Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (3 page)

Another's father, I knew, did physics at Lawrence Livermore where plutonium triggers for thermonuclear weapons were designed, tested and refined. Many of them knew—much better than I can tell you, pal—the obvious and the subtle, the prima facie and the idiosyncratic, the degrees of separation and interconnections … the webs by which their parents and their fore-parents—and themselves in their later years—were wedded to the very system, making them part of its fabric, that they purported to attack. And better than ninety percent of them, to this day, not knowing that less than half a mile and three years away, through a series of—on the surface, only vaguely linked—yet underneath tightly interwoven and interconnected events—Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins had been killed for their and their fathers' and their father's fathers' sins. It was a web woven of so many degrees of closely connected separations that when it unraveled it would have to unravel in a rage and a vengeance. And now, this vengeance was to be mine.

The pigs were close now. And I saw some students starting to edge their weight back on the hinds of their legs and their butts. The next thing would be for them to turn tail.
“Naw …fuck, naw …
” Amidst and through the tie-dies, fades and pastels of the rag-tag oleo of hippies, flower children and revolutionary-wannabes I strode towards the line of cops. I saw a pig point his paw at me as I sat down at the front of the line, arms folded rested as if a strange sensation of long-missing satisfaction was washing over me. From ten yards away the cops suddenly broke from their slow advance into an out-and-out charge.

As I was hustled roughly onto the bus, I turned against the cops who were holding me against my will and saw and heard the clash and smash of blows, the crush and crunch of dirty-blonde longhaired skulls now matting themselves into clumps of strands with the red red flow of the streamings of blood. Curious. I thought I caught a glimpse of one figure standing erect amongst the huddled and hunkering-down mass as the maze of swine—as if a plague of man-sized locusts—swept in on them.

M'f'ers, thank god, had been so anxious to get my high-yellow “Black-assed-coming-to-the-front-and-sitting-down-smart-assed-Nigger-m'f'ing”-self that two of them, one on each arm, had bodily lifted me as they snatched my 135 lb. (soaking wet) wanna-be-soldier-in-the-people's-army-dope-dealing-and-dope-using-ass from off the pavement of Ackerman Way that they forgot something. My legs touched down with my feet hitting the ground in a scrape. I don't know if at the pig-sty academy they had practiced “Two-man Body Carrying” or what but I swear I could feel a breeze rushing past my face as they hustled me towards and onto the bus. In a last heave they landed me face first into and onto the bus's steps. That was to be the last brush of fresh air that I had for three days. Literally. Meanwhile the pigs were laying into and laying it onto the ones who were either inspired to stand their ground by my walking to the front or were too late to run away as the riot squad's saunter had hastened into a stampede with their blows meshing blood with blonde. I almost felt sorry for the m'f'ers.

The star athlete was second or third on the bus with his captors prizing and showing him off to the others pigs who paused just for the moment, but only for a moment to savor their companions' capture. Then they went back to cracking heads. They had cuffed the star athlete and then shoved him onto the bus. Again, they made a mistake. Fifty others were soon on the bus handcuffed from behind—some so tightly that their wrists began to change color and swell—then they were shoved onto the bus-cum-paddy wagon. Each of the prisoners, almost to a (wo)man when she or he alight from the vehicle's stairs and found a seat gave a bit of bravado in a yelled curse at the cops that failed to penetrate plate glass windows.

After that, it got quieter than a m'f'er on that bus.

SNAP! went something and I turned and saw the star athlete had broken the strap that linked the hard plastic wrist-cuffs. An awed HUSH … that for a moment accompanied then quickly transformed itself into a CHEER! He must have thought he was back in Pauley Pavilion for he gave a fist pump in response to their dotes. The cops had been so busy “shining and showing off for the white folks” (themselves) that they had cuffed him in front and with the wrists and strength of a seven footer he had, with a GRUNT!, snapped the cuffs in two.
“Cuffs! Cuffs!”
I had no cuffs!

I hadn't even noticed so great was the forbearing of bail, court, time and fine-money dollar signs that had been bouncing around and bouncing off of the gray matter in my head inflicting their own meta-level hematoma. “No
cuffs! I ain't got no cuffs.”
I had no cuffs
…
and a pair of nail clippers! I snipped at the cuffs of the imprisoned next to me. Snipped at it at its weakest thinnest point. Snipped at it until with a final SNAP! it gave way and my seatmate's hands came free from behind his back. I handed him the clippers and he went to work on the wristlocks that were turning his hands blue. The star athlete also had a tool. Other implements were soon forthcoming from the pockets of those who had been arrested but, critically, not searched. By the time the bus had made the climb up and over into the Valley and had arrived at the Van Nuys jail on board there were fifty-two people with fifty-one pairs of plastic handcuffs littering it's aisles. A CHEER! had gone up with the rending of the last pair.

Then the silence of imprisonment reigned.

“Well, what are you gonna do?”

Leaning back against the dank of the cell wall, my eyes rose up from the feet that had materialized in front of me and kept climbing. Outlined against the steel gray backdrop drab of concrete, bar and cell she leapt out from its background as if life—up until that second—had been a scratchy black and white silent movie with not even a tin-pan score that had just jump-cut itself Technicolor 3D with a hi-fi stereo soundtrack. Dark auburn hair crested a forehead framing fire-green eyes and then cascaded down and across her shoulders. She looked just like Lauren Bacall. Sculpted in bronze. She was built like Bacall, all 5'10 of her looming directly over me, complete with Bacall's high cheekbones and wide-for-a-woman's shoulders. No wonder Bogie fell for that dame. This one … like her. She was a touch elongated but elegantly so almost like her figure had leapt from an Ernie Barnes painting. She was what down South they call “A long drink of water.” Just as easily she could have been gangly as she ended up graceful. But the bones thrown in the dice game of life had rolled out of her palm, banged themselves on the table of life, and chanced up a natural seven.

“Well, what are you gonna do?” she repeated herself.

“Everything!”
I wanted to yell. I had been hit by the same thunderbolt that had transfixed Michael Corleone when he first saw Appolonia.
“Everything,”
my mind Bogied to her,
“Everything… Schreetart, I wanna do everything ta ya', wit'ya', because of ya'.”
I fell for her like an apple on Newton … I caught myself. I must have been tripping cause I was taking so much time with these thoughts in my mind that she repeated herself. Again.

“Well, what are you gonna do?”

I sat up straight.

“Do about what?”

“About. What. Do. You. Think?”

She spoke down literally and figuratively to me. The cadence was fifth grade teacher to soon-to-be-repeating-fifth-grade student. I drew myself up from the wall reaching up to a full two inches below meeting her eye-to-eye.
“Naw … she's 5'11 “
And growing.

“Huh,” I managed.

“About continuing to take a stand and not copping a plea to the trumped up charges that they're going to file. You led folks into this. I saw you go to the front.”

“So what? I saw you standin' up ta tha cops liken you was playin' tha lead role in
Joan of Arc
or somethin'.” Yeah, it was her that I had caught glimpse of. “You wanna lead somebody go ‘head. I ain' tryin' ta lead nobody nowhere. I've had enough of leadin'.”

And in truth I had. Had had my fill. Had had it up to here. Had had it. Time spent before UCLA at LACC organizing and then guiding City College's Black Student Union through a series of encounters with the administration, the police and right-wing students had drained every bit of desire to quote unquote “lead.” Anybody. Anywhere. For any reason. Even for Rahid.

“You know that if someone doesn't take a stand,” she gestured at the sad sacks cringing around the holding tank, “then all of these ‘mopes,'”—”mopes,” she called them—”will end up copping pleas. As if we did something wrong and not the cops.”

“Lady, you don't … “

“Louisa. My name is Louisa.”

Louisa.
“Yeah, yeah, Louisa.”
The
au francais
of the handle fit her like an all dolled up Orange County trophy wife wrapped and ready to be ravaged in a plunged-neck thousand-dollar Gucci gown—commando underneath.

“Well then, Louisa, what I was gonna say was that you don't need to convince me that it was the cops who was wrong … “

“But you're going to cop-out and cop a plea.”

“Hey, I ain't got no money for an attorney. And what do you think a public defender will do but plead me out? And you?”

“I will defend myself.”

“You know the one about the lawyer who has himself for his client, I take it?”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Never mind.”

“How could they convict us when we just sitting in the street?”

I could have said “You
weren't,”
but I let it pass.

“‘Sitting in the street' in violation of a direct order to move.”

“And you're the prosecutor now?”

“No, ma'am. Just the facts.”

“Well, Joe Friday,” she disdained, “haven't you got any backbone?”

“Last time I checked I did. It's sitting right above my black ass. You know, the black ass that has had a number of foots stuck up in it.”

“Don't cry the racial blues.”

“Don't hide behind the baby blues.”

“My eyes are green … “

BOI-ING!
“Don't I know it?”

“… and I'm not hiding behind anything. I want to fight their bullshit charges.”

“Then go ahead.”

“And you won't?”

“Why should I?”

She gestured at the “mopes,” “Because of them.”

“Huh?”

“Them.”

“Them who, the ‘mopes'?”

“Yes. The ‘mopes' who right now are being bailed out by Mommy and Daddy who will get them a lawyer, pay their fines and get their records expunged.”

“Right on,” I admitted, “Now what could we do and why should I do anything to help them?”

She answered both questions at once.

“We could shame them.”

“Damn!”
She had a point. I didn't notice it then. Frankly, now that I look back upon it, I couldn't tell you just when it had happened but the torque in that knot in my craw, that proto-bleeding-ulcer, that open sore bottomless-pit of nothingness had loosened, disgorging a bit of its bile.

To make a long story short, we both went to court and we both went to jail. It's just that I took the long way around to it. Initially, along with all the other “mopes,” I had taken the plea. “No contest” was effectually the same as “Guilty.” ‘Sides they were talking six months if you went to court. That's the way justice, rather Just-us, is effectuated in the People's (that's a laugh) Court: plead guilty to something you didn't do and you can get “Probation.” Fight the frame-up, lose and do six months. It's like confessing to witchcraft while they burn you at the stake. I guess the notion is that at least your eternal soul won't have to keep on sizzling while your mortal body's being seared.

I couldn't do six months. I didn't have the time. Not for principle. Not to shame them. Not for the “mopes.” Not even for long, lean and luscious Louisa. I went before the bench, copped a plea and got off with a fifty-dollar fine. And … probation. Not her. I heard she got the six months. I say heard ‘cause I didn't go to her trial. Though I wanted to. She didn't want me to and told me so in no ways about it. Six months. Okay, so it ain't a “dime-to-death” stretch in a state penitentiary but it can seem so when you're young. I did go and see her once a week in the county. Put some dough on her books.

At first she gave me the cold-shoulder and turned and walked right back out of the visiting room when she saw who sat behind the wire. I couldn't blame her. Her jailhouse conversion of herself to the path of martyrdom had been complete. And hell hath no fury like that of the convert. The second time I came, she walked to the bars and whispered through the wire, eyes down and head nodding as she spoke “Thank you for the money. Came in handy.”

Then abruptly, she spun on her axle and left. The third time she sat down and I talked. The fourth time she talked. After the fifth time I was due to drop payment three of the ten dollars a month I had agreed to. I didn't. They did. A month and a half later when I got in from a summer class a black-and-white was waiting.

“Why didn't you make the agreed-upon payment of your fine?”

“I'm a student … and besides it was too much money … “

On that phrase the judge looked down at the case and quickly interjected:

“Fifty isn't too much for participating in a riot.”

My backbone stiffened and the Niggah in me came out:

“It wasn't a riot, it was a political demonstration. It only became a riot when the cops started beating people on the head.”

The cracker slammed down his gavel, peered down at me over the bench and with a glance to his left reminded me of the frowning armed pig bailiff whose private fancying about sugar-frosted doughnuts I had so rudely interrupted with my challenge.