Slow Motion Riot (11 page)

Darryl King was sitting in the
seventh row of the Apollo Theatre, next to his sister, Joanna. On the stage a
handsome woman in a frilly black dress was singing a snappy Ella Fitzgerald
song. Darryl ignored her and grabbed his sister's arm.

"What I wanna know," he
said, "is when do I get to run the show?"

"Why don't you shut up and
watch her sing?" his sister hissed at him.

Darryl sank back in his seat and
twisted up his mouth as the woman finished her song to warm applause. It was
Amateur Night at the Apollo and Darryl felt uncomfortable sitting there. Almost
everybody else in the audience looked legitimate. Black middle-class families
in suits and skirts. Scandinavian tourists in denims. Older poor people who
must've been saving their money for weeks to afford the fifteen-dollar tickets.
Darryl didn't see another crimey in the place, which had a beautifully
maintained interior with red velvet curtains and gold designs on the walls and
ceilings. Squirming around in his seat, he ignored the older guy in the gray
suit onstage, who was saying something about how Billie Holiday and Sarah
Vaughan got started here.

"Joanna, why'd you ask me to
come if you didn't wanna say nothing about the business?" Darryl asked.

"We'll talk," she
murmured.

"I don't wanna talk,"
Darryl said a little louder. "I wanna better job."

Without taking her eyes off the
stage, Joanna reached over with one large hand and grabbed her brother by the
throat. "You behave now," she said.

The next act was a thin man with a
ponytail. The booing started before he even touched the microphone. By the time
he sang the opening notes of "God Bless the Child," people in the
audience were on their feet, shaking their fists at him and telling him to get
off. He stayed for two verses out of sheer defiance, his bum notes resounding
like a foghorn through the great old theater. Finally, a man dressed like a
clown came on the stage and chased him off with a broom.

"That sucked," Darryl
said.

" 'S right," his sister
told him, turning one of her Gemini earrings. "You're not so dumb for a
Taurus."

She said that as if it might be
worth her while to take him to more nice places like this, so he'd know how to
act in public. He smiled a little to himself. In the meantime, a Japanese girl
and boy had walked onstage, dressed completely in black. A rumble went through
the crowd like they were about to start booing again. But then the band started
the old rhythm-and-blues hit "Me and Mrs. Jones" and the Japanese
couple began singing with so much soul and such tenderness that the audience
forgave the way some of the lyrics were getting mangled and began cheering. A
lanky young guy in a brown-and-black warm-up suit walked up one of the aisles,
stopped in front of the stage, and threw a handful of money at the singers.

"Who the fuck is that?"
Darryl wanted to know.

"I dunno." Joanna
shrugged. "Maybe the brother's selling drugs in the
Bronx
or something. I ain't seen him around here."

"Shit," said Darryl,
following the guy with his eyes back down the aisle again. " 'S what I
wanna do."

"Then save yourself some
money."

"But how am I gonna save the
money when you won't let me do the shit I gotta do?"

"It's not time," his
sister told him firmly. "I looked at the book. You got a unfavorable lunar
aspect right now."

Whenever he heard his sister talk
like this, Darryl didn't know what to say. She didn't seem to understand what
he was capable of. Otherwise she and Winston would let him do more. All this
ambition was giving him a headache.

The next act made him feel better
though. Nine girls in white T-shirts and striped pants gyrating wildly to a Big
Daddy Kane song. "I could do that," said Joanna, watching one really
sexy girl at the front of the stage who was thrusting her pelvis at the men in
the first row.

"I hate to see it," her
brother said.

Before she could turn to hit him
again, there was another shower of money coming at the performers. This time,
the bills were fluttering down like autumn leaves. They were being thrown from
the red-trimmed opera box less than ten feet above the left side of the stage.

Darryl looked up and saw Pops
Osborn standing there, in a navy blue warm-up suit with a gold Mercedes-Benz
symbol hanging around his neck. He was grinning down at the crowd like an aristocrat,
while the big West Indian bodyguard glowered at his side. When the sexiest
dancer glanced up at him, Pops threw down another fistful of dollars and put
the sunglasses with the rhinestone frames back on top of his head.

"Fuckin" faggot,"
said Darryl.

"He just be showin' off,"
his sister told him. "He ain't nothin'."

Darryl started going through his
pants pockets, looking for stray dollars. When the next act came on, a buxom
woman in a tight spandex outfit, singing almost as well as Aretha Franklin,
Pops started throwing even more money. And as stagehands rushed on to clear it
off, some of the people in front started saying they weren't twenty-dollar
bills, but hundreds.

By the last verse, Darryl had had
enough. He found thirteen one-dollar bills in his pocket and carefully crumpled
each one into a ball. Then he stood up and began to throw them, one by one, at
the stage. But somehow his trajectory was off and none of the bills reached the
singer. They seemed to lose momentum around the first row and fade into the pit
just before the stage, like snowflakes dying before they hit a damp street.

At
noon
on one of those summer days when it feels like a dome of fur has descended on
the city, word reaches me at Rodman's Neck that they need a gun downtown. The
problem is they're short of weapons at the Probation Department's Field Service
Unit, so they need to borrow one from the police. And since I'm due downtown
anyway, they figure I might as well drop it off.

I'm only too happy to oblige. I'm
tired of being up in the
Bronx
and I have paperwork to
catch up on back at the office. But most important, I haven't had a chance
recently to check up on this girl I'm interested in.

Her name's Andrea Clinton. She
works in the legal department, which is in the same building as the Field
Service Unit. She's a law student from NYU doing a summer internship with
Probation. A beautiful light-skinned black woman with delicate features and
luminous gray eyes. Nearly every man in the department has noticed her, but
she's spoken about much more often than she's spoken to.

When I get to Probation, I don't
even bother stopping by the Field Service office on the first floor. I go right
upstairs, looking for her. I find her by the water cooler just outside her office.

"I haven't seen you around
here in a while," she says brightly. "What brings you our way?"

"A case," I lie.

I have to justify my presence on
this floor, since I normally only come up here to hand in the paperwork for
violations. "Nothing too heavy, I hope," she says, glancing over her
shoulder at me as she heads back into the office.

I follow her in. I'd be intimidated
as everybody else by the way she looks, except for one thing: Just below her
mouth to the right, she has a mole. That changes the situation. It's like some
cheap
Hollywood
makeup man thought he'd jazz up her
somber beauty with a sleazy Marilyn Monroe touch. In fact, that mole is the one
thing about her face that makes you feel like you could ask her to a ball game
or buy her a domestic beer.

The other secretaries in her office
smile when I come in after her because they know what I'm really here for.

"So what's your case?"
Andrea asks, sitting down at a nearby word processor. "Are you violating
somebody?" She straightens her back and her fingers fly across the
keyboard, inputting furiously.

I realize I have to come up with a
reasonable-sounding excuse. "Yeah," I tell her. "I'm thinking
about getting rid of one particularly bad guy I've got on my caseload."

"What's his name?"

"Darryl King."

On the other side of the room,
Miriam, a stocky secretary with a Clark Gable mustache, does her nails and
talks on the phone in Spanish. "Whaddeedo?" Andrea says.

"Excuse me?"

She swallows hard and laughs.
"I'm sorry, I was just eating a peanut... I meant to say, 'What did he do?'
"

I hadn't been counting on her
asking this. What did he do? I try to make up the case against Darryl on the
spot. "Well," I say, "he showed up late for his appointment...
And then he wouldn't cooperate and directly answer the questions I was asking..."

She can tell I'm stumbling around
to gather my facts. Taking another peanut from the paper cup on her desk, she
leans back and places it between her soft lips. She looks very sexy, holding
her hair back with her hand. "What else?" she says.

"He, uh, kind of threatened
me."

"How?"

"He asked how much time
someone would get for killing a probation officer," I tell her. "And
then he went into this whole sick fantasy riff about being a cop and pouring
gasoline down people's throats..."

Somehow when I say this, it doesn't
convey how scary it was sitting there listening to him. Andrea doesn't seem
impressed. "Is that it?" she asks. "Why don't you just recommend
him for a psychiatric exam?"

She may be new here, but she's clearly
smart enough to know that nothing I've said constitutes more than a slight
technical violation. Certainly not enough to stand up in front of a judge. I
have to say something to avoid looking like a complete fool here.

I hitch my pants and try the honest
approach. "I guess what it comes down to," I say, "is that I
just have a bad feeling about the guy."

"A bad feeling?"

"Yeah."

"A bad feeling." She
repeats the phrase disdainfully, as though it were the name of her least
favorite song.

Across the room, Miriam the
secretary is winking at me and pulling on her right cheek. I'm not sure what
the gesture means exactly, but I suspect it's derisive.

"Darryl may not have done
anything that bad yet, but I know he's going to," I add a little lamely.

"Hmm." Andrea glances
over at the clock.
Half past noon
.
She draws her chair back, slips off her high heels, and puts her black
stockinged feet on the linoleum floor.

As she stands up and smooths her
plaid skirt, she stops to stare at the left side of my windbreaker. "Are
you wearing a gun or something under that?" she asks.

I get embarrassed, realizing I
still have the gun from the target range in my shoulder holster, without any
bullets in it. I should've stopped downstairs and dropped it off before I came
up here. Maybe I was doing some dumb-ass John Wayne daydreaming. "How
could you tell?"

"The way it was bulging,"
she says, reaching into her black leather shoulder bag and pulling out a pair
of white running shoes. "Walk me to the elevator," she says, putting
them on. Out of her high heels, she moves with limber, athletic grace.

As she tells Miriam she's going to
lunch, I take a deep breath. I figure I'm finally about to get my shot at
asking her out. Miriam waves and keeps talking on the phone. I think I hear her
say the words "marital aid" amidst all the Spanish. When Andrea turns
her back, Miriam puts her thumb under her front teeth and flicks it at me.

We walk to the elevator bank and
Andrea pushes the down button. I get ready to ask her what she's doing on
Saturday night, but she starts talking first.

"I wanted to ask you
something," she says.

"What?"

She tosses her hair back and gives
me a cool appraising stare. She turns me on the same way Maria Sanchez does.
They both have this thing that tells me I have no business trying to make it
with them.

"How can you try to violate
somebody just because you have 'a bad feeling'?" she says.

"I don't know. I've been doing
this awhile. You can tell sometimes."

"Is that right?" She
narrows her eyes. "Now this boy Darryl wouldn't be black, would he?"

"It happens that he is."

"And is that why you have 'a
bad feeling' about him?"

"No," I say calmly.
"I get bad feelings about white people all the time too."

"You know," she says,
closing her bag, "I always thought guys like you became P.O.s because you
wanted to help people."

"Yeah," I say.
"That's right. I really like most of the people I work with."

"Then why is it you're walking
around with a gun and talking about 'bad feelings'? Would you rather be a cop
or something?"

Somehow when she says all this, it
doesn't come off as bitchily self-righteous. It's more like she's young and
into provocation. Pushing you a little, just to see where you really stand.
That's okay. In fact, it reminds me of somebody I used to know.

"Things are a little more
complicated than you're saying," I tell her.

"So explain it."

I scratch the back of my neck and
think about it. "Sometimes you have to be your client's friend," I
say finally, "and other times, you gotta be a hard-ass."

I hear the whining sound of the
elevator coming down the shaft. It stops a couple of floors above us.

"But when you blame Darryl,
you're just blaming the victim," she says. Now I know who she sounds like:
me, about a year ago.

"No, I'm not blaming the victim,"
I explain patiently. "I'm blaming the guy who robbed the victim's gas
station."

"Yeah, sure," she says.
"I'll bet you treat your rich white clients exactly the same as you treat
a poor boy from
Harlem
."

It's gonna be hard to ask her out
on a date after this. I try to think of a way to turn the argument around.

"Look," I tell her.
"Why don't you work with me on one of these violations? Then you'll
understand what I'm saying."

She gives me a long, searching
look. I hope what I said about Darryl King before didn't sound racist. A lot of
people think she's white because of her skin tone, but I wonder if it just
makes her more sensitive to slurs.

"Listen," I say, using a
softer voice and rubbing my eyes because the new contact lenses are still
bothering me. "If you're so sure this Darryl King is going to get a raw
deal from me, you should report me to my supervisor."

"And tell her what?"

"Tell her I'm being unfair and
discriminating."

She considers what I'm saying.
"Your supervisor is Ms. Lang?" In other words, she's asking, is your
boss a black woman?

"That's right," I say.

She runs a delicate finger along
the outer rim of her ear. "I don't know," she says distantly. "I
don't know."

"Hey," I say abruptly.
"What do I have to do to get through to you?"

"What?"

"You know, I'm doing and
saying all these things just to get you to notice me and you just look right
through me."

"Well, I..."

"You know something?" I
say, putting a finger on my chest. "Every day I sit upstairs in my little
cubicle and I talk to these people who've done these awful stupid things. And
you know what I do with them? I give them a break. Each and every one of them.
They've all screwed up terribly, and I give them another shot. So you know
what? You should give me a break. All right? I haven't even done a crime. I
just want you to give me a fair first chance. That's all."

The dazed look Andrea's been
wearing through most of this speech turns amused. As the elevator doors open,
she reaches over and shakes my hand. Her manner is grudging, but her touch is
warm. I don't know if I'll be able to get her interested in me now, but I'm
going to try anyway. "Do we have a deal?" I ask. "I mean, to
work on the case."

"Well," she says as the
elevator doors slide back together again. "I suppose everybody deserves a
chance."