NEWSLETTER

I Got Conned By The Black Keyser Soze
I was working at an art warehouse in Chelsea in like 1994. I was riding my bike home and it was snowing really hard. I got squeezed in between a car and a bus, and I ended up knocking the side-view mirror on the car pretty bad. It fell off and kind of hung there. I thought to myself, “That’s fucked up. I’ll stop and handle this the right way.” So I pulled over and the car pulled over and immediately this African lady, like a lady from an African country, jumps out and starts screaming at me in broken English. She’s just cussing and screaming like crazy. So I’m like, “OK, fuck this. I’m outta here.” I jumped on my bike and she jumped right on my back, still screaming the whole time. I kind of just stood up off my seat and leaned back, and she fell right on the ground.

Out of nowhere, I’m fucking surrounded by all these local guys—black guys—who just happened to be nearby. They really came out of nowhere. They’re all looking at me and there I am: This young white guy who just pushed an old African lady down in the snow. There’s this moment of slow motion, just looking around the circle of dudes and they’re all getting closer, kind of pulling up their pants, rolling up their sleeves, and going, “What the fuck, man?” I didn’t know what to do, and without even thinking about it I went into Crazy White Boy mode. I picked up my bike and started fucking slamming it up and down onto the ground screaming, “Fuck! FUUUUUUUCK!!” That made everyone pause for a second. All of a sudden this one dude runs into the middle of the group and goes, “Wait, wait—I saw the whole deal! This guy was being cool. He stopped and tried to talk to her and shit!” He calmed everybody down and they were all kind of stepping back as they started to understand what had happened. I mean, yeah, I did hit her mirror. But then I stopped and was fully ready to take responsibility, pay for it, all that stuff.

All presenter photos by Patrick O’Dell. Styling by Sara McCormack. Luis: Hugo Boss suit, Dee Cee shirt, Welsh MFG Co. glasses, Black Sheep and Prodigal Sons pin.

So I say to this guy, my fucking savior, I go, “Thanks a lot, man.” He was like, “I work in that store over there”—he pointed to a bodega on the corner—“and I saw it go down. It’s cool.” So we’re all talking and I start looking at her mirror with this guy and we’re trying to fix it. He goes, “Hold on, man. I’m just gonna go tell my boss what I’m doing.”

The cops came just then and were like, “Is everything OK here?” We all said, “Yep—we have it under control.” Even the African lady had calmed down by then. We were all best friends. The guy who saved me gets back and keeps looking at the mirror with me and goes, “Oh shit, man. All you need is a little bit of that super-strong glue right here. See?” And I looked and he was totally right. He goes, “Dude, I’m gonna run to the store and grab it for you. I’ll be right back.” I was like, “Thanks!” and I was just thinking to myself, “Damn there are still some really nice people left in this city.”

Then he goes, “Hey man, let me use your bike—it’ll just take two seconds. Here, hold onto my bag while I’m gone,” and he hands me this Jansport bookbag. I was like, “OK, cool,” and then he hopped on it and rode off. Then, right away, it was the total Usual Suspects moment where it all came together. The dude had been talking about my bike the whole time: Asking me where I got it and how much it cost and all that. I looked down at the bookbag. It was some bootleg Canal Street shit. Then I looked up at him as he rode away, and—swear to god—he flashed me the V for victory hand sign and mouthed the word “Peace.” And then he was gone. Poof. I never saw him or my $600 bike again.

The African lady saw it all happen and just started yelling, “Oh, you stupid! You so, so stupid!” She had a carload of kids and they all started laughing at me too. She ended up driving me around looking for this guy, but it was like no way were we gonna find him. Finally I just hopped out at a red light and started walking home. I never did fix her mirror either.

TERRY SISTERS


Riot Town
On April 29th, 1992, one week after my 16th birthday, a white-trash trucker named Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck at the corner of Florence and Normandy in Los Angeles and beaten to a bloody pulp by a mob of angry black people. Summer and Christmas came early that year.

Me and my brothers are Koreans, born and raised in L.A. We grew up in Koreatown, but ended up going to high school in Beverly Hills. In my art class Frank Sinatra’s granddaughter sat to my right and Sammy Davis, Jr.’s adopted son sat to my left. In front of me sat Ariel Pink, to whom I was very mean because I thought he was a fag. Mort Saul’s son was in my science class and he would drive KIT from Knight Rider or the De Lorean from Back to the Future to school. I hated everyone, and was filled with an intense rage and anger, mostly directed toward Persians and privileged white kids that didn’t understand humility. My only outlets were playing the bass drum on the marching band and graffiti. But then in Ms. Goler’s English class I discovered creative writing, and wrote and prophesized about a day when the minorities and the have-nots would rise up and take over. My older brother Jimmy had started to get into stealing cars, while I focused on shoplifting at all the local malls. The idea of anarchy ruled me, and of course its sign was etched into my notebooks and fake leather jacket. Two weeks later it all came true.

The rioting had escalated overnight and school was canceled midday. There was pure chaos and pandemonium in the air. All the rich kids were scrambling to their secure houses in the hills or catching flights out to Palm Springs, and I felt like I had finally come home, at peace in the heart of a storm. The air just smelled different.

So my brother pulls up onto the school lawn in a delivery van that he stole with our mother’s sewing scissors. He’s inside with his friend Fred (another Korean kid) and yells, “GET IN!” I jump in with my best friend Eddie (also Korean). Olympic Boulevard was just a huge parking lot. No one was moving, but we didn’t give a fuck. None of us really knew how to drive, so we hit all the cars, drove on the sidewalk, over newspaper dispensers and parking meters. There was a sunroof and we had loaded the van with huge rocks and we were screaming like maniacs and chucking them at rich white people in their fancy cars, breaking their windshields. Everyone was scared to even look at us—we were so bloodthirsty we would have killed them.

As we crossed Western into South Central, the scene changed. Blacks were putting up signs that said “black owned” so that people wouldn’t loot their shops. People were running in the streets and we were getting crazy looks. We pulled over into a mini-mart area and started throwing rocks into a store, then these black dudes came out of nowhere and it got scary. But then they started to join us, and it was over for the race war. Now it was just about getting ours. The shop window was broken, but the gate wouldn’t come down. A gangbanger pulled out a gun and started shooting at the lock, and then a fleet of police cars came speeding toward us and everyone scrambled. But they just drove by. That was it. We were in anarchy. There was no more law. I could practically hear the Cannibal Corpse songs in my head. We kicked the gate down and raped, ravaged, and pillaged the karaoke shop in seconds.

We saw Eazy-E drive by in a convertible wearing black gloves and shooting a pump shotgun into the sky. I was screaming with joy. We drove past a Gap and I saw Shawn Pringle, a black kid I grew up with, with all his black friends. I screamed his name, but he pretended like he didn’t know who I was. That hurt. Everyone was grabbing shit and looting and pushing and punching. We got in our van and crashed into everything on the way to East L.A. In the black neighborhoods, on every other block a store was on fire. In the Mexican neighborhoods every fucking store was on fire. You could feel the heat through the windows. Moms were looting with their babies, stealing diapers and beer and dry cleaning.

Everywhere that we’d grown up was on fire. Koreans were on rooftops with automatic weapons protecting their businesses. We were the only Koreans that looted during the riots. That’s why I still get called a nigger by my own people. There was definitely a sense of us vs. them and I wasn’t gonna run and hide behind closed doors. I came to play and I wanted to fight, but whatever racial inequalities started this war were long gone. At this stage in the game it was all about stealing. When the walls went down, no one gave a fuck what race you were, everyone just had jumbo-screen TVs in their eyes.

As we turned the corner onto Vermont, we drove past a Von’s Market where the sky opened up and Huey choppers were circling. Soldiers were rappelling down and lining up in the parking lot. We slammed on the brakes and made a U-turn. Game over. We drove back home through Hancock Park over everyone’s lawns.

When we got back to Beverly Hills it was a ghost town, no one on the street, not a sound. There was a line of Beverly Hills cops protecting the city border. We parked a few blocks away and set the van on fire. It didn’t explode like in the movies. We stashed our loot in the bushes and walked back home.

A week later I wrote this same story for my English class and it was dismissed as fiction by Ms. Goler, but everyone kissed my ass and wanted to be my best friend. I used it as an opportunity to lose my virginity and get invited to rich kids’ houses, where I raided their refrigerators and shit in the top part of their toilets.

The day after the riots we found out our parents’ business had burned down. We spent the next few years on welfare.

DAVID CHOE


CONTINUED:
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