Corruption Officer

by Gary L. Heyward

  CHAPTER 23

  HOOD BOOGAS

  “No, poppie, please noooo! Please don’t take it. I need it!”

  “Ma’am, you’re going to have to let it go!”

  “Poppie, please, my back. I have back pains. I can’t sleep without this bed.”

  Me and my partner were at this Spanish (anyone who speaks Spanish—Mexicans, Dominican, Puerto Rican, etc.) lady’s apartment. She was pleading with us not to take the box spring and mattress while I was holding up the bed and my partner was prying her fingers off. I shook my head, wondering to myself, What kind of stupid shit have I gotten myself into? My partner was hearing none of it. He continued to yank the bed out of her apartment and down the hall to the elevator. She crumpled to the floor and continued to sob out loud and to curse us out in Spanish. I stepped over her and went down the hall to help my partner put the items into the elevator.

  “Yo, do you think that we should have at least let her keep the mattress?” I asked my partner.

  “Shiiiiiiit, that’s a hundred muthafuckin’ dollars!” he said. “Do you have a hundred dollars in yo pocket right now?”

  I shook my head no.

  “A’ight then!” he said.

  Then we continued to push and cram the items into the elevator. I took one last look down the hall at the woman. She was sitting on the floor in front of her apartment crying. I shook my head in disgust at myself because I knew that I knew better. And, oh yeah, did I mention that she was seven months pregnant?

  Here I was now on another suicide mission, another part-time job, trying to make a buck. I teamed up with a store that rents out items to people with bad credit. My job was to retrieve the items when the renter couldn’t make the monthly payment.

  The routine went like this: I knocked on the apartment door like I was the police. When the person inside looked through the peephole to see who was knocking, I showed my Corrections badge, which looks like a police officer’s badge. The person inside opened the door, puzzled as to why the police were knocking on the door. At that moment a representative from the store stepped into view with the contract agreement in hand.

  In most cases the client would slam the door in the representative’s face. But because they thought a cop was standing right there they would give in and let us retrieve the items. I’d stand there with my badge around my neck (of course with my name and numbers taped up so that they could not be seen) and my firearm exposed at my side. Every now and then we would have to put some extra icing on the cake by using radios and police jargon, like “Yes, we have the suspect in sight,” and “Have the backup stand by in case of resistance.” Once they heard the response on the other end, “Ten-four,” they threw their hands up and gave in.

  —

  After the Spanish lady we continued to retrieve items from the remaining apartments on our list. By the end of the day, we had made out pretty good. Well, that is, up until we made our last stop. My partner and I were outside an apartment where we had just successfully run our routine.

  The routine started off pretty good. My partner and I were standing outside adding up what we were getting paid. “Let’s see, we get one hundred dollars if we get the items and fifty dollars just for knocking on the doors of the not-at-homes,” he said. We also received hazardous-duty pay. That’s for when we show our badges in these neighborhoods where the people behind the door may have warrants or be drug dealers and think that we came there to apprehend them.

  We were standing there and all of a sudden the worker from the store came running out of the building. He jetted by us and jumped into the car, leaving me and my partner standing in front of the building dumbfounded.

  We walked over to the car, got in, and asked him what happened. But before he could say anything, two actual police cars, with sirens wailing, pulled up to the building. The police jumped out with guns drawn and ran into the building. I waited until they were all the way in the building, then I peeled off down the block, getting out of there. After we collected our money, my partner slapped the shit out of the worker for not telling us that the tenant called the cops on two people impersonating the police. That was the end of that gig, because later on we found out that other cops had gotten fired for doing the same thing for this store.

  It was late when we got off that day. I made a mad dash to get my medication—yep, from the liquor store. I bought a half gallon of Hennessy and was on my way to see a “hood booga.” (A hood booga is any low-self-esteem female in any hood who is on welfare with a bunch of kids, who has no job, no goals, no ambitions, and who is comfortable with lounging around all day collecting her food stamps, who will give up the cookie to any city employee because he has benefits . . . yeah, I said it!) These were the females that I preyed on, because when you’re going through something and have long hard days at work you need a three-hole-minimum-requirement, down-for-whatever-sex-you-desire type of female. Personally, I think women like this need a holiday named after them.

  On my way to her house, I stop to get the equipment I need.

  Bag of weed. Check.

  Chicken wings and French fries. Check.

  Condoms. Check! Check!

  Oh yeah, I almost forgot, a big ole bag of sunflower seeds that she can eat all day while watching television.

  It’s close to three in the morning when I get to her house. I hear the music blasting when I get off the elevator. Hey, why not, she doesn’t have to get up in the morning. I knock on the door and I hear her yelling at her kids as she unlocks it, “Y’all better go to bed! Taquan, I told you to move your toys out the hallway!” I thought, Great, the kids are up and don’t they have school in the morning? She opens the door with nothing on but a T-shirt and a joint in her hand. I don’t do drugs and I hate smoking cigarettes, weed—it’s all the same to me.

  “Hey, boo,” she says.

  “What’s up, baby,” I say.

  She goes to give me a kiss and I turn my head. She gets the side of my face. She’s not offended. She knows what it is. I go inside and it’s the normal setting. There’s a couch and a television, with toys and bags of unwashed clothes on the living room floor. I give her the bag of weed and the chicken. She says, “Thank you. They ain’t had nothing to eat all day.” Then she goes into the room with her kids. I hear her instructing them to stay in there and go to bed after they finish eating the chicken wings. I take off my jacket, sit on the couch, and get comfortable. I open the liquor and start drinking it from the bottle. She comes back with her cup and fills it up. It doesn’t take long before I am feeling nice and can tolerate the strong weed smoke.

  She’s still smoking when she gets down on her knees between my legs and starts to unzip my pants. She pulls me out and starts to kiss on me between puffs and I don’t even care because I pick the bottle up and take it to the head for a couple of seconds, letting the air bubbles flow back into the bottle. Now she has me in her mouth and, one-handed, unbuckles my belt. I take my gun out of the holster and place it by me on the couch. With my pants now down by my ankles, she goes to work and the shit feels so good. I grab the back of her head and start to drift in and out thinking about my life right now. I’m so tired of all these crazy jobs that I’m doing now to stay afloat. I hadn’t really seen my kids. I’m not sure if it’s from working so much or my resentment from my kids’ mother taking me to court.

  Damn, this shit feels good. I open my eyes to watch her performance. Then all of a sudden her youngest child comes running into the living room. She stops in mid-goggle and I half-ass sit up, but she nudges me to lean back with one hand still around me. She yells for him to get back in that room and go to bed. He looks at her, grabs his favorite stuffed animal off the floor, and runs back into the room. She continues her assault and before long I am releasing my tadpoles into her mouth to seek out her tonsils. Then she stands me up and I grab the bottle and my gun and hold up my pants as she pulls me past the kids�
�� room and into her bedroom.

  There we knock all the clothes off the bed and onto the floor and get butt naked. I drink some more from the jug as I admire her body. She takes off her shirt and climbs up on the bed on all fours. She has big flabby tits and a gut to go along with a big round cheddar cheese cellulite butt. To put it short, I am in heaven. I mount her and quickly get into a rhythm and all you hear is the cranking from her raggedy bed. I slip out and proceed to put it in her third hole and as I look down to get into position I see that my condom popped. I don’t care because I am so gone now and this tight shit feels so good that I just can’t stop! She moans and says, “Damn, baby, that feels good. You fit right in there.” Is that a compliment or an insult? Now I’m vigorously hitting it. I am up on my tippy toes so that I can hit it at a better angle. I’m sweating and farting and shit and I have her bent over with her gut on the bed. My gut is on her back. Her titties flapping. My titties flapping. This is bliss. I reach down and pick up the bottle and drink. I got Hennessy pouring out from the side of my mouth and dripping down my chest.

  As I am still hitting it, I bring the bottle down and for the first time I notice the large mirror that she has on her dresser. The view of myself that I see is disgusting. I think to myself, You’re not living right. Your job situation is out of control and you’re a drunk. I can hear my momma say, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Right then she tightens up on me. I grunt “uhhh” and any remorse or guilt that I was feeling just skates right out of me.

  CHAPTER 24

  ROCK BOTTOM

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  I’m awakened by my mother banging on my bedroom door. I look over at my clock and it says 2:30 a.m. I answer her, half asleep, “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s somebody on the phone for you named Marshal,” she says.

  I’m puzzled and wondering why an officer from my job is calling me at this time of morning. I make my way to the phone and on the other end I hear, “Gary Heyward?” I say, “Yes,” and the voice on the other end lets me know that he is the city marshal and he’s in the parking lot about to repo my van. I put the phone down on the table. My heart sinks. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. My mother notices the look of despair on my face and asks me what happened. I momentarily ignore her question and pick the phone back up.

  “Hello! Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, I see that you have an officer’s plaque in the window. So that’s why I am giving you a courtesy call so that you can come down and get any personal items that you may have inside the vehicle.”

  “Thank you. I’m on my way down.”

  A few weeks have passed and all the suicide jobs have fallen through. All my resources to get money have dried up and the bills just keep piling up. I knew this day was coming. I was behind in my payments and I knew that I could not keep playing hide-and-seek with my van, parking it in different spots, praying that when I came out in the morning to go to work it would be there. Plus I owed about a gazillion dollars in parking tickets.

  After I retrieved my items I stayed up until it was time for me to go to work. I had to use mass transit now and leave home at least an hour and a half earlier to get to work on time. I got dressed and left. I walked slowly to the bus stop because I didn’t have a dime to my name, not even carfare to get to work. When the bus pulled up I took a deep breath because I knew that I was not supposed to be using my badge to get on for free, but I had no choice, and some bus drivers really act like they’re paying your fare out of their pockets if they let a corrections officer on for free. But if I were an NYPD officer, no problem. Some of the drivers ask you to pull out your ID because our badges are so similar. I waited to be the last one so that the embarrassment would not be so bad if the driver gave me a hard time. He didn’t and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat down. All the way to work I just kept thinking that something has got to give.

  I arrived at work and took my post. It was my steady post, which meant no more rotating schedules and different times to be at work. I was assigned area 8 upper and my permanent hours were 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It was bittersweet, though, because all the inmates in my area were high-classification inmates. So I had all murderers and drug kingpin types. I started my shift with Flocko in my face asking me if I was all right, because I didn’t look so good. He started making jokes about me looking like a bum with my face unshaven, my hair not cut, and my bummy wrinkled uniform. I really had not noticed my appearance and didn’t care, so I laughed at him, because we were real cool and I’ve known his whole family since we were kids. He had been trying to get me to bring him stuff in for a few months now, whenever he got the chance. Now that I was his area officer I knew that he would not stop, but I also knew that he knew how far to take it. He continued with his workout and I went back to doing my job and stressing about my situation. The day went on with me in and out of disbelief about no longer having a vehicle. I walked to the back of my housing area so that I could get a signal on my cell phone so I could check my messages. I was happy that I at least still had a phone.

  BEEP, first message from my moms: “When you come home can you stop by the supermarket and pick up some butta beans? I thought I had some in the cabinet, and don’t forget I need my change”—the rent—“this week.”

  BEEP, my moms again: “You got a letter from that loan you applied for; they said no because you had too many garnishments; also go to C-Town grocery store because they have the beans on sale and I don’t like that manager of the other store on the corner.”

  BEEP, my baby momma: “Your daughter needs some sneakers, so could you get them this week? I didn’t get my check yet” (my child support payment). After this message my blood began to boil. I thought about her words and repeated them: “My check!”

  I knew that I had to take care of my kids, but the thought of her getting my money like that and her not having any accountability as to where my money was being spent just burned me up. I mean, she could be spending it on anything and anybody and it ain’t shit I could do about it. The court was making sure that they kept track of me paying her, but no one was keeping track of how the money was being spent on my kids. How could she fix her mouth to say, “My check didn’t come yet,” as if she were in here with me dealing with murderers and shit?

  My day dragged on and I went to check my messages again.

  BEEP.

  It’s the hood booga telling me that she has some news for me . . . she’s pregnant! I yell out, “Fuck!” Then I throw my phone against the wall and it shatters. This gets the attention of some inmates working out nearby. I put my hands on my head and pace back and forth. Of all the stupid things for my dick to do at a time like this. This can’t be happening. Let me think, let me think, did I cum in her? I did remember wearing a rubber. I know I didn’t go up in there raw smiggady. Damn, I needed to get to a phone.

  I pick up the pieces to my phone and go to the officers’ station to get an outside line. Frantically, I call the main control room so that they can give me an outside line and they connect me to the HB. I know that you’re not supposed to talk your business on these lines but I am desperate and have to get to the bottom of this. Hood booga answers the phone and I say, “What’s up?” Then she says, “Oh, you can’t call nobody back? You been ignoring a bitch’s call, but as soon as I tell you I am pregnant, bliiing, here you go!” I say, “Are you sure?” She says, “Yes, I am sure and before you come at me, nigga, it’s yours.”

  I’m stuck. She continues, “I ain’t got no coverage, so unless you give me the money for an abortion, I’m having it.” I don’t say anything at first. Then I tell her I’ll call her after I get off work.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Of all the stupid things that I’ve done in my life I go and make my shit worse.

  I know this chick is lying. I can feel it, but what am I going to do? She’s got me fucked up right now. I know I ain
’t about to have a baby with her and start this shit all over again, especially after what I am going through right now. I know she is definitely plotting on doing the child support thing with me. I begin to panic. I got to get this money up. I start to pace the floor again in the officers’ station and then Flocko comes up to the station to ask if I can open the shower for him. I look at him for a long moment and he looks at me, puzzled, like, “Why are you looking at me like that?” I then tell him to go ahead in the shower. I sit back and take a look around me as if I am being watched. I know what I have to do. . . .