Call It What It Is
This week and last we have been in the Federal Court Building on 1st Street. If you are ever in downtown LA, you should go. It's a beautiful modern building of marble and glass and wood, and upstairs on the 4th floor there’s a collection of photographs by Herman Leonard, one of the best jazz photographers of all time. Almost none of the photos are posed --though there are a few still-lifes: Lester’s hat, Billie’s ankle cuff high heels-- mostly they are the artists in action: singers mid-note, musicians leaning against each other laughing, players listening to some out-of-frame angel. But the way they are lit seems like more than chance, stunning and emotional and heavenly. It’s a strange choice to have such a collection in a place where men are brought in shackles, cops in uniform fresh and clean and shiny, pretending that what they do is right. But maybe these musicians are the exact people to watch over all this: artists and their work that contain so many things at once.
I have been writing this piece since last January. I pick it up, add a little and then put it away. I don’t know what I’m trying to get at. It seems like I’m just listing one bad thing after the next. For what? I started out thinking it was a picture of working in a civil rights law office, how all of our cases have to do with police misconduct, which seems like an offensively wrong word to describe what most of the cases are really about. Why don’t we call it what it is? Murder of body and spirit. But legal language is purposely confusing, even the term murder doesn’t mean what you think it means. You have to prove intent, malice, sanity. I thought about qualified immunity and the mafioso blue code of silence, gangs, our bodies and skin, and how racism is at the root of everything. Huge and daunting subjects. What could I say about something like that? In the end, I kept it like the photos: captured moments that contain many things.
3 Snaps Thursday
1.
Yesterday I accidentally saw a nude photo of our client after he had been shot in the belly. It was in the middle of a file of his medical records that I had been reading, a photo of him lying on a hospital table, graphic and gory and red, so much red. I leaned back from my desk. “Jesus!”
There was a moment of silence where I heard the echo of my voice and then, from his office across the hall, Michael said, “You’re gonna have to get used to that.” He has been saying this to me for the past 2 years. He has said it so many times I wonder if he’s being sarcastic, but that’s not his style. “Which photos are you looking at?…Anderson?” He asks, slightly irritated.
“Roberts” I say, “Looks like he got hit by a cannonball,”
“It wasn’t a cannonball,” he said, “it was an artillery shell.”
“Okay,” I call out. “Okay,” I say again to myself. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. Gary, his name is Gary, is alive at least. The incident happened three years ago. He can walk. He can laugh. He can ride his motorcycle again when he gets out of prison. But it feels strange to see him nude and cadaver-like, when I just spoke with him briefly a few days ago.
2.
The phone rings and I reach for it with one hand while I try to x-out the photo of Gary and his traumatic gunshot wound with exposed bowel without looking directly at it. It’s a guy who is looking for representation. He starts right in with a few details: 3 days ago, cousin, LAPD, running away, shooting. I ask him if he can hold one minute and he says yes. I get up to close the door. Sometimes these calls can take a while. I get some water, my notepad and a pen. I write the date and Wrongful Death at the top of the page. I hate that I already know what this is.
I pick up the phone again. Hi, I say, Okay. Let’s start with your name.
“Brandon,” he says.
By now I can almost write the story without hearing it, part of it anyway. Two characters, one scene. One person does this, one person does that, this happens, then that happens and then one person is dead. It follows a pretty tight script. But I want to know about the people. I want to know what they say and do, the incidents that led up to the event. Brandon tells me his cousin’s name was Charles and he had been homeless for 8 years. He once had a landscaping business and a house and family, but then he had a bad breakup and his twin sister died from cancer and two months later their mom went, and it all hit him hard. “He lost everything.”
Charles lived behind L-Bird’s liquor store in a tent. Everyone knew him there. He used to hold the door for people, say Howyadoin! Even the cops knew him. He swept in front of the store and kept the parking lot clean. Sometimes a family from San Marino came to pick him up to work in their garden. It often seemed like he would turn things around and then he didn’t. Charles’ sons went to the High School down the street and they were embarrassed that the guy at L-Bird’s Liquor, the neighborhood homeless guy, was their Dad. “They are kids,” he says it in a way, just those three words, that make it a whole story. Brandon pauses for a moment. He can’t speak. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he clears his throat. He tells me that the sons had actually visited Charles the day before he was shot just to say hello and that they wanted to give him some money but Charles wouldn’t take it. “He called me from L-Bird’s to tell me how proud they made him,” he says. “He would never take their money,” he tells me like he wants me to know, and then he pauses. Five seconds pass, then ten. “Sorry,” he says, again.
“I’m sorry too,” I say.
He goes on to say that after his sons’ visit, Charles went on a hard binge. He drank for 2 days straight calling Brandon at all hours. Brandon was exhausted and stopped picking up. The following day he got a call from the police asking him to come to the station to tell him that Charles had attacked a woman with a pair of scissors and then came towards the cops and was shot in the head. There was a long pause after that. I could hear Brandon sniffling and then blow his nose.
One whole wall of my office is glass and I looked out of it into the parking lot, our building was once a livery stable, then a hotel, then a whore house before being turned into an office building. I wasn’t thinking this then but I’m thinking it now: so many bad decisions are made in one brief single moment.
Finally he said, quietly, “They didn’t have to do that, you know?”
3.
Normally if a potential client goes towards a cop with deadly weapon, it’s a no. There’s not much of a chance we could get anywhere with that case. But because Charles had a history with this particular police department, it was a maybe. And because we also had a history with this police department in a previous case, it was a maybe plus. And what pushed into we will look into this territory was that Charles was dead. That doesn’t seem right, but that’s how it is. Murder of someone’s emotional well-being rarely makes it to court, even though that happens all the time.
A while back a guy named Jesus called and started right in telling me about getting pulled over last year with his girlfriend who was driving. When the cops saw him in the car they said, “Where’s the gun homie,” and then made them both get out. They handcuffed his girlfriend and before they handcuffed him they bent 3 of his fingers back until there was a pop. “I wasn’t even fighting,” he said, “They thought I was in a gang.”
“Are you in a gang?” I asked, kind of rhetorically.
“Well yeah, but I’m 47. I don’t do anything bad.”
“I just need to know all the details,” I said. I didn’t want him to feel wrong. “They still shouldn’t have done what they did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They shouldn’t have. I wasn’t resisting.”
I listened to the problems he faced now because of what they did even though I knew at that point I knew Michael would never agree to representing this guy. Not because he was in a gang, the LAPD is a gang, but because too much time had passed.
1 Again.
I had to get back to Gary because his deposition was coming up and I needed to double check the exhibits. I had to organize the videos from the ring camera on the front of Gary’s house of the cops walking up to his house, trying to break down the door, first with a battery ram and then with an artillery weapon, before Gary was shot. I can slow down the video to get it frame by frame, so Michael can say there, that’s the proof.
Even though I don’t watch videos where I can see someone getting shot or injured, of course my mind imagines the whole thing. I imagine Gary waking to the sound of a battering ram against the front door, walking/running across his living room. I see him reaching for the doorknob and then I watch his face start putting it all together. And just as he’s about to open his mouth to speak, something connects with the flesh of his belly and Gary is slow-motion-thrown backwards, feet out from under, arms clawing, reaching to hold something with the slow, graceful movement of a magnificent sea creature.
But of course I don’t know any of that. And all of details of the case I do know, the fact that the arrest was for a non-violent crime, that Gary had no criminal record, that he was a Hell’s Angel, that it’s 4 am and he was awakened from a sound sleep, that the cops were either scared or pumped up or exhausted or all of the above, are separate from the video. A fact that seems impossible, and is impossible. And yet. Sometimes the camera catches the exact moment, one you might not have expected, that puts everything into place.
For more info about the photographer Herman Leonard, go here.
Some made lives making music. Others lost their lives, physically or metaphorically, in confrontations that never should have happened. The story of Charles, who didn’t want to take his kids’ money, will stay with me. Your writing is a powerful act of witnessing.
Not even that photo of the incomparable Billie Holiday prevents this from feeling such a sad catalogue of injustice and human misery. But her voice always gives us hope. As does yours, Deirdre.