However, before we leave the Tiko, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t share, in these notes, an early experience from when I called the development home.
Picture, if you will, the swarm of flies that used to gather around the garbage can at my childhood home. What if I told you that the flies were one City patrolman and the can my old neighborhood? One man orbited the Tiko incessantly, maniacally.
Officer Dred Douglas was a hero, a myth, a legend. Judge, jury, and occasionally, hangman. A national news anchor once called him America’s top cop. He seemed to work 24-hour shifts 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And perhaps he did. It was not unusual to find him napping in his squad car, wearing highly reflective sunglasses so as to make us residents think he was watching, always watching.
Douglas’s omnipresence was the way of Douglas. Sometimes during the ride from school in the Bug—back when it was still Sir’s—we’d see Douglas sitting in his patrol car near the entrance of the Tiko.
“There’s that windbag cop,” Sir would say, glancing in the rearview. I wouldn’t look back for fear that Douglas was monitoring me through the side mirror reflection. Yet by the time we arrived at our building, which was about a two-minute drift into the center of the development, Douglas would be waiting at the corner, pretending to check the channels on his walkie-talkie—click click clicking from one line to the next. Douglas, in this way, could come up at the start of a sentence and also be the last word in it.
“That guy gives me the jeebies,” Sir might say. Or “You would think they would have promoted him out of here by now.” He would then rub his forehead beneath his fedora.
So Douglas was everywhere, and he saw everything. Like a football referee who ejected players for improper shoe lacing, no infraction—no matter how apparently insignificant—escaped his Argus-eyed view. Douglas would have made an excellent poster child for the community policing/broken windows war, if the City produced such posters. Douglas was a paragon, his light blue shirt and dark blue pants starched and creased to military specifications. In the summer, he wore a wide Stetson, and in the winter, he grew a beard that he didn’t cut until after the New Year, so that by Christmas he looked like Black Santa. But he delivered abrasions, contusions, and shattered bones all year round.
Although he had the look of the kind of officer who might appear in a public service campaign, directing pregnant mothers to avoid live power lines, he hated children. He hated adults, too. He even hated pets—I once saw him punt a cat. Neither Sir nor Mama spoke to him. No one did because talking to him meant you’d have to make eye contact. And eye contact was highly suspicious to Douglas. As was the conspicuous avoidance of eye contact. The best policy was to maintain a distance of about five hundred yards from him at all times, which basically meant you had to stay out of the Tiko to avoid him. (This was before the City began expanding the Tiko’s fencing to accommodate new settlements for people who lost their homes in other parts of the City.) He seemed to think he was stationed in a war zone. And that if he only held out, his reinforcements would be along at any moment to shock and awe us with Daisy Cutter bombs dropped from helicarriers disguised as cirrus clouds. We were all the same to him: nurses, bus drivers, drug dealers, preachers, car thieves, and professors alike. He’d show us good when the time came, his baton seemed to say, as he paced the Tiko slapping the stick against his thigh.
I suppose under one analysis, Douglas was a good man doing the job he was hired to do. No one could deny that he was a diligent officer of the law. He was like an overeager linebacker who blitzed on every down. It didn’t matter if he got the sack as long as he disrupted the play. And he disrupted both work and play. During the years we lived in the Tiko, I personally observed him bodily searching nearly every man, woman, and child at least once. It didn’t matter if he had a reason to suspect that some crime was being committed. No body was left unturned. Yes, all the swaggering Jeromes with their baggy pants and fitted T-shirts, but also the mothers and daughters. And if he could find them, that is to say, if they existed outside jail or the cemetery, the fathers, too. I saw it all. Elderly men with their pockets turned out. Girls dressed for parties in platform heels with the contents of their purses scattered across broken concrete. Splattered ice cream cones. Overturned red wheelbarrows. So much depends upon a man with a hatred of his own.