Manhattan Nocturne (23 page)
Read Manhattan Nocturne Online
Authors: Colin Harrison
9: A camera follows a black woman from room to room. Cockroaches everywhere. She opens a kitchen cupboard glistening with roaches. Camera pans ceiling. Roaches. Woman
and what seems to be a housing official go into a bedroom; each leg of a crib set in a coffee can filled with a lye solution. The cans are filled with dead, half-dissolved roaches. Official nods. Baby is crying; mother sees a bug in the child's ear. Can't get it out. Mother becomes hysterical.
and what seems to be a housing official go into a bedroom; each leg of a crib set in a coffee can filled with a lye solution. The cans are filled with dead, half-dissolved roaches. Official nods. Baby is crying; mother sees a bug in the child's ear. Can't get it out. Mother becomes hysterical.
10: Party scene, somewhere in L.A. Valley of lights in the background. Poor-quality video. Camera appears to be attached at headlevel. Faces appear, speak to Simon Crowley. Nicolas Cage, David Geffen, Sharon Stone, a waiter who smiles emptily, Tom Cruise. Sharon Stone again. Conversations, etc. Trip to bathroom. In mirror, Simon Crowley looks at himself. He is checking the wire. A tiny optical cable is attached to his eyeglasses near the right hinge. Runs beneath long hair into collar, some device hidden in baggy jacket. Crowley in mirror checks face, teeth, eyes. Mouths something to himself. Grabs crotch. Returns to party. More of same, etc.
11: Countryside, shot from a distance of several hundred yards. Man in overalls driving a tractor drags an old car behind him under a tree. Jumps down from tractor. Attaches winch to tree limb. Opens hood of car, attaches chains. Winches engine out of car as tree limb dips with each ratchet of the winch. Engine clears hood. Man drives tractor around to other side of car, hooks up chain, drags car away. Engine hangs from tree.
12: Dusk, or dawn. A small, flat-bottomed boat manned by an Indian who poles the boat through a muddy river. He is skinny but vigorous. The boat moves along the bank past ancient stone temples and steps where women are washing clothes by beating them upon the stones. A water buffalo swims by. Ahead there is a fire on the bank. The man poles the boat toward it: an immense bier tended by two men with long rakes. Marigolds are strewn on the ground and two children play nearby. A small brown dog watches. The boat draws nearer. A human form is perceptible within the flames. One of its blackened arms has contracted upward in the heat. The children play contentedly; the dog snaps at a fly. Another water buffalo swims past, snorting air through his nose, eyes rolling, big as apples.
13: A suburban movieplex. On marquee: RICTUS w/BRUCE WILLIS. Teenagers in clots move in and out of the light. Everyone is white. High-school girls promenade self-consciously; boys slouch. Cigarettes are being smoked experimentally. A stream of people leaves the theater: couples, groups of girls, groups of boys, older married people. Looking for their car keys, eyeing the teenagers. They have all just seen the movie. They have no expression.
14: A tiny woman with white hair works in a basin, her back to the camera. She wears long yellow gloves, is hosing and washing something in basin, hosing and washing. She lifts an oily bird out of the basin, towels it off, gives the sleek little head a kiss, and takes it out into a yard. In the yard are perhaps a hundred similar birds, all clean. The woman disappears, returns with another oily bird, sets it in basin, washes and dries off. And repeat. And repeat.
15: New York City, Lower East Side, night, traffic. Shot of Tompkins Square Park. Camera pans the inside of a messy van. Camera returns to shot of park. Cops pass outside. Then more. An advancing mass of people appears. Flashlights, burning torches. Cops assume formal riot-control positions. TV lights visible in distance. A rain of bottles and cans and sticks and trash comes toward the cops. The crowd advances. Cops meet them with riot shields and batons, whacking at their legs and shoulders. More cops appear. The van is bumped. The van is being rocked, protesters climbing on top of the roof.
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Suddenly this looked familiar. I slowed the tape to normal speed.
Simon [whose voice I recognized from previous tapes]: You locked the doors?
Billy [also recognizable]: Yeah. [Sounds of feet on the roof. Screams. Cops pass by van, swinging batons. Noises on van roof cease. More noises farther away, shouts. Bright flickering to one side, though the image is not in the frame.]
Simon: The tires are melting.
Billy: Destructive motherfuckers.
Simon: I think we're okay.
Billy: Fucking protesters. [The crowd has passed. Three older policemen follow, one talking into radio. A helicopter circles overhead in trees, its sharp cone of light sweeping the scene below. Men holding television cameras, reporters are interviewing policemen outside a large blue mobile-control unit. A Chinese man goes by on bicycle with a delivery box on the front of his bicycle. He is stopped and sent back.]
Simon: Over there.
Billy: That's a cop cameraman.
Simon: Why is he filming license plates?
Billy: He's coming down here.
Simon: We could drive out quick.
Billy: No, they have it barricaded.
Simon: We'll be here until, like, four in the morning.
Billy: I got some sandwiches and stuff back here.
Simon: I'll shit on a newspaper.
Billy: Thank you for sharing that.
Simon: Wait, wait.
Billy: He's coming.
Simon: Just be cool. [A minute passes. A policewoman with a small handheld camera passes by. More police walk by. Many are standing around. A firecracker goes off, and a few policemen glance toward the sound. One talks into the radio.] All right, Billy, I'm gonna shut off thisâ[New image: the camera has been adjusted and zoomed across the street toward the sidewalk.] Okay, now we're looking ⦠[A commotion in the distance.] That's the protestersâthey're unhappy with ⦠[Commotion, and the crowd coming closer. Police start moving blue sawhorses into position. The streetlights above the trees cast pools of light and shadow. The crowd shouts angrily; police and crowd converge; a police van backs up and stops; TV lights are on across the park;
more noise, more commotion; it seems that the surge of protesters has changed direction; the camera is now in position to show the ragged boundary between protesters and cops. People are running by. Now bottles are landing on the cops, and then another firecracker goes off; to the right, forty or so yards back, is a blinding red flash followed by red smoke; the collective attention of the crowd is jolted toward the flash. In the foreground a large white man with some kind of long bat or club leaps forward and swings at a black policeman who is looking at the red smoke, catching him in the back of the neck.] Oh, fuck! [The policeman falls limp to the ground. The assailant runs toward the camera at an angle; in four strides he is off-screen. The protesters surge forward, and the cops look confused; some have noticed their fallen comrade and have rushed to encircle him; a bright light now shines on him, and a cop is radioing; other cops run up and begin administering first aid.] You see it? That guy hit him! [The helmeted police at the protest line have already heard on their radios that one of their own has fallen, and they suddenly push against and viciously beat back the protesters; a cop on horseback appears, rifle drawn; he aims at the heads of individuals and screams at them. The protesters fall back, and back, and back, until they are a dark mass, screaming.] They fucking whacked the cop!
more noise, more commotion; it seems that the surge of protesters has changed direction; the camera is now in position to show the ragged boundary between protesters and cops. People are running by. Now bottles are landing on the cops, and then another firecracker goes off; to the right, forty or so yards back, is a blinding red flash followed by red smoke; the collective attention of the crowd is jolted toward the flash. In the foreground a large white man with some kind of long bat or club leaps forward and swings at a black policeman who is looking at the red smoke, catching him in the back of the neck.] Oh, fuck! [The policeman falls limp to the ground. The assailant runs toward the camera at an angle; in four strides he is off-screen. The protesters surge forward, and the cops look confused; some have noticed their fallen comrade and have rushed to encircle him; a bright light now shines on him, and a cop is radioing; other cops run up and begin administering first aid.] You see it? That guy hit him! [The helmeted police at the protest line have already heard on their radios that one of their own has fallen, and they suddenly push against and viciously beat back the protesters; a cop on horseback appears, rifle drawn; he aims at the heads of individuals and screams at them. The protesters fall back, and back, and back, until they are a dark mass, screaming.] They fucking whacked the cop!
Billy: I know, I know!
Simon: Wait a minute, we gotta get outaâ
I leaned forward and punched the stop button. I didn't need to see the rest. I knew the rest. I knew all of it. As New Yorkers remember, beginning in the 1970s Tompkins Square Park began to devolve into a smoke-smudged encampment of homeless people, squatters (many of them the children of the executive classes and reared in such deprivation zones as Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, or Darien, Connecticut), drug
addicts, hangers-on, lowlifes, part-time hookers, and street poets. I covered the story a number of times. The police would periodically roust the squatters out of their shanties and tents, only to have them return. Meanwhile the local residents living in apartments and houses wanted their park back. The representatives of the homeless made the point that these people had no place else to go that was either as safe or that offered the pleasures of a collective green. The city took the position that the taxpayers in the neighborhood and their children would benefit from having a genuine park, not a gallery of human misery defecating on what was left of the grass.
addicts, hangers-on, lowlifes, part-time hookers, and street poets. I covered the story a number of times. The police would periodically roust the squatters out of their shanties and tents, only to have them return. Meanwhile the local residents living in apartments and houses wanted their park back. The representatives of the homeless made the point that these people had no place else to go that was either as safe or that offered the pleasures of a collective green. The city took the position that the taxpayers in the neighborhood and their children would benefit from having a genuine park, not a gallery of human misery defecating on what was left of the grass.
The conflict was inevitable, and I won't go into the specifics of the night of the protest or the police crowd-control strategy or the short-term political mind-set of the Dinkins administration. The important point is that one Officer Keith Fellows, standing at a curb, was clobbered from behind with a baseball bat. As reflected on Simon Crowley's videotape, the assailant jitterbugged into the surging crowd and disappeared. I was there, circling the park, talking to whomever I could, wired out of my mind on nine or ten cups of coffee, feeding uninterruptedly on the violence. Suddenly, on the cop radios, I could hear the word going out that an officer was down and gravely injured, bleeding freely from the ears and nose. In the logic of the police command, such a message translates thusly: Somebody Has Fucked with the Power. When this happens, the great logistical machinery of the NYPD moves with shocking speed; I watched as huge blue personnel transports seemed to materialize out of the shadows; suddenly there were
hundreds
of cops booting it across the dark park, and having been attacked, they now ferociously revoked any right of free assembly on the part of the protesters, arresting them by the dozens on no pretext, using disposable plastic handcuffs. Then, beneath the glare of portable searchlights that gave the scene the hyper-reality of a professional football game played at night, they conducted a careful search of the park. At the same time, other policemen conducted a house-to-house search of the entire neighborhood, finding their way onto rooftops and into abandoned buildings
(such as 537 East Eleventh Street, only a block north) and onto fire escapes and anywhere else. Dozens of people were questioned closely, and yet for the police the exercise was one of frustration; perhaps a thousand protesters had been in the park; no one came forward, and no one admittedânor could be threatened into admittingâthey they had seen the blow to Fellows's head. There was some speculation that this may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that the protesters had set off (again, as Simon Crowley's videotape indicated) a colored flare moments before; Officer Fellows himself may have turned his head in the direction of the sudden flash of light when the blow fell.
hundreds
of cops booting it across the dark park, and having been attacked, they now ferociously revoked any right of free assembly on the part of the protesters, arresting them by the dozens on no pretext, using disposable plastic handcuffs. Then, beneath the glare of portable searchlights that gave the scene the hyper-reality of a professional football game played at night, they conducted a careful search of the park. At the same time, other policemen conducted a house-to-house search of the entire neighborhood, finding their way onto rooftops and into abandoned buildings
(such as 537 East Eleventh Street, only a block north) and onto fire escapes and anywhere else. Dozens of people were questioned closely, and yet for the police the exercise was one of frustration; perhaps a thousand protesters had been in the park; no one came forward, and no one admittedânor could be threatened into admittingâthey they had seen the blow to Fellows's head. There was some speculation that this may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that the protesters had set off (again, as Simon Crowley's videotape indicated) a colored flare moments before; Officer Fellows himself may have turned his head in the direction of the sudden flash of light when the blow fell.
The night turned over into day, and all that was left was a trampled field of mud watched over by a detail of fifty cops. The baseball bat itself was found shoved down a sewer drain. It had been wiped clean of fingerprints. Meanwhile Officer Fellows lingered in a coma at Beth Israel Hospital, his brain swollen critically. When the rumor that his assailant was white had lasted more than two or three news cycles, the Reverend Al Sharpton appeared outside the hospital with his caravan of followers, charging that the police department was not doggedly pursuing its investigation “because they think the life of a black cop ain't worth as much as a white.” And so onâthe racial theater that is the city. The claim was met with the usual somber assertions. Fellows's wife was shown on TV entering the hospital, shepherding their three children. I revealed in my column that Officer Fellows had saved no fewer than four lives in the previous fifteen months, and I did not reveal that he had been accused, perhaps unjustly, perhaps not, of police brutality twice in his nine-year career. He could not respond to the charges, which by then were irrelevant anyway. I also spoke with his wife, who expressed her frustration that she could not explain to her children why the police had not caught the man who hit Daddy.
After Fellows died, I wrote about the funeral in my column. The NYPD buries its dead with pomp and solemnity; the ritual serves as a promise to the living policemen that they will be buried with honor if they, too, die. The service was
held at the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church on Flatbush Avenue, and the police cleared the streets for blocks around the churchânever mind the traffic jams this causedâmade the neighborhood quiet,
respectful,
then lined up thousands of cops, five thousand in all, along the avenue in dress uniforms, hats, and white gloves. Nothing moved. Traffic lights turned red, green, yellow, and no one watched. A few guys with radios worked the rooftops. At a signal, the line of cops began to stiffen into grave-faced attentiveness. Mayors came and went, mob regimes rose and fell, drug gangs flourished and died away, but never the New York City Police Department Here on the street it was the Power, forever. Then the hard-core Irish guys with the bagpipes and the green clover tattooed on their left knees marched down the street, the drum banging slowly, then came dozens of cops on huge motorcycles, wearing blue helmets and mirror shades, looking like urban centurions, their bikes barely moving, as if the laws of physics had been temporarily rescinded by divine decree. Then the black funeral parlor car with the flowers, then more cops on motorcycles, then the casket car bearing Fellows in a mahogany casket, followed by cop brass and more cop cars, and, last, a huge police wrecker truck, in case a civilian vehicle unluckily got in the way of the procession. This police funeral, like others I'd seen, was stoic and brutal and beautiful all at once.
held at the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church on Flatbush Avenue, and the police cleared the streets for blocks around the churchânever mind the traffic jams this causedâmade the neighborhood quiet,
respectful,
then lined up thousands of cops, five thousand in all, along the avenue in dress uniforms, hats, and white gloves. Nothing moved. Traffic lights turned red, green, yellow, and no one watched. A few guys with radios worked the rooftops. At a signal, the line of cops began to stiffen into grave-faced attentiveness. Mayors came and went, mob regimes rose and fell, drug gangs flourished and died away, but never the New York City Police Department Here on the street it was the Power, forever. Then the hard-core Irish guys with the bagpipes and the green clover tattooed on their left knees marched down the street, the drum banging slowly, then came dozens of cops on huge motorcycles, wearing blue helmets and mirror shades, looking like urban centurions, their bikes barely moving, as if the laws of physics had been temporarily rescinded by divine decree. Then the black funeral parlor car with the flowers, then more cops on motorcycles, then the casket car bearing Fellows in a mahogany casket, followed by cop brass and more cop cars, and, last, a huge police wrecker truck, in case a civilian vehicle unluckily got in the way of the procession. This police funeral, like others I'd seen, was stoic and brutal and beautiful all at once.
In time, of course, almost everyone had forgotten Officer, Fellowsâall but his family and a few fellow police officers and the detectives who had doggedly pursued the case. (Admittedly, his killer probably remembered him, tooâthe moment when the weapon sank into the officer's head, the frantic sprint under the trees, the struggling entry into the crowd, and then the flight away on one of the near streets.) And now here was this videotape, taken by Simon Crowley. It was a bit jumpy and dark, but I knew that the police would spare no expense to enhance and enlarge the image of the assailant. Upon rerunning the tape and hitting the freeze button, I myself could see that he was white, about thirty, six feet tall, bearded, perhaps two hundred and ten pounds, and wearing
an old army jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He carried the baseball bat in his right hand in the middle of its length, like a relay runner clutching an oversize baton. I stopped and started the tape. There was an instant when the man ran through a column of light thrown by the streetlamp and you could see him clearly; there may even have been a tattoo visible on his meaty left arm. The police, I knew, could do a lot with this information. They might know just who that man was.
an old army jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He carried the baseball bat in his right hand in the middle of its length, like a relay runner clutching an oversize baton. I stopped and started the tape. There was an instant when the man ran through a column of light thrown by the streetlamp and you could see him clearly; there may even have been a tattoo visible on his meaty left arm. The police, I knew, could do a lot with this information. They might know just who that man was.
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