But on this first day I wanted to make a good impression, so I made sure I was “dressed for success” in full regulation rig from head to foot. When I checked myself in the mirror before I left home, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I was quickly disillusioned.
I arrived at the precinct early, long before roll call, and stopped off at the locker room to stash a few of my personal items away.
Petrie and Blanco had lockers farther down the row from mine, and they were standing in front of them, changing into their uniforms. I greeted them, rather shyly. We hadn’t met before, but I could see their name tags, pinned to the chests of their uniform shirts.
And they, of course, could see mine.
“Aren’t you Melton, the new guy?” Petrie asked me.
“That’s right,” I said.
If I expected him to say something like it’s nice to meet you or welcome to the force, I was disappointed. He stared at me, looking at me up and down, and then he turned to Blanco—who was also giving me the eye, and in a way that seemed more challenging than friendly.
“Hey, take a look at this, Blanco. What have we got here?” Petrie said loudly, after he’d taken his first good look at me. “Is this really a rookie, or is it a male model all dressed up in a police uniform for a photo shoot?”
Blanco now looked me up and down in the same way his partner had. “He’s got to be an actor, playing a cop in a movie or a TV show,” he suggested. “No real cop ever looked that pulled-together!”
“Yeah, get a load of the shine on those shoes. I can see myself in them. And the crease in those trousers. And that shirt! I don’t think it’s just pressed. I think it’s been starched, too.”
“I bet he starched and ironed his socks and underwear, too,” Blanco opined. “Maybe that’s why he’s standing there so stiff,” he added, maliciously, “as though he’s got a nightstick rammed up his ass.”
I found myself in the awful predicament of feeling I ought to say something, but having no clue what to say. So I just stood there, no doubt looking every bit as stupid and uncomfortable as I felt.
“Kind of quiet, aren’t you, Melton?” Petrie baited me.
“I haven’t had my coffee yet,” I said. “I guess I’m still half asleep.”
“He’s not just pretty,” Petrie told Blanco—once again referring to me in the third person, which was beginning to annoy me. “He’s polite, too. Well-mannered. I guess that’s what they teach them at the academy, nowadays.”
“I wonder just how accommodating he’s prepared to be,” Blanco said. “You know, how much ass he’s prepared to kiss?”
“Plenty, I bet,” Petrie suggested. “Hey, Melton, once you’ve had your coffee and you’re all wide awake and ready to go, you can start by kissing mine, if you want to. You might as well start getting some practice in. Trust me, rookie, it’ll come in handy on this job. “
Blanco snickered. “You know, we could sure use a new precinct bitch. Maybe we ought to offer Melton, here, the job. He looks like he’d be perfect for it.” Blanco then deigned to address me directly. “You do know what a precinct bitch is, don’t you, rookie?”
“No, sir,” I replied, feeling miserable but struggling to hide the fact.
“That’s a new cop fresh out of the academy who’s so damn pretty, so damn sexy, that we don’t risk him going out in the field,” Blanco said, salaciously. “We wouldn’t want him to get his pretty face and body bruised, let alone shot up. Instead, we keep him around here, sort of like a pet. And any time a cop gets horny, he takes the precinct bitch into one of the interrogation rooms. He tells the bitch to get down on his knees and suck his cock. And the bitch does it. If he knows what’s good for him. If not, he learns fast enough.”
Petrie chimed in. “You can always tell who’s the precinct bitch. He’s the one who always has dirt patches on the knees of his pants, from spending so much time kneeling on the floor with a dick in his mouth.” He once again glanced down at my neatly pressed uniform trousers, but this time he smirked even more broadly.
“Sometimes we take turns shoving the bitch belly-down on the table in the interrogation room and fucking him up the ass,” Blanco informed me. “And the guys who don’t want to fuck him can stand on the other side of the one-way glass and watch.”
“Yeah, and if they get so turned on that they have to jack off, and they come all over the glass, then it’s part of the bitch’s job to clean it off.” Blanco looked and sounded more than a little turned on, himself, as he added this detail.
Petrie emitted an amused snort which reminded me of a pig rooting about in a trough after mash. “And when the show’s good enough, we even sell tickets.”
I realized that the two cops were putting on a well-rehearsed act. They were taking turns, each trying to outdo the other by coming up with more and more outrageous comments, to see which of them could get the bigger rise out of me.
I could feel myself blushing furiously, which made me all the angrier with myself for allowing them to get to me.
“Well, all this is interesting, gentlemen,” I managed to say. “But I don’t see that it has anything to do with me. I’m nobody’s bitch!”
Petrie smiled at me in a sly, knowing way that made me feel distinctly queasy.
“No?” he asked.
“Hell, no!” I insisted.
“You think not? Then you’d better watch out for that bastard Ducati, kid.”
Even at the academy, I’d heard about Franco Ducati. He had the reputation of being the toughest cop in Precinct Two. When I’d first heard I was assigned to the same precinct, I was actually naïve enough to be excited about the prospect of meeting him!
“Why’s that?” I asked, in my innocence.
Petrie enlightened me. “He fucks pretty little rookies like you up the ass just to keep in practice. When he doesn’t want to go to the trouble to find himself a real man to fuck.”
“He’s pounded the butt of every newbie who’s ever set foot in here,” Blanco added.
“When the department decided to become an equal opportunity employer and hire gay men and lesbians, it didn’t know what it was letting itself in for,” Petrie said. “It didn’t know it’d be hiring sexual predators, too!”
“Yeah, Ducati is what they call a real asshole bandit.” As Blanco said that, I thought I detected a decidedly salacious tone in his voice. To me, he sounded more titillated than put off by the thought of an “asshole bandit’s” presence on the force. “Wait’ll he gets his first good look at you, Melton,” he went on. “He’ll be drooling—from both ends.”
I tried not to show my increasing discomfort at the turn the conversation had taken.
“Aw, you guys are just making fun of me,” I protested. “He can’t be that bad.”
“Take my word for it, rookie,” Blanco told me. “He’s worse.”
We joined the other cops who were drifting in, one by one, and taking seats for roll call. Ducati wasn’t among them yet, but by coincidence he continued to be the topic of discussion.
I kept my mouth shut and listened to the discussion taking place around me. I learned that Ducati’s partner was out on medical leave for an indefinite period. Who’d be assigned to share his patrol car was the hot topic that morning. Judging by what I overheard, the experienced cops seemed to be split about fifty-fifty. Half of them thought that riding with Ducati was a privilege, and the other half considered it an ordeal to be avoided at all costs.
When Ducati himself swaggered in, the talk about him immediately ceased.
I studied him, as surreptitiously as I could, while he exchanged greetings with his buddies.
If a horny gay guy wanted a fantasy figure of a stud cop to jack off over, then Franco Ducati would have filled the bill to perfection. He was tall and powerfully built—all muscle, no fat. He carried himself in that easy, confident way that men who have good bodies and are well aware of the fact so often have. I estimated his age was somewhere in the mid-thirties, about the same as my torm
entors Blanco and Petrie. He had brown hair, flecked here and there with gray, and he wore it close-cropped on the back of his neck, and on his temples, a little longer on top.
He was almost but not quite handsome. There was a hardness in his features and in his eyes that could be a bit off-putting. I got the impression that he wasn’t a big talker. Sitting there, he said little, but kept his face saturnine and watchful, smiling only briefly in response to the comments of his fellow officers. But I sensed that his calm gray eyes observed everything from under their thin curved eyebrows. He was clean-shaven except for a bushy little mustache, and his uniform and shoes were immaculate. But of course—I couldn’t help thinking, with a flash of resentment—no one would dare to taunt him for looking too good!
Finally, the watch commander appeared, and called us to order. He took roll call. I was flustered when, after responding to my name, heads turned in my direction and I found myself the object of the other cops’ curiosity. Some of them looked friendly, others seemed wary. I couldn’t read Ducati’s expression, which I concluded was neutral.
Consulting his clipboard, the watch commander ran through a long list of announcements.
“Ducati,” he said at last, putting down his clipboard. “I’m going to pair you up with Melton, for the time being.”
“With the goddamn rookie?” Ducati exclaimed. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? It’ll be a good experience for both of you. I’m sure Melton will have all sorts of questions that you’ll be able to answer for him.”
“Like I have the time to listen to a lot of crap from a goddamn newbie,” Ducati said, in a stage whisper.
The watch commander ignored his interjection. “And it’ll do you good to take a new man under your wing and mentor him. It’ll give you a chance to exercise your paternal instincts.” The watch commander would have made a good actor. He actually said this with a straight face!
I could hear Ducati muttering obscenities under his breath, against a background of snickers from our fellow officers. This wasn’t exactly encouraging. Worse, Blanco and Petrie were exchanging leers and nudging each other, sharing their own private dirty joke at my expense.
But I had no choice except to follow my “mentor” to the garage.
“Okay, kid,” Ducati growled. “There are only three things you have to keep in mind if you want to get along with me. First, keep your mouth shut. Second, do exactly what I tell you to, and don’t do anything I don’t tell you to do. And third, don’t even think about sucking up to me, kissing my ass, or in any other way trying to impress me—because about the best you can hope for along those lines is that I won’t be totally pissed off at you or disgusted with you by the end of our shift. You got all that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, meekly.
“Good boy.” Ducati said that in the way one might address a pet dog which had just taken its dump in the course of its walk.
We got rolling.
I have to give Ducati credit. He might not have liked the assignment, but he didn’t complain about it to me. Instead, he was businesslike. As we cruised the neighborhood, he explained where we were going, what we were on the lookout for, and why.
In between these mini lectures, he did make overtures toward small talk. He asked me about my background. He seemed amused by the fact that my work history included the security job.
“Oh, so you were a rent-a-cop, huh?” he asked.
“I guess that’s one way to describe it.”
“What’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to you on that job?”
“Nothing exciting ever happened,” I had to admit. “Once I came in to work first thing in the morning and I found a drunk passed out in the vestibule. You know, the little space between the street door, and the inner entrance door which is kept locked? I guess he thought that was as good a place as any to bed down for the night. I called the paramedics and they hauled him away. And another time, somebody’s microwave caught fire and set off the smoke alarm. We had to evacuate the building, and Gideon and I took charge of that,” I said, with a hint of pride no doubt audible in my tone of voice.
Ducati grunted. “It does sound boring. And who’s Gideon?”
“Another guard I worked with.”
“Buddy of yours?”
“Sure. We got on okay,” I said—a discreet understatement on my part. “He thought I was crazy because I wanted to become a cop,” I added.
“He was right. This is a tough job, and it’s not for everyone.”
“And you’re thinking it’s not for me, either. Is that it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to.”
“And I’m not necessarily thinking it, either. Don’t tell me what I’m thinking, kid,” he said, although not unkindly.
“Sorry.”
“Forget it. I was thinking that some of that bright-eyed, tail-wagging, puppy-dog eagerness of yours will wear off soon enough. So enjoy it while it lasts. Tell me something, kid,” Ducati demanded. “Are you still a virgin?”
I wasn’t sure I liked the turn our conversation had taken. “Of course not.”
“Really? You sure as hell look and act like one. You look like you’ve still got all your cum bottled up inside you, and you’re about to burst from the pressure. Fuck! Now you’re starting to turn all red. Aw, I’m making the pretty boy blush. That is so fucking sweet.”
“Knock it off,” I muttered.
“What’d you say?”
“I said, knock it off. I may have to work with you, and take orders from you. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take any crap from you.”
“Oh, you’re a tough guy, huh? Not as much of a pushover as I thought you were, are you?”
“Listen, I know we have to work together, and I know I have a lot to learn—”
“Rookie, you have everything to learn.”
“All right, everything to learn. I respect you and I know I can learn a lot from you. But I don’t see why I have to be pushed around in the process. Being new on the job is stressful enough, without all the harassment on top of it. I’m already sick of pretending to be a good sport by putting up with it.”
“Already? So who’s been harassing you, besides me?”
“Nobody. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, tell me.”
“I don’t like to name names.”
“Anything you tell me in confidence doesn’t go outside this car.” There was a hint of impatience in Ducati’s voice. “So spill it, rookie.”
“Well … there were these two guys, Petrie and Blanco—”
“Oh, those assholes. They’re morons. Ignore them.”
“I tried to.”
“Yeah? Well, good for you. You’re no doormat, I’ll say that for you.” As Ducati said that, I almost thought I could detect a grudging respect in his tone of voice.
After that, his behavior toward me subtly changed. He was still businesslike, and could hardly be described as warm. But he dropped the belligerence.
Ducati, I quickly discovered, was the kind of cop who was the object of a good deal of genuine respect on the street. Everywhere we went, people seemed to know him. They greeted him, and he engaged them in conversation. Some of this respect seemed to spill over onto me, simply because I was in Ducati’s company. When he introduced me to people, he didn’t mention the fact that I was new to the force. No doubt it was obvious, even to a lot of the civilians we encountered. But I appreciated the way Ducati treated me as though I was just another experienced police officer—at least when we were in the presence of the public.
When the two of us were alone, though, it was another matter. Then he continued to call me “rookie” or “kid,” and he saw no need to censor his speech around me, or handle me with kid gloves. But I was already beginning to understand that his toughness was largely a façade. He’d constructed it long ago, as a defense, and now, like most such long-standing walls, it had developed
cracks and chinks.
Chapter Six
A Watering Hole
Among the bars downtown was an establishment called The Tudor Lounge. When it had first opened, decades ago, its interior had been designed to suggest a typical English pub. That was fair enough. The problem was that the décor had never been refurbished, so that its original brash tackiness had long ago mellowed to a distinctly rundown seediness. For some reason that has never been satisfactorily explained to me, this was the bar where all of the local cops chose to hang out when they were off duty. The place, in short, had become an institution, and as a result its owners saw no reason to change anything. But as a watering hole, The Tudor Lounge was comfortable enough—it certainly possessed the virtue of not being at all pretentious—and it was an ideal place to go to find out the latest police force news and gossip.
And, in its discreet way, the bar could also be a pickup spot. I discovered that it wasn’t just a certain type of gay man who had a thing for cops. There were women, too, who liked to hang out around cops and end up in bed with them, if they could.
As for same-sex hookups—they too could be made at the Tudor, as we called it for short, provided one was careful. It was widely known that if a woman police officer happened to be a lesbian, and she wanted to socialize with other lesbian officers, then the place for her to go was not one of the openly gay bars in town, but the Tudor.
Nor was anybody surprised if two or more male officers got into an intense private conversation at one of the bar’s tables or in a booth. Such a discussion might well be perfectly innocent and nonsexual. If, however, it was sexual—if, in fact, the cops were cruising each other—then that was their business. Nobody necessarily read anything into it when men left the bar together.
As a rookie, it took me a few visits to the Tudor before I had observed enough of what went on inside the place to understand the protocols. Once I did, though, I had to admit that the place provided an interesting alternative to the average gay bar. Despite the presence of the women officers and the female “cop groupies,” the ambience was still predominantly male. I noticed that it was unusual for a cop to bring his wife or his girlfriend there. No, the Tudor was basically a place where male cops could hang out with other male cops. The atmosphere reeked of testosterone.
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