Chapter 29

I woke the next morning to no water, no shower, not even hot tea, and with more anger than I'd ever felt towards any group of people in my life. I turned on the TV immediately, filled with all that hate. The actor, Edward James Olmos, was telling everyone to come down to Central L.A. and help clean up.

My first thought was ASSHOLE! You people wrecked it, YOU CLEAN IT UP! But then the camera panned the street. Black people were sweeping up glass and putting back what was left of the produce in some Chinese guy's store. For the first time in three days the media was showing people of color helping instead of hurting. Although there was still minor looting, and a few buildings burning, the police had finally come out in force. The National Guard had been called in and armed soldiers were roaming the streets.

Then the man himself, Rodney King, got on the air, crying. He sounded like a high school dropout, but one thing that came across every TV and radio that morning was his plea we "all just get along." And I was suddenly humbled by this ignorant man.

I called the KTLA news department. "I want to know where to go in L.A. to help with the cleanup." I needed to do something to repent my sin of racism.

"We don't know," a woman at the station said. "Call the AME church downtown. They probably know."

"What are you talking about? You're showing Edward Olmos on your station right now. He's asking for volunteers. What number did he give you to call?"

"Not sure."

"Then ask your reporter to ask him." What was wrong with these people?

"Hang on," she said curtly and put me on hold. Ten minutes later she was back on the line. "The reporter with Olmos is already on his way to another site. The police are telling us we can't ask people to go down there yet because there's still rioting going on. We would be liable if anyone got hurt." Leave it to the media to cover their ass while exposing everyone else's. "We're really busy here. I've got to go. Good luck. Bye." She hung up before I could cuss her out.

I clicked the receiver down to call the AME church, but when I started dialing I heard Lee yelling through the phone, "Rachel…Hello…Ray…What are you doing?"

"Oh. Hi. Sorry. Didn't hear you on the line. I'm trying to call the AME church to see where I can volunteer to help clean up some of the looted stores."

"What!? Are you crazy?" He practically shouted. "This is no time to play martyr. Especially if you're White. I don't want you going down there." He said it like a command.

"I don't care what you want, Lee. This isn't about you, or us. It's for me. And I'm going." I pulled on an old pair of jeans and my hiking boots.

"This is not a good idea, Ray." He paused. "Are you watching TV?" It was a rhetorical question. "They're still killing each other out there. I don't want you to be next."

"Well, that's sweet and all, but I need to go down there and see for myself what's going on, help out if I can. I'll be fine, don't worry."

"Famous last words. I'm sure Mr. Denny felt the same way before they dragged him out of his truck and bashed his head in with a brick."

I sighed. He sounded like my mother.

"Is this a noble thing? I mean, what are you trying to prove by going down there? You're not going to change anything mixing it up those lazy, whining pricks?"

"I'm hoping to change me, Lee."

"Well, call me a racist then, because I don't give a shit if every one of them bites it down there. Save the taxpayers the bill of throwing em all in jail."

"Wow. Was your humanitarian persona just to project the proper image?"

"Don't get self-righteous, honey. I'm concerned for your safety. I just think this is a really stupid idea."

"Duly noted." I finished tying my laces and stood up. "Look, I've gotta go."

Long pause. "Yeah, okay." He knew he couldn't win. "Call me the moment you get back, okay? And be safe out there."

"Okay. Have a nice day," I mocked. "Bye." I sighed heavily, shook my head. The man was a consummate hedonist, as were most all addicts. I left the plumber I hired in the crawl space under the bathroom, got in my car, and onto the freeway, and spent the first twenty minutes of my drive trying to figure out why the hell I still wanted Lee to want me.

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I wasn't scared going to South Central L.A. I knew the media made a mockery of reality. The first time I realized they were more than just exaggerating, they were out and out lying was the winter storm of '81 that destroyed part of the Santa Monica Pier. News showed a debris filled parking lot, complete with seagulls drifting around on what looked like a small lake. Excited to see this rare occurrence, I took my Nikon and drove to the beach. The pier parking lot had some minor puddling as I cruised over to the collection of news vans. Several reporters from various stations were standing around a twelve foot wide area of standing water. A camera was on the ground near the waterline and I realized they'd shot the puddle from the ground to make it look larger. Some young lackey packing up threw the rest of the sardines in the water he'd been tossing into the puddle to attract seagulls. Until that moment I believed what I saw on the news was real. I hadn't realize the myriad of ways they faked it.

I swung onto the 110 and passed the tall buildings downtown thinking about that storm. Again I craved a joint so badly I could almost feel the tingling lightness creep across my scalp. The buzz would surely relieve the weight of my guilt, and lift my profound sadness.

Took the Washington St. exit. It wasn't near as obliterated on the street as the news made it look. There were a few more burnt out buildings then usual, but the area had always been a wreck. Graffiti on the walls and empty lots filled with junk dominated the scene for as long as I could remember. There was one major difference. The National Guard was everywhere, with guns and in tanks. Like, what the hell were they going to do with tanks. This was L.A., not Czechoslovakia.

I came to a red light, rolled down my window and asked some old Black guys hanging out on the corner where they needed volunteers to help clean up.

"I think they started cleaning up the Stater Brothers on Central a few blocks down. They're probably looking for help over there," a guy said.

"Thanks." I rolled up my window and drove down a few blocks, then turned into the Stater Brothers parking lot. About fifty people were in the process of cleaning up the burnt out store. They had brooms and shovels and were filling three huge dumpsters in the parking lot. News vans were grouped together at the far end of the lot. Reporters were interviewing some of the volunteers. A tank with National Guardsman sitting on it, drinking sodas and coffee, was parked on the sidewalk to the side of the store.

Like Ralph's, the market had been fire bombed. It would have burnt to the ground had the fire department not soaked the roof, which had caved into the market. The sidewalls were standing, but the store had no ceiling, and the glass front was gone. Ralph's had burned only minimally and was cleaned up the same evening it was bombed, but this store was a wreck, completely destroyed. I grabbed a shovel and helped one of the sweepers clear the parking lot of glass and debris.

"Hey, thanks for coming down and helping in the clean up." He smiled, gleaming white teeth against chocolate brown skin, young, maybe early-twenties.

"Sure, no problem." I spoke as I lifted the filled shovel and dumped it in a bin. "I'm really sorry this happened to you guys."

"Yeah. Me too." He swept vigorously, his hard arm muscles bulging under his long sleeve shirt. "We're really devastated about this whole thing. I've lived here ten years and nothin like this has ever gone down. This market employed at least fifty people from the area. Now all these people are out of a job until they rebuild. If they rebuild." His big brown eyes seemed to dim as he filled the shovel with glass and water soaked pieces of ceiling. I struggled to lift it into the dumpster. "Hey, let's switch." And he handed me the broom.

"Thanks." I took the broom, and we switched places. More people came to help as the morning wore on. By the time most of the parking lot was cleared there were a good hundred people out there. Or I should say a hundred good people. Some women set up a stand with drinks and sandwiches for the volunteers. The crowd was all Black. I was the only White person there. Funny thing about that was I didn't feel White. Everyone treated me like just another volunteer. Except to the press. They kept bugging me for an interview. I finally went ballistic on the fifth reporter who asked me why I came to help in the middle of a riot. "Why are you here?" I glared at the preppie White reporter. "Fisting the first amendment doesn't absolve you from promoting hate, nor your audacity in filming the effects. So get the fucking mic outta my face, pick up a shovel and help clean up the mess you helped create." I went back to sweeping. The guy with the shovel flashed me a wide smile as he lifted the trash into the bin. The reporter went back to his cronies. No one asked me for an interview the rest of the day.

When the parking lot was cleared we went inside to help with the cleanup. Shelves were still standing, but most of the produce and products were gone, looted. Some remaining items were floating in filthy water that rose to my ankles. While volunteers cleared shelves and shoveled soaked boxes of food and pieces of ceiling into trash cans, a continual stream of Latino families came in and stole anything they could get their hands on.

I was among the volunteers appointed to stop looters from taking food items out of the water, which the firemen assured us was full of asbestos from the fallen ceiling. A Latino girl about 15 years old joined me as an interpreter.

"Don't take the food from the water, and don't feed it to your children. It could kill them. It's poison. Do you understand?" I did the hands around neck choking sign, the interpreter repeating my words in Spanish.

They didn't listen. Not one of them. They lifted bags of chips, bars of butter and cartons of milk out of the dirty water, then put the stuff they collected in Hefty bags. After the twentieth time we'd said it I looked at the young interpreter and saw tears in her deep brown eyes and streaking down her soft, oval face.

"They won't listen to us." She had only a slight accent, probably first generation born here. "They are illegals and trust no one. They are poor and desperate to feed their kids."

"I'm sorry," I said, lacking words of wisdom to bolster her. "I am so sorry."

She came to me and hugged me tightly then broke down completely, literally sobbing. I held her, stroked her long brown hair and tried to be the strength she needed, but the truth was I could hardly breathe.

"It'll be OK," I whispered in her ear. "The bags are sealed. The kids will be fine," I lied, then held her face in my hands, dried her cheeks with my sleeve. She flashed a soft smile but I felt her lingering doubt. I took her hand and lead her to another family looting who didn't listen to us. In a flash of anger I grabbed the Hefty bag partially filled with water-soaked groceries from who I assumed was the mother, emptied it then filled the bag with what remained of cereal boxes on a shelf. The Latino interpreter spoke to the woman in Spanish the entire time in the same angry tone as my actions. I don't know what she said, but the woman left with her four kids after that, and the Hefty bag free of toxic food.

The remaining food and looters gone, we went back to cleaning up. With every shovel I threw away, a little of my hate went with it. The place was as spotless as it could be by the time the National Guard chased us all away, reminding us of the curfew. I was exhausted on the drive home. And though I was without hate, blackness consumed me. Images of the day flashed before me; all those people that had lost their job; immigrant parents dragging their children through the aisles while looting; the Latino girl's beautiful tear-streaked face.

I didn't even try to stop the tears blurring my vision on the drive home. Until today, it was more concept than reality there were hungry children in L.A. Where were the famous actors doing infomercials for our starving kids? My heart ached, a physical pressure in my chest for the inequity of our beginnings, and the status quo we all tolerate. I got off the freeway and onto the streets of my clean, upper-middle class neighborhood. "Here by the grace of god go I," I said aloud as I pulled into my driveway. And I don't even believe in god.

My phone was ringing when I came in the back door but I didn't run to answer it. I sat on the kitchen floor, let Face rest her head in my lap, stroked my dog and cried. I finally got up and took a blazing hot shower, then gathered the filthy clothes I'd worked in all day and threw them away. In my bedroom, I slipped on jeans and Lee's soft white shirt, flopped on my bed and clicked on the TV. Most stations were showing small gatherings of volunteers helping across L.A. And though it sparked a flash of faith in the human race, I settled on reruns of Rosanne.

The TV did not absorb me. My mind kept cycling over the absurdity of chance, the entropy of luck born solidly into the middle class, and White. Only could have top it born rich, and male. And every part of me carved a buzz right then, detach from the reality that it takes millennium to make a dent in human cognition. We're still breast beating monkeys, without the emotional maturity to manage the technology we're creating. It was likely we'd nuke ourselves into oblivion before making the transition to unification.

The phone ran for the third time in an hour and I finally picked it up. "Hi." I said flatly.

"Hi." Lee's tone was somewhere between anger and relief.

"Are you?"

"Why?" He paused. "You wanta be?"

"You bet." I sought to get as fucked up as possible, craving the lightness of simply being, and to breathe. "Can you come over?"

"Well, there is a curfew on. But I'm willing to risk it. Give me half an hour. If I'm not there by then I'm either busted or dead."

Lee was at my door twenty minutes later and we spent the evening getting high over games of Tavli. He left me at close to midnight with a heartfelt hug which I returned in kind, glad he'd come, marveling how easy it was to be with him as I shut the front door. I wasn't sorry I'd gotten high tonight, but it didn't detach me from the world outside completely like I'd sought— narrow my focus to my own existence, as most seemed to live. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling afraid to close my eyes. Every time I did I saw images of the day and the faces of the damned.

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