Luna Park Mississippi Review

The main thing that gave them away was the terror of bulletproof body armor, Velcroed on like Superman pecs and abs, which as you can imagine came as a shock. And that’s an understatement. It was like my arms fell off. The guns you couldn’t even really see at first. Campus, at night, is a manic anthill in a concrete sea. Like if you saw it from the sky it would be all dark, some shitty billboards, some cars on freeways, then: bam! crashed in there between the parking lots and the used cars and the Jenga-stacked apartment blocks, all dark, there are floodlights. Even the outskirts of campus are dark. But the dorms converge at the library and tucked into the bottom corner of Birnkrant there is coffee at Trojan Grounds. And that’s where the action is. It’s so well-lit the birds get confused and tweet all night long. It’s white kids and rich kids and kids studying at the tables, kids smoking on the stairs or locking up their bikes, kids waiting to get buzzed into the dorms, kids with books or dates or in pajamas, sneakers, bathrobes, even fancy sweaters and Prada miniskirts or some such thing, but not everyone’s like that, there are other people, people like me, who would only ever wear a sweatshirt and sneakers, and there we are all centered around the last thing open late.
Trojan Grounds. One a.m.

But the feeling in the fluorescent-lit air is not like late at night. These fountains, they’re like summertime noon. They’re splashing around like firecrackers. The way it looks when there are girls sitting there at the lip of the water? I like the prettiest ones. And there they are. With their books on Darwinian Feminism and Intro to Film Theory, clutching their grande nonfat lattes, eating Doritos, talking on tiny phones. And here I am, I’m running right up the stairs with a little jump in my step like if I were on a skateboard it would look really cool—but something stops me short. And then it’s like I said before, the shock, it’s like my arms fell off. It’s like how it feels to bang your nose. Because standing just inside the door, right there, right out in the light, is a man who is huge. And he’s too big, wearing all black like in movies about L.A. where they rob banks and shoot the witness dead.

The next thing I know I see what it is in his hands and it’s a gun. Me: dead as fast as a finger snaps. But no, the girls keep right on talking on their phones. The water in the fountain keeps splashing like a bird beating its wings. And the kids inside the coffee shop, the kids in bathrobes and miniskirts and sweatshirts, all of them start to lie down on the floor. Scared as balloons bursting to pop, all of them.

There on the threshold, I can see it through the window. I can see their faces. But that’s later. Because first we talked the whole dictionary in one flat second of looking straight at each other, me and the guy with the gun.
The swinging glass door between us is no shield but so long as I’m on this side, I think. So long as I stay right here on the steps and not inside on the floor like I never won the lottery or had any lucky thing in my life. And even though I’m holding still, willing stillness inside myself, my anxious hands are someone else’s and they shake like I’m supercharged on caffeine, like miming a basketball star, like tossing dice. But it isn’t funny. It’s the scariest moment of my life, scarier still than an appendix out or no money for house payments or the thick sounds of my father drunk on the other side of the unpaid-for wall in our unpaid-for house as he flicks on and off the lamp to be sure the bastards haven’t cut our unpaid power.

I think these things and warily we glare, me alone in my fear, and that man and the big thoughts that he thinks crowded with the company of the gun, and there is panic on my face, and in his tense eyes there is a fierceness, a defiance, and that is what unnerves me.

I’m not tall, but if I had to fight I would do it. All of a sudden, standing here, I’m thinking of Shelly and her face. I’m thinking I should already have kissed her by now. But thinking of Shelly is like the Fourth of July: there she is yesterday in the movie theater laughing and it pops and sparks in my brain, then it’s the blank sheet of tonight and I’m right here, finding out for real what will happen next and not just wondering about kissing glossy crooked lips. All this goes through my mind like it’s been more than seconds since the last thing that happened. But no, I’m trapped in right now like now will never end, and all the while I’m tied in this over-lit night to the fierce, stark eyes of the guy with the gun and whether he shoots me or not I could die right now of cancer or a car accident or an aneurysm. I think of Shelly. I want to run.

The guy with the gun tilts the gun, beckoning me inside. A car horn honks. The night air swarms warm and breezy against the back of my neck. I try to think of one lucky thing. I picture my roommate getting stiffed on the rent because I’m dead. I look at the kids in line crouched flat against linoleum like it’s an earthquake drill. The water in the fountain splashes like someone dropped a hundred pennies all at once. I look at the gun and then I do the thing that I’m about to do. He wants me inside and close to the gun and down on the floor.

No, I think, no way, not me, and slowly I shake my head. Not me shot dead.
We both are still. He is sizing me up right now, I know it, and I try to be like someone who would be his friend. I’m standing poised on the threshold. No sudden movements. He doesn’t want to call attention. He can’t get me if I just stay still. I’m going to make it be cool. I am not going inside there. I hold my breath. Cool. It’s cool. Please be fucking cool. I let the clear glass between us give me strength.

What I don’t want, of course, is to get shot. What I don’t want is to get close to the gun. All this is true, yes, but also true is what I haven’t said: I think I have a pretty good idea what he, standing still with his sweat and his gun, wants to have happen. And the thing that happens next is not cool. He motions again, a curt, smooth lean towards the inside with the gun and his head gesturing as one, and outside the door I don’t move except to raise my fingertips and show the palms of my hands and I feel my breath like glue in my mouth, and there’s the spark of a quick pause before we understand each other.

And then—then suddenly between the two of us an amazing thing happens. Suddenly between the two of us flows a steady, careful current. There’s a flicker of something. There’s an invisible handshake, it’s a draw, stalemate, an impasse, and suddenly despite the circumstances it’s clear we won’t do anything to each other, this man with the gun and me in my sneakers. I can feel it. I’m sure he wants me inside with everybody else, lying on the floor with my hands over my head, and maybe he wants this in a pretty reckless way, but he trusts me to just stand still, and I just stay like I am and hold as rigidly still as if I were cast in glass, a little see-through statue of me with a little plaque that reads Here Stands Damien Amato, Please Don’t Shoot.

When everyone starts to lie down on the floor that only makes the men more conspicuous because of course the men don’t lie down. Guns are nothing like guns on TV. Five of them. All of them big. One of the terrifying men leaps over the counter in a smooth acrobatic motion and he knocks into Eduardo, this guy who works there. He grabs Eduardo’s head. He is pulling on the hair so that the neck is exposed, and I am sure that now Eduardo will die and I think oh please Jesus Christ don’t let him die. Eduardo’s head is being crushed underneath the powerful thick arms of the terrifying man and Eduardo, who has never been big, now looks like a tennis ball in the jaws of a pit bull.

There are black bags and green money, should I do something, I think—and suddenly just like that it’s over. The gaze is broken. The door swings open and it’s over. The terrifying men rush out towards me and I don’t even feel myself step aside, but I feel the cold metal railing at my back and suddenly everyone around stops short and the terrifying men are hustling, they’re shouting and they have deadly guns and they jump into a car that I didn’t notice before, and then, suddenly, like a superhero just in time, a DPS officer screeches out in his campus cruiser and I get the shock of my life: one of the men, my man for all I know, leans from the window of the getaway car and with his gun—bang!—he fires—bang!—at DPS.

Now people panic. Bang! People scream. The people inside Trojan Grounds flood out and scatter and no one pays for what’s in their hands. In the thick crush of kids I don’t see the cars speed away but we can all hear the campus cruiser’s siren and the two sets of tires screeching. We also hear the cannonball crack of guns going bang and that sound is a shock like a white flashlight blasting the black dark. The grande nonfat lattes have been abandoned. At first all the scared faces look fake, like joke masks or peekaboo. People have scraped knees. Some people start to cry, but mostly in the fluorescent-lit night everyone starts to talk at once and in the swirl of stories, every voice jumping and dipping at once, all the kids gasp and shout at each other and point wildly with me and when the police sirens come there’re thirty witnesses to choose from.

The backseat of the patrol car is weird with its handle-less doors; if we crashed and caught fire there would be no escape. We’re out in the night now, away from the floodlit flip-flops and backpacks of campus. I like it though, the way the streets look. I wouldn’t say desolate, it’s true there isn’t much around, but I would say it’s got character. It’s the real L.A. I stare out the window. Hoover, Figueroa, Crenshaw.

When I tell my mother I know just what she’ll say. I know what she thinks of this neighborhood. But what you have to do is look out for the things you wouldn’t notice: razor wire, chain-link fence, miles and miles of concrete gray and patched-up asphalt where somebody decided I live here and I own this and this is my life and then drew the real names of the streets, in reds and purples and blues with yellow and green, jagged lightning-bolt lines and the fancy calligraphy of a tag thrown up so beautifully it makes me want to be here too. I want a camera. I want it on my wall. And a thing like that makes you stop and think. Because no one ever wanted to be here, at this dismal intersection with broken glass and potholes where there’s nothing happening and where the shops are boarded up, and now, well, now I notice it. Now I want to look at it. Now I want that piece of colored beauty with me, too. Downtown, Chinatown, South Central. That’s the real heart of L.A. It’s where L.A. started, before the sprawl, without Rodeo Drive or the Martini Lounge or Westwood, no, here things are packed in tight, it’s urban, tall stone buildings and fancy crumbly Victorian mansions, neon Food 4 Less signs, bus stops and one-way streets. I try to look at it and relax.

“What’s going to happen is this,” one of the two cops spins around to face me and I try to make my heart get slower. “We’re going to pass on by those suspects nice and slow. You recognize these guys, you say the word, simple as that, you hear me?”

“Sure,” I say, “yeah, okay,” and then I think of it and say, “sir.” I read the street signs that we pass. Being in the back of the cop car makes it so I feel bad about the whole thing, like they’re just going to take me to jail and put me there. Lock me up, toss the key, strap me in, and pull the switch. There is no door handle. I couldn’t get out if I wanted to. I’ve been arrested before. Once in Texas. The charges got dropped. But the backseat was the same. I watch the streets and I try to relax. I can hear the police radio bursting into silence, then crackling steady white static.

In our patrol car we emerge out of the dull safe dim night of the street and slice suddenly through the harsh border of cop-light where all shadows are stark and absolute. The blunt aggression of the spotlights makes my eyes ache, and I can only imagine how it feels to have them pointed in your face. When we get to where they were caught, we just coast past like we’re headed someplace else. In the light it’s obviously them. Lined up on their knees. I can tell right away. I am an eyewitness. All I have to do is say yes if it’s them. They shot someone and stole money and it was wrong and I am an eyewitness. I know I have to do what’s right. I don’t want them to see me. My throat feels like I’ve been running.

“Take a good long look,” says the cop-voice, “and we’re just going to swing on by another time here. I’ll keep it nice and slow.”

It’s them, for sure, but it’s different, too. Without the Velcro vests, without the assuredness, they seem like younger brothers of the men who robbed campus. It’s like they’re waterlogged or something. Like they had to jump in a river to get away. Not really that. But something. I see my one. I don’t think he can see me, at least the cops say he can’t see me, but I scrunch lower in the seat just in case. I still want no sudden movements. I still want to show my empty hands. I look right at his eyes to see if I can tell what’s going to happen next and I try to hypnotize him like I did before and it’s even the same spell: Stay calm, I tell him. Be cool. It’s okay.

But obviously, for him, it’s not.

It was really stupid to shoot a DPS officer. The thing is, DPS are all LAPD who either got sick of it, or who want their kids to go to a school like ours, or who were recruited straight out of the academy. But it depends because generally it’s a cushy job, just yelling at rowdy frat boys or whatever, and there’s the tuition remission and the higher pay and it’s way safer than the street, so depending on who it is, a lot of people—hard-ass well-trained people—take campus up on it and opt for Department of Public Safety. But they’re still basically LAPD. They know what’s up. And they have cop guns and everything. Handcuffs, whatever. To make you feel safe. If you’re rich.
We do a three-point turn. We make another pass. It’s a hot night. I feel sick. The smell inside the police car is like an old shoe with too much polish. These guys in the line, they don’t look much older than I am. Maybe a little bit older. It’s them for sure, and I have to say so. I don’t want to, but I do...

...Continued in Mississippi Review, vol. 35 no. 3.