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    james-grady

    James Grady

    Contributor

    Like a Cocked Gun, Part 8 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

    Posted:
    09/28/09
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    Previously: A three-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s blighted Liss Gardens pits gang truce negotiator Dante Jones against his wife Rhea who's worried he'll be killed, the West Side and East Side Liss Garden crews who's beefs exploded into violence, a city councilman who wants to dump his support of Dante's Coalition of Committed Citizens, and the Gardens' crime kingpin Luther.
    Dante walked into the meeting with Liss Gardens West Side crew. The energy in that crowded yellow kitchen felt like a cocked gun.
    This meet had a no weapons rule.
    Trust starts by taking people at their word. Taking a chance.
    Count seven West Siders, including Jerome.
    Establish a zone of comfort.
    Then: hug a thug.
    Set aside good and evil, right and wrong, choice and circumstance.
    Gangbangers have scant experience with intimacy.
    People handle their lives. They know flesh on flesh, the ache of gone and not there, slaps, punches, pushes, kicks, violations. They do and are done to. All of them insist they know sex. They high-five, shoulder and fist bump. But few know the selfless equal intimacy of human touch that nurtures empathy.
    So when Dante met a man who could be more than a killer, he shook his hand, gave him a hug: I care enough to risk you attacking me or thinking I'm a fool. Dante and 'Trey needed three minutes to hug a thug their way around the kitchen.
    Figure half of these guys had had charges on them. A couple had real part-time jobs, a couple more picked up cash on the fringes of Luther's industry, none of them were strangers to crime. None of them had seen 25. No doubt at least one of them had fired some of the shots near the subway stop the night before that left three people murdered.
    "OK guys," said Dante, "we gotta circle up."
    Inertia stood the group in a circle around a white kitchen table, each one with his arms over the shoulders of the men beside him.
    The West Side warriors knew this ritual from NFL games on TV. They didn't realize the Coalition political strategy: Expand the shape of the group to expand its consciousness.
    Dante said: "Anybody gonna pray or say?"
    Get them to articulate beyond anger and fear.
    Silence. Silence is the worst!
    Then 'Trey said: "'Just come to me that we all want to walk out of here to where it won't hurt any more than it does now."
    Perfect! Now set the agenda. Dante said: "What's going on?"
    A babble of voices shouted: They started it! Nobody gets to do us like that! They gotta pay!
    This would be so much easier if they were a TV gang, thought Dante, picking up on how the young men checked the reactions of a stocky guy in a red shirt, deferring to him: He's the shot caller. Not a "boss" because this neighborhood street crew doesn't have a political science textbook structure. These guys grew up together, played together, now saw that together as the only way to live. So if one got mad...
    Half an hour in, Dante spotted the mad one: Mondel, handsome, strobing too much electricity to be a shot caller -- or to be ignored. Twice, Dante heard Mondel insist: Nobody can be doin' what ain't his to do.
    An hour in, Dante said: "I'm an old man so...."
    He nodded to Red Shirt: "Can you show me the bathroom?"
    When I'm out of the room, the dynamic will shift. 'Trey will be there representing. A second shift happens when I come back. From those shifts, maybe we can shift them 5 degrees off the killing line.
    Upstairs beyond the babble of kitchen voices, Dante asked shot caller Red Shirt: "'Mondel got some personal beef in this?"
    "He walked off some girl named Shawn. Now some East Side fool taking up with her. Guy called Caps."
    "And you all back Mondel when some girl makes him do trash?"
    Red Shirt stared at the old guy closing the bathroom door. Dante waited. Flushed the toilet, washed his hands, came out. Red Shirt still stood there: We've got a chance.
    Back in the kitchen, push it: "What are you guys going to get out of this war?"
    `Gonna get even!'
    `Nobody gonna tells what to do, take what's –'
    Dante said: "No."
    Young men waiting to bury a dead friend fell silent.
    Put faces on it. "You got one brother dead. So do they. Plus a girl, named Barbara. Barbara. Because of you guys on one side of this nowhere Gardens beefing with guys on the other side, she's dead, too. Nothing you can do will bring them back or make that right.
    "You think you're gonna get even? How will you know when you get it? When will it be over? Nobody's going to tell you what to do? Every TV commercial tells you what to do. If you're going to war because of the East Siders, they're telling you what to do. You keep doing it and being a chump, 'most you can win is life in a cell or maybe somebody will toss your sneakers over a telephone wire before everybody forgets about you forever."
    Mondel blurted: "There's things a man –"
    Red Shirt interrupted: "Dante, we can't back down 'cause they won't. We gotta be who we are because that's who they are."
    "You guys," said Dante, "the East Siders, too: you all sound like those suit & tie gangbangers across town in Congress. It's always the other guys' fault. Politicians figuring your angles, not gonna step up for some idea bigger than keeping you just who you are."
    Silence filled the kitchen.
    'Trey said: "Harsh."
    Everybody laughed.
    Took 30 more minutes, but the West Siders agreed to a "truce summit" if the East Siders agreed, too – with Dante there "to make sure fair's fair."
    Mondel hid the fire in his eyes.
    A cold hand cupped Dante's heart.
    An hour later at a meeting with East Side crew in an alley across the Gardens -- a meeting greased by whoever in the East Side crew belonged more to Luther than to his neighborhood buddies -- during the rituals and the venting, blaming and denials, Dante watched Mondel's romantic rival Caps say a whole lot of nothing and mean every word.
    Mondel radiated energy.
    Caps absorbed energy.
    And though like their neighbors across the Gardens, the East Siders agreed to a truce meting, Dante knew those two men doomed any peace.
    Their tension would stay controlled long enough for the Coalition to work a truce agreement, have a ceremony, maybe even get another picture taken with Councilman Reggie. But in days, Mondel or Caps would snap. One squeeze of a trigger and an explosion of blood would kill one or both of them, suck all their brothers into a war.
    Can't isolate Mondel and Caps to work on them.
    Spotlight them as the triggers for war in the Gardens.
    Then Luther will green light them.
    Dante walked out of that afternoon alley gut-sick and haunted:
    Are all my politics going to end up just being about who gets killed?
    What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady
    Related: 'What's Going On:' Facts Inside the Fiction
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    James Grady

    Best known for his first of 14 novels SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR that became a Robert Redford movie, James Grady has been a U.S. Senate aide and a national investigative reporter... more

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