Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  He smiled and gave me a dignified nod.

  “You think you could come out of there for a minute and talk to me?” I suggested.

  He nodded and smiled a bit more, but didn’t get up. He just continued to rock back and forth.

  “Sir . . . I need you to come out here for a minute.”

  This time, he spoke, in a soft, apologetic tone. “Lo siento, no entiendo.”

  Spanish. I tried again. “Hola, señor. No habla Ingles?”

  “No, no habla Ingles,” he agreed.

  I summoned up my minimal Spanish. “Ah, entiendo. Cómo se llama?”

  “Jesús.”

  Of course that was his name.

  “Hola, Jesús. Me llama Rosa. Cómo estás?”

  “Estoy bien, gracias.” He gazed at me, rocking, his eyes wide and trusting.

  I had now exhausted my small supply of Spanish phrases, and turned to my cell phone. Pulling up Google Translate, I typed in “Do you live near here?”

  Google suggested that I say, “Vives por aquí?” so I gave it a try.

  Jesús gave a small but decisive head shake. “No, no. Estoy esperando.”

  He was waiting, Google Translate informed me.

  “Para quien?” For whom?

  “My friends. Me recogoran.”

  “You’re waiting for your friends to come pick you up?”

  “Sí, sí. Me recogoran. They come.”

  “Qué trabajo haces? What work do you do, Jesús?”

  “Construcción.”

  Jesús didn’t seem at all bothered by my continued questions. His Christlike demeanor was unruffled, his gaze direct, calm, forgiving.

  “Ah, entiendo.”

  I was starting to think I understood. I assumed Jesús was part of the region’s army of Spanish-speaking day laborers, one of the men who waited outside Home Depot each morning hoping to be picked up by contractors looking for a pair of extra hands. Now, at the end of a long workday, he was waiting to be picked up and brought home again. It made sense.

  My radio chirped. A Spanish-speaking officer was on his way over to help, the dispatcher said.

  While we waited, I tried again with Google Translate.

  “Jesús, entiendo qué estás esperando, pero no puedes sentarte aquí. I know you’re just waiting for your friends, but you can’t sit here under these stairs. You’re making the people who live here nervous. Estás poniendo nerviosos a los residentes. Could you wait for your friends somewhere else?”

  He shook his head courteously, and said something in a mix of Spanish and English that sounded like “waiting for aliens.”

  Ah, I thought, he’s saying he’s an illegal alien, or his friends are illegal aliens? This was possible; many day laborers are undocumented. Perhaps he was nervous about standing out in the open, or worried about talking to the police.

  At this point, Gonzales, the Spanish-speaking officer we had requested, appeared, and I briefed him on what I had learned so far.

  “He says he’s waiting to be picked up, and I think he said something about illegal aliens? I didn’t really understand.”

  Gonzales turned to Jesús and began an exchange in rapid Spanish, then looked back at me again.

  “He says he’s an alien. He’s waiting for the other aliens to pick him up.”

  “Yeah, okay, the other undocumented workers?”

  “No, the other aliens. The aliens from outer space. He says they dropped him off here this morning, and he’s waiting for them to come back with their spaceship so he can return to his home planet.”

  “Crap.”

  From under the stairs, Jesús continued to rock and smile.

  Gonzales politely asked him if he’d mind going to talk to some doctors—specifically, the doctors at the city’s emergency psychiatric clinic.

  Jesús considered this for a moment. I thought he would decline, but after a bit of thoughtful rocking, he agreed. “Sí, I go with you.”

  With an effort, he pulled himself up and came out from under the stairs, murmuring softly to himself as he approached us.

  I looked at Gonzales for a translation. He grinned.

  “He says the aliens can just as easily meet him at the doctor’s.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, we responded to an assault call. When Lowrey and I arrived, we found a heavyset bearded officer standing on the porch, looking disgruntled. His name tag read “Lamar.” As we got closer, the reasons for Lamar’s displeasure became clear: sitting on the doorstep was a slender, wriggling young man, his hands cuffed behind him, and next to the young man was a small pool of vomit.

  “He punched his aunt and uncle,” Lamar told us.

  “They pushed me first! They got they hands on me first!” the youth interjected. He looked upset, and he was wiggling his legs around. “I gotta go, I gotta see my son, my baby mama gotta go to work tomorrow. This is so sad!”

  Lamar looked at me, then pointed at the vomit. “Watch that, watch that there.”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  The boy interrupted. “That’s my throw-up!”

  “I know,” said Lamar, disgusted. “And now we gotta deal with it. Just stop moving around like that, or you gonna end up sitting in it!”

  “My baby mama’s pregnant,” the boy said defensively, continuing his nonstop squirming. “What you want me to do?”

  This seemed like a non sequitur, and Lamar ignored it.

  “So tell me again what happened?”

  “Well,” said the boy, “I just came in to use the phone, ’cause I gotta call my baby mama—” He shifted position again. “Can I just pull up my pants?”

  He rose to a crouch, his cuffed hands down behind his knees, and turned so his backside was facing us. His wriggling had caused his baggy jeans to fall down his hips, partially exposing his buttocks. He started to giggle.

  “My pants, could you—?”

  “Oh, really?” Lamar’s mouth twisted in disapproval.

  “My pants are down, man,” the boy said plaintively. “I can’t, I can’t—”

  “You’re killing me, kid!”

  “You’re having a bad day,” I put in.

  “I am! This is so sad!” The boy waggled his butt at Lamar. “Awright, come on!”

  Lamar opened his palms and gazed up at the sky, as if hoping for some heavenly intercession. “Dude, what were you doing?”

  The boy looked sheepish and giggled some more. “Brah, I was trying . . . I was trying to do the little thing—” He gestured with his head toward his cuffed hands.

  “You were trying to work the cuffs down and under your feet so your arms would be in front,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, yeah!” he agreed. “I seen it on TV. But when I did that, my pants . . . It’s not as easy as it looks on TV. My pants fell down.”

  He still looked embarrassed, but he was laughing uncontrollably now. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry y’all gotta see me like this. Please, brah, please . . . help me here. Please, brah!” he appealed to Lamar. “You gotta help me, or everyone in the whole city gonna see my butt!”

  By now Lamar was laughing too, reluctantly. “Aw. Man. I can’t believe I have to do this.”

  He put his gloves on, then started tugging the boy’s waistband up, the boy still half-crouched and giggling. “Man, you are killing me here! Stop wriggling! Whoa, watch it, watch it! Don’t get in the throw-up!”

  “I got this, I got it!” the kid said. “Okay, I’m good!”

  He sat back down, shaking with giggles.

  “Oh, man,” he said rhetorically, glancing back up at Lamar, then smiling up at me. “He lookin’ at me like, ‘Oh my God!’”

  “You’re probably having the worst night of anyone I’ve met so far,” I told him, smiling back.

  “I am, actu
ally,” the kid said, growing suddenly somber. “I just need to get outta here and go get my son from my baby mama, she gotta go to work tomorrow, I don’t want her to lose her job.”

  “You keep an eye on this clown for me for a minute?” Lamar asked. “I wanna go see what’s going on inside with my partner.”

  When Lamar was gone, I looked back down at the handcuffed youth.

  “I just don’t want her to lose her job,” he said again.

  “I know. Just hang out. Give us some time to see if we can sort this out. You wanna tell me what happened?”

  The kid, animated again, launched into a complex and not very coherent tale. “It’s my grandma’s house, I just went in to use the phone, and my aunt, she starts saying, ‘Get out, get out,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m just using the phone, and why you saying that, it ain’t even your house!’”

  His voice was getting faster and faster, and rising with excitement. “Then she and her boyfriend, they’re both pushing and shoving me! And I’m like, ‘I’m too small for your big ass, you stop pushing me!’ And I squared up at them!” He tried to reenact this, but since his hands were cuffed, all he could do was twitch his body rapidly back and forth, which he did several times, adding a few comic-book sound effects—“Oof! Pow!”—for good measure.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the house and called out, “Grandma! You tell the police, they put their hands on me first!”

  I pointed to the vomit. “So when’d you throw up? How’d that happen?”

  He looked surprised. “Oh. See, my girlfriend’s pregnant. So I just . . . you know what I’m sayin’ . . . ” He gave me a knowing little wink. “I got . . . symptoms.”

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “I mean, we eat, and sleep together,” he added. “And throw up together! It’s my second time too. . . . But,” he added thoughtfully, “I didn’t throw up with our first child. So . . . I bet we’re having a girl, this time.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. It was starting to occur to me that this kid was somewhat crazy. “Well,” I offered, “maybe that just shows you’re emotionally involved with you girlfriend’s pregnancy. That’s good, I guess.”

  “I am!” He nodded eagerly. “I am emotionally involved. I spend all my time with my son. I tell my girlfriend, ‘I’m not going to let you go through this alone.’”

  He looked down at the ground, and the pool of vomit.

  “I just . . . I want to be a good man.”

  “I hear you.”

  “My family is fucked up, though,” he confided. “The only time they wanna see me is when I got money. It’s fucked up. Aw . . . my stomach’s balled up so tight. I feel like I might throw up again.”

  I liked this kid. He was a weird kid, mercurial and probably more than a little bit nuts, but appealing.

  “Are you sick? Do you want me to call the medics? If you want, we can get them to come check you out.”

  “No, no, it’s nothing, it’s just what I said, my girlfriend’s pregnant—”

  Just then, a man came up the walk from the street and started up the stairs.

  “Whoa, whoa!” the boy and I cried in unison, but it was too late. He stepped right in the vomit.

  “Ew!” cried the boy. “Ew, sorry, brah, it’s my fault, man.”

  The man cursed, gave the kid a pissed-off look, and backed off, wiping his shoes in the grass.

  “Aw, shit,” said the kid. “Everybody be looking at me. Everybody looking at me like I retarded.” He gazed up at me. “Could you put my hood up over my head so people can’t recognize me? Please?”

  I complied, pulling his hood as far forward as I could.

  The boy lowered his head to his knees. “It’s not even funny no more. I just want to see my son.” He started to cry. “I ain’t seem him in so long.”

  I was about to remind him that he had said, just moments ago, that he spent “all his time” with his son, but the kid was sniffling forlornly into his hood, and I didn’t have the heart.

  He stared down at his knees. “I just want to be able to make money so my baby boy and my baby girl can look sweet. I want—I want my son to go to college. I ain’t gonna let him get into no trouble, not like me. I see him mess around with drugs, I gonna whup his ass. Whup his ass. . . . I mean, me, I was a problem, from when I was ten, twelve. Not my son! I’m gonna whup his ass.”

  He glanced up at me from under his hood, and added hastily, “I mean, I’m not lookin’ forward to it, I hope he be a good boy, but if he ain’t, I whup his ass to teach him to be better. He too little now, you can’t hit him, he into everything but he just a baby, he don’t understand, but when he bigger . . . I gonna tell him, don’t be like me. You be like me, you end up with the police, in handcuffs, you little butt hanging out.”

  Parallel Worlds

  Homicide—Murder 1—MPD was dispatched . . . for reports of a shooting. Once on the scene, officers observed V-1 laying on the ground suffering from multiple gunshot wounds . . . Victim was unconscious and not breathing. . . . Victim was transported to a local area hospital . . . where he was pronounced deceased.

  —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

  It was a strange way to live.

  During the hours I spent immersed in the world of the Metropolitan Police Department, everything else faded away. Policing was immediate and raw—sometimes tedious, frustrating, or absurd, but often wrenching, and always absorbing. When I was patrolling, it was hard to remember that I had another, quite separate life, one in which I was Rosa or Professor Brooks, not Officer Brooks. But that other life—my “real” life—existed in a parallel universe.

  I was on sabbatical from my job as a law professor during my first months at the police academy, but I still went to occasional Georgetown workshops and faculty meetings. I wrote articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, worked on law journal articles and chapters for scholarly books, and participated in conferences and panels on national security, international law, and civil-military relations. The book I finished right before applying to the reserve corps—How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything—was published in August 2016, when I was about halfway through the police academy, and in the months that followed, I combined my life as a model police recruit with the usual things authors do when they’re trying to promote a book, speaking at bookstores and doing radio interviews.

  By August I was also back at Georgetown full-time, serving as one of the law school’s associate deans for graduate programs. Unlike the “real” dean, who presides over faculty meetings, sets budgets, and represents the school to students, the community, and big-money donors, law school associate deans function much like department chairs in other parts of the university. No one covets these positions, and the dean generally has to do some arm-twisting to persuade reluctant faculty members to step up. I was no exception—I agreed to become an associate dean mostly because I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse to say no.

  As an associate dean, my days were a whirl of meetings and memos. From nine to five, I’d meet with disgruntled staff members unhappy about their budgets, soothe the nerves of anxious students worried about their postgraduation job prospects, and review proposals for new courses. Then I would change into my uniform—first, my khaki recruit uniform, and after graduation, my blues—and head to my MPD life.

  My two worlds could hardly have been more different. Academic culture—even in law schools—is theory-oriented and full of polite, passive-aggressive circumlocutions; police culture is pragmatic, profane, and largely indifferent to norms of political correctness. In 7D, no one bothered to be passive-aggressive—there was no need, since open aggression, both verbal and physical, was accepted and often praised. No one cared about theoretical constructs, and “Don’t ever be such a fucking moron again” was considered an appropriate form of wo
rkplace feedback. Sometimes this rattled me, but other times, I found it almost refreshing. In the academic world, I was accustomed to tiptoeing around difficult issues lest someone take umbrage. At 7D, no one ever tiptoed—and perhaps the conversations, though often jarring, were also more honest.

  Initially, my separate worlds never overlapped. Often, each was completely immersive: during my two weeks of firearms training, for instance, I was at the police academy every day from six thirty in the morning to two thirty or three in the afternoon, then home for a few hours, then back at the academy again for regular recruit classes in the evenings, and back once more every Saturday. The law school and my life as an author might as well have ceased to exist. After graduating from the academy, there were similar periods of near-total immersion—weeks when I would do several patrol shifts back-to-back and my “other” life, my “regular” life, would start to feel almost imaginary.

  This was true the other way around as well: when I was sitting in a Georgetown faculty meeting or traveling to give a talk about my book to an audience in Ottawa or Vienna, my police life seemed equally unreal.

  Every now and then, though, when I was overtired or distracted, I’d forget for a moment which world I was in. In 7D, I’d lose track of the context and offer a casual comment about the social construction of crime and the otherization of communities of color. My fellow officers would look at me with consternation, then remind me that the guy whose plight had prompted my burst of academic blather was “a fucking animal, and if he doesn’t want to go to jail, he can just stop selling crank.” Other times, sitting in a frustrating meeting back at Georgetown, the academic niceties would slip away from me, and I’d find myself telling my horrified faculty colleagues that the motherfuckers on the university budget committee needed to get their heads out of their asses.

  Despite these occasional slip-ups, few people in either of my worlds knew about the other. It’s not that either world was a secret, exactly—a handful of my friends and Georgetown colleagues were aware of my life as a police officer (and as I had predicted, they were variously stunned, dismayed, amused, and intrigued, sometimes all at once). And when police academy instructors or, later, my various patrol partners asked about my day job, I told them. But in both worlds, most people didn’t ask many questions. Maybe they didn’t know what to ask.