TEAR GAS

When I was working Watts, Compton and Inglewood, home of the infamous Bloods and Crips, I got chased one night. I’d parked on Manchester and had walked an unmarried mother around to her house in Gramercy Place to get the fare. She lived in two rooms with five begrimed and befouled kids. As I started walking back, I noticed two black guys having a fight beside my car, which is the kind of thing that would draw your attention, I suppose. They weren’t really fighting, just pushing and shoving and swearing and breathing Night Train into each other’s faces. 

I was driving my mate Kitch’s car whilst I was having my upholstery repaired, and the driver’s door was jammed shut, so I could only get in the car through the passenger’s door - the side these two drunks were fighting against - and scramble across into the driver’s seat. 

Now there was a gang of youths - that’s the politically correct term I think - hanging about on the opposite corner. That’s all they do. Just hang about on the corner watching their lives go by. 

They noticed me – being white I did stick out a bit - and started walking towards me, calling out, ‘Hey! Yo!’ 

They were about eighteen or nineteen years of age, which is old enough when there’s a mob of them. I had my tear gas in my pocket, but I wouldn’t be able to spray all of them. 

I quickened my pace a little and as I did so a couple of older blacks shouted out to me from across the street. I’d say they were in their late twenties, and they also started loping over towards me, hair-picks sticking out from their ‘fros like television aerials. 

I reached the car, elbowed the two drunks out of the way, climbed in the passenger door, locked it behind me, scrambled over to the driver’s side and noticed a hissing sound. They were banging on the roof of the car by now and my first thought was, ‘Oh no, they’ve done the fucking tyres.’ 

What do you do when you’ve got a flat tyre? Well, you climb out and assess the damage first of all. Kick it, maybe, and then get the jack out, jack it up and - if you’ve got a spare - change the wheel. If you haven’t got a spare you’ve got to hitchhike to the nearest tyre shop and get it plugged. 

What do you do when you’ve got four flat tyres and a dozen members of the Bounty Hunters or the Mad Swan Bloods trying to rock your car over? Well, first of all you assess the situation, hoping that the hissing sound is the air conditioning or something and wondering briefly whether now that we’ve all had some jolly good fun perhaps these guys would be kind enough to help you put the car up on blocks - surely they must have experience of that - and then maybe drive you down to an all-night tyre shop while the others guard the car for you. 

Realising that there’s little chance of that, the only other option is to drive out of there on four rubber less wheels. 

It was then that I felt my lungs tighten and realised what had happened. It wasn’t my tyres at all. And it definitely wasn’t the air conditioning. As I’d scrambled over from the passenger’s seat to the driver’s side, the tear gas had gone off in my pocket. I now had an extra reason to hurry. I needed to get out of there before my eyes got too cloudy to drive. They were already starting to sting. 

I started the engine, put it in drive and - making the homies jump out of the way - drove off like a lunatic. I heard a couple of gunshots from behind, but I don’t think anyone was shooting directly at me. A car’s a pretty hard target to miss, isn’t it? I think someone was just firing into the air. 

I wound the window down quickly and drove with my head hanging out, taking deep breaths of the South-Central Los Angeles smog. I just wanted to get out of there before my eyes went. But it soon wore off. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I wouldn’t want to be sprayed full in the face with that stuff.

(More stories from these times in my book ‘White Boy in Watts’)

Copyright © Karl Wiggins