The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  He looked fifty or so, his ambiguously tan head was shaved, his white business shirt was worn tieless with the sleeves rolled up past the elbows to show off impressive arm muscles, his racial pedigree could not be figured as one thing or another from his facial features, and he affected chomping on a cigar he never seemed to light. His voice was a dominating duet of mellow bellow and hard-edge rasp.

  He radiated his Big Joeness in a magical manner that instantly convinced Luke that this was a dude you wanted on your side in a back-alley brawl or the political equivalent down there in City Hall.

  “Well, Joe, what are we gonna do about it?” Bruce Johnson demanded after about thirty seconds of introductions and not much more wasted in repeating what he had already told Roody on the phone.

  “What are we gonna do, Bruce? You mean what am I gonna do about it, don’t you?”

  “What’s the union gonna do? We both know it’s the same thing!”

  Big Joe Roody laughed a rumbly belly laugh. “Come on, Bruce, you know I just carry out the will of my membership.”

  “That and telling them what that is.”

  “That’s called leadership,” Big Joe growled sarcastically.

  “Bottom line, Joe,” said Bruce Johnson. “Cut the bullshit, this is serious.”

  “Oh really? What I’m gonna to about it is call a general membership meeting like a good union leader should do, and put the situation to a democratic vote—”

  “Please—”

  Big Joe held up a big ham-hand halfway through Bruce Johnson’s groan. “—right there in Duncan Plaza in front of City Hall. Every brother who’s not on shift, and if you can divide by three, which even the mayor and the police superintendent can probably manage, that means two-thirds of the entire force.”

  “They’re gonna let us do that?” Luke found himself exclaiming.

  “Well, kid, I suppose they could order the cops to arrest us for trespassing.… Oh, I forgot, we’re the cops. They might be pea-brained enough down there to order a cop to evict himself, but I know damn well they’re not dumb-ass crazy enough to order the entire police force to arrest itself and then sue the city for police brutality.”

  “What’s this meeting supposed to do for Luke?”

  “Ask not what the union can do for Luke, Bruce, let me tell you what he’s going to do for the union. He’s gonna get up there on that big round stage in the middle of Duncan Plaza and tell the brotherhood and the news media just what he told you.”

  “To do what, Joe?”

  “What I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for a while now.” Big Joe Roody’s eyes seemed to harden and he waved his cigar around for emphasis. “Which is get a resolution passed that no cop anywhere in New Orleans is to evict another cop from his house anywhere in New Orleans. A resolution with teeth.”

  “It’s already in the latest contract, Joe,” Bruce Johnson reminded him.

  “Yeah, it’s in the contract, but the union’s had to look the other way when pressure from City Hall comes down on Superintendent Mulligan to force cops to evict cops in far away precincts when ordered—”

  “How can they get away with that?” Luke demanded angrily.

  “Because we’re the cops,” Big Joe told him. “People always hate the cops until they need them because all we are otherwise is a pain in their asses, givin’ ’em tickets, busting them for dope, or pimping, or their latest armed robbery, what’s to like when you meet a cop enforcing the law on you? So we never have popular support in this town or anywhere else in the history of the world, the good folk don’t have nothing to do with us most of the time, and it’s our job to be enemies of everyone else. So we been having to look the other way on some precinct captains following orders from City Hall to evict some cops in other precincts, in return for City Hall keeping the media from goin’ on loudly about how many other voters we’ve really been evicting, which wouldn’t exactly smell like political roses. So we’ve had each other by the testicles.”

  Big Joe’s full lips open in a big sardonic grin. “Until now. Now your son-in-law’s sad and funny story’s gonna be the wedge I’ve needed, Bruce.”

  “To do what?”

  “To force those fuckers to make a choice. Luke here stands up there on that stage, wavin’ that eviction notice like Neville Chamberlain at Munich as he delivers the punchline.”

  “Force them to make a choice, Joe? I don’t get it.”

  “Between delivering what the banks and smart money and all are paying them for at the cost of being slaughtered on the air by every comedian in the State of Louisiana and maybe even Mama Legba too and a police strike lettin’ the Alligators out of the Swamp, or lettin’ the union enforce the letter of the contract forbidding any cop to evict any brother, and telling the smart-money boys, hey, we’re the best government your money can buy, but what can we do, Big Joe Roody’s got us by the balls this time, and y’all know for sure that if we don’t go along on this one, we ain’t going to get reelected to do you any more good later.”

  “You expect me to get up and make a speech to all those people?” Luke protested, but the words rang kind of false even as they emerged from his mouth.

  And he certainly didn’t fool Joe Ruddy.

  “Spare me the shit-kicker act, Luke,” Big Joe told him. “You think I don’t know all about the Alligator Swamp Police?”

  He beamed at Luke as only he could beam, cocked his head, and winked at him knowingly. “Takes one to know one, kid, you enjoyed it then, now didn’t you? And you’re really gonna enjoy it now.”

  9

  “It’s Mama Legba and her Supernatural Krewe!”

  The announcement was canned and so was the accompanying fanfare, the rented venue for today was a high-school basketball arena still smelling vaguely of sneaker sweat and Lysol, and the stage was a rickety temporary one at midcourt.

  The studio audience was no more than a few hundred people, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was on the other side of the el cheapo two-camera live hookup, namely the numbers out there in ratings land, on the top local broadcast TV channels in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport, syndicated live on various secondary channels on most cable hookups in Louisiana, and streamed on its own Web site and smartphone apps for devotees in the rest of the universe.

  Nor was it exactly “Mama Legba” who pranced up the makeshift stairs up onto the makeshift stage in black jumpsuit spangled with stardust, a long white high-collared cape draped over her shoulders, and an outsized tiara of iridescent green peacock tail feathers crowning her with glory, and brandishing a shotgun mike wrapped in gold foil as a scepter.

  At this stage of the show, before Erzuli or any other of the Supernatural Krewe took over, it was just MaryLou Boudreau in a Mama Legba Mardis Gras costume under whiteish face makeup and heavy dark eye shadow to age her a decade or so for the camera.

  Some unbooked, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable appearances in minor talk-show audiences by MaryLou ridden by Erzuli or another of the Supernatural Krewe, and they were booking her on the same sort of stuff as an unpaid guest. And then, when Papa Legba demanded just recompense live on the air a few times and finally with Baron Samedi and Ogoun doing guest-star shots to back him up, they started paying.

  This had been enough to get her picked up by Harry Klein, then a rather down-at-the-heels agent, but good enough to come up with the format for Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe and sell it to the kind of second-level net and cable channels that featured local and regional televangelists and chef shows, umpteenth runs of series that were famous a long, long time ago, and pitchmen for kitchen tools, lawn furniture, and snake-oil cures. From that to the current more elevated distribution was simply a matter of outlets reading the rising ratings and jumping aboard.

  It had been the consensus of the entities who had agreed to it behind MaryLou’s conscious back that the stage name should be “Mama Legba.” After all, Erzuli was “mama” to Legba’s “papa,” the brains behind Pa, and/or who had hi
m by the balls when she felt like it.

  But what went up on stage was not pure Erzuli either, rather a kind of composite entity. MaryLou’s was Mama Legba’s material body full-time and her “soul” or “personality” part-time as less than authentic human ringmaster supposedly in control of the loa acts, and upon occasion Erzuli’s foil in a double-voiced act.

  Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe now had a major fan base in the Big Easy, excellent penetration in the Delta and Cajun country, dwindling slowly as it proceeded up the Mississippi past Baton Rouge, regarded as the work of Satan in upstate Bible Belt Country, where there was nevertheless a Born-Again audience that couldn’t resist tuning in for a guilt-ridden peek at what Jesus was up against.

  “Who among you has need of intercession by Mama Legba and my Supernatural Krewe?” MaryLou demanded as the unvarying, opening line.

  “Who has a problem that Jesus can’t fix? Who is living in a gypsy camp under Interstate Ten? Who is about to be kicked out onto the street? Who is about to lose their lover? Who is sick with something the doctors can’t cure? Who wants to lose a lousy lover they can’t get rid of themselves? Who needs to meet the love of their life? Who wants to pay back the boss that fired them? Who needs Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe?”

  The studio audience would have roared out “We all do!” in unison if they weren’t individually all screaming “Me!”

  That was the sort of live audience that always showed up on the broadcast, screened for it by now, competing with each other for the doorman’s attention in camera-candy costumes more than fit for a secondary parade, colorfully broadcasting the woes of their tales.

  Matrons in hospital gowns hooked up to phony rolling IV stands. Dickensian beggar families in filthed-up rags. Evicted folks with pushcarts of their worldly goods. Giant nutria. Hookers in teenage leatherpunk gear. Tough-guy thieves in Robin Hood drag handcuffed to phony cops brandishing baseball bats.

  All fighting for the attention of Mama Legba, the aid of the loas, and their fifteen minutes of fame on television.

  MaryLou always delivered the standard opening, and it was still MaryLou who did the picking and choosing with the shotgun mike, since Erzuli and the guest stars from the Supernatural Krewe decided whether or not the sob stories she chose won the brass ring and therefore had to hear them before they deigned to ride the composite entity and become “Mama Legba.”

  MaryLou pointed her scepter-mike at the likely looking black man in the saffron Hari Krishna robe holding up an empty beggar bowl with the appropriate pathetically whining expression.

  “I been living unner da Eye-Ten since the last Hurricane Season, tryin’ ta work da Quarter, but no luck an’ da cops makin’ my poor miserable life even more, an’ I need some a da magic to fill this here bowl.…”

  The loa Linto upon occasion took pity on the beggar trade, turning the inept into the cute and cuddly, but not all that often, and not this time either.

  MaryLou tried the woman in the homemade nutria costume, which obviously had taken an impressive amount of inexpert work, but nevertheless made the food-chain scourge of the marshlands look like the giant rapacious rat of its odious reputation, no doubt hoping that Loco, more or less loa of the biosphere, might just come up with some kind of plague to rid the bayou country of this voracious varmint.

  “I call upon Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe to save the nutria!”

  MaryLou groaned and cut her off as the audience booed and screamed, the nutria being about as popular in lower Louisiana as pythons in Florida or rabbits in Australia, and unsurprisingly no fave rave with Loco either.

  “I worked thirteen years in the sales and I’ve still got my job,” said a well-groomed white man in a standard-issue black business suit, with a wife and two kiddies flanking him behind two purloined shopping carts overflowing with the usual street-survival gear. “I bought us a house back in the day before the superbuck, and last month the cops came and kicked us out into the street at gunpoint after the mortgage payments already sucked us dry. What are we supposed to do, Mama Legba? I’ve been googling, and so I call you to send us Erzuli, she’s the loa of good fortune, is she not?”

  Are you not? MaryLou demanded to the default loa inside her head. Can’t you give this guy a break?

  MaryLou had no say in who what loa might choose to have Mama Legba favor or what might be said through her lips, but she and Erzuli could converse inside their mutual head and MaryLou could initiate the back and forth and cajole, whine, and complain as much as she liked, and Erzuli seemed to rather enjoy the backtalk.

  No way, hon’, this honkie inna money suit be a dark horse of the honkie god Mammon, who usually goes by Brigitte here in the Krewe, he ain’t poor by Babalu’s accounting, and like I keep tellin’ you, girl, we don’t do no business with business, money, or monkey. If I did, you’d be filthy rich.

  And that was that. Erzuli couldn’t be bullied, indeed was quite capable of bullying most other members of the Supernatural Krewe, though Papa Legba seemed to overrule her occasionally and let MaryLou talk back to her on the air.

  He claims it’s because he thinks the act is better if we do a Punch and Judy inside of Mama Legba once in a while for comic relief, Erzuli had told her skeptically, and he is the loa of crossroads and fortune, so I suppose show biz too, but between you and me, hon’, he’s mainly trying to show me who really wears the immaterial pants.

  So MaryLou was even granted a certain amount of duet airtime with Erzuli in control of Mama Legba, but she was never consciously there when another loa was riding, and it was always Erzuli who took over solo when it was time to summon other spirits from the vasty deep.

  “My boyfriend done run off with a faggot an’ I want his johnson to get stuck up his butt an’ fall off!”

  “The cops who kicked me out inna street went inside stole my TV and tablet an’ I need ’em back!”

  “My no-good son’s gone and turned into a junkie, an’ I think he’s dealin’ onna street to pay for it, an’ I want the cops to arrest him anna judge to give him like six months just to teach him a lesson.”

  None of this crap roused an answer, and who could blame the loas? Not MaryLou, who knew she was having a bad show with the scepter-mike so far, or there was just nothing interesting enough to any of them out there to provoke a guest-star appearance.

  There seemed to be a loa for just about anything, some like Erzuli and Papa Legba major players, others, like Bade, Agwe, Dumballah, specializing in various forms of luck, or knowledge, or performance, and not very reliable, and apparently even more minor spirits back there below the line, as they would say in show biz.

  In that respect, the magic of show biz, major and minor, was not that far removed from voodoo.

  “My pimp, he beat me, he got no job, he make me work the streets, he screw around, he tell me I’m no good at it, he won’t even make no love to me no more.You gotta get me outa this, Mama Legba!”

  This from a black woman not quite entering middle age and not a bad looker, in severe el cheapo miniskirt, a bra straight off the racks at Kmart smeared with black paint and glitter, and high black plastic boots.

  Well, Erzuli? This good enough for you?

  “Let me at the bastard!”

  This was not just inside MaryLou’s head. MaryLou heard the words come out of her own mouth, out of Mama Legba’s mouth, but in the voice Erzuli used when she was working it, made otherworldly by some kind of natural, if that was the word, reverb effect.

  “I give you a spell to put on him, sister, you go get yourself some rose water, mix in with your own spit, an’ grease his rovin’ rod when he asleep, an’ he ain’t gonna get it up for nobody else, no way, no how.”

  “I call this spell the pussy whip,” MaryLou felt moved to add herself, and Erzuli, laughing inside her head, let her do it in her own voice to the laughter and cheers from most of the female part of the audience.

  Pussy whip? Now what in the material world or ours be that, hon’?

/>   Allow me?

  This I gotta hear! And even Papa Legba be laughing.”

  “Your no-good won’t just get it up for no one but you, you gonna control when and if he gets it up at all!” MaryLou’s voice said through Mama Legba’s snarling lips. “And I’ll bet you watching this on TV right now, you pathetic piece of crap, you give it a try and see!”

  Who-ee, girl! That give him what for! But that give me an idea—

  “That bad boy gonna change his ways!” the voice of Erzuli proclaimed, “you hear me out there in TV land, peckerhead? He’s gonna fall in love with you for real, now ain’t that a bitch, he gonna worship that pussy of yours like it was the Gates of Eden! He gonna do anything to get inside!”

  “And you have the power,” MaryLou added. “That poor thang of his is gonna be up for you all the time but—”

  “—it’s gonna go limp as a dead eel every time he tries unless he gets down on his knees an’ prays to it—”

  “—and you have to give him leave—”

  “—an’ I don’t advise you spoil him by doing that too often—”

  “—and he’s gonna want to take you off the street so bad that if he can’t work or steal enough he’ll … he’ll…”

  MaryLou found herself embarrassingly at a loss. Over to You, Erzuli.

  Sorry about this, hon’, but Guede wants the punchline, on this one, an’ he got a real good one!

  And the next thing that MaryLou knew, she was standing there in front of an audience in a total and totally satisfying uproar. Seemed like every woman was clapping and laughing and cheering at the same time, Erzuli was laughing uproariously inside her head and even a goodly number of the men, sweet-and-sour faced, couldn’t quite contain themselves.

  “You over there, with the dog and the shopping cart—”

  No business like show business! MaryLou sang wordlessly to Erzuli. And we’re the stars!

  With special appearances by guest stars from Mama Legba’s Supernatural Krewe—