The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  On the other hand, there are also those who point out that the Loan Lizards of Wall Street or whatever you want to call whoever or whatever gone and done it, screwed themselves in the bargain too in the end, which is only what they deserved, even if the marks, including yours truly, sure ’nuff didn’t.

  When the shit hit the swamp cooler ceiling fan and blew down the inflatable dollar, I found myself shafted up the ass by two mortgages I couldn’t even think of carrying under the sudden circumstances and I needed buildings to stay in any business at all.

  When in doubt, follow the money, so who made out in the Great Deflation? Or thought they would? Or might still?

  Seems to me it had to be the wise guys who blew all the hot air into the balloon that tanked the housing and building market back in the day of the so-called Great Recession and the whole damned real economy with it. The banks wrote mortgages they knew were shit, packaged them into so-called collateralized debt obligations perfumed to smell like shinola, which they fobbed off on the suckers, who repackaged them and sold them off to other suckers, and so on and so forth, until there was so much ring-around-the rosy that they all ended up buying their own crap more times removed than they could follow, and down the whole house of marked cards came.

  Or as some smart-ass wrote at the time, “They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.”

  Well, as some other smart-ass pointed out, you can’t allow yourself to get washed away by the same stream of bullshit twice, so this time around, “They,” whoever They is, tried something different, unless you’re one of those innocents or cynics able to believe the Great Deflation just happened.

  What with half the houses and a good share of the business real estate in the good ol’ US of A stuck with mortgages that was under water—something we all in New Orleans knew more than we wanted to post-Katrina—and the whole economy holdin’ on to the rim of the toilet bowl thanks to the real-estate market collapse threatening to drag it all the way down the willy hole, even tight-assed Republican politicians had the brain cells to realize that something had to be done before they got sucked down with it.

  A lot of different somethings as it turned out, all of them designed to put a floor under the mortgage market, all of them various means by which state and mostly federal governments and agencies put iron-glad guarantees under various kinds of no-risk mortgages rendering them no-risk in the process. No less than 20 percent down. Not less than twenty-year amortizations at fixed interest rates of no more than 7 percent annually with balloon payments at the end strictly forbidden.

  Sweetheart deals for both the banks and those who could pony up the down payment. Even more so in post-Katrina and late pre–Hurricane Season New Orleans, where there were all sorts of trick deals to get the down payment on the federal cuff as hurricane recovernment money, thanks in no small part to good ol’ Brad Pitt, who waved his magic wand and got Ninth Ward Katrina victims brand-new houses with the down payment ponied up as a subsidy.

  Sure seemed like a no-brainer to me at the time. While I could hardly get a government subsidy for the down payment on a mortgage to buy a whorehouse even in New Orleans, I could wangle a little something extra on the down payment on a mortgage to buy the building in the Quarter containing a cash-cow saloon by enticing my friendly neighborhood bank to fold in enough extra of Uncle Sap’s money in a combined deal to cover the down payment on the cathouse in the Garden District too. This was koshered by calling the annual cash flow from the saloons and the bordello whose premises I was renting at the time “capital” to inflate my net worth, and greasing the requisite palm to look the other way. It ain’t called the Big Easy for nothing.

  But then the Great Deflation hit the fan and the good times, which seemed just about to start rollin’ again, got squashed down with a thud that made the Great Recession seem like a replay of Herbert Hoover’s and FDR’s and Huey Long’s golden oldies.

  How did it happen? You could pay with your deflated dollar and make your choice of crazy conspiracy theories. The Chinese stood to benefit because they were holding all that paper denominated in dollars. OPEC made out like bandits because oil was priced in dollars and they could jack the price just about as high as they wanted. Ditto the drug cartels. Ditto Mafia loan sharks. Would you believe a conspiracy of all of the above? Would you believe Elvis gone and masterminded it after returning from Mars on his flying saucer?

  “Never attribute anything to conspiracy that can be explained by assholery,” yet another wise guy suggested, and I’d never discount it as a major factor in human monkey business, and especially not when there were all sorts of fancy computer trading programs helpful in aiding all the players in tripping over each other’s dicks at the same time.

  However it happened, the dollar somehow went up big-time against everything else. Maybe it started with the Chinese cutting the value of the renminbi for some inscrutable reason like giving lagging exports a shot in the arm, and the Japanese and Europeans and all were forced to play follow the leader. Or maybe it really was the Loan Lizards of Wall Street out to gobble up the land of the free and everything built on it, in conspiracy with other secret masters or not, since they did, after all, have the clout in Washington to keep the Fed from trying to keep the dollar down, especially since both the Republicans and the Democrats were beating their patriotic breasts and competing with one another to take the credit for the glorious comeback of the superbuck.

  Was great fun, folks, now wasn’t it? Who didn’t think the good times were on a roll when the dollar that would’ve previously bought you one cheap stogie now would buy a whole box of primo cigars? Who didn’t want to buy a Chinese entertainment console for the price of a plate of General Tso’s Chicken? Who didn’t want to take the Grand Tour of Europe for the price of a week in Disney World? No one, or so it seemed at first, when everything cost five times less dollars to buy than the year before. Every man a king, every gal a queen, as good ol’ Huey Long promised in order to win elections way back in the day.

  But for each dollar that bought five times more, someone had to be selling something for five times less. I was selling a bottle’s worth of Jack Daniel’s for the price I used to get for a shot of bar whiskey. A full nighter with one of my best girls in the royale suite now went for the previous price of a blow job behind a parked car. The same thing, of course, was going on in every business in the country.

  Well, those who adapt survive, which was anyone with a brain in his head large enough to figure out that you had to cut what were now ridiculously high wages, which wasn’t too hard to do, seeing that the Federal Minimum Wage would now have supported a family of twelve in high style if it wasn’t adjusted downward, seeing as how the annual federal and state budget deficits could be eliminated simply by letting the taxes fall slower than the falling budgets in dollar terms.

  Seemed for a moment nobody got screwed.

  Nobody, that is, who didn’t owe debt written in stone in the pre-deflation numbers.

  Which, what with mortgages, and credit cards, and corporate and government bonds and the national debt, was just about nobody, the governments of the United States, Louisiana, and New Orleans, and yours truly included.

  Genuine riches, like gamblers’ luck, have to flow from one place to another if they’re moving at all. Real wealth is the kind that can’t be created or destroyed by the price of bullshit futures on the schlock exchange or the dollar price of pussy. Farmland, factories, sports franchises, boats and trains and planes, real estate. The lion’s share of which had debt of one kind or another to the Credit Card Banditos, the Loan Lizards of Wall Street, the Chinese, Ali Blah Blah and the Forty Financial Engineers.

  Debt that could neither be carried nor written down to its true worth in current superbuck dollars, and believe me I tried!

  During the Great Recession, these bastards had ended up selling Confederate Money derivatives and deadbeat-backed mortgage bonds to themselves in the biggest pyramid scam in history,
and when it collapsed, they ended up repossessing a lot of real estate they couldn’t unload without all these government mortgage backing programs.

  Now the same Loan Shark Lizards were holding mortgages on even more real estate, mortgages whose values were far from under water to say the least in steroid dollar terms, but whose interest payments were now impossible for most of us to meet for the same reason, and were foreclosing on whatever tasty morsels they chose to wrap their reptilian tongues around.

  It didn’t take a financial engineer to see that when the government sucked the necessary hot air out of the dollar and it fell back to earth, as it had to if the Chinese weren’t going to foreclose on the entire United States, those who had run this version of the Great Scam would own the country—real estate, livestock, and factories—and be able to turn it into their plantations like the lords and ladies of the antebellum romances.

  That’s who wins and who loses, but don’t ask me whether the winners just staggered into it, the luck of stepping in their own shit as they say, or whether it was a diabolical evil conspiracy. I reckon the historians, and the conspiracy creeps, and the novelists and movie makers, will be playing at figuring that out for the next hundred years or so, and living quite well off of trying.

  J. B. Lafitte, like millions of other folks not in on the scam, had a more immediate impossible problem. I was deep in foreclosure on the whorehouse in the Garden District and the saloon building in the Quarter, and having by then abandoned the saloons and the whorehouse whose premises I had been renting, if I didn’t find some way to weasel out of it shortly, I’d be entirely out on the street.

  And at the time, I hadn’t a clue.

  6

  Luke’s Alligator Swamp Police did indeed become the acknowledged top gang in their turf, with the local citizenry benefiting by this rude new enforcement of something like order if not law.

  The police might still not be loved or even exactly respected by the main beneficiaries thereof, fear and loathing of the cops being all but bred into the gene pool of most of New Orleans, let alone the Alligator Swamp, but there was grudging appreciation of the diminishment of rapes, armed robbries, murder, and general mindless mayhem.

  And the gangbangers came to realize that the rules of engagement enforced by the Alligator Swamp Police had certain advantages over the previously darwinian law of this here jungle, like your chances of getting killed were noticeably diminished while the proceeds of the usual monkey business were not.

  They came to accept that the police were something you could deal with as long as you played by their rules. Don’t give them no trouble, and they won’t screw with you.

  It worked for as far north, south, and east of the Brad Pitt Houses as the Alligator Swamp Police could make their presence known without airboats or reinforcements, which were not about to be forthcoming.

  The Experimental Community Outreach Unit was a success. One would have thought that Luke Martin would have gotten the credit and maybe even a quick promotion to sergeant. One would have thought that similar units would be deployed all over the Alligator Swamp.

  One would have been dead wrong.

  The main business of the New Orleans Police Department was business, namely keeping trouble out of the Zone and “New Orleans Proper,” and there were nowhere near enough cops to do this by maintaining a cordon of cops around the Alligator Swamp. Nor was there enough budget or manpower to set up Experimental Community Outreach Units all over the Swamp, besides which the usual strategy of instilling fear of the police in general in the denizens thereof by unpredictable raids and reliably predictable brutality had been been working well enough on the cheap for a long time.

  Luke was given to understand that the Experimental Community Outreach Unit had been an experiment that was supposed to fail, something to shut up the noise emanating from the Brad Pitt Houses and satisfy the politicians playing to this bothersome peanut gallery. Because if it was loudly proclaimed a success, the media pressure to do the financially impossible and clone it all over the Alligator Swamp would be a political no-win situation for City Hall.

  So keep your trap shut, kid, Luke was ordered. Who goes along, gets along. And before he could consider protesting even within the department, they gave him a consolation prize, they did him a favor, though he didn’t think so at the time.

  They pulled him out of the Swamp and made him an ordinary cop in New Orleans Proper, an emotional demotion for a top Alligator Swamp gang honcho, but a far sweeter beat to any true New Orleans cop.

  Which step by step was what Luke evolved into.

  In the Swamp, he had been happy playing the top gangbanger honcho, but in the Quarter, in the Zone, in New Orleans Proper, the police were part of the System Big Easy style.

  The primary job of the police was to prevent murders, robberies, rapes, and muggings to the extent possible and acceptable to those facing election, and to arrest enough murderers, thieves, rapists, and muggers to look competent on the news broadcasts and sites. Corporate swindles were not to be looked into as long as they were incorporated into the approved overall monkey business of New Orleans.

  “Vice,” namely whorehouses, genteel streetwalking, a certain tolerated level of drug dealing by approved entrepreneurs, back-alley poker and craps, and so forth, was generally not a police problem either. Far from it, since these enterprises had to rent their unofficial licenses from the police with cash in paper bags, small ones for small-fry, larger and larger ones for bigger and bigger fish.

  The corruption of public servants by the unofficial powers that be was not a problem for the police either, unless power struggles downtown dragged them into it, in which case the problem was Kingfish-sized, but not to anyone below the level of captain.

  Such intricate and complicated machinery could of course hardly run without a sufficient amount of grease at every level. The police had no license to steal, nor were any but soon-to-be terminated rogues fucking around with dealing or pimping, but ordinary cops were not to be denied free drinks and food in saloons, or their fair share of the cash flow.

  Luke had no moral problems with any of this—indeed, growing up as a Swamp Alligator, “moral problems” had been an unknown concept—nor did he long object to being ripped from his roots in the swampland and planted in richer higher ground.

  His salary supported rent just south of Claiborne as soon as the paychecks started coming in because no one was about to demand security deposits or months in advance or any of that shit from a cop or they’d find themselves hip-deep in code violations.

  A patrolman’s salary and his ration of grease afforded Luke Martin a lifestyle he had never dreamed of attaining, indeed never really had understood existed. An apartment in a rough-edged corner of the Upper Ninth. He could eat in restaurants. He could buy new clothes. He could hang out in the Blue Meanie.

  The Blue Meanie was a cop bar, not officially of course, but the presence of uniforms, badges, and NOPD-issued sidearms did not encourage casual patronage by a general run of barflies. It was not the only cop bar in town, but the handful of others tended to be racially segregated too, not officially of course, but blue cloth did not guarantee black skin a warm welcome in a white cop bar and vice versa.

  The Blue Meanie, though, was the cop bar, and as the name implied, all those wearing the blue tribal colors were truly welcome.

  An upscale police saloon, where wives, girlfriends, would-be girlfriends, cop groupies, and the younger offspring of police families going into the family business did not feel uncomfortable.

  Luke had been made aware of this scene by the cop social network: that in the Blue Meanie, even a newbie recent rookie could feel he belonged, could shoot the shit with anyone entitled to wear the blue colors, even the occasional avuncular sergeant, and that skin color was irrelevant.

  The married guys were comfortable showing up with their wives and their legally adult sons and daughters. Guys who were seriously hooked up could be more or less assured that no one would
hit on their girlfriend. The unattached, such as Luke, could achieve quick hookups with cop groupies, and/or cruise the scene in more genteel style if something more genteel was what they were after.

  Luke had turned the cops in the Experimental Community Outreach Unit into a top predator gang, but citywide the New Orleans Police were more like a tribe than a gang, and Luke found that this was the tribe he wanted to get into. And after a couple of months he came to realize he was already in it.

  The Alligator Swamp Police had never been a hot news item and indeed their short story had never been spread beyond police circles under stringent unofficial orders from City Hall, but it was hardly the sort of tale that would not eventually spread by word of mouth among the members of the tribe, and no more so than in a cop saloon where the tongue-looseners were freely flowing.

  Luke Martin was not a legendary hero, but his single significant exploit inevitably became known in the Blue Meanie to the point where it even got him a free beer or a shot of bar whiskey to brag about it once in a while for, after all, the notion of a handful of cops intimidating a swampfull of Alligator gangs with sheer display of police firepower went down more smoothly in such environs than most of the firewater the bartenders were pouring.

  Perhaps it was inevitable destiny that he would meet up with, and hook up with, and eventually marry Luella Johnson. Or perhaps her daddy had set it up. Or perhaps she had caused her daddy to set it up. Or perhaps all of the above. In the months and years that followed, she would never give him a straight answer, nor would Sergeant Bruce Johnson or the rest of the extended Johnson clan, and it would always remain a subject of good-natured family dispute.

  Luke was standing in the crowd by the bar on a Saturday night when he first caught sight of her, making her entrance not quite on the arm of a balding paunchy gray-haired old dude dressed as a sergeant.