“Come on, Cecil, get up,” says Turner.
“Whass up?” He opens his eyes slowly.
“You’re getting a free ride to court.”
“Why?” He sits up. “What did I do?”
“You didn’t go to court on your violation hearing,” Angel says. “Now the judge wants to see you.”
Cecil’s mother steps into the room behind us. “What are you doing here?” she howls. “He’s a good boy. Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“Sorry, ma’am, we’re just doing our job,” I say.
“Hey, Baum, we’re not holding a discussion group here,” Bill snaps. “Save your sensitivity training for your girlfriend.”
“Come on, Cecil, get dressed,” says Turner.
Cecil leans out of bed and grabs a pair of dirty blue sweatpants off the floor. His girlfriend wakes up briefly, looks around at all the people in the room, loses interest, and then goes back to sleep.
“Can I take a shower?” Cecil asks.
“No time,” Bill says as he cases the room for guns.
“Keisha, where my Reeboks at?” Cecil grumbles. His girlfriend remains unconscious. From across the room, his brother looks at him with an expression of infinite sorrow and suffering.
“Can I brush my teeth and all?” Cecil asks.
“See how clean he is?” his mother says.
“Yeah, but one of us will have to go to the bathroom with you,” says Turner. “Baum, get his shoes, will you?”
I look under the bed and find a brand-new pair of black Reeboks. I bang them together to see if there’s a shiv concealed, but only dust flies out. Cecil takes the sneakers from me and walks into the bathroom. Angel follows, leaving the door ajar in case Cecil tries to attack him.
The rest of us go to the living room to wait. There’s a nice river view, but the pale green paint on the walls is filthy and peeling. The furniture consists of two couches with stuffing overflowing from their upholstery, a small brown table in the corner, and a Sony twenty-four-inch color television with a VCR. A videocassette of the film The Principal lies on top of the machine. That movie is probably as close as this family can come to having order in their lives.
I look over and see Bill in the middle of the room, raising his wounded leg at a peculiar angle. For a moment, it looks like he’s going to make like Chuck Berry and duck-walk across the floor.
“You know it’s a funny thing, Baum,” Bill is saying. “Sound doesn’t travel too well in this kind of building. That’s because they put bags of sand between the walls. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Before I can answer, Bill points to a Just Say No to Crack sticker above the table in the corner. Then he smiles and picks up a small crack pipe from the table under it.
“Why do they have that Just Say No up there?” I ask. “Are they being ironic or something?”
“You’re looking at it all wrong, Baum,” Bill snarls. “These people aren’t capable of any kind of intellectual reasoning. They’re like animals.”
If I heard a white guy say this, I’d probably pick a fight with him. But since it’s Bill, I just feel mixed up again. I wonder what he’d say if he ran into Darryl King. Maybe he could’ve done a better job of controlling him than I did.
He clears his throat and holds the crack pipe up like it’s a rare scientific specimen.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Well,” he says, “I could bring it to court and present it as part of the violation hearing.” He tests the pipe’s sturdiness with his fingers. “But the judge might throw it out as an illegal seizure. So I think we’ll exercise a more basic kind of enforcement.”
He crushes the pipe with his left hand and flicks cigar ashes on the floor with his right. “You know, it’s funny about this crack business, Baum,” he says. “It’s a little bit like dealing with the villagers in Vietnam. They want you to clean up their town, but they don’t want you to take their sons away.”
Just then, I hear Angel calling my name from the bathroom. I go down the hall and meet him at the entrance. “Hey, man, I gotta use the other can in the house,” Angel says. “Keep an eye on Cecil here, will you?”
Behind him, Cecil is standing at the sink, still shirtless, with his toothbrush in his mouth. Angel departs and I move into the bathroom. Cecil ignores me and gazes admiringly at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. I step around him to the other side of the cramped room and find myself standing by the bathtub. I’m considering whether I should take a seat on its ledge when I hear water dripping and look down to see a sickening brown ring around the tub. I raise my head to say something to Cecil. Suddenly, he slams me hard on the head with the medicine cabinet door. I’m completely unprepared—barely able to catch a hold of the bathtub ledge and avoid falling over backward into it.
I look up in pain to see Cecil snatching a red Swiss Army knife out of the cabinet and brandishing it at me. With the toothpaste foam still around his mouth, he looks a little rabid. I don’t know what to do. I’m paralyzed. Cecil advances on me with the knife. “Oh shit,” I hear myself say. “Oh shit.” It seems to take an eternity for me to remember I’m carrying a gun.
I finally pull it out and yell, “Don’t move,” in a high, squeaky voice. Cecil drops the knife and stands still. By now I’m so scared that I start hitting him around the face and shoulder with the butt of the gun and shouting: “WHY’D YOU DO THAT, YOU DUMB FUCK?! WHY’D YOU SCARE ME LIKE THAT?!”
When he puts up his hands to protect himself, I just start hitting him harder.
Eventually I feel Turner pulling me off the kid as Bill and the others charge into the room. My pulse is racing and blood is pounding in my ears. As much as anything else, I feel humiliated about getting caught so off guard like that. After the training session at Rodman’s Neck, I should’ve known better. Bill puts his hand on my head and I hear someone laughing. “Take it easy, man,” Bill is saying. “Everything’s copacetic.”
While I get my breathing and temper back under control, Bill and Angel shove Cecil to his knees in front of the toilet and make him put his hands behind his back. Bill takes his handcuffs out and beckons to me.
“You can put these on the skell,” Bill says. “It’s your first collar, tough guy. You lost your cherry. I knew you were more than a social worker.”
I put the cuffs on him and walk out into the living room, rubbing my head where the medicine cabinet door hit it. I notice one last strange item on the wall above one of the couches. It’s one of those novelty posters made by stores around Times Square. It says Wanted: Dead or Alive and offers a million-dollar reward. The black-and-white picture is of Cecil Shavers and his brother. The photo seems to be a couple of years old, from a better time, before Cecil started smoking crack and his brother was crippled by palsy.
It looks like something their mother did as a way of saying: “Look out world, here come my boys!”
Angel leads Cecil out of the bathroom in handcuffs and takes him out of the apartment.
I guess only one of the brothers lived up to the poster’s promise.
39
“YOU KNOW THIS ISN’T right,” Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough was saying. “I mean, you know the difference between right and wrong, don’t you?”
The boy didn’t say anything. He kept his head tucked inside his parka and quivered like a small frightened sparrow. The other detective in the room threw a paper clip and swore loudly.
“Now let’s not be impatient,” McCullough said in a nice voice. “Eddie here just needs a chance to get accustomed.”
Very slowly, Eddie Johnson took his head out of his coat and looked around. His eyes followed the border where the blue paint met the white paint about five feet up the wall. He was watching that border like it was a waterline and he was drowning underneath it, McCullough thought. In a way, he was drowning. With the new charge he was facing for carrying the unregistered handgun, and the old probation term he had for throwing rocks at cars in the Bronx, he could get
as much as four years in prison. His only chance now was to make a deal.
“These things that you do,” McCullough said softly. “You can’t keep doing them. It’s not a life.” He shook his head.
Eddie Johnson grimaced a little as the other detective brought his fist down hard on the desk. “Enough of this shit,” he told McCullough. “Let’s just lock this mutt up.”
“Our friends at Narcotics wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that, Lou,” McCullough said, getting out of his chair and walking around like he’d just gotten off a horse. “They think Eddie here can help us out. They have a lot of faith in him.”
“Ah, he can’t even fuckin’ talk,” said the detective named Lou who had enormous thighs and hair on his head that looked like it belonged in his armpit.
“Yes he can,” said McCullough. “Can’t you talk, Eddie?”
“Yes,” Eddie said in a quiet, blunted voice.
He looked at both detectives warily, as though he sensed they were trying to confuse him. After a couple of seconds he put his head back inside his parka. The detective named Lou picked up a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory and began waving it around menacingly.
“You know what I think?” McCullough said, facing Eddie. “I think getting arrested the other day is gonna turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. I really think so.”
Eddie brought his head out of his coat and looked at McCullough curiously. “When you put your head in your coat like that, you’re chewing on something, aren’t you?” McCullough said.
Slowly, reluctantly, the boy began to nod.
It took just a little while longer for McCullough to get Eddie to open the coat and show him the chicken bones that he carried around in his pocket and chewed on when he got scared. Then the detective sent out for a ham and cheese sandwich. Eddie gobbled down half of it and stuffed the other half in his pocket.
“Before you didn’t have anybody looking out for you,” McCullough told him. “Those people who were supposed to be your friends didn’t help you out when you got arrested the other day. So now you have us. And we’ll look out for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” Eddie mumbled, sitting forward in the steel chair that badly needed to be oiled.
“We’re like your family now. Okay?”
“Okay.” The kid looked like he was about to start crying again.
“So tell us exactly what you told those detectives up in the Bronx,” McCullough said. “Tell us about your friend Darryl King.”
40
I’M STANDING BEHIND A building in Washington Heights, waiting for the action to begin. Bill and Angel have gone in the front, looking for an old breaking-and-entering guy who’s missed three appointments with the judge. In all likelihood they’ll just grab the guy and haul him out. But Bill says that given his case history, there’s a chance the guy will try to make a break for it through the back entrance, so I better be ready.
Sure enough, within two minutes, I see a runty little white guy with his hair in a ponytail and wearing a lot of jewelry climbing down the back fire escape. He looks like a renegade from the 1960s, except his face appears to have been run over by a tractor. He jumps down off the fire escape and I go chasing him across a vacant, rubble-strewn lot. Just like TV. He’s not too young and not too swift, so I catch him and tackle him easily, as though we were playing touch football in the park. The guy doesn’t even seem too angry with me. He’s probably been caught and locked up so many times that it doesn’t make much difference to him. In fact, he gives me a little wink, like he admires my technique.
I’ve got to admit that I’m starting to like this job a little. After two years of heart-wrenching cases that never seemed to end, it’s a pleasure being liberated from the glum social work pieties and bureaucratic snares. I like having people respond when I order them around. And I like getting out into the field and doing physical work, instead of sitting behind a desk all day.
The worst part of the job is not having any time to catch up on my paperwork and see Andrea. The best part is getting to hang out with Angel and Bill. When I was in school, I missed out on things like cruising around with the boys on a Saturday night. Now, for the first time in my life, I feel like one of the guys.
After we process the breaking-and-entering guy, they take me on a sightseeing tour through Harlem and the rest of Upper Manhattan, even though I could use the time to knock off some of that paperwork and see some of my old clients.
Driving without any particular pattern or direction, they start off at the Audubon ballroom on West 165th Street, where Malcolm X was murdered, and then decide to race down to the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street, where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., once preached. We take a detour over to P. T. Barnum’s old house near Sugar Hill, with its weird cornices and gables, and then head south past the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue where Duke Ellington rehearsed his band and sometimes watched baseball at the Polo Grounds from his window. I’ve actually been around here before because I went to City College, but I don’t let on because Bill and Angel are obviously having a good time playing tour guides and local historians.
We swing by the beautiful old houses on Striver’s Row and then drive past the Apollo, where Bill says he saw James Brown and Bobby Blue Bland perform years ago. Finally they show me the old whorehouses and numbers joints on St. Nicholas Avenue and encourage me to have a look inside for myself.
“They love white meat in there,” Bill says, pointing to a shabby tenement. “Jack Kennedy used to go in there, you know.”
“What?” I give him a dubious look from the backseat.
“You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” says Angel.
“Sure,” Bill says, putting his left leg up on the dashboard. “Jack Kennedy went to that whorehouse every time he was in Harlem. Right, Angel?”
“Right.”
“Sure.” Bill gestures with a lit cigar. “He was having an affair with Josephine Baker. You knew that, Baum, didn’t you?”
“Josephine Baker?”
“That’s right,” Bill says in a deadpan voice, rolling down the window. “And Moms Mabley too. You knew Kennedy was fucking Moms too, didn’t you, Baum …”
Behind the wheel, Angel is starting to shake with laughter. Bill continues to insist that the president was having an affair with an eighty-year-old black female comic.
“Kennedy was fucking Moms Mabley?” I ask.
“Of course,” Bill says with utter confidence. “She gave him head …”
“What about Slappy White?” I say. “Was Kennedy fucking Slappy White?”
“The old guy who was on Sanford and Son?” Bill asks.
“Yeah.” I lean back in my seat and open the beer Bill gave me. “I heard Slappy wouldn’t have JFK …”
The two of them start laughing and slapping my hand. “Pretty funny for a white guy, Baum,” Bill says.
We pass a bunch of middle-aged guys standing outside a tenement, polishing BMWs and Mercedes in the afternoon sun. Given the neighborhood, you’d think they might be drug dealers, but they seem a little old and ratty. Drugs are supposed to be a younger man’s game. Maybe they’re just paid to wash the cars. In the meantime, Angel fiddles with the radio, trying to find a station we can all agree on. Most of what he gets is static, except for one station playing a reverberating electric guitar introduction.
“What is this shit?” Angel asks.
“‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns N’ Roses,” I say. “That’s old already.”
Angel and Bill both turn their heads to look at me. “The young generation, Angel,” Bill says. “We need them to be our eyes and ears.”
I shrug. I’m having a good time now. I’ve even succeeded in putting Darryl King out of my mind for the moment.
“You know what I like?” Bill says as we pass Sylvia’s Restaurant, the Casablanca Bar, and Beeper World on Lenox Avenue. “Country music.”
“Is that right?” I rest my elbows on the ba
ck of his seat.
“Sure,” says Bill. “You knew that, didn’t you? Some of it’s like poetry, you know, the way it tells a story. That’s all we listened to around the Mekong Delta ’cause I had all them hillbilly rednecks in my unit. Who’s the guy who does ‘Okie from Muskogee’?”
“Merle Haggard,” I say, drawing on my own country record collection.
“Yeah.” Bill chomps down on his cigar. “I knew a guy from Muskogee over in Vietnam. Only he didn’t like that song. Henry Lee Oliver. Blond-haired white boy about your height, Baum. Man, he hated that song.”
“Why?” I ask. I’ve always sort of liked that song in spite of its belligerent, hippie-baiting lyrics.
“That’s what I always wondered too,” Bill says. “You’d figure a guy from Muskogee would consider that song his national anthem. But he never wanted to be around when they played that song. He said it made all the people where he came from sound like rednecks and he wasn’t like that. Taught me a lesson.”
“What?” I ask.
“That you can never know what to expect from people. I’ll tell you, up until then I thought all white people were rednecks.”
“It’s just most of them,” Angel says, looking over from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah,” Bill tells him. “But not Henry Lee Oliver. He was all right. He hated that ‘Okie from Muskogee.’ He liked, you know, whaddyacallit… ‘Ruby.’”
He starts to hum the melody. After a couple of bars I recognize it as “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” a terribly sad song about a guy who comes back from the war as a paralegic and winds up lying in bed helpless and alone while his wife goes out on the town with other men. Angel and I join in for the chorus, and we sound pretty good within the confines of the car.
Bill stops singing and for once he looks somewhat reflective. “Yeah, Henry Lee used to hum that song over and over when he went to sleep at night. I guess it must’ve spooked him or something. He used to say how awful it would be if something like that happened to you. You know, getting crippled in the war and coming home to see your woman fucking somebody else.”
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