As I was coming into Lafayette station I watched four cops bringing a teenaged kid up from the platform in handcuffs. They searched him about four times in the most visible of areas and then waited for the wagon to haul him away. When I got down to the platform it was explained to me that the kid had been caught walking across the tracks from one side of the station to the other.
[To you non-New Yorkers, there are many stations where you can't travel in the opposite direction from one platform to the other unless you leave one exit and go back in another, meaning you have to go through a second set of turnstiles. If you have an evil person in the token booth, you can be made to pay twice if you go into the wrong entrance by mistake].
Now I've seen at least ten people do this same action in my time in this city. It's actually pretty common, though dangerous. But usually the worst thing that happens is that you get a ticket. This time they were sending the kid to central booking (even though they never read him his rights according to bystanders) to make some kind of a point. Fort Greene is a white neighborhood now and if the darkies are going to be there they need to follow all the rules and not ruffle any feathers. It's no different than the time they wrote up the brother who had a box of kittens on the train who he was trying to give away to avoid their termination when every white broad with a purse dog gets a pass. I've seen white boys light cigarettes right in front of the cops and they've done nothing. This is not to say to say that any of this is a big surprise, but more of my own reflecting of some of the foolishness that went through my head last year.
For a short while last year I was under the delusion that I was going to quit the writing racket and actually become a cop. I had been told that with my background and general intelligence I would have gotten into the criminal investigative division easily. As I liked solving puzzles and figured that benefits and a general pass from many government agencies might be in my favor, I was almost to the point of applying. This would have been the most foolish thing I'd ever done in my life outside of appearing on the Teen Summit virginity episode.
I study cops a lot, as the local sandwich shop is one of their hangouts on the late night. Back when I was deep in the clouds it was the only place for decent munchies on the late night. Most of them are young guys with little education, who got into it to feed their families or because they had friends or other folks who had done it before them. It's a racket marked by prejudice to the very nature of the directives they receive from their sergeants and lieutenants. As this place is now a haven for the rich with the rest of us languishing around it, the thing is to sell the Giuliani dream, which means making all the darker faces into menaces that have to be managed and controlled in favor of a Utopia for the privileged that offers so much of what the rest of the country cannot.
I would never have made it as a cop, even if it was my job to solve murders. My intellectual interests would have been quickly strangled by the systematic racism that comes with the job, the hot-ass uniforms with the 20-pound utility belts and shitty pay in exchange for having to look at anyone I knew twice for bending or breaking the law. As far as I'm concerned that's mostly a gig for assholes and control freaks. And while I can be the latter I just don't think I could write the tickets and make the arrests my time in patrol would require. Let's not even talk about the NYPD's long history of shooting people for having non-threatening items in hand, brutality, etc. I would have basically been washing out from day one. And The Dervish and Negarra would have disowned me.
I've thought about a lot of jobs in moments of desperation, but always avoided things that I knew would kill me slowly. I'm a good pitch man, but using that skill to sell carpet or magazine subscriptions would give me a migraine in the first hour. I'd hate the routine of driving anything commercially that would keep me in traffic all day or have me screaming at little metermaids like the fat Italian I saw on 30th Street this morning. To be honest, knowing what I know now, I'd only be happy writing, directing or teaching, the worlds where I've been living for as long as I can remember.
It's a funny addendum that I (think) I lost my virginity when I did because my college crew and I took on a slew of cops and security guards who had wrongfully arrested one of our classmates. The dude pushed my girlfriend and I was about to go off, not thinking about the consequences at 17, not thinking about what was law, only what was right.
As I've become a student of the Old Testament lately, there are many verses about the evils that can with man's law as opposed to God's. There are warnings about lawyers and jurisprudence, which is what makes the movie The Devil's Advocate so ironic for me. I now know why my uncle Junie got off the force when he did. Its one thing when it's all that available, but in the end I'm never convinced that it's worth all the risks. Though real cops seldom die in the line of duty, I imagine that for those with any serious ambitions towards something else might find themselves dying slowly, of boredom, or prejudice, of the anger projected upon them by a world that's learning everyday that so many of its rules are bullshit. I'm glad I'm not one of them. I'm glad I was destined to be something else. Out.
No comments:
Post a Comment