Currently Idle

An exchange

“Happy, um… is it, Hannukah?”

“Thanks! And merry, ah… let’s see… Christmas – right?”

-15

That’s how cold it was when I woke up this morning.

There’s something about the dip below zero which is almost non-sensical. How can the temperature be negative. It’s as if the world some how falls below the level or rationality and dips into the realm of the absurd. The air gets so clear it almost hurts. When you walk outside, you are assaulted by an alien atmosphere. Everything screams at you – “If you were a caveman, you would be DEAD in 10 minutes.”

If I was a caveman, I’d be dead 100 times over for so many reasons.

My brother’s friend

My brother told me an anecdote the other day. He said a friend told it to him a few years ago. For some reason it has stuck with me. It’s not much in its entirety.

“Women can fake orgasms. Men can fake relationships.”

Tiny moments of inaction/No man should have to die like this

i’d like to say that i’m haunted by the following story; or that i think of it often; or that it was a watershed moment in my life; or that it has somehow grown to carry some great weight in my life. instead, it’s just something i think about every so often, a situation in which i feel that perhaps if i had acted differently in one tiny moment, i could have saved someone’s life.

a few years ago i was working on an investigation and i had to do an interview with a parole officer attached to a fugitive task force. our interview wasn’t until the afternoon, but since i had to hook up with him anyway, i used it as an excuse to go out with the task force for some early morning fun–kicking in doors and grabbing fugitives out of bed at gunpoint. these guys do this all the time, but for me it’s an opportunity to do some more tactical work and get out on the street. that morning one of our hits was the house of a woman where they suspected a parole absconder was staying. we staked out the house and then knocked and asked for permission to search the house; she allowed us to search and swore that he wasn’t there. another cop and i were sweeping the upstairs (guns drawn, popping open closets and peering under beds) when a shout broke out downstairs. guess who was hiding in the closet in his boxers? if i remember correctly, the combination of his bad attitude and his woman’s lying about his presence in the house landed her in handcuffs for a few minutes (until the decision was made that pursuing a harboring case against her would be more hassle than satisfaction) and landed him out in the street and en route to jail in nothing but handcuffs and his boxers. that was a routine hit; the last time i went out with these guys, a few months ago, we were clearing a house when a detective and i focussed on a comforter on the floor in a kitchen with a twitchy man-sized lump underneath it. we stood over him with our guns pointed at him and i just remember screaming “show me your hands, your hands, show me your fucking hands!” i think my screaming scared him more than the guns. on the street, you always, always, always gotta watch the hands. nobody can shoot you with a knee or an elbow. until i see those fucking hands, i’m very agitated.

but back to the morning at hand. in addition to hunting for the regular retinue of parole absconders and federal fugitives the task force was on the trail of a bank robber that morning. a rather half-assed, pathetic bank robber, for what it’s worth. he had passed a note at a bank and gotten a couple hundred dollars and then done an “armed robbery”–he had held up a dollar store with a welding gun for another couple hundred. if you’re ever reading a police blotter and see that someone is sticking up dollar stores with a welding gun, feel free to go ahead and make an assumption–our old friend crack addiction is involved. sure enough, the guy had come out of prison (he had beaten an old man nearly to death with a pipe a decade before) and had started a welding apprentice program, easing back into life. but i guess it ain’t easy; crack will get you every time, and according to his parole officer, apparently it got him.

so we were on the trail of this guy. i don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but i think that someone knew that this guy had a friend who was a cab driver/crack user. so we went to his apartment, expecting that we might find our target or at least get a clue as to his whereabouts. the apartment was tiny, cramped, and filthy. we woke up the cab driver, who was all skinny with bad tattoos, and his girlfriend, who roughly fit the same description. this was probably no later than eight o’clock so we woke them up and they looked like hell warmed over. he acknowledged that the guy had stayed there a few nights ago, and the previous night he had given his buddy a ride to a low rent motel, and described what room he had stayed in. he wasn’t sure if he’d still be there or perhaps have moved on; someone asked him what has become an oft-repeated question of mine: if you were to bet a hundred dollars, which (of the options you suggested) would you choose (as to where we’ll find him?)

he answered and we made a beeline for the motel and got the key from the manager–the room was their specialty room with a hot tub–and we streamed in and cleared the room. no luck; the morning manager rang up the night manager and learned that they had thrown the guy out the night before for partying too loud. they said a cab picked him up, and thought that maybe he was going to another nearby cheap motel. we went to a string of nearby motels and began checking their registries while calling a few different cab companies to see who had made a pickup at the first hotel for passage to another motel the night before. we struck out with the registries and began to move on to different motels when one of the cab companies called back; they woke up one of their night drivers and got him on the phone with one of the detectives; he had picked the guy up and deposited him at one of the motels we had already checked. he also remembered something else; he had a woman (prostitute) with him and she followed them in her own car to the motel, and she had the vanity tags HOTSTFF. we quickly ran her tags and all of a sudden the parole officer recognized her name as having rented a room at one of the motels. we raced back there and confirmed with management that the room was still occupied, with no HOTSTFF car to be found.

here’s where we started to make mistakes. we went and stacked on the door–all guys in a tight formation ready to rush the room, and we brought the manager with us to quietly open the door with the key. but unfortunately, i stacked (with a marshal or two) on the side of the door near a window. bad tactically, because they can see you, and because then they can shoot you. bad choice number one. then instead of just unlocking the door and stepping out of play, the manager knocked on the door. we should’ve just taken the key. so he knocks and the guy either smells a rat or peers out the window and sees the raiding party–since i’d conveniently staged in front of the window, of course. manager with keys, bad choice number two. immediately the guy starts throwing a chair against the door and we realize it’s time to roll. the two guys in front rear back and start kicking the shit out of the door, throwing their shoulders into it. the door starts to break off the hinges but the problem is kicking the door over the chair barricading its entry into the room. a barrage of shoulders and boots ensued.

and then there was one moment. a guy had just thrown his shoulder into it and he stepped back a moment, to collect himself, maybe, to take a quick breath, and to give me the obvious opportunity to take the next smash at the door.

and i did nothing. i froze. i didn’t kick the door, or throw my shoulder into it; i don’t know why i froze. i don’t know why. maybe i was afraid i wouldn’t be strong enough; maybe i didn’t realize it was my turn; i don’t know. this is not an excuse, and i feel bad, and i feel bad for everything that followed from that moment of inaction, and i don’t know why. i have no good excuse.

so i held back for a nanosecond, and the first guy–maybe he didn’t even consciously detect my hesitation (though i suspect he did)–he kicked the door again and it fell in on the chair the guy had used as a barricade and we all swarmed over the door and literally fell ass over teakettle over one another into the room with guns drawn and all screaming to learn that he had already run to the bathroom at the back of the room and was screaming “i have a gun!”

in any event, this led to a situation wherein we were in the room, he was in the bathroom fifteen feet across the room separated by nothing but a thin sheet of drywall, and we all realized, if he’s really got a gun and wants to go out in a blaze of glory, he can come out blasting and we can’t all scoot out the door at once, or he can just light us up through the drywall. (we learn early that there is cover and concealment; cover is good; concealment just means they might not see you, but they can hit you. drywall is concealment; you can shoot right through it. a car door is cover. the first rule of a gunfight is always: move to cover.)

anyway, we pulled out and two of us stayed on either side of the door with guns pointed into the room in case he decided to come out. we tried a little shouting negotiation and he continued yelling things like “it’s all over” and “i’ve got a gun, don’t come in here, i’ll shoot myself.” you know, when a guy sticks up a dollar store with a welding gun and then spends all his money on crack and a prostitute, it’s not likely that he went and bought a gun, too; but “not likely” is not enough for anyone to rush up to the bathroom door and pull this guy out. so we held the door for a while and a parole officer who had met him before tried to talk to him. he reminded the guy in the bathroom that they had talked about fishing, and the parolee had told the officer about his mother. “come on, come on out, don’t you wanna go fishing again? don’t you wanna see your mother?” “it’s all over.” NOT what you want to hear from a barricaded subject.

so someone called the local police department and told them what happened and they sent their SWAT team over and a couple of guys who had taken a negotiation class who had a telephone to throw to him so he could talk to them. they threw the phone in and he creeped out and grabbed it and i sat for a while in the adjoining hotel room as they tried to negotiate with him, which really means they just tried to talk him into surrendering. he asked for a lighter so he could smoke a cigarette, and for the fairly obvious reason that throwing a lighter to a barricaded subject could lead to a big fire, they refused. he focussed on wanting a lighter almost obsessively, and they threw him a book of matches but still he wanted a lighter, and i remember him saying over the phone: “this is what my life has come down to: a fucking lighter. my life isn’t even worth a fucking lighter.” they tried to explain that they had thrown him matches, when i had what oprah calls an “aha!” moment.

guys, i said. he’s got crack, and he wants to blow through the rest of his crack. once i said it it seemd so obvious; of course. he’d had the time to get into the bathroom with his crack, and he wanted a little more of the pipe before getting taken in again.

the conversation went on for an hour or two, and eventually he hung up the phone, and after a bit of silence everyone started to get worried. finally they decided to end it, and the SWAT team went into a hallway that ran behind the bathroom, and poked a pair of holes with a halogen tool through the wall–remember, paper thin drywall in a motel–and pumped a load of pepper spray through the holes. moments later, he came running out crying and pouring snot and spit all over. i’ve been pepper sprayed twice–it’s a requirement–and it sucks, and there’s no way what i’ve had compares to the load this guy took.

so he staggers out and gets tackled and handcuffed and he’s barely dressed, in boxers and maybe a t-shirt. i heard a cop bemoan that he hadn’t had a chance to hit the guy with the taser. someone chimed in that that would have been great. someone else put a blanket from the bed over the guy’s shoulders–it was autumn–and the show was basically over.

i ended up back at the police department and walked him into the building, barefoot, eyes and nasal linings burning, chastened, beaten, tragic and sad. his penis was dangling out of the front of his boxers and i adjusted his shorts to tuck it back in for him. you could tell he felt bad; he almost seemed apologetic. bad for having caused a scene and created this big mess and for getting caught. drug addicts, in my experience, are good at feeling bad and apologetic. after all, that’s pretty much what they feel, is bad, bad, bad, and then they hurt everyone around them, so they feel even worse and sorry.

he ended up talking to one of the detectives and giving a statement about the robberies and was taken off to jail. my wife taped the six o’clock news for me and i watched the story about the “standoff at the motel” and thought perhaps i caught a glimpse of myself in the background of some of the shots.

two or three nights later i watched a movie with my wife; i can’t remember which. but i remember these next few moments with a frightening clarity. the movie ended and she went off to brush her teeth. i switched on the television and caught the last few minutes of game six of the world series. i’m no baseball fan but i’ll watch a few minutes of the big game. it ended and the yankees lost to the marlins and a talking head for the news came on with a teaser about the big headline, to the following effect–the bank robber suspect who held police at bay in a motel room standoff the other day is dead tonight.

i watched the story, and it seems he choked to death on the floor of his cell on a golf-ball sized chunk of crack wrapped in plastic. he had been on suicide watch for a couple days but was then taken off and wasn’t being observed and when officers finally found him he was dead.

they suspected he either had passed the crack out his butt, where it had been hidden, and was now attempting to swallow it to keep it secreted in his person, or it had been inside his body and not passed, but was starting to come apart and his body was throwing it up when he died. i suspect the latter theory. i remembered at one point on the negotiation phone we heard a lot of water running and swallowing, and though we didn’t know it then, i know it now: that was when he was swallowing the crack.

another thing i realized in that moment, as i sat on my couch, as the florida marlins celebrated winning the world series, that in no small part that man was dead because of me. i realized that he had the opportunity to do whatever he did with that golf-ball sized lump of crack–to swallow it–because he had all that time in the bathroom, which he had because of our poor entry into the room, which was due in part to my poor stack formation.

and then i think of that moment when the parole officer pulled back for an instant and i didn’t move. if i had kicked that door, in that moment, we might have made it in the room in time to catch him bolting for the bathroom. maybe he was scooping up the crack off the bedside table and we could have tackled him, if i had hit that door instead of freezing for that moment. and then, of course, no barricade, no SWAT team, no time in the bathroom to swallow the crack, and no choking to death, writhing, slowly dying on the cold floor of a jail cell with a golf-ball sized lump of crack trying to work its way out of his esophagus, blocking all the air, as the lights went down forever.

the more i think about it, i wonder why, if we ascertained that he wanted a lighter to smoke crack, no one made sure to do a body cavity search. i think they found a crack pipe and some rock in the bathroom so that must have satisfied everyone. i know i didn’t think of it.

i don’t think about this every day, and i certainly don’t consider myself solely responsible. like i said earlier, i’m not haunted, and i don’t know how much this sole instance has made me grow. i mean, i’ll never hesitate to kick a door again, but that’s not the sort of spiritual and emotional growth i’m striving for in my life these days.

but when i think of tiny things that can make a difference, i think of this story. not doing anything can have just as damaging repercussions as doing the wrong thing. a tiny moment of inaction and it’s one part of a link of chain that leads to a man choking to death on a jail cell floor. maybe by the time it was my turn to kick the door he was already in the bathroom. i’ll never know. i cross myself and offer a prayer to god every time i pass the motel, make eye contact with the door to that room. i hope he’s happier in heaven than he was on earth.

i have another story where something i didn’t do resulted in someone else dying–a murder this time. but that’s a story for another night.

White Stripes

So, I love the white stripes. I didn’t even know who they were two years ago, and then they became my favorite band. Something about stripping down to the bone. It’s why I love Mending Wall. It’s why I love Thoreau, even with all the pretentious bullshit and “look at me! I’m in the woods! but I can get to town in 20 minutes!” It’s REALLY REALLY why I will buy anything Henry Rollins touches and see him perform in any venue, any where. Thus spake:

Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define your character

But back to the topic at hand. Here comes this really strange looking introverted nebbish and a slightly overweight but INSANELY hot chick, and they (the two of them) take on fake names (Jack and Meg White) and make just unbelievably fucking good music.
But this was NOTHING. This was just pornography. I just saw them live on the Daily Show (only musical guest ever) and I’m just sitting here realizing I’ve discovered sex. I’m at a loss for words.

I Am Thou 2

Xingu thinks perhaps I’ve undersold the concept of my computer game here. What you have to imagine is that your sim world suffers when you close down to go to work or the bathroom or to sleep or something. You get back and open the laptop, they all cry out “Why hast thou forsaken us???” and you notice that everything’s all fucked up. “No no no, that’s not right! That asshole wasn’t supposed to be re-elected! Hey — Rivvy’s book was supposed to be published MONTHS ago! And where are those random bags of cash I planted in the backyard of everyone worthy? GEESH!”

You know, just like life.

Cheese Bag

The scrawny lil’ toughie at what passes for our local mini-mart asked me if I wanted a bag for my cheese. I said, Oh no, that’s alright. I use too much packaging as it is. She says, it’s a really small bag. Thanks, I say, but I’m just starting to feel like my whole life is just bags and wrappers and containers and trash and, you know, extra, unnecessary stuff. And she goes, Gee, is that a metaphor for something, do you think?

I walked out of the store thinking, Did she just call me fat?

St. Nick

Everytime Mr. F writes something it’s like a freakin statue lands on the dinner table. There’s a moment of stunned silence, then everyone says “wow, thats beautiful”, then some moron goes “pass the broccoli.”

I guess I’m the moron.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Feast of St. Nicholas – which is where Christmass comes from for most people who don’t actually go to church or anything. It’s damn cool actually – St. Nick was just this rich guy who got religion and worked a few miracles. He became the patron st. of children because (I’m not making this up) he apparantly fished the *pieces* of three kids out of a butchers vat and went “hocus pocus” and they transmogrified back into little (presumedly very surpised, and somewhat angry) toddlers. The butcher was apparently going to turn them into something (fruitcake is my guess).

He also made a somewhat bizarre habit of giving dowries to maidens who were too poor to have one. The whole concept of a dowry is still hard for me to get my brain around, much less some old guy walking along the street literally flinging gold coins into the bedrooms of young girls (where, apocryphally, they landed in the stockings that were hung up to dry.)

According to legend, he now lives in Spain with his servant black peter where he makes lists of good and bad kids and runs around giving them presents – tomorrow – having nothing to do with Christmas.

All this is just a way of saying “give me my god damned presents tomorrow please.”

A few fun things I’ve heard at work . . .

i was interviewing a police officer recently about a surveillance he had taken part in. he and another cop were in an abandoned house peering through some curtains they had set up in front of a picture window looking out onto a drug infested block (ie, a block where a couple hundred people live, people who get up, go to work, take their kids to school, and all the while walk past groups of young men sitting on stoops, selling drugs and shooting at each other; i just like to point out that all “bad neighborhoods” and “drug infested areas” are really just residential areas where some number of the residents–75%?–live, work, go to school, and eke out a working poor existence–while the other 25% (these numbers are near-imaginary estimates) do drugs, sell drugs, sell and do drugs, sell their bodies to afford drugs, and shoot, beat, and maim each other over drugs.) anyway, this cop was in the surveillance post and as luck would have it a group of young men set up their evening’s activities directly in front of this window. as the officers described it, they were about eight inches away from these guys, separated by a curtain and a pane of glass, listening to their every conversation and watching as they hit off all the fiends who came up and down the block looking for their next high. one of the cops said to me, speaking of his hours of observing these young men “it’s amazing to observe the animals in their natural environment.” (the surveillance ended when a loud car drew the young men’s attention and one of them ran across the street to grab his shotgun hidden under the stairs of a house to shoot at the car; the cops then had to call in other cops out on the street.) referring to people involved in drug activity–and their families, girlfriends, parents, younger siblings, friends, and anyone who lives on the block–as “animals” is common. other appellations include crumbs, shitbags, assholes, motherfuckers, wastes of sperm and egg, and “utterly worthless human beings.”

another time i was looking for a woman who had dated a drug dealer/shooter. not surprisingly given my experience, he was black. she was white, and again, not surprisingly given my experience, was a heavy girl. i called a local sheriff’s investigator who i thought might have had contact with her and might know where i could find her or if i could talk to her and what her story was. he summed it thusly–”she’s just one of those girls that likes to tar paper roll.” it took me a moment to figure out what that meant.

i tried to spring a guy from prison recently. he has information i want, and once we got to the point where i told him what i wanted and he implied that he knew enough to help me, he asked me to get him work release. i told him that since one of his felonies was a violent felony, it wasn’t likely. he told me it was such a stupid charge, because all that happened was that he was selling a crackhead some dope and she stuffed it in her mouth instead of paying so he punched her in the mouth and took her money. by the time he came up to court to make a decision six months later, his public defender told him to just plead to the robbery, he’d get only another six months and then parole and be done. he acknowledged that the public defender was right, he had gotten out quickly, but now he’s got this damn “violent” felony following him around. naturally i’m left working on different ways to make him talk without getting him what he wanted.

i love asking men in prison, or en route to prison, or recently released, what they’re going to do with themselves. i’ve got one guy starting a moving company; another intends to work for his girlfriend’s parents’ printing company; several think that the welding (or whatever) classes they took inside will help them find work, and god willing they’re right; the most common response is “moving down south.” the south is seen as a temptation/police/violence/prison free fantasy land. in countless interviews, in the probable majority of which i’ve been lied to either subtly, partially, or outright, i’ve never seen more conviction in my subject’s presentations to me than the constant assurance that this time, it’s his last time; whatever goes on outside, he won’t be going back to prison. it’s as if they want to believe it so badly that it becomes important to them that i believe it as well. (and i desperately, desperately want to believe it, for them and with them. i wish them such success in my heart, and i don’t know who is more acutely aware of the actual probability of their success and failure, me or them; they that know the mean streets they will return to, or me who knows the statistics, the futility, the hopelessness, the violence, that they will return to.) one man i asked about job prospects snickered at me. he explained “it’s hard to get a job. you go in there and tell them you have two felonies, it’s like you’re black market. nobody’s taking that.” black market. i think of that often.

one of the first jail/informant interviews i did the guy seemed quite smart, but was caught up in a great deal of stupid and tragic things. he was a passenger in a car being driven by his girlfriend (not his BM (baby mama), but his girlfriend, god rest her soul) and the car was shot up by some rivals/haters/bad guys/enemies of his, and the girl died. he ended up a witness in that case, but soon enough caught a new case of his own when he beat up his BM. he was also a drug dealer and a gang member. so i asked him why, why, why, someone who seems as smart as you, would you go to the corner and sell drugs? if you got out today, would you go do that? he said, “look out there. it’s snowing, it’s cold. i get out today, i don’t have a coat. i don’t have boots. i don’t have parents or anyone i can go get the money for these things from. but i know a man on the corner, and he’ll front me some stuff, and i can sell that, and make five hundred dollars, and pay him back two hundred and invest the other three hundred and make another five hundred, and pretty soon i got a coat and boots.” while i’m certain that once he got his money his taste would run towards what the marketing departments have settled on calling “urban”–puffy jackets and timberland workboots, no doubt–he wasn’t talking about needing a coat and boots to earn style points. he meant that he didn’t own a winter coat, or boots, and would freeze. perhaps that wasn’t as subtle as i’m afraid it might have been, but i wanted to make it crystal clear because it’s a point that has stayed with me in all the years that have passed since then. “it’s cold out there, and i don’t have a coat.”

Many Kids Outgrow Nut Allergies

NPR ran a story this morning about kids who outgrow their allergy to nuts. Many of them do, evidently. Check it out. I especially like the mom who says “It’s hard when they tell your kid he can eat all the nuts he wants, which they told you yesterday would kill him.”

Don’t you love doctors?