“Look,” the exasperated watch commander argued, “that West Los Angeles officer deserved thirty days off for what he did.”
“Deserved?” Deserved?” Spermwhale Whalen thundered. “His old man and his old man’s old man owned that fuckin bar for thirty years. He grew up behind the bar.”
“Department policy forbids policemen to engage in off-duty employment in places where alcoholic beverages…”
“What would you do if your old man was pressed for a bartender for a couple weeks?”
“He only got thirty days.”
“Only? Only! Take thirty days’ pay off me and I’d starve to death. So would my ex-wives and my ex-kids and my turtle. Where the fuck else does a guy get fined for somethin he does during nonworkin hours that don’t violate no laws?”
“Professional sports,” said Lieutenant Finque.
“They can afford it, we can’t,” Spermwhale shot back. “All I can say is I’m glad I got my twenty in next January I’m gonna start speakin my mind then.”
“The lieutenant needs that like a dose of clap,” said Sergeant Nick Yanov, who winked at Spermwhale.
“Fuckin pussies run this outfit,” Spermwhale growled, settling down a little under the placating grin of Sergeant Yanov. “I know why all the brass downtown go up to Chinatown for lunch. They operate this fuckin department from the fortune cookies.”
“Well, what say we read the crimes?” Sergeant Yanov asked, much to the relief of Lieutenant Finque who feared gross and ugly and dangerous old cops like Spermwhale Whalen. Lieutenant Finque could never seem to reason with them.
“Here’s one on Virginia Road where a housewife invented a do it yourself antiburglary kit,” Nick Yanov said, rubbing his bristling chin as he read. “She’s an invalid who stays in bed all day with a Colt.38 under her pillow. Blew up a burglar the other day when he opened the kitchen window and tippy-toed in. Her second.”
After everyone finished cheering, Sergeant Yanov looked at the clock and said, “Not much time left. Here’s a mug shot of that dude the dicks want for shanking his old lady Cut her long, deep and continuous. Hangs around the poolroom on Adams.”
“Hey, Sarge,” Spencer Van Moot said, “I’m getting tired of all these station calls to the old broad lives on West Boulevard. Doesn’t the desk officer know she’s a dingaling? She always wants to know things like where does she buy a crash helmet big enough for her thirty-five year old epileptic son who keeps falling on his head.”
“Only takes a minute,” Sergeant Yanov said. “Her boy’s been dead for five years. Makes the old woman feel good talking to a big good looking blond like you, Spencer. You probably remind her of him.”
“Well she’s not my type and I got better things to do,” Spencer answered, and then he got mad as the assembly room exploded into hoots and laughter because everyone but Lieutenant Finque knew that Spencer’s better things to do were bargain hunting on Wilshire Boulevard.
“It’s time we hit the streets,” Lieutenant Finque repeated, since he believed that a lieutenant should never let a sergeant, especially one as lenient as Nick Yanov, take over the rollcall.
Unquestionably, the biggest pain in the ass on the night-watch at Wilshire Station was Francis Tanaguchi. He was twenty-five years old, a third generation Japanese-American who grew up in the barrio of East Los Angeles and spoke good street Spanish but not a word of Japanese. He adored guacamole, chile relleno, barbacoa, menudo, albondigas soup and tequila with anything. He hated sushi, tempura, teriyaki steak, sake and could not operate a pair of chopsticks to save his life.
As a teenage member of a Chicano youth gang he had spray painted “Peewee Raiders” on more walls than any other gang member. Still, he was never totally accepted by Mexican boys who lumped all Orientals together by invariably nicknaming them “Chino” or “Chink.” Francis fought to be called “Francisco” or at least “Pancho” but settled for “Chink-ano.” It stayed with him until he joined the Los Angeles Police Department at the age of twenty-one.
Gradually he found it was advantageous to be Japanese. There were many Mexican-American policemen but there were few Japanese-American policemen, even though Los Angeles has the largest Japanese-American population in California.
Sometimes Francis and his black partner, Calvin Potts, had profound philosophical discussions about their ethnic roots.
“So now if I wanna get somewhere in the department I gotta be a Buddhahead,” Francis moaned to his partner.
“You think you got problems?” Calvin remarked. “How about me? How’d you like to be a brother in your paddy world, huh?”
“Who said I’m a paddy for chrissake?” Francis answered. “Goddamnit, I’m a Mexican.”
“You’re a Nip, Francis,” Calvin reminded him.
“So quit calling me a paddy.”
“You all look alike.”
“It’s goddamn hard becoming a Jap when you’re my age. I been at it four years now and I still can’t take a picture or mow a lawn straight.”
“You think you got it rough,” Calvin said. “How’d you like to have other policemen put you down when you date a white chick. How’d you like that, Francis?”
“I ain’t seen it stop you yet, Calvin.”
“That’s because I’m drunk when I date a white chick. I get drunk to stop the hurt.”
“You get drunk when you date any chick. In fact, everybody knows you’re an alcoholic, for chrissake.”
“I’m only an alcoholic because it dulls the hurtin,” said Calvin.
“How’d you like to get sick to your stomach every time you look a fish head in the eye?”
“I do get sick to my stomach every time I look a fish head in the eye.”
“Yeah, but that asshole Lieutenant Finque ain’t trying to duke you into the Oriental community by using you as a part time community relations officer at Japanese luncheons where you force down three raw squid and puke all the way to Daniel Freeman Hospital afterward.”
“That’s all in your head, that reaction to Nip soul food.”
“That’s the worst place to be sick-in the head. And that prick Lieutenant Finque is doing it to me.”
“We’ll talk to the guys at the next choir practice. Roscoe or one a those whackos’ll think up some way to fix his ass.”
Calvin Potts, at twenty-eight, was three years older than Francis Tanaguchi and had been a policeman two years longer. He was tall, athletic, divorced, the son of a Los Angeles bail bondsman. He had been raised in Baldwin Hills when there were only a few black families on the hill. He had dated girls and women of all colors all his life. In truth he seldom had any trouble with racial slur. It wouldn’t have bothered him much if he had. He was an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic, as was a brother, a sister, two uncles and numerous cousins. He came from a hard drinking family. He had been a Scotch drinker at sixteen. He was also an alcoholic because he was insane about his ex-wife, Martha Twogood Potts, whose father was one of the most successful black trial lawyers in Los Angeles.
Martha Twogood Potts had decided in the second year of their marriage, after several reasonably successful sexual encounters with more marriageable men, that she had been goofy to marry a no-account cop. She scooped Calvin Jr. out of the crib and called her daddy who convinced a Superior Court judge that it would not be unreasonable for Officer Calvin Potts to pay child support and alimony equal to thirty-five percent of his net pay. This left fifteen percent for the car payment, twenty-five percent for food, twenty percent for gas and car repairs, and forty percent for an enormous personal loan he incurred getting started lavishly in married life. Since the total outlay was 135 percent, Calvin remedied the situation by letting the Mercedes be repossessed and buying a second-hand gearless Schwinn bicycle which he rode back and forth to work. He then divided the twenty-five percent food allowance into two equal parts, half for food and half for booze, and discovered that twelve and a half percent of a policeman’s net salary would not buy enough booze for even an a
verage alcoholic. So he moved in with a girl known as Lottie LaFarb, a part time telephone operator who made certain calls on company time which earned her up to two hundred dollars a night when she got home.
Calvin Potts had been working with Francis Tanaguchi for six months and they had become inseparable. Calvin could not begin to understand this since he hated people in general and Francis Tanaguchi was by all odds the biggest pain in the ass at Wilshire Station. But there it was. They were always together. Everyone called them The Gook and The Spook.
There were several very good reasons why Francis Tanaguchi was such an enormous pain in the ass. He did annoying things, some of which were cyclical, some more or less permanent. One of the permanent annoying things he was accused of doing was arranging calls to the other choirboys’ residences at 4:00 A.M. A mysterious woman with a lasciviously voluptuous voice would begin to talk as the sleepy choirboy was coming awake in the darkness. The listener would be treated to a low crooning lush sexual litany which could transform almost any old three ounce cylinder of flesh, vein and muscle into a diamond cutter. Though it was generally suspected that Francis Tanaguchi was responsible for these bizarre calls, it was never proved and he never admitted it. Drunk and sober, Calvin Potts had begged threatened and bribed him to no avail.
No one had ever seen the Dragon Lady as they had come to call the owner of the voice. And no one had ever been able to hang up once she was into her routine. All had wet dreams about her. The wife of Spencer Van Moot had left him for the third time when she, on another phone extension, heard the erotic, blood boiling promises.
Perhaps the greatest harm was done to Father Willie Wright one night as his fat dumpling of a wife lay snoring beside him. Father Willie answered the phone and sat galvanized in the darkness while the Dragon Lady promised to use her body and Willie’s in a way that any reasonable man should have known was physically impossible. But Father Willie was not reasonable at this moment. He was gulping, dizzy, disoriented. He was speechless and frenzied. The Dragon Lady began making incredibly luxurious, unwholesome, juicy noises. Then she hung up.
Father Willie lay there for a moment then fell on the sleeping Jehovah’s Witness who only tolerated sex when she was awake and prepared for it.
The next afternoon before rollcall, Father Willie Wright, his left eye blood red from a desperate blow by a chubby little fist in the night, waited at Francis Tanaguchi’s locker and challenged him to a fight to the death in the basement of Wilshire Police Station. Calvin Potts and several other officers interceded while Francis professed total innocence. Father Willie was led into the rollcall room swallowing tears of rage, swearing for the very first time in anyone’s memory.
“Ya fuck, ya!” yelled Father Willie. “Ya dirty slant-eyed heathen godless little fuck, ya!”
Francis Tanaguchi had other annoying habits, not the least of which was biting people on the neck. It started when Francis went to a shabby Melrose Boulevard movie house where they were offering a Bela Lugosi Film Festival to a college crowd which hooted and yelled and smoked pot and ate popcorn.
Francis was with a chilly clerk typist named Daphne Simon who worked the morning watch at Wilshire Records and seldom dated policemen because she felt they were too horny. Francis had won her heart by sending a thirty dollar floral arrangement which he had gotten free by stopping at a Japanese nursery near Crenshaw Boulevard and thrilling the immigrant proprietors with his blue clad Oriental body. Francis had only planned to try to get them to bounce for a handful of violets, but when he saw how delighted they were with him, he promoted the sort to multicolored carnations.
As he sat in the smoke filled movie house, Daphne Simon roughly pulled his hand out from between her legs every time he let it accidentally fall there. It made him wish he had saved the flowers for Ora Lee Tingle at choir practice. Francis Tanaguchi came to dislike Daphne Simon who was in some exotic way giving him a blue veiner by squeezing his hand saucily before she slammed it down on the wooden armrest between the seats. But if he was starting to dislike Daphne Simon he was falling in love with Bela Lugosi.
“You wanna go where, Francis?” Calvin Potts squinted, when Francis settled into the black and white the next afternoon.
“To that big costume store on Western,” Francis repeated.
“You goin to a masquerade?”
“No.”
“I know, you’re gonna buy a polar bear suit for you and Ora Lee to wear while you flog each other with dead baby ducks at the next choir practice.”
“I’m gonna buy some fangs,” Francis said simply.
For three weeks, which was about as long as one of Francis’ whims lasted, he was called the Nisei Nipper by the policemen at Wilshire Station. He skulked around the station with two blood dripping fangs slipped over his incisors, attacking the throat of everyone below the rank of sergeant.
“It was okay for a while,” Spencer Van Moot complained to Calvin Potts one day “But those frigging teeth hurt. And it starts to get really depressing having Francis draped around your neck all the time.”
And even as he spoke Francis leaped from behind a wall and onto Spencer’s back, nipping him on the neck with the gory plastic fangs.
Sam Niles finally came to work with a bullet painted silver and let Francis see him putting it in his gun.
Harold Bloomguard hung parsley over his locker and told Francis it was wolfsbane. Then Whaddayamean Dean, and finally everyone else, started carrying crosses to ward off the Oriental vampire who would hiss and snarl when a cross was produced and slink back to his locker until he spotted someone with his back turned.
Spermwhale Whalen finally grabbed Francis by the collar and said, “There’s so fuckin many crosses around this locker room it looks like a platoon a nuns’ dresses here. Francis, I’m gonna stick those goofy teeth right up your skinny ass if you don’t knock it off!”
“Okay I’m getting sick and tired of tasting all these crummy necks anyway,” Francis said, and the vampire returned to earth permanently.
The night that Francis got bloody hands and decommissioned the U-boat was a smoggy evening in late spring. It started as usual with Calvin complaining that he always drove.
“Looky here, Francis, I been on the job longer than you, and I been on this miserable earth longer and I don’t know why the fuck I let you jive me around like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like drivin you around like a fuckin chauffeur every night.”
“I write better English than you so you should drive while I should keep books.”
“You what? You write half the time like some ignorant wetback. You didn’t learn no English in those Chicano East L.A. schools.”
“Well you drive better than me.”
“Bullshit. You ever seen a brother drivin at Indianapolis?”
“You ever seen a Buddhahead driving? Every cop knows a Buddhahead is a worse driver even than a brother.”
“Tomorrow you drive.”
“I can’t. I don’t want nobody to see me with glasses on. They make me look like an Iwo Jima sniper. It embarrasses me.”
“I never seen you with glasses.”
“I only wear them when I wanna see.”
“And we been partners all this time and you never wanted to see?”
“There’s nothing on this job I wanna see, Calvin. The only time I put em on is when other guys take em off. I put em on to get laid. That’s all I wanna see anymore.”
“Do you put em on at choir practice when you ball Ora Lee Tingle or Carolina Moon?”
“No, that’s another thing I don’t wanna see.”
Then Calvin started getting sullen. It came over him more frequently of late and he was drinking more than ever before. He had been forcing himself lately to stop thinking of that bitch, Martha Twogood Potts and her sleek caramel flesh. But he could not repress his thoughts of Calvin Jr. and how the toddler hardly knew him now and did not even want to be with his father on weekends. And how he truly didn’t want t
he boy with him in the apartment of Lottie LaFarb, even though she was a kind-hearted telephone operator and barely a prostitute and lavished him with pussy and what money she had and loved Calvin Jr. unequivocally.
Sometimes he wanted to beat the shit out of Lottie LaFarb and Francis Tanaguchi, the only two people in the world who, he felt, gave a damn whether or not he stuck that Smith K-38 in his mouth and blew the top of his skull all over the tobacco stained plastic headliner in that black and white Matador which at the moment smelled of urine and vomit from the drunk the daywatch had booked near end-of-watch.
Calvin Potts’ surging anger was broken when the honey voice the choirboys had come to love said, “Seven-A-Seventy-seven, Seven-A-Seventy-seven, see the woman, family dispute at the bar, Adams and Cloverdale.”
“That’s us, Calvin,” Francis said jauntily, jotting the call on the pad affixed to the hotsheet holder on the dashboard.
“Well, roger it then, goddamnit,” Calvin said viciously.
“Seven-A-Seventy-seven, roger,” Francis said, looking at his partner whose coffee face was polished by the dipping hazy sunlight as they drove west at dusk. “What’re you pissed off at, Calvin?”
“Nothin. I’m just gettin sick and tired a workin this car. Why can’t we go back up to the north end next month?”
“We can, I thought you wanted action.”
“I’m sick a action. I’m sick a these eastside trashy niggers that’ve took over this area down here. I’d rather work the Fairfax beat. I could easier put up with all the Hebes in Kosher Canyon chippin their teeth every time you give them a ticket.”
“Okay We’ll talk to the boss about working a north end car next month. I know what you need.”
“What?”
“A little trim.”
“Oh yeah, just what I need,” said Calvin looking skyward for a disgusted instant.
“I know Lottie’s taking care of your everyday needs but I got a special one just moved in my apartment building. Meant to tell you about her.”
The Choirboys Page 9