by Mark Johnson
“Yeah, Lusty,” Devin says. “We can’t just spray-and-pray like the thugs do. You know we gotta acquire before we fire—be sure of our target—and it was dark as sin up under that house. You couldn’t see shit,” Devin says, turning to me. “You couldn’t be sure where he was, and for all you knew he coulda dragged a hostage up under there with him. And what if you fired and missed, what’s behind him? Where would that bullet end up? You could hit a kid riding by on a bicycle, or another cop.” Devin turns back to Lusty. “He only had one round and couldn’t get good target acquisition, shithead. Quit Monday-mornin’quarterbackin’.”
“All that’s true,” I say. “But to tell the truth, I didn’t even consider any of that. Never thought he might have a hostage, never considered target acquisition or unintended victims. I kinda wish now I had squeezed off that one round, but I decided not to, and I’m not sure why. I remember thinking maybe I should save it in case I really need it, like if he comes out at me. And I knew the place was already swarming with cops, and everybody was yelling, “Pull back!” so I did. Simple as that. Figured, Let the guys with bigger guns and more bullets take it from here, my work is done.”
Lusty has no more questions, apparently, which is good, because I’m sure Devin and Earl are out of answers by now. And I sure as hell don’t have any answers. In fact, I have more questions, myself. But I’m not about to give voice to them.
“Have they set the day for Green’s wake and funeral yet?” I ask.
“The wake’s set for Thursday at 1700 at Radney’s on Dauphin,” Devin says. “Then the funeral’s at ten Friday at his church in Prichard, and then the procession from there all the way out to Serenity Gardens, practically to the Mississippi line,” Devin says.
“I’ll be glad when that’s over,” I say.
“We’ll all be happy to get that behind us,” Earl says.
Cop funerals are big deals. Every state and local elected official, district attorney and judge, every chief and sheriff in the region, and hundreds of officers—including many from jurisdictions across the country—will be in attendance. Interstate highways (in this case, I-65 and I-10) will be shut down for the procession. The fire department will cross the fully extended ladders of two trucks over the highway to suspend a huge American flag. Strangers shake your hand and thank you for your service. The roads and overpasses are lined with officers saluting and well-wishers waving flags. And ordinarily stoic men are fighting back tears.
I’ve attended three such funerals before this one. They are emotionally draining, whether you personally know the departed or not. By the time the bagpipes play and the rifles crack and the color guard presents the folded flag to the widow, you’re ready to spend the next couple days in bed, or drunk. Or drunk in bed. But of course, you don’t. You report for duty. And as it happens for this one, duty means regular assignments, plus five or six more hours of Mardi Gras parade detail.
About four or five days after we put Green in the ground, I’m reporting to parade-duty roll call at Ladd Stadium as usual, after a full day of work, and Joey Broder, a detective from the Fourth Precinct grabs me.
“There he is! My hero! How’s it feel to make the top-ten Most Wanted by the Black Foot Soldiers, Mark? I’ll make that web page into your new screen saver, if you haven’t already, man! I mean, that’s like, better than a medal.”
“Huh? The Black Foot who? What the hell you talking about, Joey?”
“Oh, man, you mean you haven’t seen it yet? Wow! You’re famous! Check this out, man.” Broder pulls up the website on his iPhone and shows it to me. There’s a full color portrait of the dead cop-killer Lawrence Wallace on the left side, and one of me, taken from the MPD website on the right side. Between us, over a background of a burning American flag, inch-tall flaming lettering declares, “FUCK racist mobile police regime terrorist MARK JOHNSON. —Mobile Black Foot Soldiers.”
“I think it’s a pretty good likeness. You got your Dirty Harry look on,” Joey says. “Seriously, man: make it into a screen saver for the office. Or have it blown up into a poster, y’know, suitable for framing? I’m thinking maybe twenty-four by thirty-six?”
I read the copy below the blazing likenesses of Wallace and me:
Sunday, February 5, 2012
(BREAKING) Was officer Steven Green Acting White? Mobile Black Foot Soldiers praise Brother & Activist Lawrence Wallace in DARING Dollar General Reparations Protest, Condemn Green’s Observance of “White Laws” denying Rights to Reparations; (PLUS) Racist Mobile Police Regime Terrorist Mark Johnson POPPED, Anti-Recovery Vigil Planned. “Although we know Johnson has been released from the hospital, let us continue our prayers against him, his family & his kind for the racial terrorism we face from him & his kind.” —Mobile Black Foot Soldier Moses Abernathy.
I look from Joey’s iPhone screen to him, a little pissed. “You are one sick motherfucker, Broder. Have your laughs about me, but you shouldna put Green in it. That’s really poor taste.”
“What? I didn’t do this! You think I had nothing to do last week with the funeral and Mardi Gras and everything, so I just decide to fuck around on the Internet and invent the Black Foot Soldiers? This is real! Kimbrough over in the Fifth is the one who saw it first, and he showed it to me, and everybody’s seen it. Check it out yourself, old man. You’re not the only white cop in a gunfight they wanna burn down. They got the same kinda shit on cops all over the country.”
I look at the iPhone screen again and scroll down. It continues:
Mobile Black Foot Soldiers are reportedly mourning the loss of reparations protester Lawrence Wallace as well as the loss of Mobile Police Officer Steven Green. Green was reportedly stabbed to death by Wallace after Green arrested him during an alleged reparations protest at a Dollar General on North Schillinger. Many local soldiers now suspect Wallace believed Green was acting white by attempting to arrest him in a protest against the historically racist Dollar General Company.
(Developing Story)
After I get my parade assignment, I leave roll call and swing by the precinct to log on. Sure enough, it’s there, and as Joey said, they’ve got the same kind of crap about wounded and slain white cops from all over the country. I print out a couple hard copies of the Fuck Mark Johnson page and call my old patrol buddy Richard Crudup who’s in Intelligence now and ask him where his parade post is. He’s working an undercover, plainclothes unit that mingles in crowds and busts little gangster wannabes for lighting up blunts or brandishing guns along the parade route. When I get to his corner at Broad and Springhill, I show him the Black Foot Soldier hard copy. He hasn’t seen it yet either, has never heard of the Black Foot Soldiers, but promises to run it through their databases and get back to me in a day or two.
“It’s probably bullshit, Mark. A made-up group by some racist nutjob with a laptop and lotsa time on his hands. I wouldn’t sweat it,” he says. “On the other hand,” he adds (because he’s Crudup, and he’s like this), “remember: consider all scenarios, watch your six, and stay in Condition Yellow, even when off duty. And you might think about changing up your route to and from work . . .”
“Thanks, Richard. You’re such a comfort.” I’ve known him since my rookie days on third squad patrol at the First. Crudup’s one of those cops who is always vigilant, studies all the cop and gun magazines, goes to the range every weekend. He and Balzer used to forty up with me when I was right out of the academy during the slow, early morning hours of night shift at Craighead (called Crackhead by Balzer) Elementary School and he would drill me with scenarios: you’ve been shot in the gun hand, your weapon’s still holstered, and the bad guy’s approaching to finish the job. Quick, what do you do? (For that one, he taught me how to draw my gun cross-body with my left hand, which places the weapon upside down in the hand when drawn, but still fireable with decent accuracy when held upside down with the weak hand, as long as you know how to do it.) They don’t teach you that stuff in the academy, or at the range.
So it’s at once comf
orting and a little disconcerting to have Richard looking into the Black Foot Soldiers for me.
Meantime, I’m more than a little jumpy. The next morning, after I’ve shaved, showered, dressed, and started the coffee, I go out like always to fetch the morning Press Register to read over a hot black cup. It’s a little after 5 a.m., still dark, and cold. I notice an unfamiliar vehicle idling in my neighbor’s driveway, directly across the street. I stop in my tracks and study the car, which doesn’t look like my neighbor’s, but the windshield is fogged up so I can’t really make out who’s sitting in it. My neighbor’s never up this early, either. And what’s he doing just sitting there in his own driveway, in somebody else’s car?
I draw my weapon and dive for cover, rolling behind the azalea bed in my front yard. There is no blaze of assault rifle fire. Slowly I rise, Glock aimed at the dark blur behind the steering wheel, and command, “Get out of the car and let me see your hands!”
A long few seconds pass, and I’m wishing I had my radio to call for backup, but it’s still on the charger in the house. I’m thinking, this azalea bush doesn’t exactly qualify as “cover,” and I decide I can drop back to the brick wall by my front door if it comes to that, when the car door opens, and old white-haired, retired Jim McClanahan slowly gets out, his hands in the air, and says, “What’s going on, Mark?”
A couple days later, Richard tells me his first hunch was right. Black Foot Soldiers is a lone nutjob, not a network. It’s a guy known to local police in Trenton, New Jersey, who does not represent any threat, at least not all the way down here in Mobile.
While this news makes it less traumatic to fetch the morning paper (for me as well as Jim across the street), it has no effect on the recurrent nightmares disturbing my sleep. I keep dreaming of losing my ammo as bad guys are closing in, then I wake up with a jolt. I doubt even Richard has a solution for that scenario.
After another week of fourteen-hour Mardi Gras days and sleepless nights, I call a friend of Nancy’s, a woman she knows from being on the symphony board with her, who used to be a contract psychologist for a large metropolitan police department and still consults for departments around the country. (My department’s free mental health counseling is unable to book me an appointment sooner than forty-five days out. Plus I don’t trust them to keep my business confidential.)
On a moment’s notice, Nancy’s friend Leah tells me to come on over for coffee. We settle with steaming lattes on her back deck overlooking Rabbit Creek, and she’s smart. With minimal chitchat and a sixty-second summary from me of the Metro murder, the siege, sleepless nights, and unformed questions since, Leah suggests I talk to somebody I trust and respect who’s “been there”: another cop who’s survived a gunfight involving a fatality.
When I get back to the precinct, I ask Devin, who knows everybody in the department, and whose judgment and discretion I trust. He names a few guys who have been in gunfights, then eliminates them one by one for various reasons (he’s an asshole, he’s a bad drunk, he’s stupid) until he snaps his fingers and says, “Pete Parsons. He was in that nightclub shoot-out up in the Third eight or ten years ago. He’s a great guy, really 10-8. Give Pete a call.”
Parsons and I meet for lunch at a Denny’s. He’s early forties, been a cop nearly twenty years (his first and only job, right out of the army and college) with two grown kids and an intact marriage to the same woman all these years. The latter is almost unheard of among cops. I appreciate Devin’s wisdom in recommending Parsons to me.
Parsons tells me his story, which is a harrowing one: guy goes into an after-hours club, takes ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend, the bartender, and a couple of random customers hostage at gunpoint. Begins killing people. Pete’s the second in a four-man tactical stack that storms the club. Bad guy’s waiting for them, up high—standing on a table, peeking over an interior privacy wall just past the front door. The tac stack fails to look high—and for the bad guy it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They eventually killed the shooter without further loss of life, but the first tac officer was wounded so badly, it ended his career, although he survived. Pete was hit in four places, and it took most of a year before he was back on duty.
Parsons credits his wife, family, pastor, and a few close friends (including a couple of cops) with pulling him through it. In addition to the months of physical therapy, there was the PTSD to deal with: the nightmares, the second-guessing, the survivors’ guilt, the paranoia that we’ve all heard about. He assures me there’s no shame in seeing a shrink and strongly recommends pastoral guidance. He gives me his pastor’s name and number. “But the best thing for me was what we’re doing here, right now. I talked to guys who had been there. And lemme tell ya, unless you been there, you just don’t know. The biggest thing I struggled with was when all the other cops—who had never been in a firefight themselves, either in the military or on the streets—would come up to me and say, ‘Man, why didn’t you return fire? If I’da been there, I’da emptied my magazine at him.’
“The fact is, I was a little preoccupied. Andy Andrews, the first guy in, when he got hit he fell back into me, then I got hit, and I’m bumping into Cotton behind me, and we’re all in this narrow passage and none of us knows where the fire is coming from, we have no clue he’s shooting down on us from above, we’re just scrambling backwards for cover, dragging Andrews with us. For a while, I go through all that with guys who’d ask, and they’re all ‘Well why didn’t you toss a flash bang?’ or ‘I woulda done this,’ or ‘I woulda done that,’ and finally I just got to the point where I say, ‘Well that’s all fine and good, but brother, you weren’t there,’ and I just walk away.”
That’s exactly what I need to hear.
Fat Tuesday finally arrives and the season of wretched excess, of folly’s triumph over death, staggers off to oblivion for another year. Kate and David are over for supper, and David takes his leave to head out for one of his meetings. He’s also in recovery, although from a slightly different shade of fatal compulsion from my own.
“Want some company? I’m a little short on meetings myself, with all that damn parade duty.”
“Heck yeah, Paw ’n’ law. Come ahead on!”
En route to his meeting, located in the heart of Prichard, David asks, “So how are ya doin’, really? I can’t even imagine what all this has been like for you.”
I start to minimize, to give him my rote response, the no-big-deal, I’m-good-to-go spiel, but stop. He deserves more; he knows bullshit when he hears it.
“To tell the truth, David, I’ve realized that I don’t really know anything, for sure. I can’t make any sense of it all. I didn’t even know the cop who died. Met his wife and kids at the wake, and she recognizes me from the news. ‘You’re the one who found him, who got wounded,’ she says to me. ‘Thank you,’ she says. With all she’s dealing with, she thanks me. For what?
“And I keep picturing the face of that kid. It, like, haunts me. The kid slit a cop’s throat and then tried to shoot me with the dead cop’s gun. I mean, what the fuck’s up with that? So I pull up his rap sheet: Lawrence Wallace Jr., twenty years old. He wasn’t any badass gangbanger, that’s for sure. Hell, I’ve been arrested more than he’d been. There’s nothing in his jacket but a couple of minor drug charges: a weed second and a controlled substance—probably a rock or a pill—and that was it. No violence at all, at least on paper. I’m totally baffled. What happened to him? Did he just snap that day? I mean, what a bizarre way to rob a Dollar store! He probably coulda gotten a deal, it was so weird: probation and mandatory headshrinking. But then, at Metro, he slashes a cop’s throat? The sheer fucking brutality of it makes me sick. But even after that, when he crashes through the door with the cruiser, he couldn’t have known the cop was dead.
“So then, finally, under that house down the parkway, why didn’t he just surrender when I lit him up? It still wasn’t too late. He’d do some time, for sure, but he’d maybe get youthful offender, or plea insanity, get some kinda deal,
and he’d get out eventually, and he’d be notorious, if that’s what he’s after. Was it a death-by-cop thing? Planned out all along? I seriously doubt he planned on dying like a trapped rat, under that house.”
David and I roll off the interstate onto Wilson Avenue in silence.
“I don’t know, David. My only answer to your question is, I got no answers. I don’t know jack, other than I sure’s hell need a meeting.”
David makes no reply. I’m not even certain he’s been listening. He seems to be trying to figure something out.
It’s a rundown meeting hall in a former retail store on a rundown main street in the poorest community of one of the poorest states in the nation. Even the streetlights are busted. David and I are the only white faces in a rough-looking crowd of thirty or so people gathering to share their experience, strength, and hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. I recognize a couple of familiar faces, “double winners” who occasionally attend the meetings I do, as well as this one. Though we’re all applying essentially the same remediating steps to our own particular brand of insanity, this meeting is run a little differently from mine. Rather than people taking turns, or speaking spontaneously, a meeting chairman calls on them to speak. I’m glad for that, because I realize early on that I likely won’t be called on to speak, and that’s good. I feel depleted, like I got nothing to offer tonight. I just wanna sit back and soak up some gritty, practical, hard-fought Truth.
The chairman is calling on people he knows, people with some long-term, quality clean time. There’s some Wisdom in this group. As the end of the hour draws near, the chairman calls on David, sitting right next to me.
“I’ve had it driven home to me in recent days just how fucking bloodthirsty our disease really is,” he begins. “It is pure evil. It wants us dead.” People voice their accord: “Yes!” “Uh-huhh.” “Das right!”
David continues, his voice growing thick. “This disease will stop at nothing to inflict pain and suffering on me and whoever’s around me. It doesn’t give a damn who’s in the way, who gets caught in the cross fire.”