Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Manny was hot on the tail of a gun-toting bandit. A bandit who could have stopped at any second in the darkness and shot his pursuer to death at point-blank range. Yet Manny continued running all alone through the night toward the sound of fleeing footsteps. And the threat was very real, because the next day during a thorough search with detectives, they found a .22 automatic and empty cartridge cases.

  While Manny was running that night he had this epiphany, the first and last he ever had. Manny Lopez thought: I am invincible. And the wonder of it enveloped him like an impenetrable shield. And he thought: This is my purpose. The why had become clear to the young sergeant. His reason for being was revealed.

  Manny ran faster and faster. A few more steps and he’d fly! But that was nothing. Danger was nothing. Women, power, glory—nothing. Before him was something infinitely more thrilling. An idea. Manny ran toward it as others have, saints and madmen. It lay before him like a line of shadow. Only a step or two and he would cross. The idea was this: I am not mortal.

  But he would never make that dark crossing. He stopped. So suddenly he nearly hurtled on his face. He twisted his head about like a scorpion in a jar. Looking, listening—for what? He didn’t care about the bandit now. He saw nothing. He heard nothing but his own desperate breathing and hammering heart, and he thought: This is wrong. I’m thinking wrong things. Wrong!

  Manny Lopez, the man they were all convinced had never known fear, began to feel something like fear. Of himself. He kept thinking about it through the evening and all night and the next day: I am invincible. I am not mortal. It was all wrong!

  Manny had always said that if he ever quit the Barf squad it would only be because he was sick of defending his policies to the brass or to his own men, sick of sniping and jealousy. Though he was devoted to his family, he would never have quit for them. And never for personal safety. But Manny Lopez for the first time wondered if something wrong had happened in his own head.

  Ken Kelly had always said, “Of course we were afraid of him. We’re all afraid of psychotics, aren’t we? We’re terrified of unpredictable lucky psychotics.”

  Dick Snider had always claimed, “There was nobody who was crazy enough to do it except Manny Lopez.”

  The very last night in the canyons was by far the most terrifying of all. Everyone was secretly certain he would be murdered on the very last night. Still they walked the canyons, sweating it out to the end. Absolutely nothing happened. It was the quietest night of the year.

  Manny Lopez had often said he never wanted it to stop. That in the BARF experiment he had found out who he was. But now things had changed.

  Perhaps the experiment was ended not a moment too soon. Even worse things may have happened to all of them if they’d tried to continue the crazy experiment under a leader who perhaps had been driven sane.

  BASTARD CHILDREN

  THE CHIEF OF POLICE TRIED TO REWARD THE BARFERS BY creating a plainclothes gang detail for them. There were a number of adjustments to make as the months passed, while they were doing ordinary sane normal police work. A great deal of dissatisfaction began to set in. Several of them seemed to fall prey to various kinds of disappointment and depression based on they knew not what.

  They felt betrayed in a sense. They had been part of a grand experiment. A bunch of minority cops were going to show the white majority what they could do. But people were criticizing in hindsight many things they had done. Until they became uncertain of what they had done. There was talk that relations between the police on both sides of the border could never be repaired.

  When BARF was discontinued, U.S. government spokesmen said that there was going to be a beefed-up presence of federal officers on the border. The beefed-up presence never materialized. When the experiment had begun, they were sure that the department would be so proud of them that minority cops would finally be numbered proportionately among the investigative squads of the department, but there was still only token representation.

  Even the good intentions of the police chief in creating the gang detail seemed a further segregation of the Barfers instead of integration into choice jobs, as they’d dreamed.

  More than one said, “We felt like bastard children.”

  And some of the friends who had started out together would never be friends again. And that troubled them and seemed to fill them with a deeper kind of disappointment.

  Finally, Barfers started drifting away, away from the police department itself. Joe Castillo took his wounded fluttering fingers to the San Diego Marshal’s Office. He left the police department for a job wherein he served subpoenas and guarded courtrooms and admitted he was bored, and could talk only about the good old days when he was a Gunslinger.

  One day BARF attorney Ray Wood, on his way to court, was startled to see a citizen being jammed up and choked out by a marshal in a courtroom corridor. The marshal was Joe Castillo. Some Barf habits died hard, it seemed. And as more time passed, Joe Castillo quit the marshal’s office and joined the sheriff’s department. But still there was this restlessness. In 1983 he left his wife and filed for divorce.

  Renee Camacho lived through his worst time. He watched his father die from a colon cancer that went right to the bone. The boy tenor was devastated. Very few young men were so close to a father, and Renee found that he didn’t care about anything, least of all the work he was doing in the Child Abuse Unit, dealing with people who beat and burned and tortured and sodomized their children.

  This only child of Herbert Camacho was unable to deal with any of it anymore. He came to work and put his case load away and went through the motions. Finally he left police work entirely and moved to Los Angeles, taking a job in a photo-developing store.

  About the BARF experiment, Renee said, “I was confused about all of it from the day the chief said he wanted to stop us because somebody was gonna get killed. I thought of course somebody’s gonna get killed. And if this job isn’t worth that, we shouldn’t be doing it. From that moment on none of it made sense and I guess my heart was gone out of it.”

  In 1983, Renee Camacho, having gone through something very much like a youthful version of mid-life crisis, moved back to his world in San Diego and tried to return to the police department. It was noted that he had not been diligent in his last days as a cop. During the time that his father was dying. Police administrators are also products of a profession that sees not only the worst of people, but ordinary people at their worst. And anyway, bureaucrats have never been known for sentimentality. Renee was considered unfit for rehiring. He was accepted by the sheriff’s department.

  When asked what he got from the BARF experiment, he could only say, “Well, I got a chance to make my dad proud of me. I was brave. For my dad.”

  After killing the bandit, Big Ugly discovered that he wanted a child more than ever. Joe Vasquez and his wife, Vilma, adopted a baby, a white baby. And then, as so often happens, soon had a baby of their own, a Mexican baby. Big Ugly got himself two beautiful children.

  Tony Puente found it more and more difficult to fight with his wife over her religion as each Christmas came and went. He also discovered that, despite himself, he came to buy smaller and smaller Christmas trees each year. Finally, instead of its being so big he needed to truck it in, the Christmas tree was so tiny and scraggly he could practically carry it in his back pocket.

  He hoped he wouldn’t one day find himself disseminating religious tracts on a street corner, but he was clearly admiring of the faith his wife had. He hoped he would never become one of them.

  Ernie Salgado and Eddie Cervantes still had difficulty concealing very strong negative feelings about the BARF sergeant. They remembered his humiliating insults as though it were only yesterday.

  Old Fred Gil, after all the hard luck, after nearly being killed by a body bag, with a bullet still in his hip, after spending a lifetime trying to prove to an absent father that he wasn’t a mama’s boy, found a compatible mate and a new life.

  His second wife, Jud
ith, had a good job as an office manager, was a slim, attractive blonde, didn’t smoke and seldom took a drink and, like Fred, might never say anything worse than “goldang.” He did ordinary sane normal police work, and in their spare time they raised show-quality Maltese dogs and entered them in competition. Old Fred Gil finally got a break.

  As to the experiment he could say only: “Maybe the answer was in Washington and Mexico City? I don’t know. I just don’t think ten guys out there was ever an answer.”

  Of all the Barfers, there was one who stated immediately and unequivocally that he would gladly return to the canyons and do it again. Carlos Chacon felt that they had better jobs with the police department than they would have had without BARF, and he was right. Carlos said that they all “prospered” as a result of the experiment, and he was perhaps not so right. He still had eyes which could show joy, grief, anger, fear in ordinary conversation. Carlos Chacon still had violent dreams.

  The only other who said that he would return to the canyons was the boss Gunslinger himself, Manny Lopez. A funny thing happened to Manny when he went back to ordinary duty. First, he was named a police officer of the year by Parade magazine and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He was flown to New York for the award and rode in the airplane with his chief, William Kolender.

  Americans are fickle about their myths and legends, and pretty soon, when there were no more stories about fabled Gunslingers, people started forgetting all about Manny’s exploits. Other cops said Manny doesn’t want much from life, only a ticker-tape parade every Friday.

  Jimmy Carter went out; Ronald Reagan came in. Mexico went down. People could hardly remember the name of The Last of The Gunslingers, and even his former Barfers started to doubt that Manny would ever become mayor or police chief. In fact, given all the enemies Manny Lopez had made among the brass when this sergeant had so much power, no one was surprised when he didn’t place very high on the promotion list.

  Manny found his life becoming empty. He felt as disoriented as a scorpion in a jar. He thought that maybe money was the answer. Manny Lopez became the third to quit the police department. He became an entrepreneur. He started buying and selling grease.

  Manny started a little business collecting cooking grease from local restaurants, grease which was then refined and mixed with cattle feed. All those animal fats mixed with molasses and stirred in with feed was supposed to fatten up even the scrawny cows of Mexico. But it turned out that there were too many other grease hustlers lurking around McDonald’s and Jack-in-the-Box, so Manny had the idea of processing the stuff south of the border in Tecate.

  But there aren’t any Kentucky Fried and Burger Kings down there and Manny couldn’t find his grease. In fact, what excess grease they have in Mexico they recycle until there’s nothing left. Or they sell it to the people. Manny was at it for two years. Manny was a failed grease hustler.

  Manny Lopez discovered that his talent lay in law enforcement, but he couldn’t go back. There was his pride and ego. So he opened a private investigation agency and figured to make a financial killing, what with being a fabled Gunslinger. He was shocked to discover how quickly people could forget myths and legends.

  Finally, Manny Lopez secretly contacted his old friend and mentor, Chief of Police William Kolender. The chief truly liked and admired Manny but the civil service rules prohibited his return as a sergeant. He would have to come back as a patrolman. And that, of course, was unthinkable for a man who had been a legend.

  Chief Kolender said of the BARF experiment: “It ruined Manny’s career.”

  And that was that. The chief was a very smart fellow who understood, even if Manny didn’t, that life is no picnic for Gunslingers Emeritus, and that Manny could never start again at the bottom.

  Perhaps Manny was just a young fellow with lots of brains and style and courage who found himself thrust into an extraordinary moment in time—confronted with the potent force of the bitch Celebrity, and the power of myth, and with it the seductive ideas of destiny and invincibility. And then that incredible moment when mortality was falling away into canyon darkness like shredded alien rags, a moment he feared but never wanted to end.

  In his home there is a wall covered with pictures and scrolls and plaques and medals. And up there somewhere is the knowledge that it will never be again.

  Manny’s old enemies—and he made a bunch on both sides of the border—no doubt had a chuckle at the thought of him hustling grease. Say it ain’t so, Manny! The Last of The Gunslingers? A failed grease peddler? Manny’s coming in for a landing. A crash landing.

  But Manny Lopez wasn’t through being Manny Lopez. Five years after the experiment ended, one of his former Barfers, perhaps trying to prove he wasn’t so young and impressionable anymore, happened to have a few drinks with his old boss, and decided after too many tequila shooters to put the failed grease peddler in his place.

  This ex-Barfer’s wife, like many of the wives, used to be just as much afraid of Manny as was her husband. Well, nobody was afraid of a failed grease hustler, and his former subordinate felt like lording it a bit.

  He said, “By the way, something I always wanted to find out. My wife told me that at one a the Barf parties you made a serious move on her. She never told me for a long time. Now I wanna know, Manny!”

  And what could a failed grease peddler say to that? No, it’s a lie! Or: I’m shocked! Or: let’s let bygones be bygones?

  Manny Lopez, who had so many times thrown punches and fired shots when he was literally falling to earth, just looked at his ex-subordinate with a tinge of melancholy and said, “I never wanted you to know this. Your wife told one a the girls that she wanted me more than the rings on her fingers. I wouldn’t even talk to her after I heard, and I guess she couldn’t deal with my rejection. I never wanted you to know this, mi hijo.”

  And with that, Manny sadly put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and patted him consolingly, and left quietly.

  “I shoulda blew you away in those canyons when I had the chance!” the cop yelled, after he’d recovered.

  But Manny was gone. Stifling him with the bar tab. And Manny’s former subordinate learned that a scorpion in ajar is still a scorpion.

  If one possessed any charity at all it was best to remember Manny Lopez as he was when they were forcing him into that moment in time and trying to create a legend. When he was sitting in the blackness of a tube, in the blackness of the night, and suddenly vanished. When he was jerked from the pipe by a powerful masked bandit and tumbled down into the land of Mexico and was surrounded by El Loco and three armed cutthroats—literally enveloped by murder. And then for his eyebrow to do its reptilian side-winding crawl into that perfect question mark because, ¿Sabes qué? Manny Lopez had them right where he wanted them.

  DÉJÀ VU

  THE FATE OF THE OUTSIDERS WAS PERHAPS THE MOST DISQUIETING. As time passed, certain traits, responses, emotions they acquired during the BARF experiment seemed to keep coming up. In 1982 three officers had to undergo psychological counseling in an effort to assess certain traits which might cause either embarrassment to the police department or mortal danger to the officers themselves.

  Robbie Hurt had managed to crack up another car, his beloved Porsche, in the parking lot of his local saloon. He and his wife, Yolie, were long divorced, but the thing was he never really left her alone. They lived apart yet he kept calling, and sometimes the three of them—Robbie, Yolie and Robbie’s lady friend—would go to dinner or to a movie. And if they were out dancing after dinner he could still display something like jealousy if Yolie was dancing with someone else. Robbie wasn’t sure of very much in his personal life, not since the old days when he was seduced by the Bitch, more so than any other Barfer except Manny Lopez.

  Robbie entered a program of psychological counseling, primarily to deal with premature cynicism and his drinking problem, before it could claim his life in another car crackup. He talked to his shrink about BARF and his “problem” an
d how it had never abated and how it seemed all mixed up with feelings from those days when he was out in the darkness listening and never knowing. And feeling this unbelievable frustration which had to be worse than the present danger the others were experiencing. And how at the end of the shift he just had to drink hard stuff because of this frustration, especially when some of the others would let him know he was an outsider. He didn’t talk much though about the thing that was infinitely more destructive than frustration: the Bitch, and how he was seduced. He vowed to cut down on the drinking and believed he would as soon as he found Real Happiness in his forthcoming second marriage.

  Ken Kelly was yet another Barfer who quit the San Diego Police Department.

  Ken Kelly said, “I was angry when BARF ended. Real angry and I stayed angry. What was the point of it? Why did we do it? I felt betrayed.”

  The National City Police Department is said by San Diego cops to be a hard-nosed police department, a red-necked police department. It’s still in the Truman administration, they say. Policemen carry Colt .45’s in National City. Or .357 magnums. Big guns. The crime rate is the highest in the county. Ken Kelly joined the National City Police Department, where he quickly made sergeant.

  In 1982, Ken Kelly underwent something so extraordinary that he wasn’t ready to believe it for a while and was ordered again to have his head shrunk until he believed it

  Sergeant Ken Kelly was on duty the night of January 23, 1982, in an unmarked police car. That car was later named The Gunship because of Ken Kelly. There was a theft of beer from a 7-Eleven Store. Not a robbery, just a theft of some beer. Three guys in a sports car merely ripped off some suds and boogied. The store manager called the cops, who spotted the car and the car took off and the chase was on. Eventually three patrol units were in the chase, as well as Ken Kelly in The Gunship. The shoplifters looked as though they were going to give it up finally. But on a street where they were pretty well blocked off by police cars, the guy behind the wheel changed his mind after slowing down. He decided to go for it and rammed a police car. Then he backed up and Ken Kelly thought he’d run over a cop because he heard a loud thump.