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The King of Compton 163 results—“Soul Train” this ain’t—but I am happy taking part. These are not dances I know. But my feet and I have much to claim. I think about Hal’s pronouncement: things will get better. I can shift the current of history with a flap of my wings. I can deepen its tone with my instrument. If I walk away from L.A., move off to another frontier and take up another tradition, my passage from place to place will be well marked. Hal thinks I’ll stay on. He says L.A. is just a place where people stay put. Clearly he’s going nowhere; L.A. holds the dreams that are left. “Natives don’t leave,” he says. “For a lot of us, this is the end of the line. This is nirvana.” My father calls me one morning not long after the reunion. He talks fast, a wind storm blowing by many subjects: politics, the state of education, my Uncle Edris’s health. One other thing. “How’s that story coming?” he asks. “Which one?” “The Eastside deal. Have you turned it in yet?” Daddy’s been checking on this story like a sick child, like something entrusted to him. I choose my words carefully for the prognosis. “Not exactly. I’m still working on it. It’s a challenge. It’s long. Longer than most pieces I write. Different.” “Uh-­ huh.” I hear papers rustling. “Well, you know, Hal’s been asking about it. He wants to know. That’s really his deal. Of course, you know that.” The King of Compton M ayo r Om a r B r a d l e y a nd H i s R e i g n o f C h ao s April 2001 I don’t come here. As I drive through Compton on my way to meet Mayor Omar Bradley, past faded but neat rambling houses and islands of large shade trees, I realize that in all the years I’ve been informally covering black Los Angeles, I’ve been strenuously avoiding all things Compton. Los Angeles is 164 Stomping Grounds full of small towns that feel distinctly apart from it—Inglewood, West Hollywood , Beverly Hills—but still connected to it, within sight of it. Not Compton . It feels adrift, unseen, its sun and sidewalks and empty spaces hardened by time and indifference. Which is not to say it looks bad. With its tidy lawns and general quiet, it would probably be a disappointment to ardent gangsta-­ rap fans who imagine it as a kind of ground zero of ghetto. But Compton is not so much debauched as it is detached, which I don’t remember until I see it, again, myself. I’m feeling better—well, less guilty—when I reach the Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles on Central Avenue. During the drive I thought about all the things I’ve read and heard about Compton and about Bradley, most of them on the outer edge of bizarre—the state takeover of the city’s mismanaged school district, the City Council’s dissolution of the police force and award of a no-­ bid trash contract to a man who once testified that he’d passed bribes to council members, the mayor’s tendency toward cronyism, autocracy, and occasional public rages, including an altercation with a political rival outside the council chambers because, according to the next day’s L.A. Times, the man had “drawn his finger across his throat in a threatening gesture.” In my car, I heroically decide that I will set things straight where they have always been out of focus, misunderstood; I will give Compton the empathy and the gravitas it has always needed. But Bradley has no use for my assessment, or anybody else’s, and he never stops letting me know that. His aide, Melvin Stokes, meets me first, with scrupulous politeness, and shows me to a table with assurances that his boss will be arriving momentarily. Bradley does, and appears just as obliging until I begin asking about some of his more questionable actions as mayor. Then all hell, which as it turns out is never far from the surface, breaks loose. Apparently , he’s only met with me to tell me how utterly useless it will be to meet with me at all. He snarls a lot of things through his teeth and uses obscenities freely. He declares that...

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