by Dave Hill
“Did anyone get hurt?” Travis asked, as if there might be a dead body somewhere that the guy had for whatever reason forgot to mention.
“My finger got cut while they were wrestling me for the gun,” the man explained, holding up his left hand. I felt bad for him—it must have stung a little.
“What happened after that?” Jim pressed.
“Yeah—what happened after that?” I followed excitedly, prompting sidelong glances from both Travis and Jim that suggested my talking privileges were in serious danger of being officially revoked.
“Watch the tape,” the man said, gesturing back to the television. “It’s all on there. They took my gun, hopped over the fence, and then ran into the house right behind mine over there.”
“Officer Hill, take notes,” Travis told me. “I want to know exactly when you see the perpetrators on the screen.”
I realized he was just throwing me a bone, but even so I struggled not to appear too giddy as I rifled through my pockets for a pen and paper. My pen poised, we all stood in silence watching the monitor for a minute or so before two boys who seemed to be in their late teens appeared on the tiny screen.
“There they are! It’s the perpetrators! It’s the perpetrators!” I squealed, doing my best to act like I’d seen this sort of thing a million times before.
After another few seconds, the man with the bloody finger appeared on screen waving a pistol around like he was in a Spaghetti Western.
“And there you are,” I screamed. “And there’s your gun that those perpetrators are totally about to take from you like candy from a goddamn baby!”
To their credit, Travis, Jim, and even the man all acted like they really needed me to give the play-by-play to understand what was happening on the screen. As a rookie, I appreciated the gesture.
Once the video finished, Travis and Jim did some paperwork and the man gave them the tape to take back to the station for further review. Meanwhile, I gave one last “Goddamn if this doesn’t get any easier!” kind of look around the man’s living room—always a good cop move.
Back in the driveway, Jim agreed to head back to the station with the videotape while Travis and I went to check out the house the two kids had supposedly run into.
“Things just keep getting better and better,” I thought.
But as excited as I was to finally fight some crime at the professional level, I was also starting to get a bit nervous about the possibility of getting shot.
“Are we still gonna get lunch?” I asked Travis as we climbed back into the squad car, in hopes of distracting myself from the prospect of death.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “But you gotta remember I’m at work right now, and I gotta take care of shit, so just chill out for a second!”
“Sorry!” I responded in a manner that suggested I wasn’t going to put up with Travis turning his tough cop talk on me for much longer. Just because I was a rookie didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be treated with dignity.
A minute later we pulled into the driveway of the modest two-storey house behind the house of the man with the bloody finger. As we hopped out of the car, it began to rain, which served as just another reminder of the fact that police work is never easy. Then Travis began to make his way up the driveway, slowly removing his pistol from his belt holster as he walked. Despite my taste for action, I was starting to get officially scared. I figured a cop doesn’t take his gun out unless he thinks he might have to use it.
“What should I do now?” I whispered nervously as the rain slowly made a mess of my hair.
Travis said nothing and instead just waved with his gun for me to follow him toward the back of the house, hopefully because he wanted the backup, but maybe just because he wanted to make sure I stayed out of trouble. I tried to keep it together but suddenly felt in way over my head. Not only did it seem like someone might very well get shot, but I was also totally starving. I could feel my blood sugar dropping and everything. It was really unpleasant.
As I followed Travis back behind the house, he waved at me again with his pistol, this time in a way that seemed to say, “You gotta stay back now because this is the part where someone might answer the door with a gun and try to shoot us.” I crept slowly back to the side of the house while giving Travis an “Oopsie!” gesture—palms up, arms bent, face adorable yet confused.
“If one of us actually ends up getting shot, this will definitely go down as just about the worst lunch date of all time,” I whispered. Travis just looked at me.
As I stood there anxiously, I saw a woman in her early twenties walk up the driveway then quickly turn around and head back down the street.
“There is a woman in her early twenties who just walked up the driveway then quickly turned around and headed back down the street,” I whispered to Travis in an effort to settle back into my police work.
“Stop her!” Travis whispered sternly. “Ask her what the hell she’s doing.”
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled at the woman as I shuffled down the driveway. I didn’t even let my voice crack, not even a little. It felt good, empowering even, to be so manly like that. Even so, the woman just kept walking. She didn’t even look over her shoulder. Not only was it kind of rude, but it also hurt my feelings.
“Pure balls on that one,” I thought.
Then I yelled, “You, in the pink jacket,” which totally stopped her in her tracks. Then she turned and looked right at me, Officer Dave Hill, a young rookie thrown into the goddamn mess of these city streets for the very first fucking time in his career.
“What … the hell … are you doing?” I asked through clenched teeth.3
“I was just gonna see if my friend was home, but I don’t think she is ’cause her car’s not in the driveway,” she told me.
Suddenly she was singing like a goddamn canary.
“And now what are you doing?” I asked her, not even close to fucking satisfied.
“I was just gonna go home, I guess.”
“Good!” I said, doing my best to stare a hole right through her. “You can just get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back as far as I’m concerned.”
She had already turned away by the time I said that last part, but I’m pretty sure she heard every word of it. And as she faded out of sight, I headed back up to the side of the house where Travis was still standing at the back door with his gun drawn. A total pro, Travis seemed to sense my presence without even looking at me.
“What did she say?” he whispered.
“She said she had just come to see if her friend was home but she didn’t think she was because her car’s not in the driveway,” I whispered back.
“Where is she now?”
“She left because I told her she could just get the hell out of here and never come back as far as I was concerned.”
Travis just looked at me after that, before finally lowering his weapon.
“I don’t think anyone is home, either.” Travis sighed. “Let’s get some lunch.”
Just in case Travis and the lady in the pink jacket were wrong, though, we headed back toward the squad car with one eye on the house at all times. I felt like a kid in a water balloon fight, quickly retreating from the opposition while looking over his shoulder, only instead of being afraid of getting hit by a water balloon I was afraid someone might pull out a gun and shoot me in the face, which is different. The odds of that happening probably weren’t very good at all, but—again—given our original plan (sandwiches), all the non-sandwich-related action seemed extra intense.
“Are you sure it’s okay for us to just leave like that?” I asked.
“You want me to just break down the door and barge right in?”
“Yeah!”
You probably saw this coming, but Travis just looked at me after that, too. It was honestly getting kind of annoying.
As we drove away, Travis suggested we go to a diner around the corner.
“What happened to Italian?” I asked.
<
br /> “They’re closed by now.” Travis sighed in a manner that suggested that I better get used to making sacrifices pretty darn quickly if I ever hoped to make anything of myself on the force.
Adding insult to injury, we didn’t make it ten more feet before a voice came on Travis’s police radio again. It was Jim. He wanted Travis (and me, I took it) to get back to the station and pronto. Apparently he had watched the videotape again, this time with the sound on, and the old man’s story didn’t exactly wash.
“Well, there goes lunch,” Travis said.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I’m about to faint from starvation!”
“Sorry, Dave, duty calls,” Travis said before rerouting.
I couldn’t argue with him. Besides, it was more his loss anyway because little did Travis know that I’d planned on picking up the tab at lunch in a bold act of self-imposed rookie hazing.
“I’m gonna have to take you with me to the station first because the parking lot we left your parents’ car in is in the other direction,” Travis told me. Whatever. I still say it was because he wanted me to finish the case I’d helped crack wide fucking open.
A few minutes later, we were back at the precinct where we were greeted by Jim and another cop who looked just like him: same mustache, same dark world view, everything.
“Pete, this is my friend Dave,” Travis told him. “He’s visiting from New York City.”
“New York City, eh?” Pete said in a manner that suggested he hoped I spent most of my time running from a bunch of street gangs just like in that Warriors movie but realized I probably didn’t.
Before we got down to business, Travis, Pete, and Jim all lit up cigarettes. I decided to bum one from Travis as long I was standing there. Up until that point in my life, I’d kept a strict rule to only smoke when really, really drunk, but I decided to make an exception in the name of crime-fighting solidarity. Plus, as any decent cop movie will tell you, it’s never a bad idea to take a big drag of a cigarette and exhale slowly right before bringing the fucking hammer down.
“So what’s the story?” Travis asked Jim as a thick haze of smoke began to fill the air.
“Well, it seems the old man’s gun went off long before he made it around to the back of his house,” Tom explained between drags. “Here, have a look for yourself.”
Jim hit PLAY on a nearby VCR and we watched the surveillance video again, this time with the sound on. Sure enough, we heard a gun go off about ten seconds before the man with the bloody finger ever showed up behind the house, which, of course, suggested to us crime-solving types that maybe the old coot was a bit more trigger-happy than he had originally led us to believe. Jim, Pete, and Travis all smirked at one another as the tape finished and the monitor went back to playing static. I smirked, too, though I wasn’t exactly sure why.
“Looks like someone’s gonna have to talk to the old man about getting his story straight.” Travis groaned.
“Yep,” Jim said.
“Yep,” I agreed.
All three of them looked at me after that; I guess it was just a cop thing. Then we all snuffed out our smokes and headed out back to where the squad cars were parked. As Travis and I took to the streets again, I began to wonder if I’d get to do the questioning once we got back to the old man’s house. I was surprised, however, when, just a few minutes later, Travis drove into the parking lot where I’d left my parents’ car instead.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “What about the man with the bloody finger? What about the goddamn B and E? What about us?”
“You’re off the force,” Travis told me, offering his hand and a smile.
“Huh?”
“It was good seeing you, Dave. Let me know when you’re back in town next.”
“Yeah, sure,” I told him, my throat a little dry from that crime-solving cigarette I’d smoked earlier. “I’ll do that.”
On the drive back home, it was hard not to question what had really happened that day. How many shots were actually fired and who pulled the trigger? Was the whole thing an inside job? Did the man with the bloody finger know the two boys on the videotape a lot better than he had let on? And did that woman in the pink jacket think it was maybe just a little bit sexy when I yelled at her in my manly cop voice? But on top of all these unanswered mysteries, I felt exhilarated. Even though neither Travis nor I found ourselves in a haze of gunfire or wrestling some perp to the ground before carting him off to jail or anything cool like that, there’s just something about being a lawman that makes you feel way more alive than, say, sitting around in your underwear eating room-temperature soup.
Part of me wanted to ignore that thing Travis said about my being “off the force.” But waiting at a stoplight on the way home, I couldn’t help but notice I was no longer sitting in a squad car. And suddenly my jeans and down jacket didn’t make me look so much like a guy working undercover as they did a guy who had just borrowed his parents’ Buick for a few hours. Even so, when the light turned green, I stepped on the gas pedal extra hard in an act of rogue defiance. Yeah, I knew I was in a 35 mph zone, but I gunned it right on up to 37 mph before turning on the cruise control anyway. I might have been a civilian again, but I was a civilian playing by his own goddamn set of rules.
About twenty minutes later and a world away from the crime-riddled streets of Cleveland, I pulled into my parents’ suburban driveway. After parking the car out back, I walked through the side door into the kitchen and threw the keys on the counter.
“How was lunch?” my dad asked, looking up from the newspaper.
“Who’s asking?” I said, still in cop mode.
“Your father.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. It was fine.”
I tried to just head up to my room after that, but my dad stopped me before I managed to get out of the kitchen.
“Have you been smoking?” he asked. “You smell like cigarettes.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. Were you smoking or not?”
“Look, dammit, you don’t ask me any more questions because asking questions is my job, you got me?” I told him.
My dad refused to let me borrow his car for the rest of my visit for talking to him like that, but whatever—it’s not like you can expect a totally regular civilian to understand us goddamn lawmen anyway.
Big in Japan
If there’s anything I’ve learned about myself in this life, it’s that I can’t stop rocking. But here’s the thing about rocking and playing in bands: when you’re a young man, playing in a band is cool. Other guys think you’re cool, girls want to make out with you (or at least you think they do, which is what really matters), and you yourself are convinced that the only possible outcome of your rock ’n’ roll exploits is that you will one day go on to become the greatest rock god of all-time.
But then the years start to roll by and you get older, and maybe a little fatter. And suddenly you find yourself at an age where playing in a band can be kind of sad, maybe even downright pathetic. And it’s at exactly that age that some friends and I decided to form our brand-new rock band.
We called ourselves Valley Lodge1 and we knew it was all over before we had even started. We knew there weren’t going to be any platinum albums or stadium tours or groupies hell-bent on licking us from head-to-toe and maybe even making plaster replicas of our genitals. But none of that mattered because, when you’re rocking out, you don’t care about anything else. You don’t care about problems with money or women. Or even the fact that you’ve suddenly become that sad, old rocker dude you’d always swore you’d never be. All you care about is rocking out and then rocking out some more.
To that end, we rocked out whenever possible, which admittedly wasn’t that often since all the other guys in the band had wives and jobs and babies and other bullshit that tends to get in the way of things when you’re trying to rock the fuck out of people. As a result, we’d play every couple months or so. Usually about fifteen or twenty of our friends w
ould show up, mostly because they felt sorry for us or pitied our unwillingness to let the dream die.
“You, um, er … looked like you were having a lot of fun up there,” they’d tell us after shows. “And it’s so great how you just don’t care how it looks.”
That was pretty much the deal for a while. Then one day everything changed. I woke up and—like most days—the first thing I did was check my e-mail. And aside from the usual spam about how I might learn to better please a woman and a couple of replies from some of the many “missed connections” ads I’d placed on Craigslist, there was another e-mail.
“Hello, Valley Lodge,” it read. “We are a record label based in Tokyo. We think you are so very great and would like to release your album in Japan.”
“Finally someone who gets it,” I thought. “Finally someone who gets how unstoppable we are at rocking people.”
“Fuck yeah, motherfucker, you can release the fuck out of that album!” I wanted to respond before instead writing, “Thank you. My bandmates and I would like that very much.”
Releasing an album in Japan would have already been way beyond my wildest, most delusional dreams. If those old pictures of Cheap Trick and Kiss playing over there are any indication, it’s the ultimate place for rock. So after I received another e-mail from the guy at the Japanese record label a few days later, I almost had a seizure.
“Hello, Valley Lodge,” it read. “We were wondering if you might be willing to do a tour of Japan in support of your album.”
“Hell yeah, we would. We’ll rock every man, woman, and child over there so hard you’re gonna have to mop down the entire country when we’re done!” I wanted to respond before instead writing, “Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun.”
Then I immediately called up the other guys in the band and told them how we needed to get on a plane with our guitars, our tightest pants, and our cocks and balls as soon as humanly possible. In my mind, we’d fly over there and, wherever the people of Japan needed their asses handed to them by our gravity-defying hot rock action, we’d just show up and kick them in the nuts with the handful of compositions we’d managed to write on those rare occasions when all three of the other bandmembers’ wives let them come to practice.