Apprehensions & Convictions

by Mark Johnson

  When I could stand the cold gray of the upper Midwest no longer, I interviewed for the top post at the United Way in Baton Rouge, and had there learned (the hard way) not to raise any questions about race relations or poverty. The search committee couldn’t hustle me back to the airport fast enough.

  I had approached Baton Rouge with the same tried-and-true technique that had worked for me before. In advance of the formal meetings with the search committee, I would plan enough time to do the following: hit a local recovery meeting and afterward talk to the folks about the town, visit a couple United Way-funded agencies (such as the Salvation Army and maybe an Urban League or women’s shelter) where I could gather a little intel on local social services, and, if possible, look up any local acquaintances. Failing that, I would study the local newspaper in order to gather a few local names and pick up on current points of civic pride or contention. Then I would sort through all this and pick out the most interesting and obscure tidbits to sprinkle into the interview process. It had wowed the search committee in Waukesha when I had casually mentioned the mayor’s name, praised them for their progressive public school system, which I had learned hosted recovery meetings for youthful addicts in local high schools, and demonstrated a decent grasp of the local racial, ethnic, and economic demographics.

  Upon arrival I called the Baton Rouge recovery hotline and requested somebody to take me to a meeting. A rough-looking fella with missing teeth and a fine mullet flowing out of the back of his greasy tractor cap picked me up in his battered rebel flag-emblazoned GMC and took me to a meeting on the west side of the river, in what he called the “Free Republic of West Baton Rouge Parish,” where a colorful collection of outlaw bikers and backwoods Cajuns shared their drunkalogs and stories of recovery. Then I looked up an elderly retired Lion Oil executive, a friend of my dad’s, whose second trophy wife was mildly intoxicated when I got there and flirted with me, while he (apparently oblivious or indifferent to her coquetry) liberally (but apologetically) used the N word to describe the major challenges facing his beloved hometown.

  I had a cab driver (who grilled me about Milwaukee’s then-infamous homosexual cannibal serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, as if by coming from the same area I could explain it) take me to a United Way–funded homeless shelter in a rundown part of town, but the night manager there, speaking through a cautiously cracked door, eyed me suspiciously and denied me admission, refusing even to talk with me. He insisted I make an appointment with the director if I wanted to talk about the agency or its mission or its relationship with United Way.

  In spite of this discouraging start, it had seemed to go really well with the search committee, in the beginning. They appeared to think I was a perfect fit. The local foundation exec, who was an ex officio member of the board and chair of the search committee, told me over lunch at the penthouse Petroleum Club that he personally had selected me as a finalist from among the numerous applicants because he recognized and appreciated my prep school education. He was a preppie as well, he confided, and, though not from the South, had found the prep school experience invaluable in grasping and navigating the sometimes tricky social subtleties that he had learned are so important in the Deep South. A matronly socialite, also a member of the search committee, whose assignment had been to drive me around the grandiosely pillared and galleried subdivisions from among which I would no doubt choose to quarter my family, was convinced I was a true son of the South.

  “You really understand our little river town,” she declared, beaming. I had just recited a florid declamation (not unlike the preceding) of fondness and longing for Luling, where “my daddy” (a consciously selected term) had been the plant manager of a petrochemical plant—the likes of which were of course the primary economic engine of Baton Rouge (after LSU).

  “We really feel like you’re one of us,” she had declared midway through the final interview with the search committee. Other heads nodded in agreement around the table. The committee of about eight prominent business leaders, plant managers, bank presidents, and the like had been inquiring about my philosophy and experience in fund-raising, consensus building, community needs assessment, donor cultivation—the usual United Way stuff.

  Having satisfactorily fielded the committee’s questions, they then had invited me to ask any questions I might have about their United Way, their hometown, their way of life. All I did was to observe that the only black people I had met over the course of my visit to their ethnically fifty-fifty town had been the porters at the airport, the taxi driver, and the housekeeper at the hotel, and to wonder aloud why. There was confused silence in the room. I felt compelled to explain my question, though it should have been obvious they had understood it all too well. I pointed out that unlike their demographically diverse community, as far as I could tell there were no black United Way board members, or even agency executives, and there didn’t appear to be any funding allocated to an Urban League or similar kind of minority-focused program or community center in the shamefully rundown parts of town I’d had my taxi driver show me, which were but a stone’s throw from the proud and pristine campus of LSU. The matronly socialite’s brow furrowed tragically, and the foundation exec, chair of the search committee, and fellow preppie had scowled and reddened, sputtering, “I take issue with the implications of that question!” and gone on to point out that the Reverend So-and-so, a most outspoken and vigorous leader of “that community,” is on the board, though he was unavailable to serve on the search committee, and that the chamber has been trying to clean up that part of town for decades but has been actively resisted by its residents, and we can certainly all agree that no understanding of any depth can be obtained by simple head counts and sweeping generalizations based on a few hours of sightseeing and conversations.

  And bam! It was over. I was whisked directly to the airport, hours before my flight’s departure.

  I read in a trade newsletter a month later that they ended up hiring a black female. Go figure. At first flabbergasted, I quickly figured it out: my profound insight and the fearless probity with which it was delivered had so shaken and traumatized the search committee that its ultimate decision to select an African American female was an act of shame and contrition. I had done Baton Rouge a big favor.

  So when I was invited to interview in Mobile, I was a lot more circumspect and cautious. Arrived a full day early, at my own expense for the extra hotel night. Took my time. Rented my own car and drove around town myself, starting with an alternate route from the airport, not the way they had directed me to get to the downtown hotel. Arbitrarily picked Old Shell Road, instead of Airport Boulevard, to approach downtown Mobile, simply because the name conjured the white, oyster-shell-packed surface of the cul-de-sac of company housing I remembered from Luling. Starting way out west by the University of South Alabama, whose small, new, raw-looking campus bespoke earnestness, humility, unself-consciousness—and didn’t even look like the same species as that shrine to southern pride, LSU—Old Shell took me through the heart of Spring Hill, the stately tree-lined neighborhoods of homes large and small, which I later learned were the homes of “Old Mobile” families—not at all like the starkly ostentatious, newly built, uniform subdivisions of the petro-plant oligarchy I had toured in Baton Rouge. These places were tasteful, lovely, gracious. And then, in the blink of an eye, Old Shell took me down a hill, under an interstate, and I emerged into block after block of shotgun houses. But nothing like the dilapidated, littered and peeling, dangerous-looking crack shacks of Red Stick’s “colored town.” These were almost Victorian in appearance. Gaily painted, some of them, most charmingly tidy albeit older, modest homes that appeared to be occupied by a mixture (!) of friendly middle-class black and white folk who cut their grass, kept up their cars, and swept their front porches.

  I stopped and called the local recovery hotline, explaining I was from out of town, somewhere on Old Shell Road, and is there a nearby meeting anytime soon?

  “Theyah sure is, honey” c
ame the deliciously southern reply. “If ya hurry, you’ll catch the bettah part a the ’leven o’clock Sunshine Group at the Old Shell clubhouse. It’ll be ohn ya right if yuh comin’ from the ayuhpoaht, a green house with the numbers ten-oh-fahv above the front poahch. Ya just go ohn ’round back to pahk, go ohn in the back doah, poah ya’self a cup and find yase’f a chayah, sugah. It’s a goo-o-d meetin’, the Sunshine Group is.”

  And it was. Black and white, male and female, young and old together. Jittery newcomers with tattoos, flitting eyes, and court papers to be signed, wise and wizened old-timers who spoke gentle truth and hard experience.

  A block away from the Sunshine Group was the Salvation Army. As I had at the agency in Baton Rouge, I stopped in unannounced, explained I was visiting for a United Way interview, and asked if I could look around a little. A genial staffer gave me a quick tour of the busy facility, offered me lunch, which was just being served (generous portions of tasty red beans and rice among the offerings), and introduced me to clients, kitchen crew, and professional staffers alike, all of whom were friendly and treated me like some kind of visiting dignitary.

  Wow! I was home! So I made damn sure not to blow the interview. I asked no accusatory questions. Instead I charmed and soothed and flattered and painted word pictures and told amusing anecdotes on myself. In the end, before I left town the search chair told me that I was her choice and confided that it had come down to a young man from United Way of America (the office of the national association of U’Ways in Alexandria, Virginia) who was about the same age as me and had the same number of years’ experience, but his was mostly at the Alexandria headquarters rather than local United Ways. He had a broader view and a more analytical approach because of his perspective from the national office. “Ah told the committee, as Ah see it, it comes down to a choice between a technician and an artist. On the one hand we have a theoretician, a statistician, an expert in best practices from all across the country. But in you we have more of an artist, with soul and passion. And I made it cleah to them which of y’all I believe is right for our little Mobile.”

  The search committee’s choice (though not unanimous, I was later told—local labor volunteers had received a less-than-unqualified endorsement of me from their union brethren in Wisconsin) was decidedly in my favor.

  When they made the offer, it was a no-brainer for me, though Nancy took some convincing. A lunch with a local Jewish couple finally assured her she need not fear cross burnings on our front yard. We didn’t learn until a few months after settling in that as recently as 1984 there had been a random lynching of a young black man on a street corner downtown. (Spraggins hadn’t mentioned that.) Despite this unsettling discovery, when I came across the following a few weeks later, it seemed to speak for me:

  Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle . . . among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

  —W. Somerset Maugham

  Or did I just will it to speak for me?

  13

  Plainclothes and Provenance

  I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

  —Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

  In my third year of patrol, I was contacted by a detective in Domestic Violence. He said there was a vacancy opening up in their unit and thought I would be a good fit. I was flattered. Then I asked why me?

  “You write good reports,” he said. “You’re one of the few who can write a complete sentence and spell.” (Most cops are bright and witty and capable, but with spelling and grammar, not so much.)

  I was no longer flattered but was still intrigued. I talked it over with Sarge, Roney, and Balzer. I was surprised at their unanimous rejection of the idea. Sarge warned that going to headquarters, for any assignment, was a bad idea.

  “Nothing good happens at headquarters,” Sarge warned. “Too much office politics, backstabbing, ass kissing. Too much brass, with not enough to do, all up in your business.”

  Roney and Balzer opposed the idea as well but on wholly different grounds.

  “Domestic!? You goin’ jankity on me, bruh?” Roney said, his eyes big. “You don’t get enough 39s out here? All that lyin’ and cryin’ . . . think about doin’ nu’n but domestics, all day, e’ry day!”

  “Not only that, but it ain’t even real police,” Balzer opined. “It’s a lotta paperwork, lotta court, lotta talkin’ on the phone, ridin’ a desk, wearin’ a necktie.” Balzer cocked his head and narrowed an eye, as if considering another perspective. “On second thought, that might be just right for an old fart like you.”

  I withdrew myself from consideration the same day.

  A year later, I was invited to consider moving to Financial Crimes, the unit some consider the white-collar detail. FiCri covers employee theft, fraud, forgery, embezzling, and the like, although it’s just as often more blue-collar theft by deception: the guy who says he just resurfaced your neighbor’s driveway around the corner and happens to have enough hot tar and asphalt left over, and rather than just dump the excess product, for half the normal price, today only he’ll do your driveway. You give him a few hundred dollars, only to find after the next rain that he did nothing more than paint your driveway black. And of course, by then he’s long gone, back up to Clarke County or halfway across Mississippi.

  Again I declined the offer. I was still having way too much fun in patrol.

  But by my sixth year on the job, I was on my third captain, Sarge had made lieutenant and been transferred to the Third, the Bear was dead, Roney had become a jump-out boy with a street interdiction antidrug unit, and Balzer was riding a Harley in Traffic Enforcement. Few of my original squad were reporting to the First Precinct anymore. Even LD had gone to HQ, to become, of all things, a PIO*. He looked good on TV, as long as he didn’t talk too much.

  Meanwhile, I was in the same precinct, same squad, same beat. Beat 12 covers a lot of geography and comprises commercial businesses, single-family homes, and Section 8 houses and apartments. It has the second-highest call volume in the precinct, and it borders beat 13, which, comprising the Birdsville and RV Taylor projects, has the highest call volume, much of which bleeds over into 12.

  I remembered a conversation from a couple of years back. It was at the checkoff desk one morning after a particularly active night shift. I had humped two dozen calls, made six arrests (three of which were felonies), and covered nearly two hundred miles in the preceding twelve hours. Sarge and the Bear, looking over my reports and my daily call log, had asked me why I never requested a different beat.

  “Twelve is a young man’s beat, Mark,” the Bear said. “Don’t get me wrong—you handle it fine, don’t you agree, Sarge?”

  “May be the best on the squad,” Sarge confirmed.

  “So why doncha work a swap and take it easy for a change?”

  I mumbled something about us old guys being creatures of habit, and I didn’t wanna hafta learn a whole new set of streets and thugs.

  “Besides, I’ve grown kinda fond of my peeps in beat 12,” I joked. “And they would no doubt miss me, too.”

  But now I’m beginning to think maybe a change would do me good. I had always gotten restless in previous jobs after about six years. I had moved on from each of my three United Way posts at around the seven-year mark.

  And of course Nancy was still pissed off that I was even a cop at all, still getting into fights and chases every few weeks. Most of our non-cop friends were baffled by my refusal to advance up the ranks, if not for the reduced risks, then at least fo
r the (slightly) higher wage, and to put my management skills to use. I had passed a reluctantly taken, not-studied-for corporal exam a while back, but I had been relieved to learn that my score had not been high enough to qualify for placement in one of the limited number of corporal slots; I then decided not to risk promotion again and never took another exam. (The tests are really mechanisms for culling morons—though they seem to fail often in that regard—because the two hours of multiple-choice questions require little more than rote memorization of inane, arcane details having little to do with street policing or supervision.)