Lights and Sirens
Part 51 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.”
~Flannery O’Connor
Ortega and Bradbury
For the rest of your life you will chafe against the darkness. Dark rooms. Dark houses. Dark alleys. Dark thoughts. You will come to hate the darkness for the things you have found in it. And in retirement, sitting on your porch in the evening sun with a highball, watching the pygmy nuthatches flitter around the willows in the yard, you will come to measure success in the war on drugs—Nixon’s fantasy—by different metrics than the ones you used on the street. The weight of a seizure, the money you put on the table, mean nothing at all anymore—if they ever did. Time and distance from the fight can only bring illumination. It’s difficult to win so many battles against the street dealers and even, occasionally, the smarmy parasites of a Drug Trafficking Organization, to overcome the obstacles thrown in your way by your own department, by institutional inertia and a lack of political will, knowing the entire time you are losing the so-called war, and that it isn’t even close.
Futility is a kind word when you measure it against the risks you took every time you gave knock and notice, waited long enough to satisfy a jury and a judge, long enough for the people inside to arm themselves or go running for back doors and windows and closets, and then burst through the threshold into the blanketing dark where you were confronted by a freak with tattoos on his face, a three-striker and a crank cowboy, tackling him over the coffee table to clear the way because you had seen his hands in a flash of your gun light and you couldn’t shoot him. It’s a kind word to describe the feeling every time you reached for a light switch only to realize again where you were, in a doper house where there wasn’t a single fucking light bulb anywhere. It’s a word to describe every time you found a terrified child in a diaper that hadn’t been changed in days cowering in a bedroom closet, every time you kicked a door on a room full of zombies with blown out veins and hype sores between their toes camped on a nasty mattress on the floor, every time you dumped a box of Lucky Charms in a doper’s kitchen and watched the little bags of heroin fall out.
What were you winning, exactly? It wasn’t the war on drugs. It was sometimes the war on burglary, child abuse, or even mailbox theft. Sometimes, by arresting dopers, you put a dent in the scourge of catalytic converter thefts sweeping through Samarkand like a virus. But you were always losing, even when you won. If you spent months on a caper and put six mopes from Chihuahua in jail and a quarter million dollars on the table, the mopes were replaced in minutes and lawyers on permanent retainer to one cartel or another would fight the case to the bitter end for one reason only: discovery. Their interest wasn’t in the soldiers gone up the river, or even the money or the dope, it was to learn how you penetrated the veil, how you got to them through all of that darkness, so they could learn and adjust and get back in front of the tigers who were always on their tail.
When it’s just you and the birds and a lovely sunset in the Cascades, you will marvel at the people you worked with. Many of the best cops you worked with could have gone the other way, into the darkness. And maybe, when they were kids, they even strayed into it a little bit. And the truth is also this: it made them better cops. A teenaged shoplift on a dare, some fights, some drunk driving and a joint or two in the back of a panel van on Butterfly Beach should almost be required. But for whatever reasons that was a life that didn’t stick. It didn’t become an endless tour of rationalizing all of the reasons scumbaggery was a great way to live. Fisticuffs after football practice with a jerk didn’t graduate into robbery and car theft, didn’t morph into murdering some kid over which side of the city he lived on. You’d love to hang that on great parenting but cops are like everyone else when it comes to the parenting lottery. The street lawyers and the enraged Karens like to say you became a cop because you have power issues, and there are some who do, but they tend to weed themselves out when they discover that if control is what they are after, if control is their kink, they are never going to find satisfaction in police work.
