Paul Bacon (2 page)

But cruising down the West Side Highway past Tribeca, our entire crew was given a heroes’ welcome. Thousands of Lower Manhattanites,
who normally couldn’t be forced at gunpoint to agree on the time of day, were now lining the road, blowing kisses and waving
homemade banners proclaiming, WE LOVE YOU! The air inside the bus turned jubilant, infusing our entire group with camaraderie.

It all came to a sudden end when we got off the bus a few hundred yards from Ground Zero and took our first whiff. More than
a day after the Twin Towers had fallen, the buildings’ remains were still spewing toxic smoke like an underground volcano.
Within moments of stepping off the bus, nearly every man without a hard hat had broken ranks and begun walking back uptown.

A few minutes later, a construction foreman approached our group at a frantic pace. Cigarettes were flicked away and coffee
cups were dropped to the ground as we huddled around the important-looking man to receive our orders. But all he could tell
us to do was stand by, because no one knew what to do with us yet. Only guardsmen, firefighters, and police officers were
being allowed near the smoldering World Trade Center site. Even the real laborers were out of their league now. For the next
two and a half hours, the foreman returned with similar news, each time looking more and more frazzled.

Finally, four hours after we’d arrived with our unusual civic spirit, the organizer brought word that made it seem like old
New York again. The man climbed atop a ladder and spoke to us through a bullhorn. We were rapt. “We got all the hands we need
for now,” he said. “As it is, youze’re just a bunch of lawsuits waitin’ to happen. So thanks but no thanks.”

Most seemed to understand the situation and began to disperse. Someone in the crowd, perhaps another tourist like myself,
cried out, “There must be something we can do!”

“You know what you can do?” said the foreman. “You can give me a fuckin’ break, all right?”

CHAPTER 3

F
OR THE NEXT WEEK, post–9/11 security measures shut down most of Lower Manhattan. Subways and buses stopped running south
of Fourteenth Street, and nonresidents were being turned away. Police checkpoints seemed to be on every corner of my neighborhood.
Nonessential businesses like clothing boutiques and restaurants remained shuttered. When the bars reopened, the New York equivalent
of flowers blooming in spring, a college fraternity brother named Dave called me on the phone. He invited me to happy hour
at our favorite Mexican restaurant in the West Village. He said he already had a table. He said he was sitting outside in
perfect weather, looking at a plate of nachos with my name on it. He also told me that some of his coworkers would be joining
us, and they’d been barhopping since noon. Sure, I said; the more, the merrier.

Meeting Dave for the first time since the towers had fallen was like seeing him at a class reunion. Like me, Dave lived and
worked downtown.

“You’re alive!” I said, reaching my arms to the sky.

“
You’re
alive!” he said.

Our usual handshake led to a hug, which became a bear hug.

Then his colleagues arrived. The two men in polo shirts and tan slacks wobbled up to our sidewalk table the same time the
waitress brought our first drinks. One of the men, William, a senior account executive at Dave’s firm, sat down next to me
and immediately grabbed the pitcher. With no place setting of his own, William took my water glass, spilled its contents on
the sidewalk, and replaced it with freshly blended margarita.

I looked over at Dave, and he winked at me.

“Fucking cops,” William said, then took a long swig.

Dave asked him, “How many times did you get stopped on the way here?”

William said, “I lost track. Man, those guys are rejects. I don’t have my ID with me. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

Four pitchers later, William was still cursing the aftermath. When he wasn’t looking, I gently kicked Dave under the table.
I pointed my thumb over my shoulder, as if to say, “Let’s lose this guy.”

Dave leaned in and whispered, “He’s buying.”

I nodded. A few more rounds couldn’t hurt.

I distracted myself by people watching. Gazing around the neighborhood, I saw a demographic shift taking place. The massive
effort to clean up Ground Zero, about two miles away, had turned the trendy West Village into a staging area for hundreds
of dump trucks, cranes, and other utility vehicles. Less-than-trendy drivers of these vehicles were walking around and mixing
with the locals, who seemed surprisingly undisturbed by their presence. I sensed a new attitude taking hold when I saw a smartly
dressed couple with a bichon frise in tow sharing a cigarette with a garbage collector.

The change did not go unnoticed by William. He watched the blue-collar visitors with a wistful look of admiration. “You know
what?” he said. “I hate my job. No, seriously. I wanna build something. I wanna weld something. I wanna work with my hands.
I wanna be a fireman, you know?”

I found myself agreeing. “Yeah. I wanted to be a fireman too, when I was a kid.”

“So did everybody!” he shouted, banging his hand down, rattling the silverware. “But look at us now.”

When I got home that night, I sat down at my computer and checked my e-mail. I had eighteen new messages; all but one of them
looked like spam. The last was from my employer, with the subject line “Staffing Advisory.”

“Dear Temporary Associate,” it began. “Due to recent events, our Wall Street office will be closed for an undetermined time.
Your service to our company has been greatly appreciated, but is no longer required.”

First I’d been fired via cell phone by someone in a taxi, and now I was being fired with a mass e-mail. I wondered if the
next time I got laid off, I would just hear it on the wind.

I started looking for a new job the next morning. I checked the listings on my temp agency’s Web site, finding many clerical
positions that paid well. The openings ran the usual gamut from administrative assistants to assistant administrators. Could
I go back to that now?

On a lark, I decided to pull up the New York City Fire Department’s Web site. A picture of a shiny red fire engine appeared
on the screen, and my heart beat faster. A long-forgotten dream was still a dream. Why not give it a try? I was in decent
physical shape, and I already had proven rescue skills, thanks to the time I’d spent training to become a scuba instructor
a few years earlier. I clicked around the various pages on the site, thrilled at all the important, exciting things that firefighters
do. I was picturing myself sliding down a brass pole when I stumbled across the FDNY’s age requirements for new recruits.
I turned out to be a whopping five years over the maximum limit.

Luckily, I hadn’t grown too attached to the idea of becoming a fireman. I was, however, still interested in serving the city.
Seeing its valiant response to 9/11, I felt like the guy at the end of
Ghostbusters
who, after the Upper West Side is flattened by spectral warfare, crawls from the rubble and shouts, “I love this town!” I’d
lived in New York longer than I’d lived anywhere in my life. The city was my home, and it needed protection. Manning the fort
and getting paid for it—I could do worse. The only question was how I would serve. Join the military? That would probably
take me away from New York. Growing up as a marine brat, I knew Uncle Sam would send me to a series of backwater bases and
foreign countries. If I wanted to defend my adopted hometown without leaving it, I saw only one choice: join the police department.

Before I got my hopes up, I visited the NYPD Web site and went right to the recruitment section. I was three years
under
its maximum recruitment age. The department’s other qualifications were even more lenient. As long as I had two arms and two
legs, no felony convictions, and could tell red from green, I was almost assured a place on the force. A week later, I sat
for a reading test designed for kindergartners. Then, a week after that, I ran a few laps in a gym and scaled a four-foot-high
fence to prove, I don’t know, that I wasn’t afraid of heights, and that was it. I qualified as a recruit candidate. All I
had to do now was pass a background check. That would be easy; I had no skeletons in my closet.

The NYPD’s background check, which took six months to complete, was on par with a White House cabinet appointment. On top
of providing a lifetime of tax records, I had to get a notarized letter from my parents confirming that they had paid for
everything from my diapers to my college education. I also had to obtain written references from two decades of previous employers,
retrieve long-buried paperwork for every broken bone and torn ligament I’d suffered, and show that I’d answered all my teenage
speeding tickets and curfew violations.

After the paperwork was done, I visited the NYPD medical division in Queens. I received a complete physical rundown, including
the usual sight and hearing tests and a drug test. Things got a little personal after that. Standing in a room with about
forty other recruits, I had to strip down to my Calvin Kleins to show I had no gang-related tattoos, then strip down to my
John Thomas to prove I was the sex I claimed to be. Putting my clothes back on, I was escorted to a small office, where I
filled out a probing self-evaluation. An hour later a civilian psychiatrist joined me in the room and started reading my responses.

“You’ve had ten girlfriends,” he said. “That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“I’m thirty-four years old,” I said.

“I’m thirty-three, and I only dated two women before I met my wife,” he said smugly. “Tell me, how do these failed relationships
of yours usually end?”

I said, “Painfully, I guess.”

“
Painfully
,” he said with a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He wrote the word on my evaluation and circled it a few times.

“Painfully
emotional
,” I added.

“At what point do you generally start hitting your female companions?”

“Hitting them? I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

The psychiatrist dropped his chin and looked at me over his glasses.

“Well, okay. I did hit my college roommate once,” I admitted, “because he snuck up on me while I was studying and screamed
in my ear. He thought it was funny. I didn’t.”

“How did you hit him?” the psychiatrist asked.

“Not very hard.”

“I mean, in what manner?”

“I pounded on his chest like a punching bag.”

The psychiatrist started writing “punching bag” on my evaluation.

“But only until my adrenaline rush passed,” I said. “He was laughing the whole time. Seriously, I’m not a violent person.”

The psychiatrist said, “How often do you feel these ‘adrenaline rushes’?”

CHAPTER 4

I
LEARNED THE RESULTS of my background check two months later. At approximately ten forty-five P.M. on July 7, 2002, I received
a phone call. The man on the other line told me to report to the NYPD recruit orientation ceremony in Brooklyn at six the
next morning. This wasn’t much notice. I didn’t know whether to jump for joy or tremble with fear. I had just seven hours
to turn myself over to the police.

I decided I could start telling my friends now. It had been a long process, and I hadn’t breathed a word to anyone except
my parents, whose signatures I’d needed for the background check. Joining the police ran counter to what most people thought
of me, and I didn’t want to have to explain myself again and again until I was sure I was in. Now that it was official, there
was someone I wanted to tell right away. I knew Dave would still be up, so I called to give him the news.

“Wait,” he said. “
You
are becoming a cop?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“You, who hates guns.”

“Yes.”

“Who says marijuana should be legal.”

“Could make my new job a lot easier.”

“Okay,” he said. “Assuming this isn’t some kind of practical joke, why?”

“It just feels like the right thing to do.”

I’d be facing a more critical audience the next morning at orientation. Despite a copious amount of air-conditioning in the
auditorium, I started to perspire as I walked inside. Uniformed police officers were all over the place. It felt as if a major
bust had just gone down, and I was returning to the scene of my own crime.

I took an aisle seat near the exit door in case someone outed me as a Democrat. I didn’t think being a liberal should prevent
me from working in law enforcement, but I wasn’t counting on any of my future colleagues feeling the same way. I’d never met
a cop who wasn’t writing me a ticket. Everything I knew about police culture came from the University of Colorado Sociology
Department and the televised comments of Reverend Al Sharpton.

As if there to reinforce my bias, a bald-headed instructor who could have passed for a Klansman was pacing around the auditorium
like a drill sergeant, shouting at us in a roughneck drawl. “Yo, in the balcony,” he snapped at one recruit wandering around
the second level. “Take your seat. This ain’t no opera!” To another young man who looked like he was still on summer vacation,
the instructor shouted, “Take those sunglasses off your head! You ain’t playin’ baseball no mowah.” I started to enjoy the
man’s biting repartee. Then he singled
me
out in front of the entire group. “Get your feet out of the aisle, recruit,” he shouted at me from the stage. “This ain’t
no plane!”

I found this offensive. Obviously, anyone leaving his feet in the aisle of a plane would get his toes smashed by a passing
food-service cart, making this a forced metaphor at best. Rather than point out the instructor’s semantic inconsistencies,
I took a cagier strategy: I quickly and quietly did as I was told. But I didn’t like it.

My father, both of my grandfathers, and two of my uncles had been in the military. I knew I owed my existence in no small
part to their sacrifices, but it seemed like a waste not to reap the rewards. What would be the point of their battling oppression
if I wasn’t free to pursue a life of leisure, intellectual achievement, macramé—what ever I chose? At least that’s how my
mother had put it. A disgruntled military wife, my mom drove off-base while my dad was in the shower one morning and never
came back. Years later, she told me that if the draft was ever reinstated, she would drug me, kidnap me, and lock me in her
basement until the fighting was over.

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 people 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.