Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Here, Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles, relates how he and his staff had drafted “four messages” for public consumption, “depending on the verdict” (85). Strictly as “a precautionary measure” they had one prepared for “an acquittal on all counts,” but “it was something we didn’t seriously think could happen” (86). It did happen and the “message” was “essentially […] to express my outrage at this verdict of not guilty for all of these officers” and make a plea to the people to express their own “dissatisfaction with the jury verdict […] in a verbal fashion and don’t engage in violence” (86). Bradley admitted it was a tall order, given that the verdict “simply appeared to be something completely […] disconnected with the TV shots that you saw” (86). In rendering this testimony, we find a mayor who not only understands the “disconnect” between the marshaled evidence and the trail verdict but who positions himself as completely at odds with the justice system within his own city. If it is a self-exoneration of a kind, Bradley’s remembrance also amounts to a frightening exposure of systematic breakdown.

The title of this section refers to the separate “messages” the mayor’s office had prepared “depending on the verdict” in the Rodney King trial (85).

This section’s voice is Richard Kim, a Korean-American appliance store owner. Like Chung Lee (“Riot”), Kim finds his store under siege, with hundreds of people seeking shelter from gunfights in the streets. “So it was like going to war,” Kim reports, and this is the testimony which best approaches the title of this entire act, “War Zone” (87). Kim offers a minute description of the gun battles in the streets, in which he used his van as a barricade and exchanged fire with three or four people shooting handguns outside his store. He succeeds in dispersing them to a collective sigh: “pa-chew” (89). More of a bang-bang account (literally) than the more contemplative interviews which precede and succeed it, Kim testifies to the war-like mayhem visited upon innocent civilians during the riots and, once again, the Korean-American community in particular.

The title of this section refers to Kim’s exhortation to the armed looters taking aim at his stereo equipment store (88).

TV writer Joe Viola has just mailed in his daughter’s college registration to Berkeley and he’s standing at the corner in the middle of the afternoon when a car zooms by and a kid leans out the window to show his “nine” [millimeter handgun], saying, “‘I’m going to kill you, motherfucker’” (91). One can sense the breathless incredulity as Viola relives the moment: “Right here, right on the corner! I sat back down like my ass was filled with cement, right on the corner, right here, ‘butta boom’” (91). As gang-laden cars pull into a nearby parking lot, Viola runs for his home, to get his wife and kids, conjuring the image of an ordinary, middle-classwhite man caught up in the opening stages of a city-wide riot. Viola’s recollection causes us to reflect on how neatly we are ever able to steer clear of the social traumas of the society we live in. The exasperated question, ‘How could this happen here?’—“Right here, right on the corner!”—asked in other interviews hardly needs asking here.

The title of this section refers to theprecise spot where Viola sank to the curb in the emotional fallout of having a gun pointed at him and his life threatened as the L.A. riot got underway (91).

Conjuring a scene of “war,” like Richard Kim (“Don’t Shoot”), the interview with Judith Tur, Ground reporter, LA News Service also supplies the title for this entire act. The interview is also designed to open out the Reginald Denny beating, which, like the Rodney King beating, was also caught on video and quickly became the iconic image of the L.A. riots and another rendering of senseless racial injustice, this time in reverse (black-on-white versus white-on-black). Thus begins the first of three successive interviews offering various takes on the Denny incident and culminating with Denny’s own reflections. (Paul Parker’s “Trophies” offers a fourth.)

It is Tur’s peculiar luck to happen upon the Reginald Denny beating in progress and to be responsible for shooting the resultant video. She is overhead, in a helicopter, capturing the scene for the LA News Service. Her bearing of witness is a responsible, dutiful act. Others, whom she spies taking videos in the street, look on with less worthy motives: “here’s another animal,” she remarks, “videotaping this guy [Reginald Denny, getting beaten]. These people have no heart. These people don’t deserve to live” (96). It is both the first naked expression of race hatred by a white protagonist in the play and also the first inversion of victimhood, exchanging violence visited upon blacks by white-led law enforcement for white people placed under siege by opportunistic blacks acting as “animals” and “taking advantage” in South-Central (95-97).

Something has gone haywire in American society, as Mike Davis suggested in the opening Act, only for Tur, it is not wreathed with nostalgia or any sense of hope but rather with panic and disgust. It has occasioned a sense of complete (personal) divestiture: “I mean this is not my United States anymore. This is sicko. Did you see him shoot him? Did you see that? (Rewinds the tape) This is like being in a war zone” (96). Having faced personal adversity and having worked hard under humbling circumstances, Tur has no sympathy for the plight of inner-city blacks: “Let them go out and work for a living. I’m sick of it. We’ve all had a rough time in our life” (97). Having formerly opposed guns and violence, she’s now reversed course: “I don’t hate [guns] anymore. If I’m threatened, my life is threatened, I’m not even going to hesitate” (98). Just as Tur has reversed course, so we are led to ask anew: Who is under siege? Who is the victim? Who is the angry party? For Tur, the answer is white people, like herself: “I hate to be angry—and what’s happening, the white people are getting so angry now that they’re going back fifty years instead of pushing ahead” (98). To return to Jason Sanford’s testimony, it is a good question who “they” is here: the black community, presumably, who, by this reading, are letting white people down by their failure to evolve and progress.

The title of this section refers to a bird’s-eye view of the Reginald Denny beating (96).

This section’s voice is Allen Cooper, a.k.a Big Al, who is an ex-gang member, ex-convict, and activist in the national truce movement. For Cooper, Rodney King and Reginald Denny are both sideshows to a larger, structural problem that continues to go unaddressed. Echoing Cornel West’s emphasis on “delusory foundations,” he claims, “This Reginald Denny thing is a joke […] a delusion to the real problem” (102). There is not much optimism here that such delusions will be seen past. A sort of streetwise Cornel West, Big Al demands attention to the truths, and perversions, of the historical record: “You gotta look at history, baby, you gotta look at history […] Anything is never a problem ‘til the black man gets his hands on it. It was good for the NRA to have fully automatic weapons, but when the Afro-American people got hold of ‘em, it was a crime!”(101)Cooper offers that those guns were brought into the black community “for a reason: to entrap us!” (102).

Cooper looks on events with a jaded eye: the media took something that happens everyday within “the country jail system” and “handled [it] like a soap opera”. “It ain’t nothin’ new,” he asserts, “It was just brought to light this time” (100). And even at that, all it brought to light was that “It doesn’t mean a thing. Now if that was an officer down there getting’ beat, it would a been a real national riot thing” (101). The trouble is too much focus on the individual: “It’s not Rodney King. It’s the ghetto” (101). And it is conditions within the ghetto (“so dangerous”), rather than any sort of racial preconditioning, which necessitate firearms and inspire violence—but “you got to live here to see what’s goin’ on” (101).

The title of this section refers to the level of violence and danger in LA’s black neighborhoods, a level high enough that even a “bubble gum machine man” feels compelled to carry a pistol (101).

Doubtlessly the most famous victim of the riots and one of the most identifiable figures in the whole string of affairs stemming from the Rodney King beating, Reginald Denny’s long and somewhat strange testimony is a central panel in Twilight. He spends time reliving the incident, but the most significant element is what Denny takes out of it: a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation and common humanity, the “common thread in our lives” (108).

Denny fantasizes about building a “happy room” of racial harmony, where he will go to seek solace and camaraderie. In it, he will display “all the riot stuff and it won’t be a blood-and-guts memorial,” but rather “a happy room” full of all the “love and compassion and the funny notes and the letters from faraway places […] It’ll just be fun to be in there […] and there won’t be a color problem in this room” (110-11). Denny excoriates his fellow whites, the “‘selfish little shit’” who will rely on others when the chips are down and then “soon as he’s better he’ll turn around and rag on ‘em” (112). Denny says, “I just want people to wake up. It’s not a color, it’s a person” (112).

The title of this section refers to Denny’s perceived brotherhood with all the other people who experienced or witnessed the riots (108).

This section’s voice is Captain Lane Haywood, a twenty-year veteran of the Compton Fire Department. Haywood testifies to the strain L.A.’s firefighting crews were under during the riot. He and his own crew thought they were coming under fire while putting out blazes on the rooftops of burning buildings. To their astonishment, Haywood and his men observe the small effort made by police to stop the looting of Compton: “you had looters breakin’ in, breakin’ the windows of Pep Boys, tryin’ to get in, With the police there […] ” (114). The city is boiling over: “I’ve never seen so much hostility in females. In my life” (115). In a statement echoing Stanley Sheinbaum’s regarding the LAPD (“These Curious People”), Haywood makes clear that his firefighters are poorly supported by their superiors; for example, bulletproof vests, shipped in by the FBI, were never offered to the Fire Department. Under normal circumstances, the fire chief didn’t want his personnel to wear vests “because he claims it will telegraph a message to the citizens that Compton is dangerous”; instead, their vests should be their “badges,” and “a badge of courage” (116). Haywood is only willing to take that so far: “I have a responsibility to my family to come home. I take the dangers that relate to fire and so forth […] but the gunfire, you know, that’s not a part of this” (117).

The title of this section refers to the firefighter’s badge, which should serve in place of a bulletproof vest as a symbol of his security (116).

In one of the most amazing stories in the play, Elvira Evers, a general worker and cashier for the Canteen Corporation, recounts how she and her unborn child survived an abdominal gunshot during the looting as both baby and bullet (lodged in the baby’s elbow joint) were simultaneously removed from her body. Incredibly, Evers’s personal physician was on hand when she was wheeled in to emergency and, miraculously, if the baby “didn’t [get the bullet] caught in her arm, me and her would be dead” (123). Yet another victim who was neither black nor white, Evers, a Panamanian woman attempting to make it in Los Angeles, derives a larger message from the whole experience: “So it’s like open your eyes, watch what is goin’ on” (123). While she touts a sense of awareness, Evers also serves to reveal once more the truly multiracial character of Los Angeles, and of the United States. As another victim neither black nor white, Evers gives the lie to the prevailing black-and-white narrative of race relations.

The title of this section refers to Evers’s desire to have her baby daughter fit in, even if only by appearance—in this case by piercing her ears in infancy (122).

This section’s voice is Julio Menjivar, a lumber salesman and driver. Menjivar offers a second take on the LAPD’s willingness, “black and white,” to allow looting to go unchecked in South Central (see also “A Badge of Courage”), the officers laughing as they “passed by and said it in the radio: Go for it. Go for it, it’s yourneighborhood” (124). But while the LAPD looks the other way, and even spurs the riot on, the National Guard swings in and starts rounding people up. Menjivar, an El Salvadoran by birth, is one of them; thrown to the ground, taunted with “ugly things,” and taken away in handcuffs, he bears witness to his wife, mother, and sister almost getting shot by guardsmen who were “pissed off, too angry” to do their jobs (126). “Never never in my life have I been arrested,” even in revolution-ravaged El Salvador, and, like that, he has a “record,” a $250 fine, and three years on probation (127-28). None of it makes sense, except that he was in the wrong place, in the wrong skin, at the wrong time. Adding to the sweeping indictment, there appears to be no arm of law enforcement that is exempt from brutality and corruption.

The title of this section refers to the National Guard which appeared on the scene in South Central and began arresting and assaulting people indiscriminately (125).

This section’s voice is Katie Miller, a bookkeeper and accountant. Not a victim, save in feeling left out, Miller is a riot and looting supporter. A resident of South Central, Miller didn’t participate in the looting “this time,” but “was praising the ones that had,” particularly those who overwhelmed the local Pep Boys: “you know, you oughta burn that sucker down” (130-31). Miller believes people have made too much about the enmity between “the Koreans and the Blacks” and opts to blame the looting in Koreatown on a third racial group, the Mexicans (“We wasn’t over there lootin’ over there”) (129). Even so, she finds a defensible rationale for the burning of Korean-owned businesses in this “Black neighborhood” in Koreans’ “lack of gettin’ to know the people that come to your store,” an attitude adopted with even more stridency by Paul Parker (“Trophies”) (129).

Miller’s testimony is also the first of what might be called a “white privilege” quartet, falling before and after the “Park Family” remembrances (“Godzilla,” “The Beverly Hills Hotel,” and “I Was Scared”). It is the only one seen from the other side, as Miller remarks at length, and with great frustration, on the blatant disparity between who and what matters (and who and what does not) in TV news coverage. She is particularly incensed when news anchor Paul Moyer, making $8 million a year “for readin’ a piece of paper,” gets choked up when finally the looting descends upon Wilshire Boulevard and one of the more exclusive stores in the city (I. Magnin) gets hit, going on the air to tell viewers that he remembered “‘goin’ to that store when I was a child’” (132-33). Miller gets the message: “I said, ‘Okay, okay for them to run into these other stores,’ you know, ‘but don’t go in no store that […] my parents took me to that is expensive—these stores, they ain’t supposed to be […] looted. How dare you loot a store that rich people go to?” (132).

The title of this section refers to Miller’s resentment over white privilege, their sense of injustice only when it touches their own experience—in this case, the looting of an exclusive store “that rich people go to” (133).

This voice of this section is Anonymous Man # 2, who works as a Hollywood agent. In receiving our first Hollywood voice, we also get a second take on white privilege (and white guilt), and one of the most definitive statements of the “Us versus Them” mentality as this anonymous Hollywood agent walks us through a lunch at the Grill in Beverly Hills on the day of the Rodney King verdict.

The “we” in question is the “white upper class” which comprises this prime power-lunch spot in totoand normally spares little time thinking of life in the lesser quarters. Despite the appearance of normality, there is an air of“incipient panic,” a “palpable” tension coursing through the restaurant, “like wewere transmitting thought to each other all across the restaurant” (134-35). Suddenly over “Caesar salad, da-de-da,” and even though “nothing had happened […] nothing, zero […] we were getting ourselves into a frenzy” (136). Customers take their leave “talking about the need for guns to protect ourselves” out in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills (136). Soon the streets are filled with a bunch of “yuppies” in Armani suits all running around shutting down their offices,“fleeing […] wild-eyed” as if “Godzilla was behind them” or “they were leaving Hiroshima or something, Dresden […]” (138-39).

Much of this recollection involves the agent’s questioning, and bewilderment over, why his colleagues reacted so hysterically and just what this revealed about the disharmony between the races if not of American class structure itself.

The title refers to the movie “Godzilla” and the panicked way “yuppies” in Los Angeles’ better neighborhoods responded to the riot, as if fleeing Godzilla, or a nuclear bomb.

Act Three, Voice Thirteen are the voices of The Park Family & Walter Park. Walter is a store owner and gunshot victim.Walter Park, a heavily sedated man since being shot, is yet one more Korean-American victim of the riots. After sustaining a gunshot wound to the head, he is left “kinda lonely” and longs to go to Korea to perhaps forget about his experiences in Los Angeles altogether (143). Unwilling and, indeed unable, to discuss the riot directly, or issues connected with it, Park talks wistfully of Korean traditions. His story, with regard to the riot, must be told by members of his family.

Voice Fourteen is Park’s stepson, Chris Oh. Oh, a medical student, describes seeing his stepfather after his “bifrontal partial lobectomy” (145). For Oh, there’s no way to slice it: when you come out of it, and “you realize you can’t do those things” you used to, “you look different” and in most ways you are different: removing the frontal lobes at some level removes “your basic character” (146).

Voice Fifteen, Mrs. June Park, Water Park’s wife, weeps as she thinks back on what has become of this “very high-educated,” “very nice” man who came to the U.S. nearly three decades earlier and had become a pillar of the community, who had donated “a lot of money to the Compton area” and was well-known to the City Council and local police force (147).

In the next section, Chris Oh returns to reveal the intimacy of the violence perpetrated during the riot. He explains that the gunshot that permanently altered Walter Park’s life “wasn’t one of those distant shots [but] was a close-range, almost execution style” job by an African-American man who walked up to Park’s car, while it was stopped at a traffic light, “broke the driver’s side window,” and shot Park point-blank. Park then involuntarily “pressed on the accelerator and […] ran into a telephone pole” (149).

This composite scene, and its collective titles, conveys the tragedy of a quite-unintended victim of the riots, once more Korean-American, as experienced by and throughout his family.

This passage recounts the scene among the wealthy denizens of the Beverly Hills Hotel during the riot as told by Elaine Young, a real estate agent.Young is a real estate agent to movie stars and was made famous by a plastic surgery accident. Like the scene described by the Hollywood Agent at the Grill in Beverly Hills (“Godzilla”), Young describes the affluent set seeking safety in numbers within the “fortress” of the hotel, where people stayed until “three or four in the morning […] talking and trying to forget” (155, 151-52). During the three or four days of the riot, patrons went through the same cycle of anguished questioning: “‘How could this happen in California?’ And ‘Oh my God, what’s happened to our town?’ And ‘These poor people […]’” (152). This was followed by acceptance: “‘Well, let me put this out of my mind for now and go on’” and “‘[h]ere we are and we’re still alive’” (152).

Young is hurt by the fact her reflection on this time (in another interview) was taken out of context to portray her as “a dumb bimbo shit” and to show how she and other wealthy folks were so oblivious to others’ tragedy that they went on partying the night away at the Beverly Hills Hotel like they were guests in The Great Gatsby (153). Young declares, “I took this thing extremely seriously” (154); the fact it was hard to tell from the outside is a condemnation which pervaded the entire political and justice system in L.A., all the way up to Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl Gates.

The title of this section refers to the hotel where Young and her fellow elites hunkered down during the riots, seeking succor and security (151).

This voice of this section is identified as “Anonymous Young Woman,” and a student at University of Southern California (USC) at the time of the riots. The young woman describes the sense of fear on the USC campus that the riots might extend to USC’s fraternity and sorority row, “Because they did do that during the Watts riots” (156). (We again encounter that “they,” presumably the very same “they” in 1992 as in 1965.)

Students are pictured packing their belongings, donning tennis shoes, and preparing their escape routes. The prevailing image this young woman had during the wait was more remote: it was of her parents heading to California as part of a caravan of vintage 1940s’ cars; she is worried what it will do to her father if his pride and joy, a ’41 Cadillac, gets damaged: “All I can think of is a bottle getting anywhere near it” (158). For this USC student, the disorientation and fear experienced during the L.A. riots was personal and visceral (“scared to death”), and yet it is also out-of-touch. Like Elaine Young’s grieving for the closure of the Beverly Hills Hotel, this conclusive statement seems a perfect picture of the obliviousness of white privilege to the realities of those unprotected by class and race. A very good example of privilege is to focus on potential harm to one’s luxuries while others’ homes, livelihoods, and lives are in process of destruction.

The title of this section refers to the fears of USC students that the campus’ sorority and fraternity row might get attacked, as it did during the Watts riots of 1965 (156).

Here, we find a member of the US Congress,Maxine Waters, Congresswoman, 35th District, taking a sympathetic reading of the riot and its causes, both supplying something like an official response from within the African-American community and highlighting that the disturbances did have public mediators capable of doing some of the work, in real time,that this play intends todo in retrospect.

Unlike the preceding passages, this derives not from an interview but is the transcript of a speech given by Congresswoman Waters at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, in the wake of the riots and the resignation of LAPD police chief Daryl Gates. (Recall that Waters was cited as a friend of Stanley Sheinbaum and both informed Sheinbaum about the gang truce meetings at Nickerson Gardens and accompanied Sheinbaum to have a look.)

In the address, Waters remembers the Watts riots of 1965 (referenced in the previous interview (“I Was Scared”)) and the Kerner Commission report (following the nationwide 1967 riots), which emphasized “institutionalized racism,” a “lack of services,” and “lack of government responsive to the people” (160). Yet nothing has changed in twenty-five years; the report remains valid. Waters utters a plea to the President on behalf of “the young men who have been dropped off of America’s agenda,” the ones who “don’t show up on anybody’s statistics,” and who are not therefore, as many politicians imagine, “a thug or a hood” (160-61). 

Rather, “the times are such, the environment is such, that good people reacted in strange ways. They are not all crooks and criminals” (161). Moreover, Waters cautions, there is nothing distinctive about LA; “THEY’RE HUNGRY IN THE BRONX TONIGHT, THEY’RE HUNGRY IN ATLANTA TONIGHT, THEY’RE HUNGRY IN ST. LOUIS TONIGHT” (160). The Rodney King verdict “was more than a slap in the face. It kind of reached in and grabbed you right here in the heart” (161). When that happens, Waters assures, “It is all right to be […] frustrated and angry. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, riot is the voice of the unheard” (162). Without a voice in the political or mass media sphere, it takes a sensation to gain notice.

The title of this section refers to the voices of “the unheard,” which expressed themselves in form of the L.A. riot (162).

The voice in this section is also Maxine Waters.Here, she takes her oratorical plea to the President, made in LA, and brings it directly to the White House during a meeting on “a kind of urban package” to which none of the African-American leadership has been invited (not John Lewis (Chief Deputy Whip of the House of Representatives), not the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus) and which Waters has decided to barnstorm (163). The point of this passage is to demonstrate how insulated and out-of-touch Washington politicians are to the reality faced by so many of their fellow Americans. Abiding by “ritual and custom” and “things that fit nicely into the formula,”they are “so far removed from what really goes on in the world” that “it’s not enough to say they’re insensitive or they don’t care. The really don’t know . . . they really don’t see it, they really don’t understand it, they really don’t see their lives in relationship to solving these kinds of problems” (163-64).

Waters takes the opportunity to tell the President directly, who is clearly befuddled by her unexpected presence, what she has already told congregants of LA’s First African Methodist Church: “‘Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair’” (167). Waters then calls for an extensive job and housing program to alleviate structural iniquity and assist those who “are not in anybody’s statistics,” who’ve “been dropped off everybody’s agenda” (167-68).

Speaking on behalf of Los Angeles’ black community, Waters emphasizes that “all of this anger and despair was exacerbated by the excessive use of force by police departments, that the Justice Department has never ever used its power to do anything about excessive force in these cities” (169). Calling for the Justice Department “to find a way to intervene in these cities when these police departments are out of control,” Waters gets the support of a black man “who didn’t look black at all” from the Department of Labor. He “looked at the President and said, ‘This country is falling apart’” (169). It is a good question to what extent he meant this in the way Judith Tur (“War Zone”) and Elaine Young (“The Beverly Hills Hotel”) do.

The title of this section refers to Washington D.C. and the marked disparity between the mindset within the cloistered halls of power and that within the streets of Los Angeles and the nation’s other beleaguered cities (163).

The voice in this section is Paul Parker, Chairperson, Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee. Parker, like Katie Miller (“That’s Another Story”), speaks with open pride of the riots: “They lost seven hundred million dollars. I mean, basically you puttin’ a race of people on notice” (175).

As if speaking directly to the Anonymous Hollywood Agent (“Godzilla”) or Elaine Young, the real estate broker (“The Beverly Hills Hotel”): “We didn’t get to Beverly Hills but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there, you keep it up” (175). Bristling over the astonished, judgmental claim that “‘[y]ou burned down your own neighborhoods,’” Parker clarifies that Koreans were the intended target of “about ninety-eight percent of the stores that got burned down” and that this was a tactical victory: “The Koreans was like the Jews in the day and we put them in check” (175).

It was a “victory” over two racial rivals, true both to the long legacy of black struggle and the race pride inspired by his own boyhood memory of watching Roots on TV: “We did more in three days than all these politicians been doin’ for years. We just spoke out. We didn’t have a plan. We just acted and we acted in a way that was just” (176). “Justice” is a big theme for Parker, as it is throughout the play, and he makes clear that he will not find peace, in this life or the next, if “I didn’t do something in terms of justice” (176).

With experience in law enforcement and the army, Parker reviews the whole sequence of events and offers a blunt breakdown of the mainstream response to inner-city violence: “They basically feel that if it’s a black-on-black crime, if it’s a nigger killin’ a nigger, they don’t have no problem with that. But let it be a white victim, oh […] they gonna go to any extremes necessary to […] convict some black people” (171). Parker sees this mentality surfacing clearly in the sensational coverage given to the Reginald Denny case: “Because Denny is white, that’s the bottom line. If Denny was Latino, Indian, or black, they wouldn’t give a damn” (172). After all, “many people got beat, but you didn’t hear about the Lopezes or the Vaccas or the, uh, Quintanas or the, uh, Tarvins. You didn’t hear about them, but you heard about the Reginald Denny beating, the Reginald Denny beating, the Reginald Denny beating. This one white boy paraded all around this nation to go do every talk show there is, get paid left and right. Oh, Reginald Denny, this innocent white man […] a white victim, you know, beaten down by some blacks. ‘Innocent’” (172-73).

Parker balks at being forced “to have some empathy or sympathy toward this one white man” when “daily” black men and women are kidnapped, raped, accosted, pulled over, and searched without cause: “You know we innocent, you know where’ s our justice, where’s our self-respect” (174). Instead, “They caught it on video. Some brothers beatin’ the shit out of a white man” and no one needed to think twice about what had happened (174)—even though, as Michael Zinzun’s account and the Rodney King video both make clear, the reverse situation was a daily reality. Regarding the Denny incident as another convenient sideshow, Parker echoes Big Al’s judgment of the “Reginald Denny thing” as a “joke,” a “delusion to the real problem” (102).

The title of this section refers to the trophies Parker collected as a star athlete and which pale in comparison to the massive trophy of the Los Angeles riots, which put an entire “race of people on notice” (175).

This voice in this section is Daryl Gates, Former Chief of Los Angeles Police Department. Gates offers a fairly meek and self-pitying defense of his actions at the beginning of the riot and his decision to attend a prescheduled “fund-raiser” that wasn’t a “fund-raiser,” and certainly not the “big cocktail party” people automatically envisioned (183).

He admits he “should have turned around,” “should have been smarter,” shouldn’t have given “so many people […] an opportunity to carp and to criticize” (182-83). Focused primarily on himself, Gates describes an LAPD already “demoralized” and thought it would have worsened matters for him to be forced out of his job. Many of his officers “were just shaking with anger because they were being accused of things that they wouldn’t think of doing and didn’t do and they know the people around them, their partners, wouldn’t have done those types of things” (184).

But Gates cannot go long without dwelling on himself and his amazement that he, of all people, after forty-three unblemished years in law enforcement, whom a recent poll named “the individual with the greatest credibility” in Southern California, should become “the symbol of police oppression in the United States, if not the world […] Me!” (185-86). On the very day that “the Rodney thing […] happened, the President of the United States was declaring [Gates] a national hero” and then, “suddenly, I am the symbol of police oppression. Just because some officers whacked Rodney King out in Foothill Division while I was in Washington, D.C.” (187).

As soon as Gates says this, we are reminded of what Congresswoman Maxine Waters had to say of the Washington bubble, as well as the tone-deafness of so many charged with making sense of the whole affair, like the news anchor, Paul Moyer, who so offended Katie Miller (“That’s Another Story”). While we feel perhaps for the betrayal felt by the anonymous Simi Valley juror (“Your Heads in Shame”), who is sickened when the jurors are portrayed as “white racists,” it is harder, yet highly instructive, to watch the trail of victimhood ascend all the way up to the Chief of the LAPD.

The title of this section refers to Gates’s explanation of why he attended, and then lingered so long, at a fundraising event outside the city at the moment the riots were getting underway (182).

The voice in this section is Dean Gilmour, Lieutenant, Los Angeles County Coroner. Gilmour takes a step back to demonstrate that the 58 deaths cited in relation to the Los Angeles riot are blown out of proportion, and also that the city has a crisis of homicide on a daily basis: “Just because somebody died during this time frame doesn’t mean it was directly related to the riot. […] I mean, we have gang shootings every day of the year. What would set these apart from being riot-related?” (191).

It is a long and macabre interview and only tangentially related to the riots, yet something Gilmour says in relation to the closure sought by every family grappling with a death holds true here: “There has to be some resolution,” a making sense, whether by memorial, a “service,” a “burial,” until which time “most people can’t let go with their lives and pick up the pieces and start from there” (190). In the text, that will be the job of the aftermath, which takes place in Act IV: “Twilight.”

The title of this section refers to the gory task of locating, collecting, and identifying human remains as a coroner’s officer (189).