This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (14 page)

Witnesses materialize from nowhere. Latino men tell the officers a black man in a striped shirt took the gun. The one who does the most talking continually pulls up his shirt to his neck and strokes his round stomach. We drive around until we find a black man in a striped shirt. Paige and Mendoza separate him from his two older companions.

“He's been with us all night,” the older men say.

“Sure,” the cops say.

“Put your hands over your head,” Mendoza says.

“Why do I got to put my hands up?” the man asks.

Mendoza's voice is light and firm. He does not threaten so much as edify. “Because I said so.”

As quickly as the man is cuffed he is released, and then we are driving again. It is dark now, and the people who stare are no longer people I can exactly see. When we finally return to the station, six hours after we left, there is a new crew of men and women handcuffed to the bench. Paige, who seems disappointed that my ride-along was so quiet, starts pulling down the binders over his desk to show me pictures of dead young men. I know that every binder that winds around this building contains more of the same. Polaroids. The gun fired so close to the face that it scorched the skin. A bullet in an ear. Countless pictures of bodies face down in pools of blood. Paige tells me about a mother who killed her kids by putting them in big garbage cans and pouring cement over them. She beat them first, but didn't kill them. “I mean,” he says, “of course they died. Ten kids.” He shows me a filing cabinet with miniature drawers like a library card catalogue, each drawer crammed with cards like Ishmael's. Every person on every card is dead.

At home that night, I go over the details with my father, who wants to hear all of it. He likes Paige and Mendoza. He owes them one now for taking care of me. When I tell him the story about looking for the gun at McDonald's, he nods. “But you can't write about that,” he says.

“The point is to write about it,” I say.

“Some of it,” my father says. “Not all of it.”

I have no idea why it would have been wrong to look for the gun at McDonald's.

I want to write about the police in Los Angeles. I want to tell a story about people who do hard work. I want to explain that living beneath the weight of all those three-ring binders filled to capacity with the neighborhood dead takes a toll after a while, that being the one to discover the children entombed in cement wears you down. I have no intention of exposing anyone. It had been my intention to show what's good. But good, like police, turns out to be complicated.

F
irst there is a written test. Even though my father has given me directions a dozen times on how to drive to the Police Academy from the house, on the morning of the test he changes his mind; he wants to drive me over and pick me up. He says it's the only way he can participate, and I say fine. This is, I believe, something we are doing together. When we arrive at the Academy at 7:40 for the 8:00 a.m. test, a line of people is snaking all the way down the driveway. For that minute I remember that I don't actually want to be a cop. A van pulls up beside us. The man who gets out leans back in to shake hands with someone inside.
Way to go. Good luck
. My father, who has not taken me to school since I was in the early weeks of first grade, kisses me and drives away.

In line, I am given a blue card on which to write my name, address, and where I heard about the LAPD. I print my father's name. I also get handouts about career opportunities and how the order of tests will progress. An attractive black woman wanders back and forth through the line, repeating over and over again in a loud voice that we
must
have a picture ID and be at
least
twenty and one-half years old as of today. A few people peel away from the group and slink back towards their cars. Most of the nearly two hundred people in line look like they've barely scraped in under the wire for age. Logo T-shirts are the order of the day:
House of Pizza
,
Nirvana
,
Toad's Gym
(a drawing of an especially well-developed, slightly menacing toad). It's a shorts-and-running-shoes crowd. Everyone wears sunglasses and is polite about sharing pencils. Less than ten percent of us are women, and less than ten percent, I would guess, are older than twenty-five. At eight o'clock on the nose, three white girls click-run across the parking lot—high heels, ruffled miniskirts, Lycra tank tops, and shoulder-skimming hoop earrings. Their big hair is long and full of loose, shiny curls. They have Natalie Wood's eyes, red lips, foundation makeup. The woman wrangling the line clucks at them, “You girls didn't want to get up too early now, did you?” They fill in their blue cards using each other's backs for desks. It occurs to me that this line wouldn't be a bad place to meet a certain type of guy.

I am far enough up in line to get a spot in the last row of the first classroom, which seats 102. It is a regular classroom with green chalkboards and rows of identical desks. There is a lot of information to cover. The test is being given by a black woman named Desrae from personnel. She has a certain movie-star quality with her high-heeled mules and chenille top. We are given a score sheet and told to fill in our name and then wait. Fill in our address and wait. We are not to get ahead of ourselves on any line. The last time I took a test, it was the Graduate Record Exam and it was ten years ago. Four number codes are printed on the chalkboard that correspond to our race and gender categories. We are to write down the one that applies to us on the top of our score sheet. The categories are: black males; Hispanic males; all other males; all females. Desrae goes over this three times as she walks down the aisles, her voice so lyrical and clear that I cannot imagine anyone's misunderstanding the instructions. Could we be nervous enough to mistake our gender? After we darken in the circles comprising our social security number, we wait while another personnel department member comes around and presses our thumbprint on our test sheet.

The young man in the desk next to mine looks at my driver's license. “Montana,” he says. “Well, you've come a long way.” I lived in Montana last year; I just never got around to getting a new license. It occurs to me I may have broken some law by not attending to this. I tell him I live in Boston now, even farther away, and he tells me he lives in Mesa, Arizona, where he's a police officer.

“And you want to be a police officer here?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. He's from Los Angeles originally and his best friend wants to be LAPD but his friend couldn't pass the test here—or in Mesa for that matter, where, he informs me, they really need cops and are hiring like crazy. He wants to take the test just to prove to his friend that he can waltz into town and pass it without even wanting the job. He asks me what I do for a living now; I tell him I'm a writer.

“Oh,” he says.

We stop talking for a minute, and then he leans over again. He wears his sunglasses on the back of his head, hooked behind his ears in the wrong direction. His hair has the bristly nap of freshly mown grass. “I got a commendation,” he says. “For a report I wrote on a convenience-store robbery. Do you want to see it? I brought it along in case it would help.”

I do want to see it. In his file he has his certificate of graduation from the Mesa Police Academy and a letter of commendation, as well as his well-written report. His name, I see, is Todd White. Todd White has the kind of round, cursive handwriting that was praised in sixth grade. I am just on the first page, barely into the description of what the suspects were wearing, when it's my turn for the thumbprint. I don't take enough ink and have to do it again. “Don't do it like they do on television,” the woman with the ink pad tells me, “don't roll it side to side. It's straight down, top to bottom.”

There is a slight, sick feeling that comes from giving up my thumbprint to the LAPD. I'm on file now. I'm in the machine forever.

We are told to put all materials under our desks, and there, sadly, goes Todd White's packet of letters. We are told to put away all dictionaries and grammar handbooks, all calculators, watch calculators, slide rules, and compasses. I could not pass any test in which a slide rule might help even if I owned one and were allowed to use it. The test booklets are passed out, face down, along with pencils. We are told that if these numbered test booklets are removed from the room we will never be able to try out for the LAPD again. We have forty-five minutes, which should be plenty of time to finish.
Start. Go.

The test includes four different ways to spell “calendar” and “attitude”; choose the correct spelling. Four different sentences, each saying the same thing in a slightly different way, in which we are to choose the most grammatical. Reading comprehension, in which none of the four answer options (choose the one that best describes the role of the police officer in a burglary) really describes what I've read. Vocabulary words:
incarcerate
,
felony
,
misdemeanor.
The test would be difficult for non-native speakers or anyone who slept through high school. I take my time and read everything twice. The proctor calls five minutes.

Once the test booklets are collected, we fill out anonymous questionnaires:
Where did we hear about the LAPD? What is our current income?
Then the out-of-towners are told to go to a separate room. As we gather up our things, Todd tells me that later, when they come in and call a list of names for people to meet in the hall, those are the people who failed the test, a detail that must have come from his friend who couldn't even make the cut in Mesa.

There are forty people in the out-of-town group. The out-of-towners are better-looking than the teeming masses from the test: We have not shown up on a dare after a night of drinking games. We have not shown up wearing questionable T-shirts. There are still fewer than ten percent women in the room. This session will be run by Officer Crane, a very slim black man with a mustache. His uniform is so tight I can make out his abdominal muscles. The sleeves ride his biceps like tourniquets.

“Everyone else has the chance to take a five-hour training class to pass the oral exam,” he tells us. “You people don't have that advantage. So it's my job to tell you as much about the oral as I can in as short a time as possible.” He tells us that they will ask us why we want the job. “People will say, ‘I want to protect and to serve.' ‘I want a good career.' ‘I want to serve my community and help people.' ‘I want to be a part of number one.' ” He stops to lift his chin and kiss the air. “Can you believe it? That's what everybody says. If you say this you'll get a high enough oral score to pass, but it won't be high enough to get in.” (A score of 70 is passing, but rumor has it you need 95 to actually be considered for the Academy.) “What you have to tell them is how your being an L.A. police officer will benefit the community, the department, and yourself.” Officer Crane has a large, neon-pink water bottle, which he drinks from compulsively as he paces to every corner of the room, forcing us to swivel in our stationary desk chairs.

“Ask yourself, how has your job experience prepared you for a career in law enforcement? Well, any job requires that you be a team player. Say you're working at the counter of McDonald's, Burger King, or whatever your local hamburger stand happens to be.” He says this kindly. There is no condescension in Officer Crane. “And you're thinking, ‘That hasn't helped me be a police officer at all.' But you tell them, ‘I'm capable of making independent decisions with little or no supervision. I'm honest, trustworthy, and responsible. I deal with the public, people from all different ethnic groups, and I treat them all fairly. I have a good attitude towards customer service. I'm a TEAM PLAYER. This is true in any job.”

I want to raise my hand.
Except for novel writing, Officer Crane.

“Show them you know something about the city. Tell them there are eighteen different geographical regions, that eighty-eight different languages are spoken in the schools. Tell them you know all about the different careers in the LAPD, narcotics, child abuse, dog patrol. Tell them this is a career that would allow you to have a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Tell them that to prepare yourself you've gone into the military. Don't just say you work out, tell them you have a customized training program: ‘I build up my endurance through running and swimming.' ‘I build upper-body strength by lifting weights.' ‘I could use force that was reasonable to overcome a suspect.' ”

He talks about the integrity that is required at all times. While I believe I am the only person in the room planning on writing about my experiences, I am not the only one furiously scribbling into a notebook. He maps out possible scenarios and we listen. “You and your son are at a Raiders game,” Officer Crane begins, “and a rowdy group wants to fight a cop, and your son says, ‘Hey, Dad, you're a cop, go get 'em.' But you have to go and call security. No heroics.” He turns and paces quickly to the other side of the room. “You're out with your kid and you stumble onto a robbery in progress at a convenience store. The gunman is holding a gun to the cashier's head. You go in and pull your gun, they shoot you
and
the cashier. You had figured your kid was safe in the car, but there are other guys working outside and they shoot your kid.”

The aspiring cadets inhale sharply at their desks.

“You
have
to
call
for
backup
, the guys in the car. You get a good description of the suspect and wait to direct the officers when they arrive after the suspect has taken off. You'll do more good this way. When you're off duty, your role is to be the best witness.”

A woman enters the room and Crane gives us the “time out” signal I've seen my father make so many times. She has a thick stack of blue cards, and announces she's going to read some names and those people should gather their things and meet her outside. Todd White gives me a conspiratorial nod. She has to read the names of everyone who failed from the entire original group of nearly two hundred because she doesn't know who is in the room. Every time she reads an, “Anthony” or “Andrew” I hear my name. What if, after years of teaching college freshman composition, I fail a grammar test for the police department? How
do
you spell “calendar”? She reads about eighty names, most of them Hispanic. Ten people in the room get up and leave. Todd and I stay put.