Lights and Sirens
Part 56 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“People sing about victory, about liberation. They’re wrong. Who won and who lost is not a question. In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won and who lost.”
~Bao Ninh, North Vietnamese Army
Comanche Moon
It was a little after bar closing, say two thirty a.m., and you were standing under the buzzing fluorescent lights at the Castillo and Montecito 7-11 with Officer Scott Klacking. Klacking was a great partner to have on the street because his sense of humor was deeply rooted in the best kind of hard-earned constabulary cynicism. He was smart and he was a veteran swimmer in the pot of human soup you were all simmering in, night after night, and much later on he would survive a bout with cancer and emerge with a palpable and infectious appreciation for travel and for life on earth. You could be bracing a mope with a half dozen non-bookable misdemeanor warrants on the railroad tracks, the kind of person Detective John Dutcher would summarize as a “certified piece of shit,” whose pockets were full of uncapped needles and used dental picks and keychain dildos he’d stolen from the Adult Store at 400 State Street. You would go through the motions and look over at Klacking and see the snark, the witty rejoinders building up in his smile, see his eyes start revolving in a cartoon whirl at the tangled monkey’s fist of bullshit you were expected to unravel without offending the public, without violating a policy manual that was six inches thick and constantly growing, or falling down some impossible legal rabbit hole.
The 7-11 was a hangout for cops working the graveyard shift, a hidey-hole between the city’s nightly spasms of dysfunction, when everyone needed a quick time-out from the tide of municipal lunacy, and you were always welcome because Habibi, a North African emigrant who ran the shop alone all night, wanted you there to ward off the crazy bums and the meth zombies wandering in off the railroad tracks and out of their camps built in the manzanita and mountains of garbage on TV Hill. You would negotiate with Habibi for a serving of his homemade ceviche, or haggle over a hot dog that had been on the roller for a week, a desiccated and unsightly tube of acid reflux he was happy to give you for free. You’d meet your beat partners there and stand with a cup of bad coffee, making snide commentary about the fuck books on the magazine rack with their wild appeal to the full spectrum of human interests: a new edition of Big Junky Black Asses was on the shelf next to Young Starlets Covered in Jello, all hastily buried behind the less ambitious and yet well-thumbed latest from the brain trusts at Beaver Hunt and Juggs. Between shoplifting City College kids with smoky daydreams of becoming famous marine biologists, and the ice plant junkies in trench coats covered with human feces and motor oil, Habibi struggled to keep his weird library of human fantasies properly stocked.
Police work can feel random, a kind of perpetual bingo parlor where everyone is waiting to see what numbers are coughed up by the hopper. Uncertainty is baked into the gig and over the long term it can grind people down because there is no way to escape it, just as there is no bottom to human depravity. In a busy city you just keep catching the shit-cyclone square in the face, day after day, night after night, and over time the heart begins to harden by degrees. You say off-color things at dinner parties and startle the guests. You become superstitious. You park your black and white under an overpass on New Year’s Eve until the gunfire stops, you look at the full moon on a Friday night and sigh because the widely destructive human behavior that comes with a Comanche Moon is far too real. The job can become a long dark tunnel and eventually your once generous view of human nature devolves into something else, something far less magnanimous than it was before you took up a life behind the shield wall.
Maybe that’s because the job can become terribly reductive after spending nearly all of your time in the company of liars. The ecclesiastical bores who run the police department lie to you while insisting it’s for your own good, and almost everyone on the street lies. The lies are all the same, the only thing that changes are the people telling them—because they don’t realize that you’ve been on the bricks for a while and that you’ve heard it before, that they aren’t the first person to run over a kid in an intersection, flee the scene, and immediately call 911 to report their car was stolen. They actually believe that they invented the lie, that it is a stroke of genius, that they clever and that you are terminally stupid, and when you show up at their house they default to the level of argumentative Adam Henrys, assholes insisting on the lie, with neither the grace nor the fundamental humanity to own their own bullshit.
Your rose colored glasses, if you ever had them, get shattered beyond repair.
So you seek a harbor site at the 7-11 with your partners, and Habibi, who is probably the only friendly face you will see out there amongst the capering crazies in the tall grass. Which is when you get the call to handle a 911 hangup, an unknown person reporting a vehicle versus tree outside the Emergency Room at Cottage Hospital. It’s a weird call, and not your beat, but you acknowledge it on your handheld, wave goodbye to Habibi and your partners, and head out again into the night to the saddest ringing of a convenience store’s door chime.
