Serpico… The French Connection… Magnum Force… tableaus of murder, suave narcotics dealers, massive payoffs, crazed killer rookies… bullet holes in foreheads, eyeballs, cheekbones spattered in twilight city streets.… These are the police… battling the forces of evil, mayhem, insanity that threaten to engulf us at any moment. But wait… let us take another look… what have we here?
A thirty-year-old policeman named Ed McGuigan of Geneva, New York, is putting on heavy-duty Big Boy Gardner’s Gloves… another policeman, a big round man named Cring (Richard Cring, partner), is standing there in the dusty old station house with him. Outside, across Castle Street, the tough city bars are quiet… McGuigan and Cring are also quiet, businesslike, tense. They are going out on Patrol. Their assignment? They must stop a potential killer… a killer who stalks the third floor of one of the plush three-story original American settler Historic Houses that line Geneva’s South Main Street. The killer is named Toughy. He is… a Persian cat, and he is Out of Control.
“I hope we don’t get scratched,” says Trickler. “These goddamned animals… once they lose their minds… you can’t tell what the hell will happen.”
Cring nods his head.
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes bulging. “I know what you mean.”
Earlier that day I had talked with Cring about his duty.
“It’s not bad,” he says. “But what I really look forward to is retirement. I’ve been on the force six years. Only fourteen more and I can move to Atlanta, get a nice little house… play some golf.”
That is if that damned cat, Toughy, on Main Street doesn’t get him first.
“The main reason I hope it’s not too crazed,” says McGuigan, picking up a wire hook and a burlap bag, which he tosses jauntily over his back, “is that if he is nuts… and I have to shoot him… Christ, I’ll never hear the end of it my… wife for one… she loves animals… and the damned civic groups… you can’t shoot a cat in this town and expect to get away with it.”
Which is, of course, true. You can’t expect to get away with anything in a town the size of Geneva, New York (population 17,500). The town is located on Lake Seneca, which runs from Geneva, way down past Watkins Glen, of Grand Prix and Rock Concert fame. But Geneva itself, like many small cities in America, will never gain the fame of Watkins Glen. For Geneva is what is known as a “dying town.” Once prosperous in the ’20s, once the home of gamblers, a vacation spot for Mafia men who were attracted to the lake (Lake Trout Capital of the World), to the good hotels and the Club 86 where they used to see name stars such as Billy Eckstein, the town has long since been past its Golden Age. Though private and prestigious Hobart and William Smith colleges and the Cornell Experiment Station reside here, the town’s main economic booster, the Sampson State Air Force Base, has been gone since the Korean War. With it went Shuron Optical, though the uninhabited building still stands next to Shuron Baseball Park, once home of the minor league Geneva Twins, who themselves have disappeared. Also listed among Geneva’s casualties are the Patent Cereal Company, the Andes Range Company, the U.S. Radiator Company, and finally the Geneva Market Basket. All of them were bought out by bigger corporations and moved to more lucrative, less isolated cities.
When one rides around Geneva (as the police do), one begins to feel that all that is left in the town are bars: those bars mostly inhabited by working-class whites; the black bars; the funkiest and strangest of Geneva’s bars, Moon’s, which features poor whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and several transvestites; bars like Tiara’s, where Geneva’s first murder in several years took place last summer; and the Central Hotel, which even the police don’t like to walk by, in the town’s “Butt End.” Many more, without names or signs, are just storefronts with taps serving Genessee and Utica Club to the tired, sweaty blacks, Puerto Ricans, and rednecks who work at the few places left to work at in Geneva—Libby’s and the American Can, or the Geneva Foundry, a hideous smoke-belching building that blasts forth excrement into the sky night and day.
This torpor then, which pervades every aspect of the town, is the atmosphere in which the Geneva Police must work. The boredom, the feeling of exhaustion, of almost a twilight sleep, is as real an enemy to the police as the fights, marital spats (their most dangerous call), and burglaries that the Punch Patrol must combat.
On my first day cruising with the Geneva Police, I ride with Jim Trickler, twenty-six, who has served two years on the force. We have been riding his route—the Northwest Area of town, out Highway 5 and 20, past the Twin Oaks Restaurant, a hangout for Hobart kids, past the Town and Country Plaza and back again—for three hours and not a trace of anything has happened.
“It’s like this,” says Trickler, taking off his blue cap and running his hands through his hair. “Sometimes nothing happens for so long you wonder why you’re getting paid at all… but that’s when it can get very dangerous for you… because when it does happen, it always happens fast… very fast… and if you’ve let the boredom get to you, you could react in the wrong way… or maybe not react at all… which could be fatal.”
It is eight o’clock on a Friday night and Officer McGuigan, thirty-two years old, married with two children, is telling me about his most memorable evening as a policeman: “I was off duty and I was trying to catch some hookers down on Exchange Street,” he said. “It was right outside of the Paddock Bar.….”
He is smiling and his eyes twinkle. Though his nickname among his fellow cops is Barney Fife, he looks more like a thin Steve McQueen, blond, friendly, and boyish.
“Anyway, we were down there to get this whore… me and a couple of the other guys… a couple of them were real bad actors. They just didn’t have it right… I mean they stood out on the corner just leaning on the parking meters saying, ‘Hey, baby’… stuff like that.…. I figure there’s only one way to get this baby… you got to drive up to her and come on from the car. I get the unmarked car… the one that works, most of the cars don’t work, a couple of the engines are literally held together by bailing wire… anyway, I ride up to her and I say, ‘Hey, how you doing.’… I don’t ask her to go with me, ’cause that is entrapment… but sure enough, she comes right over… and soon she’s in the car.
“Anyway… these colored broads all got old men… pimps… and you don’t want to have to mess with some of these guys… jeez… so anyway, we get going, now I’m tryin’ to get her to take me to this motel outside the town, where the cops are waitin’, you know… but she don’t want to go… so we start going out 5 and 20… right along here… and she finally says, ‘Hell, whitey, I gonna give it to you right over by the car wash there… yeah right over there by the car wash across from Loblaw’s.…. and I’m thinkin’… ‘Ohhh boy, maybe I ought to knock off a piece free and make the city pay for it,’ you know? But I don’t do it.…. Anyway, we get over there and she takes off her dress, right there in the car wash, man she just whipped that dress off… and she no sooner had it off than she looks at me and says, like she can smell me or somethin’, ‘You’re a cop. You are a cop, you mutherfucker.’ Well, I had just given her the money… that’s very important… it was ten bucks… and I said, ‘That’s right, baby… and you are under arrest.’ Well, she started screamin’ and yelling, and she laid one on me almost put me through the window, wham, she punched me in the head, knocked me every way but loose. I didn’t want to hurt her. She’s a girl, right? But what you gonna do? I finally grabbed her, and held her down. Well, she sees where I’m takin’ her and she says, ‘No you don’t, you muther’… and grabs the wheel. I couldn’t believe it. Then, she manages to get over next to me, and slams her foot down on the gas pedal. Oh, that was it. I thought, ‘Well, Ed, you’ve had it now, baby.’ We were going across the parkin’ lot about eighty miles an hour, and I’m holding her, slapping her with the back of my hand now, with one hand, and trying to steer with the other, and we were headin’ right at the big lights… zoom zoom… just whizzin’ past’ em… By Jesus, I thought, this is it, Ed… and finally I whacked her a good one and said, ‘You cool it or I’ll put you out with some Mace’… and I started trying to take her in. It was a hell of a struggle, I’ll tell you… and I felt weird… I mean a naked black chick in my car… riding down 5 and 20. Christ, what a night.”
He is in high spirits now, laughing and looking at me.
Soon, however, the car falls into silence. Though the radio is always on, and we are receiving calls from the Canandaigua Sheriff’s Department and the New York State Troopers, one learns not to really listen to it. It’s like a low Muzak in the back of one’s brain.
“I wish something would happen,” McGuigan says, apologetically. “Some nights it’s like this. Christ, we been ridin’ five hours and not even one high-speed chase.” We drive up 5-20, past Carroll’s, Home of the Club Burger, and past McDonald’s, Home of the Big Mac.
“Do you like to go to bars when you get off?” I ask.
“Forget it. Practically every time I try something like that some jerk starts in on me, ‘Hey you… cop… what chu doin’ here?’ You have to either punch your way outta the place or jes turn around and quietly leave. I drink in the Men’s Club downtown now. It’s a drag. A real dead place, but at least I don’t get bothered.”
He is quiet for a minute, listening to some jockey on the radio. Then he turns toward me, and nods his head.
“You know what it is,” he says. “It’s my face. That’s what it is. I got this youthful face so every son of a bitch in Geneva thinks I’m a punchin’ bag. It’s my face.”
At the wheel is a heavyset officer named Don Cass. His parents own Cass TV and Records out at Town and Country Plaza. Cass, twenty-three, has been an officer for just ten months.
“I love it,” he says, as we ride up South Main Street. “Some officers go home and forget it… but I love it. I’ll work any time they want.…. Last year when we had the murder downtown, I was a rookie, and I was off duty… well, my parents have a police band radio and so do I. But I was asleep at the time. My mother heard that Trickler had taken the man in from the Tiara Club, and she called me. I went right down there, and guarded the prisoner’s cell all night. I mean I was new on the force, and it was a murder… you wouldn’t want to miss something like that.”
“GD-10 to GD-4.”
Cass picks up the microphone. He has big hands, and the mike disappears in his fist. When he talks, his heavy jaws move to the side in a chewing motion. He seems to enjoy talking over the mike.
“GD-4 to GD-10.”
“There’s a stabbing reported at Geneva General Hospital. Go up there and check it out.”
“Check GD-10.”
Cass steps down on the gas. He drives with two hands on the wheel, talking pleasantly as we shoot toward the complaint.
“I would rather be doing this than anything,” he says. “On what other job can you be outdoors, help people and see so much action?”
We pull into the Emergency Room Entrance at Geneva General.
Inside a young, muscular black man with short-cropped hair sits on a cot. A doctor is sewing up two slash marks just above his left temple just above his ear. The patient turns and stares at Cass.
“Aw-oh,” he says. “It’s da cops.”
Cass waits until the doctor is done, and asks the patient his name.
“Smithson,” says the black man. “Donald… but I don’ wanna start no trouble.…. Ya see it was jes one my frens… he and me we had dis little disagreement… and he got excited and I guess I musta been wrong, ’cause I was de one got stabbed. I don’ wan press no charges. Jes a little dis’greemen’.”
At that moment a short, dark man with slick, black hair comes in the door. His name is Detective Simon, and he is well-known in Geneva as the only cop who has been involved in two shootings.
“Stabbed, huh, buddy? He stabbed you?”
“Hi, ’Tective Simon,” the black man says. “I don’ wanna press no charges. He my fren… no trouble.”
“Jes a pal of yours, huh?”
“Dat’s right.”
“Okay, you have it your way.”
The black man smiles. He seems greatly relieved.
“I tell you what though,” he says.
“What’s that?’” says Simon.
“I want to be a dee-tective jes like you, Dee-tective Simon. You let me be a dee-tective, and I get all the dope pushers.”
“Sure, pal,” says Simon.
“You gimme a ride home, Detective Simon?”
“Sure.”
Simon looks at Cass.
“When you make out this report,” he says, “don’t play up the stab wounds… call ’em scratches… ah… suffered when the patient and his friend had a ‘misunderstanding.’ All right?”
“All right,” says Cass.
An hour later I sit with Cass in the Chalet Coffee Pot in the Greyhound Bus Station on Lake Street, right across from the Tiara Club. I ask if he has ever been hassled by former Geneva High School mates who may resent that he’s a cop.
“No, well, there was one guy, the first week on the job. I saw there was a warrant out for this guy I went to high school with for being AWOL. And so, I was coming up Castle Street, right there on the corner of Castle and Main, he’s standing there hanging out in front of the sub shop. I had to arrest him. It didn’t bother me when I did it… but later I thought about it… and it was strange.”
We sit and drink our coffee. The blond waitress keeps smiling at Cass as she had at Trickler and McGuigan the night before.
The station house is a small, cramped room in the back of City Hall. There is a desk at which the sergeant sits, and around the desk are some shelves that the police built themselves. The desk sergeant calls the squad cars from here. Now, in his one hand is a copy of Penthouse, and in the other is the microphone. On the table next to him is a bugging device that picks up signals from bugs placed inside Geneva businesses that are likely to be robbed.
“If anyone talks in any of these places, we got ’em,” he says.
While I am looking over the buggers and the police radio, two officers come in from the patrol for a break. One of them is laughing and telling the other one about a potential bust.
“You know Girelli, the kid who drives the white Continental?” says the first officer.
The other one nods his head.
“Well, when you see him, I want you to nail him. Grab his ass and if he starts in giving you any of that search warrant jive, tell him the search warrant is up in the sky, and so will he be if he doesn’t shut up.”
The other cop laughs, and goes out past the Wanted Posters (Wanted: David Donald DeFreeze… drinks plum wine and may be wearing tinted glasses) to the men’s room.
I approach the first officer and ask him if what he just stated isn’t illegal.
“Maybe,” he says. “It depends on the way you do it. You can’t search his car without a warrant, right? So, you get him to harass you, and arrest him for harassment. Then you can search his car nice and legally.”
I am again riding with Jim Trickler. We have been riding since three o’clock, and I have noticed that many people wave to Trickler.
“Why do people wave?” I ask. “Do you know them all?”
Trickler talks in his closed-mouth, Alan Ladd fashion.
“No… I don’t know all of them. A lot, but not all. Some people just wave because you’re the police.”
We ride up Pultney Street past the professors’ well-kept houses. We watch a group of long-legged, pink-and-blue-sweater William Smith coeds riding their ten-speeds across the intersection. They look at Trickler and myself with their big beautiful eyes, but I have a strong feeling they do not see either of us.
“They don’t wave,” said Trickler. “But I love coming up here… and staring at them. It’s enough to make your mouth water.…. There are some really good-looking girls on this campus. Sometimes I feel like I missed my generation,” he says. “I guess these kids are having a ball, aren’t they… free love and all?”
Trickler started as a factory worker out at Libby’s. Like many of the police, he moved from the factory to the force, which is a great leap up in town social status. But the world of William Smith and Hobart, with all its advantages and seductions, lies just outside of his reach. His only contact with the colleges comes through busts or disturbances, such as the famed Tommy the Traveler riots in 1970.
We turn up St. Clair Street and more William Smith students walk by.
“They walk differently than the girls from the town,” Trickler says.
I watch them through his eyes, and feel his yearning and perhaps a little of his bitterness. “You know,” he says, “except for the danger… this job is exactly like what I did while I was in high school: ride around and wave at girls.”
While working with Trickler, McGuigan, and the other officer, one name came up over and over again. The name was Verdehan. The younger officers’ respect and admiration for Verdehan bordered on hero worship.
As Trickler tells me: “If you want to meet a tough old-fashioned cop, Verdehan is your man. He’s been on the force for over twenty years, and he’s seen it all.”
I meet Verdehan at the station. Desk Sergeant Jabara is watching an old Cagney film, and Verdehan is showing some photographs to another officer, Jay Covert, known as the Hippie for his long blond hair and gentle manners. I had ridden with him the night before down Geneva’s Butt End. While we stood waiting in the cold, he had confided to me that he planned to leave the force as soon as he could get his Elementary Education Degree. Now the two officers stand there chatting, a perfect study in contrast. Unlike Covert, Verdehan exudes the image of “the cop.” Though he is no bigger than Covert, he “feels” bigger. He stands straight, wears his cap to one side of his head, and puts his huge rugged face close to yours when he wants to emphasize a point.
“Look… look,” he says. “Here’s some pictures of my vacation to Florida.”
He sees me watching and calls me over.
“That’s a beach,” Verdehan says.
“Oh?” says Covert, smiling at me. “Is that a beach?”
Verdehan misses the joke. His big gnarled hands slide to the next picture. “That’s the new modern airport they got there in Daytona,” he says.
“Planes land there, I’ll bet,” says Covert.
Verdehan shuffles through some more pictures of trees and beaches. Then he comes to his “criminal pictures.” He puts his big face close to mine and says: “See that. I’ll bet you don’t know what that is, do you?”
I look down at a very conventional hookah.
“No,” I say.
“Jeepers,” says Verdehan. “That is a bowl… they call it a bowl. It’s what they smoke marijuana out of. I got this picture on a good bust I got a couple of months ago. Got two ounces.”
Soon we are walking up and down Exchange Street. The bars are humming.
“I love this work,” Verdehan says. “I give any guy a break. But if he takes advantage or tries to use force… forget it.” Like all the other members of the Punch Squad, Verdehan is fond of telling stories about his most violent fights. He gets halfway into one (“. . . so I get him in a chicken hook, and start pulling him down Exchange…”) when the radio crackles.
“GD–10 to Portable-3.”
Verdehan takes out his pocket radio, pulls up the antenna and answers the desk.
“Bob, get down to the old Temple Theater… quick, somebody just drove a car through the window, and there’s a big mob out front.”
We make it to the top of the alley and look down Exchange Street. Three blocks away there is a white car on the sidewalk, its hood stuck inside the Temple Theater. Shattered glass and pieces of wood lie all around it.
“Let’s go,” says Verdehan.
We start running again, down past the Paddock. A few town women with teased blond and brown hair come out of the Paddock and raise their glasses to Verdehan.
“Hurry… we’re safe,” one shouts. “Big Bob’s here.”
Verdehan doffs his cap, and we run across Castle Street to find Covert, Trickler, and Steve Pesarek (Verdehan’s nephew, who had told me Verdehan was “like the Marines to me when I was a kid, which is probably why I joined the force”) talking to the crowd.
“Anybody hurt?” Verdehan says.
“No,” says Covert. “They grabbed the girl and took her up to the station. The car belongs to these guys.”
Two black men about eighteen came toward us.
“We was jes in Moon’s drinkin’,” says the young one, “when this friend of ours comes in and says, ‘Didn’t I jes see you go by?’ I said, ‘No, we been in here.’ ‘Well, somebody has got your car then,’ he said. We went outside and there it is… she’s coming down Exchange Street, and she is jes going round and round and round… and then wham… she takes off across the pavement, takes off this fire hydrant clean, and smashes right through the building.”
I walk around to the driver’s side of the car. The doors are bent into a V. Inside the Temple Theater are a couple of barber chairs. Sitting there next to the front fender of the car they look like some kind of junk sculpture.
Suddenly from behind me, Detective Simon is on the scene. He bounces around on the balls of his feet, snapping pictures with his Polaroid camera. The crowd circles around, pouring out of Cliff’s and Moon’s. Two girls, with ratty looking bleached-blond hair and shiny looking miniskirts revealing their fat white legs come forward out of the crowd.
One of them looks quite upset.
“Where did you guys take our friend, Patches?” she says. Simon doesn’t answer. He keeps snapping pictures.
“I said where did you take her?” the girl says loudly.
Simon, who is noted for his hot temper, turns and tells the girl that her friend is in the station and to go away.
“You can’t keep her there,” the fat blond says.
Behind her a black man tries to pull her arm and calm her down.
“Let me go, Sugar Bear,” she snarls. “I want Patches. These white mutherfuckers can’t keep her in jail. She didn’t do nothin’.”
“Look,” Simon says. “She’s in the station, which is where you’ll be if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”
“You can’t scare me. I’m only asking a question,” the girl says.
“Go home, or you’ll be up in the station,” Simon says.
“I can ask all the questions I want,” says the girl. “You don’t scare me.”
“That’s it,” says Simon, his eyes popping out. “You’re going up to the station. Let’s go.”
He drops the camera on the roof of the battered car and goes after her. She tries to pull away but he catches her and is dragging her toward the door.
“You white mutherfuckers,” she screams. “You white assholes.”
She hits Simon in the side of the head, and then digs her nails into his temple. Blood flows from his scalp. Trickler and Covert grab her from behind and struggle with her. People pop out of the tenement apartments above Demming’s Hardware.
“You rat finks… we’ll get you all,” they scream from their windows. “Especially you down there taking notes.”
Suddenly I feel like the police; what was only a routine investigation of a rather un-routine car wreck has become a possible riot situation. But who had caused the riot?
At the station, while the two girls screamed, “White mutherfuckers” at the police, I asked Simon if it had been really necessary to arrest the girl.
“Yes,” he says, in his short-breathed Cagney manner. “She was harassing us. You let one harass you and you got a riot on your hands.”
“Yes,” I say, “but she was really only upset about her friend. I don’t understand why you just didn’t ignore her. She was just badmouthing you, showing off.”
Simon doesn’t answer me. He takes the two boys who claim to own the car into his small office for questioning.
Inside the desk room, the police are laughing it up. They seem happy to have been involved in the scene. Most of the concerned townspeople are filing out now, and order of a sort is once more restored. I look at Trickler and Verdehan and Covert, and they all smile at me.
“I told you,” says Verdehan, sticking his big, handsome, brutal face close to mine. “There ain’t nothing like this job. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. You got your outdoors, you’re doing one hell of a public service and you got the action. I like that most of all. I love the action.”
I was happy when “The Yawn Patrol” came out in barely established New Times magazine. I was paid $1,500 for it, which, when you consider I was making $12,000 a year teaching, wasn’t bad. The sad part of the whole deal, as far as I was concerned, though, was that very few people read New Times. I doubted anyone outside of my own little world would see it at all. But at least I had a “clip” to send to another magazine. Little did I know what would follow.
It started two days after the pub date. Though not one newsstand in Geneva sold New Times, somehow the Geneva police had the issue at once. How did I know? Because at the end of a typically freezing cold day, after teaching a course in Southern Novel, I walked from the classroom to the faculty parking lot where two of the cops I had written about, Jim Trickler and Ed McGuigan, were waiting for me.
And they didn’t look happy.
“Hey, Robert,” McGuigan said. “You are a real asshole.”
I didn’t say anything, but my stomach turned as I tried to look innocently puzzled.
“Yeah,” Trickler said. “That remark you said I made about those rich girls’ legs… that got me the last three days sleeping on the couch.”
Now I felt sick. He was referring to his comment about how the rich girls walked like they had money and how he loved looking at them.
“How could you write that?” he said.
What could I say to him? They’d told me anything they said was fine to write about. They’d seen me taking notes in the back seat.
“Look,” I said. “It was such a great line. It shows the class differences [my radical training was of some use after all!] between you and the people you serve. It delineates the line between men and women and.…”
“Bullshit,” McGuigan said. “That’s all bullshit.”
“Yeah,” Trickler said. “Tell that to my wife.”
They glowered at me, and headed back to their patrol car.
“Well, you have a nice night, out at the lake all by yourself, Robert,” Trickler said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
They both smiled in a snarling, knowing way, and I felt real fear zapping through me.
And with good reason. For the next month I got strange phone calls in the middle of the night. When I picked up the phone, there was a very scary silence. I hung up, and lay there in the dark waiting for two cops to come bashing through my doors. I sent my girlfriend back to her dorm room for a while. It was just too creepy to think about her out there in the lake house with me.
I wondered if I should get a gun. I had dreams of myself getting blown away like Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. Maybe I would become a Radical Martyr! Then Sol wouldn’t dare call me a clown!
How could they be so goddamned vindictive? It was just a harmless little article. But, I had to admit, it was easy to see it their way too. They let one of the school professors come into their lives and he turns out to be exactly the kind of rat all townies thought he would be.
So, on top of feeling frightened, I felt guilty. I hadn’t lied. I hadn’t thought twice of writing what I wrote. But maybe I’d screwed up a guy’s family life. These were small-town people, not used to publicity or complexity. Maybe his wife would never trust him again and it was my fault. I had come from a neighborhood in Baltimore with three cops in it, and if you crossed any of them like I had the Geneva cops you might find yourself, at the very least, beaten to a bloody pulp. Or at the bottom of Baltimore Harbor.
Christ, all for a magazine piece. This New Journalism thing was a lot trickier than I had imagined.
The days slipped by, and the phone calls stopped coming. Snow fell on the town and I saw the cops digging people out, helping drunks get home, and I felt lousy about what I’d written, but at least the excitement had died down.
Then a funny thing happened. That spring, Tom Wolfe was invited to the campus to speak. I was thrilled. My hero. Tom Wolfe!!!
I was determined to meet him, to hang out with him… and in fact, it couldn’t have been easier. I threw a big party for him at my little cabin. It was a decently warm day and I had my buddies in the rock band White Trash come out and play. Tom was there dressed, of course, in his white suit. I showed him my novel, Shedding Skin, and told him about “The Yawn Patrol.” He said he’d seen it and would read it. I was insane with happiness. Tom Wolfe would read my work! It seemed impossible. I told him about feeling guilty about what I’d written, and he smiled and said: “Look, you’re new at this. And you will have those feelings. But you have to see this as your job, from now on. You have to take it as seriously as those cops take their job. If they’re bothered about what you said, too bad. It’s your job to report it. Once you leave here this will be what you do. And if you’re any good as a reporter, you’ll report the real stuff. So forget all about it. You did the right thing.”
I was stunned by his tough, professional attitude. And I knew he was right. This was going to be what I did from now on. I was there to get a story, not to be the cop’s friends. Trickler’s line did show the tremendous gulf of class and desire that separated the cops from the wealthy girls at William Smith. I was right to include it.
Tom gave me his address and his phone number and told me to write him, and said that we would see one another in New York.
I drove him back to the airport in Rochester the next day and he told me all about Joseph Smith and the Mormons, and what northern New York had been like a hundred years ago. These were facts I should have known myself but had been too lazy, too superior, to find out.
Meeting him was the turning point in my life. I knew from then on that I would be a journalist for as long as I could.
As for the local cops, well, I was still uncomfortable when I saw them riding by me. But I figured it had all blown over and nothing more was going to happen.
The whole thing was history. I’d met my hero Tom Wolfe, and on top of that I had received good news. I heard from New Times. The editor-in-chief Jon Larsen loved the piece and promised me they would come up with a new assignment for me as soon as possible. I was deliriously happy. The existential clown was making money, getting published, and was heading for a whole new career. In New York!
Interestingly enough, many of the people who had sided with my wife in our breakup began to talk to me again. Proof that the old saw, “Everyone loves a winner,” is all too true. But I didn’t give a damn. I was leaving, and if I never saw any of them again it was okay with me.
I felt so good that I decided to splurge and treat myself to a good meal. I went out one night, had a steak at the Bellhurst Castle, the town’s only good restaurant, and then headed down to Causey’s bar, a student hangout. I liked Cosmo Fospero, the proprietor, and thought I’d just have a few Jack Daniels to celebrate my good fortune.
I showed up at the bar around eight, and quickly drank two Jack Daniels, then felt so good I had two more. I was fast getting bombed when the back door to Causey’s private party room opened. I had never seen anyone come out of that room before, and I was so loaded that at first I didn’t recognize them.
By the time I realized who was walking toward me it was already too late.
It was the two cops who hated me most, Jim Trickler and Ed McGuigan. They were dressed in their black leather jackets and they looked dead-bang serious.
“Well, well, if it isn’t our old friend, Bobby Ward,” Trickler said.
“Hi, guys,” I said, trying not to panic.
“You’re coming with us, Bob,” McGuigan said.
“The hell I am,” I said. “On what charge?”
They didn’t say anything else, but grabbed me by the arms and pushed me toward the back room.
Oh, shit, I thought. This is it. This is where I get the beating of my life. I thought about running but my feet wouldn’t move. I was drunk, disoriented, and terrified.
They threw me into the room, slammed the door behind me. Then they pushed me into the middle of a circle of people. I looked down at the floor, and waited for the first kick or punch.
But nothing happened. I looked up, expecting to find all the other cops I had written about, but instead I was standing in a circle of… middle-aged women.
Women? What the hell? Who were they?
Then they started in on me:
“You rotten bastard.”
“You piece of shit.”
“You made my daughter cry.”
“You ought to be beaten until you die.”
“Asshole!”
“Shithead!”
Their faces were twisted with hate, while behind them six Geneva cops roared with laughter.
Oh, God, I was in a circle of cop’s wives. And they were having the time of their lives!
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”
“To hell with you!”
“Fuck you!”
And then it occurred to me. This was the perfect revenge for my piece. Just as I had humiliated them for living in a fantasy world while doing mundane little tasks, they had humiliated me by scaring me to death and then showing me that their humanity was larger than mine. They would make me think I was in a great noir ’40s drama, the tragic, noble hero about to be beaten and thrown off the pier into Lake Seneca.
But that’s not what happens to an existential clown.
He’s not a beaten, brave hero, at all. He’s no Philip Marlowe. Only, once again, a joker and a fool.
They pushed me out of the room a few minutes later and as I wandered out into the snowy night I heard them laughing so loud I thought the sound might knock down the dusty old bar.
I staggered to my car, and drove home. Humiliated, beaten and alone.
Two months later, I was walking by the school, heading for the English offices, when a cop car stopped next to me.
I looked over and saw Trickler and McGuigan.
“Bobby,” Trickler said. “Get in the back.”
“Oh, come on, you guys,” I said. “Enough’s enough.”
“Don’t make us come out and get you,” McGuigan said.
I shook my head and got in. Jesus, I thought, maybe this is it—the day they really do kick my ass. I was so tired from all the harassment that I didn’t much care.
We drove along, heading out 5 and 20, toward the edge of town. There were deep woods there, a good place to drop a dead body.
But we never made it to the tree-line. Instead we stopped at the Amy Joy Doughnut Shop, the very place where I’d first seen them. Trickler parked and they turned around and looked at me. Then they held up the magazine.
“You were a fuck to write this,” Trickler said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“But on the other hand,” McGuigan said. “It’s the best thing anyone ever wrote about cops. It’s just… hilarious. We just got done rereading it this morning and we laughed so hard we were crying.”
“You were?” I said, in disbelief.
“Yeah,” McGuigan said. “All that stuff about the cat… that was just right on the money. Great work. Hey, what kind of doughnuts you want?”
“How about glazed?”
“Only one?” Trickler said. “C’mon. Have two and some coffee. On us. You’re a hell of a writer. We just wanted you to know, no hard feelings. Okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Right. Okay.”
We all laughed and Trickler and I ran through the funniest parts of the story again, while McGuigan went in and got our doughnuts and coffee. We sat there for a half hour, then eating, drinking, and laughing. Then they drove me back to the school in time for my American Classics class, shook my hand, and wished me good luck.
I left them feeling good about my work and amazed how forgiving and kind they really both were. Great guys in a small town with a heart bigger than I’d ever given it credit for.
My very first piece and I’d had more drama in my life in the past six months than I had in the last six years.