My job is to save your ass, not kiss it.
—attributed to Officer Jack Balzer
Sharon Brown was almost four months along when I first met her—just starting to show, although it depended on what she was wearing. She mostly wore loose-fitting tops and baggy blue jeans. There was no mistaking that she was a mother, however: her three previous children occupied most of her time, energy, and attention. They were Lucy (fifteen months), James (twenty-eight months), and Rayford (three and a half years); Sharon was just twenty-three.
She resided in a “transitional living” apartment for single moms, a program run by a United Way agency. The agency’s director had suggested Sharon as a success story worthy of a campaign video. The hardest part of producing a campaign video is to find a good subject—someone whose misfortune resulted from circumstances beyond her control, to which no blame could be attached. (This rules out the lazy, the addicted, the self-indulgent, and all the blamers, schemers, demanders, and dramatizers.) You need a hard-luck case with integrity, humility, and strength, someone who had lived by the rules, worked hard, stayed true, but found herself nevertheless in impossible circumstances. Someone who would make you think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Someone who, with just the right break, could overcome her dilemma and live happily ever after. And if you can find those qualities in someone who’s reasonably articulate and attractive, you’ve got a winner. It seldom happens.
Sharon was that winner, a fund-raiser’s dream. She possessed an uncommon beauty, seen immediately in her deep brown almond-shaped eyes, clear and guileless yet shyly averted. If she returned your gaze even for the briefest of moments, you could get lost in those eyes. Her long lashes, perfectly arched brows, creamy caramel complexion, full tender lips, and silky black mane were free of all artifice and cosmetics. Frequent smiles flashed pearly perfection worthy of a Crest commercial, yet her countenance conveyed a modesty and simplicity unmarred by vanity.
She had joined the army right out of high school but had been released when she became pregnant the first time. The return to her hometown and junior college had produced an associate’s degree in mechanical drafting and a brief marriage, from which her second child was born. Her husband had turned out to be an abuser. “He had a temper that would just take ahold a him; he couldn’t help it. But neither could I. Seem like it never was nu’n I could do right for him.” She shook her head dolefully. “Mama warned me he had the rage in him, she saw it, but I didn’t listen. Thought I could just love it away, or the babies would soften him, but . . .”
Rather than live in fear and raise her babies in violence, Sharon left him. His stalking was relentless until she left town altogether and, babies in tow, moved in with her older sister in Atlanta. There she fell in love with her employer, a successful older man, a city alderman who had built his own insurance agency and had promised to leave his wife for her. Her naïveté had resulted in a third child. “He was my boss, a big public man, and I believed him,” she said, embarrassed. The alderman provided generous child support in exchange for her silence.
“I will say, he’s good about that. I couldn’t have made it without his checks every month—or almost every month. There’s been some lapses.” Sharon paused with a downcast look but shook it off with a deep breath and a bright smile. “But that’s why I’m so thankful to the Women’s Center for this place. We are truly blessed. We’d be out on a park bench, and that ain’t no place for babies, is it Ray Ray?” She bent to hug little Rayford, who tugged on her knee.
I didn’t ask about the father of the unborn child she carried now. I didn’t want to know. I was enthralled by the matter-of-fact candor with which she spoke of her life. There was no trace of bitterness, blame, or self-pity. No despair. Sharon’s full and boundless heart was plain in her delight with her firstborn, as she gave Rayford a tender squeeze and set him toddling off to resume play with his brother, a gap-toothed grin stretching ear to ear. Sharon spoke on of her gratitude to the center, unfazed moments later by the interruption of Lucy’s plaintive whimpers from the crib. The infant quieted as soon as Sharon scooped her up and nuzzled her to a breast with a practiced, efficient modesty. “This place has other mamas like me, and when the center helps us find work, we’re able to fix our schedules so we can help each other watch the kids. I’ve met some really good people here, people who’ve had it way worse than me, but they’re still such good, nice people. They’re even gonna help me move into my own place, soon’s I can find somebody with a truck.”
Despite the seeming chaos of squallers and crawlers, Sharon’s tiny apartment was tidy and clean, if sparse. The children were content and healthy. There was a noisy, cozy harmony to the household, and it emanated from Sharon. I got some great footage, and Sharon’s spontaneous audio would require minimal editing.
“I’ve got an old pickup,” I told her. “When do we start the moving?”
“Why are you doing so much for that woman?” Nancy inquired after I’d spent the better part of a weekend getting Sharon and all her babies settled in her new place. “I don’t get your endless compassion for her, anyway. She keeps making the same mistake, over and over, and doesn’t seem to learn from it. Hasn’t she ever heard of birth control?”
“She has shared her story, basically exposing herself to everybody who’s gonna see the video, with no expectation of payback in any way,” I reply. “And it’s gonna be my best, strongest work yet. It’s the least I could do.”
“But hasn’t she heard of birth control? She’s in her twenties, had some college. The pill’s been around now, for what? Two, three decades?”
I feel myself getting defensive, like my video lacks credibility or my compassion is misplaced. Or both. “She just falls in love easy . . . she’s from a small town, never with more than one man at a time . . . she’s a real good mama, and working her ass off to provide for all those babies.” I can hear myself getting louder, strident. “Working twenty hours a week, taking two college classes, doing child care for the other women at the center almost every day, and nurturing her own kids around the clock!” I’m forgetting to take a breath, my face is reddening. “And she’s so grateful for everything! Says she’s ‘blessed,’ of all things!”
“Whoa! I’m sure she’s very kind and a good mother and hardworking,” Nancy replies, calmly earnest. “I’m just saying, I don’t get it. What’s her problem?”
“Don’t you see? She has a compulsion. It’s got nothing do with education, or culture, or even logic,” I say. “Everybody has their own blind spot. Some people, it’s alcohol or drugs. Other people, it’s status or the corporate ladder or getting rich and powerful. It’s just their . . . their thing-that-trips-them-up, that consumes them, something they think they’re good at, and they think is a good thing, or at least good for them, but they don’t even see what it’s costing them. They just can’t help it. With Sharon, it’s babies. Or maybe certain men. Or both. But mainly babies.” I had just articulated something I hadn’t really thought through myself and doubted Nancy would get it. Or buy it.
To my surprise, she sort of tilted her head, pondering, and began nodding. “Yeah, I guess that could be it. Never thought of it that way.”
I won several local and regional United Way and PR association awards for my campaign video that year, and we had one of our most successful fund-raising efforts ever. We even introduced Sharon and her kids at the post-campaign awards banquet. Sharon’s second daughter, fatherless child no. 4, Felicity, was with us by then, along with Rayford, James, and Lucy, all of whom were very well behaved and cute as speckled pups. Sharon thanked everyone on behalf of her family and the other single moms at the Women’s Center and announced that if all went according to plan she would receive her BA from the university by next May, which would mean a bright future for her and her kids. She received a standing ovation.
The following year I moved to the United Way in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, a larger community, halfway across the country, and lost touch with Sharon. She sent me a long, newsy upbeat letter a few months after I got settled in there, wished me good luck in the new job, and asked me to write back. Months passed; I had my own struggles in the new job and didn’t keep up my end of the correspondence. One afternoon I came across her letter and called the Women’s Center, asking for her. She was no longer there, they said. Sharon had met someone, a man who had a good job on the Alaskan pipeline, and she had packed up all her babies and gone off with him. She had managed to complete her BA before she left, they said, but had taken up with the oil man before starting a career. The last they had heard, she was expecting again.
Years later in Mobile, at my third United Way, I had been asked to join the Quality Assurance Committee of the local office of the Alabama Department of Human Services. It’s one of many such committees and task forces that a local United Way guy is asked to join. Among my duties on this committee were quarterly home visits with caseworkers to DHS clients. We were to monitor the professionalism of the DHS staff and acquaint ourselves firsthand with the often daunting challenges presented by the DHS caseload.
I’ll never forget the visit to a rundown Section 8 project house in Prichard, Alabama. Prichard is the shame of Mobile, if not of the state of Alabama and the entire Gulf Coast. Half the housing units are vacant, burned-out hulks, set ablaze accidentally or otherwise by cracked-out, homeless squatters. The occupied units intersperse the charred, collapsing wrecks and the weedy vacant lots with nothing but heaving sidewalks to orphaned steps to bare foundations strewn with broken glass, used condoms, syringes, and soiled Pampers. Prichard is worse than the worst of Detroit or Chicago or New Orleans. Prichard’s Alabama Village looks worse than anything in Beirut or Baghdad. It looks like the end of civilization.
On my DHS Quality Assurance home visit to Alabama Village I met the Fannie Dortch family of twelve who reside in a three-bedroom home with one bath, a small kitchen, and a living room. The packed-dirt yard was strewn with trash. Underneath the house, mangy pit bull mongrels snarled menacingly among mounds of their own flyblown feces. The wretched curs were restrained with stout chains looped around the cinder blocks supporting the house. Inside the house was even worse than outside. The floors sagged. The furniture was ripped and broken. Bare mattresses on the floor served as beds for three or more. Plastic garbage bags overflowing with sour clothing served as chests of drawers. The kitchen sink was piled high with greasy, crusty pots, pans, and dishes. The stench would gag a goat. The floors, cabinets, and countertops were alive with vermin. I didn’t want to stand still for too long and damn sure wasn’t gonna sit down anywhere. I felt itchy after just minutes.
The lone adult in the home was Fannie Dortch, twenty-nine, mother of all except the newborn, who was the child of Fannie’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Shermekya, who (according to Fannie) was at school. Fannie was clearly not right in the head. She alternated between aggression, terror, and vacant wordless stares in her responses to the checklist of questions the cheery caseworker posed from her notes in the case file. (“I don’t see any green leafy vegetables in your salad crisper. Remember what we talked about last time, about proper nutrition?” “How’s Keisha doing with her asthma? Have you gotten her prescriptions filled? Where’s her inhaler?” “And Jamarcus—why isn’t Jamarcus at school today? We haven’t been suspended again, have we?”) Children ranging in age from Shermekya’s infant to eleven or twelve years old were everywhere, in all stages of undress and varying degrees of filth: crusty eyes, running noses, scabby and sore-ridden cheeks and arms, stained underclothes. Some would stare sullenly or smile shyly at the caseworker and me. Some would chase each other screaming right between us as we attempted to converse with mama in the kitchen, or crawl underfoot as the caseworker gingerly checked the refrigerator, the pantry, and the medicine cabinet.
As we drove back to the DHS office, the caseworker (a dispassionate, orderly, relentlessly professional MSW* in her eighth year with DHS) explained the Dortch family to me: all the children had different fathers, some of whom paid child support, most of whom did not. Fannie has been diagnosed as bipolar and learning disabled and did not progress past the fourth grade. The home is a frequent scene of domestic violence between the various fathers, sometimes between the older children themselves, and between Fannie and all of them. I asked why the children had not been removed from the home, adopted or parceled out to foster care, or even institutionalized. “We’re about keeping families intact, flooding them with resources and supportive programming aimed at building on their strengths, not focusing on their deficits, breaking them up and scattering them to the four winds. We’re all about family, for the obvious societal, moral, and legal reasons.”
I nodded thoughtfully at her words, thinking, this is no family. This is a multigenerational train wreck. How many more like this are out there? No amount of state, federal, or United Way funding, or DHS casework, is going to make any difference to Fannie Dortch and her brood.
A couple years into policing, I’m dispatched to back Jack Balzer on a domestic. Balzer is an eight-year veteran, mid-thirties, with a quick, irreverent wit, lots of swaggering trash talk. (“My Balzer bigger’n yours!”) He’s the kind of quirky, mischievous guy who will wander around your home at a Christmas squad party, notice you have the word NOEL in decorative, wooden block letters nestled in holly on your piano top, next to the Christmas tree, and surreptitiously rearrange them to spell LEON. You discover the rearrangement and move the letters back to spell NOEL, only to find them ten minutes later changed back to LEON. You leave them unchanged. A half hour later, he confesses, snickering. You look at him blankly for some kind of explanation.
“Who the fuck is Leon?”
“Santa Claus, in the ’hood,” he replies with a broad grin. “He’s a dope slinger in my beat. Everybody knows him and likes him. We shouldn’t forget the Leons of the world in this season of goodwill to men.”
I still don’t get it. But that’s Balzer’s off-kilter sense of humor. He’s always playing the smart-ass for laughs with Sarge at roll call, always the center of outrageous storytelling at squad keggers. Sometimes when he’s been drinking (which is frequent) his mouth writes checks his fists can’t cash, and he gets cut down to size. One night at a squad party, Balzer got into a shouting match with our corporal, a big bear of a guy, 6 foot 3, 300 pounds, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. His size made it rarely necessary for the Bear to even raise his voice. But Balzer had gotten carried away, teasing the Bear about being out of shape. They stood nose to nose shouting taunts at each other, until Balzer made an unfortunate remark about losing all respect for the Bear, at which point Bear, with one lightning-fast stiff-arm to the chest, launched Balzer airborne over a table and into a flower planter on the opposite wall. It was a sight to behold, like out of a movie, one that was described many times over at subsequent squad socials, often by Balzer and the Bear together.
One time Balzer and a few of his buddies were drinking at Legends Lounge, a low-rent bar down Dauphin Island Parkway favored by outlaw bikers and loose women. A brawl erupted, with Balzer right in the thick of it. When a heaved chair shattered the back-bar’s mirror and its proud display of whiskeys, the barmaid screamed, “Somebody call the law!” Balzer looked up from the hapless brawler he was beating senseless in the midst of the fray, raised a bloodied fist, and bellowed, “I am the Law!”
Always in debt—largely due to his several ex-wives and hefty child support obligations—Balzer would use up all his vacation days, comp time, and sick days as soon as he earned them, to work extra jobs and do mechanic work to make ends meet. Gifted with a wrench, he always managed to keep his Harley and his truck roadworthy, as well as those of his loyal customers (mostly cops and bikers). In a scheme to get ahead of his debt once and for all, Balzer quit the department to go to Iraq to do contract policing or quasi-military work for one of those hired-gun outfits employed by the Pentagon. The promise was six figures, tax free, for a nine-month tour of duty. He returned to the department in about two months, reporting that it was totally FUBAR and the promises were bogus. The experience cost him all the time he had built up in his PD pension and did nothing to improve his bank balance.
But for all his reckless, errant ways, hare-brained schemes, and imprudence with women, Balzer was pretty 10-8 when on duty, the kind of guy you were glad to have backing you.
He didn’t suffer fools or would-be heroes (often one and the same) on the job. I had a squad party at my home once, and some of the guys started teasing me about responding to calls before backup arrived. My wife and daughter were in attendance, and I didn’t need them getting all worried about my taking unnecessary chances, so I poo-pooed the criticism by dishing it back, accusing my accusers of laziness or jadedness or driving like little old ladies. Balzer, who had not even been part of the conversation, exploded.
“It ain’t no joking matter, and I’ll tell you why. You walk into a scene you think is just a garden-variety domestic or something, you think you can handle it without backup, and all of a sudden you’re outnumbered and you’re fighting for your life, screaming like a girl on the radio. Not only is your own life in danger, but now you have endangered me and everybody else who’s running code to get to you, risking a wreck on the way. And when I get there, it’s a goddamn fight going on that probably never woulda started if two cops had walked up, and so I’m bustin’ my knuckles on some assholes that probably woulda complied if you hadn’t thought you were Dirty fuckin’ Harry or something!”
There’s that damn Clint Eastwood thing again, I’m thinking. All the joking and the trash talk ceased. Balzer had the floor.
“And the biggest risk is when they’ve already whipped your elderly ass before any of us even gets there, and they’ve taken your gun! Now me and everybody else is comin’ into a whole new scene, and if one of us gets popped with your gun, it’s on you, motherfucker!”
I can see the stricken look in the eyes of my wife and daughter to this day. It comes to me when I get the urge to respond without backup.
For all his bluster, Balzer could laugh at himself, and some of us knew Balzer was really kind of mushy on the inside. He once had asked me if I would kick in some cash for a down-on-their-luck father and son he had found sleeping in their truck one night on patrol. All they needed was a couple hundred to get the dad’s toolbox out of the pawnshop and Balzer had arranged for a good construction job for him, one that could put him and his teenage son in a decent apartment.
It had sounded to me like a bullshit scam, one I’d heard (and fallen for) too many times at United Way. I had learned the hard way to leave these kinds of cases to pros. “Why don’t they go to the Sally or the Waterfront Mission?” I’d asked Balzer. “They got real caseworkers, three hots and a cot, and they even have short-term cash loans for just this kinda thing.”
Balzer would hear nothing of it. This was his project. The damn Sally and Rescue Mission were just flophouses for mooches, winos, and manipulators. He was a cop, not a bleeding-heart social worker. He could tell when people were bullshitting or not, and this case was the genuine article: a bona-fide workin’ man, down on his luck, just trying to be strong for his son. I told Balzer I was still unconvinced, but I’d match whatever he was willing to give them. We each put in a hundred. A week later, I asked him how his father-son rescue project was going. He grew sheepish and admitted the two had skipped town the next day. “The shitheads probably scored a flask a Wild Irish Rose ’n’ a fistfulla Lortabs ’n’ headed for the boats in Biloxi to blow the rest of our cash,” Balzer said. “I shoulda listened to you. From now on it’s strictly cuffin’ and stuffin’ for me. I’m leavin’ the social work to the professionals.”
So Balzer and I forty up a couple of doors down from the domestic. “Ever been here?” he asks. I shake my head, so he briefs me. “I’m here once or twice a month. I can tell you what’s going on. It’s always the same. Grandma’s good people. Mama Ruthie, she works in the kitchen at the Tiny Diney and supports the whole bunch. Problem is her crazy-bitch crack-whore daughter, Shaletha or Shabetha or Bathsheba, something like that, who keeps poppin’ out babies and dumpin’ ’em on Mama so she can be rippin’ and runnin’ with dope slingers and gangbangers for days at a time. Then she comes home all tweaked out and tells Mama she ain’t raisin’ her babies right.” Balzer flicked away his half-smoked Marlboro. “You ready? Taser charged? I ain’t kiddin’, she’s a handful when she’s been flyin’ about three days nonstop.”
Balzer and I mount the front porch and listen to the crashing and breaking of furniture inside, the screeching of women’s voices and the wailing of children. We pound on the door and yell “Police!” to no avail. I keep pounding on the metal door while Balzer steps back to his cruiser, hits the yelp siren, then repeats “Mobile Police Department, open the door now!” over his PA system. A kitchen chair crashes through a pane of the front picture window as Mama Ruth comes ducking out the front door.
“She crazier’n’ ever dis time, Officer!” grandma cries, her eyes pleading. “Y’all gotta stop her ’fore she hurts one a dem babies!” Balzer and I enter the fray.
The house is a shambles, or “ramshacked” as they say in the ’hood (and in many police report narratives). A fifty-inch flat screen has been shattered. Chairs are overturned, kids’ toys and treasured knicknacks scattered and broken everywhere. Grandma’s framed portraits of Dr. King and an African Jesus have been ripped from the wall and impaled on the plastic handlebars of a child’s tipped-over Big Wheel trike. We can hear smashing dishes and a woman’s incomprehensible growling in the kitchen. Terrified toddlers are shrieking. A boy about fourteen emerges sobbing from a hallway, his contorted face a spasm of anguish. Balzer and I scoop up the younger ones in our arms and herd the others out the front door. There are five of them, all but the teenager preschoolers, all crying and trembling and clutching at us. It breaks my heart. A boy in diapers who’s maybe three or four is bleeding from a pretty deep cut to his palm. One of the others has blood smears on him but apparently not his own. I wrap the wounded toddler’s hand in my bandana as Balzer radios to start medical. We tell Mama Ruth to keep pressure on the hand and to make sure they all stay safe out here in the yard till the paramedics arrive. I pull out my pepper spray and Balzer unsnaps his Taser. Together we reenter the fray.
A young woman is slinging glassware and dishes against the refrigerator in the kitchen, her eyes fierce, inhuman, her voice a low moaning keen over the devastation she wreaks. She has the visage of a horror-flick fiend, a she-devil. She’s outfitted in shiny, knee-high red vinyl boots with stiletto heels, torn fishnet stockings, a skintight skirt barely covering her buttocks, and a spangly T-shirt pulled tight into a knot above her bejeweled navel. The straps of her G-string ride her hips above the waist of her skirt and the T-shirt’s neckline plunges so low that half her lacey red brassiere hangs out. A florid script proclaiming “hug Love” is inked across her cleavage. (The T that I assume precedes “hug” tatted on her left breast is obscured from view.) Platinum tresses, an outrageous contrast to her deep chocolate complexion, have become caught and twisted in the tangle of bling around her neck and have pulled the entire wig askew. Both eyelids are painted with some kind of neon sparkle; one eye has inch-long false lashes. At first I think it’s a spider perched on her brow. The other eye’s lashes have, apparently, been lost in the fray.
When she spies Balzer and me, she shrieks and launches a volley of saucers at us. We duck and dodge, and they smash against the overturned kitchen furniture and walls.
“Shaletha! Stop it now!” Balzer commands.
“Get on the ground, now!” I bellow. “Don’t make us put hands on you!”
She fires another plate at us, hissing, “Fffuck you honkey muhfuckas!” and makes for the backdoor through the adjoining laundry room. Balzer leaps and grabs her by the hair, and the tangled blonde mass slips completely off her head. But the ringlets knotted into the tangle of golden chains around her neck form a noose in Balzer’s grasp that tightens around her throat and jerks her off her feet. With a loud thud, the house shakes and Shaletha’s on her ass. We’re both on her, yelling “Stop resisting! Give us your hands!”
For a nineteen-year-old girl no more than 120 pounds, Shaletha’s strength surprises both of us, and she’s scratching and squealing and biting like a wounded panther. Her claws slash at my throat, and she sinks her teeth into one of Balzer’s hands.
“Sheee-it!” Balzer yelps. “Fuckin’ bitch bit me!”
I blast her with the pepper spray, less than a foot from her face. The problem with pepper spray in a fight is it gets all up in everybody’s face. In an instant the fight’s out of all three of us, but mostly it’s Shaletha who’s blinded and choking for breath. Balzer and I manage to flip her and cuff her before we stagger away coughing, leaving Shaletha in a snarling writhing mess on the laundry room floor. We catch our breath in the living room, spitting and slinging stinging strings of snot from our noses.
I squint out the window and see the paramedics out in the yard with Grandma and the kids.
“You go on out and let them look at your bit hand,” I sputter. “I got her.”
Balzer exits through the front door and I direct my attention back to Shaletha. She’s still twisting and straining against the cuffs, kicking at the washer and dryer that ring out with loud metallic clangs from her stiletto heels, but mainly she’s just heaving around trying to breathe and spewing vicious, incomprehensible obscenities at me. I go grab her by the arms, hoist her to her feet, and wipe the pepper spray from her face with a dish towel.
“Settle down and the breathing won’t hurt so much,” I tell her. She tries to twist away from my grasp, which I tighten.
“Owww! You’re hurting me!” I ignore her.
Outside, the children have become distracted by the big shiny red fire engine and the ministrations of the paramedics—all but the older boy, the teenager, who still weeps openly. It occurs to me that he’s too old to be Shaletha’s child; maybe a younger brother. Is he weeping out of shame, because he failed as the “man” of the house to stop his big sister? Or does he see in Shaletha his own dreaded future?
Shaletha resumes her bucking. I’m always a bit puzzled by this, from cuffed prisoners. If they break free, is their plan to run down the street with their hands behind their backs until some sympathetic thug with a cuff key or a hacksaw rescues them?
“Just settle the fuck down, Shaletha! It’s over! None a this shit was even necessary!”
“You don’t know!” she shrieks. “You don’t feel me!” Then, “Necessary!” she sneers. “How you know what be ‘necessary’ to me! An’ dis shit ain’t over! It never gon’ be over! ’Less’n I’m dead, or dey be gone! Y’on’t know shit, y’ole honky muhfucka!”
We make our way to Balzer and the paramedics. Shaletha screams “Balzer! You know! You feel me, bruh! Take my babies! Take ’em away from me, please! I can’t do it no mo’! Please take my babies, please, Balzer!” I’m disgusted and wishing the babies were out of earshot.
Balzer turns his attention from the paramedic swabbing antiseptic on his Shaletha-bit hand. He gets right up in Shaletha’s face. Tears are still streaming from all our pepper-sprayed eyes. Shaletha’s mascara has run down her cheeks in long smeary black stripes highlighted with the glittery sparkles from her lids. We’re all blurry to each other, but the situation is very clear to Balzer, and he speaks for me, too.
“First off, I ain’t your ‘bruh,’ bitch. You self-centered little cunt! I don’t want your babies! Don’t you get that? Why should I, or Officer Johnson, or these firefighters, or even your poor old mama have to take care of your babies? We have our own babies! We take care of ’em, like grown-up human beings are supposed to! When are you gonna grow the fuck up, Shaletha, and stop letting your gangbangin’ dope boys put dick all up in you?”
Shaletha is seething, quivering with rage. But mute.
“Huh, Shaletha? Will you ever grow up? Do you ever think about anybody but yourself? Or is dope boy dick and partying all you care about, Shaletha? You are one sick, twisted fuckin’ crack ho!” Balzer turns to me and mutters, “Put her in the fucking cage where she belongs.” That I do and shut the door with a satisfying slam.
When I return, Balzer is apologizing to Mama Ruth for his profanity and advising her to call DHS to get the custody of the kids transferred to her, and to get a restraining order against Shaletha, and not to bail her out, no matter what she promises when she calls from Metro or how much she blubbers about being sorry. “Don’t even accept her calls,” Balzer instructs, and explains that Shaletha will be jailed for DV assault, child endangerment/neglect, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. Mama Ruth is so apologetic for Shaletha’s behavior and grateful for Balzer’s coarse, rough compassion, I feel like weeping.
I want to suggest to Mama Ruth that she put the kids up for adoption, give them a chance at a decent life. But I know it’ll fall on deaf ears, or likely offend her. And worse, I know that even if she chose adoption as the best option, DHS would put the kids through an endless bureaucratic shuffle of paper and temporary placements in foster homes (where the caregivers are indifferent at best) until they age-out of the optimum adoptable years and begin bouncing between juvenile detention and the state reform school, eventually becoming no more than crime or death statistics.
In the back of my mind is the small whisper “There, but for the grace of God . . . ,” but I disregard it. I just don’t have the heart to tell her (or Balzer) that the bureaucratic, brainless, heartless twin threshers of Human Services and Justice doom Mama Ruth’s grandbabies to a destiny of unrelenting, mind-grinding, soul-slaying misery, to be repeated generation after generation.
Several weeks later, Nancy and I are at a small dinner gathering of the smart set—people whose acquaintances I had made in my previous life and who (largely for Nancy’s sake, I figure) had not yet dropped us from their social rosters.
The event is hosted by the manager of a German petrochemical plant down Rangeline Road and his wife. We know Heinz and Ilse Schultz from serving on the symphony board together. At the party I overhear Nancy speaking with Heinz.
“So Heinz, what do you think of my husband’s new career?”
I listen closely (though surreptitiously) and brace myself, knowing Heinz’s answer will be ammo for Nancy in some future argument between us. Being of German descent herself, Nancy admires the often-bruising candor of Germanic opinion. Heinz takes a moment to consider his response.
“Only in America is it possible,” he says, with a gee-whiz kind of tone. “Only in America is it possible for one to make such a change, to reinvent oneself so completely. You know, I think it’s just great! It’s a noble thing your husband chooses to do. I admire him for it.”
Whoa! Take that, Nancy! I’m putting that nugget in my own clip.
The gathering comprises educators, a psychologist, a journalist, a federal administrator, an investment broker, a civil litigator, a medical researcher, and a geneticist—professional, learned, progressive thinkers all. After dinner, while we’re all still gathered at the table, the question is posed to me: Since your, er, shall we say, unorthodox (chuckle) career change, Mark, you’ve sort of seen the world from both sides now, from the social work view and now from the rather, um, rough-and-tumble perspective (heh, heh, har, har) of law enforcement; how have your opinions changed (if indeed they have) vis-à-vis social problems and solutions?
For the first time in a long while, I have the floor, and I’m not at a loss for words. I pause, for effect. “Great question! One I’ve given some thought to, actually, because I do sense some subtle changes in me.” Another momentary pause. Knowing looks, titters around the table, sympathetic glances from the women to Nancy. “A career cop I know told me early on, ‘Us cops have the rare privilege of confronting evil, face to face, and the ability to do something about it.’ That was his word: privilege. That really struck me. He wasn’t talking about campaigning to raise money or taxes to start more programs, or making speeches, or rallying and marching to ‘stop the violence.’ He was talking about doing something tangible, right now. Cops have the unique ability—the duty—to act. To act at once, in the face of evil: to stop it, contain it, even eliminate it, destroy it, if necessary. It’s really an awesome privilege.
“But confronting pure, living, coldhearted, dead-eyed evil is rare, even for cops. What really gets to me is what we encounter way more often, what some of us call feral youth. Kids, born to older kids, all on drugs, raising themselves with no responsible adult supervision or example, with absolutely no sense of right and wrong, never even heard of the golden rule, absolutely no direction, discipline, ambition, or integrity, utterly bereft of any moral sense. They don’t go to church, or school, or to any kind of job. They’re not in Scouting, or the Boys & Girls Club, or on the football team. They steal from each other, abuse and assault and kill each other, often as not their own flesh and blood: mothers, brothers, cousins, baby-mamas, babies, uncles, grandmas. They’re not evil, really. They’re barely sentient or capable of reason or abstract thought. They’re animals. Not even domesticated. Feral. And they’re armed. I arrest twelve- and thirteen-year-olds with Glocks in their pockets, over and over. The same ones, from the same families—but not ‘families’ like anything any of us know. I’ve put three generations, all related, into Metro at the same time, more than once.
“So the solution has become real clear to me, for these litters of feral youth running our streets: adoption or foster care. We need to break up these destructive, chronic clusters of criminal parasites. They’re not really families—there’s no social unit to save. Adopt ’em out to real families ideally, though that seems to be out of fashion these days.
“For the life of me I don’t know why. Some of you know, I’m a bastard, myself. A love child, put up for adoption as an infant. There was too much stigma back in the fifties for unmarried girls to keep their kids. Today, the middle schools have special parenting classes for thirteen-year-olds! Where’s the shame? We need to put the stigma back on pregnant girls and snatch their little bastards up for adoption.
“And if there aren’t enough adopting families, we build orphanages. Run by professionals, usually affiliated with churches. They’re a thing of the past, too, because it’s fashionable to be a single mother, and Uncle Sam subsidizes it. We build either more orphanages or more prisons.”
I’m undeterred by the open mouths and wide eyes around the table. I let the other shoe drop: “That’s the treatment. But to break the cycle, to prevent it, we should require monthly drug screenings and contraceptive injections as a qualifying condition for any and all government or charitable aid.
“There you have it: state-mandated adoption, orphanages, drug testing, sterilization.”
Silence.
I can talk a good game, despite private doubts. Besides, being the turd in the punch bowl can be fun, when your career isn’t threatened.
*A holder of a Master in Social Work degree.