Slow Motion Riot (20 page)

"We just wanted to ask a few
questions," I say.

She's already in the house, with
the Chihuahua trailing her and the screen door closing behind them. Angel,
Bill, and I bound up the steps and in the door after her.

The house is neat and clean with an
orderly kitchen to the left of the foyer and a spacious living room to the
right. The woman is already turning on the TV and lighting a cigarette with
trembling fingers. She puts the wrong end in her mouth first.

"So ask, ask, ask," she
says irritably as she collapses on a sofa and the Chihuahua yaps around her
feet. "What do you want from me?"

"Baum," Bill murmurs.
"Take a look around the place. Make sure she's still living here."

I start to argue, but think better
of it. I'm definitely out of my element and I decide there's no harm in
verifying that this is the woman's true home. I make a quick tour of the seven
rooms. Most of them look exactly like any other room in any other suburban
house I've ever visited. Andrea must've grown up in a place like this. No
wonder she was so dismayed by my apartment. I wander into the little girl's
room; there're stuffed animals and a down quilt on the bed and pictures of
Mickey Mouse and Snow White on the walls.

The shock comes when I go into the
room where the woman sleeps with her husband.

It's like stepping into another
universe. Or a third world country. The walls are bare and scraped in places.
Clothes are strewn all over and two filthy, smelly mattresses, without blankets
or sheets, are laid end to end on the floor. I wonder if this is the kind of
place Darryl King comes from. On my right, the closet door is open a little
bit. It's dark in there and for a second, I think I hear something stirring
inside. The sound leads me into a daydream of what it would be like if Darryl
King was hiding in there, waiting to jump out at me. I can see his angry eyes
and his hand coming up at me. When I find myself reaching for my gun, I decide
it's time to get out of there.

I take a quick look in the closet
and step back out into the hall. It's confusing and disorienting to see that
the rest of the house has remained unchanged and suburban.

I go back into the living room.
Angel is trying to talk to the woman, but she's just staring straight ahead at
the soap opera on the television.

"So who takes care of your
daughter?" Angel is asking.

"He does." The woman
points at her father-in-law standing in the doorway, but doesn't turn her eyes
to look at him.

"Are you still taking
drugs?" I ask. I'm surprised to hear some anger creeping into my voice.

"Just the methadone," she
says nonchalantly. "And cocaine like once a night."

"Why're you doing that?"

"Because the methadone makes
me so tired that I'd go to sleep otherwise," the woman says as if she
can't believe what an idiot I am for not understanding immediately. She's so
out of it that it doesn't even occur to her to lie.

A beady-eyed actor on the screen is
kissing a blonde actress. The father-in-law glares at the woman from the
doorway. I can tell the old man truly despises her for being a bad mother. Just
then, Bill moves to my side and gives me an elbow in the ribs.

"Hey, Baum," he mutters.
"Check out the dog."

I scan the floor and finally spot
the Chihuahua squatting near the woman's knee. Amazingly, the dog, who can't be
more than eighteen inches in length, is harboring an eight-inch hard-on and
quietly working himself into an autoerotic frenzy.

"Oh shit," I say.

The Chihuahua, seeming to sense
everyone looking at him, slinks behind the sofa, toting his grotesque erection.
The woman briefly glances after him.

"Aw, he's all right," she
says. "He just needs a girlfriend. That's all."

Here was the new thing on the
street: When the police came to arrest you, you didn't run. You just stood
there and gave them attitude. Yeah. What's up? What you gonna do? You gonna
shoot me? Stupid teenage macho shit.

But the kid they picked up outside
the bodega robbery on East Tremont was different. The ones who'd actually
jumped the guy behind the counter and taken the money were across the street
already, strutting around and flashing their new rolls at everybody like they'd
earned it themselves. But the kid in the unseasonably heavy parka was still
hanging around by the mangoes and the melons at the stand. He kept tucking his
head inside the coat and quivering, as though he was laughing or crying to himself.

In fact, Eddie Johnson wouldn't
have been taken in at all if the patrolman hadn't bothered to pat him down and
find the unregistered handgun, the marijuana, and the chicken bones in his
pockets.

That night, I try to call Andrea,
but she's not around, so I leave a message with her roommate. With these new
hours, it's hard to keep up with anybody.

I dig up my photographer friend
Terry Greene and we go to have dinner at an Upper West Side coffee shop and
maybe catch a movie. I have tuna on rye, which is what I always eat, and Terry
has ice cream and seven-layer cake. I don't know why he never seems to gain
weight, though I notice he's more jittery than usual these days. I hope he's
not doing heroin again. Afterward, we go for a walk around Lincoln Center.

"I don't know about this field
job," I say as we circle the fountain in the middle of the complex.
"I'm way behind on my paperwork now. What I'd really like is to see a
couple of my old clients again. That way I'd feel like I was still doing
serious work."

"I thought this was what you
wanted," he says, scratching the purple streak in his hair, which he's
accentuated into a kind of a Mohawk. It looks a little pathetic since he's
almost thirty. "You're actually getting to see where these people live,
instead of just talking to them in the office." He stops and tries to
light a cigarette, cupping his hands protectively around the flame.

"Yeah, I suppose I am getting closer
to the source."

"Hey," he says abruptly.
"What about My Life as a Dog?"

For a second, I think he's talking
about the aroused Chihuahua I saw earlier today, but then I see he's pointing
to a movie poster with that title in the window of a nearby video store.
"We could rent it and go back to my house," he says.

I shake my head. "I really
don't feel like seeing a foreign film right now."

"Okay," he says wearily
as he stops scratching his arm and goes back to scratching his head.

"It's just this field job
makes me wonder if we're accomplishing anything. I mean, we just go marching
into people's houses and start ordering them around. I don't know if. that's so
great..."

I notice that he's wearing a pin on
his lapel for Peru's Shining Path movement. But when I ask him about it, he
gets very defensive. "I just been reading about them," he says.
"I think what they tried to do is really interesting."

"But aren't they kinda right
wing?"

"So?"

"I thought you said you were a
socialist."

"I said I was trying to develop
anarchist tendencies," he insists. "That's why I stopped reading the
TV listings ..."

"Anyway," I say, rubbing
my eye where the contact lens was poking it, "I was getting a little fed
up with the way things were going in the office, but that doesn't mean I want
to become a full-time cop."

"Is that what's bothering
you?" He looks at me the way he'd look at an alarm clock waking him from a
peaceful rest.

"That's part of it."

"What's the other part?"

"That I might start liking
it."

"All I'm looking for is a
little comeback," Richard Silver said. "You know what I mean? Just a
little comeback."

He clenched his teeth and all of
the tendons and veins in his neck stood out. Slowly, he lowered the 350 pounds
of weight he'd lifted while on his back.

"You look stiff," said
his personal trainer, Sandy, a blond-haired, blue-eyed former surfing champion
and Vegas bodyguard.

"Stiff? I got pressures like
you wouldn't believe."

"Keep your back
straight," said Sandy, kneeling by the Nautilus machine.

Richard Silver looked straight up
at the ceiling and did five quick reps with the 350 pounds. While he was
catching his breath, a buxom redhead in black nylon stretch pants paused in
front of his machine and pulled up her white T-shirt, exposing a smooth flat stomach.

"Jesus Christ," Richard
Silver said.

"Is that enough weight for
you?" Sandy asked.

"Hell no." Richard sat up
for a moment and twisted from side to side. Sweat matted his hair and ran down
the front of his blue T-shirt. "Gimme four hundred."

"I thought you already had too
much pressure."

"Hey, Sandy, do me a favor.
Don't be funny. Help me get big, all right. That's what I pay you for. Jesus
Christ. As if I don't have enough problems."

He lay down on his back again as
Sandy added more weight. On the other side, a dozen lissome women were bouncing
up and down to a frenetic disco beat in their aerobics class.

Richard Silver caught sight of
himself lifting the weights in the floor-to-ceiling mirror while Sandy stood
there admiring his own biceps. It made him think of an old bull trying to pull
a cart past the new stud on the farm.

"You got business
troubles?" Sandy asked, throwing back his mane of blond hair.

"The worst," Richard
Silver grunted between reps. "There's gotta be ten people now devoting themselves
to making my life miserable. You go out of the picture awhile and everybody
tries to change the rules on you. They turn everything upside down."

"Yeah," said Sandy, who
had no idea what Richard Silver was talking about.

"Hey, Sandy, you don't know
anybody who's into offshore banking, do you?"

"I don't know." Sandy
reached down and ever so subtly realigned the position of his balls in his
jockstrap.

A Refrigerator of a guy was
standing by them now, waiting to use the machine.

"And then there's my wife,"
Richard Silver said, extending his bulging arms.

"What's the matter with
her?"

"I should say my ex-wife. She
wants to give me a hard time about seeing my son. You believe that? She goes
around saying things about me. In front of my son."

"It's not right," said
Sandy, turning to give a wide smile to a slim-hipped blonde passing by.

"Ah, what do you know?"
Richard Silver dropped the weights with a loud crash and went over to the next
machine, which looked like a medieval torture device with red cushions.

Sandy adjusted the weight to 425
pounds as Richard put his back to the machine and started lifting. He stopped
after ten reps. "The head of the investment firm you train, can he do that
many?"

"Almost."

Richard Silver did ten more reps
quickly. He stood up and held on to the hems of his shorts while he caught his
breath. His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt. "I'll tell
you something, Sandy," he said. "The more time goes by, the more you
find yourself doing things you never thought you'd do in a million years. Just
to get by. That's the sad part."

"Huh," said Sandy.

"If you could put yourself in
a time machine twenty years ago, you'd never recognize yourself now. That's how
things change."

Sandy wasn't listening. He was too
busy staring at a full-lipped brunette, who was wearing hot pink shorts and lifting
at least three hundred pounds by spreading her legs on the Y-shaped machine
across the room.

"Hey, Sandy," Richard
Silver said. "Tell me something. You fuck a lot of these girls?"

"A few, I guess."

The girl in the hot pink shorts
smiled at Sandy and closed her eyes as she kept lifting.

"Jesus Christ," Richard
Silver said. "Jesus Christ."

The next day in the field begins a
little more promisingly. Just before seven, we arrive at a tall, red brick
housing project that takes up an entire block near West 134th Street.

As dark clouds gather overhead,
Bill, Angel, and I have a conference with the four other probation officers in
the plaza outside the building. Officer Jocelyn Turner takes out a manila
folder and reads from the file about the guy we're seeking.

"This mutt has really been
acting out lately," Angel says in his peculiar mixture of cop talk and
social work jargon.

His name is Cecil Shavers. A
twenty-two-year-old male black with a long history of drug arrests and violent
behavior. His regular probation officer set up a violation hearing after Cecil
got rearrested and then failed to report. Of course, Cecil did not show up for
the hearing either, and the judge issued a warrant for the unit to pick him up.
According to the reports, Cecil's father is wheelchair-bound and lately Cecil
has taken to tying him up and beating him to get crack money. The report also
mentions that Cecil's mother works as a cleaning woman and his younger brother
has cerebral palsy.

Turner shows me the file photo of
Cecil. He has a bony face, cornrowed hair, and eyes set far apart. Suddenly,
playing What's My Crime? at the office seems like a long time ago.

We walk through the plaza to the
building's entrance. Bill warns us all to look up at the roof and make sure
nobody is throwing anything dbwn on us. A light rain is starting to fall. From
the old green benches, two old women, four little kids, and a man in a
wheelchair watch us approaching.

"Should we show them the
picture and ask them if Cecil still lives here?" I ask Bill.

"No way. The old man over
there is probably his father," Bill answers. "Fuck 'em, we don't want
them to know we're coming..."

The glass in the front door is
cracked into a spiderweb pattern. Jocelyn Turner tries to check the apartment
number in Cecil's file with the directory by the aluminum mailboxes. She gives
up after a few seconds. "If the name is still on the directory, that
usually means the people are gone," she says. "And if the people are
still here, they've probably ripped their names off the directory. Same shit,
every time."

The building is about thirty years
old. The lobby smells like piss and motor oil. There are a few graffiti scrawls
on the walls and a couple of crack vials on the floor. A little boy in a New
York Mets cap sits outside a first-floor apartment and asks us if we can fix
his family's air conditioner.

We have a bumpy ride up to the
twenty-seventh floor in the steel elevator. At one point, I make the mistake of
leaning on the wall with my hand. A mysterious brown liquid gets all over my
palm. My fellow probation officers convulse with laughter.

Jocelyn Turner walks up to the door
of 27K and starts knocking with her blackjack. The door is covered with a large
black-and-white poster that says "Crack Shatters Lives" in bold
letters surrounded by broken glass. It takes two minutes of continuous pounding
before a woman's voice from inside shouts out, "Who is it?"

"Police. Open up," says
Bill loudly. He gives me a conspiratorial grin. "That always works better
than saying we're probation officers," he explains quietly.

Turner pounds on the door again.
"Let's go, ma'am. Open it up, now."

The door finally opens. A round-faced,
fiftyish woman in a white housedress stands there, rubbing her eyes. Turner
shows her the shield. The woman doesn't bother to look at it.

"Is Cecil here?" Turner
asks.

"I dunno...No."

"Are you his mother?"

"Uh, well...yeah."

"Then make it easy on all of
us," Turner says. "Where is he?"

"I don't think he's
here," Cecil's mother says with a bit of confusion. "I ain't seen him
in a long while."

"That's a lie," Bill
mumbles to me. "He's right here."

"Ma'am, we're gonna have a
look around here for ourselves," Turner says, pushing past the mother and
heading through a narrow corridor with her gun drawn.

"What makes you so sure he's
here?" I ask Bill.

"Believe me, I know,"
Bill says. "These people just get into the habit of lying. They do it
every time. Once you do this a few times you'll see. They never tell you when a
guy is there."

I follow Turner and the others
around a corner and into a dark blue room. In the bed on the left, Cecil
Shavers is naked and lying on his stomach. His head is turned just enough to
the right so I can see his eyes are closed and his mouth is half open,
revealing a gold front tooth next to a chipped one. Under him, a
fragile-looking young woman in a ripped pea-green nightgown seems to be struggling
for comfort and air. I can't tell if they just got done fucking or are about to
get started.

They're being watched from the bed
across the room by Cecil's brother. He's about a year younger than Cecil. All
his limbs are withered. He looks both horrified and fascinated by what his older
brother is doing to the girl in the bed. A triangle-shaped bar hangs over his
head. He's naked, except for the bed sheet covering his lower body up to the
start of his pubic hair. His right hip bone protrudes at an unnatural angle and
his left arm is about a third the size of his right. He twists his head as
though he's in great agony.

There's a poster on the wall
between the brothers' beds. It shows a teddy bear in a slumped position with a
bottle in his paw and a slogan scrawled over his head, "I have a drinking
problem—Only one mouth and two hands." I assume Cecil was the brother who
put the poster up.

"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.