Just then, I hear a man’s voice shouting. I whirl around looking for the source, and then realize the sound must’ve come from the video screen. My Rambo guy is under attack again and he’s crying out for help. This time he’s surrounded by three ferocious-looking guys with Mohawk haircuts. I look up to say something else to Darryl, but he’s already walking away from me. His left hand is jumping and jerking at his side, as though it has a mind of its own.
No point in going after him. I’ve done my job here, which was to inform him personally about his court date. Now it’s up to him to show up. I turn back to the game. Two of the three Mohawked guys have disappeared, and the one remaining is now locked in a mortal struggle with my Rambo guy. I push a button and pull the lever. The two figures on the screen tumble over each other, punching and kicking. After a couple of seconds of fighting, they stop and just lie there facedown on the animated New York sidewalk. Nothing happens for a few moments. Then, little animated bloodstains slowly appear on each figure’s back. Somehow, they’ve managed to kill each other.
Two days later, I’m looking through my mailbox when I find an old torn envelope with my name on it among the interdepartmental memos, notices for union dues, and new case files. The letter inside is written in spidery black ink on dirty blue-lined paper with a laundry list on the back. On first glance, it looks like it’s from a child. But when I read it, I realize it’s from Darryl’s great-grandmother, who I’d spoken to on the phone the other day. Any doubts I’d had about violating Darryl evaporate. It says:
“I, Ethel McDaniels, the great-grandmother of Darryl King is a seventy-six-year-old individual who cannot continue to live with my great-grandson Darryl who have been making My Life a living Hell Due to his crack abuse and cryme. Will the Court please help me. I give this letter to Probation Officer Steven Baum.”
“P.S. Please do not tell Darryl I wrote you.”
29
DETECTIVE SERGEANT BOB MCCULLOUGH got gas pains every time he looked at the file for the Pops Osborn homicide. This guy was a piece of shit when he was alive and he was a piece of shit dead. Whoever killed him did the world a service, except that McCullough now had to fill out another DD5 Supplementary Complaint Report, giving an update on the investigation.
Everything in the New York City Police Department was a fucking ritual. Filling out forms. Going to promotion ceremonies. Talking to inspectors. Attending mass and the Holy Name Society. Getting drunk at parties. If they made it a ritual to give the assistant chief a blowjob, he’d have to do that every week too. Maybe there was a piece in it, but probably not for a family newspaper.
A better piece might be something like “Why the Police Department Is Like the Church” with all these fucking rituals. If only the department had a ritual for resurrecting the dead. Then this Osborn motherfucker could tell McCullough who killed him and he could close out the case. But then this Osborn would be walking around again and somebody else would have to arrest him as a drug dealer and they’d have even more paperwork.
“Efforts to interview reltives of the decedent were met with negtive results,” McCullough typed with his index fingers on the old gray Royal manual. “Recnvss of the plce of occurrence ws lso negtive.”
He read it over and grumbled, “Oh, fuck me royally,” when he realized the a key was sticking on his typewriter and he’d have to fix the report with liquid Wite-out and a pen.
The only reason he was having to write this thing up was because that blue-eyed jerk from Narcotics was bothering him. The one who kept saying, “If you’re Captain Willie’s boy, you gotta be all right.”
Fuck him. If that lazy Narcotics hump didn’t need the statistics so badly just to look like he was doing something in front of his chief, he would never have bothered McCullough about this. And McCullough was backed up enough with work anyway. That poor old lady strangled with her own bridgework shoved down her throat, that robbery at the Citibank on Second Avenue, that forty-year-old guy who got blown away with a 9 mm because he stepped on some thirteen-year-old’s red suede sneakers.
Not that he was going to make lieutenant off any of these cases. It would just be nice to clear some of the deadwood away.
What a thing this job was. Day after day, seeing people at their most wretched and vulnerable. Confronting them with their despicable and intimate secrets. Where were you last night anyway? Who were you with? Why’d you beat your kid up like that? Why’d you kill your wife?
The worst part was looking through homicide victims’ apartments. You always ended up seeing things they’d never shown anybody while they were alive. Their diaries. Their unmailed love letters. Their intestines splattered against the walls. What a thing it was to find out so much about these people, and then to come home and not be able to tell the wife where you wanted her to touch you.
It got him thinking about the girl on cable television.
Even as he sat there with the phones ringing and the detective at the next desk talking to somebody, he could picture her curled up, with her luminous white ass in the air, licking her rouged red lips and saying those dirty things that she promised to put into writing: “First there was Harry—I slam-fucked him and wrote him a letter. Then there was Sam, I sucked his cock, Roto-Rootered his ass, and wrote him a letter. Then there was Bob …”
He felt like calling her right now. Right here in the precinct. He wanted her to say those things to him. Right here in front of everybody. He had the number. Who was going to know? As far as the guy at the next desk was concerned, he could be talking to his wife or the Crime Scene people.
He dialed the number and waited. After the fifth ring, her voice started, “Hi, big boy, why don’t you take off your clothes and get comfortable right now? I wanna suck your big, hard throbbing dick …”
Under his desk top, he was getting a massive hard-on. It was a good thing no one was watching him. “I’m getting all wet just thinking about it,” the girl on the phone was saying. “I just want you to fuck me harder …”
His hard-on was demanding his attention now. It was threatening to burst through his desk top unless he gave it a light petting. Who was going to see it? As the girl on the phone declared she’d never been so horny in her life, he began to reach down.
“Come on,” the girl on the phone said. “Give me every inch.”
At that moment, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a beautiful young woman staring at him. She was like his fantasy made real, except she was black, carrying a briefcase, and looking impatient.
“Detective, I’m Andrea Clinton from the Probation Department,” she said, holding out her hand like he was supposed to shake it instead of using it to jerk off. “I’d like to talk to you about the Pops Osborn case and Darryl King.”
He tried not to panic or come on the spot. He covered the receiver and calmly said, “Can you wait over there a second? I’m talking to the captain.”
She nodded and he was about to make up something about sending a sector car around, when he took his hand off the receiver and the girl on the phone let out an orgasmic cry that everyone within ten feet of his desk could hear.
“You’re too much, big boy,” she moaned. “Fuck me again?”
30
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT that detective,” Andrea is saying. “He got this weird look when I walked in.”
“Did he tell you anything about Darryl?” I ask.
“No, he wasn’t too anxious to tell me much of anything,” she says, stepping around a pile of books on the sidewalk.
We’re walking through the East Village after spending most of Saturday afternoon at the office working on the Darryl King violation.
This is the neighborhood where I always wanted to live when I was growing up. I used to take the train in from Flushing every weekend, just so I could wander up and down St. Marks Place, looking at the freaks, the punks, and the girls dressed in black. I guess that wasn’t much more than a dozen years ago, but the place seemed so much stranger and more romantic
then. I remember how even the air seemed headier and more intoxicating than it was in Queens. My favorite thing then was to buy pot from the hippies around the Third Avenue Gem Spa, get stoned, and gawk at the drag queens and punk girls outside the Trash and Vaudeville Boutique.
Now about half the village is gentrified, all the drag queens are dead from AIDS, the pushers are shady-looking guys chanting, “Crack-it-up” from the doorways, and the only punk girls left are way too young from me. Still, I like living here.
There’s no other place in this city where you can feel so much a part of all the people who aren’t part of anything.
“WHITE FOLKS!!!! HEH! HEH! HEH! HEH!”
This wild-eyed, skinny black guy with a scraggly, devilish beard keeps sneaking up behind us and yelling, “WHITE FOLKS!!” as though it were an embarrassing accusation.
“I’d tell him he’s only three-quarters right in our case,” Andrea says as we cross Third Avenue, “but what’s the point?”
The energy on the street tonight seems a little different to me. It’s up over ninety degrees again. Everyone’s walking a little too fast and talking a little too loud. It’s like all sense of distance and civility have evaporated in the humidity. Car horns are honking and arguments are breaking out on the sidewalks for no reason. Dogs lunge at each other’s throats. A punk kid spits at a lady in pink jogging shorts going by.
Just ahead of us, a short Oriental man and a big blond Swedish guy are walking with their arms around each other, oblivious to the orchestra of bad vibes surrounding them. Rounding the corner of Third Avenue and heading down St. Marks Place, they trip and stumble into the pack of sidewalk vendors selling bottles of incense and back issues of Stud magazine.
The wild-eyed black guy, who was taunting us, sneaks up on the big Swede and his Oriental friend. “WHITE FOLKS!!! YEEEEEAHHHHH!!!!”
The two men shuffle away with guilty expressions. “Come on,” I tell Andrea. “All this tension’s making me hungry.”
We find a loud, dim restaurant with vague Tex-Mex overtones. The lighting is indirect and so is most of the conversation here. The couples seem more interested in their food than each other. The front window looks out on an entrance to Tompkins Square Park, where a crowd is beginning to gather.
As she stares out at the street, I notice that Andrea looks even younger than twenty-four tonight, with her “Be-Bop Café” T-shirt and her halo of curly hair tied back in a ponytail again.
“Is that some kind of protest starting?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I heard something about a neighborhood demonstration. Something to do with the yuppie condo and a curfew to keep the homeless out of the park.”
“That’s the kind of thing I wanted to be involved in this summer,” she says with some mild disappointment. “I was trying to get an internship with one of the tenants’ rights groups down here, but I applied too late.”
“Is that how you ended up at Probation?”
“No, I was interested in that too,” she replies, maybe just a little defensively.
“But it’s not the kind of thing you want to do when you get out of school, right?”
“I’m not sure.” She shrugs. “I’ve got offers from a couple of the big firms already, but I want to make sure they’ll let me do some pro bono work if I join them.”
Pro bono. I wonder if that’s actually Latin for “this isn’t what I really do for a living.” Andrea’s a lot more middle-class than I am, it turns out, which embarrasses me a little. She’s from Princeton, New Jersey, where her father is vice president of a software company and her mother teaches art history at the university. She looks very serious when she talks about them.
“You get along with them okay?” I ask. “You like your parents?”
“They’re fine,” she says with a warm smile.
Through close questioning I find out she majored in English at Yale and spent half her time getting involved in politically correct causes and the rest having affairs with people she didn’t particularly like. “I had two long-term, serious relationships with guys, and a short one with a woman,” she says, laughing. “Why do I feel comfortable telling you this?” I shrug and she takes a sip of her beer.
“It’s because you’re a good listener, right?”
“I practice at home in front of the mirror,” I tell her.
As she orders the house wine, I notice she’s wearing an ebony bracelet and a gold necklace. Not a spoiled girl, exactly, just used to the good things in life. I fire a dozen more questions at her and what started as a slight shaking around her shoulders soon erupts into a full-throated roar of laughter. She slaps the table as she rocks back and forth.
“What’s the big joke?”
“Nothing,” she says, taking a deep breath and still smiling. “You’re just so … so … so …” She beats the table with her fist a couple of times. “Intense is the word, I guess. You’re acting like you’re my probation officer.”
“I’m sorry.” I look down at my beer. “I just get so used to talking to people that way …”
“I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious,” she says, reaching across the table and brushing my hand. “I just thought you were being funny, that’s all.”
She is truly a knockout, I tell myself for about the hundred and second time since I met her.
She orders the chicken fajitas and I ask the waitress to bring me another beer. “So I was sorry I gave you such a hard time the other day before I read Darryl’s file,” she says.
“It’s okay, I’m used to it. It’s just that after a while, I think you just get to be a little more careful about your sympathies. Otherwise, your heart gets broken too often and it doesn’t work as well …”
This strikes a bum note and she gives me a suspicious look.
“That’s a great excuse for giving up,” she says. “Is that why you’re going into this field unit?”
“No, it is not,” I say, tapping the table for emphasis. “I’m doing it because it’s an assignment. I still have plenty of good clients who I care about.”
While an old Neil Young song plays on the jukebox, I start to tell her about Maria Sanchez. But then I remember that I tried to take Maria out on a date the other night and I decide that’s not such a good example. Instead, I tell her about Charlie Simms.
Charlie’s remarkable, I tell her, the closest thing I’ve got to a complete success story so far. I met him a couple of years ago when I was just starting off at Probation and he was just starting off as a thief. Neither of us knew what we were doing. He’d been arrested for trying to steal a radio from an off-duty cop’s Buick when the cop was standing a few feet away. I was still trying to figure out the difference between a felony and misdemeanor.
Charlie first came into my cubicle wearing a Confederate army cap and a giant watch around his neck. Right away, we started talking about how the only role models in his neighborhood were the guys who had the best cars. I tried using social work bromides to convince him that the problem wasn’t that he’d gotten caught trying to steal the radio, but that he’d broken the law.
Over the last couple of years, Charlie and I have done a lot of growing up together, I tell her. He’s taught me something about the street and I’ve helped him in the straight world. He tells me the new drugs on his block and I give him books by Claude Brown and Malcolm X so he can get a better sense of his own people’s history. Now he wears leather Back to Africa medallions, he’s almost done with school, and he’s planning to marry the girl who had his baby last month. He’s also out looking for a job. Though it’s too condescending to say out loud, I’m proud of Charlie. His progress is a measure of how far I’ve come in doing my job.
“If I spent all my time trying to turn around hopeless cases like Darryl King, I wouldn’t have any energy left for people like Charlie,” I tell her as Neil Young keens about a friend who died from a drug overdose and beer sloshes around in my mug.
“I wasn’t defending Darryl,” she says
, leaning forward on her elbow. “I just wonder if you’re finding excuses not to care anymore.”
“That’s not true!” I say loud enough to be heard over the music. When I see people at the nearby tables are looking at me funny, I lower my voice a little. “I really get into it with some of these people,” I say. “Like this kid came in the other day, Ricky Velez. He’s a token sucker. But I noticed that he couldn’t really read what I had on my blackboard. Like he had a reading problem. Just like me. I pick up on these things because I’m dyslexic.”
“Really?” She looks up.
“Yeah, sure. I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.”
She seems a little skeptical.
“I’ve been through the same kind of rejections my clients have been through.”
“You have, have you?” She still isn’t convinced.
“I mean, you could look at these people and you could look at me and say nobody could be further apart. But I’m just like a lot of these people,” I say, touching my chest with my fist. “I’m just like them.”
“No, you’re not,” Andrea says firmly. “You’re white.”
I feel like somebody just slapped me across the face. I look down, feeling stupid and gravely embarrassed. “Yes, of course, you’re right,” I mumble.
She stares at me for a long time, her eyes at exactly the same level as mine. Her expression seems to say, I know what it’s like, you never will. I hope she isn’t about to get up and walk away in disgust.
Instead, she lets a couple of silent seconds pass and then changes the subject. “You know you still never told me why you became a probation officer,” she says.
“You really wanna know?”
“That’s why I asked.”
I don’t answer right away for fear of saying something else foolish. “It’s kind of hard to say.” I put my chin on my fist and try to force the idea into a coherent shape. It’s strange, but hardly anyone has asked me this so directly before. “I guess I started off like I wanted to help people. You know. Other people join the Peace Corps, but I don’t like to travel …”
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