Slow Motion Riot (15 page)

"I still don't believe you
tried to break into the wrong car," Joanna Coleman said to her brother,
Darryl.

"And got arrested," his
mother added. "Don't forget he did that too..."

"Didn't you visualize what
would happen?" his sister said, pointing to the book Visualize Success on
top of the TV.

Everybody else started laughing as
Darryl stared dumbstruck at the letter from his probation officer telling him
to show up for a violation hearing. "I don't visualize taking no more of
this shit," he muttered, ripping up the paper.

They were back in the narrow
apartment his mother shared with her grandmother Ethel, Darryl, and
occasionally, Darryl's girlfriend, Alisha, and their two small children. Ganja
smoke drifted through the wind chimes suspended over an unmade sofa bed by the
window. Joanna's boyfriend, Winston Murvin, who had watery red eyes and long
dreadlocks, held up his hand and waited for them to be quiet.

"Now listen up all you
people," he said. His light Jamaican accent made the last word sound like
"pee-pell," even though he was from
Jamaica
in
Queens
, not the Caribbean island. "I am going to
show you how to do this once and only once, then that's it."

Winston asked Aaron Williams to
bring over the bag of cocaine he'd taken from Pops Osborn's apartment. Aaron
put the bag on the table next to a hot plate, a large bottle of water, and a
yellow-and-red box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. A slow reggae song lopped
along in the background. Joanna and Winston's two kids did a silly,
arm-swinging dance on the bed a few feet away.

Darryl knelt down by the side of
the table. Winston put the bottle on the hot plate and turned it on. Then he
dropped the baking soda and the cocaine into the water. "This is how you
do it when you don't have a tank of ether to use for the purifying,"
Winston explained.

It seemed to take a long time for
the coke to boil down to its oily base. The baking soda sopped up its
impurities. What was left, after Winston added cold water, were hard white
balls of cocaine base.

"This is a business like any
other business, mon," Winston told the assembled group. "We live by
the law of the supply and de demand. So don't be getting high on our
supply."

" 'S right," said his
girlfriend, Joanna, staring accusingly at her brother, Darryl. "Just like
any other business."

"And the ones who come out on
top are the ones who understand the laws of the economics," Winston went
on. From the incantatory way he was speaking, he might've been talking about
the world of spirits instead of the business of selling cocaine. "Now we
can buy a kilo for thirty thousand dollars from our friend in
Miami
.
And what does that mean?"

Darryl looked at him and shrugged
uncomprehendingly.

"That means we have at least a
hundred and twenty thousand worth of crack," Winston explained patiently.

Darryl smirked and waved his hand.
"I know all that," he said.

The Jamaican gave him a cool, level
glare. "Then why are you not in business for yourself, Darryl, mon?"

Darryl got embarrassed and didn't
say anything. He hated getting disrespected in front of the whole family like
that. He wondered if it would be possible to kill Winston without everybody
getting pissed off at him.

"Remember," Winston was
telling everyone. "The first sample you give the customer must be the
purest hit he's ever had. That way he'll keep coming back for more."

"Then you step on the shit
with baby laxative or inositol," Darryl's mother added helpfully.

"Thank you," Winston
said. "That is the first rule for any salesman. Get the customer hooked on
your product." He glanced over at Darryl. "Will you remember all of
this later, Dooky?" Winston asked mockingly. "Are you a good student?"

To show his disgust, Darryl made a
ticking sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and then he refused to
look at the Jamaican. Darryl's girlfriend, Alisha, sat by the television
rocking the baby to sleep. The older child, Toukie, was running back and forth
with Joanna's two kids.

Winston spooned the white balls
onto a sheet of paper on the table. He showed Darryl, Aaron, and the others how
to measure the hardening coke and chop it into chunks the size of a penny.
"And that is what we call cracks," the Jamaican man said, like a
magician revealing a trick.

"Gimme some of that
shit," Darryl said, stuffing a couple of chips into his glass pipe and
flaring his huge butane lighter.

"Darryl, mon," Winston
said. "You'll never get rich that way."

They laughed again. Hours went by.
Darryl, Aaron, and Bobby took turns with the crack pipe. Alisha took the two
children back to her mother's house. Darryl's mother chased her grandmother out
of the apartment, once more telling her that Darryl would beat her old face in
if she didn't stay out of the way.

As she came back in and settled
down on the unmade sofa bed, Darryl's mother talked about how the local dealers
used to test the purity of heroin in the old days. "They'd find theyselves
some junkie and take 'im back to the apartment, and shoot 'im up, and if they
threw up and got all sick, they knew the shit was good," she said.

"Is that so?" asked
Winston.

"I should know," said
Darryl's mother proudly. "I was the prime testee on my block."

"Damn." Darryl gave his
mother a stern look.

"Back when I was your age,
Darryl, I was shootin' up heroin for five years," she told him. "We
didn't have it as easy as you all. Drugs cost more, they was harder to get, and
they was harder to take. You understand what I'm saying? That's the problem
with this country now. The youth have it too easy."

In the meantime, Winston was trying
to demonstrate to Darryl and the others how to stuff the crack into the small
glass vials and put rubber caps on them. He did a dozen vials himself and then
he told Aaron to try.

"Very good," Winston
said. "Aaron is a good factory worker. This is our factory now, and we are
a corporation."

Winston explained that while he was
busy dealing with his suppliers in Miami and the Kennedy Airport area, the
posse should have somebody making crack twenty-four hours a day in the small
apartment. He designated Darryl King's mother to be the financial comptroller
at the factory, paying workers five hundred dollars a week. He gave his
girlfriend, Joanna, responsibility for overseeing the street peddlers, who made
roughly one thousand dollars each. The more industrious ones could make ten
times that amount in a week. Winston told Joanna to be wary of ambitious young
dealers trying to slice off a piece of the territory for themselves.

"Only give it to them on
consignment," he said. "At the very, very most, a hundred and fifty
capsules at a time. We don't want them to run away on us."

"What about me?" Darryl
said. "After what I did, I should get to be more than just enforcer."

"Darryl," said Winston
Murvin. "You are our first and most loyal customer."

I take time off around lunchtime to
finish some of the paperwork for the Darryl King violation. I call Judge
Bernstein's chambers to set up a court date and then slowly type a second
letter to Darryl, whiting out all the words I misspell along the way. He didn't
respond to the first one I sent, so there's no reason to expect he'll answer
this one either, but I don't mind the extra work. If I don't cover myself now,
the judge will find the hole in my case later and throw me in it.

"Make sure you touch all the
bases," Jack Pirone used to say in our training sessions. "The system
can afford to fuck up; you can't." I find Darryl's home phone number in my
file and dial it. I don't particularly want to speak to him again, but there's
a regulation that says I have to make every possible effort to reach him before
the date of the violation hearing.

The line has a tinny, unnerving
buzz. I let it ring nearly a dozen times before somebody picks up. Then it's
another thirty seconds before I hear anyone speak.

"Hello?" says a meek,
high-pitched voice.

"Ah hi," I say. "Is
Darryl King there?"

"I don't know." She
sounds like a sweet, older woman. She doesn't say anything for a moment. From
her steady breathing, I can tell she has not moved an inch away from the phone.

"Hello," I say. "Are
you still there?"

"Yes."

"Can you please check if
Darryl is there for me, ma'am?"

"Oh, of course, I'm
sorry." She makes her voice even smaller and wispier. "Darryl...
Darryl... Darl..."

She's just holding the phone a
little ways from her mouth and whispering to herself. Darryl King could only
hear her if he was three inches high and standing on her shoulder. She clearly
doesn't want to find Darryl even if he is there.

"I'm sorry," she says in
a voice that's said "sorry" more than any other word over the course
of a lifetime. "He doesn't seem to be here right now."

I explain who I am and why I'm
calling.

She keeps saying "uh-huh"
in a happy, agreeable tone. Anyone listening to her end of the conversation
would think she was being offered a free magazine subscription and a weekend in
the
Bahamas
.

I ask her if she's Darryl King's
mother.

"I'm Darryl's great-grandma,
Ethel."

"Um, I don't like having to do
this, Mrs— uh, ma'am," I say. "But you must tell Darryl it's very
important for him to come to court on the date I gave you. Otherwise, he's
going to be in even more trouble than he is right now."

"I understand."

"See, because..."

"Darryl is a good boy,"
she says suddenly. "He is actually a very nice person... He just do
have... his little moods sometimes."

"What kind of moods?"

She doesn't answer.

"Does he have moods from
taking drugs?" I ask.

Still nothing.

"What does he do when he's in
these moods? Does he break things? Ma'am? Does he steal things? Does he hurt
anybody?"

She seems to realize I'm trying to
gather evidence against her great-grandson because she maintains her silence. A
fly buzzes around my cubicle and lands on my desk directly in front of me. I go
to swat it, but the fly jumps off quickly and I bang my hand on the edge. It
takes several seconds for the pain to subside.

"Well, Darryl isn't in right
now," she says. "I believe he's gone downtown to see his friends at
the video arcade."

"Is that right?" She must
be talking about Playland, the place on
Times Square
that Lloyd told me about.

"Maybe I should have Darryl
call you," his great-grandmother finally says in her smallest voice.
"Could I have your number please?"

I give it to her and then she does
something unusual. She asks me to give her my office address. "Thank you
very, very, very much, Mr. Baum," she says. "You take care."

Normally, that would be enough. But
this time, Ms. Lang comes marching right back into my cubicle with the
"violation of probation" papers I'd just dropped on her desk.

"You touch all the
bases?" she says. "You talk to Darryl?"

"I called his house, but he
wasn't there," I tell her.

"Did they say where he
was?"

"Well...sort of."

The Playland video arcade is next
to a television studio and a Wendy's fast-food restaurant in
Times
Square
. In its windows, there are monster masks and signs
advertising that photo IDs and authentic military dog tags are available here.
Just standing on the sidewalk outside, you can hear it's a noisy place, but
when you walk in, it's like entering a fire zone in
Beirut
.
The air is thick with electronically produced sounds of gunfire, car crashes,
and women screaming.

I glance around and take in the
names of the video games making this racket: Street Fighters. Shadow Warrior.
Operation Wolf. Two Crude. Ninja Star. Castle of the Dragon.
Crime
City
. Basket Brawl. The titles
alone are an assault on the senses. A sad-eyed girl with a ring through her
nose slouches against a machine called Forgotten Worlds. Next to her a
bullnecked boy in a backward baseball cap is ignoring her and holding on to a
loud game called RoboCop. He's so riveted to the screen that you'd think it's
giving him electroshock therapy. In fact, the whole atmosphere of the arcade is
so intense and obsessive that it's easy to forget there's actually daylight outside.

"Happy Motherfucker's
Day," someone walking by me mumbles.

On the whole, I'd rather have piano
wire wrapped around my neck than be here, but I have no choice. Ms. Lang wants
to take special care with this case, so she won't let me file Darryl's
violation unless I've actually made contact with him before the court date.

After a couple of minutes of
searching, I spot Darryl King near the back of the place. He's wearing a couple
less chains than the last time I saw him and a pair of jeans that look just a
little loose on him. The game he's playing is called Devastators. Just standing
behind him, I can see he's very good at it. The game is essentially a cartoon
version of the movie Rambo: A burly Sylvester Stallone-type figure stands at
the bottom of the screen, waiting to be attacked by an army of men in gray
uniforms. Using a lever and two buttons, Darryl maneuvers the Stallone figure
with great skill, deftly evading half the men in gray and killing the rest by
stabbing them and shooting them. Eventually, the Stallone figure reaches the top
of the screen and blows up the gray army's ammo dump. The whole screen explodes
in celebration and flashes Darryl's score of fifteen thousand points over and over.

"Well, all right," says
Darryl.

He almost steps on my foot backing
away from the machine and then turns around abruptly.

"Remember me?" I say.

For a split second, his features
come together in the middle of his face, like he's about to get mad and punch
me out right now. I remind myself that we're still on neutral territory here,
halfway between my office and Darryl's home, so I shouldn't have anything to
worry about.

"I'm Steve Baum," I
remind him. "Your probation officer."

A few more seconds pass while he
decides how to react. The Pac-Man machine behind him plays a cheerful ditty and
an old guy with smelly hair walks by pushing a broom over the blue-and-white
checked floor. Whitney Houston smiles at me from a poster on the wall. Slowly,
Darryl begins to smile too.

"Yeah, I know you," he
says to me. "You my nigger."

Now I'm sure he's confused, but he
sidles up next to me like we're old friends who haven't seen each other since
high school. I notice for the first time that we're about the same height,
though his forearms are about twice the size of mine.

"What's up, Mr. Bomb?" he
asks. "I didn't know you was coming here."

He says this like he would've
prepared hors d'oeuvres if he'd been alerted. When he's grinning this way, his
face has an open, boyish quality. If I was just meeting him now, I'd take an
instant liking to him. He seems like a charming, normal kid. I have to force
myself to remember what he was like that night he came into my office.

"You know you've missed a
couple of your appointments," I tell him.

He looks abashed, like a child
confronted with a toy he's just broken. "I know," he says. "I
was ill."

"You were ill?"

A machine called Elvira screams and
a dumpy, effeminate man brushes by me on his way to the fake jewelry counter on
the south side of the arcade. Darryl looks me right in the eye for a moment and
then dips his head shyly. "I'm sorry," he says in a quiet voice.

I figure this is a guy who's been
through the criminal justice system enough times to know when he's supposed to
put on a good boy act. So the surprise isn't so much that he's behaving himself
now, but that he acted so violent when he was in my office before.

"You know we still have some
unfinished business to discuss," I tell him. "Our first appointment
was not what I'd call very satisfactory."

He nods as though he'd been
thinking the exact same thing and it'd been keeping him up at night. "Can
I speak with you?" he says, putting a light hand on my arm and leading me
toward a quiet corner of the arcade. At that moment, his touch is so gentle and
his tone is so reassuring that the idea flashes into my mind that maybe all of
this has been a terrible misunderstanding and he is just a victim of
circumstance after all. I wonder if it's possible that I judged him too
quickly. I think of the thing I saw in his file about him being raised in a
foster home.

But then we pass a skinny boy with
a harelip and a flattop and he looks at Darryl like he's waiting for some kind
of signal. I get a peculiar tightness in my gut that reminds me of the training
session I had at Rodman's Neck. I wonder if I'm about to get jumped here. From
Darryl's arrest record, I remember he's got plenty of experience with assaults.
The front door is only about thirty yards away, but with all these machines and
all the noise they're making, it's doubtful that anyone would see me or hear me
if anything bad happened back here.

Darryl is standing in front of a
video game called Gang Wars. He fishes around in his pants pockets and then
pulls out two quarters and puts them into the machine. Without taking his eyes
off me, he pushes the button allowing two people to play the game.

"So now you've got yourself in
all this trouble," I tell Darryl. "Why've you been fucking up so
much?"

"I got so much confusion on my
mind," he says.

On the Gang Wars video screen
behind him, a narrative is unfolding. Yellow letters appear against a black
background, saying: "
New York
.
The 21st Century. A girl is kidnapped by someone unknown." The letters
fade and an animated street scene appears. A run-down cityscape of abandoned
tenement buildings, craggy sidewalks, and sinister garages. Another Rambo-type
guy in a tank top and a headband walks across the screen. Darryl turns and
starts controlling his movements with the lever and buttons on the machine.

Darryl keeps talking even as he's
playing the game. "See, what I need to do is get some place where I can
get all the shit out of my head. You know what I'm saying? 'Cos like, see, what
I wanna do is try to get my own self into a position to take advantage of the
opportunities in the marketplace."

What the fuck is he talking about?
It sounds as though he's been reading up on those business training schools on
the matchbook covers.

On the screen, the Rambo guy is
being set upon by three or four other steroid cases. The object of the game
seems to be punching them and kicking them senseless so you can reach the
kidnapped girl. I notice that Darryl is very good at having his Rambo guy beat
people up, but he doesn't seem to be making much progress in finding the
kidnapped girl.

"Like I know I'm fucked
up," Darryl is saying. "But I got shit I wanna do. You know what I'm
saying? It takes money to make money... work. I wanna expand. You know. Make
contacts. I just need time to work it out, and then I'd have my shit together.
Right? But now you come by my crib and that fucks me up all over again."

"Well, the problem is not that
I came by your crib," I tell him as he continues to beat the crap out of
people on the screen. "In fact, this isn't your crib, it's a public place.
The problem is that you didn't show up for your appointments, and when you did
show up, you were acting out. So what am I supposed to do?"

He pushes a button and the Rambo
guy on the screen punches someone twice his size in the face and kicks him in
the nuts. "'S what I'm saying." Darryl steps away from the machine as
it flashes his score. "So step off, all right?"

"Step off?"

He waves his hands at me.
"Gimme a break."

"You got a break, and you went
out and tried to steal a car."

He makes this little ticking sound
with his mouth and looks ever so slightly annoyed with me. I can tell he's
trying to hide his anger. A couple of other kids who seem to be friends of his
are hovering nearby. I tell myself once more that I have nothing to be afraid
of.

"So you got my letter,
right?" I say.

"What?"

"The letter I sent you about
the judge. You have a violation hearing in court next week. You know that,
right?"

"Right," he says.
"It's your turn."

"What?"

He points to the video game. The
Rambo guy is standing in the middle of the screen, waiting to be directed. A
couple of his pumped-up enemies are approaching. One of them looks a little
like the cartoon character Thor, with his flowing blond hair and huge hammer.