The LawDog Files

by D. Lawdog

  And that’s something you might just want to think long and hard about.

  FILE 22: Detoxification

  Your Humble Scribe and a Minion were watching an inmate who was praying vigorously to Ralph, Ye Ancient God of the Porcelain Throne.

  Inmate: “Oh, Gaaaawwwwd!”

  “Sweet Jeebus,” sayeth the Minion, looking a little greenish herself, “Does he have anything left?”

  I attempted to look properly concerned but probably failed miserably, “Probably not. Pretty sure I saw toenails come out just a second ago.”

  “Do we need to send him to the hospital or something?” asked the Minion, who hadn’t quite reached the fullness of cynicism enjoyed by her elders.

  “Nah. When he was arrested—curled up under the dining room table of a complete and total stranger at three in the morning, I might add—he had a baggie with trace amounts of heroin in it. Trust me. The jail nurses are quite familiar with the protocols for opiate detox.”

  “You don’t unnerstand!” He gulped a couple of times, “Gawd, please kill me!”

  “If I were you, I’d shut up and concentrate on keeping your organs on the inside.”

  “Don’t make fun of me! Yeeaaarrgghh!”

  “If you feel something round and furry coming up, best swallow hard ’cause you’re going to need it later.”

  Minion: “Eww.”

  “You’re makin’ fun of me!” There was a pause as he performed the old Better-Out-Than-In ritual, “I’m somebody! I went to Local State University!”

  “Graduated,” I snarked, feeling really proud of myself, “Magna cum laudanum, no doubt.”

  Inmate: “Yeah! Blargh!”

  Minion (Rolling her eyes at her Mentor in All Things Knuckledragging): “That… was terrible.”

  LawDog: “I’ll say. I’m pretty sure the jail kitchen doesn’t serve a damn thing that color.”

  Minion: “Smartass.”

  Ah, well. The finer points of extemporaneous wit are lost on the young.

  *sigh*

  I’m so unappreciated in my time.

  FILE 23: Rivers of Ink

  Why a fountain pen?

  Well, I’d be lying if I said that ego didn’t have something to with my choice of writing instrument. People will stop what they are doing when you uncap a fountain pen and watch in fascination as you write with it.

  And in today’s world of mass-produced ballpoint pens and gel inks, there is something satisfying to the soul to be found in writing with an instrument which dates to the 1850s and can trace its direct lineage back to the 10th century.

  The big plus to a fountain pen is the simple fact that it is easier to write with one. Fountain pen ink is liquid and flows freely. The scribe need only guide the nib across the paper, and the ink will apply itself.

  Ballpoint pens, on the other paw, use paste ink and require the writer to firmly apply enough pressure to rotate the ball, dragging the paste out of the reservoir and onto the surface of the paper.

  Granted, it is not a lot of pressure, but it does add up over the course of a day. Since I initial or sign over a hundred documents in a shift, answer a score or more Inmate Request Forms, Grievances, and the occasional Citizen Complaint, and annotate or add suggestions to a double handful of stuff written by other officers, my writing hand gets a bit of a workout.

  It may just be my imagination, but at the end of the day I can tell a palpable difference between a shift using a fountain pen and a shift using a ballpoint pen.

  And I just like them.

  * * *

  I carry two pens at work. One of which is a fine-point gel rollerball for the frequent occasions when I’m writing or signing something that has carbons.

  The other is a fountain pen with a medium nib. This is the pen that I use for everything else and is the one I use the most. I use it to the point where I have to refill the converter about every three days or so.

  Somebody forgot to remind me that a promotion comes with an exponentially expanding increase in paperwork. The bastards.

  Anyhoo, part of the reason I was going through rivers of ink was that when an Inmate Request Form, colloquially referred to as a “kite”, crosses my desk, I answer it properly.

  Instead of scrawling a single word such as “Approved,” “Denied,” “No,” or the like, I address the response to “Mr. (or Ms.) [Insert Critter’s Name Here] and write a—usually—short paragraph explaining why I am not going to authorize the inmate to receive a My First Meth Lab in the mail or opining that if Ms. Critter didn’t want to get stripped and placed on Suicide Watch in Solitary, then she shouldn’t have tried to hang herself with a bed sheet on video.

  I hadn’t realized that this would get as… distinctive… as it had, until the other day, when an officer brought me a kite from an inmate in the last ten minutes of my shift. It had been a long shift, I was tired, out of ink, out of sorts, and running low on patience, and the request was a calculated attempt to game the system.

  So I grabbed the kite and my rollerball, wrote a quick “Denied, see Inmate Handbook,” signed it, and handed it back to the officer for return.

  Lord have mercy.

  I got back to work next shift, and the first thing I heard was that a certain inmate had twisted off. He was raising hell, flooded his cell, filing grievance after grievance, and generally acting the ass.

  Huh. I trundled back to Solitary to ask him just what the hell his major malfunction was and to impress upon him the advantages of a nice, quiet night when, upon seeing me, he practically burst into tears.

  “Mr ’Dawg! They’s fraudulating a superior officer! They can’t do that!”

  I blinked, feeling my eyebrow slide up, and the Smartarse Gnome took the opportunity to grab my tongue. “I’m pretty sure that fraudulating violates the laws of physics, if not the laws of the State of Texas, Anthony, but which particular case of flagrant fraudulating are you referring to?”

  He waved a stack of kite forms in my general direction for emphasis. “You, Mr ’Dawg! They is impressonating and fraudulating you! And I won’t stands for it!”

  I looked at the oncoming tier officer, “I am? Why was I not told? Did I at least hold out for dinner?” That worthy gave a puzzled shrug, which, come to think of it, is a normal response from my minions, and I turned back to the passionately declaiming Anthony.

  He promptly shoved a stack of kite forms into my paws, each one with a paragraph or three on the back in rich burgundy from a medium nib. “That’s you.”

  “Okay.”

  He waved a single sheet of paper upon which four words were written with a fine-nibbed blue-ink G2.

  Oops.

  “They said this is you, but I know better! I know better! I knows your writing, and this ain’t it! They wrote it and said it was you! That’s fraudulating! If someone writes something and says that someone else writes it, and that someone didn’t write it, and that someone is a superior officer, that’s impressonating a superior officer! I won’t stands for it! It’s fraudulating!”

  Crap.

  Why me?

  FILE 24: The Power of Paper

  While this isn’t a funny tale, it was one of those things that I sat down at my desk and pounded out in one short stretch and turned out to be one of the more quoted things I’ve ever done.

  I think it’s even more relevant today.

  * * *

  I’m fond of paper.

  A single sheet of paper can hold ideas, hopes, dreams; it can carry a song, orders, love; it can recall history, bear witness when none is left, and it can serve as the base of art for bairns as well as their great-grandsires.

  Many folks name the invention of the printing press as a foundation stone of human civilization, but what is the use of a printing press with no paper to work with?

  For all of its utility and history, though, there is one area in which paper is sorely lacking:

  It makes lousy armour.

  Oh, I’m sure there are fantastic suits of papier-m�
�ché hauberks using fabled Oriental Death Bamboo paper and sacred Tibetan yak lacquer, but let us cast our gaze upon a single sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 paper.

  Let us further stipulate that it is of a good, heavy kind of paper—quality stuff—say, 32lb paper. Pretty, is it not?

  We shall hang this sheet of paper from something. A clothesline, maybe, or a door frame. Something that will hold the paper at the top and at the bottom yet allow some room behind the paper.

  Now, flick a hand at the paper and see how much force it takes to tear through it. A simple pass of the fingers, I’d wager. Nothing as vigorous as a baseball bat, or a fireplace poker, surely.

  If you were to lay a similar sheet of paper—flat, as it is meant to be read—upon someone’s cheek and then slapped that cheek with all of your strength… would it absorb the blow? Would an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper cause the impact to hurt less?

  How about a punch? Would a sheet of paper—or two sheets, or three—laid upon your stomach turn the trauma of a punch? A kick?

  Does anyone think a sheet of paper will stop a kitchen knife or a bullet?

  No?

  Let us change the exercise a bit. Take a new sheet of paper and then rummage around and find your favorite pen. With this most wonderful of writing instruments, I want you to write two words upon the pristine white surface of this sheet of paper.

  The first word shall be “RESTRAINING,” and just below that, write the word “ORDER.” Just those two words. If those two words are not to your liking, you may substitute the words “PEACE” and “BOND,” the former above the latter.

  As you admire your penmanship, I urge you to contemplate how much those two words change the ability of that sheet of paper to stop slaps. To absorb punches. If this single sheet of paper was held in front of your stomach, would it stop a kick?

  Not so much?

  Take this sheet of paper and add columns of section signs (§) here and there, write “IN THE NAME OF THE STATE OF TEXAS” at the top and scribble a judge’s name somewhere near the bottom.

  How about now? Has the paper now suddenly become magical? Will you now trust this sheet of paper to stop a baseball bat aimed for your face because it has writing upon it?

  *sigh*

  Paper makes rotten armor, no matter how many inked symbols it holds.

  And when it comes down to you and a critter in a deserted parking lot in the afternoon, or a busy office at brunch, or your living room at midnight at bad-breath distances, that’s all your ex parte restraint order, or your peace bond, or even your Protective Order is. It is merely a piece of paper.

  Oh, I hear you now: “LawDog, if I have a valid Protective Order, and the critter violates it, he goes to jail!”

  Yes. He does. Remember, however, that when he does that violating, you have to be able to contact the men with guns to come help you. And then they have to come to you from wherever they are at the time you call. Until they get there, if the only thing you’ve got is that piece of paper.

  And, as we’ve seen, paper just doesn’t make decent armor at all.

  Gentle Readers, nothing says, “Protected,” quite like a Protective Order in one paw backed up by a self-defense tool in your other, and the mindset and willingness to use it behind your eyes.

  FILE 25: Unhappy Meal

  Yes, I once bought an inmate a Happy Meal from McDonald’s. Truth be told, up until that time, no inmate that I transported had ever complained about getting a burger and fries from Micky D’s before. I figured that anyone who had been in our jail for an extended period and was on the way to prison—probably for an extended period—would be happy to get some “real” food. And by “real,” I mean non-institution food.

  Ick.

  TDC in this story refers to the Texas Department of Corrections, which is incorrect, since the proper title has been Texas Department of Criminal Justice for some time, but when I started it was always called TDC, and I’m nothing if not a man of habit.

  * * *

  There I was, staggering through the briefing room in search of a coffee pot when the sheriff laid a fatherly arm across my shoulders.

  “’Dog,” sayeth that worthy, “I just received a grievance from TDC.”

  I blinked at him, muzzily.

  “Seems like one of our prison-bound inmates has complained that the deputy who transported him to durance vile provided him with an actual child’s Happy Meal from McDonald’s for lunch on said trip.”

  I could smell coffee. It was here. Somewhere.

  “According to the inmate, when he protested, this deputy confiscated the toy from said Happy Meal, hooked it into the partition between the seats, and—I am quoting here—‘Made it talk smack,’ unquote, to the inmate for the rest of the trip.”

  Coffee. Coffeecoffeecoffee.

  “In a high, squeaky voice.”

  Where was that little caffeine jolt of life?

  “The worst of it all, according to the inmate, was the toy staring at him for the next six hours. You wouldn’t happen to know if any of our officers might be inclined to do something like this, would you?”

  Oh, holy days! The warrants crew had brought coffee! May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Coffeecoffeecoffee!

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  “Huh?” I responded, wittily, as the Blessed Java Bean of Wakefulness started firing up the old synapses.

  “Nothing, ’Dog. Check with Range about firearm re-qual next week.”

  Hmpf.

  FILE 26: Dinosaur

  As I get further toward retirement age, the kids just get younger and younger, and I find I have less and less in common with them.

  I don’t think, however, that this makes me a member of an extinct species.

  * * *

  “We,” announced Faithful Minion #1 with a certain amount of relish, “Have A Problem.”

  I looked up from the pile of paperwork that seemed to have adopted my desk as its ancestral breeding ground to see a young lady at the intake desk. Short, nervous—not unexpected considering she was under arrest for something—maybe 80 pounds.

  I looked back to where someone had sent me a request for permission to look for mop handles, “Call the kitchen. Get her a sandwich.” Someone needed my okay to look for bloody mop handles? Seriously?

  “Ah, boss, she’s deaf.”

  “Okay. Give her her cell phone. Let her send a reasonable number of texts.”

  An inmate had sent me a request for information on getting a divorce while in jail. “Didn’t I just sign off on a proxy for this one to get married?!”

  “PD seized her cellphone. I really think we need a dinosaur.”

  Huh? I looked back out to the intake desk, where the Wee Lass was poking a finger at some equipment with a puzzled air.

  Ah.

  I hied myself from the desk and wandered out to where our 18-to-22-year-old guest was looking from Faithful Minion #2 to the Brand-New, Just Purchased At No Small Expense 1973-era TDD machine that had been plunked down in front of her.

  “This,” I announced to my faithful minions in tones that emphatically did not resemble in any way, despite slanderous assertions by folks higher in rank than I, a Tyrannosaurus delivering the lecture ‘Mammals: An Evolutionary Failure’, “is what the deaf used to use for communication in the days before texting and email.”

  So saying, I dialed the number in front of the Wee Lass and placed the phone handset in the TDD cradle with a flourish.

  “Ohhh,” sayeth the faithful minions.

  There was a long pause. A really long pause. The Wee Lass poked the TDD with a suspicious, and more than slightly uncertain, index finger. A faithful minion cleared her throat.

  “Sooo… she types into the… PBB … and it talks to whoever is on the other end?”

  “TDD. No. She types into the TDD here, and the message comes up on the TDD on the other end.”

  “Oh.”

  I realized what was coming just before my faithful minion opined. “Since she do
esn’t seem to know what the hell that PBB is, the chances of there being another one on the other end of this call–”

  I raised my hand, sighed the sigh of a man beset by the inequities of dealing with young people—children, really—and asked, “How have you been communicating with her?”

  “Oh, she reads lips.”

  Good. I turned to the Wee Lass and, enunciating fully, I asked, “Is there another number you would like us to call for you?”

  The Wee Lass stared at me with one eyebrow cocked. There was another long pause, broken by Faithful Minion #2 announcing, “She reads lips. I don’t think she reads mustache.”

  I felt my eye twitch as Faithful Minion #1 mused, “I think she can read mustaches. It’s just that the mustache was saying, ‘In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.’ Or something.”

  I pivoted to look at my faithful minions. Innocent faces, the lot of the little buggers.

  Sigh.

  FILE 27: Treed

  There are two kinds of people who read this story: the kind that have dealt with a Texas feral hog in the past and read along nodding their heads and those who haven’t dealt with them and think this is stretching the truth all out of sorts.

  * * *

  Back in the late 90s, I was on my first night patrol after having just gotten back from a gun class out of state. Along about 0500 dispatch called, “Dispatch, Car 12.”

  The 0500 calls are always interesting, so I admit to some anticipation, “Go ahead.”

  “1100 Possum Drive, 911 call, report of a possible prowler.”

  I sighed. 1100 Possum Drive was a nice, middle-aged lady divorcee who called in a prowler about three times a week. Said prowler always being brush rubbing the siding on her house, or a cat, or the wind.