by Ann Patchett
When it’s time to go back to California for the test, my father wants me to come out early. This has always been the case. Any trip west should start sooner and last longer. He says he can drill me for the oral exam, but what he really wants to do is to watch me run. The morning after I arrive, we walk over to Glendale Community College and I run laps on the track while my father stands at the grassy edge looking at his watch. “Fifteen seconds,” he yells at me when I pass, which is how much time he wants to see come off the next lap. Fifteen seconds is a lifetime, and I reach down deep within myself to give it up. My father has at different times in his life been proud of me, but this morning he is thrilled with me. While I kick my heels up towards my back and cut past the other runners, my father, looking at me and his watch in equal measure, is a policeman, and I am the best cadet in his class. He shouts for me to sprint—sprint!—the last hundred yards, and I rip holes in the soft dirt. “Jesus, Ann,” he says when I stop. He comes to me and hugs my shoulders hard while I pant. “You’re going to kill them.”
I am no great athlete, but at this point in my life I am a very good student. This is the test and I have been studying for months.
My father wants to go to the Police Academy to see me jump the wall. When we arrive, we find the practice wall occupied by a group of women in matching sweatshirts, their last names printed large across their backs. They are in a special training class for their physical abilities test. An officer with a whistle hanging around his neck barks at them encouragingly. He tells them how to get over the wall and then proceeds to demonstrate. Television notwithstanding, I have never actually seen a person jump over a wall, and he does it in a way that has never occurred to me, grabbing on to the top with his hands while one foot is up near his chest. He then kicks over rather than pulling up. My father tells me to get in the line with the sweatshirted group, but I hang back, suddenly self-conscious. Even with such clear instruction, many of the women flounder and fall in their attempts to get over. I wait until they are dismissed before I go and try. Now that I am relying on physics and not just upper-body strength, I jump over again and again without even having to run.
In the evening, we sit in the backyard of my father and stepmother’s house, a house I lived in briefly when it had been my mother and father’s house. (For years after my parents’ divorce, my father rented the house out, and then moved back in again when he remarried.) I can never remember my father being as happy with me as he is on this night. I ask him to tell me things: Who was his favorite partner? What was the best case he ever had? We talk about police work until it’s dark and my stepmother, Jerri, gets tired and goes inside.
“You really are going to need to stay on for a year,” my father says. “If you’re going to get a feel for the thing. You need to give it that much time.”
I tell him I am not going to be a cop. I want to write about it. I’m a writer.
He thinks about this for a minute. “If you stayed on for two, then you could go right in the FBI. Now that,” he says, looking off past the lemon tree growing by the driveway, “that would be a hell of a book.”
My father has arranged for me to go on a ride-along during my stay. Why cops would allow a total stranger to sit in the back of their squad car and ask questions when they’re trying to work is beyond me, but it’s not an uncommon practice in Los Angeles, where directors are always looking for ideas and actors are trying to hone an authentic edge. My ride-along is with Sergeant John Paige and Officer Ray Mendoza of Newton, the station where my father had been commander years before. When my father tells me about these plans, I thank him. It sounds like a good idea. But as we’re driving over, out of Glendale and into a part of Los Angeles I do not know how to find my way out of, I am more than a little nervous. When I tell my father this he says he doesn’t understand. Why would I be nervous about spending an evening in the place he had worked for years?
My father wasn’t pleased when I left the house wearing jeans, a white shirt (linen, buttoned all the way with a T-shirt underneath), and running shoes. He wanted me to look nicer. My father and Jerri are going to a cousin’s wedding and they’re dressed for it. At the front desk they turn me over to Sergeant Paige, who’s wearing blues and a tattoo on his forearm. He is maybe fifty, gray hair, neat mustache. There’s very little conversation at the handoff; my parents are in a rush to beat the traffic. I follow Sergeant Paige down the hall and along the way a few introductions are made. “She’s Frank Patchett’s kid. You remember Captain Patchett.” “Jesus, yes, how is your dad?” Sergeant Paige has some paperwork to do before we go, including some forms that I must sign in order to relieve the City of Los Angeles of her responsibility to me this evening. Sergeant Paige suggests that I should go amuse myself, look around, make some friends.
Newton Station is near South Central Avenue on Fourteenth Street, a mile or two south of downtown Los Angeles. Its area of service covers approximately nine square miles and includes South Park and the Pueblo Del Rio public housing development. Inside, big bald spots break up the green indoor-outdoor carpet. The desks are in rows so close together that it requires some real maneuvering to squeeze past the chairs. I am told that what I’m looking at now represents an improvement. For a while, the desks were so tightly packed that two officers sitting back to back could not pull out their chairs to stand at the same time. This arrangement was eventually deemed a fire hazard, but even now the entire place strikes me as a fire hazard. Cardboard file boxes are stacked along the wall to towering heights; above them there are a few dark windows too high up to see out of. The little bit of available wall space is covered in men’s ties. It’s a rite of passage to cut the ties off of the guys who make detective, guys who are promoted out of Newton Station, and tack them to the wall. A thin young black man in a thin red T-shirt, his hands cuffed behind his back, sits on the floor and waits. He answers the occasional question from the officer typing his report. He’s polite about moving his feet to let me by.
There are only two holding cells in the Newton station. The lack of cell space is a problem solved by a long wooden bench, weathered and worn into something that could be sold in an antique shop in Colonial Williamsburg. That bench, which is located in a back hallway that leads out to the parking lot, is bolted to the floor, and a dozen pairs of handcuffs are bolted to it. Three men and two women, all black, are now physically attached to the bench. The bench itself wasn’t attached to the floor until a few years ago, when a man who was cuffed to it walked out the door, dragging the bench with him. The cast of characters on the bench changes as I go down that hall several times over the course of the evening, and to a one they seem bored. The utter lack of emotion coming from all parties involved is strangely soothing.
Above every desk is a shelf pressed full of plastic three-ring binders. This is where they keep the dead people. Under the glass on one desk is a five-by-seven index card with a picture of an Ishmael Martinez, whose date of death came a few days past his fifteenth birthday. His face is thin and boyish, and although he is trying to look menacing for the camera, he does not succeed. The card includes his date of birth and home address, with KIA scrawled in thick red marker. I ask the officer at the desk about him and he seems glad to tell the story: four kids steal a car. During pursuit, the kids hit a light post. Two die on impact. Ishmael’s arm is torn off and he’s dead a couple hours later. The fourth survives and will go on to operate a wheelchair with his tongue.
What I want to ask, but what I don’t ask, is why his picture is under the glass on the desk.
After the completion of paperwork, Sergeant Paige and I leave for an early dinner with Officer Ray Mendoza, who is thirty-four and missing half a finger. We take an unmarked car and go for Mexican food. The day is still bright and not too hot. The restaurant isn’t busy and the people who work there, who know Paige and Mendoza, are happy to see us. The woman with the menus gives us a deluxe booth big enough for a family of eight.
Paige wants to know if I’m thinking about coming on the job, joining the LAPD, and I tell him no, I just want to look around. They’re fine with that. They ask what I do, and I tell them I’m a writer. “You should write a book about cops!” Paige says. Mendoza is quiet while Paige rattles on about how the job has changed. He says my father is one of the few who got out without being really screwed up. “The job didn’t ruin him the way it does most guys,” he says, piling salsa onto a tortilla chip. I wonder to myself if Paige is ruined. “Your dad was of the golden age,” he says. “When this job meant something.”
The waitress speaks to Mendoza in Spanish and he answers her in English. This will happen all night.
Officer Mendoza has been back on the job for four days, after having been out for nine months. He was ambushed in his police car and shot four times, not far from where we are eating. I know for sure he was shot in the hand and the knee. I don’t ask him about the other two bullets. I ask him why he’d come back to work after that, but he seems not to understand.
“You can get a pension if you’re traumatized,” Paige interjects, and then points to his partner across the wide expanse of booth. “Mendoza here wasn’t traumatized.”
“I wish I was,” Mendoza says. “I wish I could tell you I had bad dreams or was afraid to go out, but I’m not. I’m a cop.” He shrugs. “This is all part of it. There’s a good chance that somebody is going to shoot you.”
What upsets him though, the thing that might keep him from making it all the way to his pension, is working for an organization that would rather see a cop killed than a cop kill somebody. “It’s cheaper for a cop to get killed,” he says.
“Management,” they say in unison, and not with a trace of goodwill.
“Williams?” I ask.
“Fat Willie,” Paige says, just as my father would say. Willie Williams replaced Daryl Gates as the chief of police. He was considered by most to be a public relations gift to the city. “He didn’t say a single word during the union negotiations. Nothing one way or the other. He isn’t even a real cop. He’s a management puppet, spending his time in Philly. He’s not even legal to carry a gun in California. Chief of police, no gun.” The idea being that while there are plenty of people to accuse the police, there is no one around to defend them.
Plates are put before us, shocking quantities of food that could feed as many people as this huge booth could hold. Paige says people don’t want to know what cops do. They want it done and they don’t want to hear about it. “We’re hired guns, essentially,” he says, cutting into his enchiladas with real enthusiasm. “That waitress,” he says kindly to Mendoza, “doesn’t she have beautiful eyes?”
Paige says people want them to be social workers, to reach out to the community, but that’s not their job. Their job is to get the bad guys. This phrase—bad guys—will come up again. “If they want us to be social workers, fine, but don’t tell us how to do it. Look the other way while we change the world for these kids.”
My father was that guy, the social worker—forever starting up after-school programs, encouraging kids to volunteer at the police station. At Thanksgiving, he had cops drive food baskets to families in the neighborhoods. At Christmas, he sent around toys, always in the black-and-whites to let people know who the good guys in the neighborhood were. Good guys, bad guys.
Paige owns property in Nevada and will retire in three years. The property, he tells me, is not too far from a Nordstrom. “My wife,” he says, “couldn’t go more than a week without shopping.”
“We all want our patch of green grass,” Mendoza says, though his will have to be in L.A. He was born here, he tells me pointedly, and his family is here. He doesn’t know anything else, and doesn’t have anyplace else to go.
My father has instructed me to pay for dinner, and they are happy to let me since the total bill comes to five dollars. I leave the rest of the money for the waitress with the beautiful eyes.
In the car, the two men never stop talking, joking, providing a running commentary on the world around them. (Paige’s comments are often directed out the window.) The radio emits a constant stream of information. Even though Paige is behind the wheel, they share the driving equally, with Mendoza giving traffic updates: “Coming up on your left. Slow down a little. The light is yellow. Watch the car pulling out.” It is exactly the way my father talks to me or whoever else happens to be driving. It is a consequence of the job. Paige and Mendoza ask me questions about myself, and in return I ask them questions about Newton. Fifty-five gangs have been counted in their nine square miles.
An ice cream truck goes by, tinkling out “It’s a Small World.” The houses are mostly neat. Many are owned rather than rented. It is Saturday, and the neighborhood’s front yards are rife with weddings and presentation parties—quinceañeras. Little girls in pale green polyester taffeta swoop down the sidewalks like tropical birds. Men cluster in front of the garages, drinking beer. They watch us. The cops stare and the people stare and no one cares or is afraid or turns their eyes away. The high school girls in their bright purple crinoline stare at me, the white girl in the backseat of the cop car, and wonder what I’ve done.
There are striking numbers of both children and dogs in South Central. Pregnant dogs. Dogs of all sizes with pendulous teats waddle slowly past. Young girls walk down the sidewalks with babies in their arms and young children hanging on their backs. A mother on her way to the laundromat is trailed by five children in a straight line, each carrying exactly the amount of laundry stuffed into pillowcases that he or she is capable of, a toddler bringing up the rear with the box of detergent. The air smells of eucalyptus.
We drive past the site of the 1974 shoot-out between the LAPD and the Symbionese Liberation Army. All that remains is an empty lot. House, house, house, house, empty lot, house, house. Two streets later we see a framed-out house with a pit bull on the second story, though I can’t see any stairs. We go to Winchell’s for coffee, forgoing the doughnuts, which Paige refers to as “fat pills.” The coffee is awful and I drink it.
The radio spits out a constant river of information, unintelligible words and squawks that Paige and Mendoza ignore, until suddenly something is for us and we are speeding towards a set of bungalows. I have no idea what has happened or is about to happen. I imagine they’ll tell me to stay in the car, but to my great surprise they tell me to come with them. I’m wondering if I should have actually read the hold-harmless forms I signed back at the station. Because they leave the doors open, I bring my purse, which is overlarge and full of notebooks. Mendoza tells me to stay with him and I do. Guns are drawn. After they check out a one-room bungalow, Paige tells me to go inside. Two solid inches of broken glass blanket the floor beneath a naked plastic baby doll. That’s it. Other officers materialize, though nothing is happening. We talk for a while and then head to our cars as if we’ve come to the end of a picnic.
The nonevent of this first call has somehow changed the chemistry of the evening. Once we are driving again, Paige and Mendoza start looking for trouble hard. They slow for every group of young men and stare them down. “How you boys doing tonight? Are you getting into any trouble?” The cops, like the boys, are restless. They seem to want to find the very danger they are warning against. A thin boy, who could not be more than thirteen, with a spray of gang tags tattooed across his wiry stomach, aims his finger at us as we drive by.
When the next call comes, we speed into a park and drive directly through a softball game while the game continues around us. People make small allowances for the police car, but they do not stop or look or care. Several other officers are on the scene but there is no disturbance, only the crack of the bat and the cheering that follows.
At dusk we see a man running past a McDonald’s. Paige and Mendoza are both out of the car, but after four steps, Mendoza limps back. “I got shot in the knees,” he tells me, as if he’s only just remembered this. “Can’t run.”
Paige tackles the Latino man after half a block of chase and cuffs him. I watch it like television. A black-and-white is there instantly and takes the man from us. Back at McDonald’s, we’re told there was a hit and run. There is a magazine of bullets in the car that was left behind, and so everyone is convinced a gun must have been thrown into the bushes near the drive-through. We begin to stamp around in the bushes, and I secretly hope to be the one to find the gun and so make my uselessness useful. Despite all the action in the parking lot—police and police cars and a man in handcuffs—the drive-through business stays brisk. Mendoza tells me he’s seen bodies with tape outlines lying out on the asphalt, and it still didn’t slow.
Witnesses materialize from nowhere. Latino men tell the officers a black man in a striped shirt took the gun. The one who does the most talking continually pulls up his shirt to his neck and strokes his round stomach. We drive around until we find a black man in a striped shirt. Paige and Mendoza separate him from his two older companions.
“He’s been with us all night,” the older men say.
“Sure,” the cops say.
“Put your hands over your head,” Mendoza says.
“Why do I got to put my hands up?” the man asks.
Mendoza’s voice is light and firm. He does not threaten so much as edify. “Because I said so.”
As quickly as the man is cuffed he is released, and then we are driving again. It is dark now, and the people who stare are no longer people I can exactly see. When we finally return to the station, six hours after we left, there is a new crew of men and women handcuffed to the bench. Paige, who seems disappointed that my ride-along was so quiet, starts pulling down the binders over his desk to show me pictures of dead young men. I know that every binder that winds around this building contains more of the same. Polaroids. The gun fired so close to the face that it scorched the skin. A bullet in an ear. Countless pictures of bodies face down in pools of blood. Paige tells me about a mother who killed her kids by putting them in big garbage cans and pouring cement over them. She beat them first, but didn’t kill them. “I mean,” he says, “of course they died. Ten kids.” He shows me a filing cabinet with miniature drawers like a library card catalogue, each drawer crammed with cards like Ishmael’s. Every person on every card is dead.
