It turned out to be a cop bumping into his own car, but Ken pulled out his .357 magnum and cranked one off. And fortunately for him as well as for the petty thieves, he missed. He would later get a one-day suspension for firing that shot, but after what was to happen the next night, he would be sent to a head doctor.
On the night of January 24th, the very next night, at a time when Ken Kelly didn’t even have all his paperwork completed from the shooting the night before, he was back in the field, having just gotten a fight settled, when he heard one of his men in pursuit yet again. Two security cops from “Death Valley Hospital”—so called because the cops say more people die of violence there than are born—happened to be in a market when a bunch of kids came in, snatched some beer and took off in a Dodge van. The security cops decided to play like real cops and started chasing the kids, and some real cops eventually joined in. Another batch of suds stealers, and that was all.
At the time of the chase the city cops didn’t know for sure why the kids had begun running in the first place or who they were. The pursuit rambled all through National City and into San Diego. A National City cop took over as lead chase unit out on Highway 805. Ken Kelly paralleled the chase and found himself in his old stomping grounds of San Diego, blowing by at a hundred miles per hour.
This was just like the night before. This was eerie. This was déjà vu. This was impossible.
On Market Street, Ken Kelly jumped on the brakes and slammed to a near stop, cranking hard to the left. The chase was southbound on Forty-first Street. Ken Kelly parked the car diagonally, using it as a barricade, and ran around in the headlights and here it came! Just like the night before. Or was it the night before? Or was it a dream?
The van was loaded with kids. The van swerved from side to side. Ken Kelly took out the .357 magnum. Like a dream. They were so close he saw the little numbers on the headlights. He fired once before he knew he’d done it. The van passed him. He fired twice more and knew he’d fired, but didn’t feel the big gun kick, not a bit.
The first shot hit the E in DODGE and took it out. The second was to the left and lower. The third shot entered the side of the van just as it flew past.
The van ran out of gas finally. One of the kids inside the van was a sixteen-year-old boy who had been crouched between the seats. The .357 slug crashed through his jaw, through his hand, and smashed into his femur. The boy was the cousin of a police sergeant. His hand was crippled and his face was disfigured.
Ken Kelly spent all of 1982 on an emotional roller coaster. There was strenuous debate as to whether he should be charged with a felony. The district attorney finally decided not to charge him.
He spent time with a psychiatrist by order of his police department and he told the psychiatrist all about the dreamlike events of January 24th which, following the events of January 23rd, couldn’t possibly have happened, but did. He talked about his days on the Barf squad and what it meant and didn’t mean and it was all very confusing.
“We’d rather be tried by twelve than carried by six!” Ken Kelly said. “That’s what we always said working Barf. We took them down hard: fists, saps, gun butts, whatever it took. Until such time as the guy was dead or pretended he was dead or flat-ass surrendered unconditionally. They wanted us to shoot people. Everybody did. Maybe they didn’t say it but we came to know it.”
Somehow Ken Kelly got through the year. He worried that his head wasn’t quite right, but gradually began feeling better. Then on a spring day in 1983 he started feeling very bad. At first he thought it was the flu. Then he felt worse. He went to a doctor and discovered that his blood pressure read like a major league batting average. Ken got scared. A cardiologist examined him and found that physically he was in good shape. The cardiologist advised Ken to see a psychiatrist. It was suggested that he might not be fit for police work anymore.
One night Ken Kelly was driving home in his car. He turned on the radio and a song was playing. The song was “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” He thought it was very ironic. He listened to it on 1-5 southbound. He listened to it all the way into Chula Vista. In Chula Vista he suddenly started crying. He couldn’t stop crying. He got home and he was still crying.
His older sister and his wife, Joyce, tried to stop him from crying but they couldn’t. Pretty soon all three were crying. It went on until he was too exhausted to cry anymore.
The Barfers had been given a lot of awards at the conclusion of the experiment. Not just local stuff. Not just Manny’s award in New York. The Attorney General of the United States presented them with an award for their work, even as the United States government chose to ignore the rape-robber-murder situation in the canyons. Perhaps it was the last chance to get some P.R. mileage out of the experiment.
At all of these award ceremonies and banquets and parties there was one person conspicuously absent: the BARF creator, Lieutenant Burl Richard Snider. In fact, he was never even mentioned by the speechmakers.
All of the Barfers still loved Dick Snider, and they decided to pitch in for a plaque. They wanted to present it to him at the big bash for the attorney general’s award. A deputy chief wouldn’t permit it. Though the deputy chief had never set foot in the canyons and had been seen around Southern substation about as often as Halley’s comet, he was the one introduced as the man in charge of the BARF experiment. The deputy chief stood up and took a bow and people applauded wildly.
Dick Snider—for all the fuss he made in getting the experiment started, and for all his talk about helping aliens—was never looked upon with fondness by the administration. It held no brief for a lieutenant who refused to be a lieutenant and chose to crawl around the hills with lizards and rattlesnakes. And yet the administration was right. He never stepped into middle management and acted like a lieutenant. He didn’t learn to compromise, and couch his terms tactfully, and use discretion.
He had initiated the publicity blitz that brought political notice, which brought the Barf squad into existence. And of course when BARF was hot, nobody could touch it. BARF had a life of its own. And these inspectors and deputy chiefs remembered all this. And how even after a direct order to muzzle himself, Dick Snider refused to understand the political expediencies. He only understood putting crooks in jail. For sure, the Dick Sniders of this world are a pain in the ass to administrators and bureaucrats.
The betrayal he felt was more acute than that of the others. After all, they were out in those miserable canyons for a myriad of reasons: to prove something to absent fathers or dead fathers or fathers soon to die. To prove themselves worthy of white respect. For career advancement. Finally, for love of the Bitch, and appointments with Destiny. And sometimes, only incidentally, to relieve some suffering of innocents.
As Manny himself admitted, “Only Dick Snider had pure motives and he kept them till the end.”
Dick Snider believed all along that if the people of La Jolla were worth risking lives for, so were the aliens in the canyons. He was the one to decide what the bottom line was: we should only do it and continue it if it’s worth dying for.
For him it was. Within one month after BARF was ended, a terrifying thing happened. He had just come back into the Southern substation after a five-hour search for some crooks in San Ysidro. He went into the office to put away his gear and was getting ready to go home when he felt like somebody smacked his chest with a sledgehammer and left the iron inside. He got dizzy. He felt a buzzing in his head. A ferocious pain down the side of his neck. His heart began pounding irregularly. He got up and started walking from his office to the captain’s office. He sat down.
The captain’s secretary looked at him and said, “Are you okay?”
He was not okay. He didn’t remember much else except an ambulance ride with Renee Camacho. He couldn’t breathe. He was in the hospital for three days. He thought it was a massive heart attack. It wasn’t even a minor one. The doctor talked to him about hyperventilation. The doctor talked about stress. The doctor asked the big cop whether he ha
d experienced any unusual frustrations, disappointments, fears in recent months. It was almost too funny to answer.
Dick Snider went back to duty. The city of San Diego said that the attack could not possibly be job-related. Dick Snider was taken out of Southern substation and ended up in communications, which was under the street, below a fire station.
Dick Snider was far from the canyons and his cops and the border and all the things that obsessed him for so many years. This unofficial “mayor of San Ysidro” and his grand experiment were no more. And for the aliens, nothing had changed.
Dick Snider’s career was in the basement. In fact, a couple of levels lower than a basement. He looked at his new surroundings down there below the street and said, “Good. I thought they might as well bury me. And they have.”
As President Ronald Reagan was completing his first year in office and it was apparent that this administration was no more concerned with his obsession than the last one, Dick Snider had another of those moments. It happened at home at ten o’clock in the morning. He thought it was the Big One for sure. It was worse than the last one. He became paralyzed. He could hardly talk by the time he got to the hospital. They had to explain to him what hyperventilation really was, and how sometimes the best thing that can happen is that you pass out, allowing the oxygen and nitrogen to right themselves.
And Dick Snider squinted through his own cigarette smoke and felt that his heart was about as sound as a peso and said in his country drawl: “Believe me, pardner, I’m trying to believe it. But I kinda hate to keep passing out just to get myself right!”
They decided to send him to a psychiatrist, making him the third member of the experiment to have his head shrunk in 1982. Dick Snider talked all about the BARF experiment. The examining physician was of the opinion that Lieutenant Burl Richard Snider suffered from “psychophysiological cardiovascular reaction and labile hypertension” and should not be continued as a police officer. And that this condition was definitely job-related. In other words, Dick Snider got a stress pension. And yet another was gone from police service.
Dick Snider was by now aware of mistakes, and felt guilt about not recognizing certain symptoms in his young men and felt sad about the bitterness some felt toward each other. Dick Snider was not a complicated or sophisticated man. He had the history of western America in his face. He was a son of the Great Depression, a believer in law, and his country, and fairness.
It had been a long time since a young border patrolman got an idea by looking out the window of the bridal suite of the hotel in San Ysidro, watching San Diego cops chasing aliens. The idea being: there is not a significant line between two countries. It’s between two economies.
The border patrolman had thought about the aliens a whole lot in order not to think of a young son dying—I couldn’t save him!—and he had this idea that if a human being set foot across that imaginary line, that imaginary economic line, the person was entitled to be saved.
He had spent half a lifetime on the border and he knew the language and ways of the people, and admired them. They were not unlike himself in most ways. So perhaps it was natural that an uncomplicated man who believed so implicitly in the American way should try to do it American style. That is, if political hot air blows nothing but dust devils, send in a cleansing wind.
What did they accomplish finally? He couldn’t say for sure. “We probably saved a few lives,” he said. “Of course we also took a few.” Then he added: “Well, there was that miracle.…”
And it was true enough. There is a Mexican woman named Rosa Lugo who saw her little girl in the nightmare of gang rape being saved by a host of wild angels. Try telling her it wasn’t a Christmas miracle. There was that. Things like that.
But it had finally resulted in so much blood and bitterness and discontent, and ruined careers and sense of betrayal. So much psychic violence, which twice struck him down like a hammer and filled his family with dread.
At a time when Ronald Reagan was announcing economic recovery, and Miguel de la Madrid was clutching the sleeve of a teetering nation, and people were looking toward dangerous foreign enemies and crying quite correctly: “If Mexico goes, look out, America!” At this time in history, Dick Snider preferred not to think of his life on the border. He’d much rather sit at the organ in his little living room and play to relax, and to steady his heartbeat. He couldn’t read music but he could play some songs by the numbers. His favorite went:
Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.
Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain.
Now the dark days are gone and the
bright days are here …
He was fifty-two years old, his face a web of lines, and as he played, his slate-colored eyes squinted through the smoke of the dangling cigarette, and his big leathery farmer’s hands were spread out over the organ keys. He looked up at a plaque on the wall.
It was a modest plaque, not presented at any formal ceremony and certainly not by the police department officially. It was given to him by a group of young men, some of whom were born about the same time as a child he had lost so long ago.
“It’s the only one,” he said in the ubiquitous drawl of country America. “There’s only one a these.”
The plaque read:
To Lt. Snider
The person responsible for
the formation and existence
of the
Border Crime Task Force.
Thanks always,
B.A.R.F.
It was the one thing of sure and certain value his experiment had left him.
CHANO B. GOMEZ, JR.
DESPITE THE OVERALL SENSE OF BETRAYAL THAT MOST OF them reported, which stayed with them over the years, not a one of them could, with certainty, name their betrayer.
One ex-Barfer, given the advantage of time’s passing, looked back and tried to fathom the nature of the experiment. He said he could not justify some of the things done during those forays into the canyons. Since Mexico had fallen on such hard times, the aliens were coming as never before. During one month in 1983, nearly fifty thousand were caught there in the Chula Vista sector. And with robbery, rape and murder proliferating like the cholla cactus in that rainy winter, he particularly felt the futility of it all.
The question was, what did they get out of it? What thing of value? The ex-Barfer pondered that and tried to be cynical but his face had too much disappointment in it. What did they get out of it? The answer was uttered like a question. With the saddest of smiles, he said, “A couple blow jobs?”
It may be that the only one who totally understood the amorphous experiment in the canyons was the man who could see much of it from his vantage point on the upper soccer field, old Chano B. Gomez, Jr., himself. It might take a tamale vendor to figure it all out finally, about good intentions, and myth and legend, and the good and bad that goes into myth and legend.
As to the Barfers, these children of the working class had been honest and brave and loyal to their mission as they were given to understand it. Perhaps in his own way every man came to know unconsciously what that incredible mission finally was, though they didn’t know who commissioned it, or if anyone did. It was to dramatize a dilemma of migration and exploitation so enormous that two governments, two economies, had despaired of solving it.
It would be ironic if the little tamale vendor with his goat whiskers and his maracas hissing like rattlesnakes wasn’t really shaking those maracas at pollos after all. The final irony would be if those hissing maracas—Cha cha, cha cha cha!—were meant to warn not pollos but them, the Barfers.
Maybe it would take a foreigner like Chano B. Gomez, Jr., to know how typically American it was to thrust ten young men into a monstrous international dilemma with an implied mission to dramatize it. It made for many a good show down there in the natural amphitheater of Deadman’s Canyon, if you were perched on a rock at the top.
They gave their nightly performances and almost everyone applaud
ed. They did it the only way they knew—not ingeniously, merely instinctively—by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was, not even in the nineteenth century. A myth nevertheless cherished by Americans beyond the memory of philosophers, statesmen, artists and scientists who really lived: the quintessentially American myth and legend of the Gun-slinger, who with only a six-shooter and star dares venture beyond the badlands. Beyond all charts. Even to the phantom line between substance and shadow. To draw against the drop.
HARBOR
NOCTURNE
Joseph Wambaugh
Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
New York
Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Wambaugh
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