The Blue Knight (8 page)

“What’s your first name, Officer Morgan?” asked Scott, looking at my nameplate, “and what do you think of street demonstrations?”

Scott was smiling and I could hardly hear him over the yelling as the ring of marchers moved twenty feet closer to us to block the entrance more effectively after the fat bitch in yellow directed them to do it. Several kids mugged at the cameraman and waved “V” signs at him and me. One asshole, older than the others, flipped me the bone and then scowled into the camera.

“That’s it, smile and say pig, you pukepot,” I mumbled, noticing the two black cossacks were at the other end of the line of marchers talking to purple legs. Then I turned to Scott. “To answer your question, my name’s Bumper Morgan and I don’t mind demonstrations except that they take us cops away from our beats, and believe me we can’t spare the time. Everybody loses when we’re not on patrol.”

“What do you patrol, the fucking barnyard?” said one little shitbird wearing shades and carrying a poster that showed a white army officer telephoning a black mother about her son being killed in Vietnam. She was shown in a corner of the poster and there was a big white cop clubbing her with an oversized baton.

“That poster doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It’s awful damn lame. You might as well label it, ‘Killed by the running dogs of imperialism!’ I could do a lot better than that.”

“Man, that’s
exactly
what I told him,” Scott laughed, and offered me a cigarette.

“No thanks,” I said, as he and his baby doll lit one. “Now that one’s sort of clever,” I said, pointing to a sign which said “Today’s pigs are tomorrow’s porkchops.”

None of the other kids had anything to say yet, except the shithead with the poster, who yelled, “Like, what’re we doing talking to this fucking fascist lackey?”

“Look,” I said, “I ain’t gonna lay down and play dead just because you can say ‘fuck’ pretty good. I mean nobody’s shocked by that cheap shit anymore, so why don’t we just talk quiet to each other. I wanna hear what you guys got to say.”

“Good idea,” said another kid, a black, with a wild natural, wire-rim glasses, and a tiger tooth necklace, who almost had to shout because of the noise. “Tell us why a man would want to be a cop. I mean really. I’m not putting you on, I want to know.”

He was woofing me, because he winked at the blond kid, but I thought I’d
tell
them what I liked about it. What the hell, I liked having all these kids crowded around listening to me. Somebody then moved the marchers’ line a little north again and I could almost talk in a normal voice.

“Well, I like to take lawbreakers off the street,” I began.

“Just a minute,” said the black kid, pushing his wire-rims up on his nose. “Please, Officer, no euphemisms. I’m from Watts.” Then he purposely lapsed into a Negro drawl and said, “I been knowin’ the PO-lice all mah life.” The others laughed and he continued in his own voice. “Talk like a
real
cop and tell us like it is, without any bullshit. You know, use that favorite expression of L.A.P.D.—‘asshole,’ I believe it is.” He smiled again after he said all this and so did I.

“What part of Watts you live in?” I asked.

“One-O-Three and Grape, baby,” he answered.

“Okay, I’ll talk plainer. I’m a cop because I love to throw assholes in jail, and if possible I like to send them to the joint.”

“That’s more like it,” said the black kid. “Now you’re lookin’ so good and soundin’ so fine.”

The others applauded and grinned at each other.

“Isn’t that kind of a depressing line of work?” asked Scott. “I mean, don’t you like to do something
for
someone once in a while instead of
to
them?”

“I figure I do something
for
someone every time I make a good bust. I mean, you figure every real asshole you catch in a dead bang burglary or robbery’s tore off probably a hundred people or so before you bring him down. I figure each time I make a pinch I save a hundred more, maybe even some lives. And I’ll tell you, most victims are people who can’t afford to be victims. People who can afford it have protection and insurance and aren’t so vulnerable to all these scummy hemorrhoids. Know what I mean?”

Scott’s little girlfriend was busting to throw in her two cents, but three guys popped off at once, and finally Scott’s voice drowned out the others. “I’m a law student,” he said, “and I intend to be your adversary someday in a courtroom. Tell me, do you really get satisfaction when you send a man away for ten years?”

“Listen, Scott,” I said, “in the first place even Eichmann would stand a fifty-fifty chance of not doing ten years nowadays. You got to be a boss crook to pull that kind of time. In fact, you got to work at it to even
get
to state prison. Man, some of the cats I put away, I wouldn’t give them ten years, I’d give them a goddamned lobotomy if I could.”

I dropped my cigar because these kids had me charged up now. I figured they were starting to respect me a little and I even tried for a minute to hold in my gut but that was uncomfortable, and I gave it up.

“I saw a big article in some magazine a few years ago honoring these cops,” I continued. “‘These are not pigs’ the article said, and it showed one cop who’d delivered some babies, and one cop who’d rescued some people in a flood, and one cop who was a goddamn boy scout troop leader or something like that. You know, I delivered two babies myself. But we ain’t being paid to be midwives or lifeguards or social workers. They got other people to do those jobs. Let’s see somebody honor some copper because the guy made thirty good felony pinches a month for ten years and sent a couple hundred guys to San Quentin. Nobody ever gives an award to him. Even his sergeant ain’t gonna appreciate that, but he’ll get on his ass for not writing a traffic ticket every day because the goddamn city needs the revenue and there’s no room in prisons anyway.”

I should’ve been noticing things at about this time. I should’ve noticed that the guy in the headband and his old lady were staying away from me and so were the two black guys in the plastic jackets. In fact, all the ones I spotted were staying at the other end of the line of marchers who were quieting down and starting to get tired. I should’ve noticed that the boy, Scott, the other blond kid, and the tall black kid, were closer to me than the others, and so was the cute little twist hanging on Scott’s arm and carrying a huge heavy-looking buckskin handbag.

I noticed nothing, because for one of the few times in my life I wasn’t being a cop. I was a big, funny-looking, blue-suited donkey and I thought I was home-run king belting them out over the fences. The reason was that I was somewhere I’d never been in my life. I was on a soapbox. Not a stage but a soapbox. A stage I could’ve handled. I can put on the act people want and expect, and I can still keep my eyes open and not get carried away with it, but this goddamned soapbox was something else. I was making speeches, one after another, about things that meant something to me, and all I could see was the loving gaze of my audience, and the sound of my own voice drowned out all the things that I should’ve been hearing and seeing.

“Maybe police departments should only recruit college graduates,” Scott shrugged, coming a step closer.

“Yeah, they want us to solve crimes by these ‘scientific methods,’ whatever that means. And what do us cops do? We kiss ass and nod our heads and take federal funds to build computers and send cops to college and it all boils down to a cop with sharp eyes and an ability to talk to people who’ll get the goddamn job done.”

“Don’t you think that in the age that’s coming, policemen will be obsolete?” Scott’s little girlfriend asked the question and she looked so wide-eyed I had to smile.

“I’m afraid not, honey,” I said. “As long as there’s people, there’s gonna be lots of bad ones and greedy ones and weak ones.”

“How can you feel that way about people and still care at all about helping them as you say you do when you arrest somebody?” she asked, shaking her head. She smiled sadly, like she felt sorry for me.

“Hell, baby, they ain’t much but they’re all we got. It’s the only game in town!” I figured that was obvious to anybody and I started to wonder if they weren’t still a little young. “By the way, are most of you social science and English majors?”

“Why do you say that?” asked the black kid, who was built like a ballplayer.

“The surveys say you are. I’m just asking. Just curious.”

“I’m an engineering major,” said the blond kid, who was now behind Scott, and then for the first time I was aware how close in on me these certain few were. I was becoming aware how polite they’d been to me. They were all activists and college people and no doubt had statistics and slogans and arguments to throw at me, yet I had it all my way. They just stood there nodding, smiling once in a while, and let me shoot my face off. I knew that something wasn’t logical or right, but I was still intrigued with the sound of my own voice and so the fat blue maharishi said, “Anything else about police work you’d like to talk about?”

“Were you at Century City?” asked the little blonde.

“Yeah, I was there, and it wasn’t anything like you read in the underground newspapers or on those edited TV tapes.”

“It wasn’t? I was there,” said Scott.

“Well, I’m not gonna deny some people got hurt,” I said, looking from one face to another for hostility. “There was the President of the United States to protect and there were thousands of war protestors out there and I guarantee you that was no bullshit about them having sharpened sticks and bags of shit and broken bottles and big rocks. I bet I could kill a guy with a rock.”

“You didn’t see any needless brutality?”

“What the hell’s brutality?” I said. “Most of those blue-coats out there are just lads your age. When someone spits in his face, all the goddamn discipline in the world ain’t gonna stop him or any normal kid from getting that other cat’s teeth prints on his baton. There’s times when you just
gotta
play a little catch-up. You know what five thousand screaming people look like? Sure, we got some stick time in. Some scumbags, all they respect is force. You just gotta kick ass and collect names. Anybody with any balls woulda whaled on some of those pricks out there.” Then I remembered the girl. “Sorry for the four-letter word, miss,” I said as a reflex action.

“Prick is a five-letter word,” she said, reminding me of the year I was living in.

Then suddenly, the blond kid behind Scott got hostile. “Why do we talk to a pig like this? He talks about helping people. What’s he do besides beat their heads in, which he admits? What do
you
do in the ghettos of Watts for the black people?”

Then a middle-aged guy in a clergyman’s collar and a black suit popped through the ring of young people. “I work in the eastside Chicano barrios,” he announced. “What do you do for the Mexicans except exploit them?”

“What do
you
do?” I asked, getting uncomfortable at the sudden change of mood here, as several of the marchers joined the others and I was backed up against the car by fifteen or twenty people.

“I fight for the Chicanos. For brown power,” said the clergyman.

“You ain’t brown,” I observed, growing more nervous.

“Inside I’m brown!”

“Take an enema,” I mumbled, standing up straight, as I realized that things were wrong, all wrong.

Then I caught a glimpse of the black cossack hat to the left behind two girls who were crowding in to see what the yelling was all about, and I saw a hand flip a peace button at me, good and hard. It hit me in the face, the pin scratching me right under the left eye. The black guy looked at me very cool as I spun around, mad enough to charge right through the crowd.

“You try that again and I’ll ding your bells, man,” I said, loud enough for him to hear.

“Who?” he said, with a big grin through the moustache and goatee.

“Who, my ass,” I said. “You ain’t got feet that fit on a limb. I’m talking to
you
.”

“You fat pig,” he sneered and turned to the crowd. “He wants to arrest me! You pick out a black, that the way you do it, Mister PO-lice?”

“If anything goes down, I’m getting
you
first,” I whispered, putting my left hand on the handle of my stick.

“He wants to arrest me,” he repeated, louder now. “What’s the charge? Being black? Don’t I have any rights?”

“You’re gonna get your rites,” I muttered. “Your
last
rites.”

“I should kill you,” he said. “There’s fifty braves here and we should kill you for all the brothers and sisters you pigs murdered.”

“Get it on, sucker, anytime you’re ready,” I said with a show of bravado because I was really scared now.

I figured that many people let loose could turn me into a doormat in about three minutes. My breath was coming hard. I tried to keep my jaw from trembling and my brain working. They weren’t going to get me down on the ground. Not without a gun in my hand. I decided it wouldn’t be that easy to kick
my
brains in. I made up my mind to start shooting to save myself, and I decided I’d blow up the two Black Russians, Geronimo, and Purple Legs, not necessarily in that order.

Then a hand reached out and grabbed my necktie, but it was a breakaway tie, and I didn’t go with it when the hand pulled it into the crowd. At about the same time the engineering major grabbed my badge, and I instinctively brought up my right hand, holding his hand on my chest, backing up until his elbow was straight. Then I brought my left fist up hard just above his elbow and he yelped and drew back. Several other people also drew back at the unmistakable scream of pain.

“Off the pig! Off the pig!” somebody yelled. “Rip him off!”

I pulled my baton out and felt the black-and-white behind me now and they were all screaming and threatening, even the full-of-shit padre.

I would’ve jumped in the car on the passenger side and locked the door but I couldn’t. I felt the handle and it was locked, and the window was rolled up, and I was afraid that if I fooled around unlocking it, somebody might get his ass up and charge me.

Apparently the people inside the induction center didn’t know a cop was about to get his ticket cancelled, because nobody came out. I could see the cameraman fighting to get through the crowd which was spilling out on the street and I had a crazy wish that he’d make it. That’s the final vanity, I guess, but I kind of wanted him to film Bumper’s Last Stand.