I Am A Cop
He measures out his life in fear and boredom. He's got a worried wife, he rides alone, and he always wears his gun.
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Two of the men were clearly in their fifties, but one man was young, about 23, the cop guessed. He had a beer in his hand and was waving it wildly in the air, spilling some on his shirt. He spoke before the cop could greet them.
"Yeah, I know, I know. You come cause she called you. Well, I'll say it again, we don't need no police here. It's all her anyway; if she'd just get her head straight. I don't know what things come to no more. Goddam woman don't have no pride. She's in the house. And you tell her I said there ain't no need for all this."
The cop's eyes had narrowed and he had shifted his feet apart comfortably while the drunk talked. He didn't want to commit himself one way or another until he'd heard both sides, but he wasn't going to take any shit off any drunks either. That was a dead end road.
He knocked on the front door and a tall, big-boned woman with dark hair opened the door and asked him in. She was wearing average-looking clothes and smiled at him with white, even teeth. She looked capable and self-confident.
"Yes, officer, I called. Won't you sit down? Well, the reason I called, I don't, well, I've never called the police before but I've had enough of him. Lonnie James, that good-for-nothin out there all drunk. Well, I'm through with him.
"Let me start over. I live across the street. This is my neighbor's house. I had to come over here to wait for you or God knows what he might have done to me. I told my husband tonight that I want a separation and probably a divorce and that I want him to leave me alone. I was going to try to spend the night in my own house, but he's all drunk now and he's been threatening me.
"Anyway, he went out and got in his truck—he's got two shotguns and a rifle in there—and he's been driving around the neighborhood like a madman, drunk as a lord. About 30 minutes ago he come wheeling into our driveway and shouted a bunch of things I won't repeat to you. Then he backed out and run over my neighbor's mailbox.
"Then he drove off to God-alone-knows-where and I called the police. I'm at my wits end. I just want him to leave me alone, me and the child. Can you help me?"
The cop had been taking out a pocket notebook while the woman was talking and now he asked her several report form questions, while he thought about the best way to answer her last question. Name. Address. Telephone.
She interrupted him, saying, "To show you how ridiculous it's been, he even thinks I've been running ardund on him. He's accused nearly every man in the neighborhood of having an affair with me."
The cop put his notebook away and glanced at the woman with new interest. There was suddenly a sexual undercurrent in the room, an electricity that hadn't been there a moment before. The cop grinned at her. Her face was flushed.
"OK, do you want me to put him in jail for the night? The soonest that he could be out would be three to four hours, maybe even more. But there's no guarantee that he wouldn't come right back out here then. Do you have any relatives here in town that you might want to spend the night with?
"Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not telling you to tell me to put him in jail or not. And I'm not telling you to spend the night somewhere other than your house. I just want you to understand the full picture. I can put him in jail or I can tell him to settle down and sleep it off. But I'll decide what to do with him. I just don't want you climbing all over me with a quick change of heart if he won't cooperate and I'm forced to jail him. I mean, it happens, you know. But in my opinion, what you need is a lawyer and some time to think things over."
The woman watched his face as he spoke and her hands shredded a pink tissue. She only hesitated a moment before she said that she would take the child and spend the night at her mother's house. He told her to get some clothes together while he explained her decision to Lonnie James.
Outside, it was still raining hard and the wind had picked up. As he walked towards the carport, he saw his cover officer driving slowly down the shiny street looking for the address. The cop shined his flashlight at the other car and it pulled over and stopped.
The cop turned back to face the occupants of the carport. He nodded to the older men, and then carefully studied the woman's husband. The man had sandy blond hair and a thin, angular face. His eyes were red and puffy, but he was neatly shaven.
"Yessir, how you doing tonight? Your wife tells me that y'all been having some family arguments. Now, wait a minute, she tells me one thing and you tell me another. The point is, she seems to be afraid of you tonight and she's decided to go spend the night someplace else and let things cool down. Now, what happens to you is going to be your decision. You can either start acting like a grown man with responsibilities or you can go to jail. It's as simple as that. You're drunk and you got no business out on a night like this. All you're doing is upsetting people and upsetting yourself. Well, sir, what's it going to be?"
There was an awkward silence in the carport. The husband seemed to lose weight before their very eyes as the cop was speaking, and now he was listening to his own thoughts. The others listened to the rain fall on the roof, and one of the older men blew his nose loudly.
The husband hunched his shoulders together and bent his head. He traced a design in the dust of carport floor with the toe of one of his boots. He tucked his hands in his hip pockets, but one of them briefly escaped and gestured emptily.
"Daddie, what more can a man do? She wanted a separation before and I give in to her then. She says she just wants that job so she can have more money, but that ain't so. I told her I'd let her work, if she'd just stay with me, but she says that's only part of it.
"When we come back together, I promised not to touch her, I promised. But one night she said she was tired of me watching her get undressed like a dog looking at a sack full of bones. She said she wanted me, but only if I'd bark for her, right there in our bedroom. So I did, and afterwards, oh, it was good, Daddie, it was good. She said she loved it.
"But now this. I just don't understand. What more can a man do? I told her I'd do anything, I'd change. I'd change. What more can a man do? Daddie, she says I ain't enough for her."
He was crying loudly, painfully, at the end. One of the men patted him lightly on the shoulder, but didn't say anything.
The cop had no expression on his face. He stood off to one side of the sobbing man and watched the rain wash the grass of the front yard. Across the street the woman left the house carrying a baby and an umbrella and got into a waiting car. The cop couldn't tell if she looked in their direction.
On Being a Cop
PEOPLE ARE INTRINSICALLY LEERY OF the police, and resent both that feeling and the men who cause it. We are the enforcers, the men of order. We are raw, overt power. Our appearance, carefully para-military, and our demeanor, often impolite and even arrogant, do little to conceal or disguise that power.
Threats and violence are the darker grease for the machine of justice. To live with this lubricant of power is to be touched and stained, some more slowly than others, by the endless compromising inherent in the maintenance of a feasible law and order. Policemen are abused by their power. We put into motion the entire cycle of retribution—detection, arrest, prosecution, punishment. It's our job, we deal in problems with faces and names.
If we have to lean on someone to solve a problem, we usually don't hesitate. Being a policeman is, perhaps, the most masculine of the machismo jobs. Wearing a badge and a gun, set apart by distinctive uniform, and dealing with violent, traumatic crises, we are the Americans most vulnerable to the fascist label. The belief in force itself as a solution weaves a bright, disturbing thread through the entire fabric of American police attitudes.
And, yet, would you allow us to be different, to have the normal American distrust of power and elitism? Is a policeman allowed to suffer from emotional problems, to be a poor manager of money, to be a coward or an alcoholic? No, he is not, and can be suspended for any such lapse. What do you expect of a policeman—honesty, trustworthiness, bravery, perhaps? Or maybe fairness and politeness. Do you demand these qualities of your neighbors, your friends, or even of your family?
Or even more bluntly, do you require everyone you know to wear a gun everywhere they go, on pain of suspension without pay if they are caught weaponless? The gun is part of the mystique, part of our alienation. The sound of the word itself, harsh and gutteral, presages the kind of rigid philosophy that I live my life by every waking moment. I will, with remorse and grief, kill another human being in order to save a life, be it mine or the life of an innocent victim.
Yet a mirror reflects no monster to my questioning eyes, no throwback to another age of eager hubris and violence. How have we changed? Tell me, do the roles so reflect? And what do you give me, other than this terrible power? Do you respect me as another man, an equal unto all? How much training do you grant me? What would you have me tell my wife when she begs me to quit and find another job, another life of peace and normality?
My doubts creep toward bitterness and cynicism, but there is no solace there. I have seen three policemen die from my shift. I care about the job. My friends care about the job. But you are killing us. And we can't understand it.
We are you.
My Library
