“How can any rookie say no to this job?” he asked his wife. “Especially a black rookie?”
This black rookie didn’t say no. He leaped at the offer.
They called him King Kelly. “Guys that ride bikes get handles like King,” he said. “And a biker always gets a rep, a jacket. Even a cop biker. Me, I had a cock jacket. They thought every broad that rode my bike, with the exception a my mother, got laid. Like I had a cock bike with a trick seat on it! I’m a married man with three children. Just because I’m a biker I get a cock jacket and a handle: King Kelly.”
There was a gaggle of waitresses at a certain restaurant near Southern substation. The cops had handles for them: Fat Mindy. Thin Mindy. Lana Banana. Two or more waitresses were always ready to party after work, to go to The Wing, a nearby park named in honor of early glider flights wherein daredevils soared fifty feet above the earth. The cops and waitresses would drink beer at The Wing and commiserate about their respective jobs and about how unappreciative the public is, and pretty soon they’d be soaring at five thousand feet without benefit of glider.
One night King Kelly went for a run on his screaming 550 Honda with a blood alcohol reading of about .18, he believes, and his passenger, Lana Banana, was even drunker. Everyone loved that Honda and the bright-orange snowmobile suit that went with it. It was fun to see how fast the Honda would roar by the base of Otai Mountain. King Kelly found out how fast it would go while he was breathing .18 blood alcohol: exactly 105 miles per hour. It only works if you’re without goggles and without a helmet and you’re blowing about .18.
“If you lose it at one-oh-five,” he said, “you go down in a tumble a sparks and you don’t have to worry about comas and IV’s and paralysis and irreversible brain damage.”
It made perfect sense at the time. The night wind was frosty and Lana Banana put her icy hands inside the orange snowmobile suit just as a rabbit ran out and froze in the beam of light.
Ken Kelly’s last thought was: We’re gonna hit a rabbit at one-oh-five. My wife’s gonna be mad because even though I’m innocent they’re probably gonna find us with her hand inside my pants, wrapped around my balls. The rear wheel’s gonna slip out and we’re gonna die now. Good-bye.
Except that he reflexively swerved just enough to go into a deadly high-speed wobble.
“More! Do it more!” Lana Banana screamed, later describing the wobble as something akin to straddling the world’s biggest vibrator.
And thanks to the volume of alcohol in his body, his reactions were so slow that they rode out of the deadly wobble which would have killed a sober man. Lana Banana said it was a hell of a sexy ride, a 550cc Japanese dildo, is what it was. And that Ken Kelly was a prince! No, a King!
He was a sturdy blond with lank straight hair combed back flat but always falling over his ears. After a few drinks he loved to take both palms and pull his hair back tight on his head and leer, with darting pale-blue eyes. His Jack Nicholson impersonation. But actor Jack Nicholson never looked as deranged as Ken Kelly, not in his most eccentric performance, not when Ken Kelly let go with his demented scream: “Sex! Drugs! Rock ’n roll!”
He was known as a talented cop. He was smart and gutsy and spoke in colorful, profane, grammatical English. Ken Kelly wanted to join the new task force badly. He was twenty-eight years old with plenty of police experience, having been a cop for nearly six years, and he knew the canyons better than anyone. From the time he was a boy until he joined the San Diego Police Department, Ken Kelly had hunted doves in Spring Canyon, and north of Airport Mesa, and even in Deadman’s Canyon and Smuggler’s Gulch. He knew he could find his way around those hills night or day.
The task force was another chance, he felt. He had tried dozens of times without success to get to Vietnam while in the Air Force. He always wanted to do something significant and fate was denying him.
“If you ever decide to give a white boy a break,” Ken Kelly pleaded to Manny Lopez, “I know one loony enough to go out in those canyons.” Then he’d do a Gunga Din and say, “I’ll carry water, sahib. Take me with you!”
Ken Kelly was not one of the original San Diego cops selected for the experiment, but he wasn’t about to give up. He could be found leaping out of police corridors at any hour of the night crying out to Manny Lopez, “Take me with you, bwana. I’ll be your gun bearer. If you don’t, I’ll go bad, I swear. Sex! Drugs! Rock ’n roll!”
He never gave up. He figured: Who knows what might happen out there in those canyons? Somebody might get stung by a scorpion and they’d need to send in a bench warmer.
Manny Lopez couldn’t go to the John without a voice from the next stall whispering, “If you don’t take me, I’ll go wrong. I’ll wear a blindfold and a garter belt and star in stag movies. Take me with you!”
Manny Lopez would giggle and promise Ken Kelly that if there was ever an opening …
EXODUS
IT WAS THE FIRST WEEK OF OCTOBER WHEN THEY FINALLY got to do it. There were jokes and chatter and excitement during the briefing that afternoon. There were lots of cracks from the other patrol cops as the task force gathered shotguns, revolvers, flares, first aid kits, goggles, flashlights, binoculars, ammo, radios, handcuffs.
As sunset approached, Eddie Cervantes, the Marine reservist, said, “Time to saddle up,” and someone pissed him off by noting that in The Sands of Iwo Jima that was John Wayne’s line.
Then Dick Snider—who was as big as John Wayne, with more lines eroding his dust-bowl kisser—said, “Let’s go out and put some crooks in jail.”
It didn’t sound right coming from someone dressed in camouflage fatigues and a black woolen watch cap and combat boots, and armed to the teeth. It sounded like cop talk just when they were starting to think of themselves as some kind of commando raiders, ready to outswat SWAT.
The whole operation sounded military enough on paper. Renee Camacho, one of the first men chosen by Dick Snider, was going to work a support team with a border patrolman. They’d handle the equipment, and God knows what-all they had that four-wheel-drive vehicle loaded down with.
“Everything but frigging C rations!” one of the patrol cops said when he looked into the Bronco. And he called them “Flea SWAT-ers.”
Eddie Cervantes was working the other support team with a U.S. Customs officer. One observation team would be manned by a big young cop named Felix Zavala and a border patrolman. The main observation team would be handled by the supervisors, Dick Snider and Manny Lopez. They had the valuable commodity: a starlight scope for nighttime observation work.
The arrest team would be manned by the two ex-Marine D.I.’s, Ernie Salgado and Fred Gil. They would be assisted by rookie cops Robbie Hurt and Carlos Chacon. The victim team, which would be responsible for corralling the alien robbery victims, was worked by another rookie, Joe Castillo, who was disappointed that he might not get enough action, along with the other U.S. Customs officer, who spoke the good Spanish needed for victim interrogation.
There was a continuation of chatter and jokes as they took the short ride to the canyons, impatient for sundown. There was plenty of reconnoitering to do once they got there and placed the teams where they could observe unobserved after darkness. And though some of the cops of Southern Division had occasionally driven up those bone-jarring rock-clay trails, which were slimy-slick in winter and cement-hard in summer, they hadn’t really seen and heard and smelled this patch of land when it came alive.
It was not a large area of responsibility, not geographically. Just a few square miles of low hills and shallow canyons, full of dry brush in Indian summer, and cactus. And mesquite losing its vitality and balling up into prickly tumbleweed. The parched vegetation was stunted but surprisingly relentless and enduring, like the scorpions and tarantulas. Wind rattled the dry brush. Every rattle was spooky because of snakes.
First impressions: two hawks wheeling in the sky through smoke plumes drifting north from the Mexican city. Then a pack of coyotes, brown shapes and gray, slinking ac
ross the trails at dusk, eyeing these humans with indifference. The overriding image at dusk was of shadow. Looming shadow, fleeting shadow, silvery light and cloud shadow in the canyons. Sometimes brassy light as the sun rested suddenly on the ridge. Then shadows crossed the sunball on the horizon. Silhouette shadows. Human beings.
An unbelievable tableau to digest all at once. The garishly painted shacks blanketing the hillsides across the imaginary line quickly assumed the color of urban smoke. Smoke at dusk in the shadowlight. There was the “upper soccer field,” a plateau so called because the aliens did indeed play while they waited. And the lower soccer field, a smaller plateau. And Deadman’s Canyon, Spring Canyon, Washerwoman’s Flats, where an old Mexican squatter used to live and do her laundry in the dirty trickle flowing through the U.S. canyons.
The unbelievable tableau: the throngs, the multitudes, the masses! They were everywhere: huddled by campfires, squatting, playing, buying tamales, selling soda pop, chatting, laughing, swapping clothing, exchanging money with guides, singing, weeping, getting ready. The nightly army of aliens was readying itself to come. All of this only several hundred yards across the canyons. All of this just north of the invisible line, on U.S. soil, in the no-man’s-land tacitly relinquished to them by the United States government, which had decided that its border patrolmen would avoid these few square miles of miserable earth and wait farther north, on more accessible land.
Even through binoculars it looked for all the world like an enormous sprawling picnic. There was a game of baseball in progress. There was an astonishing number of women and children among them, not to bid the men farewell. They were coming too. Perhaps they had tried it last week and been caught? Or been turned back? Or robbed? Or raped? Perhaps they had tried it many times.
And there were pregnant women coming for the sole purpose of giving birth to their babies in the home of some barrio midwife. To have a child who is a U.S. citizen, entitled to all the rights and privileges accorded same. To register the birth and perhaps return with the child to Mexico, that child’s future guaranteed should things get worse.
“I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it,” Renee Camacho said. “And I’d lived in San Diego all my life. It was like … did you see the old movie Exodus?”
So the task force assembled across the canyons and chose their observation points, from which they would support each other, observe crimes, arrest bandits and corral victims. And they would look at one another in wonder when hundreds of other aliens suddenly materialized in the dusk. Human beings of all ages would rise up as though from the earth itself. People who had been invisible—resting, sleeping, eating, praying. Up from the mesquite and the rocks and the skeletal oaks. They would simply rise up!
And then it was dark. Just like that.
The hills began to move. The masses began to surge northward on their journeys to the land of plenty. It was dark. Darker than they dreamed it would be. Dick Snider had told them over and over how dark it was in the canyons, but Jesus Christ! This was dark. Could an ordinary night get this dark? There was even an early moon. But it was dark. And they weren’t alone, not by a long shot.
The Star Trek lights attached to the sawed-off shotguns were of no value whatsoever and were quickly removed. The radios were faulty in the canyons. The starlight scope was seeing only shapes. They saw what looked like a guide meeting a group of fifteen. Some looked like children. They saw what could be three bandits waiting behind a rock pile. Then the shapes disappeared. Then the rocks disappeared.
It was not quiet but it seemed quiet. There were the ever-present dogs barking in the canyons, delirious with joy at the scraps left by the aliens beginning their march. The kerosene lamps were glowing all over the hills to the south, which was Colonia Libertad, home of bandits and smugglers and drug dealers and addicts. What looked sordid in the day was beautiful by night. The kerosene lamps flickered. The squalor was transformed.
The music began, radios mostly, but they could hear some live voices singing, all from the hills south of the imaginary line, from the shacks and cantinas of Colonia Libertad. Then they started hearing the clicks. At first it scared the hell out of them. The safety being taken off shotguns? The bandits have shotguns? No, castanets! That’s all it is, castanets. What the hell’s this? Somebody’s doing flamenco in the canyons?
It was stones. The clicking of stones. Or sometimes they snapped their fingers. They did not talk, these masses coming toward them through the canyons. They signaled to each other by clicking stones together. All of them: the aliens, the guides, the bandits.
Cadaverous dogs who accompanied them a short way suddenly did not bark or growl or whimper. Children didn’t cry. All creatures of the canyons seemed to revere the ritual, played out each night of the year when there was neither flood nor storm. The silence of the masses was eerie and made the cops very uneasy. Click click click and no other sound from them.
The city cops couldn’t see twenty feet in front of them. And it got darker. Then they couldn’t see ten feet in front of them. And it got darker.
Tony Puente, the only one among them to wear corrective lenses, removed his glasses, wiped them and put them back on because he could see only eight feet in front of him. Within one minute he could not see five feet in front of him. And neither could the others.
The San Diego newspapers carried heroic headlines for a few days: POLICE PUSH TO WIPE OUT BORDER BANDITS. And STALK BANDITS AT BORDER. And CRACK DOWN ON BORDER BANDITS.
But the sad fact was painfully clear their third night out: The commando raiders could not find their dicks in that darkness, let alone bandits.
One task force member claimed he heard a rattler. Another ran his hand into some cactus and required first aid. Another was forced to arrest three aliens who literally stumbled over him in the darkness. Reluctantly, disgustedly, he had to turn them over to the Border Patrol to get them out of the way.
Dick Snider tried to prove that middle age was insignificant and went chasing a group of fleeing shadows, ending up on his face, saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” through a mouthful of mesquite.
In less than a week the commando raiders were no more. There was nothing left but the derisive hoots from their peers which echoed from central headquarters to the Mexican border. Everyone giggled and asked if they could use the raiders’ sexy camouflage fatigues for camper tarps.
So much for plan A. The contingency plan, if Dick Snider was not to fall on his sword after the commando debacle, was to have some of the task force members dress as aliens and act as robbery decoys. In fact, this was much closer to proper police work and something the cops were not unfamiliar with. Vice cops, narcotics cops, detectives, all have occasion to decoy bad guys, and what was the difference, really, whether you did it at Eleventh and Market Streets or in a vermin-infested gully called Deadman’s Canyon?
But first they were going to test their decoy techniques on San Diego city streets. On October 11 five of the task force cops, dressed more or less like aliens, took a stroll through the streets of San Ysidro looking as diffident as possible.
It was about 11:00 P.M. when the five of them walked along Kostner Drive. They saw three young men standing by a parked car. The young men were Mexican-Americans. Just like them. The three young men, who’d been smoking a joint or two, were totally fooled by the mannerisms and the ragged clothes.
Tony Puente removed his wire-rimmed glasses, realizing that few aliens could afford any glasses, let alone gold wire rims. In the slang of the streets a young man asked if they’d like a ride north, but the cops ignored them and kept walking, in the manner of pollos. Then the three young men strolled up beside them and one of them said in Spanish, “Come with us. We’ll protect you from la migra”—which was what the pollos called the U.S. Border Patrol or anyone dealing with aliens in either country.
But the cops just lowered their gaze and walked a little faster. Then one of the young men said, “They’re going to arrest you cabrones!”
&
nbsp; But these dumb pollos seemed way more scared of them than of la migra. Still, he tried once more and said, “¡Vengan carnales!”
But calling them brothers didn’t help either. These pollos picked up the pace. Finally one of their benefactors, who was wearing about a hundred jailhouse tattoos on both arms and hands, started running toward them. A funny thing happened. The cops began hotfooting it down Darwin Way and they started feeling like pollos. The five of them were running from three lowlife vatos who were cursing and threatening them—but not yet demanding money, a crucial element in the crime of robbery.
One of the street thugs got sick and tired of this and, cornering them in a cul-de-sac, picked up some rocks from the ground. Then the hoodlums were looking at shiny brass shields and realizing they had really screwed up, and the pollos-cum-cops began chasing the thugs back the way they had come.
Tony Puente was very surprised to have felt, however briefly, like an illegal alien. To feel threatened by everyone. To be abused by petty hoodlums who probably could have been bought off by a few extorted dollars.
It was only a “probable cause” arrest. The thugs had not as yet demanded money. They would not be charged with robbery and were released the next day. It was an unremarkable encounter except that it proved that they could look like aliens. But there was the other thing, the strange sensation as they got into the parts they were playing. They told Dick Snider to get them union cards from the actors guild.
They tried it again the next night. Two men with the look of smugglers offered to give the pollos a ride to Los Angeles for $100, and were arrested for a violation of the “wildcatting” law in the California penal code: that is, offering transportation for money, without a license. Not a great pinch, but their alien disguises and mannerisms were working.
Lines and Shadows Page 5