BUSTED IN NEW YORK

A Nighttime Walk Leads To Trouble

How long had it been since I'd been out late on the Lower East Side? Back
in the New Wave bohemian days of the late nineteen-seventies and early
eighties, the Lower East Side was the capital of mischief.

The low life was still literary. I could be persuaded to go anywhere in
search of an authentic urban experience. But then my friends grew up, and I
moved far away, as Europe seemed to me at the time. Because I don't drink
and run wild anymore, because I now live down a dirt track in the English
countryside, a Manhattan roomful of the young and the smooth can be
intimidating.

But the reggae club the summer before last was known as a chill lounge.

Rona let her hair hang over the beat. We were waiting for Billie. I was
telling myself not to have a hard time waiting.

I was looking forward to my session with that inner-child finder, marijuana.

The reggae swelled around me. My head bobbed like a duck's when there's
bread on the water.

I saw what looked like a ballet dancer's leg. Billie, and a Billie who knew
the score.

Her opening drink would not take long. We were going to step outside.

We couldn't smoke pot in this reggae club. Not even in a reggae club?
That's how long it had been since I'd been out late on the Lower East Side.

Street lamps threw a spotlight over pedestrians crossing Second Avenue.
Killer taxis left unpleasant gusts.

I leaned into the summer heat. Soon we three were alone in the dark of
Sixth Street. Rona checked behind her. Then, like backup singers on the
downbeat, Billie and I snapped glances over our right shoulders. Maybe some
people wouldn't have bothered, but we were pros. We were veterans of the
streets.

Rona fired one up, and passed it. We were chatting.

I hogged it. We were drifting toward midnight.

Billie handed it back to Rona. Three shapes in front of a doorway decided
to heckle us. "You're having a good time." They sounded like unappetizing
old kids. We moved to the curb. "We know what you're doing." Rona pushed
her hand against the air to let them know that the joke, whatever it was,
had to stop. "Smoke it." We shook our heads at their being so boisterous
when they were maybe getting high themselves, and in a doorway, of all places.

We should have looked ahead instead of behind.

We saw the corner and we saw the big man in white-guy plaid shorts cutting
a pigeon-toed diagonal from across the street.

Everything about him was aimed toward us. His bright white sneakers
continued to rise and fall in our direction. A huge meatpacking arm was
held out to us, and a big voice was coming at us, too. His other arm came
out of his undershirt with a square of ID. We had to keep moving toward
him, like something swirling down a drain.

There now seemed to be enough light for a film crew's night shoot.

How could we have missed the blue unmarked van parked on the other side of
Sixth Street?

"Been smoking something?" No answer. "Put your hands flat on the trunk of
this car." The women, my friends, were side by side at the back of the car.
I was on the sidewalk and had to bend over. Other undercovers quickly
appeared. "We're going to empty your pockets." A woman had taken up
position behind Rona and Billie. I felt a hand go into my pocket.

My total financial assets held by a faded money clip hit the trunk of the
car. "Did you all just meet tonight?" a new voice demanded. "No." My own
voice was thin and completely lacking in the authority of outrage.

The money clip was followed by a pack of menthol cigarettes, a disposable
lighter, a case containing reading glasses, a John Coltrane-Johnny Hartman
CD-"You listen to some good music," a head of hair said-and a mobile phone.
"Where's your beeper?" He patted me down. "You got a beeper?" "No," came
the thin reply.

The detectives murmured.

They'd found the smallest stub of weed in a matchbook in Rona's pocket.

The woman detective left. The detective with the hair asked the ladies to
step over to the sidewalk.

Where Plaid Shorts had, like me, the beginnings of his father's stomach,
this one had pecs and biceps rolling out of a magenta tank top. He looked
like a television actor in the role of maverick cop. The rest of him was in
the suburban version of casual: crisp bluejeans and clean sneakers.

"So you guys just met tonight?" Tank Top asked.

It was my turn. He was going to compare answers.

Plaid Shorts said he was going over to the van to check something. "How do
you know each other?" Tank Top demanded. "School." If he identified us as
middle class, wouldn't he have to watch himself?

Maybe I was trying to prick some white blue-collar resentment; anything to
turn the tables a little. When he asked about my beeper, I thought maybe he
hoped he'd interrupted something good, criminally speaking, such as a black
dude giving two white chicks a taste of the street herb they were about to
buy or get ripped off for. But if he saw that we were O.K., then the
paperwork on the citation that they gave out in these cases would speed up.
One black guy with gray in his beard and one and a half white girls, not
two, because by that time they must have figured out that Billie's honey
skin and the Asian cast to her eyes and her Church of England accent were
some weird Caribbean story.

Yes, Officer, I wanted to explain, the one with the henna highlights is a
famous Jewish scientist, the daughter of the British Commonwealth is a
banker, and I'm a black guy who needs two pairs of glasses and won't be on
your computer lists, not even a credit rating.

Billie and Rona had shown no emotion until Plaid Shorts brought the
handcuffs. Then they gave out soft, pastel exclamations. Plaid Shorts led
them, affronted and vulnerable, across the street to the side door of the
van. I thought, Rona's daughter walks just like her. I felt my watch being
removed. Tank Top put my arms behind me and pushed my hands high up my
back. I felt the metal around my wrists.

I thought of my parents and how they would hurl themselves into this if
they found out. I felt and heard the handcuffs lock. I thought of my
parents and their lawsuits.

Back in the good old days, they'd sued our home-town police department to
force it to desegregate, and when that worked they sued the fire
department-things they did in their spare time, as good citizens, as blacks
of their generation, members of the N.A.A.C.P. rank and file. Injustice had
only to ring their doorbell, and they were off to the poorhouse. And here
was frivolous me letting a white man put me in handcuffs for something
other than protest.

I remembered what my father had said to my tears at my sister's memorial,
the year before: Keep it together.

But I was in shock. "I'm going to be sick." I was starting to list from
side to side. "Have you been drinking?" "No." I was going deaf. "I'm going
to pass out." Tank Top gripped me just below my right armpit, and we
started off, but my feet waited before they followed my legs. The world
broke into silent, colorful particles. I got to the door and fell flat into
the van. Rona's face floated.

I began to hear her. I concentrated on finding her face in one place,
something I could get up for and move toward, even if only on my knees.
"Don't hurt him," Rona and Billie called. "I'm trying to help him," Tank
Top countered.

Keep it together, I chanted to myself.

Not because I was a black man in handcuffs in front of two white guys; not
because I was powerless, which made it all the more necessary at least to
imitate the examples of dignity in confrontations with police which I'd
witnessed; and not because I was a grown man losing it in front of two
women who, though in handcuffs, were trying to defend me. But because they
were my friends.

They were the ones with children at home. I crawled over to my friends in
the seatless, windowless rear of the van, dripping sweat on them.

Plaid Shorts yanked the van into the street.

Because we couldn't grab, and there was nothing to grab on to, we rolled
into Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole positions, and rolled again when Plaid
Shorts hit the gas. "This is such bullshit," Billie said to the ceiling.
"This sucks," Plaid Shorts said. But he wasn't talking to us. He looked
across to Tank Top. "You got that right." "A big one," Plaid Shorts added.
"Hate it," Tank Top said to his window. "Total bullshit." Rona had dusted
off her repertoire of apt facial expressions. This one said, "Are these
guys for real?" "Five more years, man, and then I'm out," Plaid Shorts
said. "I can't wait to just do my band." He did a near wheelie around a corner.

We shouldered back up into sitting positions pretty expertly after two corners.

Tank Top took some gum from the dashboard and said he had to keep at this
bullshit until he could pay off his wife. He told Plaid Shorts that instead
of alimony he was offering his wife a once-in-a-lifetime, can't-refuse lump
sum. "It's like a buyout."

The acid-driven power chords of Pink Floyd took over the van. Rona's
expression said, "These guys are too much." "They're wild," Billie's eyes
said back as she looked for the place behind her where the music was
blaring from. Maybe the detectives were trying to tell us something.

Not that they were nice guys who regrettably had to do their job but that
they were better than the job they'd been reduced to doing, and that they,
too, had aspirations. The Rolling Stones came on next, and Plaid Shorts
sang along.

The music was perhaps meant to say that they weren't uncool, redneck cops
having a blast at the expense of the liberal, the black, and the in-between.

I was too ashamed to be sympathetic. Being addressed as "sir" by Tank Top
only after I had shown weakness and fear-that was humiliating. A cop could
go off at any time. I'd thought of that and had been afraid, and there was
no way to take it back. And for what had I lost my self-respect? For an
offense the detectives thought beneath their training.

What did you do last night?

Oh, I was picked up for a reefer and I fainted like a man. The van went up
one street and down another.

We couldn't see much, but most likely we were driving around and around as
various undercover operations didn't work out. On one dark corner we waited
so long in the van by ourselves that we almost slept.

The van door slid open, and in the shaft of light Tank Top was helping a
Hispanic woman, maybe in her fifties, climb aboard the bummer bus. "Hey,
Officer," she said when we were under way. "My hands too hot." The
detectives parked and helped Rona and Billie out. Tank Top said, "I'm going
to loosen these tight cuffs, like you asked." Then he turned off the
lights, slammed the door, and left me with this woman who made unsavory
sounds in the dark. I thought she was trying to ditch her vials of crack
and the detectives would then claim that they were mine. I went over on my
side, practicing the I-was-asleep defense. They put Rona and Billie back in
the van, turned on the lights, drove off, stopped again, and got out by
themselves. As soon as the doors closed, the Hispanic woman, who'd freed
her hands, whipped out a big bag of heroin, snorted it on her knee, and
deftly worked her hands back into the cuffs.

Rona was laughing in disbelief.

Quietly, the Hispanic woman zoned sidewise.

The detectives, when they got back in, firmly looked straight ahead.

The next time the van door opened, a Hispanic man, maybe also in his
fifties, climbed in. A dark Rasta youth was pushed in after him. "Ooh," the
Hispanic guy said, and tried to shift himself.

He nodded greetings of solidarity. What he'd been oohing about hit Rona's
hygiene radar first.

It made delicate Billie draw in her legs. The gleaming Rasta youth sprawled
before us had matted dreadlocks that looked like what comes from the back
of a furnace when its filter is changed. Maybe I should have thought harder
about this being someone's son, but the stench was overpowering. Meanwhile,
he kept up a stream of Babylon raas claat denunciations of the police.

He shouted curses on the white man. I thought, Rasta, my brother in Garvey,
you are on your own. The detectives paid him no mind. They'd made their
quota for the shift.

We'd been smoking a joint right around the corner from the local precinct
house, that's how hip we were. The detectives took us inside and the
handcuffs came off. After three hours, it was a relief to see my fingers.

Tank Top took me and the Rasta youth upstairs to a grotty corridor, and the
strip search began. He made the Rasta youth wait in the shadows at the end.
He ordered me to hand him my clothes item by item. I was to turn around,
bend over, and drop my shorts. He said quickly that that was enough.

I was to take off my socks and turn them inside out. "Get dressed." He
asked if I'd ever been arrested.

No. He said he would try to tell me what was going to happen.

I thought I understood. He motioned to the Rasta and sent me downstairs. He
and the Rasta followed moments later.

Tank Top had returned my property, except for the phone and the CD. Such
stuff had to go over to the lockup at Central, he explained.

If that was the case, then the Rasta youth had a prayer shawl and a Torah
for Central to deal with. Tank Top tried to talk when he took my
fingerprints. "So what kind of things do you write?" After that, he had
paperwork to finish.

Now and then, he would dial a telephone number, mutter, hang up, and shrug.

A clock kept vigil over a wall of "Most Wanted" leaflets.

When Plaid Shorts announced that we were moving, around five o'clock in the
morning, the Hispanic man asked how much money I had on me. I'd covered the
money clip with my hand when Tank Top passed it to me, but, clearly, I
hadn't been quick enough.

The Hispanic man said I couldn't bring in anything where we were going,
because it would get taken off me. He informed Plaid Shorts, who agreed
that I'd get robbed.

Rona put my belongings, even my glasses, in her pocket. My property would
be safer in the women's section, the Hispanic man advised as we were put
back into handcuffs and then linked to one another.

I was made to lead our daisy chain of handcuffs through the precinct's main
room. As Plaid Shorts increased the pace, two officers by the front door
erupted into grunting song. "Working on the chain gang, uh."

We hopped out of the van into a street that was still dark. A semicircle of
light waited for us to approach.

This was the Tombs, that place I'd heard about, read about.

Two more daisy chains of prisoners joined ours as Tank Top, having rung
twice, banged on the metal grating over the entrance.

It rolled up. Plaid Shorts and Tank Top surrendered us in a series of rapid
clipboard signatures. When I realized that they intended to abandon us at
this concrete threshold, I wanted to ask them when they planned to read us
our rights.

I'd begun to think of them as our undercovers. They were responsible for
us. But they were gone, and we were across the line, and the metal grating
was coming down.

I followed a black female corrections officer's rump up some stairs.

A black male corrections officer unhooked everybody.

My eyes stayed on Rona and Billie when they were ordered to move to the
other side of the corridor.

The women went in one direction, the men in another.

Green bars streamed along either side of me as I hurried both to keep up
with the corrections officer who was now taking us down to the basement and
to keep ahead of someone whose footsteps menaced my heels.

The Rasta youth and I were directed into the last cell of the long jail. I
insinuated myself onto the narrow metal bench that went from the bars of
the cell to the rear wall, where it made a right angle toward the partition
that hid the toilet.

Nine mute, tired faces emphasized how cramped and stuffy the tiny cell was.
One man was curled up asleep under the bench.

I didn't want to look too intently at the other men in judicial storage, in
case to do so meant something I could not handle the consequences of. I
also didn't want to look away too quickly when my gaze happened to meet
someone else's. However, no one was interested in hassling the new arrivals.

Men were waking up, and their banter competed with the locker-room-type
noise coming from the corrections officers' oblong station desk. A short
white girl with thick glasses and a rolling lectern called my name. She
said the interview was to determine who was eligible for bail, but the
questions also separated the wheat from the chaff, socioeconomically speaking.

Some guys probably had no job, no taxable weekly income, no address, no
mother's address.

She lost patience with the Rasta youth's decent background. "Education? How
far did you get in school?" A community-college degree.

Her head was tilted up toward the spectacle of his hair. "We'll say grade
fifteen."

Some time later, the Rasta youth and I were summoned again.

But again we were going only a few yards.

A black corrections officer shooed aside someone blocking the door of the
new cell, which was large and, sneaked glances told me, held some huge dudes.

Fresh apprehension was bringing my body to something like exocrine parity
with the Rasta youth's. I didn't know what to expect, and so tried to
prepare for the worst.

We were shoulder to shoulder on a metal bench, like crows shuffling on a
telephone wire. The move to this restless population had to be the final,
dangerous descent, the reason I'd crammed my watch into my glasses case and
handed everything off to Rona.

A black youth with his hair in tight break braids called out to a new
arrival, my Hispanic comrade. "Come on in." The black youth's knuckles
looked as big as Mike Tyson's. "They took the murderers out early." He
slapped five with a couple of his hulking neighbors and concerned himself
with what he could see of his reflection in the metal bench between his thighs.

He said something more. I didn't hear what it was, but it must have been
wicked.

A black corrections officer reversed himself and glared through the green
bars. "What?" "Nothing, Mo," the black youth said loudly, evenly.

Only one of his neighbors giggled. "Say what, chump?" He was going for the
keys at his hip. "You say something?" He was so agitated that he couldn't
get the key in. He was as tall as a basketball power forward.

Everything he said was a variation of "You want to say something?" The cell
door flew open, and in a few steps the corrections officer was over the
massive head of twinkling break braids. "A real man would say something
now." He waited for an answer.

I could see him shaking. The black youth wasn't going to feed him any lines
or provocation. The corrections officer pivoted toward the door. He had a
baton on his belt, but no gun. He made a satisfied noise with his keys.

It was not an impressive performance. I knew that. The corrections officer
hadn't come up with any good lines.

He just kept repeating himself.

I could tell that all twenty-four of my cellmates were thinking how off the
hook the corrections officer had been to raise up-the lingo was coming to
me-on somebody like that. I was getting excited, feeling that I was on the
verge of bonding with the other guys in our high and hip judgment against
the corrections officer. He didn't meet our rigorous standards when it came
to "reading" someone in the street manner.

The black youth with the oiled, sparkling braids delivered our verdict:
"Definitely bugging behind something."

The black corrections officer flung the metal door so hard it bounced
against the cell bars and rode back some. Giant steps put him in a place
that blocked my view of the black youth.

Spit was dancing from his head, pinwheel fashion, as he roared, "If I
started to kick your black ass now, where would your black ass be next
week?" I couldn't remember when I'd seen such sudden rage. It stopped all
other activity in the basement.

The tendons in his neck were ready to explode.

I couldn't begin to think what his nostrils might be doing.

Maybe our survival molecules were not the only ones to have been put on alert.

Some of his colleagues had come by to monitor the situation.

They turned back in a way that indicated they'd respect some code not to
interfere.

The cell was very still as the corrections officer made his exit. The
street judgment was in the silence. Nobody wanted to look at him until he'd
turned the lock. He'd made his point. He'd shown how dangerous was his
longing to have a reason to lose control.

The corrections officer's brown skin looked glazed, as though it had been
fired in a kiln. He didn't seem to know how to finish his scene and stood
wheezing by the bars. I almost thought he was going to mellow into the
dispersal-of-balm-and-poultice phase of tough love. The mask of the
shock-tactics practitioner would drop. He'd apologize, give advice, tell
the young brothers how he was once on his way to being where they were. The
black corrections officer said, "Remember. I'll be going home at four
o'clock. You'll still be here. You're in jail. I'm not." Maybe I should
have taken into account the possibility that he had seen and had a lot of
trouble doing his job. Maybe he and the black youth already had a story
going and I'd missed what started it. But that didn't matter.

Only what he'd said about four o'clock mattered.

It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning yet. My Hispanic comrade was
looking at me. He took his eyes heavenward and clasped his hands.

Then he shot me an inaudible laugh.

Jail was going to get me over my fear of saying the obvious, because there
was no way to ignore all morning the fact that everyone in the cell was
either black or Hispanic. The irony, for me, was that an all-black
gathering usually meant a special event, a stirring occasion.

I thought back to some black guys I used to know who enjoyed telling me
that black guys like me ought to hang out with black groups like theirs.

It flattered me to believe that I flattered them with my yearning for
instruction in the art of how to be down with it. But this was not what
they had in mind. The mood in the cell was like that of an emergency room
in a city hospital: a mixture of squalor, panic, boredom, and resentment at
the supposed randomness of bad luck.

Some guys, the Rasta youth among them, had elected to slip down onto the
concrete floor.

They were opting out of consciousness. Our cell had no television, no
radio, no newspapers. There was a water fountain, a disgusting toilet, and
two pay phones from which collect calls could be made. I don't know how
those guys knew when the corrections officers had their backs turned, or
how they'd held on to the contraband of drugs and matches they'd been
thoroughly searched for, or how they knew who in which cell had what, but
at one moment, as if by secret signal, paraphernalia went flying through
green bars from cell to cell. The next thing I knew, guys were taking turns
smoking crack behind the waist-high partition of the raised open toilet of
our cell. Right there in the Tombs. I guess they figured there was no
chance of the crack outsmelling the toilet. I'd switched seats and, as a
result, was too near the burning funk. I saw my Hispanic comrade casually
walk away from the hot spot, and soon I, too, got up and crossed the cell.
His look of approval after I'd eased in somewhere else told me that I'd
made the right move.

A black guy with broken teeth, dressed in a torn car coat, emerged from
behind the toilet.

He ambled around and then seized the floor. "You remember Lucky Lou
Diamond? I had twenty thousand dollar over to Jersey City." I tuned in,
eager for a jailhouse Richard Pryor who could turn the cell into something
else. "Nineteen-seventy-five? Bunny hat on my head? Your Honor. There's no
mouth on the girl he touched." His free association promised much, but it
gutter-balled into such incoherence that the black youth with break braids
spoke for everyone when he barked, "Sit down."

It was quiet for a while, but then the Rasta youth snapped to attention.
Something jerked him to his feet and set him standing squarely in front of
the cell door, his right knee pounding out a steady rhythm.

I thought, Just when things were manageable, my brother in Selassie has to
flip out. I braced myself for his rap. But he was ready for his lunch.

He was first in the line we were commanded to make; first to march out of
the cell toward stacks of chalk-colored squares on long, low trolleys that
looked like what bricks are transported on at a building site. We were to
pick up a sandwich, turn, take a plastic cup of grape juice from another
low trolley, and then march back to the cell.

A black guy in an orange jumpsuit-a trusty-called after me to let me know
that I'd missed my allotted sandwich.

Something about being urged to march rendered me unable to lift anything
other than a cup of juice.

Very soon the cell was strewn with sandwich remnants.

Leaking sachets of mustard and mayonnaise found their way under the bench.

A wedge of cheese crowned one of the pay phones.

Lunch added to the odors of incarceration. However, there was plenty of
room, because some of the men whose size so alarmed me when I first entered
the cell had dived to the floor.

I counted nine guys asleep in the grime, six of them in the fetal position,
their wrists between their knees.

Heads had to loll down some broad shoulders before they could touch concrete.

A young, crack-thin guy woke and, using his palms for locomotion, crawled
along on his stomach to the trash can, where he reached up to extract
sandwich remains.

I overheard some of the guys say a little while later that the police had
arrested so many people in the sweep of the previous evening that two
special night courts had been set up to process the haul. They would start
to call names at four o'clock. Waiting might have been easier had there
been no clock.

At the appointed hour, the only official movement came from the black
corrections officer who'd flipped out that morning.

I'm sorry to report that he went through all the transparent maneuvers of
rubbing it in. He paraded by us on his way back to the oblong station desk,
ostensibly laughing at himself for forgetting something. And, just in case
the black youth with break braids was pretending to take no notice of him,
the corrections officer brought over a white officer holding a clipboard
and pointed at the youth.

His colleague tapped him a Have-a-good-night. "I told you when you got here
not to give me problems." The black youth looked toward the bars at last,
his arms hugging his chest.

The black corrections officer flicked a salute.

"Yo, Pops," I heard the black youth say once the air had calmed down again
around us. "Pops," he called again in my direction.

I couldn't believe that he was talking to me. Pops? Everybody in the cell
who spoke to someone he didn't know said, "Yo, G." I pointed to myself.

Who, me? "Mind my asking what you're in for?" I made a smoking gesture with
two fingers of my right hand. "Uh-huh. You dress Italian. But." A neighbor
of his wanted to give him five for that observation, but he just looked at
him hard. It was true. The soundtrack of brotherhood in my head was nearly
all Marvin Gaye. It had finally happened: I was older than a cartoon father
on television. I was older than Homer Simpson.

I wasn't sure if Old Four Eyes in the Robert Hayden poem fled to "danger in
the safety zones" or to "safety in the danger zones." It was important to
me, sitting there in my concrete elsewhere, which seemed dirtier and dimmer
the longer I had to wait.

As the cell emptied, it got eerier.

The few new guys, dressed in their garrulous night selves, were out of
sympathy with the general tone of exhaustion and passivity.

One new guy ranted about calling his girlfriend to tell her to hook up a
plane to Canada, because after he made bail he was going to step off, boy.
Another, the lone white, clung to a pay phone.

He suggested to a friend that they deceive his brother-in-law. "Don't tell
him it's for me." He could press telephone numbers with amazing speed.

He insisted to the next friend that she had to get the bail money out of
her mother, because he could not, he said, shooting his eyes across us, the
nonwhite, do Rikers.

My name was called, the cell door gapped open, and I floated out. Neither
my Hispanic comrade nor the Rasta youth followed.

I regretted that I would not have the chance to thank the man who had
watched my back. Very soon I found myself upstairs in a new cell that had
an iron-lattice screen.

Beyond it was the outside world.

I heard the voices of what I supposed were women corrections officers, and
then over the walls I heard Billie and Rona in their interview cells. They
heard me, we heard one another.

The public defender on the free persons' side of the barrier was a heavyset
white woman.

She went from cubicle to cubicle, guiding us toward a plea: Adjournment in
Contemplation of Dismissal, or A.C.D. If we didn't get picked up for the
same offense within a twelve-month period, then the charge would be dropped.

A.C.D.

I told the P.D. that I'd used the pay phones.

I knew that that afternoon a friend of mine had come zooming down with
newspapers and a criminal lawyer and had been denied access.

She said they were entitled to hold us for at least twenty-four hours
before they had to do anything with us. I said that being in custody was
the punishment. I said prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes was
a form of harassment. She explained that under the circumstances they
didn't have to read us our rights.

I was about to compare such offenses to civil disobedience, but the last
thing this calm and capable P.D. was interested in was anybody's vanity.

She said that high arrest figures justified the large increase in the
number of police on the streets.

It was that simple.

In the courtroom, I felt as though we were guest speakers at a high school,
the offenders with us behind the court recorder looked so tadpole, so young.

We stood when the judge entered. "He's not that kind of judge," a black
bailiff said. Maybe because I was minutes and a plea away from getting out,
tenderness got the better of me. I thought of my older sister and her
practice in defense of juvenile offenders valiantly conducted from files in
shopping bags in the trunk of her car. Our case was called, and we sat some
rows back from the attorneys' desks, where we were unable to hear the grim
P.D., even if we could have concentrated enough.

God bless the old-hippie souls who still believed in public life and social
responsibility, I thought, but the P.D. had no time for effusive thanks.

I'd been so hypnotized by green bars that the marble floor outside the
courtroom was dazzling. The white clerks behind the counter in a
payment-and-records office were accustomed to a stressed-out public and
were rude back. Down in the lobby, Rona and Billie ran for the door marked
"Women." I rushed over to a rickety blue booth for my fix of those former
slave crops-tobacco, sugar, coffee.

Perhaps our elation on Rona's rooftop was unearned, but we felt like
released hostages. We made jokes as soon as we had an audience of friends.

Even the squalid bits, when told the right way, got laughs.

Maybe we were defending ourselves against our deeper reactions to what had
happened to us. Rona's husband said that now that his little boy was old
enough to play in the street he had had to tell him what to do should the
police ever stop him. Don't move; do exactly what they say; take no
chances; give no lip. We wondered how popular these sweeps would be after
some more white people had been caught in the net.

We'd been abruptly deprived of our liberty, and that would always make for
a chilling memory.

And as I'd learned sitting in the cell with all those guys whose stories I
didn't know and couldn't ask for: the system exists, the system-for the
nonwhite young, the poor-is real. New arrest records had been created, but
we were out, and friends were standing in wreaths of smoke, savoring the
night view of fire escapes, water tanks, and lights in distant windows.

Six days after my release, I was back on the Lower East Side. I understood
what Rona meant when she said that she fell in love with New York the day
she realized that she could get a candy bar on every corner.

But jail worked, it won. I thought, I'm not doing that again.

The romance was over. For me, the changes in the streets went with
everything else. Once upon a time, people moved to New York to become New
Yorkers. Then people moved to New York and thought it perfectly O.K. to
remain themselves. Goodbye, Frank O'Hara.

"Yo, Papi," I heard.

I was astonished. It was my Hispanic comrade.

They'd given him five days on Rikers Island for possession of a crack pipe.
He was selling vinyl records on the sidewalk before he got moved off that
bit of Second Avenue. Could I help him out? It would be my privilege.

He said he remembered what the black youth with break braids had said when
they took him out of that cell in the Tombs. "Kidnapped by the Mayor, y'all."