee cup around the room. She’s probably getting in the mood to see her probation officer. I hope she’s not one of mine.
Delilah hands me the last file. “This one don’t have a photo,” she says.
Instead, it has a sticky yellow note from my supervisor, Emma Lang, on the front. “Special!” it says. “Attention must be paid! Watch this guy.” The new client is named Darryl King.
I check the sign-in sheet to make sure he isn’t here yet, and then look once more across the smoky civil service purgatory where people are waiting. That woman has finally stopped throwing Styrofoam around. The bleary fluorescent light gives everyone a slightly greenish tint, and there are piles of cigarette butts and suspicious-looking puddles on the linoleum floor. Half the clients look dead this morning, with their eyes closed, and their legs in stone-washed jeans extended stiffly over the sides of the benches. And with my hangover I’m not feeling so great either.
The one thing that picks me up is the hairstyles on the younger guys here. It’s been an excellent summer for hair so far. I see one guy has his shaped like an upside-down bottlecap—a new one on me. I know all about the Fade: that’s the flattop with lightly shaved sides. Then there’s the Wave, a lopsided ski jump of hair sloping up on one side. And of course, my favorite is the Cameo, a high ebony tower of hair that looks like an Egyptian headdress. I wonder if the bottle cap has a name yet. In a year white kids will be wearing it, which suddenly strikes me as hysterically funny.
Six expressionless eyes turn to stare at me. They belong to three teenage boys with big white sneakers and eerily dulled-out eyes. The term Jack would use is “lacking in affect.”
Not that they’d be real intimidated by me anyway. They look at me and see a tall skinny Jew in his late twenties with curly hair and glasses. The free weights are starting to give me broader shoulders and my hands are unusually big, but you wouldn’t look twice at me on the beach, I don’t think. I guess what they mainly see is just another white authority figure who’s got nothing to do with their lives, trying to tell them what to do.
Just then, somebody catches my eye over near reception. An emaciated black teenage girl, with a purple scarf and a gold front tooth. She’s squinting at the guard’s tiny black-and-white TV. I can’t quite tell if she’s one of mine. I’ve got 250 people on my caseload, and I know about half of them by sight. Two small boys are next to her on the bench. One is about five. The other is about a year old. The older one wears thick brown glasses and has big gaps between his teeth. When he thinks no one is looking, he pulls his little brother close and kisses him on the forehead.
I reach into the pocket of my windbreaker to see if I have a piece of candy to give him. Usually I carry my whole life around in the pocket: keys, change, pens, scraps of paper, food. Today I’ve got no candy, so I just give him a little wink.
The two boys look remarkably similar, except for some ugly scabs and bruises on the older one’s face. He clings to his baby brother like he’s trying to protect a smaller, unspoiled version of himself. Their teenaged mother suddenly turns and sees the older boy with his arm around the sleeping baby. She slaps him hard with an open hand across his cheek.
“Travis, don’t you touch him,” she barks.
Travis looks scared and takes his hand off his little brother. The baby wakes up and starts crying.
“You know, he wasn’t doing anything,” I tell her.
She ignores me and picks at her thumbnail.
“You shouldn’t hit him like that,” I say.
“Mind your own fucking business,” she tells me.
She goes back to watching the television. The baby keeps crying. Travis, the five year old, tightens his body and stares down at his folded hands in his lap. Another client in the making.
I should just forget about it and go look for aspirin. But for some reason, the look on Travis’s face sort of gets to me. “What’s your name?” I ask the girl.
“Parker,” she mumbles.
Definitely not one of mine. “Who’s your probation officer?”
“Rodriguez,” she says, sucking in one cheek.
A voice in my head is saying, “Forget about it, man, it’s not even your case.” But my feet take me down the musty marble hall and over to the rickety mailboxes, where I write P.O. Rodriguez a short note. “Dear Mr. Rodriguez, does your client Parker have any outstanding child abuse complaints? If not, she will soon. Check it out. Yours, S. Baum.” I drop it in his box and head to my own office.
“Delilah,” I say as I pass by the reception desk again, “when are you gonna ditch that husband of yours with the big feet and come slam-dancing with me and my friend Terry at CBGB’s?”
She giggles like a flirty schoolgirl. “You too much, Mr. Baum,” she says.
“Or not enough.”
I start reading the Darryl King file as I walk down the hall. This part of the morning reminds me of descending into a catacomb, probably because of the darkness at the end of the corridor, where nobody’s replaced the light bulb that burned out months ago. I pass rows and rows of file cabinets the color of turtles, and peer into the archive office on the right where stooped-over clerks in dust masks are sorting through ancient records of long-forgotten crimes.
Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” plays on somebody’s radio and a breeze comes from nowhere, rustling the time sheets tacked to the wall.
The information inside the Darryl King file is skimpy. He’s on probation for robbing a gas station on East Ninety-sixth Street, but he has an unusually long adult arrest record for an eighteen year old. In the last year al
one he’s been charged with numerous muggings, burglaries, and assaults, as well as “acting in concert.” At one point he was accused of being part of a gang that beat a transit worker with a hammer. Up until the gas station robbery, though, he’d never been found guilty, perhaps because witnesses are reluctant to testify against him. The real danger signal is in the presentence investigation, written by Tommy Markham.
Tommy, a briny little guy, who spent most of his life in the merchant marines, is a soft touch. He recommends almost everyone get probation. This time, he didn’t.
He describes Darryl King as intelligent but says Darryl was uncooperative during his intake interview and kept snatching things off the desk. “The defendant seemed to be making a deliberate attempt to intimidate this officer,” writes Tommy, who routinely calls vicious mob hit men and drug dealers “misunderstood.” There isn’t much family or school background in the report. Tommy notes that Darryl showed no remorse about the robbery, saying he only pleaded guilty at his lawyer’s urging.
In his evaluative statement, Tommy Markham writes, “The prognosis for his future social adjustment is not favorable.” Coming from Tommy, that’s like saying, “This guy is definitely going to kill somebody.”
I’ve reached the darkest part of the hallway, so I can’t read anymore. Now I know why Ms. Lang put a flag on the assignment. Two months ago a guy on probation killed a young doctor, and the department wants to avoid further mistakes. Ms. Lang thinks Darryl King is a significant risk, and I’m inclined to agree.
Here’s the thing about Darryl: Everyone’s always bitching about guys like him getting probation instead of going to prison. And my response is usually to shrug and say I don’t decide who goes free. Which is true. Then I explain the system doesn’t have enough jail space for these criminals, so it’s up to people like me to play lion tamer and keep them in line. Also true.
But here’s the secret, which I almost never say out loud: Every once in a while, you just might turn one of these guys around.
I notice that the note attached to the file does not say what time Darryl King will show up at the office. Just “soon.”
As it is, I have more than a full schedule for today with Richard Silver finally coming in.
Slow Motion Riot Page 1