Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Ken Kelly wanted to say a lot of things. He wanted to say: Manny, I just went to court on this scum bucket that creamed somebody with a two-by-four just for fun and they dropped the charge. And there’s so many mass murderers getting acquitted and paroled that if the Mansons hadn’t been dumb enough to kill celebrities, Susan Atkins’d be living in Mission Valley giving Tupperware parties for Charlie. And me, I’m convicted and waiting sentence just for hitting a number one prick asshole with a flashlight and my mother’s dying of cancer and my little off-duty business selling emergency equipment blew up in my face and I’m losing my investment and my marriage is about as sound as a Chicago ballot box and I mortgaged my house for the business that blew up in my face so the only thing that ain’t happened is I ain’t found out my minister’s fucking my wife!

  That’s what he wanted to say. All he could say was: “I’m flipping out, Manny. I don’t know what’s happening except I’m flipping out!”

  Thirty minutes later, Ken Kelly was sitting in the BARF office with Dick Snider when Manny came in with some papers and shut the door. Manny said, “I’m sure you want a representative of the Police Officers Association here, don’t you?”

  “What for?” Ken Kelly asked bleakly.

  “This is a predisciplinary interview,” Manny said.

  “Well then, I guess I could call my lawyer,” Ken Kelly said to Dick Snider. “But I don’t wanna have a lawyer except that the city’s making me crazy because they’re mad about having to pay that maggot mouth I hit with the flashlight a lot a bucks because his eye doesn’t work too good anymore. All because I hit this bag a pus with a little four-cell flash-light? What was it, a magnum flashlight? With hollow-point batteries? Lieutenant, my lawyer says I oughtta go to a hypnotist to see if I was cognizant of what I did or was it unconsciousness of fact? Or did it result from a perceived threat based on my experience as a police officer? But trouble is I got too many skeletons in my closet to have a hypnotist fucking with my mind! I don’t know what to do! Ya understand? Ya understand what I’m saying?”

  Dick Snider just smoked and nodded at Ken Kelly from time to time and finally he put his big leathery hand on the young cop’s shoulder and said, “Son, I think you have a real problem. I think you need psychiatric help.”

  Ken Kelly looked up painfully at Dick Snider, the man he hoped he’d get as a father next time if reincarnation is what it’s cracked up to be.

  And Mr. Sensitivity, Manny Lopez, shook his head sadly and clucked, “Yep, King, you’re a fucking nut case. Wacko. A banana is what you are. We gotta get you a fucking lobotomy or something.”

  Dick Snider ordered Ken Kelly to take a week’s vacation and not to report for duty unless he had a note from a psychiatrist attesting to his mental health.

  Ken Kelly was sore about the forced vacation, but during that week he was glad Dick Snider had ordered it. He completed his psychiatric work-up and came back to the Southern substation full of enthusiasm. He met with Manny Lopez and said, “This was a righteous shrink! He was one that did a work-up on Patty Hearst! That’s heavy duty! He canceled his appointments for the whole day and part a the next day just for me! I spilled my guts, Manny. I told him about the first time I pounded my pud and which hand I used. I told him I stole pears when I was four years old. I told him the first time I got a hard-on seeing bare tits. And at the end I say, ‘Tell me, Doc, am I a banana or not? Do I need a lobotomy or what?’ And he says, ‘On the contrary, I wish the San Diego Police Department had more officers like you!’ Manny! I ain’t a nut case!”

  Ken Kelly had a letter from the head doctor to prove he wasn’t a nut case or a banana after all. Ken Kelly couldn’t have been happier when he walked into the office of Captain Joslin, the commander of the substation. Until the captain said, “I’ve got bad news for you, Kelly. The inspector said you’re a liability. I’ve got to take you off your present job.”

  Ken Kelly was devastated. It took every ounce of self-control to hold together. He said, “Captain, please don’t send me out a the division at least. Put me on a patrol unit, as close to the border as possible. So I can help them sometimes.”

  “You got it,” the captain nodded.

  Later, Ken Kelly said, “I’ve heard that every sane person contemplates suicide sometime. Well, I made up for all the insane people who never did. I never thought a smoking it—that’d be too dirty, too many reports for other cops. But a traffic accident? A little bit of overtime for some traffic cop and that’s all? No detectives, no lab man, no insurance man saying they can’t pay off on suicides? A cop bites it on-duty in a car? Happens all the time.”

  Ken Kelly had these thoughts when, on his first night back to patrol, he was screaming down I-5 at one hundred miles per hour. Thinking how easy it would be. Then he got real scared. He called in sick. He didn’t come to work for a few days.

  “I was unbelievably bitchy. Then I was a zombie,” he said. “My old lady was closer than ever to dumping me. My world was over.”

  He never knew why, but BARF was the only thing he wanted in life. Was it the carousing? The camaraderie? Was it a perverse thrill of screaming Barf! in the night? Was it the threat? Was he a banana?

  He’d tried to go to Nam dozens of times when he was in the Air Force, but could never leave the Mojave Desert, not in three years. BARF was something he thought would be significant, a new kind of police work. Even though he was the wrong color, he went out and got it on his own. And now he’d lost it.

  When he returned from his “sick” days off, he was called into the captain’s office. Captain Joslin looked at the dejected young cop and said, “Do you want back in BARF that badly?”

  Ken Kelly couldn’t even speak. He could only nod and hold his breath.

  The captain said, “Okay, I talked the inspector into it. You’re going back.”

  He was in a daze when he walked into the miserable little squadroom after a week’s absence. Renee Camacho and Joe Vasquez hugged him and kissed him on the cheek Mexican-style and said they were going to party for a week.

  Ken Kelly started blubbering and had to wipe his eyes on his sleeve. He said to Dick Snider: “Lieutenant, I hope that if I get reincarnated as a foxy chick I can give the captain a blowjob for this!”

  Dick Snider told him he didn’t think that would be necessary. A simple thank you was enough.

  They had been at it nearly a year. Summer started to end more abruptly than usual, with rain. And there were very few bandits. Manny took them on a mini-Death March, and his daily activity report estimated that they covered ten miles and had seen only fifteen illegal aliens all night. But they did see a fire. Stewart’s Barn was ablaze and was destroyed. There would be no more aliens hiding there after they’d crossed. It seemed like an omen of change. Something familiar was gone. The rumor began instantly that a border patrolman had torched it.

  On October 5th, the log of Manny Lopez read: “It was very quiet due to the rain. We contacted two subjects who stated that they had been robbed on the Mexican side just prior to entering the U.S. We are getting more and more reports of robberies just south of the fence.”

  And then Manny Lopez added a sardonic closing line: “I wonder why the bandits won’t come across?”

  Late one night right by the fence, right near Interstate 5, so close to the U.S. Customs House that you could hit a government employee with a rock, Manny Lopez put Renee Camacho on the fence as a decoy. It was well lit there. Renee had come to hate light. Light was jeopardy. Light was danger. He wanted to be in the dark at all times.

  “Talk to guys,” Manny told him. “Tell them you got money.”

  Renee stood there alone. Manny and the others were thirty yards away in the darkness. Two men approached the fence from the south. One of them was wearing a T-shirt on this warm night. He was about thirty years old. He was incredibly filthy and had a homemade tattoo on his forearm. He had curled puffy lips and swollen white gums. He said to Renee: “The patrol’s coming. Come back over the fence.”
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  “No, I’m waiting for my guide,” Renee answered in his lilting pollo singsong. “I’m waiting for my guide.”

  “The patrol’s coming!” the man repeated, and he turned to his partner who had approached from the darkness. His partner was an ugly man with hair like a Zulu and heavy lips. His smell was overpowering. It made Renee dizzy. He had jaundiced eyes, pupils bright as sapphire in the yellow whites.

  He said, “Come back. We’re trying to help you.”

  “No, I have to stay here,” Renee told them in his alien voice.

  “Bastard, I said come back!” the Zulu said, and Renee felt his hot breath. He smelled like murder. Like the slavering maniacs of the nightmares.

  “If you don’t come, I’m coming over there and dragging you back,” the man said with that corpse-death-murder breath. His leer was saw-toothed, as hideous as a moray eel.

  Renee Camacho was squatted down. Renee Camacho wanted to stand up shooting. He wanted to shoot the son of a bitch to death. He wanted to blast the eel head before it murdered him. There was a nice big hole in the fence, a hole leading to Mexico and murder.

  The bandits whispered to each other. The bandits took a good look at Renee and at the darkness and they walked away into the night. When Manny came running up, Renee’s legs were still weak.

  “What’d they say?” Manny asked.

  “They wanted me to go over there. So they could rob me.”

  “Well, you shoulda done it!” Manny said.

  Renee turned and looked his sergeant in the eye and said, “I’m not going across that line, Manny.”

  Manny looked back at him. He and Renee had known each other since they were players on the same high school football team. Renee and Manny went back a long way.

  Manny said nothing and they went on to other business that night. It was the last night Renee would ever be faced with a bandit smelling like murder. He knew that the next bandit who even approached him with a stick in his hand would die. Therefore he knew that he had to quit.

  Renee was dry-mouthed that night when he managed to corner Manny at the substation. He was of course expecting the kind of lambasting that Eddie Cervantes got. He was expecting lots of yelling. All of it: Chickenshit! Gutless! Pussy!

  He was almost as tense as he’d been out by the fence with the eel-faced bandit. He asked Manny to come into the office and Renee closed the door.

  Renee was very solemn. “Manny, I’ve done more than a year,” he began. “And I have this … commitment to my wife. I … promised her I’d quit after the baby was born and … you know what, Manny? Well … I guess I’m just burned out, is all.”

  Then, after the most pregnant pause Renee could ever remember, Manny said, “I’ve seen it in your eyes for a while now. I understand, Renee. I understand.”

  And that was all. Renee couldn’t believe it. No pussy? No chickenshit? No gutless? No puto? Just: “I understand.” Manny was amazing.

  At last the turning earth promised light. And release from the shadows. But when Renee got back to uniform duty it was very hard for him to watch the Barfers getting ready to go out in the canyons. They were friendly of course, and Joe Castillo came to him and said, “You did the right thing, Renee. It’s not worth it. You did the right thing.”

  They were friendly, and yet he too was an outsider now. The third to go.

  One afternoon when the Barfers reported to work, they found that an anonymous writer had scrawled another acronym on their chalkboard. It seemed an eternity ago that the lieutenant had written B.A.R.F. for Border Alien Robbery Force.

  This time it was different. And in their present state, it was the truest, most meaningful and profound acronym any of them had ever seen. When they went out to the canyons that night, the sorrowful truth of it was clanging in their heads like a gong. The acronym once again spelled BARF. But the words were different:

  Beaners

  Are

  Really

  Fucked

  LAST HURRAH

  NEWSPAPER ARTICLES IN SEPTEMBER MADE THE DRAMATIC announcement: SAN DIEGO POLICE MAY GO HOLLYWOOD!

  It had to happen. Hollywood hit the border. The Barf squad was courted by a motion picture company. Manny Lopez was of course going bonkers and so were they all. The wives were more excited. Everybody started casting the picture. And even Barfers knew that as far as Hollywood was concerned there was no such thing as a Mexican actor, so it was De Niro and Pacino. And Burt Reynolds might be able to play a Mexican. But how about a blond? Goddamn! If you lace his granola with angel dust to make him look like a lunatic, guess who could play King Kelly? Only Robert Fucking Redford!

  They wondered if Coppola would direct? And how about music?

  When Hollywood showed up, the Barfers were ready to “do” lunch. Ray Wood, the National City lawyer and writer of death documents, was to “take a meeting” with people whose Third World gardeners dressed better than he did. Ray Wood got his suit pressed that week and tried to wear matching socks and shaved the lint balls off his shirt collar with a razor. Ray Wood had to do a deal!

  The Barfers gave Hollywood an “option.” The Barfers fell in love with the Hollywood folks and took them home and threw a big party with all the beer and tequila you could drink and the wives made snacks and sandwiches and everybody was just dying because maybe Warren Beatty or somebody could pass as a Mexican. This was some kind of a week.

  There were a bunch of jokes flying around to the effect that the producers should get the bald guy to play Manny, just like in that other Manny Lopez story. The “bald guy” was Sean Connery. The other Manny Lopez story was The Man Who Would Be King.

  The Hollywood contingent was warm and congenial and the Barfers couldn’t believe that bigshots like this could be such regular guys, and the Barfers were trying to impress them with all kinds of macho charades, because what the hell, they wanted to do a movie about hardball Gunslingers didn’t they? And being the amateur drinkers they really were, the Barfers proved it with a contest involving tequila shooters. They did the whole business: tequila, lime sucking, licking the salt off the wrist, all of it. The Hollywood producers went along like troopers and had a few, but didn’t try to match the boys shot for shot. And the Barfers got blotto and fell in love with everything about these movie guys, and wallowed in some of the most glorious word pictures ever painted which took on the hue of tequila gold.

  The Barfers learned about motion picture “points” and got dizzy trying to figure out how much their points would be worth if the picture grossed, say, 30 million!

  Some of the Barfers ran out and bought swimming pools. And for referring a fellow Barfer to the swimming pool builder, each of them got a hundred-dollar discount. They did all this after receiving $250 each for their option.

  The Barfers, like most cops, were cynical in the ways of street people, and doubtful as to the innate goodness of mankind, but they hadn’t any idea about Hollywood and were unaware that in Hollywood there were people who looked about as macho as Mr. Rogers or John Dean and yet were more ruthless than Loco on his meanest day.

  The producers went back to Hollywood and Truth, which was: Whoever made money on a movie about a bunch of beaners? There’s only one goddamn role for a white man for chrissake! Two if you count the big Okie lieutenant. What the fuck were you smoking when you got this dumb idea?

  The Barfers never saw the Hollywood producers again. They had to go to the police credit union to borrow enough to pay for the swimming pools. All that background music in their heads just faded away.

  October went bust. There wasn’t much doing in the canyons and the brass uptown kept pulling them out to work a burglary or robbery series in various parts of San Diego.

  November was cold at night but a bit more active in the canyons. They arrested a group of bandits in Washerwoman Flats who had shot at a fleeing alien and beaten another half to death. There were the usual minor injuries: sprains, cactus infections, lacerations. Carlos Chacon got beaned by a rock thrower and had to spend a
night in the hospital for observation. The closest they got to some nurturing publicity was when they did a Gunslingers versus Bandits re-creation for public television.

  As their second Christmas approached, the Barf squad finally got one replacement: a veteran cop named Gil Padillo. Small, salty, he was an aggressive type whose thrusting head, they claimed, entered a room five minutes before his body. He despised Manny Lopez at once, but never got the chance to fear him because time was running out on the BARF experiment.

  It did seem sometimes that the Barfers attracted trouble wherever they went. On the 9th of December they were assigned uptown to help with the armed robberies that take place every Christmas season. And on that particular day there was a pair of very busy robbers at work in the San Diego area.

  At two-thirty in the afternoon in National City, two young black men wearing pearl earrings committed an armed robbery, firing one shot from a .357 magnum and escaping in a white Chevrolet pickup truck.

  An hour later they pulled a robbery at the FedCo store in San Diego near Fifty-fourth Street and Euclid.

  At seven o’clock that evening they did it again at the College Grove shopping center, and fired at one of the robbery victims as they fled.

  A few minutes later they appeared at the Big Bear Market on Federal and snatched a woman’s purse, punching her around for good measure. They popped a round at a potential hero who came to the rescue. They had missed all their victims with the powerful handgun, but it wasn’t because they weren’t trying.

  A few minutes after their last robbery of the evening, they were spotted by two San Diego reserve cops driving south on Forty-seventh Street. The reserves followed them without broadcasting that fact and without using emergency lights and siren. It was probable that they were a bit shy or uncertain, as reserve cops are wont to be, but while caravanning down toward Market Street they passed a patrol car containing a pair of regular officers who weren’t shy, as well as a “cool” car containing Barfers Carlos Chacon and his partner Joe Vasquez.