Riot Son, page 14
“Dance with the world,” was how Devon put it, and when Garrett spun down and curled up in a ball, Devon cozied up to his side to provide him some stability.
“The world is spinning,” Garrett whispered with reverence. Everyone knew that in theory, that the planet turned on an axis, but sometimes it really hit you and almost blew your mind.
“Hold onto it,” Devon whispered back, and that was the last they had to say for a while as the sky spit gently down upon them. Garrett held the Earth, and Devon held onto Garrett, and watched his curls morph into turning cogs like the workings of his exquisitely beautiful brain.
30.
The next day, Sunday, was Father’s Day. Devon and Garrett spent the morning having the best hangovers ever, still seeing a strange reality and enjoying heightened synesthesia. Devon could swear the bees in the trees were as synced as the atoms around a nucleus, or the planets around the sun, and Garrett found a Bob Dylan song about a moonshiner that had a harmonica “so sweet I can feel it in my teeth.” Devon knew that feeling.
On the sober drive back to the city in the afternoon, Garrett asked some relevant questions.
“Since it’s Riot Father’s Day, can I ask about your family?”
“You can ask me anything, anytime, my son,” Devon said. He’d asked enough questions about Garrett’s upbringing, mostly because it was so unique, and he’d offered so few details of his own origin story precisely because it was so average and boring. But if the boy was old enough to ask, he was old enough to know, which was something Devon’s father used to say when his kids wondered about what dirty words meant.
Garrett asked, “So what were they, your parents? Jobs, religion, country of origin? What were their first names? Mine were Marian and Paul.”
Devon said, “Mine were Robin and John. I’m so happy they didn’t name me John Junior, it’s such a generic name that it’s what they call male corpses and shit. Devon is a county in England, not that it’s why they chose it, just an Anglo-Saxon fact. A Devon is also a red beef cattle breed.”
“It suits you,” Garrett said.
“Any story behind your name? I’ve wondered about it.”
“My parents chose G as the letter for naming all their children. We go Garrett, Gregory, Guinevere, Gracelena, and Gabriella.”
“Your sisters really won the pot there,” Devon said.
“Yeah, they all got ballerina names, we got Gare and Greg, which sounds like a mechanic’s shop, a rusty one, but it could have been worse,” Garrett said. “The only mockery I got growing up was Garrett the Ferret, that’s nothing.”
“Like water off a ferret’s back,” Devon said with a smirk. They could see tall buildings in the distance now, and knew they were driving back into a teeming hive of upheaval. Two hours in one direction it was crickets and green grass perfuming the air, two hours back it was all gunmetal and grim.
“So your parents though?” Garrett reminded Devon.
“Oh, right. Mom was a substitute teacher sometimes, then cashier at the outlet mall, and now she does some ride-share driving for extra cash, last I heard. My dad was the manager at a hardware store when me and my sister Fi were kids, which was good while it lasted, until they closed that store and his choice was no job or take a similar job in Oklahoma. He took the gig in Oklahoma, but left mom and us in the house in Dallas because Oklahoma, as I’ve said before, is shit. So all during those years when I could have used a man in the house, I had a man in another state. We spent a few summers at his bleak apartment, just a couple weeks in a couple of summers really, and he would come home for big events at first, Christmas and birthdays, but not their wedding anniversary. My parents’ marriage disappeared pretty fast. Mom said she felt like an army wife without the praise. I think they’re still legally married because of joint property, and because neither one wanted to marry anyone else particularly.” Devon shrugged. “That’s pretty much the long and short of it. My sister’s cool, but kind of a dummy at life so far. She takes a few community college classes, but doesn’t think beyond the end of the week, the end of the month. She’s going to wake up at thirty-five or forty someday and be horrified, is my bet. Don’t know what she’ll do after that.”
“I think we’ll all wake up horrified by something someday,” Garrett said. “The real adventure is finding out what will do it to us.”
“Ah, young sage,” Devon said, reaching to pick up Garrett’s hand, bring it to his mouth, and kiss its knuckles. “So wise.”
Devon had a few substitute father figures in his early years. First, men of history who’d gotten rich or powerful by sheer force of will or tremendous luck: L. Ron Hubbard bamboozling people so well with pulp science fiction that he’d founded a church and captained a treasure-hunting ship for years; James Brooke and his family who took and ran their own little colonial kingdom on the northwest coast of Borneo as White Rajahs (they’re buried in Devon, England, that’s how Devon Amis found them). A transition figure was Lawrence of Arabia, whose conquests and curiosities (masochistic and sexual in nature) steered Devon away from imperial scum towards more impressive irregulars: Oskar Schindler who was well known for resisting the Nazis by employing hundreds of Jewish workers in his factory explicitly to keep them from being killed (a clear example of a white man using his power and privilege for good); Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish architect who also quietly and bureaucratically frustrated the Nazis, saving thousands of Jewish people (“saving a nation,” as he phrased it) from being shipped to death camps from Hungary by providing them with forged documents. Each of those Nazi resisters was deemed as Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel, an honorable title for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust when it would have been so much easier to fall in line. Delilah pointed out that Lilly Wust was also on that list, a German housewife who had a lesbian affair with a Jewish woman, Felice Schragenheim, and hid other Jewish women from the Nazis after Felice was ripped from her apartment and slowly killed on a march from Auschwitz. Oskar and Lilly had movies made about them; Raoul’s legacy still needed more press.
In real life, Devon’s healthy male role models were limited. He had a couple of good teachers in middle and high school, friendly and/or kind men who would have been more to him perhaps if they weren’t terrified of being too chummy with any student, boy or girl, lest they be suspected of grooming the young for nefarious purposes. He liked one professor at college quite a bit, mostly because the guy was so bitter he was honest about what a racket academia was, which gave Devon the boost he needed to drop out before his debt was too deep to touch bottom. After that, people started looking to him for fatherly guidance, because there was something about being tall and deep-voiced and bearded and employed that drew a ridiculous amount of deference.
Devon turned around in his late twenties and realized he’d have to become the man he was seeking if he ever wanted to find the dude, and that’s what he’d been trying to do ever since. His efforts showed in: the paternal fondness and tolerance he had for his sister; the helping hand he had for a shell-shocked Wayne David; the take-your-licks attitude he enforced in himself when it came to getting romantically shot down and dismissed by some women, paired with the mutual respect for other women who saw him as a colleague, brother, or friend. All of this, if Devon was being as fatalistic as a Taylor Swift song, made him the exact kind of man he needed to be if he wanted to be attractive, useful, and receptive to someone like Garrett. Maybe it all worked out for the best?
They arrived back at Devon’s place in the twilight, and though it was their own little love-nest and Oskar the cat was happy to see them returned to freshen up his food bowl, it seemed less lovely after their magical oasis in the woods. Before Devon’s feelings could crash in on him though (he could feel the altitude lowering and knew to stop the decline before his mood took a dive), he had a suggestion.
“Hey, how about we move this place around, me and you,” Devon said. “I pretty much just put everything wherever it first landed, we could get a whole new space out of it, if you want.”
Garrett looked around, doing geometry in his head, imagining this thing there, that thing here, etc. He turned to Devon like they were about to run the mother of all heists and said, “I’m in.”
It made sense that the bed stayed on the far side of the room and the sitting area in front of the door and next to the kitchen, as these were the places where guests would naturally stop to eat, socialize. But after that, Garrett had a lot of ideas on how to improve the flow.
“Right now when people sit, the focal points are the door and this dresser, we really don’t need this dresser here. If you can handle it, how about we put the back of the dresser against the bed, like a little dividing wall?”
“Tell me where to move stuff and I’ll move it, consider me Lurch,” he said, trusting that Garrett, with his ancient repertoire of references, would know the Addams family’s manservant by name.
Garrett got out Devon’s meager cleaning supplies to help beat back the dust bunnies that sprang forth when Devon started moving things around. In the end, the bed became a private little bordello, with the dresser blocking the view of the pillows from those who sat on the couch, and the nightstand moved to the other side to create a slim walkway since two people were using the bed now. No more accidental tea-bagging when crawling over one another to leave the sheets; intentional tea-bagging only from hence forth.
Garrett gave the sleeping area a little roof with a shawl that he had by tacking two corners to the wall and the other two corners to the back of the dresser. He repurposed Devon’s LED lights to festoon them over this new tent, concentrated all the weapons in one hidden spot behind the couch, and in the rest of the room he grew the seating area so that the desk was involved in the flow of it all, and the desk chair in easy range of turning to join the living room party. The kid also moved the tiny kitchen table out into the living room to fill the space left void by the dresser, and by the time he was done shifting appliances hither and thither in the kitchen, Devon was done mopping the newly exposed floor, a task which he usually only did about once a year. After they showered, the place felt brand new, and Devon felt much better.
“I like this,” he told Garrett, brushing the kid’s hair like a doll because Garrett said he could, and looking out from the bathroom at their fresh new expanse.
“It’s our place now, isn’t it, dear?” Garrett asked archly, playacting a little heteronormativity as if he suspected that was Devon’s own thought, and he was right.
“Yes, darling,” Devon said, with a quick squeeze of his new bride. “You make my house a home.”
31.
With summer in full riot (literally “riot time” was a synonym for summer, though it was an antiquated phrase referencing wanton merrymaking and revelry, not authoritarian beatdowns), the political tides were starting to turn. After the casual, daylight murder of George Floyd, a certain amount of room was made for outrage. Like loosening a pressure valve, the powers that be knew people had to blow off a little steam when their own abuse was shoved right in their faces like that. Politicians and police took their knees, and said they understood the shock, the anger, the sadness, but like … a whole month? The ghouls at the top were starting to decide that the rest of the country had had enough upset. Let’s get back to that pandemic, huh? Let’s focus on how we can save the precious economy from all these inconvenient, gasping deaths?
Once the National Guard was on the streets and the people were breaking into the halls of power, it was a lubed chute into martial law. From sea to shining D.C., tactical teams started ramping up their storm-trooping, and finally just started black-bagging folks like they always wanted to. Unmarked vans, unmarked uniforms, no reason for detainment, no official arrest: in LAX, in DTX, in NYC, suddenly people were getting grabbed, blindfolded, and taken to windowless undisclosed locations for indefinite periods of time for the purposes of illegal search and interrogations. All of a sudden if any American still felt free, it was because they weren’t paying attention.
Devon tried to feel fine about it. Not fine, exactly, but he tried to stay unruffled. He knew his country was capable of this, had done it before and the only difference this time was the citizenry had pocket cameras, but … perhaps Devon overestimated the amount of Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington naïveté in himself. Perhaps all the lies laid deep in his head about “remember the Alamo” and “shining city on a hill” and “that banner yet waved” still caused him to believe he would never see such Gestapo shit in his own neighborhood, or that if he did, the country would care, would revolt, would smack back that kind of thuggishness like only Americans could: big and loud and proud. But … they didn’t.
Devon wasn’t the only one feeling sick to see supposed freedom lovers back the fash so fast. Wayne David got what he called “the heebie-jeebies” about it, too. He called Devon — actually called him on the ye olde fashioned telephone line — and they talked it over in hushed disgust a couple of days after Garrett and Devon’s forest retreat was over.
Devon took the call in the bathroom, in the dark, so that his summer child could stay in the light and warmth of the kitchen making some vegan lasagna recipe he found online and humming peacefully along to whatever alterna-folk song was playing through his earbuds. Devon didn’t want his dread to spread.
“Are you seeing this shit, too?” Wayne David asked. “I’m not having crazy flashbacks or hallucinations or nothing, right? There’s secret police disappearing people in plain sight?”
“If you’re crazy then we’ve both been smoking the same dope,” Devon assured him. “Where the fuck are those militia assholes now, when we could actually use them? This is the tyranny they said they were training for, where the hell are they?”
“They’re inside the vans, under the helmets,” Wayne David said with a sigh.
“Are you okay, brother?” Devon didn’t like the sound of that sigh, there was too much quit in it.
“I’ve been better, but I’ve also been worse.”
The worst things Wayne David had seen and done during his service included accidentally killing a man with a ricochet round, a whole different hell than killing a man on purpose. Knowing that, Devon wanted to watch out that he didn’t lose his pal to suicide. Wayne David felt the same way about Devon, because he knew about Devon’s worst day in a war zone, too. It happened when an IED exploded the vehicle in front of Devon’s to bits, and a soldier’s lower leg blew back and nearly landed in his lap. Maybe Devon was the one with the foot fixation and not Garrett, some morbid coping mechanism from the trauma of nudging someone else’s separated-but-still-stepping foot with his own, and dissociating from his body so hard he was still not sure he came all the way back in.
“I hear that,” Devon said, and shook his head to try and clear the slate. “Hey, alright, the fall of democracy aside, what’s something nice in your day? Or what’s something you’re looking forward to soon?”
“I am marinating the shit out of some ribs, doing a test drive on a new flavor ratio,” Wayne David said. “If it’s good, I’m making ’em again next week for my mom’s Fourth of July party.”
“Fourth of July, fuck.”
“Right? Seems like they should cancel it this year, all things considered, but you know nobody will, or nobody but you liberals.”
“Hey, liberals celebrate Independence Day, too. We just do it ironically like a Krampus Christmas. Upside-down flags, upside-down crosses, ritual butt stuff, you know the drill.”
“I know where you stick that drill,” Wayne David said. “Right in the ol’ kit and caboodle.”
Devon snorted, and then heard pans slam off of the stove.
“I’ve got to go, I think dinner’s ready,” he told Wayne David.
“Aw, that’s so sweet, the little woman’s cooking dinner for you? Or you know what I mean, not trying to be sexist and homophobic at the same time.”
“I know what you mean, and Garrett’s nonbinary, so you’re not even in trouble. I tell you what,” Devon said, his own accent getting stronger (as it always did) the longer he talked to Wayne David, “I love him so much I might beat him to death and eat him for dinner so he can never leave me.”
“Ah, that’s the Jeffrey Dahmer blue-plate special, is it not?”
“It is!” Devon said. “I’m kidding, I think, but if the news shows up at your door one day asking for your thoughts on your old friend, the Antifa Man-Eater, you’ll know who they mean.”
“And I will politely correct their pronouns or whatever to ‘people-eater,’ out of respect.”
Devon laughed so hard he nearly fell off the toilet seat.
32.
The Militarization of American Police:
How’d That Happen?
From Watt to SWAT
What weapons of war do U.S. “peace” officers have and why? Great question. The answer starts with SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams and ends with the military-industrial complex. During the riotous 1960s, Los Angeles decided they needed an elite squad of city soldiers to help control the unrest. The entity formed and refined between the Watts Riots of August 1965 (when two Black men were pulled over by white police in the Watts neighborhood of L.A. and the incident escalated to a five-day racially-charged melee between cops and the community that took 34 lives) and 1971 when SWAT personnel were given a full-time presence in the Metropolitan Division of the LAPD. This idea spread during the swinging seventies, so that in addition to regular police in cities, there also sprang up tactical units for Nixon’s never-ending war on drugs (and Blacks and commies and hippies — you don’t get the one without the others). In 1984, around 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams, and by 2005, it was about 80% and rising.
