by Ann Patchett
Desrae calls me. “Ann, are you ready now?” I tell her yes and take off. I’m on bar number three, the farthest one to run to, and no tape. Still, I take my time getting on. I tense everything I have to stop swinging and then count, one, Mississippi, one. I close my eyes and it seems like the crowd is talking to me in a dream. You look great, number three. You look great, sweetheart. Your hands don’t hurt. It’s all in your head. Think about a nice cold beer, number three. I’ll buy you a beer, Iowa. They’re wrong about one thing: my hands do hurt, but what pain is so bad for a minute? When I get to one, Mississippi, nineteen, the officer brought up to time the event calls, “Number three, drop.”
“Why?” I say, not dropping. Is there blood running down my arms? Have I been disqualified? I’m only on nineteen.
“Drop, three, and hold your place.” I drop and hold. It does not occur to me that my minute is up, which it is. I had done my run to the bar in 16.4 seconds, leaving myself a comfortable margin of just over half a second to spare.
The final event, the 160-pound weight drag, is the easiest. This is the one where you must prove you are strong enough to pull your shot partner out of traffic. Run twenty-five yards, then pull a rope attached to a lead weight about the size of two stacked copies of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages (who knew something so small could be so heavy?) for another twenty-five yards, backwards, through deep, soft dust. When Desrae calls our name, we are to say left, and go left; the next person is to call right, and go right. The idea is to divide us into two even groups to pull the weight from one side of the course to the other, but the group seems to be utterly stumped by this one. Three people in a row insist on saying right.
“You people have to pay attention,” Desrae says. “They don’t put up with this kind of foolishness once you get into the Academy.”
Eventually, we all manage to count off correctly. There is a great deal of cheering for this event, since by now we’ve got some first names down and can yell, “Go, Nathan! Go, buddy!” I clap along. This will soon be over and I will pass. When it’s my turn the crowd goes wild. I am the mascot, the favorite girl. No sense cheering for the two who won’t pass or the one who might beat your time. Cheer for the scruffy one who barely clears her time but somehow, miraculously, manages. I am the long shot, the dark horse. My legs are rubber as I pull the weight backwards. It would have been a piece of cake three hours ago, but now I’m going slow and the giant men begin to chant my name, dragging one syllable into two so it sounds something like “Ay-un, Ay-un, Ay-un.” This will never happen again, and I try to hold on to it. This course is nearest the picnic tables where we began, under the pine trees, in the shade, in the soft dirt where the Police Academy looks most like the friendly summer camp I remember from my childhood. When I clear the finish line I’m laughing. “You guys are like a fraternity,” I say to the men who are clapping my shoulders and patting my head.
“You just wait,” a cop from Utah tells me. “Wait until you’re in the Academy. It’s like this every day. This is what it’s all about. There was a girl in my group who couldn’t finish a run once and me and another guy came up on either side of her and hooked her arms and we ran carrying her.”
I know that there are many different jobs on the police force, many positions better suited to women, but at this moment I am of the opinion that only men should be cops. They’re built for it. They can carry people while running. They can vault the walls.
We go back to the picnic tables to wait for our scores. Everyone comes by to congratulate me. A man named Jim, from Larchmont, New York, tells me he bought out his father’s insurance company last year, that he has a wife and two kids and a good business and he has come here to try out for the Academy. That was all he wanted to do, and his wife was supportive. I ask him why he didn’t go to the NYPD.
“Not a chance,” he says. “They’re all fat. LAPD is the only place to be a cop.”
There are two types of people in the world: those who want to be cops more than anything and believe that everyone else secretly wants to be a cop as well, and those who cannot imagine it. Twenty-nine of the first sort are in my PAT group, and one of the second. I feel like I’m betraying their optimism and good nature just by being there. I pass the test with a score of 288. Most of those who have passed have scores well over 300, one at 360. I run to the pay phone and call my father to come and get me. By the time I get back to see my group again, everyone has left. Desrae is drinking lemonade at a picnic table with some other people from personnel. I thank her, and tell her she gave me my test yesterday, too.
“Yeah,” she says, “sure.”
I wait for my father near the guard shack at the front entrance. A young black man from my group is also waiting there. He must be six feet six. He sailed over the wall like a gymnast clearing a vaulting horse. He asks me how I did.
I shrug. “Passed,” I say. “Not great, but I passed.”
He tells me that’s all that matters.
I ask him where he’s from, and he tells me Jackson, Mississippi. He tells me he graduated from Mississippi State and got into law school at Ole Miss but he wants to be a cop in L.A. “My parents want me to go to law school, but I’m doing this for me,” he says. “I was going to be a cop in Mississippi. I almost dropped out of college, but I didn’t. I stayed in. Now I’m going to do it here.”
I want to tell him to listen to his parents, but he’s having a good day and doesn’t need my input. We congratulate each other, wish each other well. Then my father is there to pick me up.
What I have learned today is that I couldn’t get through the Police Academy. I am not made of sterner stuff. Later, I will be less clear on this point. I will not remember my fears and inabilities so well. Later, I will remember only that I passed. Other people will tell me I could have done it but chose not to. Still, driving back home that afternoon with my father, driving down through Elysian Park, I know the truth. Not a chance. Figuring there is no time like the present, I tell him so.
“Wait and see,” my father says.
But after I take the longest shower on record and eat the breakfast he’s made me, he says he has something to tell me. “If you really aren’t going to do the job, if you won’t be a cop, then I think you shouldn’t go through the Academy. I’m only saying this because you said you didn’t want to go, but I don’t think you should take up the spot of somebody who wants it so badly.”
“But I told you I was never going to be a cop. I told you it was all for writing.”
“I didn’t believe you,” he says.
Later that afternoon my father gives me two presents, a medal of the Virgin Mary given to him in school by his favorite nun, and his wedding ring from his marriage to my mother. “There’s a lot of good metal in there,” he says. “You could melt it down and make something nice out of it.”
How could my father have believed that I didn’t want to be a cop? It was all he ever wanted. My father tried for three years to get into the Police Academy. Time after time he appealed and was denied because of a heart condition. When he finally found a doctor who would slip him through, he never gave them an opportunity to ask him to leave. He went thirty-two years without taking a sick day because he was afraid of having to get a doctor’s note in order to be able to go back to work. That’s what it meant to him. Why wouldn’t he think I wanted his job?
For some time after I took the test, I felt as though I’d failed—although I’d passed, and my oral exam score came two weeks later and it was a perfect 100. My father said he’d never heard of that happening before. I didn’t have what it took to make it through the Police Academy, to do what my father had done, and even if I had, I could see now that the book I had wanted to write would have been impossible. When I thought about the people I had taken the tests with, about their deep and abiding desire for this job, I knew I could never have followed Officer Crane’s admonishment to report any misconduct, especially n
ot in writing. I was an insider, even if I wasn’t a cop, and my affection for the institution was inextricably bound to my affection for my father. My father was never in favor of my telling any story that didn’t have a happy ending.
And so I put my notes away, finished up my time at Radcliffe, moved back to Tennessee. I went back to writing novels. Other than occasionally jumping over a six-foot wall, a skill I have maintained, I remembered this experience as something I didn’t do, a book I didn’t write. But in 2007, an editor for the Washington Post Magazine asked me for an essay about something I had done one summer, and so I said I would write a piece about the summer I tried out for the police academy. Sifting through the notes I had taken years before, I remembered the basic point behind my intentions, and all these years later that point has never changed: I am proud of my father. I am proud of his life’s work. For a brief time I saw how difficult it would be to be a police officer in the city of Los Angeles, how easy it would be to fail at the job, as so many have failed. My father succeeded. He served his city well. I wanted to make note of that.
(Washington Post Magazine, June 24, 2007)
Fact vs. Fiction
The Miami University of Ohio Convocation Address of 2005
I’VE MADE A point of not giving talks about Truth & Beauty. When it was first published, I didn’t go on a book tour or give interviews the way I would have with a novel. It’s not that I mind talking about Lucy, or that it upsets me; it doesn’t. In fact, I love to talk about Lucy. But I didn’t want to go around telling the same stories over and over again until they felt worn-out and common, like part of a routine you use to sell books. I decided to come to Miami of Ohio because I was so glad that you wanted to read our two books together. I’ve always pictured them traveling as a pair, the same way Lucy and I were a pair. Still, I can’t help but think how nice it would be if Lucy were around to do the speaking instead of me. It would be a better arrangement, since writing made Lucy especially miserable. In the best of all possible worlds, I would write the book and she could go out and give all the talks. She adored being up onstage. Lucy would accept any invitation to speak for the price of a plane ticket. She had a remarkable ability to connect to people. Everywhere she went people loved her and she was able to soak up all that love. Then again, she often missed her flights or forgot what time she was supposed to show up to give a lecture once she had arrived. I’m sorry to say you’ve gotten the less colorful, more reliable member of the team, which I suppose is a mixed blessing. Had I been the one to die first I feel certain that Lucy would have wanted to write a book about me. I’m just not entirely sure she would have gotten around to it.
I knew Lucy for years before she knew me. The first time I saw her was the first day of our freshman year at college. I don’t remember any one person telling me her story but still I knew it, the same way you know intimate details about the lives of movie stars. You don’t go looking for them, they just seem to enter your consciousness by osmosis. Lucy had had cancer as a child. She had lost half her jaw. She was one of the first children to have chemotherapy. She had very nearly died. I watched her from a distance, curious but not wanting to intrude. During those first few weeks of classes she was often alone, a tiny thing with her head bent down to hide her disfigurement beneath a long curtain of hair, but very quickly she became the center of attention. She cut her hair off. She moved in the middle of the most popular students, older students who asked for her opinions and laughed at her jokes. Even though part of her face was missing, I thought she was glamorous. Without ever realizing I was doing it, I made up a story about Lucy, and then that story took the place of knowing her. I made her into a brave and glamorous girl. She was like a character in a novel who brushes up against her own death and then walks away stronger, forged in the fires of her own experience. I would say hello to her sometimes when I passed her in the cafeteria, and she would look at me as if we had never met and say nothing at all.
In fact, we hadn’t met, but I forgot this in the wake of knowing so much about her. Later on, when we did become friends, I was surprised to find how much of her story I’d gotten wrong, and equally surprised by the ways in which I’d gotten it right. When we went to graduate school together in Iowa, Lucy was a poet and I wrote short stories. The poets and the fiction writers would play softball against each other in the fall, before the snows covered over the field. Lucy and I would sit along the baselines, the only fiction writer and poet who sat together. The poets always won and the fiction writers never minded. The poets may have had a stronger pitching style, but their lives would be harder. Poetry is not a business that anyone would recommend if what you’re hoping for is a living wage. After we left Iowa, Lucy decided to take a crack at telling the story of her life, the story that so many people had so freely told for her for so many years. First, she published an essay in Harper’s Magazine about the freedom that came with wearing a mask on Halloween. That essay led to a book deal, and that book was Autobiography of a Face. Lucy burst onto the literary scene just as she had always planned to; the only difference was that she did it with a memoir instead of a book of poetry.
People used to ask Lucy and me if we were competitive with one another. We were both writers, after all. We attended the same schools, won many of the same fellowships; at times we had the same publisher. Could best friends wind up on the same playing fields again and again without having some tension over who was going to win? Certainly there were some things we could be competitive about: who was actually getting more work done or who looked better in a certain pale-green dress we shared, but we were never competitive when it came to the external markers of success. After all, what we did was so different: I was a novelist; I drew from my imagination. Lucy was an essayist, a writer of nonfiction; she worked from her experience. In short, she told the truth, and I lied.
Lucy was my closest friend for seventeen years. She was the person I knew best in the world, and she was certainly the person who knew me best. She was an extremely complicated person: needy and brilliant, demanding and affectionate, depressed and still the life of every party. I knew that I would never be able to hold her in my mind exactly the way she was. I knew that every year she was dead her memory would become simpler, and I didn’t want that to happen. Very soon after she died, I wrote a magazine article about her. I thought that if I wrote it all down, the story of the two of us, the story of friendship and what we had done together, that I could remember the truth about her. In the same way it had happened for Lucy, my article led to a book contract, and I was grateful for that. There was still so much I wanted to say. People kept asking me, “Are you feeling better? You seem better today.” But I didn’t want to be better. I wanted to stay with Lucy, and writing the book was the way I could do that.
So now there are three stories: the one I made up about Lucy before I knew her, the one she told about herself, and the one I told about her after she died. And in between those three there are three hundred more: stories Lucy told to guys she met in airports, stories that were written about her in fashion magazines, stories Lucy told me that I wouldn’t tell and the things she never told me at all, gossip-laced-with-fact stories that her students told to one another or that fans wrote about her on websites. Every one of them was a portrait of a brilliant, complicated woman, but no two described exactly the same woman. All of which would lead a person to ask, What is the truth?
Lucy wrote the truth. I am a novelist. I make stuff up.
What exactly is a made-up story? I used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that people who read my novels, even all of my novels, wouldn’t really know anything more about me or my life at the end of them than they had known when they started. I’ve written novels about unwed mothers in Kentucky and a black musician in Memphis. I wrote about a gay magician in Los Angeles and a hostage crisis in Peru. The amount of real knowledge that I had on any of these subjects would weigh in about as substantially as an issue of People magazine. In
my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own. I think this is probably true of most novelists. The bright-green space alien with three heads and seventeen suctioning fingers in the latest science-fiction novel may be unrecognizable as a human, while in fact having the same emotional composition as the author’s mother. One of the things I’ve discovered in life is that no matter how vastly different our experiences are, the emotional responses to those experiences are often universal. That’s why we can relate to the story of a child suffering through the ravages of cancer and the humiliations and cruelty of the life that followed. We’ve all felt humiliated at some point. We’ve all felt that we weren’t attractive enough or attractive in the right way. We’ve all felt misunderstood. We’ve all wanted a bit more love. So, even without the cancer, we can feel what Lucy felt. That is the hallmark of her art: she was able to take something impossibly specific and make it universal.
