Blood's a rover

3/8/70

My daughters are playing in the next room. Four-year-old Dina is watching fifteen-month-old Eleanora steady herself on a large rubber beach ball and teach herself to walk. At some point, she’ll become jealous of Ella’s rapid progress and push her to the floor; Ella will cry, get up and keep going. It will be the third or fourth time this has happened. I reprimanded Dina the first time. She blamed Dwight for her actions. She had overheard Dwight telling me that Ella was quickly becoming the dominant little girl, and Dina had better “log some payback while she’s able.”

I should have reprimanded Dwight for the statement. He said those words some months ago, and it’s too late for reprimands now. I’m looking back at the past year’s journal pages and feeling disparate events cohere. Dwight has been affording me greater and greater latitude in my political actions and has been bailing out my politically jailed friends at an ever-accelerating pace. The matchup of dates makes it all the more evident: Dwight’s remarkable generosity begins the moment he tells me that Joan has disappeared.

Of course, they are lovers. Of course I could not tell Dwight that Joan’s vanishing acts are very well established, because I have lied to him about the breadth of my friendship with Joan. Dwight asked me about Joan and the USC Freedom School several months ago. Of course I lied about it; of course Dwight knew I was lying. We are in far too deeply with each other to issue reprimands or otherwise revise the rules of a duplicitous, usurious and compartmentalized union. The odd thing? I find myself approving of Dwight and Joan as lovers. I love Dwight more than I ever have, because Joan has served to instill doubt in him. Dwight is beginning to erode. I pray that the process will extend and change him gently, and not take him to grief and madness. A very real fear attends this prayer offering. I am more fully realizing that Joan manipulated me into a meeting with Dwight. Toward what end? This prayer must include all other persons who inhabit their hellishly self-willed orbit.

I had lunch with Joan shortly before she went away. She hinted at a tropical destination and told me she had left Dwight some paperwork. She said that she hoped it wouldn’t go bad, like ‘51, ‘56 and ‘61. I did not ask Joan to embellish her statement. I mentioned Dwight and his penance money and hinted at his personal catastrophe in 1957. Joan told me that she knew the story, but refused to tell me how she knew. And in that moment, I knew that Joan loved Dwight sans all political agendas.

I cried a little. Joan hugged me and gave me a beautiful emerald.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 3/8/70. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles,

Fear time.

It’s fear time now, and it’s been fear time for a while. I’ve been fearful for so long that it’s become almost banal. I’m now hyper-alert to the signs of panic expressed by my body. Months of general fear have made me more sensitive to acute and justified fear. I’ve been surviving and buying advantage moment to moment.

An anonymous informant bought me time with Mr. Hoover and Mr. Holly. A nineteen-snitch package, graciously attributed to me. It bought Mr. Holly time with Mr. Hoover, I’m sure of that. It validates OPERATION BAAAAAD BROTHER, which buys me more time to pursue armored-car heist leads. The MMLF has lost interest in me over time. MMLF members see me at the clubs, alone or with my BTA brothers. They avert their eyes, spit on the floor or make obscene gestures. There are shoving matches as both groups co-opt space at peace marches. I’m apprehensive more than fearful in those contexts. I monitor my body for signs of panic and realize that I’ve been granted time.

Time liberates me and constrains me. A friend on LAPD told me that LAPD had secretly terminated my employment. Mr. Holly and Wayne obviously knew this and never told me. This makes me a Federal operative with no police sanction and no assured position within law enforcement once my assignment concludes. Last week, I found bug wires in my apartment. I did the prudent thing: I let them sit. It had to have been instigated by Wayne and Mr. Holly. They do not trust me. Their distrust is fully justified. I have been very careful in whom I talk to in my home and what I talk about, in person and on the telephone. The discovery of the bug-tap apparatus vouched my justified paranoia and confirmed me in my role of apostatized ex-cop black militant. I assumed that role the moment I rented this apartment and have embellished it with greater and greater flair every moment since. Men with the Bent have to be cautious. I behave as if I do not have the Bent and have done so since Wayne made his “faggot” remark. In my heart, I feel like a radicalized ex-cop, weighing his options in all arenas. My actor’s sense of time and identity has proven invaluable here.

Wayne and I have smoked dope a few times. We discussed the oddly different and oddly similar metaphysical states of our lives. It was in many ways the most beguiling interchange of my life.

Time has been bestowed on me. I am probably ghetto-safe because Scotty Bennett wants me ghetto-safe. The revised ghetto word is that I may be a police informant. This is Scotty’s protracted vengeance on me, I’m sure. The worrisome thing is that I see no vindictive punch line or conclusion in sight. Scotty greatly enhanced his ghetto-legend status late last year. In the process, he dealt a severe blow to black nationalism in Los Angeles and bought me more time on the score-heroin front. There were Panther-pig dustups in October and December. Both incidents received wide publicity. A full dozen Panthers have now disappeared, six per incident. Scotty fulfilled his promise of August ‘68. Reprisal, deterrent, vengeance enacted and time purchased for me. The upshot? More BTA bewilderment, fear and indecisiveness. The growing notion that smack is heat we don’t need. I’ve got the sense that MMLP is reacting similarly. And, nuggets of gold in with the dirt: more and more rank-and-file brothers think that dealing smack is wrong.

With gifts of time handed me, I stepped up my queries on the heist. I must have said, “Say, man, you remember that armored-car job back in ‘64?” a million times and received a million dumb-struck looks and bullshit answers. I have mentioned Reginald Hazzard and described his tenuous resemblance to the burned-face robber an equal number of times, with the same results. Then two things clicked, independently.

I was engaged in a routine phone-drop talk with Mr. Holly. He casually mentioned Scotty’s brutal grilling of Jomo Clarkson. Scotty asked Jomo a string of pointedly non sequitur questions pertaining to the heist. Mr. Holly found this confusing.

It sat with me for weeks. Aaah, Scotty-what do you know and what aren’t you telling us? Shortly after that, I bailed Ezzard Jones out of jail twice. The first time was a drunk-driving beef. I pulled Ezz out of 77th Street Station and took him out drinking from there. A week later, Ezz was popped for drunk-and-disorderly. I filled out paperwork in the University Station squad-room, was left alone briefly and took advantage of it.

I checked the Unsolved 211 file cabinet and found a routing sheet for the heist. I memorized the divisional record number, called LAPD R amp;I and impersonated a cop. The clerk consulted the master file and came back on the line. She said, “I’m sorry, Officer. No such DR number exists.”

And I knew then:

Scotty had a private file stash. He was pulling filed reports in from throughout the LAPD’s geographical divisions and was hoarding the information for himself.

I am certain of it. There can be no other explanation.