Angry Black White Boy (24 page)

“Stay back!” he shouted. “Stay back!” His partner had succeeded in subduing the knot of attackers; seven men and two women lay prostrate on the ground. McGrath walked from one to the next, treating anyone who moved to another electric shock.

“You are all under arrest,” he screamed at their incognizant, twitching bodies. “Dick, this goddamn guy is dead. You fucking animals!”

“He had a gun!” shouted the crowd. “He killed them!” They pointed at the statistician and the tourist, now covered in African batik-print sheets from a nearby shop and guarded by multiracial circles of weeping strangers. Downing dropped to his knees beside the white woman, took her pulse, and stood back up. He walked over to the black body and poked it with his toe.

“Request immediate backup,” he repeated into his walkietalkie, clutching it so tightly that his knuckles turned the shade of glue. “Riot waiting to fucking happen up here, copy?”

He’d no sooner said it than the crowds surged forward and engulfed the street. McGrath and Downing went under in a human riptide, a miscegenation of frenzied bodies who knew only that they’d just witnessed three murders and that the color of their skin, the color of other people’s skin, had brought or put them here, had caused this, was to blame. Their guilt, their anger, their attempts to do what they had thought was right—to teach, to be taught, to apologize, to forgive, to decline forgiveness, to remember, to forget—these things had smashed into one another and exploded, sent splinters flying. They had touched one another, invaded, been invaded, stepped foolishly outside themselves, and their daring had wrought death and madness.

They spun around now, understanding only color, and struck out. There was nowhere to go: Violence had toppled them against one another like dominoes and all they could do now was fall together, black on white on black on white, brick on glass and match on matchbook, torch on property. The block became a sea of chaos, a human tsunami throwing flames and people.

Cap Anson smirked at Macon and squirted a blast of tobacco juice right at the camera, grinning hands-on-hips as brown dripped sickly down the lens. He knew who always won these things as well as anybody.

More cops were there soon, trying to pull the plug, but it was too late. The police decided quickly that they didn’t care; black people burning down their neighborhoods again was no big deal. White folks dumb enough to be up here apologizing, fuck it, they asked for it, leave ’em to the mercy of the niggers. The cops’ orders were containment: Keep it in Harlem and get the tourists back on board their buses if possible. But before anything much could be done, the call came that Times Square was exploding, too, and most of the city’s police forces were marshaled to defend Midtown, where the real estate was worth protecting.

At his campaign headquarters on Fifty-second Street, Marcell A. “Jackfruit” Preston was beginning to panic. He turned off the television set when the riot spread north of Fiftieth, and pressed his cheek to the window in fear. A mob of giant cartoon animals advanced up Broadway, smashing the windows of cheap electronics stores and grabbing display model telephones, radios, and microwave ovens—all of which had languished in those windows for years, baking, and none of which worked.

The congressional candidate was busy spray-painting the words BLACK OWNED over his plate-glass storefront when the mob bore down on him. In his haste, Preston forgot the
n
and scrawled BLACK OWED on his property.

“Damn right,” a rioter agreed, slapping the graffiti writer on the back. “Black owed like a motherfucker.” The man hurled a metal coffee grinder through the window and Preston’s staff screamed and covered their faces as the glass collapsed, spraying tiny shards across the office floor. The mob poured in and helped themselves to the only goods the headquarters had to offer: a television set, two laptop computers, and three thousand straw derbies with the words
Jackfruit for Congress
printed on them.

“Nooo,” moaned the candidate, realizing he was now the riot’s official outfitter. In every news report, on every magazine cover, hooligans bearing his name on their heads would be documented ravaging the city.

“No justice, no peace!” chanted the mob, rifling through a stationery store and reemerging on the street with cards and envelopes enough for every conceivable occasion, from
Happy
Anniversary to a Great Minister
to
Condolences on the Death of
Your Pride.

“Brother Ben-David dead! How many more?” shouted some as they ransacked a soup store and dumped tureens of New England clam chowder, garden vegetable, and other oppressive broths into the gutter.

“Who’s dead?” asked others, attempting to pillage a bank and leaving with nothing more than armfuls of deposit slips and free desk calendars. “Is this part of the apology?”

Chapter Thirteen

Macon cocked his head. “What’s that sound?”

Andre and Nique, walking with him through the detritus strewn in the wake of the rapidly advancing riot, knew exactly what it was.

“Choppers,” Andre said. “Ghetto birds, we call ’em back home.”

Burnt air stung their nostrils. A layer of invisible ash seemed to coat skin, words, the soles of shoes. The world was smudged and broken, heavy. Andre had the sense that if he lit a match, the emptiness in front of him would combust like a kitchen with the gas left on; violence lingered long after its perpetrators vanished. Nique treaded carefully over smoldering artifacts: charred shoe boxes, crushed CD cases, ripped and soiled clothing. He felt momentarily like an archaeologist on television, theorizing about the mysterious disappearance of some arcane, troubled civilization.

It had all happened so fast. Macon felt vaguely horrified, if such a thing were possible. He wanted to forget himself, pretend he was just an observer like anybody else. He tried to avoid looking at the small fires burning here and there in the wreckage of stores; it was too easy to imagine painted native urchins spying and whispering behind them, dashing from one hiding place to the next as if 125th Street were a Conradian river.

“This ain’t L.A.,” he said dumbly.

“It is now,” said Andre. “It’s Watts 1965, Detroit and Newark ’67, and South Central ’92.” He shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand and squinted ahead. “Damn it,” he said, scowling, “why do black people have such a fatalistic sense of direction? These fools could just as easily have gone south, toward Columbia, but no. They march east into Harlem, where there ain’t shit but bootleg Tommy Hilfiger shit any damn way.”

Nique followed the helicopters’ paths. “National Guard,” he said. “The radio stations don’t even know about this yet. They’re too busy covering the riot going on downtown.”

“I hope Logan’s okay,” said Macon, glancing at Andre. The CEO’s job for the day was to coordinate the setup for the rally. After the first skirmishes, however, which involved rogue members of NYU’s College Republicans’ Club heaving mangos stolen from a nearby Haitian fruit vendor’s stand at the soundstage, Logan had panicked and struck a blow for justice. She pounced on the blue-blazer-and-khaki-attired ringleader with her bare hands, throttled him until he lay gasping on the ground, and fled back to her Lower East Side apartment. At the moment, she was watching the riot on TV, salving her guilt at deserting her post and her horror at what she had done with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and afraid to go outside for fear of what else she might do: whyle out, lay down her life for the cause, disembowel anybody who bore a passing resemblance to her boss. The rage, the power, the bloodlust she felt scared her. She gulped another drink, hoped Team Detornay would forgive her, and decided that as soon as she finished the bottle, she’d track down the guys, apologize, and finish seducing Dre.

Professor Andrea Jenson, arriving at the park prepared to speak, found the half-assembled soundstage being torn down by a frenzied bipartisan group of skate punks, College Republicans, and trust-fund anarchists, and decided to join them. She threw her speech, “From Guilt to Gestalt: Turning Your Pathetic Fears and Secret Fascinations into Revolution,” to the ground and grabbed a passing Jamaican by the hand. “Rinehart,” she said. “Rinehart, baby, it’s me, Sybil. Let’s rip this town apart.”

The man looked at her quizzically. “My name’s Clayton,” he said. “Do I know you?”

Professor Jenson threw back her head and giggled with delight. “Clay,” she purred. “How fantastic. Call me Lula, Clay, and pass me something flammable. This is going to be one hell of a rally.”

“You’re crazy, lady,” said Clayton. “You wanna buy some smoke or not?”

“I want to buy some freedom—have you got any to spare? At what cost liberty, Clay? Oh Clay, Clay, do you know what Lula does to Clay? Do you?”

Clay broke free and walked away, out of the park and toward Fourth Street, where sanity still reigned. “No,” he said over his shoulder, “and I don’t care.”

Professor Jenson shrugged and watched him go. “Yeah, me neither.” She picked up a discarded mango, peeled away a strip of skin, and sunk her teeth in, letting the sweet juice drip down her chin.

Outside Yu’s Electronics Supermart in East Harlem, the riot had mutated again, capitalist lightning striking the primordial anger soup and restructuring the mob’s double helix into a dollar sign. The store had been looted with the quickness; aspiring DJs emerged from the gaping maws of the smashed windows holding Technics decks above their heads like tablets from God, then vanished down the block with glass crushed into their boot soles. Stereos, microwaves, and camcorders were ripped from their display mounts. Stragglers lingered outside the store, holding on to strobe lights and clock-radios like they were little sisters’ hands.

Gradually, cats took note of the tourists caught up in the eastward gold rush. Outtatown white folks walked fast toward nowhere, clueless to the proper vector of escape. They strode a few purposeful blocks, then turned around when things didn’t seem to be improving and doubled back the way they’d come, recalling with nostalgia that the black folks from whom they’d just fled hadn’t actually done anything to them, whereas the ones on this new block looked downright dangerous.

Before long, the market dynamic of the riot was established. East 125th became a giant swap meet, with looters turning spontaneously into salesmen when they ran into a tourist. Fearing for their lives, the white folks nodded fast and bought whatever looted merchandise was offered, from TVs to turtles from the Jewish pet store, unsure whether they were being mugged or merely offered the bargain of a lifetime. Loaded down with booty and hoping their new possessions would somehow protect them, the outtatowners continued to follow in the riot’s wake, like weary second-liners in a New Orleans funeral march.

Behind the last of them lingered the vultures, the repo men, scanning the herd for signs of lameness. They picked their marks with care and dove in fast, snatching just-boosted, just-bought items from the docile arms of their victims and meeting scant resistance. There was a festive mood to the pack; folks were too high-spirited for outright muggings, and instead the gentlemanly practice of appropriation and resale prevailed. Dudes sold plastic fishbowls and CB radios back to their quarries two and three times, enjoying the elongated torment they were foisting on their prey. The white folks, complying terrified with the repo men’s bizarre spur-of-the-moment modus operandi, tried not to consider what would happen when their cash and valuables ran out. They trudged on, praying that oasis was near.

Upon unloading their merchandise, the looters sauntered up the block into a vacant, grassy lot next to the Paul Robeson Playhouse to soak up some free entertainment. The People’s Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre, rally-bound on the downtown train platform when the riot broke out, had elected to stay in the hood instead and provide drama in the midst of drama. They were halfway through the first act of Aristotle’s little-known play
How We Stole
Math and Science from Them Egyptian Motherfuckers
and in fine form—resplendent in kente-cloth togas and enlivened by a swelling, nouveau-riche audience digging the show and making heavy contributions to the tips jar—when Officer Dick Downing staggered around the corner and collapsed in the weeds.

The audience rushed over to investigate. Downing’s belt and gun were gone, his left eye swollen shut. He sprawled on his side, a razor tear splitting his shirt and a thin line of purpled blood across his exposed back matching the rip. A thespian bent down, rolled him over, and splashed a cup of water on his face. At the sight of six black men in togas fronting a dusky army, Downing’s functioning eye bulged with fear. He clawed at his badge with a blood-caked hand, trying to tear it away.

An old man peered at him through thick spectacles, weight resting on a bamboo cane. “You thought putting on that badge would make you a man,” he said, “and now you think taking it off will?”

“Hey, I know this motherfucker,” came a deep, young voice from the middle of the throng. “Remember me, Officer? I’m home from Rikers now. Wasn’t no criminal when I went in, but I sure learned.”

“Show him what assault and battery looks like, G.”

“I’m ’bout to show this pig sexual misconduct with a deadly weapon.”

“Hold up.” The lead actor strode over. “I’ve got a part for this sucker.”

“Back up, man. We gonna
take
apart this sucker.”

The actor faced the crowd and his cohorts massed behind him, thick arms crossed over their chests. “It’s the part he was born to play,” he said evenly. “Costume!” As the crowd watched, Costume rooted in a suitcase and tossed a white G-string at the cop’s chest. Downing sat up slightly, wincing in pain.

“Get undressed, boy. You’re the Emperor’s eunuch.”

Downing stared down at the G-string and then up into the happy, angry, cackling crowd.

“Strip, pig. Before we make you Method-act.”

In the overgrown, trash-strewn middle of the lot, where cellular reception was better, Professor Umamu Shaheed Alam was making the most of the impromptu intermission. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, fat fingers sweat-slippery as he re-dialed his agent’s number. Finally, the call went through. “Marty!” he enthused. “Boyd. Listen: I just made another of my infamous discoveries. A theater troupe—wait till you see these guys. . . . I’m up in Harlem, man, with my people. What? Of course not; I drove the Range up. . . . No one’s gonna steal it. Why do you think I shelled out so much dough for that red-black-and-green rear spoiler?”

A tap on the shoulder interrupted Alam’s conversation. “Pardon me,” said the young man from Rikers. “But did I hear you say something about a Range Rover?” His silver switchblade glinted in the mounting sunlight as he rubbed it gently against the professor’s thigh.