Terence had been so worked up over his car. But all that went away, he said. Everybody there — police, onlookers, all of East Oakland — turned like a kaleidoscope. He felt like he’d taken LSD, and Terence doesn’t do drugs, not even Novocain at the dentist. But there he was in the middle of hell, with his poker face and the ghosts of Emmet Till, Nat Turner, and Huey Newton all looming larger than billboards. He found himself cheering for the brother, for Lovelle Mixon, for Oaktown, for the convict, for the guy who had murdered a cop, and by the end of the day would take out a total of four.
March 21, 2009, 1:08 p.m.
The first cop that Mixon shot knew him, and knew he was a gun runner. It was a routine traffic stop, but it’s unlikely the cops knew his level of desperation. Every cop generally knows, on a first-name basis, the criminals on his beat, and the head criminal knows who’s short on the money. They’re in it together, this one pays that one, that one pays this one. That’s why there are so many street deaths in prison, acts of retribution. I think Mixon was buying time. He wanted to bag up money and weapons, go to LA, and disappear. A great many people in the inner cities have no ID, no SSN — they’re nonentities. You think you fingerprinted everybody, but you can’t fingerprint the entire population. He probably knew that some of his schemes would lead him back to jail, where he was already a marked man. So that brings up — how did they know precisely where he was and who they had stopped? One of his known refuges was his sister’s apartment, where the second battle took place.
Incarceration was not the major problem for Mixon. He was trying to avoid retribution. For an African or Latino man from the hood, incarceration is not the worst thing that can happen. You find friends, associates, and mentors in the prison system. It’s just another neighborhood when you’re sent to jail, leave one hood and move on to the next. Three squares and a rack on the inside, three squares on the outside. He didn’t kill the first two cops because he was afraid to go to jail, he had decided to affect his own retribution. Understanding the end was near, he did not want to depart this world alone. He knew those cops had been sent by his superiors; he was just a pawn in the game now, traded off for something else. How many pimps are killed so that someone can acquire their hos? In the arms trade, how many runners are killed so that someone can acquire their guns?
In the Warsaw ghetto, how many Jewish husbands were turned in so the snitches could take their wives? It’s an old story, been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. Squeal on somebody so you can get their land. Mixon’s death was part of an old script, not such an individual thing as people thought. The things that didn’t add up, though, are Who did he know? and When did he know them?
March 21, 2009
For people whose Saturdays start at four a.m., like mine, that Saturday was a day like any other in Oaktown. Weekend commuters tunneled north and south beneath the stretch of earth called Richmond — El Cerrito — Albany-Berkeley-Oakland — San Leandro — Hayward-Fremont before going into the long, submerged BART tunnel in San Francisco Bay. At intervals, the snake pops up and offers a tour through the backside of Oakland and its lower bowel, East Oakland, from which those looking east can glimpse the Mediterranean hillside that runs for eighty miles. Tourists making their way to the airports pass under downtown Oakland, speaking in German, French, or Japanese about the wine country, the mud baths, and the crooked street in San Francisco which they navigated in rental cars, with pedals on the left instead of the right. But if they see East Oakland, it’s because of Ron Dellums — or in spite of Ron Dellums. As a young Berkeley councilman, Dellums argued for putting BART underground so the residents of his lovely town wouldn’t have to see the snake crawling through it. So here’s some cabbie wisdom for you: past, present, and future all exist in the same moment. Berkeley got BART underground, every other place got it aboveground, and my man Ron ended up the mayor of Oakland. Folks like to knock the boss, I don’t care if they’re white, black, or Mexican. That Dellums, he’s asleep at the wheel. Folks, Jerry Brown had already sold off downtown Oakland. He said he would get it built up like Rio de Janeiro, tall buildings downtown, flatlands the same. Nothing left for Dellums to do. End of discussion.
People say Lovelle Mixon’s going to hell because he killed four people. Hell must be a helluva place. There’s death on practically everybody’s hands, one way or another. The police chief of Seattle said recently that soldiers follow orders, police officers make decisions, and police officers are not soldiers. Something happened when the police heard that the first two cops had been gunned down that Saturday. That’s when the clusterfuck started. That same police chief said we’re a nation of 300 million guns. When they put on the Kevlar vests, you knew the SWAT teams were about to come in the DMZ. The police stopped being police and turned into soldiers. But who was giving them orders?
The po-po, cabbies, neighbors — they all knew 2755 74th Avenue. Notoriously, a woman was found strangled with her own drapery cord. Police knew it was her ex, but they classified it as suicide. I never heard of suicide by drapery cord. I rode her around a lot. She could buy out a dollar store with a twenty and still have cab fare left over. She didn’t take her own life. Murder, yes. Suicide, no. But the po-po say what’s convenient and let the badasses roam wild.
Here’s a parable: I call it the Parable of the Two Brothers, both dead now. Before Brother #2 died, having been a drug dealer, user, convict, hustler, parolee, he went around in his last days to see his kids, grands, and say goodbye. Even went to his social worker, caught up to her on his old stomping grounds, heard her telling a user, “If you can, stop using between tests and not just the day of the tests.” Brother #2 told her, “Scolding won’t work. Give him something he can’t get out here.” She didn’t know what that could be. Brother #2 said, “You can’t give money, or drugs, or women. Give him praise. That’s what you gave me.”
Brother #1 was dying, same period. Drugs, they shorten your lifespan, don’t matter if you’re a rock star or a hustler. Brother #1 hustled me out of three hundred dollars twenty years ago, so you could say I’m biased. But in his last days — he had AIDS — he kept travelling to Africa, back and forth, back and forth. Word is he had women over there under his ladies’ man spell. I didn’t buy that. It’s just that AIDS is so out of control there that he didn’t face a stigma.
Brother #1 and Brother #2, different paths to the grave, one got more wisdom than the other, but he had done more dirt on the whole. They went the same, six feet under. Which one’s going to the crowded place?
March 27, 2009
Here’s the definition of awesome. Twenty thousand police and citizens converging in Oaktown for the funeral of those four dead cops. They came from all over the country. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And all 815 OPD attended, according to the Chronicle. So who was minding the shop? Fifteen law enforcement agencies from Alameda County, CHP’s, and local police departments. Bagpipes, a twenty-one-gun salute from a military cannon, and of course a couple dozen helicopters buzzing overhead, more than the usual four circling the hood. Ah, man, and the OPD told Dellums, Shut your black mouth and sit your black ass down. They wouldn’t let him speak. If we have to let you be here, then be unheard. Word is that the mayor had mispronounced the officers’ names at a previous memorial. The PBA didn’t want that again.