How Things Look Now

I’m sitting in white L.A., reading about one of those crazy dramas that happen in black L.A. where the cops can’t take a joke from a neighborhood joker who is a little high, riding around the neighborhood in his big Chevy Tahoe, playing amplified music for the neighbors who are out on their lawns enjoying Mother’s Day afternoon (the neighbors expecting this guy will eventually run out of gas), and some deputies want to talk to him, and he likes the attention, and they decide they want him to stop, and then there are more deputies, and they start doing that slow chase thing, and then there are still more deputies, and the neighbors start to feel things are getting out of hand, and the deputies decide they have to draw a line, and suddenly bullets are flying everywhere, including into Terry Moore’s house, and past the head of Pedro Mendez, who is standing in his kitchen, and through 73 year-old Doris Bradford’s china cabinet, until — one hundred and twenty rounds later, after the unarmed suspect and a deputy have been taken to the hospital, and the officers express the belief they were responding to gang gunfire, and the Sheriff states: “We have to ask ourselves why did 10 people shoot their weapons as opposed to five” — there I am, as if standing in Mrs. Bradford’s living room, looking through one of the bullet holes (just like you are now), and I realize — with this new style of picture (which is not as concerned with separating subject from object, and seems much less like you are looking at something flat or 2-D) — I actually see where the van and the crazy corral of cops got so badly mixed up out there on the corner — even if it is raining this day, and it wasn’t at the time — and that this is how things look now.

The story.

(image: Brian Vander Brug. May 10, 2005 in The Los Angeles Times, p. A1)