Slow Motion Riot (37 page)

"How many of them still in
there?" the fireman with the extinguisher can asks me.

"I don't know."

Most of the cops fan out through
the hall with their weapons drawn. Only a couple go to help the fireman with
the ax and the iron crowbar who's trying to get the apartment door open.
"It's a snap lock," he says. "Half of them are probably baked
already."

If your heart gets broken too
often, it doesn't work anymore, I told Andrea. A man does what he does to
survive, my father told me. You're not any better than me, Darryl said. I
listen for the little girl's voice, but I don't hear it anymore.

"You must've been the one
nearest the door," the fireman holding the can says as he moves to help
his partner and the others.

"I must've."

I start coughing again. It feels
like I'm about to spit up a lung. The skin exposed on my arms and legs looks
charred and blackened in the places where it isn't red and swollen. My face
feels numb and the inside of my chest is seared, but I am alive. And in that
moment, I know that I am truly my father's son. I wonder if I will ever stop
hating myself.

With the car in the shop and the
time running late, Richard Silver and Jessica first tried to catch a cab going
downtown. But it was snowing hard and traffic was bad, so for the first time in
more than twenty years, Richard announced he was going to take the subway.

"Why the hell not?" he
said. "I practically helped build the fucking thing. Aren't I entitled to
something on a day like this?"

The line for the token booth at the
Eighty-sixth Street station was much too long, though, and he had to buy a
couple from a desolate-looking guy with swollen lips standing by the
turnstiles.

"Bet he doesn't pay
taxes," Richard Silver said, pushing through.

"Good," Jessica replied.
"Maybe it'd be a good job for you when you get out."

They walked down a flight of stairs
to the platform where the express train was supposed to pull in. The shopgirls
and secretaries were standing around the steel pillars. A guy in a long
moth-eaten old coat was asleep on the wooden bench. The man next to him was
picking his nose and reading the Racing Form. The graffiti above their heads
said: "Jesus Died for Your Sins, What Have You Done FOR HIM Lately?"

"Some life," Richard
Silver said. "You know I helped them fix up this station when they had
Gimbel's here."

"I still can't believe they
gave you three years for money laundering," Jessica told him.

The local train went by upstairs
and he didn't say anything.

"Why did Larry's cousin set
you up like that?" she said. "You didn't do anything to hurt him, did
you? You just offered him a deal."

"Ah, he was just a lousy bank
manager," Richard Silver told her with a wave of his hand. "He's got
his own problems. It was that probation thing that killed me. If I hadn't had
that violation and that prick Baum hanging over my head, I would've had a shot
at working out a deal with the feds."

"Is that what your new lawyer
said?"

He grunted and undid two of the
buttons on his gray cashmere overcoat. "Yeah, well, I'll tell you
something about that guy Baum. I had him about this far from making a trip to
the Cayman Islands for me." He showed her the distance with his thumb and
index finger.

"He didn't go for it?"

"What do you want, he's a
social worker," he said, shrugging in exasperation. "Anyway, it's no
wonder he cares so much about the blacks. He's starting to look like one of
them. I think he was in a fire or something."

Richard Silver noticed a
broad-shouldered black man in a business suit staring at him and realized he'd
been talking much too loud. "You should watch it," Jessica said.

A beam of light appeared from the
end of the tracks and began to grow larger. The distant rumble soon turned into
a metallic roar and when the train pulled into the station, people's faces were
pressed almost right against the windows.

"It's too crowded," said
Richard Silver. "Let's wait for the next one."

Jessica looked down at her watch.
"You're due at the marshal's office in fifteen minutes. We better
not."

They shoved their way onto the
train and the closing doors caught the back of Richard's coat. He turned around
and got a face full of garlic breath from the Puerto Rican man with greasy hair
and intelligent eyes, who was standing next to him. To his left, a fiftyish
black woman with her hair in curlers was giving him the kind of angry look he'd
come to expect from people who'd seen his picture in the newspapers lately. The
car was a hellish sweatbox.

"Can I get some room
here?" he said.

No one budged. Everywhere he looked
people were packed up right against each other. Jessica was nowhere to be seen.
He tried to elbow his way in a little farther, but he first felt some slight
resistance and then a rough shove that almost put him on the floor. To steady
himself as the train heaved forward, he reached up and grabbed an overhead
strap. Somebody behind him poked him in the ass with something long and stiff.

He hoped prison would be a little
bit better than this. But as the train continued its inevitable journey going
down, he knew it wouldn't. By the time they'd passed the Bloomingdale's stop,
he'd even given up hope of finding a seat. He'd just stand there, numb and
tired on his feet, like everybody else in New York.

Sometimes, when I'm standing in the
checkout line at the local Grand Union, I still get strange looks from the
housewives because of the patches of seared, discolored skin on my ears, neck,
and forehead. But I'm getting used to that, and it doesn't bother me so much.

My life is quite different from the
way it once was. I live on the second floor of a small, but cozy wooden house
just outside
Camden
,
New Jersey
,
where I attend
Rutgers
University
Law
School
.
I often spend part of the weekend working on the garden in the back, and I plan
to put in a row of tomatoes in the spring. At night I go to sleep to the sound
of cicadas and crickets rather than crackheads and M-80s exploding down the
street.

Overall, I would have to say I am
grateful for my new life. After all the turmoil and violence in the city, I
appreciate the subtle nuances more: a cup of coffee in the morning, a mildly
amusing story in the newspaper, strands of my hair on the brush in the
bathroom. With the ninety-seven-thousand-dollar settlement I got from the city
after the fire, I have relatively few money worries.

Still, there are times when I feel
a sadness lurking underneath and an emptiness inside. The other week I went to
my cousin Jerry's wedding in
Hackensack
and one particular part of the vows kept tolling over and over in my head.
Forsaking all others. In some sense, I believe I have forsaken all others by
leaving Probation and
New York City
.

The last time I stopped by the
office to pick up some papers, I ran into Jack, my old union rep. As a favor,
he looked up how some of my old clients were doing. Ricky Velez, the ex-token
sucker, got a job bagging groceries at a neighborhood Food Emporium and
eventually moved up to assistant manager. Not a major accomplishment, I
suppose, but something. On the other hand, Charlie Simms stayed addicted to
crack and Maria Sanchez remained with her family. So they both wound up in
jail.

"Do you see that girl
anymore?" Jack asked me as I was on my way out.

I stopped and started to say yes,
but then I caught myself and realized he was talking about Andrea, the law
student I'd been seeing that summer. In fact, I don't see Andrea anymore. It
became very difficult for me to be around anybody in the months after I got out
of the hospital. But I am still seeing the other girl. The one I neglected to
save that day in the fire.

In the middle of the night
sometimes I'll see her face and I won't be able to sleep. I'll rise from bed
and fix myself two or three stiff drinks. When that doesn't work, I get in the
car and drive aimlessly for hours with a beer in my hand and the radio on at
full blast. Going seventy-five miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike, I feel
free and lost in a way I never thought was possible from growing up in the
city. But I can't get the girl out of my mind.

One night just before Christmas, I
find myself driving drunkenly through Weehawken, a small industrial town near
the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. As I cruise up a street called Boulevard East,
past rows of one-family brick houses and modernized Victorian homes, I take
careful note of all the dependable old American cars with names like Mercury
and Ford sitting out front. Just then, the road turns steep and crooked, as
though it's about to reveal something surprising. When it does, it's enough to
make me stop the car and get out.

What it is is a view of the city
that I've never seen before. Across the river, the Manhattan skyline is shining
like a string of Christmas lights in the night. It takes my breath away. I see
the old piers thrusting out at the water and the top of the Empire State
Building reaching for the starless sky. The World Trade Center towers rise from
the south end of the island and the anonymous projects are fading off to the
north. Huge new glass-and-steel towers are blocking out other old familiar
parts of the horizon.

Just to get a better look, I walk
past a shady park and wander into a small concrete plaza area overlooking a
marina. I think I remember reading once that Alexander Hamilton got shot around
here, but at the moment all I see is a couple of stone memorials to veterans of
foreign wars in the middle of the plaza. An American flag hangs from the porch
of a house behind me, even though the sun went down hours ago. Somebody must've
had to get out of town in a hurry and just left it up there.

I stumble once or twice in the dark
and make my way over to the fence at the outer edge of the plaza. I look down
once and start to get dizzy. This whole thing seems to be set on top of a high
stone wall, towering over the shoreline, like an ancient barrier designed to
repel hostile forces arriving by water. I find myself leaning against some kind
of metal contraption just to get my balance. It's one of those old-fashioned
viewing machines, with the steel mask on top that you look through. Its sad
impassive eyes are pointing toward
Manhattan
.
The sign underneath them says: "25 cents. BRING DISTANT POINTS OF INTEREST
WITHIN
CLOSE
RANGE
WITH THE USE OF THIS MACHINE."

I finish my beer and check my
pockets, but I don't have a quarter. I squint once more at the skyline. During
the day there are ferries from here, but right now, it seems like it's a world
away. Somewhere across the water, somebody is getting laid, somebody else is
getting shot, somebody's getting ripped off, and somebody's getting high. The
city is a slow motion riot, destroying itself piece by piece, and I don't have
a place in it anymore. It's like looking at a family portrait of people I'll
never see again.

A dark cloud passes in front of the
moon and an airplane glows like an ember falling from the sky. The world keeps
going around faster all the time. A chilling wind whips through the air,
rustling the trees and the American flag behind me.

The End