Paul Bacon Read online

  Glancing around at my new coworkers, two thousand squared-away young people in business attire, I felt like a total slacker. They seemed perfectly content sitting at rigid attention while speaker after speaker droned away at the podium. Were they just better fakers than I was?

  Halfway through the program, an officer with a high-and-tight haircut and a lot of extra fancy doo-dads on his uniform announced that the mayor had just arrived for his blessing of the troops. As the leader of the department’s ceremonial unit, the man told us, he would now give us a crash course in standing at attention. This was standard protocol for welcoming our commander in chief.

  “Show of hands,” he said. “How many here have served in the military?”

  About half the people in the room shot their hands into the air at once.

  “The rest of you just watch and learn,” he said, then gave us a pitch-perfect, “At-ten . . . HUT!”

  On command, the many service members in our group rose to their feet in unison. Their spring-loaded seats smacked into the chair backs behind them with enough collective force to flatten a tank. I was impressed. These were the kind of people I’d want on my side when bullets started to fly.

  The fanfare seemed a little over the top when the moment arrived for our real-life salute. Our famously crime-busting mayor Rudy Giuliani had recently been succeeded by media baron Mike Bloomberg. Tastefully tan, with a casual walk and a muss of gray hair swirled around his head as if he’d just sailed in on a Hobie Cat, the newly elected mayor looked light years removed from all the pomp and ceremony. Bob Denver could have sauntered onstage in his Gilligan hat and made a more commanding entrance.

  When the mayor reached the podium, the protocol officer shouted, “Take SEATS!” and we all plopped back down. Mayor Mike read a prescripted call to arms in his nasal yenta lisp, sounding as bored with his pep talk as we were. But even though he could buy the lot of us three times over, he didn’t seem condescending. More like he was trying to lull us to sleep so he could tiptoe away before the ice in his gin and tonic melted. And while I was no tycoon, I felt a certain kinship with the man. He too was a Democrat hiding in plain sight as a quasi-Republican, more pragmatic than insincere, both of us sailing on a ship listing heavy to starboard.

  After the mayor left, nobody replaced him on the stage for about five minutes. I saw a number of people around me falling asleep in their seats. We had been forbidden from nodding off at any point—something about setting an example for our future jobs—but, having just endured four straight hours of speechifying, I thought we were just being shown a little mercy.

  No one said a word in the interim, and I felt the meditative, almost hypnotic sensation of mass quiet. I could hear my own heart beating, and as it gradually slowed until it barely kept up with the rhythm of my breath, my eyelids drooped, and I too fell into a deep sleep.

  “YOU!” was the next thing I heard—an unwelcome voice puncturing the pleasant dream I was having about happy hour on a sailboat. When I heard the voice again, I opened my eyes and found myself staring at my own lap. I looked up and saw Officer Skinhead standing at the edge of the stage and pointing at me again—now with a murderous look in his eyes.

  “Yeah, you, Mister Feet-in-the-Aisle,” he said. “Stand up!”

  I slowly rose from my chair. The entire recruit class was gawking at me, a sea of titillated faces turned to the one fool careless enough to be made the year’s first example.

  The instructor then pointed to a young woman sitting next to me and said, “You too. Get on your feet!”

  She pointed at herself in disbelief, shocked at being lumped together with me. During the entire ceremony, she had seemed perfectly poised and alert.

  “You heard me,” the instructor said.

  When she was standing, the instructor asked us, “So, how does it feel to be dead?”

  I just stood and prayed for the man to go away, while the woman tried to defend herself. She said, “But I didn’t fall asleep, sir.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the instructor said. “You let your partner there snore away like it was Christmas morning, and no one had your back. You’re as dead as he is. Matter of fact, we’re all dead thanks to you two,” the instructor said, then addressed the entire audience. “Take a look, folks, at the lazy hairbags who let a suicide bomber in the room.”

  Up to this point, I thought I’d known the meaning of embarrassment. As a fraternity pledge in college, I’d been humiliated many times, but my antics were usually forgotten in a blur of tequila shots. I was aspiring to a more serious membership now, and if this little lesson was only for effect, it was making a big one on me. I considered the large number of military men and women in the room, imagining that at least a few of them had nearly been killed for someone else’s mistake, or worse, had watched a close friend die in their arms. What must they have thought of me? I froze in place and tried not to look guilty.

  This was, thankfully, all I’d have to do for the rest of the morning session. Before the instructor left the stage, he ordered me and my neighbor to remain standing at attention until the end of the next speaker’s remarks. The woman clucked her tongue and made a wincing sound like a leaking tire just loud enough for me to hear. Personally, I wanted to flagellate myself, so I thought our punishment seemed more than reasonable.

  If our soft-spoken mayor had made it seem as though City Hall was run by kindly old men and that the people of New York loved their police even more since 9/11, his successor at the podium had news for us. The next speaker was our union president, Patrick Lynch. He was a squat, barrel-chested man with a pinstripe suit and a slicked-back Gordon Gecko hairdo. From beneath his shiny coif, Lynch presented himself as the umpteenth-generation Irish beat cop, a feisty, trod-upon descendent of a Civil War draft rioter. Through his speech, he kept his right index finger pointed out at the audience like a drawn pistol. Locked in this stance, he leveled one indictment after another against the department’s top brass, painting them as more dangerous to cops than all the city’s gangs put together. As for the public, he said, don’t get our hopes up. No one paid attention until we made a mistake. Then everything we did in the heat of the moment would be judged by people with nothing but time on their hands and no idea of the pressures we faced.

  His finger never once broke the horizontal plane until his dramatic conclusion, when he pounded it straight down on the lectern and warned us, “You have never been closer to getting arrested than you are at this very moment. But we will be here for you. Not only when you’re right, but also when you’re wrong.”

  After he walked off the stage between two bodyguards, I felt more than ever that I was about to bite off more than I could chew. Lynch had made it sound as if we’d be continually battling our superiors and the general population, leaving little time for the criminals and terrorists. It didn’t sound like a very rewarding line of work. I was tempted to just up and leave.

  But soon everyone was on their feet and heading for the doors. Officer Skinhead had returned to put us on a fateful lunch break. “Be back in your seats at exactly fourteen hundred hours for swearing in,” he said ominously, “or don’t come back at all.”

  I felt bad about having fallen asleep, so I decided to make amends with the woman I’d gotten in trouble. I turned to her and began to apologize, but she was already engrossed in a flirtatious-sounding conversation on her cell phone, so I let her be.

  As I started walking out into the aisle, I felt her pull me back by the tail of my suit jacket, still cooing playfully with the person on the other end of the line. She had deliciously smooth caramel-colored skin and big brown eyes that she kept rolling upward for my benefit, as though telling me she was trying to draw her conversation to a close. Still, she yammered away.

  “No-ho. That will never happen. I told you, I don’t do charity,” she said to the caller, then let out a nefarious giggle which completely contradicted what she was saying. Then she winked at me. If I wasn’t mistaken, she was flirting with two pe
ople at once.

  There seemed little need to apologize anymore, and even if I found her intriguing, I wasn’t in a mood to flirt. I had a lot on my mind, so I just waved good-bye.

  “Hold on a sec,” she told her caller, then cupped her phone and asked me, “You were going to say something?”

  “Sorry about getting us all blown to bits.”

  “Don’t worry about it. My uncle was on the job. He used to fall asleep all the time. The important thing is don’t get caught,” she said, wagging a finger.

  “I’ll remember that,” I told her and tried again to leave.

  “Wait,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Paul,” I said.

  “Paul what?” she said. “Cops go by last names, you know.”

  “Bacon,” I told her reluctantly.

  “Baker?”

  “No, Bacon. Like breakfast.”

  “Like pig?” she laughed. “Man, you’re gonna get a lot of shit for that.”

  “Already have,” I assured her. “What’s yours?”

  “Suarez,” she said.

  “Just Suarez?” I said. “I go by first names.”

  “Clarabel,” she said.

  “Clarabel?” I said with an involuntary chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” she said.

  She seemed too young to know that her first name had already been permanently attached to the clown on The Howdy Doody Show, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to point this out.

  “Nothing. Nice to meet you,” I said, then pointed a finger up the aisle and started moving my feet in that direction.

  “Yeah, I can tell,” she said sarcastically, returning to her phone conversation.

  Taking my first breath outside the auditorium felt like busting out of death row. No longer pinned to a hard seat in a room full of rigid people, I rolled my head around on my neck for a moment, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of it. I worked the various kinks and pops out of my upper spine, then I stretched my arms and seriously considered taking flight.

  Was it worth all this just to serve in uniform? The last time I wore a uniform was in college, when I worked at a family hamburger restaurant in suburban Boulder. Back then, I wore a pressed white oxford, a bright red bow tie, and a name tag exclaiming, I CREATE HAPPY GUESTS! While a big city patrolman’s shield would confer more dignity and purpose, I wasn’t entirely convinced I had what it took to wear it.

  I walked down the street to get a slice of pizza, then hurried back to the auditorium to find the right person to ask a pressing question. Inside, I searched out the mellowest-looking instructor in the room. The woman was standing in front of the stage, leaning against the platform with a bent knee, looking like the exact opposite of Officer Skinhead.

  “I was just wondering, ma’am,” I asked her, “is the NYPD like the military, where, if you don’t serve a set number of years, you get thrown in jail?”

  The woman laughed so loud that she honked. “No, honey,” she said, still laughing. “You can leave whenever you like.”

  This was promising. “So, do you like the job? I mean, are you glad you became a cop?”

  “You want the short answer or the long answer?”

  “Short answer’s fine.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Any other questions?”

  I thanked her and returned to my seat feeling much more confident. I wasn’t taking such a leap after all. It barely qualified as a commitment. When everyone filed back into the room and the swearing-in began, I took my patrolman’s oath with one hand on my heart and the other behind my back, fingers crossed.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I found out there really was commitment involved in joining the police department. The worst kind, too—financial. Before I got a dime from the city, I’d have to shell out nearly seven hundred dollars for my own equipment and uniform. I’d already given them fifty bucks to register my fingerprints with the FBI. And now they wanted more than ten times that amount for the basic stuff we’d need to do the job? It was like paying for a staple, or renting out the office photocopier by the page. I bet firemen don’t have to pay for water. Even beyond the principle, seven hundred dollars was a lot to cough up all at once. For some new recruits, this meant going into debt just to begin drawing a salary.

  Hardly surprising, then, to learn that the City of New York—the agency that brought you alternate-side parking—happened to have its own usurious lending institution and company store. We were promised big discounts as part of Mayor Mike’s extended family, but with the national prime rate hovering just above a millionth of a percent, the city’s employee credit rate put the mob to shame. The equipment was no bargain, either. Five dollars for a pair of pin backings, a hundred fifty for a raincoat—these were beach prices.

  I was reading the list of required items while waiting outside One Police Plaza, the appropriately cube-shaped heart of the NYPD. It was midday in July, and I was standing in a long line in the hot sun in a business suit for the fifth day in a row. I was sweating like a pig waiting to be gouged when a voice behind me said, “Holy fuck! Forty bucks for a plastic baton?”

  This was Bill Peters, a fellow recruit I’d met earlier that morning. Bill was a baby-faced man in his thirties, with a doughy complexion and very little hair on his head. He seemed like kind of a spaz, and I was already learning to take most of what he said with a grain of salt. We weren’t supposed to talk in line, so I kept my shoulders squared to the guy in front of me and pretended Bill wasn’t there.

  Not to be ignored, Bill nudged me in the back with his rolled-up price list and said, “Hey, you see this shit? Forty bucks for . . .”

  “Yes, yes!” I turned my head to whisper as loudly as I could. Three other people had angrily told Bill to shut up, but I couldn’t chastise him. He reminded me too much of myself somehow.

  Plus, he had me wondering: “They can’t really be made of plastic. Can they?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bill replied. “It’s a mix of plastic and wood shavings, basically a Wiffle bat filled with sawdust. They’re designed by the city’s liability lawyers. Great for massages. Perps come back for more,” he said, then cackled at himself.

  Later that afternoon, I returned home seven hundred dollars poorer but with nearly as many pounds of police equipment to show for it. I unloaded my bags and spread the items around my tiny studio apartment to take inventory. Within minutes, I had covered every horizontal surface with the tools of my new trade, including five sets of wrinkle-free uniforms, as well as various pins, patches, straps, snaps, bags, glasses, jackets, caps, vests, holsters, and belts. Plus there was a gun-cleaning kit and a host of beating and restraining devices—including, most strikingly, a shiny pair of handcuffs.

  They seemed intimidating even inside their plastic bag. I held the pack between thumb and forefinger and shook them out onto my bed as if I were discarding a dead rodent. It took a few minutes before I got the courage to pick them up. They looked alive, like a pair of crab claws that might latch onto my throat if I made a wrong move.

  Fearing where my curiosity might lead, I sifted through my piles of new equipment for the handcuff key. It was unbelievably small. About a quarter the size of an average house key, it looked very hard to manipulate and very easy to lose. I didn’t dare put it into my pocket. It could lodge in a hem, and I’d never see it again. I cleared a large space on top of my dresser and set the key right in the middle.

  Thus assured, I put one of the manacles on my wrist and ratcheted it down to a snug fit. This became intolerable after about two seconds, and I reached over for the key with a racing pulse. In one sweeping motion, I picked up the small key from its tidy place on my dresser and slipped it into the equally small hole on the cuff. Breathing a sigh of relief, I turned the key. Nothing. Silly me: I must have put the key in upside down. I took it out, put it back in the right way, and turned—nothing again. I was starting to panic. Sideways? There were only two ways a key could go. Ah—I tried it the first way, going t
he other direction. Still nothing. Then the other way, other direction. My hands were sweating, and I had to fight the urge to shake my arm spastically until the thing just flew off. Still, the handcuff wouldn’t open. It was devilishly attached to my arm.

  What on earth was I going to do? I could try to get help at my local hardware store, but all I could picture was the cranky old guy behind the counter giving me a skeptical look, then disappearing into the back office to report a fugitive. A patrol car would be dispatched immediately. After getting caught sleeping during orientation, I didn’t think I could afford another embarrassing mistake so early in the recruit semester.

  I tore into my neatly stacked piles of new equipment to find the handcuff instructions, turning my room upside down. Finally I came to the sad conclusion that handcuffs did not come with instructions. You were either a cop and you received official training, or you were someone else whom the manufacturer didn’t want to encourage.

  Before I gave up and called the police myself, I went online and typed in: “How to unlock handcuffs.” As I should have known, a ton of information was available on the Web, with a reported 285,000 results to my query. It did take a while to find exactly what I was looking for. To begin with, the handcuff kept catching on the edge of my desk, making it hard to move my computer mouse accurately. Also, most of the information was targeted at crafty criminals, not clumsy cops. Long before I found instructions on how to unlock my handcuffs with their own key, I found out how to open them with a bobby pin, a pencil lead, a fingernail paring, a piece of belly-button lint. (They didn’t work.)

  Finally I found that my handcuffs were the “double-locking” variety: The key had to be turned 360 degrees in both directions. I quickly freed myself, with tremendous relief, since I had to report to the police academy the following day. I laughed as I shoved the manacles in a drawer. No way would I make a rookie mistake like that again.