Slow Motion Riot (2 page)

I wipe off my glasses and start to
read Ricky's arrest report more carefully. "It says you got probation for
'theft of services' and resisting arrest," I say. "What was the theft
of services?"

Ricky clears his throat and says,
"Just tokens;" His voice sounds scratchy, like it hurts him to speak.

"Tokens?" I say.
"You mean you robbed a subway token booth attendant?"

"No." Ricky shakes his
head emphatically. "Sucked it."

"Sucked it?"

He doesn't respond at all now. For
a moment, we both just sit there in our own stupors. I'm too hung over to move.
Now I know how old strippers must feel when they hear that familiar drumbeat
and see the curtain parting one more time. I rouse myself and get to my feet.
Still feeling a little unsteady, I make my way to the blackboard, take the
chalk out of my pocket, and draw a small, slightly shaky cartoon of a man
bending over a subway turnstile with his mouth on the slot.

"Do you mean to tell me you're
one of those guys who goes up to turnstiles and sucks the tokens out?" I
say in a loud sort of courtroom voice.

Ricky nods to indicate that is
precisely what he did. He's a little young to be a token sucker, I think. I
usually see older, scragglier guys puckering up by the turnstiles. "Don't
you think that's kind of gross?" I say, pointing at the picture I've drawn.

He smiles and some of the tension
goes out of the room. "I mean there's gotta be an easier way to make a
living, right?" I tell him. "Those turnstiles are filthy. You
shouldn't put your mouth there. You do this by yourself?"

"I got a partner," he
says a little louder. "Hector."

I write Hector's name on the board.
"Hector suck tokens too?"

"No. He does selling."

"Oh I see, he's like the
business manager." I put the chalk back in my pocket and return to my
desk. "That was your first mistake. You shouldn't do all the work. You
should've made Hector the co-sucker."

"Yeah?" Ricky starts
laughing in spite of himself. As quickly and painlessly as I can, I get the
necessary information. Ricky lives near me on the Lower East Side with his
mother, who's on welfare, and his three brothers. He attends school
sporadically and understands English perfectly, but can't concentrate in the
classroom.

I've had a lot of clients like
this. People who slip from one day to the next without any sense of purpose,
all the time sinking deeper and deeper inside themselves. The only time their
lives have any structure is when they're out doing crimes. So what Ricky needs
is somebody to pull him out of himself. At least that's my considered opinion
after talking to him for two minutes.

"Maybe we should try and do
like a schedule," I say, jumping back up to the blackboard and starting to
write some more. When I notice Ricky staring at it blankly, I ask him if he can
read and write okay, without looking at him. It's the best way to ask the
question and not make a client feel too self-conscious.

Ricky grunts. Not a yes or a no.

"You know, it's okay if you
can't read so well." My tongue sticks out a little as I write on the
board. "I've got something called dyslexia myself. Ever hear of
that?" I write the word "dyslexia" on the board and underline it
twice like it's some crazy new dance we can both marvel at.

"No," he murmurs. "I
dunno what that is." Just a few words. But compared to what he's said so
far, it's poetry.

"Dyslexia is... sometimes when
you're reading or trying to write, the letters won't behave in front of your
eyes." I start drawing letters upside down and backward on the board, so
it looks as if somebody put the alphabet in a kitchen blender. "Like it's
some language you can't understand. Ever have that?"

"Sure," says Ricky.
"Kinda."

I put down the chalk and take off
my glasses. "You know it really helped when I went to this class for
people with dyslexia," I say as though I'm confiding in my best friend.
"My problem was I waited too long. I should've gone when I was your age."

I hate talking like this, but it
seems to be working. He's sitting up a bit straighter and his eyes seem a
little more focused. I ask Ricky if he'd be interested in attending a reading class.

"Maybe," he says without
much enthusiasm.

"Well, we have to get you into
some kind of program," I tell him. "And as far as they go, the
reading one's not so bad. It's only twice a week, and they have a place you can
go on the East Side, so it's not too far from your house. Okay?"

Now I'm getting determined to break
through. I pick up my chair and bring it around the desk so we're sitting side
by side. "All right," I say, taking out my notebook. "So what
I'm giving you here today is like a list of goals."

I never liked these touchy-feely
social work platitudes. But then again, the list does help a lot of people get
their lives organized. Ricky smiles when he sees I put his name at the top of
the page. "Understand most of what I wrote here?" I ask.

"Most," Ricky says.

"And if you don't understand
any of it, do you have somebody in the house who reads all right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." I pull my chair a
little closer, so its arm touches the arm of Ricky's chair. I can hear him
breathing heavily and I smell something like detergent in his fountain of hair.
I hope he doesn't smell the whiskey on my breath from last night. "So
let's just go over the list here," I say. "We got five goals for now."

"Yeah." Ricky puts his
index finger next to where I wrote "Number one." The nail is chewed
all the way down.

"Number one is the reading
class," I say, rolling up my shirt sleeves. "Two nights a week, for
an hour. It's nothing. Okay?"

"All right."

"Number two: Let Hector suck
his own tokens." I draw another picture of a guy sucking tokens and put a
line through it like it's a No Smoking sign.

Ricky laughs and slaps his knee.

"Number three is get up in the
morning," I say. "Not the afternoon. The morning. Do whatever you
have to do to get up. Make breakfast, listen to tapes. Put on like Kool Moe Dee
while you're getting dressed for school."

The kid looks like he's in shock
that a white adult knows anything about rap music. But then he shakes his head.
"I like Madonna," he says.

"Madonna?"

"Yeah," Ricky says with
sudden great feeling as he leans forward in his chair. "I got all her
tapes! I got her posters in my room! I see her boyfriend I fuck him up..."

"Okay, okay, great," I
say, putting a hand on his arm to calm him down. "So listen to Madonna for
a half hour after you get up—if it's okay with your mom—which leads us to
number four, which is go to school. And that leads to number five, which is
stay away from the crack guys."

He looks around like I've accused
him of something terribly unfair. But I know our neighborhood and I know where
he's been and where he's going. He probably took the same train as me to get
down here to Centre Street this morning. "Look," I tell him, "I
know it's a heavy scene on the block. But you gotta stay clean."

"Aw, man." Ricky twists
in his chair to face away from me.

"It's tough," I say
firmly. "But you gotta do it. The judge gave you a break with probation.
He could've put you in jail. So now you have to be careful. That's the
deal."

The boy sighs. "I guess."

This is the point where you lose
them sometimes. When they've had enough of the white authority figure. And to
tell you the truth, it's the point where I feel like stopping too. I've said
everything I'm supposed to say, and I've got other clients waiting outside. But
something keeps telling me I have to push myself a little further.

"Listen, Ricky," I say,
moving the chair around so we're face-to-face. "If you work with me, I'll
be your best friend in the world. I swear it. You call me anytime. But if you
fuck around, and try to get over on me, I'm gonna be mad. All right? Because
that'll mean you betrayed our friendship. And I'll send you off to jail myself
if I have to. Okay?"

"I understand," the boy
says.

There's still a long way to go, but
I feel like I'm finally getting through, a little. It almost seems worthwhile
to face the rest of the day. I give him the page with the list on it.

"So where you going now?"
I ask.

"Home," says Ricky,
standing up slowly. He stretches out his arms and legs like he's not sure
everything still works.

"What about school?" I
say loudly. "Remember? Number four?"

"Oh yeah." He smiles
shyly, showing off a chipped front tooth. "I go to school now."

"How you gonna get there from
here? The subway?"

"Yeah." Ricky looks
confused.

"Here," I say, taking a
subway token out of my pocket and putting it in the palm of his hand.
"Save yourself all the hard work."

"You got to visualize what
will be," the big woman said. "Plan for the future. You know what I'm
saying?"

"Yeah," the young man
mumbled.

"In other words, you got to
think about what's gonna happen if you do something." She shut the book,
which was called Visualize Success, and looked at her younger brother, Darryl
King. "You gotta build. Right?"

"Right," he said.

"And remind me I got a message
to give you later," said his older sister, Joanna Coleman.

They were sitting on the stoop of a
building near
Frederick Douglass Boulevard
in
Harlem
. A brutal midsummer sun was overhead. Small
children kicked broken glass at each other in the gutter. A half dozen crack
dealers did business on the sidewalks. Otherwise, the street was like part of a
ghost town, with crumbling boarded-up buildings, vacant lots, and silent,
toothless old men sitting on wooden chairs outside the corner grocery store.

Joanna took the large-size cup of
Coca-Cola out of her younger brother's hands and drank most of it in two gulps.
At twenty, she was turning into a heavyset woman with big thighs and a broad
head full of red-streaked hair. In a few years, she'd be taking up two seats on
the subway without any problem.

Today she was wearing a white blouse
and huge gold earrings with Gemini symbols hanging off them. She'd been
following the signs and reading astrology books since she was in her early
teens, but now that she and her Jamaican boyfriend, Winston, were getting
somewhere in the crack trade, she'd begun picking up business books like
Visualize Success and Winning Through Intimidation. It was hard getting through
most of them, though she tried to pass on what she could to her younger
brother. The trouble was he never listened.

"So what happened last
month?" she asked him.

"What?" said Darryl,
closing his Big Mac container.

"With Pops Osborn."

"That was fucked up."

"I know. I saw him after I got
back into town last week. He was standing outside his crack house."

"He was alive, right?"

"Yeah."

"So that was, you know,
irregular," said Darryl, who had on a pair of snow-white Nike sneakers,
jeans, and a T-shirt with the name of the rap group Public Enemy written across
the front. "We was on the roof. Right?"

"Who's this?" his sister
asked.

"Me." Darryl touched his
chest with his finger. "Bobby Kirk. And Aaron. So I give the gun to
Aaron."

His sister put down the Coke cup
and made a face. "Why'd you do that? Aaron a punk."

"He fourteen," Darryl
said, "and I just turn eighteen. So judge won't do nothing to him."

"Okay."

"Except Aaron miss his shot
and Pops drove away in his car."

"He fucked up," Joanna
said.

" 'S what I said. So I'm like,
'Oh shit, Joanna's gonna be mad at you.' So I come up with another plan."

Joanna belched and asked him about
it.

"We went to the gas
station," Darryl said.

"Which one?"

"Near
FDR
Drive
. So we go in there and we rob, you know. We
take money and Bobby beat up the guy."

"The attendant?"

"Yeah. Then we fill up like
three beer bottles, you know, tall boys, with gasoline. Like Winston showed us.
And we put rags in them, you know, and we went back to Pops's crack house and
we firebombed it." He pounded his left fist into his right palm.

His sister laughed. "You too
much, Darryl," she said.

"Yeah, but Pops was gone
already, so we didn't get him."

"You get anybody?"

"Just some lady. She came down
the steps with her back on fire, you know. And she just like fell in the
street. The fire just ate her up, you know. Aaron was like, 'Yo, man, you see
that shit. 'S just like the movies.' But I was like, 'No, it's not.' "

A black car with a beefy white man
behind the wheel drove slowly down the street. Joanna and Darryl stopped
talking and the dealers stopped doing business for a moment. When the car was
gone, they went back to work.

"So how'd you get
caught?" Joanna asked. "Wasn't no witnesses, right?"

Darryl grimaced and kicked at a
discarded Lotto ticket lying near his feet. "See, the guy from the gas
station called the police and they charged us with a armed robbery." He
shrugged. "But the judge gave us probation, so it was all right."

Joanna stood up. "That was the
message," she said.

"What?"

"You're supposed to go in see
your probation officer."

Darryl swore and let his head droop
between his knees. "I already seen my P.O."

"Well, you got another one, I
guess. They say you supposed to report to this one like once a week."

She showed him a piece of paper
with his probation officer's name on it. He asked her to read it. "Mr.
Bomb," she said.

He looked glum. "That's fucked
up," he told her.

"That's what happens when you
do shit, Darryl. You got to pay the price."