“Honda Accord,” he tells me. “Stick with being a probation officer.”
“Well, I’m probably not gonna be doing that forever.”
“Since when did you start saying that?” Terry asks in a surprised voice while he switches lanes and his glasses start to slide down the bridge of his nose.
“Long time ago,” I tell him as the jackhammer in my brain gets going. “Between the time I left the curb and when I got in the car.”
Traffic is bad going north, so we get on the FDR Drive. Right away, a dark blue Cressida starts threatening to shove us off on to the shoulder. There’s a furious argument going on in the yellow Mercedes ahead of us. The woman in the passenger’s seat keeps hitting the guy driving in the back of the head with the back of her palm. Off to the side, the East River shimmers turbulently and a barge full of new cars sails by. The sun makes the old upholstery stink in Terry’s car and I have to lean out the window again to get a good clean breath.
“So what else are you gonna do?” Terry asks, pushing the shades back up on his nose.
“There’s a lot of things I can do,” I say, flicking my cigarette out the window. “I’m going into this Field Service Unit, so that could turn into something. And you remember I used to talk about becoming a lawyer.” Some of the ashes fly back in my face.
“Sell out, sell out, sell out,” Terry chants as he grips the steering wheel.
“It’s not selling out,” I say, more than a little defensively. “I’m just thinking maybe there are other ways to do good work without getting burned out.”
“Yeah,” says Terry. “Like not getting fucked up so much. You know you got a real ugly side that comes out when you drink. That was really stupid that fight you had with Jamie’s fiancé …”
He fiddles with the radio until he gets a station playing “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies and I decide that maybe I will look into those law school applications. Not committing myself: just checking it out.
Traffic has come to a complete stop for some reason. I’m starting to feel the future bearing down on me. Once I thought I could do anything with my life. Even if things looked bad at any given time, there was still a chance I might pull myself together and be somebody. But I’m almost thirty now and every day I’m getting a little closer to becoming the person I’ll always be. Which scares the shit out of me.
As traffic lightens, we shoot past the heliport, the imposing Waterside Plaza apartment complex, and a high stone wall with an empty playground on top. It’s like a fortress for the rich, well out of reach for the Bronx-bound. On the horizon up ahead, I catch a glimpse of one of those obnoxious glass towers Richard Silver helped put up. I think it’s blocking the view of another smaller building that I used to like, but now I can’t even remember what it was.
When we come off the Ninety-sixth Street exit, though, time seems to stand still. The taller, newer buildings are all behind us. What’s ahead are old anonymous gray projects and tenements. I spot the name “PACO” spray-painted in huge black letters on a brick wall. It’s probably been there since the 1950s. Paco was probably a brash young stud when he wrote it. I’ll bet he’s a doddering old fool now.
“What I don’t understand,” Terry is saying, “is how you can tell your clients how to run their lives when you drink like that?”
“Enough with the drinking!” I say, slapping the dashboard as another skinhead anthem blasts from the radio. “You do drugs, don’t you?”
“I did Ecstasy last night,” Terry says with a smile.
“Doesn’t that affect your ability to reason?”
“Not at all.” Terry shakes his head violently. “I had a perfectly coherent conversation with somebody about God and the Druids.”
“And would you have had that conversation if you hadn’t taken Ecstasy?”
“Well,” says Terry. “It might not have gone on three or four hours.”
Just before four, we arrive at the building on 106th Street, where Maria and her family live. Upstairs, everyone is in hysterics. They’re sure the uncle is about to show up with his gun and blow them all away. He is said to be especially angry with me. Maria, Terry, and I manage to get the car loaded with her stuff in less than twenty minutes. But then she spends an hour crying and hugging people in the doorway. It’s very sweet, but Terry and I are hopping up and down with fright, because the uncle is supposed to show up at any minute.
We’re lucky to get rolling before sunset, I figure. But halfway to the new address, I’m looking up at the rearview mirror and swearing to Terry that a green Mazda is following us.
“My uncle drives a green Mazda,” Maria says.
“Fuck him.”
I’m sweating, Terry’s cursing, and Maria can’t stop crying. The car bounces wildly over potholes and through detours around Sugar Hill and West Harlem. A group of windshield-washing kids surround us at a stoplight. I try to fend them off with my department badge, but they spray the glass anyway and don’t bother to wipe it off.
Finally we arrive at Maria’s girlfriend’s house. It’s just after six. We bring everything upstairs and the family welcomes us like heroes. Their home is a warm, comfortable place. Salsa plays on the stereo, a large blue, red, and white Puerto Rican national flag hangs on the wall next to the front page of El Diario. An elderly couple plays on the living room floor with five very young grandchildren. Two televisions blare in English and Spanish. The smell of rich, spicy food is in the air. Maria’s girlfriend calls Terry and me into the smoky kitchen and serves us red beans, yellow rice, and green plantains. We eat standing up against the counter, and for the moment everyone is very happy. End of the story, I hope. We’ll do the violation on the uncle and then Maria will be on her way in life.
“Call me if you hear from your uncle,” I say, turning toward the door. “You got my number at home.”
“Can I call you if I don’t?” Maria asks.
I don’t know what to say. “Sure,” I mumble. “I’m around.”
She hugs both of us good-bye. Terry holds on to her for a little longer than is necessary, I think. I slap his back and we race each other down five flights of stairs and burst out laughing at the bottom.
Walking outside, I get a settled feeling inside I haven’t had in months. It looks like it’s going to be a cool, starry night, I’m with a friend, and for once I’ve done a single, unambiguous good thing with a tangible result.
“Ayyyiyii, ave Maria,” says Terry, opening the door on his side of the car. “How come you never told me what a babe she was?”
“Come on, Terry, she’s one of my clients.”
“Yeah, right. I heard that business about calling you at home.”
I blink twice. “All my clients can call me at home.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I speak the truth.” I give him the scout’s honor salute.
“You mean to tell me you’d just as soon take a call at home from one of those drooly guys who hang around the bus terminal as from that beautiful babe upstairs.”
I take the safety belt off the seat and sit down in the car. “Sure,” I say. “That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Terry puts the key in the ignition. “Then some of you probation officer types must be more fucked up than your clients.”
I stare at him for a long time before I slam down the lock on my door. “No shit, Sherlock,” I say.
17
WHEN THE FIRECRACKERS EXPLODED near his feet, Pops Osborn dove into the back of his Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He told his driver to get going and sank down like he was trying to hide his skinny body between the cushions of the black leather seats. Just as the car jolted forward, he noticed one of his brown lizard penny loafers was ripped and he cursed in a high, whiny voice.
“Don’t worry, boss,” said the driver, who was called Sunshine. “Those kids just dissing you.”
“Just drive around the block for an hour or so,” Pops said.
Pops had been going downhill ever since Darr
yl King’s posse took a shot at him. He started losing heart a little bit at a time. First his nerves went. It got so whenever he stepped outside, he’d start looking around like someone was about to kill him. Eventually he hired Sunshine, a tall Trinidadian man, for five hundred dollars a week to drive him around and guard him with an Uzi.
Business was suffering. Brash young punks were showing up on his corners and in the crack houses he once controlled. They were know-nothing kids—some as young as fourteen— though they often had Uzis of their own. They were taken care of easily enough. Pops killed two of them personally with his 9 mm. But they kept coming. They were like cockroaches. Every time you got rid of one, there were two others crawling up your bathroom wall.
The world seemed to go around a little slower in the old days, the year before, when Pops, then a confident nineteen year old, took over his small portion of the crack trade from his uncle Paul “Stewy” Harris. Pops had been brought along the right way, learning about the trade one day at a time. He didn’t get to be a lookout until he was as old as fifteen. He hung around his high school until it was time for yearbook pictures. Then Stewy had him call in sick. “You don’t wanna make it too easy for the police to get a picture of you,” he told Pops.
The size of the business was steady back then, four spots around Harlem and the Fortress, a tall redbrick building in a housing complex near the East River. Stewy had inherited the business from a guy named Breeze, who took it over when it was a heroin racket from someone named Frank, who got it from an old numbers guy called Morris, who was hooked up with the Genovese crime family in an operation going back to about World War II.
But the order of succession had broken down since the crack explosion of the mid-1980s. People lost their memories and their sense of reason. Old alliances were abandoned. Young kids blundered onto other people’s territory and shot off their automatic weapons without regard for the consequences. They lived only for the sensation of the moment, like the customers who bought their crack. Everything happened in the present tense. The rap song everybody was listening to in their cars one day was forgotten by the next. The jewelry and clothing that everybody wore Friday night was thought ugly by Saturday afternoon.
“Even the way they talk,” Stewy Harris was heard to complain shortly before he was killed. “When they say, ‘I be downtown,’ you can’t tell if these kids mean now, before, or later. It’s all the same to them.”
Because crack was so cheap and easy to make, everyone was a player. One ounce of cocaine equaled almost four hundred vials of crack. So any kid with a little coke, a box of baking soda, and enough balls to squeeze a trigger could go to the corner and sell five-dollar vials. Anarchic, primitive battles were waged for each small piece of turf. To gain any real foothold, a crew had to be willing to go anywhere anytime and kill anyone, whether they were a bystander or a rival, a cop or a social worker.
From what Pops was hearing, the crew that took a shot at him was the wildest one yet. But it seemed like nobody could give him a name to work with. Otherwise, he would go out and kill the punks himself. Several of his salespeople stopped working for him and one of his crack houses got boarded up by the city. Now he would not be able to finish paying for the customized Mercedes and the ranch-style house in Elmont, Long Island, in time for the fall. And he still wanted to get married. To whom, he was not sure. One of the women who used to come by the house would have been all right.
He looked out the backseat window of his Cutlass as his driver kept circling the block. The Sunday night crowd was out on the streets. At one of his most profitable locations, near First Avenue, a crew of little kids he’d never seen before were selling crack to people in cars. The oldest one might have been twelve. The world was going around faster and faster all the time and Pops felt his place in it slipping away.
18
WHEN YOU’RE HAVING A lot of doubts about your job and the way your life is going, the first thing you think to do isn’t to go up to some godforsaken swamp in the Bronx, slap muffs over your ears, and start firing a .38-caliber revolver at a plastic target.
I mean, if I heard one of my clients had done that, I’d tell him he wasn’t being honest with himself. Or some bullshit like that. But since I’m getting trained to go into the Field Service Unit, I have no choice.
It’s not so much the trip I mind. In fact, I sort of like getting out of the office for a little while. And I think I can handle some bullet-head instructor telling me what a high-powered rifle can do to your skull. What I don’t like is the whole idea of being a cop.
It’s not that I have anything against cops, although I’ve never met one who felt any loyalty to anyone who wasn’t connected to the department. It’s just that I’m doing something different. I’m supposed to be concerned about all the people the cops arrest and then forget about. I’m the garbageman whose job it is to recycle these people. It’s not the most respected profession in the world, or the most popular, but somebody’s got to do it and it might as well be me. Besides, if I was going to be a cop, I’d have gone to the academy years ago.
At least that’s what I used to think. On the other hand, if there are a lot more guys like Darryl King running around now, who am I to say there shouldn’t be more cops? And who’s to say that even some of your social worker types like me shouldn’t learn which end of a gun fires. I’m not saying that I’m ready to walk a beat or anything. I’m just saying the world’s a different place from the nineteenth century when that bootmaker John Augustus bailed some drunk out of jail in Boston and invented probation. You change with the times. That’s all I’m saying.
Anyway, it turns out that the Police Department’s training facility is in a remote part of the Bronx called Rodman’s Neck, off the City Island exit on the New England Thruway. To get there, you drive along a twisting country lane, passing woods, open fields, and little lakes. It’s enough to make you forget that you’re still in the city. In fact, it’s a bit of a shock to turn around and see Co-op City on the horizon behind you.
When we first get to the checkpoint of the police training facility, it looks like a military compound in the middle of the wilderness. There are armed guards at the front, chain-link fences everywhere, and a dozen low-slung barracks with aluminum roofs off to the side. But once we start to walk around, the place seems more like a summer camp for overage boys.
There’s a little hut where the guns get fixed. Just across a stretch of grass, a set of gray plank steps leads up to a small bathroom with both doors open, as if the boys inside might need a counselor’s help to zip up their pants. The painted wooden signs hang from posts with a little burnish around the edges and Boy Scoutish axioms like Be Professional and Listen to Instructions printed in earnest yellow letters.
The three of us who’ve been driven up here from the Probation Department are led into a large barracks where two dozen young police recruits sit listening to a captain lecturing them from the front of the room. The captain is a ruddy man in his mid-forties, wearing a khaki uniform and a green baseball cap. His back is ramrod-straight, but his stomach hangs over the front of his pants.
Since I’ve come in late, it’s hard to figure out exactly what he’s talking about. He keeps pointing to a white chart on a nearby easel that says “Post-Entry Level Training or PELTS,” which I always thought was a derogatory term for women. But then again, these are cops, so you never know.
The young police recruits in the audience look like soldiers without a war to go to. Most of them are younger than me. Their faces are pasty and a little unformed. I figure the majority are from Rockland County or Long Island and have never been on a subway before. I briefly convince myself I have the edge on them because of my experience.
As the captain’s lecture goes on, I still can’t get a handle on what he’s saying. The one phrase that keeps jumping out at me is “Avoid reflective action.”
Avoid reflective action. Typical cop talk. Not just grammatically incorrect, but hopelessly blockheaded. Avoid ref
lective action. Shoot first and ask questions later. “‘Don’t think’ is what they’re telling us,” I mutter to the guy next to me in the front row.
I find myself resisting the message and wanting a drink. What the captain is saying goes against everything I’ve tried to do at probation. If you don’t think about what all this means, how can you expect to understand the people you’re locking up? How can you understand the community you’re supposed to be protecting?
But the fourth or fifth time the captain uses the phrase, I realize I’ve had it all wrong. What he’s been saying is “Avoid reflexive action.” I sink back in my chair, feeling more than a little naïve.
Over the next few days, they put us through almost forty hours of tactical training and instruction on the use of lethal and nonlethal force. The hardest and most intimidating part is a trip to what they call the “Tactics House.”
“The House” is actually a small airplane hangar about a half mile up the road from the barracks. Inside it has a stage set that’s been made to look just like a South Bronx prewar apartment with a “Beware of Dog” sign on the front door, a busted television in the living room, and a doorway to a dark, mysterious back bedroom, where anyone could be waiting.
We’re told that we’ll be playing cops in a series of training skits, with cops playing the criminals. The premise is that we’ll be given the same amount of information a cop would get on a radio call, and we are expected to respond appropriately.
I feel a little tightness in my stomach as my instructor, Sergeant Hammerslough, a heavyset guy wearing chains, a mustache, and a sweatshirt that’s two sizes too small, tells me what to do.
“I want you to pretend this is real life,” he says with a mildly belligerent Bronx accent. “Me and the other officers are gonna be citizens in this. Some of us are gonna be the bad guys, but we’re not gonna tell you who beforehand. You gotta figure it out. All right? You gotta be ready for anything.”
The only information I’m given before my skit is that there’s been a call about a domestic dispute and someone inside the apartment has a weapon. My partner is a twenty-four-year-old Rockland County cowboy named Greg, who has red hair and buckteeth. Greg immediately establishes his claim as a high-blood-pressure candidate when he starts banging on the front door and yelling, “Come on out with your hands up!”
Slow Motion Riot Page 10