Slow Motion Riot (27 page)

Charlie holds up two fingers.

"What is it?" I say,
slapping my thigh in frustration. "The responsibility? You were doing
well. What's the matter? Couldn't you take the pressure?"

"What do you know about
it?" Charlie sniffs.

"Not much, I guess. I thought
you were tough enough to make it. I was wrong. You know you really disappointed
me."

He looks away from me and scratches
the back of his head. "What does this have to do with you?" he asks.

"What?"

"You say I 'disappointed' you.
I let you down. What makes you so important?"

"Don't try to turn it
around," I say, pointing at him. "We had a relationship..."

"Oh fuck you, man,"
Charlie makes a swatting motion with the back of his hand. "You're just
like all the others, you just don't know it."

"All the other what? White
people?"

Charlie smirks at me. "You
said it. I didn't."

Wheels screech on the street and
something I'm standing on cracks.

"Ah, don't punk out like
that."

"You don't know what it's
like," Charlie says heatedly.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah... You know,
I hear that bullshit twelve times a day."

"And you still don't get
it." Charlie rubs his nose. His face looks sucked out and lifeless.
"You don't understand."

"Oh yeah? What don't I
understand?"

"How hard it is."

"Ah, find me a Kleenex. I'm
gonna start crying."

"Hey, you know something, Mr.
Baum?" Charlie says. "I know exactly one guy from my block who's a
success."

"Who?" I ask.

"Rashid." Charlie points
down the alley and across the street. "On that corner last year, he
started out as a lookout for one of the crack dealers on my block. He made a
hundred dollars a day. Now he's out on his own, selling his own shit on the
corner and he can make a grand on a slow morning." Charlie adjusts his
glasses and raises his voice. "So you tell me why I'm gonna bag your
groceries for three fuckin' dollars an hour at the Grand Union."

I can't think of anything to say
for a long time. The sun beats down on the alley, making the air thick and the
garbage stink worse. This is the argument I'm most afraid of. There's no honest
answer for it.

"You'll just end up in prison
or dead if you stick around the crack business," I tell him.

"Maybe," Charlie says in
a voice that has nothing behind it. He's physically still sitting on the trash
can in front of me, but his mind is down the street already. He'll probably buy
two vials within five minutes of me leaving. His body begins to agitate like a
test tube full of combustible elements.

"I thought you were a smart
guy," I say despairingly. "Doesn't it mean anything when I say you're
gonna die if you keep doing this?"

"If I die, I got no
needs," he says, folding his arms and facing the wall away from me.

"Oh yeah? What if you go to
prison?"

"Still got no needs. I'll have
a home, three squares, TV."

"That's a bunch of shit,"
I say.

"And I'll be with my Muslim
brothers." He gives the clenched fist salute.

"Oh, you're gonna be with
them, huh? Don't real Muslims have strictures against drinking and doing
drugs?"

Charlie waves his hands
dismissively. "Let me tell you something, Mr. Baum," he says, somehow
managing to sound both rote and angry. "White people say crack shatters
lives and shit like that, but the real reason they don't like crack is because
it's the black man's business. Ain't no Mafia or policeman getting our money."

"You got it so backward,"
I say with a sigh. It's like he's taken all the old black nationalist rhetoric
and twisted it just enough to suit his own purposes.

"Y'all always act like you
wanna help black people when you just wanna take shit away from us," he
says fiercely. "You give our women birth control and say you wanna
'prevent cycle of dependency,'" he says in a nasal "white"
voice. "But you just afraid of all these little black babies growing up to
take over your world and rock your shit." He turns and jabs a finger right
at me.

I've heard a lot of what he's
saying before. I've even thought some of it might be true. But at the moment,
it doesn't make much difference to me. He's throwing away all the good work
we've done together and I'm starting to get good and pissed about it.

Charlie, in the meantime, is
continuing his crack-fueled rant. "The Holocaust wasn't nothin',"
he's saying. "My people are dealing with genocide right here in this
country, and y'all still can't figure out why we can get behind Darryl King."

For some reason, this sends me
right over the edge. I grab him by the collar of his sweatshirt and push him
hard right up against the wall. "Hey, you know what?" I hear myself
shouting. "You know what? I give up on you people!"

For a second, Charlie looks kind of
stunned, and then pushes back at me. I flash on the idea that he might have a
knife in his pocket and I try to figure out what I'd do if he lunged at me.
"You people?" he says, scrunching up his face. "What do you
mean? You mean you niggers, right?"

"That's not what I said."
I take my hands off his collar and back away from him. But it's too late.

Between "you people" and
"you niggers," there's very little distance. Charlie knows it and I
know it.

We move a little farther apart and
give each other wary looks. The only sounds I'm aware of for a minute are both
of us breathing and the blood pounding in my ears.

Gradually, the noise from the
street begins to fade back in. No one pulled any knife here, but the damage has
been done anyway. I scribble down the name and address of a drug rehabilitation
program on a piece of notebook paper, but when I try to hand it to him, Charlie
turns away. The physical contact involved in taking it from me would be too
much like a handshake. Something I don't particularly feel like doing either. I
leave the note on the nearest garbage can lid so he can pick it up himself.

"I want you to report to that
place immediately," I say. "If you don't, you'll be looking at jail
time for smoking crack."

"Yeah, right," he says
bitterly.

We turn away from each other
without saying good-bye. It's almost two o'clock and I hear myself mumbling,
"Ignorant bastards," as I walk back through the alley. The girl who I
saw before in the yellow smock dress is lingering in the building's doorway,
giving me what you'd call an accusing look if that's what you were expecting.

I used to argue with the old saying
"If you scratch a liberal, you'll find a guilty racist hiding
underneath." Now, maybe, I'm not so sure.

Darryl King looked out the window.
A brilliant day was in progress and a breeze blew through the screen. Twelve
floors below, a group of small children screamed and frolicked in the spray
from an open fire hydrant in the middle of the six-building city project called
the Charles J. Stone Houses. Across a long stretch of brownish grass, several
elderly women gathered on the benches, leaning on their canes and nodding
solemnly at each other.

On the asphalt court, some fifty
yards to the east, a half dozen young men Darryl's age were playing a furious
game of basketball.

From his window, Darryl couldn't
see the players, but he could hear the slapping sound of the ball being
dribbled. He wished he could go outside and join the game. He tried to
visualize what it would be like in his mind. He saw himself jumping high above
the fray of scrambling boys and then above the backboard. As he descended, he
reached back behind his head and jammed the basketball through the hoop so
forcefully that the backboard slid down the pole and crashed into the court.
Rival players and scantily dressed girls stared in awe at the devastation he'd
caused.

His mother's voice, talking to
someone on the phone, interrupted his reverie. "So who we want to go and
kill that grand jury witness?"

"Let Aaron do it," Darryl
told his mother to tell whoever she was talking to on the phone. "He did
Eddie Johnson all right."

She went on talking and he shut his
eyes tightly. "Moms, we got any ice cream? I'm hungry now."

She put her hand over the receiver
and looked at him. "Honey, we just moved here," she said in a flat
voice. She wore a Same Shit, Every Day T-shirt and a pair of gray stone-washed
jeans. "I ain't had no time to shop... Since when you wanna eat anyhow?"

Darryl lumbered over to the
refrigerator and took a look inside. All the food seemed old. With all the
moving around and relocating since the big shoot-out, he hadn't done much
eating anyway. Crack took most of his appetite away. It had him always agitated
over one thing or another. He'd watch the news on TV or his mother would read
the newspaper to him and he could hear his name and see his picture and he'd be
glad that he was famous but then he'd think that these people who put these
things on the tube did not know him and did not know about his mentality and
the things happening in his head and he'd get enraged about their lies and
start to break things.

"They don't know me," he
said to himself. "No one knows me."

In between everything else, he kept
getting images of his probation officer. He could not quite picture the guy's
face in his mind, but he could still hear him saying, "Don't be late...
Dooky," from the last time they saw each other outside the courthouse
elevators.

But then the little glass pipe
beckoned to him like an old friend waiting in his room. He'd smoke and smell
the heady ether aroma and his heart would beat like a huge bass drum and he'd
feel on top of things and in control again, even if he couldn't keep track of
time or think things through so well.

The future was only the time
between the last high and the next one. Hours and days would go by and he
wouldn't sleep or eat. Then he'd crash for two days and wake up starving.

Instead of "visualizing"
like his sister told him to, he'd sit in front of the TV for days, playing with
the Nintendo games and watching the Channel 5 news at ten (to see if they would
show his picture again). Other times, he just watched Dallas and Dynasty
reruns. The plots he didn't care about, but he liked seeing the beautiful
ladies and the big cars and the huge houses filled with nice stuff.

Sometimes that made him angry too,
though. Especially when the commercials came on. It was like standing outside a
candy store with your nose pressed up against the glass. They put the shit
right in your face. Cars, women, airplanes, sneakers, diamonds, giant
televisions. But they never let you have any of it.

The worst was the rich guy he kept
seeing on the news. The one who always seemed to be flying somewhere in a
helicopter or walking through some casino with a bunch of bodyguards. Every
time Darryl saw him, he seemed to have a different woman with him, younger than
the one before her. One time, the TV people even said the rich guy had a
contract with his old wife that basically said he could fuck anyone he wanted.

Though they always claimed the guy
did something else for a living, Darryl knew the guy had to be a drug dealer,
because otherwise people wouldn't be falling all over him all the time like he
had something they desperately needed. Darryl kind of liked the guy's style,
except that the guy never seemed to be having that good a time.

Darryl decided if he ever had that
much money, he'd really live it up right. He'd have all kinds of clothes. A
different color warm-up suit for every single day. And a different chain too,
instead of the same old cheap-looking red tie the rich guy wore every time he
was on TV. Dinner would be at Red Lobster every night. And the other thing was
he'd have as many ladies as the rich guy had, except he'd keep all of them. And
if one of the old ones wanted to throw down and do the humpty dance again, he'd
be happy to oblige. But the most important thing was that if they ever showed
Darryl getting off a helicopter, he'd have a much bigger smile on his face than
the rich guy.

All of that shit was waiting for
him now. He had to just figure out a way to get to it. For now, they finally
seemed to be settling in this apartment. The old couple they'd gotten rid of
had kept the place clean and well-furnished. It had two bedrooms, two
bathrooms, and a living room with a view of the plazas and the entrances below.
This building was called the Fortress. Pops Osborn controlled it before he was
killed, and it was still virtually impenetrable for police.

The "security team"—a
group of young men paid by Darryl King's sister and Winston Murvin to act as
lookouts in the lobby—could spot unfamiliar faces and call upstairs with
warnings before the intruders could cross the plaza outside. If any strangers
did get inside, a King family lieutenant on the eighth floor controlled the one
working elevator and could shut it off at any point. With the time it took to
climb the twelve flights to get to them, the King family could get rid of
whatever drugs or weapons they had, sneak out of one of the back
entrances—which had doors that only opened from the inside— and disappear
before a raid got going.

Logistically, the building was a
firetrap. Its sprinkler and alarm systems did not work and a dangerous,
flammable residue coated the walls of one incinerator chute. But for drug
dealers, it was a palace. Back when Paul "Stewy" Harris was running
his operation out of the Fortress, a joint city-federal narcotics task force
spent $303,174 on a massive sweep through the project. Vials of cocaine and
guns literally rained out of the windows. Because of the strategic problems
with the building's structure, the agents were only able to assemble enough
evidence to support five felony convictions. Given the expense, the law enforcement
agencies began to concentrate on other drug-infested parts of the city and the
Fortress was left alone.

"When we eat?" Darryl
King asked his mother.

"I dunno. What do you
want?"

"I didn't eat for half a
week." He patted the side of his stomach. "I want Ring Dings and
Devil Dogs and then some Chinese food. Like takeout."

"You crazy. We can't let no
delivery boy come here, Darryl."

"Fuck! When do I go outside
again? I'm bugging out up here, Moms."

It was the most fucked-up thing.
For the first time in his life, he was in a position to have some real money,
but there was no way he could spend it. Somewhere downstairs, there was a
brand-new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that Winston had bought for him. He was
even paying someone to wash it for him every day. But he'd never actually seen
the car because he couldn't go outside now. He went over to the closet and
looked at the custom-made white leather jacket his mother had bought all those
weeks back. With the way things were going, he was never going to get to wear
that either.

"You got only yourself to
blame," she said.

He grabbed the jacket and walked to
the door. "OUTTA HERE!"

"Darryl, you walk out that
door, I swear I'll stab you right here and now." Her voice stopped him in
his tracks. "Goddamn," she said. "Sometimes, I think you're same
as you was when you was five years old."

"I WANNA GO OUT, MOMS."

"Darryl baby, if it was up to
me, you be on the street right now. But the shit done happened already with
those cops."

"It's 'cos of that probation
officer," he grumbled. "Mr. Bomb. We gotta have somebody take him off
the count."

"Aaron and Bobby are working
on that," his mother said. "They'll get going. Now you just gotta
relax here."

"When?" Darryl asked.

She sighed. "They know a guy,
who knows another guy, who's got a cousin... I dunno. They'll work it out. They
just got to get going, that's all. See if they wanna do him outside his office
or follow him or what the fuck. So don't worry. They do it right."

"All right," Darryl said,
scratching the back of his hand and looking around the room for his crack pipe.
"I just wish they do it soon, that's all I'm saying."

"Why? You can't go out just
because your probation officer's dead, right?"

"No. But it sure as hell make
me feel better."

"Well, all right," Darryl
King's mother said. "You wanna get high now?"