The Policeman
is Your Friend

Max King Cap

It wasn’t unpleasant, third watch, midnight to eight, despite the lack of sleep. As the candidate firefighter I always sat third watch. The solitude was enjoyable, I could read in peace and aside from the occasional need to deliver minor first aid, and the extremely rare fire response, I passed most nights unmolested. While ours was a comparatively active house, runs for the truck and the engine were far from daily. The ambulance crew was hands down the busiest; Sticks and Brody never passed a night (or day) unharried by citizen misfortune. 

I enjoyed most the summer nights that had cooled comfortably after a hot thick day, those nights when a wind from the lake, just six blocks away, slid a creamy pucker over sweaty skin. It was on one of these nights I met the old weary cop with thinning blonde hair turning white; he was dangerously, flamboyantly overweight. And he was walking a beat. Beat cops (or as they are calling it now, Community Policing) are there to prove they are regular folks, just like you. It is the exterior aspect of the Officer Friendly campaign where police officers visit schools and talk to children about staying away from drugs and avoiding rough company. The weary cop was not one of those. No sergeant would ever assign him to talk to kids. His wheezing would scare them, his obese waddle would incite giggles. And there was the distinct and frightening chance that he might drop dead in front of a classroom full of children. That very thought occurred to me the first time I saw him. I remembered coppers visiting my childhood classroom. I never believed a word they said. Not then, and certainly not now. 

The night he presented himself at our glazed brick office beside the ambulance bay I thought he was an off-duty security guard. I had seen him walking along the other side of Coolidge Avenue, opposite our firehouse, and was curious if he needed help as he banked across the street and directly toward me. Coming closer I could see his uniform was not that of a security guard; the pale blue shirt, the five-pointed star, and the octagonal white patch on his left shoulder with its circling script. Chicago cop. I raised my hand in a fraternal wave but he did not respond, his oversized arm perhaps too burdensome to lift, or simply dismayed to see a Black man as a crew member at a previously all White firehouse—all of my life I had endured the empowered presumption of White cops. He was clearly weary, exhausted actually. The last fifteen feet seemed a particular struggle.

“Hi”, he said in broken breaths, simply standing was an exertion for him. “I’m just going to sit a little while in the back, if that’s alright.”

Of course it was alright. He looked as if he were going to collapse.

“You need any help?”

“No, I’m good,” he said, though he clearly wasn’t. “I’ll just rest a few minutes then I’ll be out of your hair.”

I watched him sway side-to-side, as if on a ship in rough water, toward the back of the firehouse, to the salon of mismatched furniture that served as our living room, next to the kitchen, where the TV showed sports all day and action films at night. I was worried. I imagined him sitting in one of our overly soft chairs, falling asleep to pants of shortened breath, then never waking. He was sweating when he had spoken to me. Walking a beat was something that he should not have been doing. I recalled The Untouchables movie, the scene on the Michigan Avenue Bridge when Sean Connery says to a departing Kevin Costner, “You just fulfilled the first rule of law enforcement: Make sure when your shift is over, you go home alive.” But I wasn’t sure my fat copper would survive the night. My fat copper. He was mine now. And if he died he would become the event that followed the rest of my career at the fire department.

“Did you hear about the candidate who just let a cop die in the firehouse? No first aid, no alarm, no nothing.” 

The event would become an anecdote and the anecdote would grow into a legend. By the time it had been repeated in every firehouse in the city and embellished by every crew member on every shift it would eventually come back to me, most likely from the mouth of a candidate fresh from the fire academy who would have the nerve to ask me, “Is it true that you murdered a cop?” 

Sean Connery also rejected G-Man Kevin Costner’s request for help with, “If I’m such a good cop why am I walking a beat at my age?” I wondered the same thing. What sadistic lieutenant had sentenced my unfit copper to foot patrol? How far afoul of a higher-up could he have gone to deserve a detail that might put him in his grave. There would be no daring shootout for him, as in The Untouchables, going down in a blaze of glory, no famous last words. It would happen with him simply walking his nighttime beat, demeaned by the rising and waning insults hurled by teenagers passing in an overpowered automobile, and he would feel a tightness in his chest and a tingling in his arm, and he would know exactly what was happening, he just didn’t think it would happen on this night. That brochure that the doctor had given him? Still sitting in his locker, and he had even gained a few pounds since his last visit. But by now the doctor’s instructions were crowded away by the squeezing pressure spreading to his neck and jaw, binding his chest. In the cool night his brow is already painted in icy perspiration and he is growing wearier with each labored step. A sudden dizziness overcomes him and he can no longer keep himself upright, he is now the spinning top he had as a child wobbling in its slowing gyrations, its inertia drunken, decelerating, until he is belly down, face down on the pavement, with one eye staring at blackened chewing gum in petrified fusion with the sidewalk, and faint voices cannot drown the tattoo of his surrendering heart. He has had that harsh waking dream many times. That is why he has come to sit in one of my comfy chairs.    

But perhaps the cop deserved this treatment. His lieutenant was certainly determined to drive him into retirement yet he was gamely holding on for that final pension bump. But what had he done to incur such wrath?

I went back to the TV room to check on him. Familiar with the furniture selection, he’d chosen the ratty recliner and was already asleep. I was relieved by the signal of his mellow snoring, not labored or phlegmy. Watching his girthy torso expand and contract I imagined him dreaming of his younger, slimmer self when he was a real cock of the walk. Newly badged on the department, his slim waist and blond hair was the object of admiring glances, the local beat cop he was, the disperser of street corner boys. I would have been one of those boys. That imagined recollection, that possibility, amended my view toward him, this man I didn’t know. That he was one of those cops who threw their figurative weight around, White cops compelled to police Black boys because we deserved scrutiny, our skin invited, demanded it. Targets at whom they could regularly aim and practice their impunity.

****

Jackson Park is a lengthy public garden, lakeside and manicured, stretching south from the University of Chicago down to South Shore, my neighborhood, a lower-middle class colored section of the city. The park is named not for Mahalia Jackson, the influential gospel singer who rendered the national anthem at the inaugural ball of President Kennedy, but the slave-trading, Indian-killing, economy-bungling seventh president, Andrew Jackson. At its top is a museum fashioned after the World’s Fair buildings that once stood on that location and from there the park stretches southward over three lagoons and three harbors. At its bottom sprawls a public golf course where duffers regularly slice and hook their drives into the no-mans-land of its timbered and bushy fence-line. There these errant golf balls rested like Easter eggs beneath Black Elderberry and between the roots of Honey Locust.

Collecting these wayward balls was a pastime for a quartet of South Shore children freed from the classroom by the long summer break, three boys and a girl who were exceptional in school and steered away from the unruly kids in the neighborhood. We were never late for dinner and we never talked back to adults and these balls were neglected, abandoned, essentially rubbish. Comically far from the greens and fairways, we retrieved those that were mud-spattered and cut with smiles and hidden in underbrush too dense for an adult to bother reclaiming; castoffs, begetters of mulligans. The sole wicked aspect of the adventure was that collecting these balls required climbing a five-foot fence into the confines of the golf course, a daring and transgressive adventure for well-behaved children who were just three feet and a half feet tall. We collected them like other children collected marbles or stamps—Ping, Turf Master, Faultless, Fleetwing, Top Flight, Royal, Tourney. 

Scrabbling my way deep into a thicket, too far an adventure for my comrades, I spotted a two-tone ball, half silver and half black but presenting itself like a gibbous moon. It took a while to retrieve it but it would certainly be the find of the summer and significantly raise my collection in the esteem of my colleagues. 

Eager to show off my find I clambered over the fence quickly but carefully, making sure to protect my new treasure. When I finally looked up, straddling the fence, I saw my friends running in opposite directions, and then I saw why. A police car had stopped in the street just beyond the parked cars, and two officers were standing on the sidewalk. I knew I was in trouble. It was two White officers. Their white Ford had a broad blue stripe running along its side and the blocky white letters embedded in the stripe read We Serve and Protect, though neither of those duties would be delivered upon me.

“Get over here”, the taller of the policemen said, pointing to a spot on the ground just in front of him, “and empty your pockets!” I pulled them inside out. I had fifty cents. They let me keep my two quarters and examined the golf balls I had scrounged, discarding onto the grass the one with the disfiguring smile. The taller, blonde cop kept my prize find, my crescent moon ball, while his partner with the glossy black hair pocketed the other two and opened the back door of the cruiser. I followed his finger-pointing instruction and climbed in, blaming myself for this predicament, for being greedy; had I not wanted so eagerly to show up my friends I wouldn’t have climbed so deeply into the underbrush. I had pressed an advantage I thought I held an over them, their parents, still married, would have been disappointed if their children had returned home with their knees and elbows covered in dirt, but my mother would have barely noticed in her brief glance at me from behind her smoky cloud of Salem Menthols. 

Then the door thudded shut behind me.

“You know where we’re going?”

I was terrified that he was taking me downtown, embarkation point for the Cook County Jail, or to the Audy Home. He didn’t wait for me to answer.

“We’re gonna to drive around until we find every one of your niglet friends, and all of youse are gonna apologize to each and every golfer in the park for stealin’ their golf balls.”

His shorter, darker sidekick laughed loudly. He hardly spoke but was equally frightening. Icy air-conditioning filled the car. 

We drove swiftly through the park’s winding roads, a famous landscape architect had planned it as a leisurely meander, but the blond driver drove as if in a determined hunt, braking hard and reversing direction when we passed a pair of colored kids running by. Colored kids. Running. They must have done something. He speedily rounded the Statue of the Republic, a shimmering gold leafed one-third replica of the World’s Fair original, and slowed when approaching behind the suspect children—but these delinquents were by now playing with more children and several adults in a generational family picnic. Frustrated, he angrily headed north again to continue his dragnet.

After following the park’s winding roads twice, three times, without success Officer Blonde and Officer Laughter grew frustrated and slowed to a stop near a red brick fieldhouse. A groundskeeper was edging the grass along the path. I knew they would ask him if he noticed any errant juveniles in the vicinity. They exited the squad car simultaneously in a practiced display of authority, doors thudding together, engine off, air-conditioning off, leaving me locked inside. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but the groundskeeper, an older colored man, shook his head and pointed to the shrubbery. He was landscaping, I imagined him saying, not looking for children. Besides, the park was full of children. The police couldn’t bully him. He was a city worker. He had a union, too. Behind them I could see the brick cottage dotted with high narrow windows and a water fountain centered in front with Men and Women marked over arched doorways at each end. It wasn’t twenty feet away but locked inside the patrol car it felt like it was on the other side of the park.

The enclosed car was growing hotter and I needed the toilet but the cops kept questioning the groundskeeper. They probably thought he must be protecting those rascals, hiding them. The groundskeeper continued to shake his head. My toilet urgency was increasing and the car was growing hotter but I kept silent. I wanted to pound on the window but I was afraid of angering the officers. Officer Laughter raised his right arm, pointing first in one direction then broadly gliding his finger across the horizon, as if the horde of wicked children was an approaching, golf ball-stealing army. Officer Blonde kept his right hand on his hip, near his pistol.

Naked sunlight filled the back seat of the car and a trickle of urine had escaped, spreading darkly on the upper thigh of my khaki trousers. I knocked on the window, softly at first, but as urine began to trickle down my leg I pounded more frantically. Officer Blonde and Officer Laughter turned their heads sharply toward me, glaring, but then immediately turned away again. I pounded harder on the window and screamed that they should let me out, my forehead beading with sweat, my breathing accelerated in the steamy patrol car. Officer Blonde had had enough. He stormed over to the car, his car, gleaming hazy white in the full sunshine, with anger on his face. He opened the door and shouted at me, but seeing my darkening khakis he yanked me roughly from the back seat, hoping I wouldn’t further soil his car. He pointed toward the public toilets but it was too late. Not halfway to the fieldhouse I released it all, a deluge of juvenile urine running down both legs, into my shoes, its trail leading back to the cruiser with the blue stripe and the white mantra. The groundskeeper looked at me sadly, I was standing still, crying, my khakis two-toned by piss, looking as if I were wearing chaps. He led me to the archway marked Men. I didn’t look back at the policemen but I heard their car drive away. In the fieldhouse I stood in front of a urinal crying, I had nothing left to feed it.

I first thought I would tell my mother that it wasn’t my fault, but I was a former and late bedwetter, a late child. I knew she would not believe me. She was tired of child rearing. She would have little sympathy, she would call me a big baby. So I decided to cover my big baby pants-wetting shame with a big boy lie. I would prove to her that I was a big boy who got into big boy trouble. 

The police had abandoned me nearly ten blocks north of where they picked me up, between the lagoons and the Columbia Basin, a large pond behind the Museum of Science & Industry, a permanent replica of one of the World’s Fair temporary buildings. Had I known it then I could have looked west and seen my future university, where I would study among an all-White cadre, across the street from what had been the Columbia Exposition Dahomey Village, but my interest was the West Lagoon. Instead of a long walk home in stained pants I would actively court my mother’s anger, do something to prove that I was genuinely worthy of her burdensome disappointment.

So I waded chest deep into the lagoon, reedy with cattails, to cleanse myself and hide my shame. I sank halfway up my shins in the sucking muddy bottom, then struggled up to shore and trudged soggily, muddily home, wearing a single squishing sneaker. My shoeless foot was soaking and protected me from the hot pavement, but it was long walk home and the asphalt soon dried my sodden sock and began to burn my foot. I switched to the cool grassy verge but immediately stepped into a pile of fresh dogshit.  

When I arrived on the back porch, muddy and sodden and stinking of feces, my mother screamed a sing-song of curses at me. I wasn’t coming into the apartment like that. She made me undress, completely, even wiping my naked feet on the sisal doormat before entering. She mentioned again what a disappointment I was, what a burden. I didn’t know it then but she had already made plans to ship me off to military school and was eagerly anticipating my name’s rise to the top of the waiting list. She had become significantly less motherly once her nest was nearly empty, and being a late and needy child I was an anchor restraining her from an unencumbered life, like the one my father was enjoying, my father who had divorced her in order to take a younger, paler wife. She dismissed the irony that she had been the younger, paler wife for whom he had jettisoned his first spouse. 

I didn’t tell her about the police car because she’d have thought I was lying, a husky child, a bedwetter, a liar. I didn’t tell her about the police car because she worked for the Department. So I strove to become like my father. I ignored her. Doing what I please. Let her yell. Let her smoke her life away. Let her drink herself to death. Let some cop come by three times a week to fuck her—which I could hear through the wall of my bedroom while struggling vainly with my long division and three-digit multiplication—then attempt to wheedle a response other than a little boy’s contempt. Fat chance.

She was stuck with me. I was her muddy lagoon. 

****

As I watched the fat policemen, sleeping soundly, expanding and contracting, I thought of Sean Connery’s last words. What are you prepared to do? I wondered if my fat copper did become distressed, would I quickly rush to his aid? Or would I simply take one of the ratty pillows from one of our ratty sofas and place it ever so firmly over his face.

I stood silent in the room with my fat snoring policeman, seeing him back in time thin and cocky, yet now watching over this living corpse of a man whose overburdened heart was simply marking time, I was trapped like an embittered mother burdened with an unwanted child, damnably eager to have him gone.