Slow Motion Riot Read online

Silver is one I’ve really been looking forward to. He used to be one of the big power brokers in the city, a gontser macher as they used to say around my family. He’s been ducking his appointment with me for weeks. I had to bombard him and his lawyer with dozens of threatening phone calls and letters before I got any response. Already I have a problem with the guy. Approaching my cubicle, I square my shoulders and throw punches at the air, like a boxer on his way to the ring.

  I stop short when I see someone waiting for me by my door. A Puerto Rican kid who looks about twelve with a chipped front tooth and glassy eyes. His dark hair leaps like a flame from the top of his head, crests into a pompadour, and then falls backward slickly. Splotches cover the front of his brown T-shirt and his jeans are too tight. He looks at me and shifts anxiously.

  “Can I help you?” I ask.

  The kid grunts and hands me a folder. I wonder if he can speak. “What’s this?” I ask.

  He grunts again and looks down at his sneakers. “They say give you this,” he says in a small, hoarse voice.

  I open the door and go in. The kid doesn’t move. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. There’s something lost and untamed about him. Like the boy in a French movie I once saw who grew up in the woods. Except in the movie, they had five years to educate the boy about civilization, and I’ve got five minutes for this kid. I gesture for him to come in and sit down.

  “Mr. Ricky Velez,” I say, sitting behind the desk and opening his file. “Says here you’re sixteen. That right?”

  Ricky grunts again and nods shyly. In the cubicle across the hall, “the Screamer,” an older female probation officer whose name I can never pronounce, is yelling, “WHAT AM I GONNA TELL THE JUDGE!!” at some hapless probationer.

  An overhead fan just pushes the humid air around instead of cooling things off.

  Ricky squirms around in the chair but can’t get comfortable. The seat’s deliberately too hard, because no one’s supposed to stay here too long. In the past I’ve tried to make this cubicle seem more my own, even as I keep telling myself this is my job, not my life. I’ve brought in plants, cushions, and books, but the place still looks cheap and institutional with those insane orange walls and scuffed-up floors. So now I leave it pretty much the way it was. I don’t have my master’s degree from Fordham on the walls. It was required for the job—along with two weeks of perfunctory in-house training—but my clients don’t need to see it. Instead, I put up two small posters right above my desk: one of Bob Dylan and the other of a defunct theme park called Freedomland. On the other wall, I have the Times’s “Help Wanted” section—for my clients, of course, not for me—and a bank calendar that has a color photo of a sandy beach with foamy waves. It seems like a beautiful place where nothing ever happens. And, of course, there’s a blackboard in the corner.

  I wipe off my glasses and start to read Ricky’s arrest report more carefully. “It says you got probation for ‘theft of services’ and resisting arrest,” I say. “What was the theft of services?”

  Ricky clears his throat and says, “Just tokens.” His voice sounds scratchy, like it hurts him to speak.

  “Tokens?” I say. “You mean you robbed a subway token booth attendant?”

  “No.” Ricky shakes his head emphatically. “Sucked it.”

  “Sucked it?”

  He doesn’t respond at all now. For a moment, we both just sit there in our own stupors. I’m too hung over to move. Now I know how old strippers must feel when they hear that familiar drumbeat and see the curtain parting one more time. I rouse myself and get to my feet. Still feeling a little unsteady, I make my way to the blackboard, take the chalk out of my pocket, and draw a small, slightly shaky cartoon of a man bending over a subway turnstile with his mouth on the slot.

  “Do you mean to tell me you’re one of those guys who goes up to turnstiles and sucks the tokens out?” I say in a loud sort of courtroom voice.

  Ricky nods to indicate that is precisely what he did. He’s a little young to be a token sucker, I think. I usually see older, scragglier guys puckering up by the turnstiles. “Don’t you think that’s kind of gross?” I say, pointing at the picture I’ve drawn.

  He smiles and some of the tension goes out of the room. “I mean there’s gotta be an easier way to make a living, right?” I tell him. “Those turnstiles are filthy. You shouldn’t put your mouth there. You do this by yourself?”

  “I got a partner,” he says a little louder. “Hector.”

  I write Hector’s name on the board. “Hector suck tokens too?”

  “No. He does selling.”

  “Oh I see, he’s like the business manager.” I put the chalk back in my pocket and return to my desk. “That was your first mistake. You shouldn’t do all the work. You should’ve made Hector the co-sucker.”

  “Yeah?” Ricky starts laughing in spite of himself. As quickly and painlessly as I can, I get the necessary information. Ricky lives near me on the Lower East Side with his mother, who’s on welfare, and his three brothers. He attends school sporadically and understands English perfectly, but can’t concentrate in the classroom.

  I’ve had a lot of clients like this. People who slip from one day to the next without any sense of purpose, all the time sinking deeper and deeper inside themselves. The only time their lives have any structure is when they’re out doing crimes. So what Ricky needs is somebody to pull him out of himself. At least that’s my considered opinion after talking to him for two minutes.

  “Maybe we should try and do like a schedule,” I say, jumping back up to the blackboard and starting to write some more. When I notice Ricky staring at it blankly, I ask him if he can read and write okay, without looking at him. It’s the best way to ask the question and not make a client feel too self-conscious.

  Ricky grunts. Not a yes or a no.

  “You know, it’s okay if you can’t read so well.” My tongue sticks out a little as I write on the board. “I’ve got something called dyslexia myself. Ever hear of that?” I write the word “dyslexia” on the board and underline it twice like it’s some crazy new dance we can both marvel at.

  “No,” he murmurs. “I dunno what that is.” Just a few words. But compared to what he’s said so far, it’s poetry.

  “Dyslexia is … sometimes when you’re reading or trying to write, the letters won’t behave in front of your eyes.” I start drawing letters upside down and backward on the board, so it looks as if somebody put the alphabet in a kitchen blender. “Like it’s some language you can’t understand. Ever have that?”

  “Sure,” says Ricky. “Kinda.”

  I put down the chalk and take off my glasses. “You know it really helped when I went to this class for people with dyslexia,” I say as though I’m confiding in my best friend. “My problem was I waited too long. I should’ve gone when I was your age.”

  I hate talking like this, but it seems to be working. He’s sitting up a bit straighter and his eyes seem a little more focused. I ask Ricky if he’d be interested in attending a reading class.

  “Maybe,” he says without much enthusiasm.

  “Well, we have to get you into some kind of program,” I tell him. “And as far as they go, the reading one’s not so bad. It’s only twice a week, and they have a place you can go on the East Side, so it’s not too far from your house. Okay?”

  Now I’m getting determined to break through. I pick up my chair and bring it around the desk so we’re sitting side by side. “All right,” I say, taking out my notebook. “So what I’m giving you here today is like a list of goals.”

  I never liked these touchy-feely social work platitudes. But then again, the list does help a lot of people get their lives organized. Ricky smiles when he sees I put his name at the top of the page. “Understand most of what I wrote here?” I ask.

  “Most,” Ricky says.

  “And if you don’t understand any of it, do you have somebody in the house who reads all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oka
y.” I pull my chair a little closer, so its arm touches the arm of Ricky’s chair. I can hear him breathing heavily and I smell something like detergent in his fountain of hair. I hope he doesn’t smell the whiskey on my breath from last night. “So let’s just go over the list here,” I say. “We got five goals for now.”

  “Yeah.” Ricky puts his index finger next to where I wrote “Number one.” The nail is chewed all the way down.

  “Number one is the reading class,” I say, rolling up my shirt sleeves. “Two nights a week, for an hour. It’s nothing. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  “Number two: Let Hector suck his own tokens.” I draw another picture of a guy sucking tokens and put a line through it like it’s a No Smoking sign.

  Ricky laughs and slaps his knee.

  “Number three is get up in the morning,” I say. “Not the afternoon. The morning. Do whatever you have to do to get up. Make breakfast, listen to tapes. Put on like Kool Moe Dee while you’re getting dressed for school.”

  The kid looks like he’s in shock that a white adult knows anything about rap music. But then he shakes his head. “I like Madonna,” he says.

  “Madonna?”

  “Yeah,” Ricky says with sudden great feeling as he leans forward in his chair. “I got all her tapes! I got her posters in my room! I see her boyfriend I fuck him up …”

  “Okay, okay, great,” I say, putting a hand on his arm to calm him down. “So listen to Madonna for a half hour after you get up—if it’s okay with your mom—which leads us to number four, which is go to school. And that leads to number five, which is stay away from the crack guys.”

  He looks around like I’ve accused him of something terribly unfair. But I know our neighborhood and I know where he’s been and where he’s going. He probably took the same train as me to get down here to Centre Street this morning. “Look,” I tell him, “I know it’s a heavy scene on the block. But you gotta stay clean.”

  “Aw, man.” Ricky twists in his chair to face away from me.

  “It’s tough,” I say firmly. “But you gotta do it. The judge gave you a break with probation. He could’ve put you in jail. So now you have to be careful. That’s the deal.”

  The boy sighs. “I guess.”

  This is the point where you lose them sometimes. When they’ve had enough of the white authority figure. And to tell you the truth, it’s the point where I feel like stopping too. I’ve said everything I’m supposed to say, and I’ve got other clients waiting outside. But something keeps telling me I have to push myself a little further.

  “Listen, Ricky,” I say, moving the chair around so we’re face-to-face. “If you work with me, I’ll be your best friend in the world. I swear it. You call me anytime. But if you fuck around, and try to get over on me, I’m gonna be mad. All right? Because that’ll mean you betrayed our friendship. And I’ll send you off to jail myself if I have to. Okay?”

  “I understand,” the boy says.

  There’s still a long way to go, but I feel like I’m finally getting through, a little. It almost seems worthwhile to face the rest of the day. I give him the page with the list on it.

  “So where you going now?” I ask.

  “Home,” says Ricky, standing up slowly. He stretches out his arms and legs like he’s not sure everything still works.

  “What about school?” I say loudly. “Remember? Number four?”

  “Oh yeah.” He smiles shyly, showing off a chipped front tooth. “I go to school now.”

  “How you gonna get there from here? The subway?”

  “Yeah.” Ricky looks confused.

  “Here,” I say, taking a subway token out of my pocket and putting it in the palm of his hand. “Save yourself all the hard work.”

  3

  “YOU GOT TO VISUALIZE what will be,” the big woman said. “Plan for the future. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” the young man mumbled.

  “In other words, you got to think about what’s gonna happen if you do something.” She shut the book, which was called Visualize Success, and looked at her younger brother, Darryl King. “You gotta build. Right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “And remind me I got a message to give you later,” said his older sister, Joanna Coleman.

  They were sitting on the stoop of a building near Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. A brutal midsummer sun was overhead. Small children kicked broken glass at each other in the gutter. A half dozen crack dealers did business on the sidewalks. Otherwise, the street was like part of a ghost town, with crumbling boarded-up buildings, vacant lots, and silent, toothless old men sitting on wooden chairs outside the corner grocery store.

  Joanna took the large-size cup of Coca-Cola out of her younger brother’s hands and drank most of it in two gulps. At twenty, she was turning into a heavyset woman with big thighs and a broad head full of red-streaked hair. In a few years, she’d be taking up two seats on the subway without any problem.

  Today she was wearing a white blouse and huge gold earrings with Gemini symbols hanging off them. She’d been following the signs and reading astrology books since she was in her early teens, but now that she and her Jamaican boyfriend, Winston, were getting somewhere in the crack trade, she’d begun picking up business books like Visualize Success and Winning Through Intimidation. It was hard getting through most of them, though she tried to pass on what she could to her younger brother. The trouble was he never listened.

  “So what happened last month?” she asked him.

  “What?” said Darryl, closing his Big Mac container.

  “With Pops Osborn.”

  “That was fucked up.”

  “I know. I saw him after I got back into town last week. He was standing outside his crack house.”

  “He was alive, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that was, you know, irregular,” said Darryl, who had on a pair of snow-white Nike sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt with the name of the rap group Public Enemy written across the front. “We was on the roof. Right?”

  “Who’s this?” his sister asked.

  “Me.” Darryl touched his chest with his finger. “Bobby Kirk. And Aaron. So I give the gun to Aaron.”

  His sister put down the Coke cup and made a face. “Why’d you do that? Aaron a punk.”

  “He fourteen,” Darryl said, “and I just turn eighteen. So judge won’t do nothing to him.”

  “Okay.”

  “Except Aaron miss his shot and Pops drove away in his car.”

  “He fucked up,” Joanna said.

  “’S what I said. So I’m like, ‘Oh shit, Joanna’s gonna be mad at you.’ So I come up with another plan.”

  Joanna belched and asked him about it.

  “We went to the gas station,” Darryl said.

  “Which one?”

  “Near FDR Drive. So we go in there and we rob, you know. We take money and Bobby beat up the guy.”

  “The attendant?”

  “Yeah. Then we fill up like three beer bottles, you know, tall boys, with gasoline. Like Winston showed us. And we put rags in them, you know, and we went back to Pops’s crack house and we firebombed it.” He pounded his left fist into his right palm.

  His sister laughed. “You too much, Darryl,” she said.

  “Yeah, but Pops was gone already, so we didn’t get him.”

  “You get anybody?”

  “Just some lady. She came down the steps with her back on fire, you know. And she just like fell in the street. The fire just ate her up, you know. Aaron was like, ‘Yo, man, you see that shit. ’S just like the movies.’ But I was like, ‘No, it’s not.’”

  A black car with a beefy white man behind the wheel drove slowly down the street. Joanna and Darryl stopped talking and the dealers stopped doing business for a moment. When the car was gone, they went back to work.

  “So how’d you get caught?” Joanna asked. “Wasn’t no witnesses, right?”

  Da
rryl grimaced and kicked at a discarded Lotto ticket lying near his feet. “See, the guy from the gas station called the police and they charged us with a armed robbery.” He shrugged. “But the judge gave us probation, so it was all right.”

  Joanna stood up. “That was the message,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re supposed to go in see your probation officer.”

  Darryl swore and let his head droop between his knees. “I already seen my P.O.”

  “Well, you got another one, I guess. They say you supposed to report to this one like once a week.”

  She showed him a piece of paper with his probation officer’s name on it. He asked her to read it. “Mr. Bomb,” she said.

  He looked glum. “That’s fucked up,” he told her.

  “That’s what happens when you do shit, Darryl. You got to pay the price.”

  4

  JUST AS I’M GETTING into the paperwork, the phone on my desk rings.

  “Sending a new client to see you,” Roger the guard says.

  Most P.O.s like to go out to the waiting room to meet clients; I think it’s easier just to send them straight back here. This time, though, I get a strong premonition that Darryl King is on the way. The headache I’ve been trying to ignore all morning begins to slam away at the base of my skull. I remember what Tommy Markham said about Darryl snatching things from his desk, so I clear off all my papers, remove my glasses, and turn in my chair to face the doorway.

  Richard Silver walks right in without knocking.

  “It’s like a zoo, your waiting room,” he says, like he’s already in the middle of a conversation. “Some black guy just came up to me with his eyes rolling back into his head and asked if I could spare any change.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him to shine my shoes.”

  “You got kind of a mean mouth for an old civil rights guy,” I tell him, knocking dust balls off my desk.

  He exhales and looks impatient. “I’m not a racist if that’s what you’re trying to suggest,” he says, fixing the knot of his yellow Hermès tie. “This is my city too, and I don’t like getting hit up for change every goddamn time I leave the house.”