TRUE BLUE BOOK

Here are some photographs of the book I had made of the interview with my father. Also, I had to remove the Fortune Society interviews for the time being. They first need to be cleared with the interviewee before being made public. Eventually!

HER HOME

The exterior is completely the same.

Picture this: Purple crocuses with open mouths spewing yellow stamens, huddled close and side-by-side, grow in front of bushels of evergreen shrubs. They have grown in the finely manicured front yard since I can remember, pushing their way into the soil like thumbtacks to protect the ground from the effects of gravity. The front walk leading up to the purple guardians looks like the aftermath of a quake. Bricks that read "Hanson," "Potomac," and "Lifetime" awkwardly bubble from the ground, trying to fit in, trying to find a comfortable space amidst the chaos of weeds and roots. The walk leads to the door, accompanied by the weathered gold address of 254 hanging diagonally on the rainbow of brown bricks covering the front of the house (the 4 is uneven, always has been, always will be). On one of the bricks, in between the front door and the gold letters, is a thin-lined wavering heart, scratched in with a safety pin years ago.

The interior is nothing like I remember.

My childhood bedroom, up until I was thirteen, was on the first floor of the house and regretfully located between my parent's room and the bathroom. It was painted a pink antacid and adorning the walls were plastic balloons forever suspended in artificial flight. Against the back wall towered a wooden canopied crib, in which I slept for longer than I’d like to admit. I had an issue with falling, with waking up on the hard wood floor; my hands were always tucked under my chin as I lay curled and bruised. In the mornings I found my toes stretched out from in between the bars at the foot of the bed. I would often wake to a Schnauzer licking each toe as if they were ice pops melting in the summer sun, his tongue working furiously as if they would soon disappear. Or my father’s thick fingers, like scarred breakfast sausages, tickling each toe mercilessly. Or, I would wake to a debilitating cramp.

And every morning I would have to climb out of the crib. On my better, more adventurous mornings, I would pretend as if I were an escapee bound for freedom. Sometimes I had to flee the grips of a snarling witch; other times a prison guard, and once even an unwanted lover. I would grip the bars and exclaim, “Somehow, someway, I will leave this place forever!” or “You’ll never get away with this!” or, to prince charming on the other side of the bars, “Please wait for me!” (And he always did). On my more irritable mornings I would shove my chubby legs in through the bars and cry out for help, pretending I was stuck, vying for attention. The Schnauzer, Barney, would scamper in and gently set his wet mouth down on my foot, his yellow teeth softly gnawing on skin and bone. A love bite. Apparently, I wasn't yelling loud enough (something’s are always far away).

Eventually, the canopied crib was replaced with a day bed: white flowered tubing with pink and blue painted flowers hugging a single mattress. It was here I would discover what a self-induced orgasm was at the age of six years old; I thought I was a genius. Here my mother would walk in on me masturbating to a cassette tape of janet. by Janet Jackson ("Throb," track 10) with my pale pink ballet stockings around my knees. Here I would write numerous notes to my parents in the event that I should unexpectedly die in the middle of the night. "I'm Sorry Mom, I'm Sorry Dad," they would read. Here I would pull a pillow down on my face until I came up for air choking. And here I would take out my self hate on a blue stuffed bear by punching him in the stomach repeatedly because he would never be as good as the pink stuffed bear. Never.

(The room has been torn down and joined in lavatory matrimony with the adjacent bathroom to create a larger space to shit, piss, whatever. My father’s new throne.)

When I turned thirteen, the last of my two brothers had moved out and I was given his bedroom on the second floor. Large and baby blue with nooks and spotlights, I decorated it with lyrics written in Sharpie marker on the wall. The black ink read, “Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care,” or “My cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal.” There was an L-shaped desk with filing cabinets and a typewriter on the surface. In the corner lay a box spring and a mattress (I still only sleep on a mattress on the ground) covered in green sheets and a husband pillow while sheer tapestries of bright green and venetian red billowed from the ceiling above like lime cherry clouds floating over me while I dreamed. It was in this room I lost my virginity, a clumsy five minutes of figuring out the simultaneous motions of two bodies. It was here an ex-lover tried to kill himself with a pair of black fabric scissors, spitting and crying as I bear hugged him to the ground from behind. It was here I truly fell in love for the first time, seven years ago, and still haven’t completely fallen out of it. And now it is here that I dread. It's the one room that hasn't been renovated. The walls still have the lyrics, the desk still has the typewritten pages, but the room itself is now used for storage: boxes of faded photographs, a plastic Christmas tree, birthday cards and elementary school paintings, my father’s endless towers of coins. Some things will never, ever change.

* * *

Here is something: I visit with my father recently, absorbing the changes I dread and the changes I pray for. I don’t go upstairs; it’s only filled with terrible specters of the past looking to squat my brain. I piss in a spot where I once used to sleep and I move like a praying mantis through the unrecognizable. As I am about to leave, my father tells me a story (he’s good at that). There’s a young priest, an old friend of my brother, who has a twin brother, although I am unsure who is who. He probably feels the same way about me, although I am just one. The priest calls my brother, after not seeing him for a few years, and asks if my father is having construction done on the house. The priest had a dream, like we all do, except he remembers his: my mother, in all her ghostly lucidity, came to him and told him to tell my father she really likes the changes being done on her home.

TRUE BLUE: FONZI TYPE HOOD

Earlier this month, I had a paperback book printed up of the True Blue interview to give to my father for his birthday (and he loved it). The website I printed the book through, Blurb, lists the book on their website so anyone can buy it. What do you know! You can check it out here.

* * *

Cynthia: Before we get to the police stuff, tell me about how you met mom.

Dad: Oh, I met mom in junior high school. H. Frank Carey High School. Actually, I met mom on Valentine’s Day. It was a Valentine’s Day dance at St. Catherine’s of Sienna in Franklin Square. I wasn’t Catholic, I was Lutheran. Mom was Catholic. She just stood out of the crowd. She was the one woman I was looking at, a young lady, she was fourteen-years-old and I was fifteen. I asked her to dance and we were dating ever since. We dated all through high school. Junior high school and high school. I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one when we got married.

Cynthia: You got into a lot of trouble in school. Can you talk about that?

Dad: I used to cut class a lot. I hated English, now I love English. I love history. At that time classes just didn’t interest me. I think boys mature at a much slower rate than women do and at my age, at sixteen or seventeen, the only thing I was interested was pretty girls. So I was out of school a lot. I did graduate, though I was in a lot of trouble. I got suspended several times. And (laughs) I remember my assistant principal saying to me one day, he says, “Well, you don’t look like you’re college material, but I bet you become a cop! Most of you hoods, you Fonzie-type hoods, become cops.” (Laughs) And sure enough, I did.

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.

TRUE BLUE: BIG PUDDLE 3 AM

Cynthia: Tell me about your partner, Danny.

Dad: Danny Lunt worked in the 103 with a guy named Charlie Baesel, and I was working with another policeman named Richie Murphy, and we got involved in a stolen car chase at two o’clock in the morning down by Springfield Boulevard. and the guy bailed out of the car and starting running and we had him cornered between myself and Danny. So Danny was chasing him towards me and Danny said he was going to drop kick him to stop him, but the guy ducked and Danny drop kicked me. (Laughs) so I figured, before this guy kills me I better become his partner.

Cynthia: I know you and Danny got into a lot of trouble together. Tell me about one of those times.

Dad: (whistles) There’s a lot.

Cynthia: (laughs) Okay, well tell me about the first one that comes to mind.

Dad: Okay, there was a time in the 113 precinct. We were chasing a stolen motorcycle. A motorcycle is pretty tough to chase because they’re maneuverable and they can accelerate so quickly. But it was about three o’clock in the morning and we were chasing him up and down the side streets over by Baisley Park, over by Old Creek Boulevard close to the airport. And we just had a torrential downpour and we had lost sight of the motorcycle, so now we’re scouring the side streets for it and I hit a side street that had a big dip in it, like a valley. It was deep and the bottom of the valley was full of water. Danny said to me, “Don’t chance it. I don’t know how deep it is.” I says, “Well, I have to get to the other side. I think we can catch up to the motorcycle!” So I hit the (laughs) valley where the flood was and it was deep alright, because as soon as I hit it I saw the water come over the hood of the police car. There was a waterline on our windshield and Danny was 6’5” and he hated being embarrassed. It was three o’clock in the morning. Now he’s looking at the side window and cursing at me! There’s a waterline on the side window and the water’s going into the channels of the door, filled up the inside part of the door, and was coming up into the car from the channels through the window. So now the water’s filling up in the car. The car’s stalled. We’re stuck in this giant lake. Big puddle. The water’s actually coming up over the front part of the seats (coughs) and we find ourselves sitting on the headrests bent over. Him being 6’5” and myself being 6’0”…we’re not looking too good at three o’clock in the morning. What we didn’t know was that when you short out a police car it’s wired so that the siren and the dome lights go on automatically. So here we are, three o’clock in the morning, stuck in this puddle, the car’s filling up with water. If we open the doors the water’s just gonna come flooding in. All of a sudden the car shorted out. The dome lights went on and the siren started going WHOOOOOO-WHOOOOOOO. Well, this woke up the whole neighborhood. Everybody started coming out of their houses. There’s people looking at us and Danny is saying to me, “When we get out of this, I am going to kill you!” (Laughs) He said, “Turn the key! Turn the key!” and sure enough it turned the starter motor just enough to turn a flat wheel, and we kinda inched our way out. We got out, we had to get a tow truck, people were just shaking their heads and Danny’s really embarrassed, but you know, sometimes you make a judgment call.

TRUE BLUE: THE "YOOTS"

Cynthia: So tell me more about the area back then.

Dad: Well, that was just before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the riots. And I remember them putting us on Nordstrom Avenue and down towards Atlantic Avenue for crowd control. There were three of us. The emergency service truck came around and gave everybody 200 rounds of ammunition. Fifty rounds in a box. They gave everybody four boxes of 38 caliber bullets, those were the guns we carried, 38 revolvers, and we said, “Why do we need all these bullets?” Well, about a half an hour later, there were wall to wall people coming up from Fulton Street rioting. Bats, rifles, bricks, breaking into stores, turning cars over, starting fires. And there must have been about 1200 people, estimated, coming up, looking at us. And there the three of us were standing, there were just three of us, I don’t think there were four of us, there were three of us there. We said, “There’s no way we’re going to stop them.” (Laughs) So we all got together and we thought we should do a tactical retreat. We went down the side streets, found a school, and got into a school and barricaded the doors, because there was no way we were stopping 1200 people. They had more guns than we did. So, that was the Martin Luther King Jr. Riots. And there were several riots in Brooklyn. They use to do them every summer. It was just an excuse to break into stores and loot. Liquor stores, furniture stores… and it was usually the youths, or the “yoots” as they say in Brooklyn.

TRUE BLUE: BUBBLE GUM MACHINE DOME LIGHT

I conducted an hour long interview with my father about his time on the NYPD in East New York from 1968 - 1989. I'll be posting chunks of the interview as I continue to transcribe it.

* * *

Me: Tell me about your first week on the job. What was that like?

Dad: Oh, it was horrible. Coming from Long Island, my first week they stuck me in the 8-0 precinct, my very first precinct, in Bedford Stuyvesant. I worked with a guy on a night shift, which was midnight until eight in the morning, and his name was Freddie Holmes. Really nice guy. Black cop, well seasoned, and he had about 5 years on the job. We had all dark blue uniforms then. I remember him stopping for some ribs on Pacific Street and Nordstrom Avenue at about 3 o’clock in the morning on Saturday evening. Bedford Stuyvesant on a Saturday night at three in the morning is jumpin’. Everyone is out partying. So he left me in the police car...the old green white and black ones with the bubble gum machine dome light… and he went in to get some ribs. And an elderly drunken women, it was in the middle of the summer, come up to the car, my window was down, leaned in the car, grabbed me by my police shirt, and planted a kiss on my lips (loud kiss sound) and she says, “Honey, you’re new here… and their gonna kick your ass!” And I was ready to quit, I was ready to quit. I says, “If she knows I’m a rookie cop, the guys on Nordstrom Avenue are really going to kill me…” So, that was my first week on the job. And Freddie came out of the rib place, kicked her in the ass, and told her to get on her way. And I was ready to turn in my shield and gun. I said, “I ain’t gonna make this. I am not gonna live in Bed Stuy."