I like a little Cholula on my eggs, and a touch of cayenne pepper on my fries. Hell, I like a bit of Tabasco in my Budweiser. But I could do without Mace at my hip-hop shows.
When a fight broke out among audience members during an April 4 hip-hop show at Is, a relatively new venue on West Main Street, an audience of more than 100 followed the evacuation procedures of the “Don’t taze me, bro” generation: We gawked, hesitated, then threw ourselves down the stairs and out the door faster than you could say “caliente.”
Roughly a dozen local law enforcement vehicles rushed the scene and shut down the street; officers charged up the stairs to help hired security stop the brawl. A few minutes later, a member of the Charlottesville Police Department staggered down the sidewalk from Is towards Maya, where I’d stopped to watch the scene play out. He moved a bit like a tranquilized bear might—big, unsteady steps, paws rubbing his eyes. He paused in front of Maya and growled:
“That’s why I don’t spray anybody. Fuck!”
He told onlookers that an officer had fired a bit of pepper spray to subdue a member of the audience and coated his colleague’s eyeballs in the process. Pepper spray, it turns out, isn’t the easiest thing to aim.
The cop was friendly (all things considered), and the crowd was largely helpful: Someone ran inside Maya to grab the cop glass after glass of water, which he used to flush his eyes again and again; someone else passed him paper towels to sop up the tears, snot and sweat. He winced, scowled, grimaced. It looked, in a word, unpleasant.
One crowd member passed the scene while the officer was in the throes of his red-eyed suffering. He stopped and asked, in his smart-assed best, “Can I borrow your car?”
If I were a cop, I would’ve tazed the hell out of that kid.
