by Robert Cea
O’Lary somehow heard of Devlin’s lesson to Patty about, “natural enhancers” in the pool. Now, the pool wasn’t the cleanest to begin with, and one day we just happened to be the last class in gym, which meant that there were 2,970 different types of germs all being “enhanced” in the pool by the time we got there. We were there to practice water rescue, and Patty looked as though he was going to faint. He didn’t want anything to do with that pool. Our first lesson was to show the buoyancy of different body types. A Chinese recruit, Deacon Chin, was told to stand at the edge of the pool, and then our pal Lester Knowles was picked. O’Lary scanned the recruits. “All right, who wants to volunteer for the exercise?” Now Pirelli was no midget, he was six foot three on a bad day, but for the life of me today I could not find him in the crowd of two hundred shorter recruits. O’Lary, without looking or waiting for a volunteer, pointed through about twenty PPOs, a building stanchion, a lifeguard’s chair, and an even taller instructor. And there was Patty, trying desperately not to be seen. Wasn’t gonna happen.
“Yes, that works for me, Asian, black, and a big white guy. Go next to your brother PPOs, Pirelli.” Patty was in quite the jumble fuck. He made his way slowly to the pool.
“C’mon, puppy, you look like you done your share of partying poolside, only difference is here you’re gonna learn something.” Patty neared the edge of the pool. No one said a word.
O’Lary explained that we were going to witness a natural phenomenon. “What you guys should do is jump into the water like you’re doing a cannonball; once you hit the water, keep your arms wrapped around your legs, try to let your body float back up to the top of the water.” O’Lary looked at Pirelli, who was at this point a really interesting shade of green. “You okay, puppy?” Patty looked away and didn’t answer. “What is it, you can’t swim?” At this point, Patty’s embarrassment was changing his complexion from green to purple. Lester, who didn’t have a clue, spoke in his very thick Haitian accent.
“That okay, Patty, me born in da water, man. Ya grab whole a me, man, you feel like you go under, Lester man pull you right up top, man.”
Patty squeezed his eyes closed, then charged toward the edge of the pool as if he’d just stepped on a land mine. He jumped to the farthest point away from where he thought Lester was going to be, then sank quickly toward the bottom. Lester and Chin followed; sure enough, the most buoyant was Chin, who rose to the top of the water almost as soon as he hit it, then Patty came up halfway, and Lester, he kept sinking. Lester must’ve had his eye on his gym buddy above him, because before he reached the bottom, he started to quickly swim back up toward Patty, who was just suspended in the water and not moving. Lester must’ve thought Patty was overcome. Patty, sensing Lester moving toward him like an oily torpedo, rocketed out of the water like a surface-to-air missile. It looked as though he was actually running on top of the water to get out. He bolted past the instructors and the recruits, grabbing his, my, and Devlin’s towels. He was in a zone, trying to scrub off the diseases he was sure he’d just contracted. O’Lary was trying to keep a straight face as he explained what had occurred. “So if you are assigned to a water-bordering precinct, you know who to go to first, and who not to grab on to for help. However, if you happen to be in the precinct with PPO Pirelli, pray he is in the water, because that boy, like Jesus himself, can walk on friggin’ water.” The class exploded in laughter while Patty furiously scrubbed, oblivious.
Two things occurred that day—everyone had a newfound respect for Lester because of his desire to help a fellow cop in need, and Patty Pirelli received a nickname that has stayed with him for twenty years: JC, short for Jesus Christ.
The academy was structured into three classes, social science, law, and police science. Social science focused on the different cultures, religions, and beliefs of the many people who lived in the most diverse city in the world. I always prided myself on being street savvy, having been raised in Brooklyn, “the second largest city in the world,” but it was laughable what I did not know. I learned about the Hasidim in Crown Heights, the rituals of the Santeria, snippets of different languages, key phrases and buzz words to look out for, and street slang. It was all fascinating to me.
Law class broke down into two categories, CPL (criminal procedure law) and penal law. CPL was the course that taught us what we legally could and could not do. For instance, the time limit a police officer needed to acquire a search warrant, what due process of law meant, when we were able to stop and frisk, when we were able to effect an arrest. Patty Pirelli had an acute knowledge of what the police could and could not do. When asked by our law teacher, John Iannello, about his keen understanding of this, Patty clammed up. But as Patty and I got closer, I came to understand exactly who he was and where he was from.
Patty was an anomaly of sorts. His uncle “Joe Sap” was a respected and feared capo in the Genovese crime family, the strongest of all mob families since Giuliani took dead aim at “Dapper Don” John Gotti, and the Gambinos. Joe Sap was what is known in the streets as a gangster’s gangster. It’s been said that he personally hog-tied a very mean street guy, took him to his corrugated-box factory, placed the poor sap’s head in a compressor, and squashed it into a flattened stream of pulp. That’s how he earned his name, Joe Sap—he saps the saps. Patty had his uncle’s traits—hair-trigger temper, and he could knock you the fuck out with either hand. Sap loved his nephew, so Patty would always have work when he retired or the job “retired” him. I understood their relationship, though it was an area I really did not want to know that much about. But guaran-fucking-teed, had I asked him, in a millisecond Patty would’ve given me the goods on himself and his uncle. We would come to develop an unconditional trust in each other.
Penal law was the definition of charges and their classifications, literally hundreds of penal codes and what they meant. My favorite was 265.02–03: “In possession of a loaded firearm.” I read every statute on firearms. I imagined that was the purest form of police work, finding a man with a gun. Why would anyone carry a gun unless he was going to use it? What interested me and a handful of other recruits even more, however, was how you would go about finding that man with a gun and what to do once you acquired your target. This we learned in police science class. O’Lary was our teacher, and we’d heard nobody did it better than he and his partners when he was on patrol.
Police science is basically the nuts and bolts of your daily routine on the street. All the paperwork and then some, and of course what to look for while on foot post or in an RMP (radio motor patrol), a patrol car. Has that derelict really been shopping for a wedding band for the last two hours or is he casing the store for a robbery? What do you do if you see a wanted car that was used in connection with a homicide? How would you stop, approach, question, and arrest five individuals all carrying heavy armament? This is the class that taught you how to survive on the street. My favorite.
During the lessons, we would get visits from some of Sergeant Tom’s old partners. They would come in, talk to us, and share war stories. One afternoon a police officer named John Conroy came in. Everyone stood at attention awhile longer than usual in the presence of the uniformed cop who stood larger than life before us. He was solidly built, around six feet tall, and maybe thirty-five years old. His hair was light brown and a little messy. His shoes were scuffed, as if they’d seen a lot of tussling in the mud. He didn’t seem as though he paid much attention to his uniform or his appearance. His gun belt was minimal: his six-shot .38, two sets of handcuffs, a flashlight, and plenty of rounds on his bandolier-type holster. Tucked inside his belt buckle was a shorter .38-caliber revolver, his backup.* He was “a working cop,” though he did not seem like the in-your-face types we all had recognized from television and movies. Then again, neither did Sergeant Tom. These guys were a different breed: low key, covert, never notice them until the cuffs are on. This is what I aspired to, to be on that same mission, that same quest for good and righteousness, and to do it the right way, li
ke these two demigods in front of us. And here they were giving us their particular knowledge about life and death on the inside. We were finally on the inside.
Conroy’s leather medal device above his shield ran all the way up to just below his chin. He had placed a thin metal bar behind the device, sliding it through the backs of the medals and in between the leather so that it would not flap over. The highest medal, at the top of the rack, was a light green bar bordered with gold piping; in the center of the medal was a gold star. We knew the bar to be the combat cross. From our teachings with Sergeant Tom, we understood that medal to be revered. It meant that the recipient was in a fight to the death with an armed assailant who was firing on him, or his partner, and that they had overcome the situation. The gold star in the center of the medal meant Conroy had been awarded two of them. Below the combat crosses was a row of differentcolored medals that looked like enameled train tracks: blues, greens, whites with gold trim. Some had different-colored multiple stars on them, bronze, silver, and light green. The last was the exceptional-merit medal, given in conjunction with the combat cross or the medal of valor, the solid blue bars that Conroy also wore. John had four exceptional merits. We were, to say the very least, in awe. You could tell that even though Sergeant Tom was Conroy’s superior officer, Conroy ran the show, and to all of us and most of the other instructors in the academy, Sergeant Tom was pretty much “the shit” on patrol—the medals above his shield were a testament to that. If that were the case, then who in the hell was Officer John Conroy?
After a nervous salute from Conroy, we were all told to be seated. He seemed a little uncomfortable around all of us. He was clocking everybody. I assumed that upon entering the classroom he knew how many windows there were, how many men there were as opposed to women, how many of them were minorities.
Sergeant Tom placed his hand on Conroy’s shoulder and smiled. “This is Police Officer John Conroy. Mega Man, King Kong, what the Rastafarian brothers kindly and simply refer to as the beast, or beas, if you’re cruising in the Badlands. They like to drop their ts.” Conroy smiled, at that. “Now, sooner rather than later you’re all gonna get your wings, and as far as I’m concerned, there is no one left on this job who can give the real four-one-one on what it’s like to be out there. So if you have any questions, now is the time to ask my partner in crime, John Conroy.”
Conroy did not like the attention, and he did not look anyone in the eye long enough for them to gauge what he was thinking. The standard questions were asked. What central booking was like, how to act in court, what it was like to make an arrest. No one had the balls to ask the really good questions, the ones we all wanted to know, and then Patty raised his hand.
“What did you get the cross for?”
Sergeant Tom smiled at Conroy. “That’s Pirelli, one of our glory fighters.”
Conroy paused and thought about his answer.
“Pulled a livery cab over on Eastern Parkway. Perp in the backseat transporting quantity coke,” he said casually. “He drew on us, we were quicker, which is what you always want to be.”
The class laughed. I figured the door was opened, so why not ask? I raised my hand. “Why’d you pull the cab over?” He gave Sergeant Tom the slightest of looks, then he smiled and looked directly into my eyes. Did I key into something here, was I getting even further on the inside? I wondered.
“The gentleman matched a photo of a perp wanted for a homicide.” There was something here that wasn’t being said, some unspoken language, something I felt I needed to know.
“But the man wasn’t the one wanted for the homicide?”
“That’s right, it wasn’t him. It also wasn’t his day, it was our day.”
“You could do that? Pull the car over because you think it’s a different guy?”
O’Lary jumped in. “That’s called a good-faith stop, as long as you have one of these…”He moved to his desk and pulled a short form from the mountain of papers scattered all over it. He snapped it high in the air. “This little baby is your lifesaver on the street, the UF250. As long as you fill this piece of paper out after every stop you make, no one can say that you were being duplicitous in your police work. It is the stop, question, and frisk report. After every stop, after every arrest, this paper must be filled out. If not, something or someone can come back and take a piece out of your ass.”
I was there, on the edge of something dark. I tried to raise my hand again and ask more about that paper, about being “duplicitous in your police work.” That was something I’d never heard of before. I mean, how could you be duplicitous on the job? Billy Devlin raised his hand; Sergeant Jack was glad someone else was asking the question.
“Sir, do you have any advice for us once we get out there?”
Without batting an eye, Conroy said these six simple words, which I never forgot: “End of tour, you sign out.”
I thought about those words as I ran with a hundred other cadets the next morning. It was scorching hot even though it was only 7:20 in the a.m. The sun was slowly moving past the Brooklyn Bridge and toward New Jersey. The traffic above was light, though it wouldn’t be long before the morning rush hour had cars and tempers overheating on the span above me. As I ran, I looked up at the massive stone expanse. That bridge always gave me a sense of pride. After all, it was the city’s first bridge, built more than a hundred years before, and it wasn’t called the Manhattan Bridge, or the New York Bridge, no, it was called the Brooklyn Bridge. It immediately gave the place where I grew up its own identity. I always felt like I was a part of something special; I think that everyone who was ever brought up in the borough feels that same sense of distinct belonging. But as I was running with the recruits that morning, I felt a strange distance from my home, even though it was less than two thousand feet to the south. The time I had spent in the academy had given me the feeling that it was a part of my past that was slowly being swallowed beneath this new shell that was covering my skin, my thoughts, and my soul. My home was with the 37,000 cops in New York City, wherever that was on any given day; that was now my home.
The clock was winding down toward the end of the greatest six months of my life. Before going into battle, we all had to be prepared for the mean New York streets. Sergeant Tom was in a rare mood this day. He was jazzed at what we were going to experience that hot summer evening.
“We can sit in this classroom and talk about what happened when I entered the apartment and Nat E. Dread took a shot at me, or what it’s like to encounter your first microwaved infant, or how we collect body parts from a multiple catastrophic car crash—or plane crash, for that matter. We’d all like to think, ‘Ah, simple patrol-guide stuff, bang it right out.’ We know the paper we need to fill out, the notifications that have to be made, we got it all together. After all, we’re graduates of the finest police academy in the world.” He slowed down, looked around the room, into every recruit’s eyes. He tapped his left temple slowly and almost whispered this: “Garbage in, garbage out, guys. Garbage in, garbage out.”
He then took us on a trip to the medical examiner’s office, not ten blocks from the police academy. The purpose: to man all of us up before we actually saw atrocities in the street. We gathered around the corpse on the examiner’s table. Then, unbelievably, the pathologist cut open the dead man’s skull and removed the brain. On down the body he went, removing other vital organs. It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen. I instantly found a flaw within myself: I could not stomach the carnage that violent death generally leads to. As I heard the buzz saw rip into the man’s head, heard the bones cracking, watched the brain scraped free, then dropped into a metal scale, I vomited all over the ME’s shiny linoleum floors and then some. To make matters worse, one of the workers at the morgue was an old high school friend, Mickey Farrell, who I hadn’t seen in years. I was sure that everyone in Brooklyn would soon know about the little mishap.
Ultimately, though, I worried that maybe this job wasn’t really for me, and that is what
scared the shit out of me more than anything else. At the end of the day, I waited in the darkened doorway of the Chinese laundry situated across from the academy. The clouds overhead were threatening to clean the dirty streets of Gramercy Park in a very big way. Twentieth Street that time of night looked like Coney Island in February, boarded up and deserted. One by one, the instructors exited in their street clothes, making it hard to differentiate who was who. But I had an uncanny knack for knowing the gaits and walks of most of the instructors in the B company.
Sergeant Tom stepped outside holding on to an umbrella. The only instructor smart enough to check the weather report in the morning, I thought. He walked east across Twentieth Street toward Second Avenue; his left hand held the umbrella, right hand tucked into his light London Fog raincoat, probably holding on to his five-shot DT special. I followed him from across the street, trying to determine the proper way to approach him. I made it to Second Avenue, in front of the Academy Diner, the place where every recruit has eaten since the academy was built. He stepped off the curb in front of PJ Clark’s, a pub off-limits to rookies, then turned to look inside to see if any of the other bosses were bellied up to the bar for an evening nightcap. Zilch, empty. At this point, I decided to walk right at him. He saw me, looked at his watch, and returned my salute.