Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So last winter when EXPOSÉ! was preparing its undercover investigation of cops, we knew we were putting ourselves more at risk than usual, and that was fine with S. At least, I said so. I may have thought so. In my three years with the program, I’d been involved with several sensational exposés. Our ratings were consistently high. I had reason to believe I might be invited to Sixty Minutes, at triple my salary. EXPOSÉ! had delivered the goods on dishonest charities, insurance and HMO scams, contaminated “organic” foods, corrupt nursing homes, slum landlords who let their welfare-recipient tenants freeze in cold weather or go up in flames when their substandard buildings caught fire. We’d investigated high-class brothels, AIDS-infected cokehead street hookers and their suburban johns, child porn and Internet-sex rings. EXPOSÉ! worked in absolute secrecy and it was said of our team we were beyond reproach—“unswayable, and unbribable.”

  Even our spouses didn’t know what we were investigating. Seeing S.’s chic-sexy new look, M. said, cruelly, “Aren’t you getting a little too old for this, darling? Whatever ‘this’ is.”

  WE WERE UNDERCOVER, in our disguises, out on the street and on our assignments by March 10. The program would broadcast March 25. Like all media people we worked best under the pressure of a quick deadline. Some of us worked alone, but most of us were in teams of two or three. Always there was an unmarked van close by in which a cameraman was videotaping our every move. Or one of us carried on his person, inside a padded nylon jacket, a video camera. It was a wild season! Every day the media reported murders, rapes, robberies, arson! Dramatic car chases, shoot-outs, and arrests by police. Confessions by criminals. Highly publicized trials. Unreported were rumors of cop-crimes: the “questioning” of black- and brown-skinned young men who were stopped in their vehicles, handcuffed, beaten, in some instances shot, under the pretext of their being “suspects.” It was believed that the car-thieving drug-dealing gang kids (blacks, Hispanics) had been nearly eradicated from Newark; there was a rumor we’d been hearing (but wouldn’t be able to substantiate, unfortunately) that their bones, tangled with their gang “colors,” could be found in lime pits in the Jersey City area. Thousands of homeless people, many of them black, many mentally defective, were said to have been herded into large vans and driven away—where? No one knew. But there were conspicuously fewer in urban areas. Some of us went to shelters in disguise as homeless folks, in soiled, tattered clothing, unshaven, unwashed, staring empty-eyed, and we were sprayed for lice with the others by unsuspecting city workers or volunteers, made to shuffle through long lines for grubby, lukewarm food, and these were depressing experiences as you might imagine, but patrolling cops didn’t harass any of us. Maybe we looked too “normal”? Maybe officials recognized us, even in our disguises? With my platinum-blond hair, scruffy beard, glasses with thick lenses, and a cheesy vinyl raincoat like a shower curtain, swaying and staggering on my feet, I must’ve looked to cop eyes like a loathsome strung-out “fag”—but the only time a cop addressed me, as I sat muttering to myself in a corner, was to say, with deadpan solicitude, “Sir? The last of the coffee is being served.” I blinked up at the husky young giant’s toothy smile. Were his jaws tightened, his eyes narrowed steely as ice picks? Yet he was smiling. His gloved fingers twitched, but he hadn’t laid a finger on me.

  Another day, in Newark, I was walking with an EXPOSÉ! colleague, a black man named Sherwin, drop-out from Yale Law, and Sherwin’s in dark glasses, wild goatee and flashy-pimp outfit, we’re jaywalking through traffic, laughing like we’re high, what more luscious bait for Newark cops?—and there come up to us two traffic cops, hands on their billy clubs but flashing their trademark smiles, and one of them says politely, “It’s recommended that you cross this busy street at the intersection, with the light, for safety’s sake.” He’s grinning so broadly dimples cut into his cheeks like knife wounds. The other, older cop is staring at us with a tight, clamped smile and his eyes filling up with blood. We murmured in fluty voices, “Thank you, officers! We’ll try.” Afterward I said to Sherwin, disappointed, “Y’know, these cops aren’t what we’ve been led to expect. You think they have a bad rep?” Sherwin made a rude sound with his lips. He said contemptuously, “No. We’re just having lousy luck. We haven’t pushed far enough yet.”

  But EXPOSÉ!’s reporters, variously disguised, in scattered urban areas of northeast New Jersey, were encountering similar experiences. Jaywalking, simulated public drunkenness, “suspicious behavior”—we citizens were greeted with smiling courtesy. Our women reporters, who’d steeled themselves to be sexually insulted and harassed, were encountering gentlemen cops. After the third or fourth such encounter, the thought passed through my head, Has someone tipped these guys off? Do they know they’re on camera? But in the next instant, I forgot. I didn’t want to think this might be so. That our effort was for nothing; that, from the start, there must have been collusion between WNET top executives and the Jersey police.

  A politically motivated collusion, obviously. So EXPOSÉ! was gamely filming material that, when aired, would play like PR for Jersey police.

  Yet we kept trying. We knew we were failing, but we kept trying. I’m remembering woozy March nights when S. in his “new look” was cruising certain urban areas alone, hoping for action; or in the company of Sherwin, Randall, Elise. Sometimes a rowdy gang of us cruised together, hoping to draw the attention of brutal but photogenic cops. We knew they existed! But where were they? On Saturday night Sherwin and I were making the scene of gay waterfront bars in Hoboken, swaying with our arms around each other’s waist along damp cobblestone streets hoping to catch the predatory eyes of cops passing in squad cars, our unmarked van following a half-block behind. One of us, it might’ve been me, made a playfully lewd signal to a cop-car, and the car braked to an immediate stop, and we steeled ourselves for trouble, but all that happened was a burly cop, must’ve been seven feet tall, three hundred pounds, stuck his bowling-ball head out of the car window, shook a sausage-forefinger at us and scolded, “Now, boys! Remember ‘safe sex.’ And don’t catch cold.” The squad car sped around a corner and disappeared and Sherwin called after, trilling, “Yo my mans! C’mon give us boys a ride!” But the squad car was gone. (Circling the block? We hoped.) The unmarked van continued to trail behind us, wasting video film. Sherwin said flatly, “The bastards know.” I said, “They can’t know. EXPOSÉ! has never been found out. And don’t we look like the real thing? We are the real thing.” Maybe I was a little drunk, and I’d popped a few pills (of the kind once called speed, now “crystal”) bought at the bar inside. My eyes glittered like my gold ear studs. I hadn’t showered in days—this was part of my disguise—and my body exuded a rich, ripe, musky-sexy fragrance any sharp-nosed homophobic cop could pick up at thirty feet. I wanted something more than this! I wanted a cop-confrontation! I wanted to be broadcast on TV handcuffed, knocked around, on my knees, threatened with having my head beaten in, I wanted my rights as a citizen trampled upon, I wanted to be insulted, debased, I’d be brave and cool with a bloody nose, my family would be amazed at my courage and proud of me, thrilled to know me, wasn’t this going to happen? any of it? I was feeling that powerful sexual charge of having aroused someone, even if strangers, except the arousal has come to nothing. Like lightning pumping into only just the earth, meeting no resistance and sparking no fireworks.

  But the big cops hunkered in their tank-sized car never reappeared that night.

  WHAT WAS BROADCAST on March 25 caused EXPOSÉ! to be laughed at in the media, even on our own turf. An hour of banal footage depicting Jersey cops as model cops: decent, kind, helpful, courteous, and smiling and clearly not racist, not misogynist, and not brutal. In our elaborate disguises we EXPOSÉ! reporters were Hallowe’en trick-or-treaters who’d come away with no treats.

  The logic was, EXPOSÉ!’s agenda is to “expose” truth. If our investigation exposed true cop behavior, we had an ethical duty to make it public even if it wasn’t anything like what we’d expected.


  A few days later some of us were having drinks at The Skids. Some of us were rueful, and some of us were defiant. We guessed maybe we’d been tricked. But we couldn’t know. The cop-performances were phony? We’d been fucked over? Some of us tried to see the humor in it. And S. who’d been the most depressed of the crew catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar and feels a stab of sexual excitement. That hair, that tan! Those ear studs! But it’s a sad, fading excitement. Next morning, he’s going to get rid of it all. A return to dull-brown hair, no gold studs. It’s over. I had two more drinks, and it was time to leave. I offered to drive one of the girls home but she had her own car. She laughed at me, pressing a forefinger against my lips. You should take a taxi, she said. You’re in no condition to drive. Tears leaked from my eyes to everyone’s embarrassment. Sherwin said quickly, S. isn’t himself; he’s taken this hard. I’ll drive him. But I fled to the men’s room and when I returned Sherwin was nowhere in sight. And I thought, Shithead, you’ve lost Sherwin, too. You let him go. I had a final drink, and set off for home.

  Since the EXPOSÉ! broadcast, it seemed to me I was seeing more cops than ever, and they were big husky boys bursting out of their uniforms who could barely fit their bulk into police vehicles. It seemed they were smiling, still. They stood at a distance, hands on their billy clubs. EXPOSÉ! made it clear, cops are a law-abiding citizen’s best friends. Driving past cop-cars on my way home I flicked my headlights at them and it seemed to me their headlights winked in return.

  Then, this happened.

  I remember driving up to get in line for a ticket for the Garden State Parkway, maybe the eighth car from the booth, and other lines are equally long, but one or two are moving faster, so as I often do, as everyone does, I switched lanes. And suddenly there’s a tall uniformed figure beside my car rapping sharply on the window. A Jersey cop. “All right, mister. Let’s see your license and auto registration.” He wasn’t one of the young husky guys but a little older, a seasoned veteran about my age, coarse-skinned and reddened in the face as if sunburned. I protested, “It isn’t illegal to switch lanes, for God’s sake. What’s the law I broke?” The cop didn’t hear. He was getting belligerent. A flame in his close-set ice pick eyes. Drivers of other cars, inching slowly toward the ticket booths, eyed us covertly. I could see these fellow citizens felt no sympathy for me. No pity. I’d violated a law; I was in trouble. I’d be issued a ticket at least, and I deserved a ticket. Nervously, I handed over my driver’s license into the cop’s gloved hands. He was staring at my photo I.D., and at my chic platinum-blond hair styled short in back, long at the sides. He was staring at my tanned face, my gold ear studs. I searched for the registration in the glove compartment of my car and handed that over, too. I’d begun to tremble. There was no unmarked WNET van behind me, recording this. There was no one watching. The cop was saying with a tight smile I’d better come with him to the station and I asked why, and was told my paperwork wasn’t “one-hundred-percent in order.” I asked what could be wrong with it? By this time the cop has my car door open and he’s hauled me out onto the pavement, fingers like steel gripping my shoulder where the bones feel like plywood in danger of breaking. “Come with me, mister. Now.” This big guy, six inches taller than me, sixty pounds heavier, force-walks me to a waiting squad car, cuffs my hands behind my back. I’m whimpering with pain, the metal hurts my tender wrists. I’m stammering, “Look, please. I’m a television reporter. For EXPOSÉ!—we just did an hour’s program on police. We’re your friends! Didn’t you see it?” By now I’m in the rear of the squad car, the cop and his partner are driving back into the city. Siren wailing. We stop at a windowless building the size of a warehouse. Near the docks? The river? Where? I’m dragged out of the car. My left ankle is livid with pain, I can’t walk upright, which infuriates the cops. I’m being shaken like a rag doll, against a brick wall. There’s a door one of the cops dials us into, punching out a code, and we’re inside the building, there’s a blast of hard-metal rock music, and a crimson neon sign pulsing

  ∗COPLAND∗ ∗COPLAND∗ ∗COPLAND∗

  and it isn’t clear to me if this is a cop bar, a hangout for off-duty cops, or if it’s an actual precinct in the inner city. Everywhere I look are cops: and they’re big, and dramatic. Most are in their shirtsleeves. All of them are wearing badges. They’re equipped with billy clubs, holstered revolvers, some are carrying rifles as if they’d only just returned from dangerous missions. Many are wearing mirrored sunglasses. Gloves, boots. Their ham-like thighs strain their regulation trousers. Only their ears appear small, disproportionate to their large heads. The noise in here is deafening, their hearing has atrophied and maybe, with it, their ears? Even in this terrible place S. is trying to reason, to rationalize. But ∗COPLAND∗ ∗COPLAND∗ ∗COPLAND∗ is overwhelming. Video games, vending machines, TV monitors. The rising of terror like backed-up sewage. On every side, cops are laughing. Guffawing. These are hearty hyena laughs, true “belly laughs.” These are infectious laughs; you want to join in. Cops are smoking cigarettes and cigars and shouting jokes at one another. There’s an enormous curved bar, and cops of all ages and sizes are crowded against the bar. It’s like an altar; you want to push in with them; you want to be served. They’re drinking draft beer, foaming from the tap. There’s a thunderous sound of bowling from close by. Bowling alleys long as city blocks. In the distance, I see giant cops walking awkwardly, with bended knees, to avoid striking their heads against the ceiling. And it’s a high ceiling, lost in bluish clouds of smoke. One of the friendly cops featured on EXPOSÉ!—the husky boy who’d been so polite to me in the homeless shelter—is hauling a handcuffed suspect into a back room. The suspect is a skinny, brown-skinned Hispanic teenager, already bleeding from mouth, nose, ears. Some cops are more mature than others, some are lieutenants, sergeants, captains with the insignia of their rank proudly displayed on their shirts. “My” cops are patrolmen, cop-cops with buzz cuts. Because your case isn’t important. Because you are not important. Your suffering, your life. A booted foot kicks me in the small of the back and I’m on my face, coughing. My platinum-blond hair is being tugged out of my head. My head is being thumped against the floor. My jaws are being prized open, and an enormous cop-cock is being thrust inside, large as as normal man’s forearm, and the tip of the cock hard as a man’s elbow. Off-camera, you don’t exist. You are not being recorded. The first cop finishes with me, and another cop straddles me, and another enormous cop-cock is thrust into my mouth. By this time I’m almost unconscious. I’m choking, gagging. My vomit spills onto my cop-assailant, scalding his bloated cock and fouling his blue-gray trousers, and polished leather boots. I’m an object of loathing and disgust. I’m whimpering in pain. I have no name now: not even “S.” Cop-fury! I’m being kicked. Loud raucous cop-laughter! Blinding neon ∗COPLAND∗ ∗COPLAND∗ Someone, possibly a cop-medic, is thoughtful enough to dump a bucket of water over my head, it’s not clean water but I’m grateful, my vision is somewhat cleared and I’m reviving. A drum majorette’s baton is being passed from gloved cop-hand to cop-hand. My fawn-colored trousers have been torn from me, my Jockey shorts in shreds, a searing pain erupts between the crack of my ass. They’re jamming the baton into me. Or it’s a toilet plunger with a wooden handle, they’re jamming into me. Laughing and shouting and their heated boys’ faces exuding a strange sort of radiance. Their buzz cuts gleaming with sweat and in the smoke-haze of ∗COPLAND∗ aureoles of radiant light tremble about their heads like halos. It isn’t too late, I’m thinking. I can forgive you. Even now, I can forgive you. I’m an American citizen, I’m an optimist, I want to love you. I love you. But the cops pay me no heed. It’s their game now, it has nothing to do with me. I’m a game-object like a football. I’m sobbing, crawling across the blood-slick floor. The wooden handle dangling from my anus, swaying and lurching. This makes the cops laugh louder. Their superiors, drawn by the hilarity, come to look. Women cops drift about the doorway. They’re laughing loudest of all. The wome
n cops are giants, too. Yet their nails are manicured and polished. There’s too much blood on the floor, I can’t get traction, I can’t crawl. There’s a sharp stink of piss. Disgusting feces. The cops are angry with me, kicking me seriously now in the back, my spine, in the stomach, my guts. Laughing, leaping out of my way, surprisingly agile for men of their girth, not wanting to soil their handsome polished boots.

  Whatever happens next, I’ve lost the thread.

  I know that I was found early in the morning of March 29, in a Dumpster in Hoboken, a forty-minute drive from my home in suburban Lakeview. My naked, beaten body. My abused, broken body. Yet I don’t believe the cops meant for me to die, or that I’d be flattened and processed as landfill. I believe they knew I’d be rescued by their fellow city workers, the sanitation men. I was unconscious and in a state of shock, my blood pressure dropping toward zero, but I didn’t die. That’s the crucial fact. If the ∗COPS∗ had seriously wanted to kill me they’d have killed me, like their other victims. If they’d wanted to injure my “pretty” face, they’d have injured it. There was a reason, probably a directive from the superintendent of police who’s a friend of our billionaire Mister G-d at WNET-TV and for that I’m grateful.

  Sure, I complain a lot. But I’m grateful.

  SO MY TV CAREER ENDED at its zenith, abruptly back in March. It’s June now. I’m on a fairly generous disability leave. At the station they’ve promised I can return when I’ve “fully recovered” but I know I never will either return, or “fully recover.”

  My concern right now, this past hour, is that Chop-Chop is missing. Security guards, sharpshooter practicing, might’ve shot the poor little fellow if he left our property unleashed. And my wife M. and my children K. and C. are often gone, too. I’d been under the impression that they were at work and at school but in fact they’re gone on weekends as well as weekdays and often they don’t return to 9 Deer Trail Road for days at a time. I’ve come to the humiliating conclusion that they have another home. Another household. Through the Internet I acquired a “nightscope” telescope and with this device I’ve seen, or seemed to see, my wife driving her Lexus out of Deer Trail Villas to another private community in Lakeview, turning up the drive at a large English Tudor–style house; there’s a car in the driveway I don’t recognize. But possibly this isn’t M.; my contact lenses don’t fit as they once did and my vision is blurred.