Slow Motion Riot (17 page)

"Like who?"

I think for a moment. "You
ought to violate Scottie Austin. He's a pretty bad guy."

The smile still plays on Andrea's
lips. "Oh yeah? What does he do?"

I hesitate, not quite believing she
wants to hear all of this. "His big thing is hanging around the Port
Authority bus terminal when he's not robbing old people at his house. He's into
all the scams."

She seems interested. "Like
what?"

"Everything," I say.
"He hangs around the phone booths and when he sees businessmen making
calls with their credit cards, he memorizes the numbers and sells them to the
other hustlers for twenty dollars. And then he likes to put on a tie and stand
by the Greyhound ramp where the buses come in so the people coming off think
he's like a porter. Then he takes their bags and walks them to a deserted part
of the terminal where he either beats them up and robs them or makes them pay
fifty dollars before he'll give back the bags."

"Oh yeah?" Now she's
fascinated. She orders another glass of wine and settles back in her chair.
"Who else do you have?"

"You really want to hear
this?"

"Yes, of course."

I tell her about Mo Armstrong. Mo
is a guy in his mid-seventies who liked to take pictures of himself having sex
with other elderly people in his senior citizens home. His big thing was using
the photos to blackmail their grandchildren. I've actually seen a couple of the
shots myself. In one of them, another old man is on his hands and knees in
front of Mo, fellating him through the bars of his walker, while Mo affects a
look of serene, almost regal indifference. I could understand how the pictures
were part of the blackmailing scheme. What I never quite got was why Mo felt
the need to enlarge each shot to poster size so he could hang them on the wall.

"I'm a dirty old man," he
once told me, "and my masculinity is fading. I wanted something to
remember it by."

Instead of gasping in horror when
she hears this story, Andrea grins strangely. "People are so
interesting," she says.

I realize I've never been out with
a woman who wanted to hear about my job before. We're starting to hit it off
and I hear myself telling stories I haven't told in years. I'm excited about
being with Andrea. I hope I do something for her.

"Can I ask you one more
question?" I say, realizing I'm a little looser than I expected to be
after two beers. "Are you, you know, seeing anybody right now?"

She breaks off from smiling. I get
scared I might have pushed too far and asked the wrong question. I wish I was
somebody like Richard Silver, who knows just when to stop pushing people. She
looks as if she's remembering something unpleasant.

"I was seeing Joel until the
start of the summer," she says.

"What was he?"

She crosses her arms and looks over
at the neon sign for a defunct gasoline company on the wall. "Joel is a
very ambitious young man who just graduated," she says. "Now he's
going to be a nasty yuppie and make lots of money... One of my friends said he
had the looks of a movie star and the manners of a Visigoth."

"That's better than the other
way around, right?"

"You certainly do not remind
me of Joel."

"Is that good or bad?"

She raises her glass. "It's
all right with me," she says.

After a few more minutes, we pay
the check and head for the front door. She asks me to hail a cab. It's unclear
if I'm invited along for the ride.

The point's moot anyway, since a
riot's beginning outside.

The first thing I notice is the
helicopter hovering low over the park. I turn and see about two hundred cops
lined up near St. Marks Place. It's hard to make out their faces under their
helmets and visors, but you can tell they're good and pissed from the way
they're standing. About one hundred freaks and demonstrators are taunting them
on either side of the street.

"PIGS OUTTA THE PARK!"

"DIE YUPPIE SCUM!"

Suddenly a bottle gets thrown and
it shatters in front of several officers.

Pandemonium breaks out. Now
everyone's running. More bottles are thrown. M-80 firecracker rockets explode
under the park's dense, twisting trees. Riot cops shove their way down the
middle of the street as people scream and bubble gum lights sweep over the
building. Sirens howl. Odors of horseshit and fire fill the air.

Andrea's about to say something
when she gets caught up in a stampeding crowd and almost dragged away from me.
I grab her around the waist and pull her back to my side. "Let's head
toward Avenue B," I say. "This is getting a little too scary..."

"Where are we going?"

"I live around here," I
say. "It might be safer just to hang out inside awhile."

She stares at the nihilistic ruckus
on Avenue A and gives me a worried look. "Shouldn't we try to do
something?" she says.

"Like what? Call the
cops?" I put my hands in my pockets and start walking east toward my
place.

She lowers her head and comes
trotting after me. I put my arm around her shoulders and guide her to the
doorway of my building. For the first time, I feel heat passing between us.

A couple of old homeless men are
taking refuge in the foyer. Andrea and I pass them and go up five flights of
warped old steps to my apartment. I get the door ajar, reach in to remove the
"police protection" pole that keeps it shut, and turn on the lights.

"You live like this?"
Andrea says right away.

"Something the matter?"

She blinks in wonder.
"Well." She shrugs. "Nobody can say you live better than your
clients."

She takes a good look at the
mattress without the box spring and the stacks of probation folders and albums
in the middle of the room. I know I should be more concerned about her seeing
the place in its current state, but I've been living this way for so long that
I honestly do not give a shit anymore. The only thing I hope she doesn't notice
is Barbara Russo's turquoise earring, still lying near the corner of the room.

"There's no place to sit in
here," Andrea says, still short of breath.

"Try the mattress."

She laughs quietly to herself, as
if to say, "Yeah, right, buddy."

"Can I look at your
records?" she asks.

"Help yourself.'' I go into
the kitchen and open a beer.

"Get me one too," she
says.

I look through the cupboards for a
clean glass to pour her beer into. I hear her rummaging around in my room.

"Hank Williams," she
says. "Mom has this. Can I put it on?"

"Go ahead. Do you know how
to..."

I hear the long, painful squeal of
the needle scratching across the length of the album side. I wince and after
clearing my voice of all irritation, I tell her to just push the first button.

This time the needle settles easily
into the grooves and Hank Williams starts singing about honky-tonking. I step
into the room. Andrea is sitting on my mattress. I still feel the heat coming
from her. Her right leg is stretched out invitingly. Her left leg is drawn up
as if to say "not so fast." She leans back on her elbows, displaying
the fullness of her breasts and the roundness of her hips. The ponytail is gone
and her hair falls in a seductive curtain over the left side of her face. She
turns up the corner of her mouth and gives me a look that makes my knees go weak.

"Thanks for pulling me out of
that herd," she says. "I thought I was going to get trampled."

"Yeah, that would've been a
bummer."

I sit down and hand her the beer. I
hope she won't notice my hands aren't quite steady. She sips from the glass
once and then puts it down. Leaning back so that our bodies are parallel, I start
to say something, but think better of it. Hank Williams sings a few more songs,
including a real strange one about a cigar store Indian who falls in love with
the wooden maiden across the street.

"You're touching me,"
Andrea says in a soft voice.

I look down. The knuckles of my
left hand are barely brushing the knuckles of her right hand. "So what're
you going to do about it?" I say. She smiles and leans toward me. We kiss.

She pulls her entire body toward me
and I feel something melting around my heart. I draw her onto my lap and hold
her tightly as I kiss her lips, her smooth jawline, and the nape of her neck. She
reaches down the front of my shirt to stroke me and nerve endings I forgot I
had awaken.

There's a flapping sound in the
distance. A slight breeze comes through the window bars and stirs the drapes.
Hank Williams sings "Settin" the Woods on Fire."

She raises her arms and smiles
dreamily as I pull her shirt over her head. I slide off her sneakers and
massage her feet. She makes a small sound. I pop open the buttons of her jeans
and her body springs forth. She has a lovely young figure with firm abundant breasts,
slender thighs, a long back, and a heart-shaped ass.

I take off my shirt and slowly make
my way down her body. I kiss her lips, her throat, her shoulders, and the tops
of her breasts. I move my tongue in prolonged orbits around the areolas, making
smaller and smaller circles as I close in on her nipples. I lick them until
they get hard, and then I move down to her pussy.

I explore the sides and top with my
finger and tongue. As her pussy gets wet, I catch a powerful, salty smell. I
locate the sensitive spot near the top and she begins to moan loudly. Voices
call out from the street below as though they're answering her. Her first
orgasm is brief but intense; she pulls my hair in the back as she shakes and
then cools herself down for a moment.

It doesn't take long before she's
kissing me again and pulling my pants off. My cock leaps from my boxer shorts
like a dangerous lunatic finally out on parole. I quickly find one of the
condoms I buy occasionally as articles of blind faith and I slip it on.

"Do you wanna fuck me?"
she says.

"Definitely."

I raise myself over her and feel my
way around the outside of her pussy and its lips with my cock. Then I begin to
move in. I start with short, gentle entries before making more profound,
soulful thrusts. She grinds her hips against mine, pushing my cock farther and
farther into her body. I don't think I've ever been this deep inside a woman before.

The flapping sound has grown louder
just outside the window. It's like a couple of burly angels are beating their
wings out there and watching us. Andrea sits up on the bed and straightens her
spine so that we're face-to-face. We drive ourselves together harder as
something inside her sucks my cock onward and squeezes it tight.

Andrea starts to tremble again,
more violently this time. Her low, steady moans turn into fierce, ecstatic
gasps. Her mouth opens wide and her eyes shut. As she comes again, my own hot
spreading sensation begins.

The flapping sound is so loud now
that it seems to be coming from inside my head.

Finally, I realize it's the police
helicopter hovering over the park and Avenue B. A strong wind blows in the
window. The whir of the helicopter's blades and the force of our orgasms shake
the room. Our clothes and the papers from the floor are swirling up into a
whirlwind at the foot of the bed. Dust and ashes fly against the walls. The
sheet is tugged up from under us. Andrea cries out as her eyelids flutter and
she grips the back of my neck.

Then as suddenly as it started, the
great wind subsides and everything lands. The helicopter draws away and Andrea
lies back on the mattress, with her eyes still closed and a smile on her lips.

The riot is over.

"I assume the boy doesn't have
a father," Goldfarb, the lawyer, said.

"Well, you assume wrong,"
Darryl King's mother told him.

"Where is he then?"

"I dunno." She shrugged.
"But he somewhere."

They were standing outside a
courtroom at 100 Centre Street. The air was heavy with stale smoke and discount
ammonia. With its worn marble walls and its dulled brass railings, the lobby
had retained just traces of its 1930s art deco glamour; it was a little bit
like the slatternly old hooker walking by just then, who still had good legs
and a pair of stylish stiletto heels. Goldfarb, who was in his late sixties with
a shock of white hair and a breast pocket full of shiny silver pens, looked
after her with a wan smile that turned into a leer.

"You know, it's been quite
some time since I've had sex," Goldfarb told Darryl King's mother.
"My wife died five years ago. A lonely man can start to have some
desperate thoughts."

"Well, keep them to yourself
till you get my son off," she said, scratching the front of her brown
slacks.

"Where is the dear boy
anyway?"

"Who?"

"Your son, the
defendant," Goldfarb said, taking a pen and a small notebook from his
breast pocket. "I need to speak with him. He should be here. I barely have
anything to work with. This is a violation of probation hearing, is it
not?"

"I guess so," Darryl
King's mother said, putting her right hand on her left arm, which was only
slightly thicker than a policeman's nightstick. "He just don't get along
with his P.O. That's all. That man wouldn't let him be. That's all. Darryl
didn't do nothing wrong. He's a good boy. It's just that man."

Goldfarb clicked his pen several
times, wondering if he should bother writing any of it down. He put the pen
away and glanced at his watch. "About the payment," he said.

"What?" Darryl King's
mother began to raise her eyebrows but gave up before she got halfway. "I
haven't got no money with me."

Goldfarb looked deeply chagrined.
"How do you expect me to defend your son without a retainer?" He was
peering around frantically now, like he was hoping a bank would suddenly pull
up. "Why didn't you get a Legal Aid lawyer?"

"You'll get paid," Darryl
King's mother said.

"With what? A man of my age
needs security. What collateral can you offer? What incentive is there for me
to defend your son?"

"Well, what incentive do you
want?" she said, putting a hand on her hip.

He checked his watch and looked
around furtively. "Are you suggesting what I think you're
suggesting?" Goldfarb asked.

Both of them seemed to notice at
the same time that the janitor had left the door open to the broom closet at
the end of the hall.

"Well I don't know," said
Darryl's mother.