Slow Motion Riot (35 page)

"No way," Aaron tells
her, a gold tooth peeking through his harelip and wispy mustache. "I got
my orders."

"Oh, Aaron, stop this
foolishness. Take the man where he wants to go."

Aaron shakes his head emphatically.
"Darryl said no."

"I'll talk to Darryl,"
Mrs. McDaniels says, pointing a bony finger at Aaron.

The boy is weakening. "Why you
care about him?" Aaron asks, looking at me.

"Just do it," she says.

Reluctantly, Aaron hoists me up by
the elbow. After sitting down the whole day, I get dizzy from standing up so
fast and my legs nearly give way under me. I steady myself on the slim boy's
shoulder and allow myself to be led to the bathroom, too bound up to even look
back in gratitude at Darryl's great-grandmother.

I have my fly open before I
actually enter the room. I put my hand against the wall as I lean over the
toilet. The piss shoots out of me like a flame, gas follows, and I moan out
loud with relief. I keep a powerful stream going for at least three minutes while
Aaron presses the Uzi against the base of my skull. As I continue to empty
myself, I notice a pair of cockroaches racing down the bathroom wall.

Then I smell something awful coming
from another part of the bathroom. I turn my head slowly with the gun following
it. The bathtub is full of feces.

"Oh Jesus," I say, ready
to throw up.

"Looks bad, huh?" says
Aaron.

The two small children come running
in. They're both cute kids with round, shiny faces and high-pitched giggles.
Their clothes are soiled and smelly, though. The boy wears shit-stained jeans
and a red shirt that looks like he hasn't taken it off for days. The little
girl, LaToya, has on a pair of blue pajamas with smiling gray elephants and a
wide yellow stain on the front. Her little legs are like matchsticks.

I realize the two kids are as used
to playing tag around crack dens as other children are used to playing in
country fields.

When they see me watching them,
they suddenly stop. The boy lowers his jeans to his ankles and prepares to take
a dump over the side of the tub. LaToya, the little girl, who wears her hair in
pigtails, raises her fingers to her lips and gives me a melancholy look.

"You wanna see Big Bird?"
she asks after a couple of seconds.

"Who?"

She stretches out her hand like she
wants me to take it and follow her somewhere. Aaron pushes her hand away with
the muzzle of his gun, but she doesn't get discouraged.

"Mom say Big Bird 'sa big
Muppets," she tells me, the words whistling through the space in her
teeth.

I'd noticed her brother playing
with Muppet toys before. She must have some of her own in one of the other
rooms.

"That's your Big Bird?" I
say. "I thought Big Bird was on a TV show."

She nods wildly. Aaron is half
bored, half listening, not making any effort to interrupt.

"What day is the show
on?" I ask, playing for time and trying to figure out if there's another
way out of here.

She looks at me blankly. She
doesn't know the days of the week. I smile to show her that's okay.

"Mommy say they got Big Bird
downtown, but she can't take me."

"Why not?" I can't tell
if she means there's a movie with Big Bird in it or a stage show at Radio City
or what.

"Mommy say she too busy,"
she says. She gives me a little coquettish smile. " 'Ould you take
me?"

Even Aaron seems interested in what
I'll say to that, peering at me over the sights of his gun.

"Sure, I'd take you," I
say.

Aaron shakes his head like maybe
he'd like to go too. But the little girl studies my face for a minute and her
smile disappears. "No, you don't," she says softly. "You don't
take me anywhere."

She hardly knows me and already
she's disappointed in me.

"Well, I'll try," I tell
her.

Aaron motions with his gun that he
wants me to leave. The smell was starting to get to me anyway. But before I go,
I notice the girl has a little purplish bruise on her left cheek.

"Hey, what happened to you
there?" I ask, pointing to it.

She looks up at me and puts her
finger to the side of her head.

"Crack," she says.

She goes running out of the
bathroom, leaving me completely confused. Maybe she meant a crackhead did this
to her. Like Darryl or one of his friends. Or maybe crack was the sound she
heard when she got hit. But there's another possibility, just barely edging
into my mind. Maybe she meant somebody gave her crack and this is what happened
to her when she got high. I know that couldn't be, but now I can't shake the idea.

It's that look she gave me. The one
that said: You may think this is a hard place to be right now, but try growing
up here.

Darryl's mother was crying when he
came back into the bedroom.

"Oh, Darryl, we gonna
die," she said.

"What the fuck, Moms."

The television was still on. It
showed night outside their building. This time there were gas masks, ladders,
and assault rifles all over the place. The sidewalks around the Fortress were
packed with black and Hispanic mothers, fathers, and children—many of them
residents of the building who'd been chased out by the King family posse and
the cops who'd arrived on the scene. Concession stands were set up near the
curbs to sell fried meat and Malcolm X T-shirts.

The picture on the TV suddenly
turned black-and-white. It looked like one of those old-fashioned movies.
People were running around, like a riot was about to start. Then there was a
lot of smoke and it was hard to see what was going on. They cut to a picture of
a black guy lying facedown on a concrete floor near a pair of binoculars. Next
there was a white guy on his back in the mud with his arms spread out and a
bloody bandage over his face.

" 'S a war," said Darryl.

More tears streamed down his
mother's face. " 'S not a war," she told him. "That's Attica.
That's what they say is gonna happen with us."

Darryl stared at the screen, but
the black-and-white pictures had vanished like it was all a bad dream. The TV
lady was on again, saying something about how they'd return to the scene before
the midnight deadline and now it was back to the studio. Darryl was starting to
feel drowsy. He sat down next to his mother on the bed and reached for the
crack pipe on the night table. There was a story about an airplane crash on
when he flipped open the top of the lighter.

"Darryl, we gotta do
something," his mother said through her sobs.

He tried thinking about the future,
but it didn't work anymore. He couldn't visualize it. Too much going from one
high to the next. Even now, his mind kept wandering back to how he'd like to
beam up. If only he could get his hand up to light the pipe. But sleep was
draining away his energy and his arm started to fall. His eyes closed and the
lighter slipped between his fingers.

It fell on the carpet with the top
open and the flame still going. On the television screen, the anchorman said
they'd just learned that the cop wasn't going to be indicted for shooting Jamal
Perkins. Darryl's mother began to weep a little louder and a little harder. She
looked over to say something to Darryl, but he was already sleeping. When the
commercial came on, she punched him in the shoulder and told him to get up.

His eyes slowly opened and he gave
her that look that made her fear for her own life again. "There's things I
wanna tell you," she said.

"What?" He bent over and
picked up the lighter, without noticing where its flame had licked the carpet
fibers and started them smoldering.

"I hope you don't think you
getting high now."

He lit the pipe and took a long
hit. His face closed up and his body shook a little. "Relax, Moms,"
he said.

She started to dry her eyes with
the sleeves of her blouse. "In four hours is midnight," she said.
"And they gonna come for us."

"Well, I ain't gonna give up
now," he said sullenly.

"Well, I ain't asking you
to," she snapped at him. "Your father couldn't do prison time, so you
couldn't neither."

He was going to say something to
her about that, but now he couldn't think of what it was. The newspeople came
back on the TV and did a story about sea cows mating at a zoo and the New York
Yankees.

"There's things I want to tell
you before I die," his mother said more softly.

"What?"

"I don't know." She
looked up at the ceiling for a minute and he could still see where the tears
had left their tracks on her face. The voices outside seemed to be shouting his
name out.

"I ain't worked it all out
yet," she said finally. "But there's things I wanna say to you about
life."

He rocked himself up onto his feet.
"Well, I ain't dead yet," he said. "I'm gonna get us outta
here."

"Well, what nonsense you
telling me now?"

"We're gonna get out and start
making that crazy money."

The confident way he was talking
made her want to start crying again. But he was already waking himself up and
working himself into a mood. "This a opportunity," he was saying.
"We got the whole world in front of my hands."

She screwed up her mouth
skeptically and put her hands on her skinny hips. "Well, tell me how you
figure on that."

"Motherfuckers got to give me
what I'm asking for," he said, clapping his hands together like an athlete
about to take the field. "We still got the hostage here."

His mother began crying again, but
by now Darryl was fed up. He flapped his hands and started to walk out of the
room. His mother threw a balled-up Kleenex after him. He stopped in the doorway
and looked back in, wrinkling up his nose.

"You smell something
funny?" he asked.

"Only you," his mother
told him.

Ever since it said on TV that the
cop who shot Jamal Perkins wasn't going to get indicted, I've been waiting for
the explosion in here. For a couple of hours things have been degenerating.
That kid is still flicking droplets on my face and the one called Bobby
"the House" is wandering around in shades muttering, "Violence,
ultra violence," over and over.

Most of the lights have been turned
down and in the flickering blasts of illumination from the television set, I
can see four of Darryl's other lieutenants hovering around the dinner table,
which is just two or three yards from the front door entrance. The table is
covered with guns and set up so that each kid can grab one on his way out, just
as other boys their age grab a hat and mittens heading out for school on a cold
winter's day.

It's almost a relief when Darryl
comes out of the back bedroom with his mother, though my mouth still hurts
where he belted me before. At least with him around I know I'm dealing with the
real power around here, not just a dangerous functionary who'd pop me for no
good reason. I have a feeling things are coming to a head quickly and no one's
ready for it. The voices outside seem to be getting louder and the lights
appear brighter. I guess it's almost midnight now. Once the deadline arrives,
the forces outside will have to try crashing in, or Darryl and the others will
have to try crashing out. Either way, I'm probably dead.

I start talking, as if words
themselves can keep me alive.

"Hey, what's going on out
there?" I ask Darryl.

"Yo, shut the fuck up, man.
Who asked you?"

He looks over at Bobby, who's
holding a gun on me, like he's about to give him an order. "Hey," I
say, bracing myself. "I was just looking for information."

Darryl turns up the side of his
mouth. "Oh that's all," he says, balling up his fists and taking a
step toward me. For most of the day I've been avoiding looking him in the eye,
kind of the way you don't look at people on the subway. But now our eyes meet
and it's like wires crossing.

I've never known there could be
such violence in just a look before. There's no white showing in his eyes, only
huge, angry pupils staring out of a ruined face. He's got that horrible crack
breath again and two lines of sweat are coming down his brow.

Normally I'd be too scared to say
anything, but with the way things are going I better take a shot at it.
"So did you talk to the guy?" I ask.

"Who?"

"The hostage negotiator."

He smiles like everything's under
control.

"What's so funny?" I ask,
looking back to the bedroom where he's been with his mother.

"I'm about to get paid,"
he says.

An old subway mugger's line. I'm
starting to wonder if he has any real sense of what's about to happen here.

"So what'd you say to the
guy?" I ask.

"I gave him my list."

Darryl looks around at everybody
else in the room like they're going to confirm that's just what they discussed.

I try not to let my hopes get up
too high. I'd thought his last few conversations with the hostage negotiator
had gone badly, but now he's acting like they might've worked out a deal. Maybe
he's somehow managed to seize the moment and act rationally.

"So what was on your
list?" I ask him.

"Business equipment," he
says.

That stops me cold and I look at
the others to see if they have a clue as to what he's talking about. In the red
light from the TV, his mother looks like she's trying to shrink down and lose
herself in the folds of her blouse.

"Business equipment?" I
say. "What does that mean?"

"Equipment to start my
business," he explains. "They're gonna give me a helicopter, and two
keys, so I can get started up right up..."

My sense of hope is fraying, like
an old cable carrying too much freight. "They're not gonna give you
dick."

"Yes, they will," he
insists.

One of the other kids comes over to
take Bobby's place, holding the gun on me. I don't know this kid's name, but
he's about sixteen and he wears an NWA baseball cap with the bill turned
sideways. He's only a couple of years younger than the inmates we just saw in
the film clips of Attica, who were holding knives on the hostages when they got
shot themselves.

What they said on TV was that the
prisoners and the authorities couldn't agree on the demands and, after a while,
the state just had to reestablish order, no matter what the cost was to lives.
It's about to happen again here if we don't watch it.

"Didn't you talk to the guy
about amnesty?" I ask Darryl, figuring he must've seen that part of the
television report.

"Nope," Darryl says.
"Don't have to."

"What did he say?" I hear
Darryl's mother asking somebody in the corner.

"You mean you didn't even talk
to the guy about letting me go in exchange for some leniency?" I say. At
this point I stand up in front of Darryl, just to make sure he's listening to
me.

"Sit your ass down," he
says.

"Didn't you talk to him about
doing a deal with the judge?"

"Nigger, sit your ass
down."

The guy in the NWA cap puts his
hand on my shoulder. All the other people who've been milling around, doing
drugs, and watching TV stop talking and start watching us more care-fully. Like
something really serious is about to happen. I sit down slowly.

"Damn," says Darryl,
rocking from side to side, and spoiling for a good fight.

My scalp tingles like my hair is
turning gray while I'm sitting here. "Listen," I say, "you gotta
try and call that guy back. He's gonna make this deal."

"Why the fuck don't you call
them?" he says, bellowing the words down into my face.

"Because you won't let
me."

" 'S right," says Darryl.
" 'S my motherfuckin' house. Who asked you to come up here?"

"Nobody. You broke the
law."

"What law?"

"Come on, you know what
law," I say, trying to keep the discussion reasonable. "Like the law
against shooting cops."

"What law's that?" he
says, throwing up his hands. "Motherfuckers come in my house and tear shit
up. They threaten me with violence. Shoot them guns off. What law's that?"

" 'S right," says a voice
from the darkness.

"You tell 'im, D.," adds
Bobby.

"That's not what it is,"
I say, fumbling the words. "That's not the reality of it."

"Reality?" Darryl's voice
goes up and his head jerks back. "Motherfucker. Lemme tell you about the
reality. You come around here talking about the law. But there be your law and
the law of the jungle. You know what I'm saying? See, you in the jungle now,
Mr. Bomb."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I
turn halfway away from him in my seat. "I know all about that."

"No, you don't. You think you
know. Because you sit in your office, and you be the law and the rest of us be
niggas. But now you come in my house. Right? You in my supervision. So you
respect my law. Understand what I'm saying? You not any better than us. You the
nigga here."

In the dark, one of the boys makes
a hissing noise and says, "Aw busted ..." That gets a short laugh out
of the others without really cheering anybody up. "Say it," someone
else chimes in. It's like a disillusioned revivalist meeting where no one can
quite find the spirit. But in the blue radium flashes of television light, I
see at least a dozen pairs of worried eyes looking around, just as afraid as I
am.

"Well, I'm sorry you feel that
way," I say slowly, trying hard to keep the fear and anger out of my
voice. "But what you're talking about isn't the same thing."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Because I didn't kill
anybody. I don't come to your neighborhood and rob people."

"But you put the shit right in
my face!" Darryl yells. "You put the shit right in my face!"
He's pointing furiously at the television, like it's the whore that's led him
down the road to temptation. "I seen it right there. People be making all
that crazy money. People flying with helicopters, and their boat, and driving
around in the limos. And with the females. I seen it right while I was sitting
there." He kicks the chair I'm sitting in. "You put the shit right in
my face and tell me I can't grab for it."

" 'S the system," I hear
Darryl's mother muttering.

"They doing it to us
again," someone else calls out.

"Conspiracy," says Aaron,
adding his voice to the growing uproar.

"The way they want it,"
says Darryl's mother loudly.

"Genocide," says Darryl,
using the word like it's something he heard on TV.

"Oh, fuck you," I say,
rising to my feet. "Who told you to put a needle in your arm? Who said go
smoke twenty-five vials of crack. If I gave you rat poison, would you do that
too? Why's it always our fault?"

"BECAUSE IT IS!" says
Darryl. "YOU PUT THE SHIT RIGHT IN MY FACE!!"

For Bobby, this is the cue to take
leave of his senses and he starts raving at me too.

"YOU WERE THE ONE!" he
shouts. "YOU BROUGHT DISEASE INTO THIS HOUSE! YOU EAT PORK! AND THE PORK
EAT WORMS! AND THE WORMS EAT DIRT!!! NOW there's worms in this house. This used
to be a CLEAN HOUSE."

"Bobby," says Darryl in a
quieter tone. "Chill, man. 'S just life."

I'm standing in the middle of the
darkened room, and Darryl's prowling around me. In the flashes of television
light, I can see the rest of them in a loose circle around us, but I can't make
out any of their faces.

"Motherfucker tryin' to tell
me how to negotiate," I hear Darryl saying, like he can't believe I had
the nerve to second-guess him before.

"THAT'S RIGHT!" one of
the others cries out. "THAT'S WHAT HE TRY!"

Now Darryl's standing right in
front of me and snarling. "Let me ask you something, Mr. Bomb," he
says in a low voice. "What give you the right to tell me what to ask for
when I'm in negotiations?"

"It's my life too," I
say.

"But what give you the right
to tell niggers how to live?"

The rest of them yell out their
approval. "THAT'S RIGHT! THAT'S ALL RIGHT!!"

"Well..." one deep voice
keeps saying.

"The earth is gettin' too far
from the sun," an older woman's voice calls. I can't see who it belongs
to.

"I'm not trying to tell
anybody anything," I explain.

"Yes, you are," says
Darryl, pointing his finger accusingly. "Yes, you are. You trying to say
we should go beg when we in the position to get something for ourselves."

"That's not true," I tell
all of them. "I'm trying to help."

"Now that's bullshit,"
says Darryl's mother.

"Yeah, right, Mr. Nice
Guy," Bobby taunts me.

"You trying to short us
again," Darryl says.

"No, I'm not," I say,
putting up my hands defensively, like one of them's about to take a swing at me
out of the darkness "I'm just trying to keep us all alive."

"You trying to take the shit
out of our hands when it's ours."

"Jew-Man," another voice
in the dark says.

"All right!" I shout.
"All right! The hell with all of you. Stick to your stupid, goddamn
unreasonable list of demands and keep trying to sell crack. You're all going
down in flames anyway."

"Well, there's at least one
white motherfucker going down with us," Darryl says.

They all start roaring at once.
"EEEYAHHHHH!!! MISTTTERNICEGUY! FFUGGGIMMMUPP!" I feel like an actor
onstage being booed by an invisible audience beyond the footlights. I hear the
clatter of a gun being picked out of the pile on the dining room table. There
are sounds of laughter and hands slapping.

"Right?" Aaron is saying.
"Right?"

"You tell 'im, Darryl,"
says his mother.

"What'd he say?" the
little girl, LaToya, is asking.

"EEEEEEEEYYYYEEE AAAAHHH ! ! !
MISSSSSTERRRR NICEGUYYY! ! ! !"

"TELLLIM D! TELLIM!"

They're getting louder and louder
now. It's starting to sound like a victory celebration in a high school locker
room.

In the meantime, the light in the
room has gone flat. The regular program on television must have gone to a blank
screen before switching to a commercial. It's hard to see anything now and
almost impossible to pick a phrase out of the racket Darryl and his friends are
making. All it sounds like is "pop that five-o" and a lot of
indiscriminate "motherfuckers."

All the air feels used up in here.
A vein pulses in my brow and I take a small step forward into the darkness. A
hand grabs my elbow and something brushes against my head. I don't know what it
is, but it has teeth.

I duck away from it, but it comes
back again, landing on my forehead and raking across my scalp. It doesn't so
much hurt now, as promise to start really hurting in a second. I begin
struggling to get away, but somebody has my other elbow and the thing touches
my head once more. It's hard and cold with jagged edges. I get scared it's
going to start ripping through my scalp at any moment.

"Get that fuckin' thing away
from me!" I scream.

"Huh," somebody says.
"He mad."

Just then, a commercial comes on
the TV, making the light a little brighter, so I can finally see what's been
touching my head. It's the kind of big African-looking comb I've noticed black
kids using on the train and outside the office.

Darryl sees me staring at it and he
gives me his rictus grin again. "I just want you to look pretty before you
die," he says, flourishing the comb like a downtown stylist.

The rest of them start giggling
hysterically, as though this was some great high school prank we've all been in
on. But to me it's been more like a gross violation and I reach out and give
Darryl a good shove with both hands. He goes back a step or two, and for a
second he just seems stunned. As the TV starts to flicker like a strobe light,
I see his eyes open a little wider. Somebody takes a deep sniff and somebody
else mutters, "Oh shit."