I was ashamed of the NYPD. Turnstile jumping is the sort of crime they’ve vowed to rub out, but there I was, having jumped to and from Manhattan for an entire summer, and nothing. No cops. No alarms. No token booth ladies kicking open their doors and chasing me down. Truth is, I was reassured when I got caught.
It was a Friday night; I was leaving a disappointing local concert with my semiconscious friend Hector. It was warm and misty out; for some reason, a lot of people were fighting. On our way to the subway, we saw a scruffy white guy hit a businessman with an umbrella and two huge black dudes with cell phones throwing punches outside a bar.
“You know, Hec,” I said as we approached the F train, “I have no money.”
He shrugged. “I have enough for one token.”
I wasn’t listening: I was confessing. “Hec, I really don’t want to jump tonight. I’ve jumped too much lately. It’s the law of averages. I’m gonna get caught sooner or later.”
He repeated, “I have enough for one token. You can slip in after me.” But I don’t like slipping in after people. It looks stupid, plus you can give your hip a nasty bang on the turnstile.
We headed into the F station; I picked up speed. You don’t need a running start to jump turnstiles, but it goes more smoothly that way. I flew by the token booth, planted my hands over the MetroCard slits, and vaulted sweetly over the bars. Hector did the same, even though he had money.
As soon as my feet hit the ground, I heard the cops yelling, “Hey! Yeah, you two!”
I stopped. I’d seen this coming, hadn’t I? I flashed forward through the consequences: me explaining my arrest to my parents, me with a criminal record, unable to get a good job, kicked out of high school, living on the street. But if I was apologetic and nice, maybe I’d come out okay.
I looked at the cops. Damn, they looked like cops. Both were Italian; one, a pudgy guy in his forties; the other, young and jumpy. They had brown hair and mustaches. They were in plainclothes. At some point, they must have produced badges, but they didn’t need to. They were movie cops, perfect for the part.
“C’mere,” the young, jumpy one said. He was standing in front of an open chrome door, one of those unlabeled doors in subway stations, which I had thought led to janitor’s closets. There were little slits in the door, and I realized: the cops had been sitting in there! They stared through those slits all day, keeping watch for offensive citizens. It was a setup!
Hector and I walked through the door. There was a room with a table, a bench, a lot of pipes, and some cop stuff like radios and jackets. The young officer aimed himself at Hector, the older one turned to me. They both pulled out pads of paper.
“How old are you?” mine asked.
“Seventeen,” I nodded as I said it.
“And how old are you?” Hector’s cop asked, shaking his pen.
“Uh …” Hector seemed really flustered. “Sixteen—no wait, I mean seventeen.”
“Excuse me? Is it sixteen or seventeen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I get a little confused because I just turned—”
“I hope you’re not lying to me. Because I don’t like being lied to. If you start that, we’re gonna have problems.”
“I know you don’t believe me—”
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.” Now it was clear. Just like in the movies: there was a nice cop and a mean one, and Hector had gotten the mean one.
“What school do you go to?” my cop asked. His nameplate said, “Patillo.”
“Stuyvesant.” I showed my I.D. card.* Patillo studied it.
“What does that say?” He pointed at the lettering. The words were in an unintelligible gothic font—to give my school some class, I guess.
“It says ‘Stuyvesant High School.’ ” I indicated each word.
“How come they write it that way?” he sounded suspicious, as if I’d faked the card.
“I dunno.”
“Any other I.D.?”
I emptied my pockets. Standard nerd fare: a paperback version of The Two Towers, a floppy disk, a graphing calculator. Patillo eyed the calculator as if it were a bomb. He wrote down my address and my phone number and told me to sit down next to Hector, who’d finished his interview.
“You guys sit tight. We’re putting a call in to headquarters to find out what to do with you,” the jumpy cop said. He and Patillo walked out, leaving me alone with Hector. We twiddled our thumbs—literally, like in a Norman Rockwell painting: Caught Jumping Turnstiles. Hector traced patterns in the bench with his fingernail.
“What are they gonna do to us?” I asked him.
“I think we get a ticket. Like a parking ticket.”
“Do we get a criminal record?”
“Nah. Not unless they fingerprint us.”
I started calculating the economics. A token costs a dollar fifty; I’d jumped turnstiles since June, which meant maybe forty free rides. So as long as my ticket was less than sixty bucks, I would come out ahead. That was comforting.
“All right, kids,” the two officers said as they returned. “You’re both old enough to be issued summonses so you’re getting summonses. We’ll notify your parents of this incident by mail.” Well, that wasn’t going to be fun, but I’d live. I was handed a sixty-dollar ticket that looked exactly like a parking violation.
“As for you,” the mean cop said, turning to Hector. “Don’t you ever lie about your age to a police officer. You do not know how close I was to taking you down to central booking. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to be brought in and strip-searched? To spread your cheeks?” I had known that was coming. Before we could be released, the cops had to bring up the most compelling threat of our justice system: spreading one’s cheeks.
“You’re free to go.” They opened the chrome door and shooed us out. I glanced at my ticket and started to chuckle. Exactly sixty dollars. Which meant I was repaying my debt to society, give or take a buck. I felt clean, like I should pay the ticket right there. I was proud of the police, and New York in general, for catching me.
“What are you laughing at?” Hector asked.
I couldn’t tell him the sappy stuff so I said, “You know, Hec, high school and summer camp and girls are all different from the way they are on TV. But cops. Cops are exactly the same.”
*This was the same I.D. that duped the Mini Mart clerk back when I was a sophomore (this page–this page).