My family was sure there was no way I would get in, and I suppose I thought so too.
But a week later, a letter came from the department saying that I had been accepted into the 63rd recruit class. I was ordered to report to the Plans and Training division for prerecruit work until the class began.
Heart in my throat, I called Dalton. “I got in,” I said.
“What?”
“I got into the department. Recruit school begins in October, and I’ve got a job in Plans and Training until then.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It’s MPD’s way of paying us until the training session begins. So we don’t take another job.”
“So, wait. You’re really going to be a cop?”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m going to be a cop.”
When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “What do you think?”
“I guess this means you’re not coming to Miami with me?”
“No,” I said, surprised at my lack of hesitation. I had made my choice, and it wasn’t him.
For once in my life, I hadn’t sacrificed myself for a man.
2
The Maui Police Department bet money that I wouldn’t make it through recruit school. Only about fifty percent of recruits end up graduating from the academy, and here I was, this thin haole girl with pipe-cleaner arms and a squeaky voice.
On our first day, as we sat in the department’s huge lecture hall, Sergeant Kainoa told us that out of all the applicants—I assumed it was hundreds, but later understood it to be more like one hundred—ours were the only twenty-four applications accepted. There were so few of us compared to the size of the room. On the back wall, there was a photo of each recruit class, and I was surprised to see how small all the graduating classes were. We would only graduate eleven out of that original twenty-four.
I sat with my friend Kevin, who I met while we worked as prehires in Plans and Training. Kevin and I had become workout buddies, getting up at five every morning to go to the MPD gym before work.
That first day of recruit school, I felt proud. I was one of the elite. I was also a little distracted by thoughts of Dalton. Our relationship had already been strained by my joining the police force, and he was moving back to Miami in a matter of weeks. We were going to try the long-distance thing, and I had no idea how that would go.
Looking down at my notebook, I realized with horror that, like a high schooler, I had doodled his name in the margin. Some of the male recruits seemed to be checking me out, but I was thinking only of Dalton. I barely noticed them.
There had been one guy who caught my eye, an officer I met briefly in Plans and Training. This officer—Officer Davis, tall, handsome, Hawaiian, built—had come into Plans and Training with a smile that captivated me. We locked eyes and had an instant connection. This is what love at first sight must feel like, I thought briefly, dramatically, but realized I was just attracted to his good looks. I was still dating Dalton, so the moment passed and life went on. I hadn’t seen him since then, but I remembered how he had made me feel.
Kainoa introduced us to our other instructors, who seemed cold. Cruel even. Reagan went over the schedule and told us when we would have an emergency vehicle operator course (EVOC), firearms training, arrest defense tactics (ADT), and physical training (PT). I felt a surge of excitement as he described all the maneuvers we would learn to do, but then he said, “I don’t know why I’m bothering to go over this. Most of you won’t even make it past the academics, and the rest of you will fail physical training.”
I felt my muscles tighten when he said this. I had been around cops long enough in Plans and Training to know they liked to show up on the first day of class with badass attitudes. Still, I was intimidated. I was concerned about the PT and my lack of upper-body strength.
Next to me, Kevin nudged me and said, “Don’t worry, Alli, you’re a beast!”
I gave him a smile. We had been working out like crazy, running, lifting, and circuit training every single day. I was stronger than I looked. When the instructors looked at me, I was sure they underestimated me. The odds were against me, but I knew something they didn’t know—I had a determination like they’d never seen, and I couldn’t wait to show them.
At break, they handed out granola bars, and we stood around awkwardly trying to meet each other. A chubby guy came up to me, chewing one granola bar and holding two more. “You’re going out for the force?” he asked.
I nodded, wondering why else he thought I would be there.
“You don’t look much like a cop,” he said.
You don’t either, Fatso, I wanted to say, surprised he had passed the weight requirement, but I held it in. It was our first day, and I was going to be spending nine solid months in training with him.
“You look like the most popular cheerleader in high school,” Fatso continued.
“I wasn’t a cheerleader,” I said. “I was a soccer player, so watch your ass.”
“Sorry,” he said. “You just don’t look like the cop type.”
• • •
The next morning, I was so excited to start training that I was the first to arrive. Recruits aren’t allowed to wear their uniforms outside the department, so I had to get dressed in the locker room prior to class. I loved putting on my gun belt for the first time. It was heavy and hurt my hip bones, but it gave me confidence I had never had before.
I sized up the other two female recruits in the locker room and concluded I might be able to hold my own against them. Penny Drinan had been in the military and was just like a man. A hardass. She would turn out to be our sergeant at arms, but she would struggle academically. Julia Loza was a pretty Filipina and more girlie, and she made a point of telling me that she had done some modeling in the past.
The men in recruit school were a mixed assortment, from meatheads to nerds. I loved all the local boys—they were funny, humble, encouraging. But the white male recruits from the mainland were typical meatheads. Chauvinistic. Most were physically fit. Others were a little soft. The heavy guy from the day before was named Tom Pika. It turned out his father worked in the department, and I assumed that was why he was accepted. His connections made him arrogant even though he was far from qualified for the department.
I loved the training we did in recruit school—a long training in aikido, a great deal with the martial arts, lots of hand locks and learning how to control people you normally couldn’t control. Sergeant Mankell taught us how to do hand-to-hand combat. We spent plenty of time getting hit and learning what it felt like to get hit without being stunned. My high school boyfriend, Josh, and I used to get into a lot of fights, some of them physical, but before joining the department, I had never been cracked in the face and I had never hit anyone in the face either. I came home one day and told Dalton we had practiced getting hit in the jaw all day and he just rolled his eyes. He was having a hard time watching his girlfriend become a cop.
During some parts of training, we had to keep a red band on our firearm hand. They taught us not to do anything with our firearm hand, because if you have something in that hand, how the hell are you going to draw a gun?
We also spent time on perspective training, training our eyes to look all around to avoid getting tunnel vision in a high-adrenaline situation.
“You’ll need this for domestic violence calls,” our instructor said. “You’ll be fighting with the male to get him cuffed. Meanwhile, the female is coming at you with a frying pan.”
My first day in ADT the instructor said, “Trust me, you’re going to need to use everything I teach you in arrest defense tactics. You know why? Because criminals don’t like to get arrested, and they’ll do anything they can to get away from you.” He looked around the room, appraising us. “Okay,” he said. “We’re going to start with some highly technical training. It’s called ‘Oh shit’ training.”
We all laughed, but he shook his head to indicate he was serious. “For example,” he said,
“what do you do if someone’s on top of you pounding your face? That’s an ‘Oh shit’ moment. A volunteer?”
Wanting to prove myself, I raised my hand.
He looked surprised but said, “Okay. What’s your name?”
“ALLI?” I said. There were a couple of snickers. Even I could hear my cartoonish little voice.
“Okay, Alli, I want you to lie down on the ground.”
I lay on the floor and he said, “Now, you have to do whatever you have to do to get me off of you.” As he lowered his full weight onto my torso, everyone laughed. I honestly thought he would kill me. He was an enormous Hawaiian guy, two and a half times my weight. I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t know what to do, so I bit him.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. He definitely got off me right away. Holding his arm in pain, he looked around quickly, trying not to look like a pussy. “You’re a real alligator,” he said. “Alli the Alligator.” The nickname stuck, and the bite was hard enough to leave a permanent scar.
A few days later, a girl came up to me in the grocery store. I had no idea who she was, but she pointed at me and said, “You bit my boyfriend.” At first she looked like she was going to bite me, but then she burst out laughing. So did I.
Usually ADT is the training that fails people in the academy. A lot of recruits can’t hack it. The instructors exhaust you physically and mentally first, and then they make you fight for your life, just like you’ll have to on the job. Some people have that crazy survival warrior instinct in them and some don’t. It turned out that I did. Your body will either react or freeze, and the people who react become great cops. It isn’t thinking that’s going to save your life at moments like those.
Everyone teased me about taking the department so seriously, but I was passionate about being a cop. I was even elected president of the class. If a recruit did something wrong, I had to write a letter to the chief, explaining the situation and how I was going to stop it from occurring again. Julia would sandbag when we did physical training, and we would have to run farther as punishment. My friend Jonathan forgot his bulletproof vest one day, so I had to write a letter. I took on a lot of work, but I thrived on it. We had to be there by seven thirty in the morning, but I would get there at six to work out with Kevin before class started. When we finished at four thirty in the afternoon, I would stay until six to get the paperwork done. I never wanted to leave. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt like I was in the right place. By the time Dalton left for Miami I barely noticed his absence. I just stayed longer at work, energizing and exhausting myself.
At the end of my first full week without Dalton, Julia slammed her locker door and said, “How about a drink, Alligator?”
“I’d love to, but I’m tired. I need to go home and sleep.”
“Oh come on, Alli. You never come out with us.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t really. I had avoided social situations, preferring work and Dalton instead. Plus, Loza was already making the mistakes most girls make coming into a department—sleeping with the patrol guys before recruit school even ended. I didn’t want to associate myself with her. Cops want what they want, and they want women. It’s easy for female cops to lose the respect of their beat partners and get labeled as sluts. I didn’t want to do anything that would associate me with her.
• • •
“I just can’t keep up,” I complained to Loza on Monday morning. My shoulders ached, my legs ached, and even after spending the weekend recharging in bed, I had to drag myself in on Monday. We were doing high-speed car chases, training all day and into the night, and I was constantly tired. Loza was bouncing around like Tigger, swinging her long brown ponytail.
“I’ve got something that can help you,” she said. She fished around in her bag and pulled out a little box. Popping open the top, she handed me a small red pill. “It’s caffeine,” she said. “Super-mega caffeine pill.”
I looked at the pill suspiciously. “I’m not really much of a caffeine person,” I said. “I don’t even drink coffee. Just soda occasionally.”
“Exactly why you need this,” Loza said.
I swallowed the pill with my vitamin juice and we headed out to the course. All of a sudden I was wide awake. I could do K-turns and J-turns; I could run faster, run longer. The next morning I asked her if she had another one, and she gave me a small bottle with a few pills.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll pay you back. Where do you get them? GNC? The Vitamin Shoppe?”
“You can order them online,” she said, and spelled out the name for me. “Phentermine.”
A couple of days later, I went online to look for the stuff. Turns out it was actually an amphetamine, totally illegal to purchase in the US. You had to buy it from those sketchy Canadian websites where you purchase knockoff Viagra.
“You bitch,” I said, shutting my laptop hard enough that it almost flew off the table.
I didn’t know what to do. I was pissed at myself for being so naïve, and pissed at Loza, too. I stopped taking the pills immediately. Within hours, I started to feel lethargic. Tired. Hungry. Turns out I was having withdrawal symptoms. Phentermine is addictive.
“What the hell were you trying to do to?” I said to Loza in the locker room the next morning.
“What do you mean?”
“The phentermine,” I said. “Amphetamines. Jesus Christ.”
“What?” She acted surprised. “I didn’t know.”
“Bullshit. Why are you becoming a cop if you’re not going to uphold the law? Is it because you like all the attention from the guys?”
“You’re saying I joined the force for the guys?”
I turned away, disgusted. Everybody had labeled us best friends because we were the two pretty girls in recruit class, but I had never felt Julia was serious about being a cop. She was nonchalant about the rules. I was a by-the-book recruit, and she thought marijuana should be legalized. Plus, she was so damned flirty and used to be a model. Once she brought her modeling book to recruit class, which was weird to begin with, and then just happened to leave it in someone’s patrol car so the whole department would see. I thought she was kind of shady, and I stopped returning her calls. Eventually, she dropped out of our recruit class, though she returned a year later and ultimately became a cop.
I started to worry that I wouldn’t pass my drug test because of the phentermine. I had no idea how long it would stay in my system, and I spent a couple of really tense weeks that way.
My craving for the phentermine should have put me on alert. My family has a long history of addiction, mostly to alcohol. My mother, two uncles, and both maternal grandparents were alcoholics. High-functioning alcoholics, they liked to call themselves. Mimi, my grandmother, quit cold turkey when I was a child, and two years later my family did an intervention on my granddad. By now, they had both been sober more than twenty years. But my uncles were at the height of their alcoholism, my cousin was a heroin addict, and my mom, after enjoying fifteen years of sobriety during my childhood, had relapsed into alcoholism during her divorce. I know now that I had a predisposition toward addiction, but no one in my family ever talked about it that way. The rampant alcoholism was hardly a big secret; it was just something everyone laughed and joked about. No one in my family treated it seriously. No one thought it was a big deal.
I had smoked a lot of pot in high school with Josh but never tried anything else. I didn’t even drink very much because I hated feeling out of control. I suppose you could say that phentermine was my first true addiction.
So when the drug test arrived, I was terrified. I knew if I tested positive, that would be it. I would be off the force. And I would murder Loza.
The day of the drug test, we lined up in the hallway while they inspected the bathrooms. It was easier and faster for the girls since there were only three of us. A female officer took us into the bathroom one by one. There was a special bluing chemical in the toilet to prevent me from d
iluting my urine with toilet water. The officer listened to me go, and I wasn’t allowed to flush the toilet afterward. I handed her the cup and she tested the temperature right away and put a tape over the cup. Petrified, I initialed the cup, and thankfully, nothing showed up. I swore I wouldn’t be so stupid in the future.
• • •
On graduation day, I received my badge. I wore, for the first time, my tailored uniform with my name embroidered on it, and white gloves. My Glock was signed over to me, along with three boxes of ammunition and a heavy, bulky radio. My mom came to graduation, of course, and so did my sister and brother-in-law and their baby girl, Maya. Predictably, there was no word from my father. My mom had emailed him in Florida to tell him I had started recruit school and again to tell him I was graduating. She asked him to at least send a card letting me know how proud he was of me. But there was no card. No call. He had wiped me clean from his life when I was nineteen.
Because I was the president of the class I got to make a big speech, and I won the notebook award, an academic award that made my mom proud.
As all of my teachers and instructors congratulated me, Sergeant Mankell handed me an envelope. “Here’s the five bucks I owe you,” he said. “I didn’t forget.”
I had no idea what he was talking about—probably some silly bet we had made—but when I opened the envelope later, I saw that in addition to a crisp five-dollar bill he had written a letter congratulating me. I will never forget what he wrote:
You have the heart of a lion, and you never quit.
You acknowledged your pain, but did not indulge it.
You are gentle and humble, yet sharp as a sword.
You remained generous in all that I have seen you do.
You are a warrior.
Only eleven of us had made it through to graduation. A bunch left after PT or ADT. Loza just didn’t show up one day. One guy quit because of his wife, who couldn’t tolerate the hours of recruit school. He was told that if his wife couldn’t handle recruit school, she sure as hell couldn’t handle him being on the job. Amazingly, Fatso graduated. The instructors beat him down constantly, but I guess because of his father he was passed.
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