The Choirboys

by Joseph Wambaugh

  There was not a recorded case of a radio car in the vast and crowded district ever hearing a distress whistle, but it was said that the whistle saved the property of one woman on LaCienega Boulevard when a purse snatcher almost fell to the sidewalk in a giggling fit at the sight of a sixty year old matron in a chinchilla coat blowing a little plastic whistle until her face looked like a rotten strawberry.

  “One last order of business before we have inspection and hit the streets,” the lieutenant said. “The detectives would like the cars in the area to keep an eye on Wilbur’s Tavern on Sixth Street. They have reports that the owner is beating up barmaids who’re too intimidated to make a report. He apparently only hires girls willing to orally copulate him. And if they start to object after a time, he beats them up and threatens them. Seven-A-Twenty-nine, how about stopping in there once every couple days?”

  “Right, Lieutenant,” said Harold Bloomguard who looked at his grinning partner, Sam Niles.

  Minutes after rollcall, 7-A-29 was speeding to the station call but was beaten by ten other nightwatch policemen swarming all over the tavern checking out the barmaids.

  FIVE

  7-A-85: ROSCOE RULES AND DEAN PRATT

  Probably the most choir practices were called by Harold Bloomguard of 7-A-29. Probably the least choir practices were called by 7-A-85. Roscoe Rules just didn’t seem to need them as much.

  One choir practice however was hastily called by Dean Pratt of 7-A-85, five months before the choir practice killing. It was on the night Roscoe Rules became a legend in his own time.

  Henry Rules was nicknamed “Roscoe” by Harold Bloomguard at another midnight choir practice when Rules, who had just seen an old Bogart movie on television, finished telling the others of a recent arrest: “This black ass, abba dabba motherfucker looked like he was gonna rabbit, so I drew down and zonked him across the gourd with my roscoe.”

  For a moment drunken Harold Bloomguard looked at his partner Sam Niles in disbelief. Rules had not said “gun” or “piece” or “.38” but had actually said “roscoe.”

  “Oh, lizard shit!” cried Bloomguard. “Roscoe! Roscoe! Did you hear that?”

  “You mean your ‘gat,’ Rules?” roared Sam Niles, who was also drunk, and he rolled over on his blanket in the grass, spilling half a gallon of wine worth about three dollars.

  From then on, to all the choirboys, Henry Rules became known as “Roscoe” Rules. The only one to call him “Henry” occasionally was his partner Dean Pratt who was afraid of him.

  Roscoe Rules was a five year policeman. He had long arms and veiny hands. He was tall and hard and strong. And mean. No one who talked as mean as Roscoe Rules could have survived twenty-nine years on this earth without being mean. His parents had been struggling farmers in Idaho, then in the San Joaquin Valley of California where they acquired a little property before each died in early middle age.

  “Roscoe Rules handed out towels in the showers at Auschwitz,” the policemen said.

  “Roscoe Rules was a Manson family reject-too nasty.”

  “Roscoe Rules believes in feeding stray puppies and kittens-to his piranha.”

  And so forth.

  If there was one thing Roscoe Rules wished, after having seen all of the world he cared to see, it was that there was a word as dirty as “nigger” to apply to all mankind. Since he had little imagination he had to settle for “asshole.” But he realized that all Los Angeles policemen and most American policemen used that as the best of all possible words.

  Calvin Potts, the only black choirboy agreed wholeheartedly with Roscoe when he drunkenly expressed his dilemma one night at choir practice in the park.

  “That’s the only thing I like about you, Roscoe,” Calvin said. “You don’t just hate brothers. You hate everyone. Even more than I do. Without prejudice or bias.”

  “Gimme a word then,” Roscoe said. He was reeling and vomitous, looking over his shoulder for Harold Bloomguard who at 150 pounds would fight anyone who was cruel to the MacArthur Park ducks.

  “Gimme a word,” Roscoe repeated and furtively chucked a large jagged rock at a fuzzy duckling who swam too close, just missing the baby who went squawking to its mother.

  Everyone went through the ordinary police repertoire for Roscoe Rules.

  “How about fartsuckers?”

  “Not rotten enough.”

  “Slimeballs?”

  “That’s getting old.”

  “Scumbags?”

  “Naw.”

  “Cumbuckets?”

  “Too long.”

  “Hemorrhoids?”

  “Everybody uses that.”

  “Scrotums?”

  “Not bad, but too long.”

  “Scrotes, then,” said Willie Wright who was now drunk enough to use unwholesome language.

  “That’s it!” Roscoe Rules shouted. “Scrotes! That’s what all people are: ignorant filthy disgusting ugly worthless scrotes. I like that! Scrotes!”

  “A man’s philosophy expressed in a word,” said Baxter Slate of 7-A-1. “Hear! Hear!” He held up his fifth of Sneaky Pete, drained it in three gulps, suddenly felt the special effects of the port and barbiturates he secretly popped, fell over and moaned.

  There was however one thing which endeared Roscoe Rules to all the other choirboys: he was, next to Spencer Van Moot of 7-A-33, the greatest promoter any of them had ever seen. Roscoe could, when he cared to, arrange food and drink for the most voluptuous tastes-all of it free-for the other choirboys, who called him an insufferable prick.

  At first the only thing Roscoe didn’t like about his partner Dean Pratt was his styled red hair. But he soon came to hate his partner for his drunken crying jags at choir practice. There was another thing about Dean Pratt which all the choirboys despised and that was that the twenty-five year old bachelor’s brain became temporarily but totally destroyed by less than ten ounces of any alcoholic drink. Then it was impossible to make the grinning redhead understand anything. Any question, statement, piece of smalltalk would be met by an idiotic frustrating maddening double beseechment:

  “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Or, “Whaddaya trying to say? Whaddaya trying to say?” Or, most frequently heard, “Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”

  And so, Dean Pratt eventually became known as Whaddayamean Dean. The first few sessions of the MacArthur Park choirboys found Roscoe Rules, Calvin Potts or Spermwhale Whalen eventually grabbing the lanky redhead by the front of his Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and shaking him in rage with Dean in drunken tears babbling, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”

  Yet Whaddayamean Dean became the first policeman Roscoe Rules ever took home to meet his family. Roscoe, one of three choirboys who were married, lived on a one acre piece of ground east of Chino, California, some sixty miles from Wilshire Station. Even the few friends Roscoe had made these past four years would not drive that far to be sociable. Roscoe loved it there and made the daily trek gladly. His children could grow up in a rural setting as he had. Of course they would not have to work nearly as hard. His two boys, eight and nine, only had to hoe and weed and water his corn, onions, carrots, squash and melons. Then after cleaning the animals’ stalls, picking the infectious dung and hay from the horse’s hooves and treating the swaybacked pony for ringbone, they could have the rest of the day for playing. After they studied for a minimum of one and a half hours on weekdays and two on Saturdays and Sundays. And after they took turns pitching and catching a baseball for forty-five minutes on weekends.

  Roscoe Rules had convinced both his sons that they would be allstar players their first season in Little League. And they were. And he had convinced them that if they didn’t get straight A’s through elementary school they would get what the recalcitrant pony got when it misbehaved.

  Roscoe’s two sons hated riding as much as the pony hated being ridden, but when the pony wouldn’t ride, Roscoe would snare the pony’s front feet, loop his rope around the corral fence and deftly jerk
the animal’s legs back toward his hindquarters, catching the beast when it fell with a straight right between the eyes. He wore his old sap gloves with the lead filled palm and padded knuckles (which a sob sister sergeant had caught him beating up a drunk with and which he had been ordered to get rid of). That jerking rope, that punch and the bone bruising force of crashing to earth never failed to tame the pony who would obey for several weeks until the stupid creature forgot and became stubborn. Then he would require “gentling” again. Roscoe Rules believed that animals and people were basically alike: they were all scrotes.

  Roscoe was very proud of the clean healthy life he had provided for his sons away from the city He counted the years, months and weeks until he could retire with a twenty year service pension to his little ranch east of Chino and live out his days with his wife Clara (a secret drinker), and raise grandchildren in the same American tradition and perhaps buy them ponies and make ballplayers out of them. And give them all the advantages he had provided for his own children.

  Roscoe was, like most policemen, conservative politically by virtue of his inescapable police cynicism but more so because of his misanthropy which had its roots in childhood. He had served in Vietnam and had almost made the Army his career until an LAPD recruiting poster had forced him to compare the benefits of police work to military service.

  Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were “doing the chicken” on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney And that if Jesus Christ didn’t have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew Roscoe Rules wasn’t raising his sons to be faggots.

  But Roscoe Rules had a sense of humor. He carried in his wallet two photographs from his Army days which were getting cracked and faded despite the plastic envelopes he kept them in. One showed a Vietnamese girl of twelve or thirteen trying gamely to earn five American dollars by copulating an emaciated oxen which Roscoe and several other American cowboys had lassoed and tied thrashing on its back in a bamboo corral.

  The second photo, which everyone at Wilshire Station had seen, was of Roscoe holding the severed head of a Vietcong by the hair as Roscoe leered into the camera, tongue lolling, neck twisted to one side. The photo had “Igor and friend” printed across the bottom. The thought of the photo was to trigger Roscoe’s finest hour as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  Whaddayamean Dean hated being the partner of someone as mean as Roscoe Rules. He knew his own physical limitations and rarely talked tough on the street unless he was absolutely sure that the other person was terrified of police, in which case he allowed himself the luxury of tossing around a few “assholes,” or “scrotes” to please Roscoe.

  “Know why niggers survive serious wounds, partner?” Roscoe Rules asked Whaddayamean Dean.

  “No, why, Henry?” asked Whaddayamean Dean, using the given name abhorred by the other choirboys.

  “They’re too dumb to go into shock.”

  Whaddayamean Dean giggled and snuffled and looked up from his driving at the browless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules, and at his freckled hands which would nervously grab at the crotch, especially when the conversation turned to women. Roscoe was one of those policemen who would sit bored in a radio car in the dark and quiet hours and talk of his incredible sexual encounters in Vietnam or Tijuana and knead and squeeze his genitals until his partners got nauseated.

  Working with Roscoe Rules was many things but it was never dull. He was what is known in LAPD jargon as a “Four-fifteen personality,” 415 being the California penal code section which defines disturbing the peace. Indeed, Roscoe Rules had turned many bloodless family fights or landlord-tenant disputes into minor riots by his presence. He had been transferred around the department more than any member of his academy class, had been the subject of many complaints of excessive force from citizens and even from a few police supervisors, who generally do not challenge the techniques of policemen like Roscoe Rules. Not if they respond promptly to radio calls, write one moving traffic violation a day and stop at least three people daily for field interrogations.

  During their first week as partners, Roscoe started a small riot. It was in 7-A-77’s area, but Calvin Potts and Francis Tanaguchi were handling a call in 7-A-29’s area, while Harold Bloomguard and Sam Niles were handling a call in 7-A-1’s area, while Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate were parked in an alley near Crenshaw Boulevard, Spermwhale receiving a listless headjob from an aging black prostitute whom he had known from his days at old University Station.

  The call had originated as a neighbor dispute, and by the time Roscoe and Whaddayamean Dean arrived, what had been a potentially dangerous situation in an unhappily mixed apartment house on Cloverdale had pretty well petered out to the name calling, face saving phase. There were two tired men involved: a black and a Mexican who did not really want to fight for the honor of their bickering wives or anything else.

  “Took a report here one time,” Roscoe observed as they climbed the stairway at nine o’clock that night. “Some abba dabba made a report that one a her cubs was missing. Had so fucking many milksuckers running around she forgot the police department summer camp was taking care a the little prick for a week. That’s what kind a people we run our kiddie camps for. Didn’t know he was gone till she had a head count!”

  Whaddayamean Dean shivered as he saw a team of roaches charge on a chunk of slimy red hamburger which lay rotting on the landing.

  There was a sign on the manager’s door which said: “No loiterers in this building. Due to lady tenants being kidnapped, molested and robbed the LAPD will arrest loiterers.”

  On the second landing they passed a staggering wine reeking black woman who ignored them. She was barefoot, wore pinned black slacks and an extra large dirty blouse which hung outside. The blouse was hiked in the back because of the lopsided hump which bent her double and reduced a woman who was meant to be of average height to a misshapen dwarf.

  Roscoe tapped the hump as he passed, winked mischievously at Whaddayamean Dean and said to the stuporous woman, “I got a hunch you’re for me, baby!”

  Roscoe was still giggling when they found the remnants of the once smoldering neighbor dispute. The rival factions were almost evenly divided. Two sets of neighbors, including husbands, wives, teenage and preteen children, backed the play of each injured party. Mexicans backed Mexicans, blacks backed blacks. There had been twenty-two people screaming and threatening at the height of the dispute. Now there were just the husbands of the aggrieved women. The black man had a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth where the Mexican had accidentally bumped him when they were pushing and shoving, preparatory to doing battle.

  The black man, a squatty hod carrier with enormous shoulders and a wild full natural hairdo, looked relieved by the presence of the bluesuits and shouted angrily, “You made me bleed, motherfucker! You gonna pay I’m gonna kick ass for this!”

  “Anytime, man, anytime,” said the Mexican, a slightly shorter man, a member of the same hod carrier’s local, who had been on many jobs with the black man and was almost a friend.

  The Mexican, like the black man, was dressed in dirty work pants and was shirtless to unnerve his opponent. He did not have such an intimidating physique in terms of musculature, but his chest, back and rib cage were crisscrossed with many scars: some like coiled rope, some like purple zippers, from old gang wars in East Los Angeles where he had fought his way through the elaborate gang hierarchy to emerge as a seasoned veterano covered with battle wounds and glory But then the Mexican had gotten married, fathered seven children, lost his taste for street war and in truth had not faced a f
oe for many years.

  “What started the beef?” Roscoe Rules asked, deciding to talk to the Mexican.

  The Mexican shrugged, touched his hand nervously to the drooping Zapata moustache, lowered his eyes and turned his scarred back to the two policemen.

  The black hod carrier’s wife spoke first. “The problem is, Officer, that this broad and her daughter always has to hang clothes on the same day that I’m hangin mine. And that ain’t no big thang, cept they got no respect and just throws other folks’ clothes on the ground like pigs. And I has to put another quarter in the machine and wash my clothes all over agin.”

  “That’s a lie,” said the husky Mexican woman, throwing her long sweaty brown hair back over her shoulder. “Her and her daughter are the ones that don’t have no respect. Animals, that’s what they are.”

  “Go back to Mexico, bitch,” the black woman said.

  “I was born here, nigger. Go back to Africa,” the Mexican woman said, and Whaddayamean Dean stepped between them as the black woman lunged forward, bumping Whaddayamean Dean into Roscoe, who fell against the black man, who accidentally stepped on Roscoe’s plain toed, ripple soled police shoes, which he had spit shined every day for the eight months he owned them.

  “Goddamn it!” Roscoe yelled, holding his arms out between the two women, eyeballs white with disgust. “I heard enough!” he thundered, arms still extended, knees slightly bent, face twisted in agony like Samson straining at the pillars.

  Then Roscoe dropped his hands to his hips and walked in slow circles. Finally he paused, looked at the people like a sad but patient uncle, nodded and said, “I heard enough!”

  “Looky here, Officer,” said the black man, “I don’t mean no disrespect but I heard enough a you sayin you heard enough. You’re makin me nervous.”

  Roscoe walked over to Whaddayamean Dean, pulled him aside and whispered, “This spade’s the troublemaker far as I can see. I think he’s got a leaky seabag. Dingaling. Psycho. You can’t even talk to him. Look what the motherfucker did to my shoe!”