Messing Up My Cha-Cha Twelve years, eleven months, and fifteen days into living out my Top Cop fantasies--Christie Love with a better hairdo--my Nubian brothers down on Florence and Normandie had to go and pitch a serious bitch and mess up my cha-cha. Since May of '79, when I stood in the graduating class at the Police Academy, I had survived my years with the LAPD with little more than a few bruises, a shoulder prone to dislocation, and a couple of badly torn fingernails. Survived the early years in patrol cars with partners whose every joke began "There was a white man, a Mexican, and a nigg . uh . black man ." Survived my first assignment as a gang detective in Southwest, where I learned more about L.A. homeboys in the first three months than I had in three years of graduate study in criminology.

And let me not forget the edu-mo-cation I got when I went over to South Bureau Homicide, where I saw more dead bodies in five years than detectives in other parts of the country see in their whole careers. I had survived stun guns and choke holds; Afro puffs and Jheri curls; floods, fires, and medflies; the '84 Olympics and the Whittier quake. At thirty-eight, I weighed thirty pounds less than I had in high school, had all my teeth, and had never, until getting caught near ground zero on a fine spring day, seriously been in fear for my life. But thanks to twelve decent, Gates-fearing residents of Simi Valley and its pro-cop environs, I spent the days leading up to my thirteenth anniversary in the Department back in uniform dodging bullets, new jack Molotov cocktails, and more Pampers tossed through broken grocery store windows than I care to remember. As I watched the city I loved go to hell in a handbasket, I kept reminding myself that the Los Angeles I wanted to protect and to serve was basically composed of law-abiding citizens, not mad looters dragging microwaves down Pico Boulevard--near my house, no less. There was a deadly carnival atmosphere in the air. Gang members and grandmothers, who usually gave each other a wide berth, were united in their rage over the verdict and the stench of despair that had hovered in the air since Watts blew up in 1965. But unlike the Watts riots, which were confined by segregation to a much smaller area, the alliance of the poor and the befuddled yearning to live large was everywhere, of every color and economic class, all wanting to bring down some particularly offensive part of the system in their corner of the city.

So it didn't matter if it was beating Reginald Denny in South Central or looting a jewelry store in Long Beach--anything and everything was fair game. I had to do something to keep the peace, so even though it was against Department policy, I'd finagled a way to stay on duty almost forty-eight hours. And while it was the most stressful thing I'd done since joining the force, I was getting through it okay. But it was Friday, May 1, the day after the National Guard set up housekeeping in shopping centers all over the city, that the last straw, blown in on a warm Santa Ana wind from a most unexpected direction, broke this camel's back. A motley crew of twenty of us--street cops and desk jockeys from Parker Center, South Bureau, and a couple of the divisions--had been deployed by bus to a strip mall on Rodeo Road. Spelled exactly the same as Rodeo (as in Ro-day-o) Drive in Beverly Hills, the running joke in some parts of town was how far apart the two streets really were. Rodeo Drive's sleek boutiques and Mercedes-Benzes epitomized the Southern California good life, and the chief of police and residents there made damn sure everyone knew Beverly Hills was not in the City of Angels. I bet most of the tenants on Rodeo Drive didn't even know about their poor relations that runs through what black folks call "the Westside," less than five miles southeast as the crow flies.

My Rodeo--although pr.