Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis

several years ‘conditional discharge.’ They’re young, tough and scary, and they’ll use a flick knife at the drop of a hat. The junkies, on the other hand, aren’t looking for trouble. It’s just that sometimes they need cash, and to get it they’d pull any stupid stunt. Whatever they get, they have it coming. Just showing their faces is tantamount to a confession.
    The dropouts are cool guys. They don’t do anything stupid, and they don’t have a police record. They’re enrolled in vocational courses, but never attend, which suits everybody just fine: it reduces class numbers and allows the college to hire extra teachers. They spend their afternoons at FNAC or Virgin. Scrounge a smoke here, a hundred francs there. They’re resourceful, and clean. Until the day they start dreaming of driving a BMW, because they’re pissed off taking the bus. Or they’re suddenly ‘inspired’ by dope and start shooting up.
    Then there are all the others, the ones I discovered later. A whole mass of kids who have no story other than that they were born here. And that they’re Arabs. Or blacks, or gypsies, or Comorans. High school kids, temporary workers, the unemployed, public nuisances, the sports fans. Their teenage years are spent walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which they’re almost all likely to fall. Where will they land? Punk, junkie, dropout? Nobody knows. It’s a lottery. They’ll find out sooner or later. For me it’s always too soon, for them it’s too late. In the meantime, they get picked up for trivial offences. Riding a bus without a ticket, a fight on the way out of school, petty shoplifting from a supermarket.
    These were the kind of things they discussed on Radio Galère, a talk radio station I listened to regularly in the car. I waited now for the end of the show, with the car door open.
    â€œOur old folks can’t help us anymore, dammit! Take me, for instance. I get to eighteen, I need fifty or a hundred francs on a Friday night. It’s only natural. There are five of us. Where do you think the old man’s going to find five hundred francs? So, then what happens, I don’t say me, but... my brother for example, he has to—”
    â€œPick someone’s pocket!”
    â€œThat’s no joke!”
    â€œRight! And the guy who gets his money stolen sees it’s an Arab. And straight away he joins the National Front!”
    â€œEven if he isn’t a racist, man!”
    â€œIt could have been, I don’t know, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, a gypsy.”
    â€œOr a Swiss guy! Shit, man! There are thieves everywhere.”
    â€œJust your luck that in Marseille, it’s more likely to be an Arab than a Swiss guy.”
    Since the neighborhood had become my beat, I’d collared a few real gangsters, and a reasonable number of dealers and holdup men. Caught them red-handed, chased them through the projects or out along the beltway. Next stop Les Baumettes, Marseilles’ biggest jail. I had no pity for them, no hate either. But I did have my doubts. Whoever the guy is, he goes into the joint at eighteen, his life is screwed up. When I was doing holdups with Manu and Ugo, we didn’t think about the risks. We knew the rules. You play the game. If you win, fine. If you lose, too bad. If you don’t like it, you might as well stay at home.
    The rules were still the same now. But the risks were a hundred times greater. And the prisons were overflowing with minors. Six minors for every one adult. A figure I found really depressing.
    About ten kids were chasing each other, throwing stones as big as fists. “As long as they’re doing that, they aren’t doing something stupid,” one of the mothers had told me. What she meant by ‘something stupid’ was something you called in the police for. This was just the junior version of the OK Corral. In front of Block C12, six Arab