TRUE BLUE: THE WORKS

Cynthia: Did you work during the crack epidemic in Brooklyn?

Dad: Crack, heroin, you name it. It was going on.

Cynthia: What was that like? Having to arrest these people who were high as kites?

Dad: It wasn’t bad, in a respect, except if you had somebody holding a lot of drugs. The laws of Rockefeller when he was governor, he imposed some heavy duty jail time to drug dealers. It had to do with certain weights of drugs. If they were holding a larger quantity of drugs, they would shoot it out with you rather than give. Some of them were facing life in prison if they were caught. So if they killed a cop they were going to jail for life anyway. Either way, they were going to shoot it out with you. The main thing you worried about was a heroin addict and when you had them under arrest the first question you would always ask them is, “Do you have any works? Do you have any needles?” What they called “works,” like hypodermic needles, in their pockets. They would always tell you no and you would have to ask three times, really emphasize that if you stick your hand in their pocket and I get stuck by a hypodermic needle, the chances are they’ve already contracted hepatitis c, hepatitis b, you’re gonna catch it. Or a venereal disease or whatever they have in the blood system. You would have to emphasize it, say, “Listen, if I get stuck I am gonna beat the crap outta you. I don’t want to bring this home to my family.” Most of the time they would tell you yes, I’ve got works in my pocket. That’s all. That’s all you wanna know. You take the works, smash them up, throw them down the sewer and lock them up for possession. That was probably the worst part; you didn’t want to get stuck by a hypodermic needle.

We had a situation one time (laughs), me, myself and Danny, we went to an overdose. We got called to an overdose and the parents were beside themselves. It was an African American man and they discovered him in the morning. He must have tried shooting up in the middle of the night because rigor mortis had already set in. The limbs were stiff. So he was dead for several hours. The sergeant, Carson Wright, another Afro-American, nice guy, come in and he saw the state of shock the parents were in and he said to me and Danny, he says, “Schemmer! Lunt! Work on him,” meaning give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. (Laughs) We looked at the sergeant and we said, “Serg!” I mean, his arms were reaching up. It was stiff. You couldn’t bend it down. Rigor mortis was set in and there was all sorts of vomit and foam coming out of his mouth. The man was dead several hours and I says, “Serg, come over here. We gotta talk! I am not putting my mouth on that dead man. There is no way I’m bringing him back!” I says, “I am not Jesus Christ and there is no way I am bringing that man back to life. He’s been dead for six hours!” I says, “I’m not getting down there and putting my mouth on his mouth!” I mean, if the guy’s alive or still warm, you do it. And I’ve had situations where I’ve given mouth-to-mouth to a six year old who stopped breathing in Bedford Stuyvesant. We brought the child back three times on our way down to Brooklyn Jewish Medical Center and the kid had spinal meningitis. They kept us overnight for two nights in the hospital to make sure we didn’t contract it because it’s very contagious. The kid didn’t make it. Even though it was a child, well, you gotta do it on a child, but after that you gotta think twice. They didn’t have any medical gear; you weren’t supplied with any type of medical gear that would go between the patient’s mouth and your mouth. Now they have plastic inserts. You know? And a lot of times when you give mouth-to-mouth, people don’t realize that since you’re pumping air into their chest cavity and into their stomach, alright, and then you press on them, they vomit. They spit it back up. The air comes back up. So not many people are gonna get down and do it, let me tell you, to avoid that backflow of vomit. It’s nasty.