Slow Motion Riot (34 page)

For fifteen years, Lieutentant
Jerry Lawrence had been one of the lead hostage negotiators for the New York
Police Department. In that time, he'd been to every neighborhood in the city
and talked to failed bank robbers, husbands who'd kidnapped their ex-wives,
crazed mothers grabbing their children in custody disputes, and every other
kind of desperate person in a desperate circumstance. But in the end, it all
came back to his friend John, who was one of the guards who'd been taken
hostage at Attica.

The two of them had grown up
together in Valley Stream and played next to each other on the high school
football team. So after Lawrence got back from the Marines in September 1971,
he went upstate to visit his old friend, who'd started working at the prison earlier
in the year. But instead of being able to hang out and drink beer with his
buddy, Lawrence wound up watching television at the house near Attica, as the
twelve hundred inmates took over the prison and grabbed his friend John and
thirty-seven other hostages.

Long after all the shooting was
over and the bodies were carried out, Lawrence found himself thinking about how
everything could've been handled differently. They could've tried to reopen
negotiations and get a new list of demands. The governor could've shown up and
stood outside the gate.

A thousand other scenarios kept
playing themselves out in his head over the years. The whole thing stayed with
him after he got to be a sergeant in the Brooklyn robbery squad. It was how he
wound up talking his way out of a supermarket stickup that'd turned into a
hostage situation in East Flatbush.

His technique had pretty much
stayed the same. It always just boiled down to him and the guy on the other end
of the phone. All the rest of them—the brass, the zone commanders, the
specialized units with their surveillance equipment and backup negotiators, the
media, the wandering by crazies—just faded away. "It's just him and me,
like a Clint Eastwood movie," he'd lie to other cops afterward. His former
wife was a little closer to the mark. "It's like therapy," she said.
"Except you can't be sure which one's the nut."

What you had to do was get the guy
to trust you. Even if it meant staying on the phone or sitting on the other
side of a door for nine or ten hours straight. You lost him even for a second,
he'd kill them all and it'd be your fault. If he said he saw a little green man
in the corner, you'd better not say you did too. Otherwise, he'd know you were
full of shit, like the rest of them, so why not end it all? After you'd been
talking to him long enough, though, you started to feel like you knew the guy
better than his best friend did. Sometimes it wasn't just feeling sorry for
him. You genuinely started to like the guy. Which made it too bad if it came
around later where you had to blow him out of his socks, but you tried not to
think about that too much.

At first, the situation with the
probation officer and Darryl King didn't seem too impossible. It was true that
King's people weren't allowing anybody up to the twelfth floor, where they were
holding the hostage, and the tenth and eleventh floors were also out-of-bounds.
But there was a makeshift command post set up in one of the apartments
downstairs and they were trying to fix up a direct telephone line to the hostage
takers, even though the cables around here were old and hard to work with.

However, the biggest pain at the
moment was that Detective Sergeant McCullough from the two-five hanging over
his shoulder. The writer. McCullough said he wanted to be there because he'd
been wounded by Darryl. But Lawrence figured he just wanted to hang around
taking notes, so he could get a movie deal later.

The previous efforts to get a
dialogue going with the hostage takers had failed miserably, so when Lawrence
dialed the phone and got Darryl King in the middle of the afternoon, he decided
to start off with the soft sell.

"How's it going, kid?"

"What do you mean?"

"Just checking in,"
Lawrence said casually. He glanced at the red-and-green finger painting hanging
on the kitchen wall, rhere were children's drawings all over the apartment.
"Just making sure everybody's cool."

"Yeah, what's the matter with
you, man? Somebody got a beef?"

"No, not at all."

"Because if somebody got a
beef, I got my finger on the trigger," Darryl told him.

Lawrence recognized the cocaine
arrogance with a little bit of fear around the edges. The kid had probably been
sitting up there, smoking crack all day. Time to lay down some ground rules.

"I'd like to make sure the
hostage is okay," Lawrence said calmly, pulling on one of the waxed ends
of his mustache and looking at McCullough hovering nearby. "Can I talk to
him?"

"Fuck you. No."

"Well, maybe I could just hear
his voice or something."

There were some bumping sounds,
like Darryl was walking around with the phone in his hand. "Say
something," he told somebody on his end.

"Something," a faint
voice said in the background. "What else do you want me to say?" It
sounded like a white guy with a bad hangover. Lawrence assumed it was the
probation officer, but since he'd never actually talked to the guy, he couldn't
be sure.

That was about as good as they were
going to get at the moment. They could try to use the telescopes a little later
to reconfirm the probation officer was okay. For now, the thing was to try to
get some demands on the table.

"Do you have a list of what
you want?" Lawrence said once Darryl was back on the phone again.

"I demand my shit from my old
house."

The kid honestly didn't seem to
understand that he had them by the balls now. Lawrence kept trying to pin him
down on specifics. You were always better off if you had a goal to work toward.
Otherwise, it was all just endless vamping until somebody got killed.

"What do you want in exchange
for releasing the hostage?" Lawrence asked patiently, sitting on the
kitchen counter and adjusting the bill on his baseball cap.

A group of voices all started
speaking at once on Darryl's end. It sounded like all of them were giving the
kid static.

"All right, you all shut the
fuck up before I decide to shoot somebody," Darryl was telling them
defensively.

Lawrence tried shouting, "Calm
down," into the receiver. He thought he saw McCullough make a move for the
phone, and he got ready to shove him out of the way. McCullough was about five
years younger and two inches taller, but he was a little thick around the middle.

"Let me talk to him," he
said to Lawrence.

"Get lost," Lawrence told
McCullough, preparing to draw his gun if he had to.

All at once, the voices on the
other end stopped talking and it was just him and Darryl again.

"All right," Darryl told
him. "What I want is a key."

"A key to what?"

"Make it two keys, and I want
my Olds ..."

"Wait a second." Lawrence
took off his cap for a second and wiped his forehead with the back of his
wrist. "Are we talking about two kilos of cocaine here?"

" 'S right," said Darryl.
"It's a business." Lawrence couldn't tell if the kid was crazy or
kidding. "And I want a helicopter so I can fly the shit to Cali," Darryl
went on.

"Cali in Colombia?"

"Cali is California,
man," said Darryl. "I know some people there, who can set it up
right. So you get me the two keys and the copter and you bring my Cutlass
around front so my man Aaron can drive it out west."

He was acting like this hostage
situation was an investment opportunity. Lawrence wondered if the kid had
thought about any of this or if he was making it all up off the top of his
head. "Is that it?" he asked Darryl.

"Yeah, man, and you get
together about a half million in cash and then we'll talk. You got until
midnight, man."

Lieutenant Lawrence covered the
phone with his hand and said, "Bullshit," to everyone else in the
room.

There had to be thirty people
jammed into this small space. It was like the circus clowns all trying to get
in the car. Half of them were like that stooge McCullough and didn't have any
business being there. Lawrence closed his eyes and pretended all of them were
going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

Somewhere, on one of the rooftops
outside, there was a cop holding a high-powered rifle and smoking a cigarette.
The designated shooter. He'd be the one to end it all, if it came to that.
Until then, it was Lawrence's ball game.

"All right," he said to
Darryl. "Let's get serious now."

"We are serious," Darryl
said in a hoarse, enraged voice. "We prepared to die here."

The words brought Lawrence back to
Attica. He remembered the inmates on television chanting the same thing and
refusing to compromise on any of their demands. Unconditional amnesty with
flights to "nonimperialist" countries for the inmates who wanted it.
His friend John's brother had said, "They think they're gonna get out of
this, but they won't." He didn't know the half of it. Four days later, the
governor ordered in the State Police with their guns and riot gear. Twenty-nine
inmates died that day.

What nobody expected was that his
friend John and nine of the other hostages would get killed too. Who could've
predicted they'd get shot by the State Police when they moved in? But that's
what happened when you did these kinds of big operations with a lot of
confusion and bullets flying around. The wrong people got hurt.

He hoped the same thing wouldn't
happen now with the probation officer, but he'd given up looking for guarantees
in life that day at Attica.

"I'll call you back later and
see if you're ready to talk sense," he told Darryl.

Outside the living room window, the
sun is going down and the TV klieg lights are coming up. Long shadows appear on
the apartment's walls and ceilings.

Assuming this is the last place
I'll ever see, I take a good look around. Whoever lived here before did try to
make it into a respectable middle-class home, with slipcovers on the couches
and chairs and a white lace cloth on the dining room table. They even have two
elaborate candelabras.

In the corner, I notice a
five-foot-high wooden cabinet with glass windows in the corner. Its shelves are
lined with copies of the Old and New Testaments, books of religious songs, and
figures of Jesus. Several eight-by-ten photos are arranged on a shelf
underneath the books. The people in the pictures must've lived here before, and
Darryl and the others must've chased them out.

I squint to get a better look at
the photos through the glass. They're arranged in chronological order, like a
little history lesson. In the oldest picture, a determined-looking black man is
dressed in a World War II private's uniform. In another shot from the 1940s, a
woman is standing in what looks like an armaments factory with her co-workers.
Later pictures from the 1950s have the man dressed as a bus driver, and the
woman dressed as a nurse. As the progression goes on, a young woman, who must
be their daughter, starts appearing in many of the pictures with them. As the
photos change from grainy black-and-white to glossy color, I watch her growing
up: from a high school graduation, to a wedding, to a beach holiday. But the
pictures of her seem to stop a couple of years ago, when she's about
thirty-three. I wonder if she died or something.

The last photo on the shelf is the
most recent and the most touching. It shows the bus driver and the nurse as an
old couple, in their best Sunday clothes, standing on either side of a young
boy with a bright toothy smile, who's obviously their grandson. They're proud
people who've spent their whole lives working hard and wound up in this shitty
housing project built by someone like Robert Moses or Richard Silver and
overseen by bureaucrats like me. The boy is their hope for the future.

Now they're all gone and Darryl
King and his friends are left in their place. The glass in the cabinet is
cracked, the couch slipcovers are ripped, and the lace cloth is stained with
what I first thought was red paint, and I now realize is blood. There's a
window-sized hole in the wall, opening out on the kitchen. I can see scales,
piles of money, bags of crack vials, and ether tanks spread around. The dining
room table is covered with Uzis, .45s, and various other automatics and
semiautomatics. The door to the back bedroom has been removed and instead
there's a white sheet hanging there, so the place looks like a real den of iniquity.

I notice a white telephone cord
stretched around the sheet and into the back bedroom, where Darryl's been
negotiating with the cop for a few minutes. I can only make out bits and pieces
of what he's been saying. There was one hopeful part where he sounded all
blustery and entrepreneurial, but then I hear him say, "We prepared to die
here," and a long silence passes. After a couple of more minutes, the
phone cord draws up and Darryl walks out, grinding his teeth again.

"So what'd he say?" I ask
him as he starts to walk by me on the way to the kitchen.

He gives me the kind of look a
woman would give her ex-husband during a divorce proceeding. Like it's
inappropriate for us to be talking to each other.

It's been like this for hours, with
hardly anyone talking to me. If it wasn't for the sun, I'd completely lose
track of time. They've gotten much more militant about everything; taking
shifts holding the gun on me and even putting a blindfold on me a couple of
times, for no particular reason other than it's what one seems to do when
hostages are around. Eventually they decide to leave it off.

Across the room, by the glass
cabinets, I see three girls teaching each other a new dance step and two boys
practicing paramilitary maneuvers with their Uzis. It's hard to tell if they
got all this from old film clips of the Black Panthers or Rambo.

I'm bored, my head aches, and I'm
dying for a cigarette. I hope nobody asks me to stand up quickly, because after
sitting here all day, I don't think my legs will hold up. And worst of all, my
bladder is about ready to burst.

I look over at the couch near the
television. A really pretty little girl, about four or five, with pigtails and
a gap in her teeth, is sitting between the old lady who's trying to do some
knitting and a little boy of about six who's sliding some Sesame Street toys
across one of the armrests. The three of them have been around the periphery of
my attention all day. The little girl keeps looking back and forth, like she
can't decide which is more exciting, the toys or the knitting. It seems like
they all wandered into the wrong apartment.

In my isolation and mind fog, I
start to have strange thoughts.

Like about black people. I start
remembering how my father always said black people were coming to get us when I
was growing up. But then as I got older, the black people I met weren't like
that. So I guess in some way I've always thought these weren't the black people
my father was talking about.

In one of the other rooms, somebody
is listening to a radio broadcast of a Black Muslim minister preaching his
doctrine about the races.

I wonder if somebody told Darryl
about white people coming to get him when he was growing up. What do Black
Muslims call us? Devils. I guess if somebody grabbed my people, threw them into
chains, and shipped them as slaves to a strange, unfriendly land, I might think
they were devils too. It's certainly the kind of thing the Devil would do.

In the other room, the Black Muslim
minister on the radio is saying the white man's time on earth is almost up.

I start to imagine the building
we're in is a gigantic skull and I'm trapped inside it and not allowed to
communicate with anybody on the outside. So the thoughts inside are getting
into a rage, knocking me around and building up pressure. If they aren't let
out soon, the whole skull will explode.

After a while, I notice Darryl and
the others are going around the apartment, collecting spray cans and lighters.
Maybe they've hit on some new way of smoking crack. Once every few minutes one
of them says something loud, angry, and not completely sensible. I start
getting worried that the drug is making them too crazy. I hope they don't just
decide to shoot me without regard to the consequences.

The only one who doesn't seem ready
to detonate any moment is the small old woman knitting next to the kids on the
couch. She wears a sagging gray cardigan, brown slacks, and plastic-rimmed
glasses with silvery wings. Her hair is a wiry mass of gray and black strands
dyed at random. She was probably quite beautiful once, but now her face is
well-mapped with deep wrinkles receding toward her small flat chin.

She gives me what seems to be a
sympathetic look. Next to her, several of Darryl's teenage lieutenants are
fingering their guns and watching a cop show on television like it's an
instructional film. I smile at the old woman, but Aaron, who's guarding me with
an Uzi, catches the look.

"What're you smiling at?"
he says.

I'm so surprised at being spoken to
that I sputter before answering, "I'm just a stupid asshole."

The answer seems to satisfy Aaron
for the moment. The phone rings and more voices blare from the megaphones
outside. I can hear Darryl arguing with his mother in the kitchen. More crack
is burning and everyone's sounding much too excited. More police sirens wail
outside. I hear somebody mention a midnight deadline and my palms start to sweat.

In all the confusion, the old woman
on the couch pushes herself to her feet and comes over to me. Aaron, sitting on
a wooden chair a yard away, hardly looks at her.

"How you doing?" she asks
in an odd, high-pitched voice that strikes a chord in my head.

Her right hand flutters like a
paper caught in a sudden updraft and her fingers come to a rest on her
brittle-looking collarbone. She must be Darryl King's great-grandmother, who I
spoke to on the phone just before that day in court. I remember the desperate
note she wrote to me and decide it's safer for us not to acknowledge that we've
spoken before. An ally. Maybe.

She puts her hands behind her back
and looks down at me like I'm an old friend she just spotted on a park bench.

"Lovely night," she says
pleasantly.

Behind her, I see a
thirteen-year-old kid in a red Kangol hat trying to jam his gun into another
boy's mouth. After a couple of seconds, he takes it out and points it at the
ceiling. If he fires it now, all the cops will probably come crashing in,
shooting, and we'll all get killed.

I try to contain my voice and
insides. "Lovely," I say as the boy finally lowers his gun.
"Will you be getting outside at all?" I mean, would you help me
escape?

"Well," she says.
"No, I don't think so." It occurs to me that she's not allowed to
come and go as she pleases either.

Someone outside keeps chanting
Darryl's name over and over on the megaphone and a searchlight swings through
the windows. Darryl's great-grandmother—whose name is Ethel McDaniels, I
recall—continues to act as though nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

Time is running out. My kidneys are
killing me. It feels like someone's trying to blow up a parade float in there.
The kid in the red Kangol hat is sipping a beer and flicking a straw at me.
Little droplets land on my face. It's his homemade torture. I look at the guns
on the kitchen table and think about using one to shoot him and then Mrs.
McDaniels's great-grandson, Darryl.

I watch the little boy and little
girl chase each other out of a back bedroom, yelling, "Yiii, yiiii!!"
as they go. They disappear into the bathroom and my bladder feels like it's
getting swollen to about twice its normal size.

"Who are those kids?" I
ask the old woman, trying to get my mind off the pain.

"They belong to Darryl's
sister," she says in that voice that makes everything sound either
cheerful or completely devastating. "LaToya and Howard."

Aaron is resting his Uzi on his
knee and looking at me impassively through narrowed eyes.

"So what the hell are they
doing here?"

"Oh, they was just left,"
she says. She looks kind of sad about it. "You know the family wasn't
always like this," she tells me. "Not back home. Because we didn't
always live in New York, you know. The McDanielses, they come from Lee County
in Arkansas. The boy's great-granddaddy was a..." She smiles to herself,
"Oh he was a very articulate man." From the way her face lights up,
you can tell she admired him for more than just the way he spoke. They must've
been happy together.

"He was gonna be the first
engineer in Lee County," she says, "except they didn't hire colored
folks for engineers then ... So that's why we had to come to New York."

It almost sounds like she's trying
to defend the family reputation against what's going on right here in the
apartment. "But what it was, was we thought we had ourselves a house in
Brooklyn," she says. "It was gonna be near the good schools, because
it was gonna be an integrated neighborhood. You know what I'm saying? They'd
pick up people's trash in the streets. And then, what happened is they went and
didn't build those houses."

She looks around at the mess here
like it's the direct result.

I wonder if the place she's talking
about is the Sullivan Houses, the low-income project in Brooklyn that Richard
Silver backed out of in the 1970s. A few weeks ago, I would've blamed him for
all this; I mean, what can you expect if you have people living apart from
everyone else, in poverty? But I don't have the time or the inclination to
think that way anymore. I wouldn't want Darryl King growing up next door to me
either.

"Yes sir," Mrs. McDaniels
is saying, "the trouble started with the boy's mother. She just got bored
being poor all the time. She had to be that star, runnin' in the streets."

Darryl walks into the room, waving
his arms and jabbering half coherently. I try to ignore him. But I need to piss
so badly that tears are forming in my eyes.

"Listen," I say to Aaron.
"Will you please just let me go to the can this once?"

Darryl happens to hear me as he
walks by. "You want permission?" he demands. His eyes look tired and
there's a thick white crust around his mouth.

"Yeah."

"Permission denied,"
Darryl says, taking control amidst all the confusion. "Shit in the
chair... And if you get any on the seat, I kill you."

All this rage breaks loose in my
mind. Before I can get a grip, I hear myself saying, "How about I just
piss on you?"

As casually as a tennis pro
approaching the net, he steps forward and backhands me across the mouth. I go
falling over sideways while he heads off to the kitchen. As I lie there on the
floor, bloody and humiliated, I realize I've never hated anyone as much as I
hate Darryl right at this moment. It's a primal, consuming fury unlike anything
I've ever felt before. I can't hear anything except a sound like a subway train
going right by my ears.

The kid with the straw keeps
flicking droplets of his spit on my face.

I let out a howl. Everything from
before means nothing now. I only care about one thing. I want to blow Darryl
King's head off. And I pray that I'll live long enough to do it.

I get back up on the chair, but
within two minutes I'm on the verge of losing all control of my bladder. Just
then, Darryl's great-grandmother turns to Aaron.

"Let him go to the
bathroom," she says abruptly.