Diesel Heart

by Melvin Carter Jr

  Sergeant Kline confirmed the report’s accuracy, describing what had happened and inviting the county attorney to come and see the car, still parked in front. He and the prosecutor laughed so hard that they had to put down the phone. The car, vehicle #804, remained parked “in wake” on display in front of the team house for weeks. All the macho guys loved it. Although I was not hospitalized that night, a couple days later I couldn’t get out of bed due to severe stabbing pains in my back.

  The strangler filed an internal affairs complaint against me for “excessive force.” Sergeant Kline came with me and stood up for me at my hearing, and also went with me to the chief’s office. No one ever before or since did that.

  District A-2 was located in a junkyard in a remote, isolated, off-road spot. So A-2 officers proudly proclaimed themselves the “Junkyard Dawgs.” Eventually John O’Brien, aka Dude, convinced me to attend events, like downriver rafting and playing softball, with officers who had said I didn’t belong there, officers I’d never socialize with otherwise. Dude understood my sensitivity to and disdain for the n-word and became somewhat proactive about it. To me the n-word was like an unexpected gun blast going off behind me. At one off-duty beer-saturated party, a German cop was in the process of calling me that when Dude’s elbow disappeared deep into his belly. Not making a big deal of this, Dude simply elbowed him in the gut, walked away, and disappeared into the crowd. So I had a friend and could somewhat relax with Dude around.

  “Choir practice” was the secret street cop code word for an after-work beer bash to be held in the A-2 police team house. In our case it was after midnight, immediately after the power shift. Debriefings consisted of beer, war stories, beer, beer, and more beer, confiscated fireworks, perhaps a little target practice, and especially raunchy jokes. One officer fantasized a three-foot-tall woman with a flat head where he could set his beer. Another had been to an auto accident fatality, and the human brains on the sidewalk made him want spaghetti.

  Boy, could these guys chug it down! The isolated location, plus all that beer, made for fireworks, gun discharges, and property damage. One night an officer got drunk and riddled bullet holes into a photo of the chief hanging on the wall. It made the news. The chief said it was “only a flesh wound” and put an end to all the choir practices. Several officers were reprimanded.

  About this time, the St. Paul Police Department had built a huge state-of-the-art gym right across the street from HQ. I exercised as part of my daily routine, and in preparation for a fight to the death. If I prevail, the assailant goes to jail, maybe to the hospital. I go home to mommy. But when an officer gets overwhelmed, it means death. By then I could usually count on backup, all depending on who was on the shift at the time, but other times I’d be left to fend for myself. A large black leather bag dangled from the ceiling on heavy steel chains, absorbing tons of anger, frustrations, and anxieties. It rocked, rolled, reeled, and squealed in agony! Out of the corner of my eye, I could see hostile eyes watching from locker rooms and weight lifting areas. Spectators stopped their own workouts to observe. They were in awe.

  Having an audience made me show off. “Oh no! You don’t want none-a-dis!” POW! BANG! CRASH! “Hey, Carter, whatcha gonna do when they hit back, Carter?” I didn’t have to answer. Efforts to insult me were absolutely validating, even flattering. “Yeah, Carter, that’s why we carry guns!” The bag retaliated with snaps, crackles, and pops. It reminded me of what I heard the last time I came out of a boxing ring: “Carter, you still ain’t nothin’ but a street fighter!”

  The bench press was the measurement of male machismo. Although my bench press was always at least twice my body weight, it was not as significant to me (not to mention that my leg press was almost four times my weight). But just because you got some muscle doesn’t mean you can fight. Every now and then, in self-defense training, some muscle-bound brute or martial artist would be startled when training got rough.

  I set the all-time high rope climb record at six seconds, then came back and climbed it in five seconds, a record never broken. Rumors circulated that I was on steroids. I loved hearing that and never denied it. Instead of recognizing me as a man, some nicknamed me Spider Monkey, which was even worse than Lightning the Second. “That ain’t my name, and don’t never call me no bullshit like that!” I said. They stopped using it to my face, but the name stuck behind my back.

  And then there was labeling. Labels, whether good or bad, put people in containers, limiting them to specific categories and invalidating them for others. So labeling me as a boxing champ (which I was not) contained me in a category. But somehow all this false, inaccurate, inapplicable rigmarole worked out to my advantage. Not denying false accusations gave the impression of validity. Allowing them to investigate me for stuff that never existed became decoy cloaking for my true issues, syndromes, complexes, and secrets.

  Out there on the beat, I had a reputation in lily-white-ville. Amid crowd skirmishes, I’d hear warning shouts, “Don’t piss off that little Black guy!”

  Then a strange thing happened. Eventually all the notoriety suddenly began to work for me, and I was assigned the status of “legendary.” One night a high-ranking elected official showed up, jumped into the passenger seat of my squad car, and refused to get out. After my usual courtesy routine, I put it this way: “Get the fuck out of my car! Right now!”

  About an hour later, my supervisor called for a meeting. When I got there, he was listening attentively as the official told what had happened. The supervisor closed the conversation with, “Mel is the type of guy that never backs down.”

  After about five years on the job, I found myself on the SWAT team, the elite of the elite, only the second Black person ever to be assigned.

  24

  SWAT

  The Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team is perhaps the most elite appointment in a department. Many cops sign up for it, but only the best of the best are selected. And since I was all that (at least in my mind), I applied and was accepted. (I also had been invited to join the elite K9 unit but had to choose between the two.)

  I was a natural at every element of this combat-type stuff—running, jumping, climbing, and especially shooting. My mind and body already had become a special weapon without a firearm since it became clear that I could only count on backup from some fellow officers.

  My first SWAT assignment was the entry team, where the job is to go into the worst of the worst situations, rescue the hostage, and take out the bad guy, dead or alive. As exciting as it sounds, much of the training consisted of crawling around in the filthy basement of some abandoned building in the winter with no heat, lying completely still on some cold hard greasy sooty concrete floor, waiting, or in a snowbank, waiting to wait some more.

  But the SPPD gym was the sweetest setup!

  We could work out at the new state-of-the-art facility one hour a day, three days per week. To say I abused workout time was an understatement. It was necessary for survival that I keep my mind and body sharply honed, and if fellow officers wouldn’t back me up, I decided that I needed it more than anyone. But it was also the recess I always waited for and the monastery I really needed. I signed up for SWAT for several lofty reasons, but the big reason was that, initially, team members were the only ones allowed to work out on company time. The police gym became my private chapel, where I could escape, clear my mind, and prepare.

  SWAT entry team, about 1981. Can you say, “Find the Black guy?”

  Every day somebody’d be in my face with some new beneath-my-dignity crap, be it horseshit assignments or a professional or a personal attack. Usually, I could shake this stuff off, but inevitably, some of it stuck, devouring like a parasite from the inside out. And with all the real life, death, future, and freedom drama, I couldn’t afford to be runnin’ ’round angry and armed.

  Law enforcement, with all its toxicity, drama, and horrible hours, wreaks havoc throughout every fiber of family life. Cops have the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide
s, and divorces. I convinced myself that I was doing a great job insulating my wife and children from my own internal combustion. But pressures of my daily challenges, threats, and real actual dangers, much of which were inarticulable, built up. Sometimes the slightest thing could set me off. Even I didn’t know why. Aside from smashing a few electrical appliances, ripping furniture apart, and putting my fist through a bedroom door, I’d say I did pretty well.

  My kids would stop and stare. “Mommy, is Daddy crazy?”

  “Yes, dear, I’m afraid so.”

  I had to devise my own secret personal decontamination “power forgiveness” ritual. A small park up near the state capitol has a platform overlooking the city that became my private place. Agonized, I’d race there, holding back floodgates of tears, to weep audibly in private, to pray, to breathe, and sometimes (upon release from the ER) to actually bleed. Forgiving those who deserved it least was my best revenge. It served notice to those who worked so hard to sabotage my career. Your best shot wasn’t shit! A mosquito bite! Not only insignificant, but still I rise! Fuck you in the ass, you cocksucker!

  My first SWAT callout was a situation in which a man had burst into his ex-girlfriend’s parents’ house at dinnertime and kidnapped her at gunpoint in front of her mom and dad. SWAT took a whole hour just to muster in the war room, because cops who lived way out in Blaine, Edina, and even Wisconsin had to go to their homes to get their gear and equipment, then dress and get ready. The call came out late in the afternoon. By the time we all got into our SWAT costumes and were sitting in the classroom gathering data and intel, the sun had set. It was already a very dark night.

  The kidnapper and hostage were now holed up in a room at a motel at University and Prior. He vowed to take her to another location and kill her, then himself. We knew the exact room number, where his car was parked, even the door from which he’d exit. So I’m like, “Let me take him.” In plain clothes, I’d park a car in the parking lot with the hood up, fake car trouble, and take him when they came out the door.

  But the SWAT commander proceeded with the war room briefing procedure, pounding on the chalkboard with a wooden pointer. “Here’s the blueprint of the building, the inner perimeter, the outer perimeter. We’ll set up our command post here, the media here, post a man here, and here … blah, blah, blah.”

  Eventually, with all our SWAT gear, camouflage, and fanfare, we piled into the SWAT mobile and finally proceeded to the scene. While we were en route, the bad guy brought her out at gunpoint and got into a car. A slow-speed chase ensued. We pursued, and the suspect vehicle came to a halt at Marshall Avenue and Cleveland. Two flashes blazed from inside of the car. Both kidnapper and hostage were dead.

  Well, that was that! Time to go back to the good ol’ war room and debrief on the good ol’ chalkboard.

  The SWAT team needed a place to run, jump, explode smoke and gas bombs, and practice attacks. Minnesota had just built its new correctional facility at Oak Park Heights, a state-of-the-art, level-five maximum security prison, but had not yet populated it. They told us the prison was supposed to be second only to some prison in Israel for security. Prison officials agreed to allow SPPD to run exercises, provided that we also ran an experiment to see just how escape-proof the new prison actually was, especially under extreme winter conditions. They extended a rope from the top of a four-story outdoor wall to see if it could be climbed during a snowstorm.

  By this time—still not one of the good ol’ boys, feeling particularly ignored, even alienated—I had kind of withdrawn and was just waiting to finish up and go home. I watched with interest as all the macho karate experts and weight lifters attempted but barely made it a quarter of the way. Feeling disregarded, and now disillusioned, I wasn’t interested and just stayed to myself as everyone was packing up and getting ready to go. Then one of the officers, a skydiving cowboy, said what everyone else was thinking, “Let Melvin do it!” After all the others joined in, I put my gear back on, went back outside, and climbed the rope hand over hand, all upper body, barely using my legs. Officer Gardell spotted me on a safety line and helped me climb over the wires at the top. This was recorded on video and used for training purposes. I was the only escapee in the history of Oak Park Heights, the most secure prison facility in Minnesota. This feat became a spiritual metaphor.

  Meanwhile, my personnel file overflowed with thank-you letters from citizens appreciating my services. A copy usually goes into the employee’s personnel file, and he gets a copy. But mine began to clutter the bins, so the department simply forwarded the letters to me—and quit putting them in my file. I was told that thank-you letters fit in the category of “public relations” instead of true police work.

  Although I was a hit with the citizenry, the only time in my whole career that I was ever formally commended for any courage was at a SWAT callout. It was one of those cloudy, damp, drizzly days. Mosquitoes swarmed in biblical proportions, drank bug repellant like sweetened Kool-Aid. Jesse Lopez on the city’s east side had killed his mother, father, sister, and family dog and was holed up inside the house refusing to come out. We had the house surrounded and would have stormed it, but the hostages were already dead. So it was a matter of waiting him out.

  Positioned in the tall grass and weeds, just a few feet behind the back door, I lay motionless, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, waiting. Real death in a real sense was in the air. You could taste it, feel it, smell it. My animal senses were on acute alert, finger pressure tight on the trigger. He would rush out the door blasting real bullets any second.

  Hostage negotiators radioed information about the killer. “He’s back and forth! Now he’s in the kitchen! He’s at the back door! Get ready, Carter! He’s coming to you!”

  So there’s my ass out in the grass, crouched low, poised to strike like a cobra. The rain had rinsed away my mosquito repellent hours ago. Buzzing clouds of mosquitoes swarmed, landing on my face, inside my ears and nostrils, sucking my blood, chewing on my trigger finger. One monster mosquito slammed just under my right eyeball, almost close enough for me to crush it between my eyelids. But no! It was in my line of fire and I dared not twitch. The killer was inside watching me, about to come out blasting the instant I blinked. I now appreciated Sergeant Dan Harshman and Al Garber, the FBI agents who prepared me for this moment. I watched the insect suck my sweet-sweet young blood and inflate like a bright red balloon, then buzz away fat and satisfied.

  But the killer never came out blasting. Hours passed. The day turned into night. We began to taunt him, throwing bricks at his house and through his windows. Fifteen hours later he set the house on fire and came out like a running back. So it turned out to be a gang tackle rather than a shootout. By the time I got to him, the action was almost over. I did a pile-on. I’d probably have been penalized had there been a referee. Lopez was arrested and died years later in the state mental hospital.

  Every member of the SWAT team received a formal commendation for courage above and beyond the call of duty. These guys always generously recognize and award each other. The only reason I got a commendation was because the whole team got it.

  One routine afternoon in April 1981, just as I was on my way out the door to go to work, the phone rang. Terrie, my oldest sister, had a bad premonition and called to insist that I take this night off. But I promised to be extra careful and went to work.

  Patrol was slow and uneventful early that evening. John O’Brien (Dude) and I worked sister squads, breaking in a couple of rookies. At about 1930 hours, a burglary-in-progress came out in a business district. Both squads responded, but the burglary turned out to be a false alarm.

  Afterward, John and I met in the alley behind Maryland near Arcade to blame each other for the escape had there been an actual burglary. After some routine kidding, we agreed to meet for coffee in the next hour or so. Shortly thereafter, I sat deep in the passenger seat while Paul, my rookie partner, drove. Squad 233 declared a 10-1: “Clear the air for a high-speed chase, in hot pursuit of a white
Monte Carlo at high rate of speed!” We were already in the area, but the chase had been called off before we could get in on it.

  Then, circling the block at Forest and Geranium, we came upon the worst car accident scene I’d ever seen. A white Monte Carlo had hurled itself against a corner building and was plastered like a huge broken eggshell, resting sideways against a corner storefront. Fragments of the vehicle were scattered as high as the second floor. A woman in her housecoat stood inside the building where a wall had been just moments ago.

  The specter of death loomed. A teenage girl dangled upside down from a missing car door. At perfect peace, her silent eyes followed my every move as I approached on foot. Life seeped from her body. Two motionless teenagers were also inside the car.

  As I surveyed the area, circling to my left, an upside-down police car, wedged between the building and a fire hydrant, came into view. Two legs wearing St. Paul police uniform pants extended from underneath the capsized police vehicle. I heard my voice shout over the air, “St. Paul Police Fire!” That didn’t make any sense. But since I’d already reported the location, dispatch knew where to go.

  From as far as I could crawl under the car, it appeared that only one officer was mangled under the wreckage. His head had swelled like a giant balloon. His face was beyond recognition. He was unconscious but clinging to life. All we could do for him was unfasten his collar and not move him until the paramedics arrived.