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“You mean Lin Park.”
He raised one boomerang-shaped eyebrow at me. “Yeah-huh. That’s right.” Then his gaze moved up to the knot on my forehead and he nodded again. “Well, well…”
“Yeah,” I told him, seeing he had put it together. “Maybe you should eat more fish, Ed.”
He showed me the teeth. “Don’t need to be smart, man, I’m almost a lieutenant. I just need to cover my ass.” He pointed his head at the Ralph’s bag. “Don’t you leave my ass hanging out, honky.”
“Sure. So Lin changed Hector?”
“Not the way she changed you, Billy.” He snorted. “The way she changed him hurt a lot more. Lasted longer. Made him start thinking about being black, and that’s no way to get a career to happen.”
“What career?”
He gave me his devilish smile and leaned back. “You got to understand how important it is for a black politician to be able to say he’s from the ’hood, he grew up in the ghet-to so he understands what it’s like to be really black.
“Roscoe knew that, and he got Hector to understand it. They were all set for that boy to be the first black president, Billy, and they were serious about it. You want to be major league, you got to start young these days. Ain’t nobody walks in off the street and throws a perfect knuckleball.
“Then he meets this Korean girl and the whole beautiful plan is in the shithouse. ’Cause her daddy’d rather see his girl dead than doing the horizontal boogie with a black boy. So now Hector’s gotta think about Black Identity, Black Pride and Black Culture, Racial Context, the Politics of Assimilation, and the Meaning of Color.” He rattled it off like it was a list of classes he had taken at L.A. City College, and maybe it was. But he meant it, too.
I shook my head. “Kid’s what—sixteen? And he’s thinking like that?”
Ed started to look serious. “He’d already been thinking that way, Billy, that’s the point. But now he wasn’t thinking about it tactically—he was thinking what it meant. Why it meant that, what he could do about changing it.”
He looked down at the table, almost like he was embarrassed. “Boy started out Jesse Jackson. All of a sudden he’s turning into Martin Luther King.” He shrugged. “And all he ever wanted was a background.”
“Which he thought he would get by hanging with the homeys.”
Ed nodded. “Until he met Lin.” The waitress set another beer in front of Ed and he poured it into his glass. He slurped the beer. “Now this is a girl who is not in any way a black person.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
“I bet you did. That would explain the lump on your head.” He poured the rest of the beer into his glass. It fit now. “On the other hand, it occurs to some folks that Hector is in no way a Korean person. And so now we got a situation.”
“Romeo and Juliet.”
“More like Young John Kennedy and Juliet. ’Cause he can’t even get in the door with the Koreans, and since an Asian girl does not fit the presidential agenda he’s getting no support about it from home.”
“So he’s between a rock and a hard place.”
Ed snorted. “Yeah, Billy. Either that or the devil and the deep blue sea. Whichever’s worse.”
“I never could tell the difference. And then the riots happen.”
“Right on cue. Right when Hector is standing at the bottom of his soul, looking for a way up. And hey bop-a-ree-bop”—he snapped his fingers—“there’s his ladder…” He took a long pull on his beer. When he set the glass down again and wiped his lips with the back of his hand his face was serious. “A lot of guys could get cynical here and say Hector just went crazy for some pussy.”
“You don’t think so.”
“No, Billy, I don’t. I like to think there was more to it than that. A man can be changed by love, but—”
He saw my look and shrugged. “You call me a romantic if you like, but I still think there’s a difference between love and pussy-crazy.”
“Sure,” I said, seeing that Ed was a little embarrassed. “Probably a matter of degree.”
He waved it off. “Point is, the boy was for real. You don’t face down a mob if you bluffing. ’Cause they’ll roll right over you and grab onto that new Sony Watchman you standing in front of. And that’s what Hector was doing. He was facing ’em down, making ’em think what they were doing and what that meant, how the rest of the world would see them for it. He was taking a mob and turning it into a group of people again, just talking to ’em. Word was all over the city, everybody knew about Hector. New Times was working on a cover story on him. What he was doing—it was like magic, man, and it got to you like nothing I ever saw, like maybe only that I-been-to-the-mountain speech—”
There was a catch in his voice and Ed stopped talking, either because he was aware that he was being sincere, emotionally involved in his memory of Hector, and he didn’t sound like himself—or maybe because the food arrived and he was looking forward to another beer and a second pot of peppers.
I knew Ed Beasley about as well as one cop can know another, and I had never seen him like this before. Something about Hector had gotten to him. Ed had grown up in the worst of South Central L.A. and spent his whole life since in the LAPD. If something could get to Ed and move him like that, it was for real. It could get to anybody.
