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.

UNDER THE ROSE ZINE: CALL OUT FOR SUBMISSIONS

Under the Rose: A Compilation Zine on Unknown New York is an idea that's been floating in my brain for a while now. The post-industrial wasteland of the city has always been a romantic notion of home to me, but I wouldn't consider this zine city-centric by any means. I'm also interested in the stories beyond the tri-state area, the places you sought soundless refuge or idiosyncratic secrecy, that make up what you call home.

undertherosezine@gmail.com

MONOLOGUE OF A PROTAGONIST THAT ISN'T TOTALLY ME

I recently found out that the reason blue eyes are more sensitive to the sun than brown eyes is because the blue irises scatter and transmit more unwanted light into the retina than brown irises. Those first five minutes of walking into the sunlight are hard as hell. I shield my eyes, groan, and complain to my brown-eyed friends. They always respond with, “If only I could be so lucky…” and I think this is an interesting choice of words because good luck never looks my way.

I inherited blue eyes from my mother. Her eyes are currently sewn shut, dried out, and six feet under ground (are they even still blue?). Every morning when I wash my face and look in the mirror, I can’t tell if I’m looking at my eyes or hers. I brush my bangs out of eyes and say, “Oh, there you are. Good morning.” I then pull open the cabinet mirrors so that they are facing each other to create an infinite amount of mirrors that line a never ending hallway. Have you ever tried that? It’s like looking into another dimension. It’s terrifying. I like to do this and think about what is going to be at the end of the hallway: an open doorway spilling light, an alternate version of myself doing the exact same thing, my mother. But you can never see the end.

I also recently discovered that the blue pigment is created by means of Rayleigh scatter, which is the elastic scattering of light by tiny particles that are smaller than the wavelength of light. I hardly know what that means, but basically it’s the same optical phenomenon that makes the sky blue. With this information I think of my eyes as puddles, left behind after a harsh storm, rippling the blue skies above. Or the eyes above.

TWO FOR TUESDAY

My post about Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines on the For The Birds blog was linked from NYU Press's blog From The Square. You can check it out here!

* * *

The Dance
(an excerpt from a much longer piece I've been working on)

In the blue-black shadow of the backyard, a piece of gutter hung from the house like a hang nail. It bounced playfully in the wind at the top of the backdoor. Next to it leaned a ladder. The gutter shared custody of the ladder with the unlit Christmas lights that limply hung over the front of the house. He looked up at the house from where he had collapsed in the cool spring grass after trying to sucker punch his son.

“You’re killing her, Dad,” his son had said before the blow. “Did you see her on that goddamn ladder? You’re working her into the grave while you just hide in your office.”

His wife had little to say except to shake her curls at the ladder. His daughter ripped handfuls of grass from the ground as she sobbed. The gutter wailed as it was pushed away from the house by the door being opened and he walked underneath his inadequacies.

He dragged his suitcase, filled with clothes still on the hangers, into his office and slammed the door. He stared at the doorknob and cursed its absence of a lock. He thought of his daughter, constantly employing the lock on her bedroom door every time she walked through it. That sound of metal twisting on metal broke his heart daily. He opened his office door, but only a crack.

The clock read 2:29 AM when he heard moaning in the backyard. He got up from the computer and parted the blinds with one finger. The palpable shadow of his daughter was stretched across the yard in the wake of the motion censored light. She lay face down in the black grass, and as he looked at her the window pane seemed to be streaked with rain, but it wasn’t raining. He picked up a screwdriver from his desk and began removing the door to his office one hinge at a time, the sound of metal on metal like a sonnet.

FOR THE BLOGS

The NYC feminist collective and distro I am apart of, FOR THE BIRDS, has recently started to up our blog game in a serious way. As most of us are in graduate school or touring the country, we can't commit to as many events as we once could. We'll still be out there, distroing zines and music, but we are also trying to maintain active conversation and visibility on the internet.

Today I updated the site with my first blog post, in which the author of the book I discuss totally commented! The internet is literally a tangled web, and a small one at that.

You can follow the blog posts I author here !

THE SYNDROME

The air tastes like cutlery and salt. It lay smooth and cold on a furry white tongue that he runs over rows of cluttered teeth. His mouth is a crowded room, a subway car during rush hour, a deadline. He presses the third floor buzzer and then slips his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt to hold them there and feel the beads of pulled material accumulating; the wear and tear of every day that sneaks by. Everyday that is exactly the same as the last. When he breathes out, he breathes out smoke. When he breathes in, he breathes in savory metal. He runs one hand over the back of his neck as the door opens and the warmth inside hits him like an air bag.

* * *

The window in her bedroom is open, even though there is frost crystallized like cracked glass on the window. She lay belly down on her bed, a mattress in a corner, reading from a book that she’s been trying to finish for months. She places the book on the ground, lays her head across her forearms, and begins to mentally play out a conversation she would like to have. Before she gets to the crux of the internal dialogue, a cool stream of wind whistles down her spine and the apartment buzzer sounds. She flies off the bed to answer the door, but stops cold as she glimpses a shadow escape through the window. A shadow so palpable she could have run the back her hand along its cheek, licked its teeth, pricked the bottom of its foot with a needle and sewed it back to a body before it could fly out into the piercing dusk.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU BETTER THROUGH LETTERS

Giving credit where credit is due: I named this blog after Flannery O'Connor's book of letters, bought for me by my best friend. Aside from a really smart title, the front cover is possibly one of my favorite book covers.

Letter writing has always been really important in helping me understand what it is I am trying or need to say. I have books of unsent letters addressed to individuals, groups of people, no one in particular, and myself. I recently started attaching addresses to each letter, in hopes that someday, years and years and years in the future, some of these letters may get to where they need to go. The addresses will probably be different, maybe the addressees will be gone as well, but words traveled and received even after the mouth has been tied shut with suture string will still ring true.

The last sent letter I wrote was devastating. The letter before that was about the future. And the one before that was lost in transit.

But I'm a hell of a pen pal. So, let's write some better letters together.

NOTES FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM

12:32 AM

Lauren falls asleep half sitting up, propped with two white pillows. Embroidery of pink shiny flesh and black floss crisscrosses down her chest from her sternum to the hollow space below her breasts. It’s an embellishment left behind after her heart, stretched like putty, was repaired last week. I lay next to her, curled like a cat, and I want to lick her wound. She reminds me of my mother for a moment. My mother slept in that position for an entire year, as if she were already in the coffin. I never slept next to her when she was ill. I turn away from her as water fills my eyes and the puckered white paint pours off the wall and then disappears.

9 AM

The sunlight oozes into Lauren’s kitchen as we eat cinnamon raisin toast with dairy-free margarine. I trip into frayed denim shorts and she slips into tight black jeans. I should have showered. We step onto the sizzling streets of Brooklyn, like potatoes plunked in hot oil, and get into my car to drive to the Upper West Side.

11:31 AM

We sit side-by-side across from her cardiologist, both holding our notebooks, both documenting what it is we are both grappling with: her with illness, me with support. I am having trouble listening to what the doctor is saying because my eyes are fixed on the parade of glass animals across her desk; their insides swirling colors of neon organs visible through a translucent exterior. Is it mandatory for every doctor to have so many paper weights on their desk? There are no fucking papers anywhere! Everything is filed away. Everything is in its right place. There is no business left unattended, neglected, ignored, or put aside to be dealt with at a later time. There are no loose papers to be weighed down anywhere in sight.

1:24 PM

Lauren is having an exam done to be sure there hasn’t been a build up of fluid around her heart. In the waiting room, where I do what is expected, I imagine this as a moat surrounding a castle of vermillion muscle. Snoring interrupts my daydream. The man across from me is sleeping sitting up, legs outstretched with his arms across his chest. Maybe he is dead. Death by waiting. I am eating Skittles and the nurse calls the man’s name. No movement. She calls again. Nothing. “Kick him,” another nurse says. He opens one eye. I laugh and eat my last Skittle; it’s red.

2:37 PM

The results are in and Lauren cries. We leave in a hurry to the emergency room at Weill Cornell. The tide of the moat is dangerously high. There is a weight pressing down on my chest, like two meaty palms, as we get into the car. I take a breath and count to see how long it takes before I have to exhale. 32 seconds. I feel like a failure, so I try again.

2:50 PM

Driving south on the FDR I see a sign for the Triborough Bridge and I realize I will never call it the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. I will not call it the RFK, either. I call it the Triborough, or “The Tribe” if I’m feeling cute. Will they build a bridge over the moat to the castle?

3:01 PM

There is a clipper floating up the East River and I am staring at it more than the road. “I wish it had a pirate flag at the top,” Lauren says from the backseat. My right rear view mirror then detaches from the base and blows chaotically in the wind, attached only by a thin black wire. It is a kite.

3:08 PM

There is a shirtless man sitting in a lawn chair wearing a party hat on the side of the FDR as we drive by. Next to him is a large dirty teddy bear face down in a carriage and a tall sign that reads, “Sweet pussy, sweet dick, sweet people.” Richard is my father’s name, a widower, but nobody calls him Dick. Sweet kitten, sweet Richard, sweet nobody. I look at the man and think how this is the first day without rain in weeks.

3:19 PM

The parking here is really expensive. The idea of having to pay $60 when you are suffering an emergency just disgusts me. A severely broken heart (from reasons other than being alone), but fork it over.

3:34 PM

We fill up on free coffee and Keebler Graham Crackers in the waiting room. I hold my cup of black coffee with both hands and run my lips along it’s waxy edge. I look at my bare legs and see the little erect blonde hairs. I look at Lauren and say, “You look great, but I understand that doesn’t mean you feel great.”


4:03 PM

They wheel her into the emergency room and lay her in a sterile bed while I sit next to her and write. She is propped with two white pillows. There are curtains all around us, like we are in a small tent. I want to build a fire, I want to feel warmth. The doctor tries to be funny and quirky, but is only making things worse. He reminds me of Zach Braff’s character on the television show “Scrubs”. I don’t like him.

4:18 PM

Over the intercom someone says, “Taco City in the lobby” and I’m starving.


4:22 PM

A nurse walks by and says, “I think my patient just peaced out with an IV in his arm. It’s not cool to do that.”

4:27 PM

Another nurse says, “There’s blood on this stretcher.”

4:28 PM

I sit in our tent and I want to back stroke across the moat. I want to know everything that goes on within the neon colored insides. I want to sleep next to you eternally and I want to make a new name for myself. I sit in our tent and, goddamn, I want to be a better person.