SHREVEPORT --I realize I don't know this town anymore.
Maybe some of it. The stretch on La. Highway 1 just north of downtown has the same slipping-down feel it had 30 years ago. Which I guess means it's holding on. The mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive looks about the same. I remember when it was Cooper Road.
I remember when Shreveport Police encountered an agitated naked fellow walking down it. An officer put him in a chokehold and he died. It turned out he learned the chokehold at the police academy; it was a supposedly non-lethal technique they were still teaching in the early '80s. In my capacity as a cop reporter, I even got one of the academy's instructors--a big gregarious guy with a shaved head--to (gently) demonstrate the hold on me.
The story I wrote got the poor guy in trouble. Because they weren't supposed to be teaching chokeholds, and officers weren't supposed to be using them--though there was some leeway if an officer believed lethal force was necessary to defend themselves or others. Then they weren't prohibited from using any means necessary to gain control of a situation.
But in 1983 chokeholds were infamous. The Los Angeles Police Department had finally banned them after studies had determined they were responsible for the deaths of at least 16 suspects. Because 12 of these suspects were black men, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates had offered the scientifically dubious opinion that "the veins or arteries" of blacks didn't "open up as fast as they do on normal people."
Gates never apologized for the statement, but Los Angeles banned the use of chokeholds in 1982. A lot of other departments around the country--including Shreveport--did so as well. But apparently they didn't get the memo at the academy.
And some poor naked man died.
This is why I'm a lousy tour guide. Most of what I know about this town is colored by the years I worked as a cop reporter here. I may not know where all the bodies were buried but I know where quite a few of them were found and the unhappy circumstances which surrounded their passing. Other people will tell you all about the Gardens of the American Rose Center, the R.W. Norton Art Gallery, about Herby K's and Fertitta's Delicatessen with its medicine ball-sized muffalettas. I can show you where Isadore Rozeman was shot. I can point out the house in Cedar Grove where a whole family was hacked apart with machetes.
I know the original Cooper Road was established when the white establishment of Shreveport decided to literally move their black neighbors a little further down the road. I know where the old Olympic-sized municipal swimming pool--the one the city fathers elected to fill in rather than integrate--used to stand.
In the early '80s Shreveport was always near the top of the FBI's list of most murderous cities. There were bad racial problems, and a lot of cocaine came through here. That was not a bad thing for a young writer interested in the worst things that human beings could get up to. I learned a lot; some of it I might be better off not knowing. In Shreveport I once met with a police officer who worked part-time as a hit man. I hung out with a club owner who was later revealed to be one of the country's biggest cocaine importers. I wish I'd taken better notes; I wish I'd saved them. (But that would have violated newspaper policy.)
For 20 years or so, the mob--Chicago Outfit wise guys, I heard--used Red River Parish, just south of town, as a place to dump the bodies of malfeasants. I imagine most of those bodies were never found; no one was ever charged with anything in connection with those that were.
It's strange to think I've worked at this newspaper almost five times as long as the five years I worked for the Shreveport Journal. This city looms so large in the way I think of myself--it wasn't my first job in the business, but it was where I really got my start, where I first realized that I could actually get away with writing for a living.
The Journal is long gone; all of us who worked there (we were babies) have scattered. I just read in the Times, in my buddy Teddy Allen's column, they're going to tear the old building at 222 Lake St. down.
I haven't been here in a long time. Every year or so we'd touch a toe to North Bossier when my mother still lived there. We walked across the river a time or two; we might have cruised around downtown. Last year we had dinner with my niece in a chain restaurant out on Youree Drive, which is now lit up like the Vegas Strip. (Never order a martini in a Logan's Roadhouse.) But I haven't been back back.
We're here now for a day, because Mom flew in to spend Thanksgiving with my gainfully employed and school-going 20-year-old niece. We take our opportunities.
I've never looped west on I-220 from Market Street and felt the lighting-out-for-the-territory sweep toward Texas before plunging South and onto the bridge over Cross Lake. By the time the bridge opened in 1989, I was long gone. I'd done a tour in Texas and moved on to Little Rock.
It is impressive. I tell Karen I used to live right behind that promontory. If we'd had it back in the day it wouldn't have taken any time to get from my lakeside apartment to my mother's house. Even in my rubber-bumpered '76 MGB.
We're staying at a hotel across the street from the airport. It's nice enough (complimentary breakfast; solid, free wi-fi) but there's nowhere to go for a run in the morning. The neighborhood's sketchy; the traffic hums along obliviously. I feel like I should have known this, but our mission had been to find a place to stay relatively close to my niece's apartment on Mansfield Road, an area that had been pretty rural back in the '70s and '80s.
Now it's built up, in that low-grade strip-mall style you see everywhere in America. Depressing discount stores stand shoulder to shoulder with promisingly dive-y Mexican restaurants and sorrowful check cashers. My niece's apartment complex is gated and requires a code to get in. We don't have it, so we wait for my mother and her friend Paula to show up so we can get inside. (My niece is working and will meet us for dinner, not at a chain this time.)
It's all good, no drama; and it's not too late when we get back to the hotel. I park right in front. I make sure we're under a streetlight.
Because I don't know this town.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 12/06/2016