Slow Motion Riot (5 page)

Emma Lang lingers in the doorway a
moment. She rolls her eyes in
Dawson
's
direction, tilts back her chin, and mouths, "Okay?" She turns to
leave, but then sticks her head back in.

"Oh, one more thing," she
says. "I got a phone call from that Richard Silver's lawyer a half hour
ago."

"Yeah, what did he want?"

"He says you've been harassing
his client..."

My beer looks like it's just about
sweated its way through the brown paper bag on my desk. The outline of the
Budweiser can is unmistakable now. I feel my face burning as she gives me a
stern look.

"Keep up the good work,"
Ms. Lang says.

Bobby "House" Kirk, high
on crack again, was kicking out the windows and terrorizing the other
passengers on the downtown number three train.

"Stop that foolishness and
come over here," Darryl King said to him. "I wanna have a talk with
you all."

The lights went on and off as a
crazy old man with matted hair danced around with his dick hanging out of his
pants and the little Puerto Rican guy sitting by the door buried his face in EJ
Diario. "Get Busy" played on a giant radio. Bobby "House"
Kirk, who was seventeen, enormous, and psychotic, stood facing Darryl with his
back against a metal pole. He had an H carved in his hair, and a gold ring with
four finger holes spelled his nickname across his knuckles. A third boy named
Aaron Williams, who was skinny and fourteen, with a harelip and a flattop,
stuck his head in between them. "Yo, whass up?"

Darryl steadied himself and thought
about what he was supposed to say now. There must've been a hundred nights just
like this. With the three of them ricocheting back and forth under the city
like unguided missiles.

He put his hand through an overhead
strap, feeling the train's rumbling power.

The other people in the car were
giving him that scared look again. The kind that made him feel all calm inside.
A lady with lacquered-up hair clutched her handbag and turned away from him. It
would be so easy just to take it right off her, right now.

But his sister said he couldn't do
it like that anymore. He had to stop and think about things. Use his mentality.
Get into the science of the situation. Start using words like
"dividend" instead of "give it up."

The hardest part was telling Bobby
and Aaron. "Things's be different now on," he began. "We don't
be robbin' nobody for nothin' now. Understand what I'm saying? So don't go
shoot nobody over a pair of sneakers no more, okay?"

Bobby was about to point out that
it was actually Darryl who'd nearly beaten a boy to death over a pair of Nikes
last year, but he got cut off. "We gotta have purpose when we go out
now," Darryl said, struggling to remember Joanna's exact words. "We
businessmen. Understand. We be doing business."

"Yo, Dooky," Bobby Kirk
said. "I don't wanna sell no five-dollar vials for your sister. That
shit's small-time."

"Yo, House," Darryl King
said irritably. "Don't call me Dooky no more. I'm eighteen, man."

The train grunted to a halt at the
125th
Street
station and a Spanish-looking guy with a
black beard and what looked like a Rolex stumbled on, followed by a
well-dressed black woman with a tan pocketbook. "Watch the closing
doors," the conductor said.

"Let's go rob," Aaron
started whispering to Bobby and Darryl. "Let's go get paid right
now."

He began dancing around like the
music was getting him in the mood to do crimes.

Darryl grabbed him roughly by the
shoulder. "Don't you fuckin' listen, man? We talkin' about the future. You
gotta build that shit up. Then one day we don't be riding no subway. We get a
car like Pops Osborn."

Aaron's eyes filled with awe.
"Cutlass Supreme," he said.

" 'S right," Darryl told
him. "So don't be fuckin' around."

Bobby Kirk folded his arms across
his chest and looked aloof. "I still don't wanna work for your
sister," he told Darryl.

"Then you just be ignorant,
Bobby. You too foolish to understand the economics of the situation. I ain't
even gonna go see you in jail 'cos I'm gonna be busy flying all around the world."

Bobby turned away from Darryl and
started walking to the next car. "You just soft 'cos you on probation
now," he said over his shoulder. "You afraida your probation officer.
That's all."

"I ain't even met the
guy." Darryl followed him with Aaron.

"Oh no?"

"No. I'm gonna go in tomorrow
and see him."

"Yeah." Bobby smiled and
began wiping his face with a Wash'n Dri. "You scared."

Bobby's words started a little fire
in his mind. As big as Bobby was, Darryl thought about what it'd be like to
kill him right here, right now. Or any of the other suckers sitting nearby.
Just to do somebody right now. But his sister's voice came back to him, telling
him to chill and consider the situation.

"I ain't got no worries with
my P.O.," Darryl said coolly. "He's gonna be scared a me."

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

"Why?" Bobby asked.
"What you gonna do?"

"You'll see," Darryl said
firmly, like he had it all figured out. "I took care of that cop before.
Right?"

The three of them stopped talking
all of a sudden. They were standing on the small steel ledges between the cars
now. Black space roared all around them. The amphetamized rush of the train
rattled the chains and shook them from the knees on up, like a good drug.
Nervous faces in the next car watched them through the window in the door.

"Yo, D!" Aaron shouted,
jiggling and pulling on his red-and-white Troop shirt.

"What the fuck is it?"
Darryl frowned.

"Can we just rob one for old
times?"

Darryl snorted and pulled open the
door to the front car. Without even thinking about it, he walked in like he
owned the place. Shoulders hunched, knees slightly bent, weight up on the balls
of his feet. The same charge going between him and the people in the seats. The
way they avoided his eyes. Old ladies, white students, punks his own age he
wouldn't have thought twice about taking off a couple of weeks ago. And by the
empty conductor's booth, sitting with his girlfriend, that Spanish-looking guy
who seemed to be wearing a Rolex. "Yeah, all right," he said finally.
"One more. Just wait till
Times Square
."

He went to the head of the car
where the guy was and started staring out the front window. The green and red
track lights ahead were like stars floating in outer space. He half closed his
eyes and imagined he was plunging deeper and deeper toward some distant point
without ever really getting there.

Standing on the checkout line, I
count the items my father just put in the shopping cart.

Seven green-and-red cans of Del
Monte sliced peaches. A half dozen cans of Bumblebee tuna in water. Four quart
bottles of Mott's apple juice. Eleven jars of Planters peanuts. Five boxes of
Band-Aids. Two cartons of Pall Malls.

"What're you doing, having a
party?" I ask. I didn't know he had that many friends left.

"Never mind," the old man
says with a harsh Eastern European accent that makes the Korean girl at the
cash register lookup.

I decide to wait a while before I
ask him again why he wants all this food. My father is getting more and more
eccentric with the passing years, and I ought to try to be as patient with him
as I'd be with a client.

When the Korean girl rings up a
total of $97.65 for his groceries, he gives her a look of pure loathing.

"You need some cash?" I
ask, reaching for my wallet.

"Go away," says my
father.

With trembling, liver-spotted
hands, he fumbles through the pockets of his blue windbreaker. After a minute,
he starts taking out scads of tattered discount coupons clipped from newspapers
and magazines. People in the growing line behind us groan loudly. I turn around
and smile apologetically.

Fifteen minutes later, my father
and I leave the Key Food supermarket on
Kissena
Boulevard
in
Flushing
and
head back to his house. It's
half past seven
and the sun is just starting to go down.

My father is walking with an
exaggerated stoop and a slight limp as we walk down the hill toward
Main
Street
. He has his jacket zipper all the way up,
so his stomach pushes out the front of it. His broad rump is bursting through
the seams of his gray pants. He's sixty-five, but he looks at least ten years
older. His chins dangle before his throat and a small scrub brush of white hair
sits on the barren plain of his scalp. His eyelids sag heavily, giving him a
look you might take for permanent sadness, if you didn't know him better.

"You got something on your
mouth," I tell him.

The old man wipes at it with his
jacket sleeve. "What is it?"

"I don't know. It's gone
now."

Though his arms are still strong,
he seems to be struggling with the one light brown paper bag he's carrying. I
take it from him and try to balance it with the four heavy bags of groceries I
have in my arms. "You wouldn't consider a cab, would you?" I ask.

"It's just a few blocks,"
he says. "What are you? Weak?"

I shrug and try to enjoy the rest
of the walk.

Here are the streets where I grew
up. The rows of identically quaint red brick houses always give me a feeling
that's half warm nostalgia and half nausea. Most of the other familiar
landmarks are still here. The orange school crossing sign. The temple across
the street and the church down the block. McGaskill's Pub on the corner with
the woozy neon sign outside. The screech of jets leaving LaGuardia overhead.
The smell from the Taystee Bread plant. The way the sky turns to purple and
orange at dusk. If you go down a couple of blocks, you can see the giant silver
Unisphere on the World's Fair grounds in the distance and just a little bit to
the right, the rim of Shea Stadium.

"So you been watching the Mets
fall apart this year?" I ask my father.

"What do you want?" the
old man says. "They still got that lazy schvartze in right field."

"Very nice." I sigh and
close my eyes for a moment.

Actually, the neighborhood's
changed in a lot of ways, I notice as we continue down
Main
Street
. Every other store on this strip is now
owned by either Chinese or Korean immigrants. All the newsstands, produce
markets, discount shops, and dry cleaners look the same as they did when I was
growing up, except they all have signs with Asian letters out front. The faces
on the street are different too. Not just the Chinese and the Koreans, but more
blacks, Indians, and Hispanics than I remember from before. Of course, they're
getting the same old dirty looks from the same older immigrants like my father,
who came to this area to avoid these people in the first place.

"Okay," he says as we
turn and make our way down
Blossom Avenue
.
"You can stop with the complaining. We made it home."

Here is the house I couldn't wait
to get away from. The chain-link fence around the front yard. The steel gates
on all the windows. The blue-and-red stickers on the front door saying the
house is protected by security patrols and electronic devices. The old brown
rug and the musty, ancient smell in the hallway that I could never quite put a
name to. The oppressive stillness of the air. At the end of the hall, the drab,
gray light filtering into the kitchen through the raggedy curtains. To the
left, in the living room, the rabbit-earred antenna on top of the old Zenith
black-and-white television. And the orderly stacks of the New York Post and the
Jewish Press surrounding the green couch as though it were a fortress of
conservative opinion under siege.

"Where do you want these,
Pops?" I ask. My arms ache from carrying all these groceries.

"Put them down a second,"
my father says. "If you have to." He's at the other end of the hall
already, opening the door to the basement.

I put the bags down by the front
door. As I stand up, I notice a thirty-two-ounce Louisville Slugger baseball bat
in the umbrella stand. I pick it up and feel its weight in my hands. It's
signed by Dave Winfield.

"Hey, Pops," I shout down
the hall. "What's this for?"

My father comes toward me slowly as
the last rays of the sun stream through the little window in the front door. At
first he doesn't seem to grasp my question.

"What's this for?" I ask,
slapping the head of the bat into my palm.

"This," says my father,
grabbing the handle of the bat with his left hand, "is for them." He
points out the window with his right hand.

I look where he's pointing.
"It's for the trees?" I say. "You're gonna use a baseball bat to
beat up the trees?"

My father doesn't smile. He doesn't
seem to have enough lips left for a happy expression anyway. "For the
schvartzes," he says.

I frown and look away from him.
"Come on, Pops, get real," I say, turning on the hall light. My
mother's old fixture on the ceiling is so thick and dirty that hardly any light
comes through. "You think black people are coming to get you?"

"They're here already."
My father looks uncomfortable and moves down the hallway using the bat like a
cane. "Didn't you see? From the
Bronx
I moved you
and your mother to get away from them. Now they're in
Flushing
."

"It's a free country,
Pops."

"Hah." My father gives a hacking
cough that makes his throat sound like a handball court. "Free for them.
Not for me."

"These are middle-class people
in this neighborhood. They're not gonna bother you."

"What do you know?" he
says sharply.

"You're just being crazy
again," I say, prodding one of the grocery bags with my foot.
"Anyway, even if they were coming to get you, your setup here is stupid.
You've got a baseball bat by the front door. Why couldn't they just grab the
bat and go down the hall and beat your brains out while you're sleeping?"

"I got another bat in the
bedroom."

"Brilliant." I snort a
small laugh as I follow my father down the hall. "I can't talk to you
about this. This is nuts."

He stops in the doorway and moves
toward me suddenly. "A man does what he does to survive," he says,
shaking the bat at me.

I throw up my hands. "Don't
gimme that again, please."

"It's true," my father
says forcefully.

"You know something?"

The old man ignores me and keeps
talking. "Someday, you'll know it's true," he says loudly.

"Hey, you know
something..."

"Because one day, you'll do
what I had to do..."

"Hey, you know what?" I
say, touching his shoulder. "I agree with you. What you're saying makes
sense—but only if you're in
Auschwitz
!"

My father slams the bat against the
doorway. "Don't make a joke ..."

"I'm not making a joke. You're
not in
Auschwitz
anymore. This is
America
.
Okay? The same rules don't apply."

The argument is always the same and
it always leaves me pissed-off and downhearted. It's true that my father has
had a hard life, and that at times he had to be ruthless and completely selfish
just to stay alive. When I was young, he told me how he almost killed another
prisoner over a couple of scraps of bread, and the story has haunted me ever since.

The problem is that my father has
applied the exact same logic to life after the camps and he's still paranoid,
bitter, and absolutely indifferent to the suffering of the rest of the world.
He's ruined his own life and my mother's with his compulsions, and now he's
almost done closing himself off.

I'd like to think my own life is
the opposite. Even on my worst days at probation, I figure I must be all right
since my father disapproves of what I'm doing.

"One day you'll know what I'm
talking about," he says wearily as he props the baseball bat up against
the wall and begins shuffling toward the groceries by the front door.
"You're just like me, you just don't know it."

"Total bullshit," I say.
"I'm not like you. I'm normal."

"Oy," my father says.

"Look, I'm very sorry about
what happened to you and to all those other Jews, but I'm not gonna spend my
life running scared about something that happened to somebody else forty-five
years ago."

My father cries out like he's been
stabbed.

"Well, I don't really expect
you to go along with that," I tell him. "But I've got my own life.
Okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure." My
father is trying to lift the bags at the other end of the hall. "I got my
life too."

"Glad to hear it." I
exhale deeply and slap my hands together, ready to move on.

I wish there was another subject I
could talk about with him. Cars, sports, women. Just things we could laugh
about over a beer the way other fathers and sons do. But then we've never been
like other fathers and sons. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother coming by the
house at all. My father has driven everyone else away. And he doesn't seem to
really appreciate my visits. But I still have a vague, hungry feeling, like I'm
expecting to find something I want here.

My throat feels dry. I could use a
drink now, but my father probably doesn't have anything in the house, except
Mogen David grape wine. Maybe I can pop around the corner to the Irish bar
later.

"So you want me to give you a
hand with those groceries?" I ask him.

The old man throws back his
shoulders and draws up his thick, barbed eyebrows. "You're here, aren't
you?"

I lumber down to where my father is
and begin picking up the bags. "So you never told me what you got all this
for anyway. Are you actually having somebody over?"

"Not like that," he
mutters, pushing one of the bags with his foot toward the door to the basement.

"Let me guess," I say as
I walk down the hall with the bags, steadying myself against the wall.
"When those invading schvartzes come through the front door, you want to
give them something to nosh on before you clobber them with your Louisville Slugger."

"You're very funny," my
father says in a dead voice.

I hoist the bags up and follow the
old man down the stairs to the basement. Each step creaks and threatens to snap
right out from under me. The hallway smell is here too, though much stronger.
There's no light at all. The only reason I don't trip and fall is that I grew
up going up and down these steps. When I get to the bottom, I put the bags down
and windmill my arms in relief.

My father finally turns on the
light. It's a moment before I get my bearings.

I take a good look around and begin
to shake my head. What my father has done down here is extraordinary—in fact,
it's the most orderly, sustained act of madness of his largely irrational life.

There's a tall stack of
Del
Monte sliced peaches against one wall. Dozens of saltine cracker boxes are
piled against the adjacent wall. In the dim light of one bare yellowish bulb, I
can't see all the Bumblebee tuna cans lined up against the boiler, but there
are at least one hundred of them. On the other side of the basement, there are
rows of Gatorade and Mott's apple juice bottles. It's like he's built himself a
kind of fallout shelter in case race war breaks out in
Queens
.

"Why are you doing this?"
I ask him.

"I just have to," my
father says. "I just have to."

I try to think of something to say,
but no words come to me. A steady drizzle of dust falls from the ceiling and
the old pipes make wrenching sounds. I bow my head, turn back to the stairway,
and slowly head upstairs toward the faint light.