Working

by Studs Terkel

  I’m afraid that after seein’ so much of this I can come home and hear my kid in pain and not feel for him. So far it hasn’t happened. I hope to God it never happens. I hope to God I always feel. When my grandmother passed away a couple of months ago, I didn’t feel anything. I wonder, gee, is it happening to me?

  One time a guy had shot up a cop in the hospital and threw the cop down the stairs and his wheel chair on top of him. He escaped with a bullet in him. He held up a tenement in Brownsville. They called us down at three’ in the morning, with bullet-proof vests and shotguns. I said to myself, This is something out of the movies. The captain had a blackboard. There’s eight of us and he gave each of us a job: “Two cover the back yard, you three cover the front, you three will have to secure the roof.”

  This guy wasn’t gonna be taken alive. Frank and me will be the assault team to secure the roof. We’re loaded with shotguns and we’re gonna sneak in there. We met at four o‘clock in the morning. We’re goin’ up the back stairs. On the first stairway there was a German shepherd dog outside the doorway. The dog cowered in the corner, thank God. We went up three more stories. We secured the roof.

  We could hear them assaulting in each apartment, trying to flush this guy out. He fled to the fire escape. As he was comin’ up, we told him to freeze, Tony, it was all over. He started to go back down. We radioed team one in the back yard. We heard shots. The rooftops had actually lit up. The assault man had fired twenty-seven bullets into this guy and he recovered. He’s still standing trial from what I heard. This was one of the jobs I felt, when I was goin’ up the stairs, should I give my wife a call? I felt like I had to call her.

  If a perpetrator’s in a building, you either talk to him or contain him or flush him out with tear gas rather than runnin’ in and shoot. They feel a life is more important than anything else. Most cops feel this, yes.

  I went on the prison riots we had in the Tombs. I was the first one on the scene, where we had to burn the gates out of the prison, where the prisoners had boarded up the gates with chairs and furniture. We had to use acetylene torches. My wife knew I was in on it. I was on the front page. They had me with a shotgun and the bullet-proof vest and all the ammunition, waiting to go into the prison.

  I wonder to myself, Is death a challenge? Is it something I want to pursue or get away from? I’m there and I don’t have to be. I want to be. You have chances of being killed yourself. I’ve come so close . . .

  I went on a job two weeks ago. A nineteen-year-old, he just got back from Vietnam on a medical discharge. He had ransacked his parents’ house. He broke all the windows, kicked in the color television set, and hid upstairs with a homemade spear and two butcher knives in one hand. He had cut up his father’s face.

  We were called down to go in and get this kid. He tore the bannister up and used every pole for a weapon. We had put gas masks on. All the cops was there, with sticks and everything. They couldn’t get near him. He kept throwing down these iron ash trays. I went up two steps and he was cocking this spear. We cleared out all the policemen. They just wanted emergency, us.

  If you wait long enough, he’ll come out. We had everybody talk to him, his mother . . . He didn’t come out. The sergeant gave orders to fire tear gas. I could hear it go in the windows. I went up a little further and I seen this nozzle come out of his face. I said, “Sarge, he’s got a gas mask on.” We fired something like sixteen cannisters in the apartment. When he went back to close one of the doors, I lunged upstairs. I’m very agile. I hit him in the face and his mask went flying. I grabbed his spear and gave him a bear hug. He just didn’t put up any resistance. It was all over.

  The patrol force rushed in. They were so anxious to get this guy, they were tearing at me. I was tellin’ him, “Hey, fella, you got my leg. We got him, it’s all over.” They pulled my gas mask off. Now the big party starts. This was the guy who was agitating them for hours. “You bum, we got you.” They dragged him down the stairs and put him in a body bag. It’s like a straitjacket.

  When we had him face down a patrolman grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face into the ground. I grabbed his wrist, “Hey, that’s not necessary. The guy’s handcuffed, he’s secure.” I brushed the kid’s hair out of his eyes. He had mod long hair. My kid has mod hair. The guy says, “What’s the matter with you?” I said, “Knock it off, you’re not gonna slam the kid.”

  The neighbors congratulated me because the kid didn’t get a scratch on him. I read in the paper, patrolman so-and-so moved in to make the arrest after a preliminary rush by the emergency service. Patrolman so-and-so is the same one who slammed the kid’s face in the ground.

  I’m gonna get him tonight. I’m gonna ask if he’s writing up for a commendation. I’m gonna tell him to withdraw it. Because I’m gonna be a witness against him. The lieutenant recommended giving me a day off. I told my sergeant the night before last the lieutenant can have his day off and shove it up his ass.

  A lot of the barricade snipers are Vietnam veterans. Oh, the war plays a role. A lot of ’em go in the army because it’s a better deal. They can eat, they can get an income, they get room and board. They take a lot of shit from the upper class and they don’t have to take it in the service.

  It sounds like a fairy tale to the guys at the bar, in one ear and out the other. After a rough tour, a guy’s dead, shot, people stabbed, you go into a bar where the guys work on Wall Street, margin clerks, “How ya doin’? What’s new?” You say, “You wouldn’t understand.” They couldn’t comprehend what I did just last night. With my wife, sometimes I come home after twelve and she knows somethin’s up. She waits up. “What happened?” Sometimes I’m shaking, trembling. I tell her, “We had a guy . . .” (Sighs.) I feel better and I go to bed. I can sleep.

  The one that kept me awake was three years ago. The barricaded kid. The first night I went right to sleep. The second night you start thinking, you start picturing the kid and taking him down. With the kid and the tear gas, the sergeant says, “Okay fire.” And you hear the tear gas . . . Like you’re playing, fooling around with death. You don’t want to die, but you’re comin’ close to it, to really skin it. It’s a joke, it’s not happening.

  I notice since I been in emergency she says, “Be careful.” I hate that, because I feel jinxed. Every time she says be careful, a big job comes up. I feel, shit, why did she say that? I hope she doesn’t say it. She’ll say, “I’ll see you in the morning. Be careful.” Ooohhh!

  Bad accidents, where I’ve held the guys’ skulls . . . I’m getting used to it, because there are younger guys comin’ into emergency and I feel I have to be the one to take charge. ’Cause I seen a retired guy come back and go on a bad job, like the kid that drowned and we pulled him out with hooks. I’m lookin’ to him for help and I see him foldin’. I don’t want that to happen to me. When you’re workin’ with a guy that has eighteen years and he gets sick, who else you gonna look up to?

  Floaters, a guy that drowns and eventually comes up. Two weeks ago, we pulled this kid out. You look at him with the hook in the eye . . . You’re holdin’ in because your partner’s holdin’ in. I pulled a kid out of the pond, drowned. A woman asked me, “What color was he?” I said, “Miss, he’s ten years old. What difference does it make what color he was?” “Well, you pulled him out, you should know.” I just walked away from her.

  Emergency got a waiting list of three thousand. I have one of the highest ratings. I do have status, especially with the young guys. When a guy says, “Bob, if they change the chart, could I ride with you?” that makes me feel great.

  I feel like I’m helpin’ people. When you come into a crowd, and a guy’s been hit by a car, they call you. Ambulance is standing there dumfounded, and the people are, too. When you give orders to tell this one to get a blanket, this one to get a telephone book, so I can splint a leg and wrap it with my own belt off my gun, that looks good in front of the public. They say, “Gee, who are these guys?”

  Last week we responded to a ba
by in convulsions. We got there in two minutes. The guy barely hung up the phone. I put my finger down the baby’s throat and pulled the tongue back. Put the baby upside down, held him in the radio car. I could feel the heat from the baby’s mouth on my knuckles. At the hospital the father wanted to know who was the guy in the car. I gave the baby to the nurse. She said, “He’s all right.” I said, “Good.” The father was in tears and I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  This morning I read the paper about that cop that was shot up. His six-year-old son wrote a letter: “Hope you get better, Dad.” My wife was fixin’ breakfast. I said, “Did you read the paper, hon?” She says, “Not yet.” “Did you read the letter this cop’s son sent to his father when he was in the hospital?” She says, “No.” “Well, he’s dead now.” So I read the part of it and I started to choke. I says, “What the hell . . .” I dropped the paper just to get my attention away. I divided my attention to my son that was in the swing. What the hell. All the shit I seen and did and I gotta read a letter . . . But it made me feel like I’m still maybe a while away from feeling like I have no feeling left. I knew I still had feelings left. I still have quite a few jobs to go . . .

  TOM PATRICK

  Bob’s brother.

  He has been a city fireman for two years. During the preceding four years he had been a member of the city’s police force. He is thirty-two, married. “It’s terrific for a guy that just got out of high school with a general diploma. I don’t even know English. My wife is Spanish, she knows syllables, verbs, where to put the period . . . I wish I was a lawyer. Shit, I wish I was a doctor. But I just didn’t have it. You gotta have the smarts.

  “There was seven of us. Three brothers, myself and my sister, mother and father. It was a railroad flat. Me and my brother used to sleep in bunk beds until we were twenty-seven years old. And they’re supposed to be for kids, right?”

  He owns his own house and can’t get over the wonder of it, mortgage or not. A back yard, “it’s like a piece of country back there. It smells like Jersey. We have barbecues, drink beer, the neighbors are good.

  “Twenty years ago it was all Irish, Italian, Polish. I went in the army in ‘62 and everybody was moving out to Long Island. There’s a lot of Puerto Ricans now. They say the spics are movin’ in, the black are movin’ in. They’re good people. They don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. I think I’m worse than them. Sometimes I come home four in the morning, piss in the street. I think they might sign a petition to get me out.

  “The guys in this thing were prejudiced. I’m probably prejudiced too. It’s a very conservative neighborhood. A lot of the cops are here. Up to the fifties, these guys were my heroes, these guys in the bar. You hear this guy was in the Second World War . . . I was a kid and a lot of these guys are dead now. Forty-eight, fifty years old, they died young, from drinking and shit. You just grow up into this prejudice—guy’s a spic, a nigger. When I was in the army I didn’t think I was prejudiced, until the colored guy told me to clean the floor five, six times, and I was calling him nigger. You express yourself, get the frustration out.

  “One o’clock in the morning, in August, we had a block party. They were dancing on the fire escapes. People were drinking. We had three, four hundred people there. We had a barricade up on the corner and the cops never came around. The fuckin’ cops never came around. We don’t need ‘em. I think when you see a cop everybody gets tense. Instead of concentrating on the music and drinkin’ beer, you keep lookin’ over your shoulder Where’s the cop? You know.”

  I got out of the army in ‘64. I took the test for transit police, housing police, and city police. It’s the same test. It was in March ’66 when I got called. I got called for the housing police. For the first six months you just bounce around different housing projects.

  I was engaged to this other girl and her father was mad that I didn’t take the city police, because I could make more money on the side. He said I was a dope. He said, “What are you gonna get in the housing projects? The people there don’t pay you off.” Because they were poor people. I said, “The money they give me as a cop is good enough.” Most of the people around here don’t go on to be doctors or lawyers. The thing to get is a city job, because it’s security.

  I worked in Harlem and East Harlem for three years. There was ten, eleven cops and they were all black guys. I was the only white cop. When they saw me come into the office they started laughin’. “What the fuck are they sendin’ you here for? You’re fuckin’ dead.” They told me to get a helmet and hide on the roof.

  This one project, there were five percenters. That’s a hate gang. They believed that seventy percent of the black population are Uncle Toms, twenty-five percent are alcoholics, and five percent are the elite. These fuckin’ guys’ll kill ya in a minute.

  This project was twenty-five buildings, thirteen stories each. Covered maybe twenty acres. It was like a city. I remember the first night I got there, July fourth. It was 105 degrees out. I had come in for the midnight to eight tour. I had an uncle that was a regular city cop. He called me up the night before and he said they expected a riot in this project. He said the cops had helicopters going around above the people and a lot of cops in plain clothes and cars. He was worried about me: “Be careful.”

  This one black guy said, “You stay with me.” That night we went on the roof and we’re lookin’ down and people are walkin’ around and drinkin’ on the benches. This colored guy was drinkin’ and I went down there seven in the morning. I told him to move. “Somebody’s gonna rob you.” He said, “Man, I ain’t got a penny on me. The most they could do is give me somethin’.” And he went back to sleep.

  The thing is you gotta like people. If you like people, you have a good time with ‘em. But if you have the attitude that people are the cause of what’s wrong with this country, they’re gonna fuckin’ get you upset and you’re gonna start to hate ’em, and when you hate, you get a shitty feeling in your stomach that can destroy you, right?

  When I went to the housing project, I said, There’s a lot of people around here and you meet ‘em and the older people want you to come in and have a beer with ’em. I used to go to some great parties. I’d go up there nine ’ at night and I’m in uniform with my gun on and you’d be in the kitchen, drinking Scotch, rye, beer, talking to these beautiful Spanish girls. These are people, right? Poor people. My family’s poor. They talk about the same thing and the kids come over to me and they’d pet you or they’d touch the gun.

  I made an arrest. Some kid came over and told me a guy across the street had robbed his camera. So I ran over and grabbed the guy. It was petty larceny. The colored cop said I broke my cherry. So he took me to the basement that night and they had a party. A portable bar, record player, girls come down, they were dancin’.

  I couldn’t wait to go to work, because I felt at ease with these people. Sometimes I’d look in the mirror and I’d see this hat and I couldn’t believe it was me in this uniform. Somebody’d say, “Officer, officer.” I’d have to think, Oh yeah, that’s me. I wouldn’t really know I was a cop. To me, it was standin’ on the corner in my own neighborhood. Poor. I’d see drunks that are like my father. A black drunk with a long beard and his eyes . . . He’d bring back memories of my father. I’d be able to talk to the kids. They’d be on the roof, fuckin’, and I’d say, “I’ll give you ten minutes.” It took me two minutes to come. “Ten minutes is enough for you, right?”

  One project I worked out of I made nineteen arrests in one year, which was tops. I didn’t go out lookin’ to make ’em, I ran into shit. If you run into a person that’s robbin’ another person, man, that’s wrong! My mind was easy. I just figured if a guy was drunk or a guy’s makin’ out with a girl, it shouldn’t be a crime. I was with this one cop, he used to sneak up on cars and look in and see people gettin’ laid or blow jobs. I used to be embarrassed. I don’t like that shit.

  I made all these arrests and they transferred me out. I didn’t want to leave, �
�cause I knew the people and I thought I could be an asset. It was Puerto Rican, black, I had like a rapport. Jesus Christ, I loved it. They’re sending me to Harlem because I’m so good. Bullshit! That jerked me off. I wanted East Harlem because you had every thing there. You had Italians, still. I used to go up the block and drink beer. I used to listen to Spanish music. And the girls are beautiful. Jesus! Unbelievable! Spanish girls. My wife’s from Colombia. She’s beautiful. I love it when her hair’s down. I think that’s where I got the idea of marrying a Spanish girl. In East Harlem.

  I wasn’t against Harlem, but there was no people. It was a new project. I was just there to watch the Frigidaires. I was a watchman. Sewers open, the ground wasn’t fixed, no grass, holes. We used to stand in lobbies of an empty building. I want to be where people are. So I got pissed off and put a transfer in. After six months people started moving in—and I liked it. But they transferred me to Canarsie. Middle-income white. And all these bullshit complaints. “Somebody’s on my grass.” “I hear a noise in the elevator.” Up in Harlem they’ll complain maybe they saw a dead guy in the elevator.

  I never felt my life threatened. I never felt like I had to look over my shoulder. I was the only white cop in that project. The kids’d be playin’, come over and talk to me. Beautiful. But sometimes they just hate you. I’m in uniform and they just go around and say, “You motherfucker,” and stuff like that. I can’t say, “Wait, just get to know me, I’m not that bad.” You haven’t got time. If you start explainin’, it’s a sign of weakness. Most people, if you try to be nice, they’re nice. But you get some of these guys that got hurt, they really got fucked, they got arrested for not doing anything.