Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

I got to the Glass House a half hour early and by the time I shined my black high-top shoes, buffed the Sam Browne, hit the badge with some rouge and a cloth, I was sweating a little and feeling much improved. I put on a fresh uniform since the one from yesterday was covered with blood and birdshit. When I pinned on the gleaming shield and slid the scarred baton through the chrome ring on my Sam Browne I felt even better.

At rollcall Cruz was sitting as usual with the watch commander, Lieutenant Hilliard, at the table in front of the room, and Cruz glanced at me several times like he expected me to get up and make a grand announcement that this was my last day. Of course I didn’t, and he looked a little disappointed. I hated to disappoint anyone, especially Cruz, but I wasn’t going out with a trumpet blare. I really wanted Lieutenant Hilliard to hold an inspection this morning, my last one, and he did. He limped down the line and said my boondockers and my shield looked like a million bucks and he wished some of the young cops looked half as sharp. After inspection I drank a quart or so from the water fountain and I felt better yet.

I meant to speak to Cruz about our lunch date, but Lieutenant Hilliard was talking to him so I went out to the car, and decided to call him later. I fired up the black-and-white, put my baton in the holder on the door, tore off the paper on my writing pad, replaced the old hot sheet, checked the back seat for dead midgets, and drove out of the station. It was really unbelievable. The last time .

After hitting the bricks, I cleared over the air, even though I worried that I’d get a burglary report or some other chickenshit call before I could get something in my stomach. I couldn’t stand the idea of anything heavy just now so I turned south on San Pedro and headed for the dairy, which was a very good place to go for hangover cures, at least it always was for me. It was more than a dairy, it was the plant and home office for a dairy that sold all over Southern California, and they made very good specialty products like cottage cheese and buttermilk and yogurt, all of which are wonderful for hangovers if you’re not too far gone. I waved at the gate guard, got passed into the plant, and parked in front of the employee’s store, which wasn’t opened yet.

I saw one of the guys I knew behind the counter setting up the cash register and I knocked on the window.

“Hi, Bumper,” he smiled, a young guy, with deep-set green eyes and a mop of black hair. “What do you need?”

“Plasma, pal,” I said, “but I’ll settle for yogurt.”

“Sure. Come on in, Bumper,” he laughed, and I passed through, heading for the tall glass door to the cold room where the yogurt was kept. I took two yogurts from the shelf, and he gave me a plastic spoon when I put them on the counter.

“That all you’re having, Bumper?” he asked, as I shook my head and lifted the lid and spooned out a half pint of blueberry which I finished in three or four gulps and followed with a lime. And finally, what the hell, I thought, I grabbed another, French apple, and ate it while the guy counted his money and said something to me once or twice which I nodded at, and I smiled through a mouthful of cool creamy yogurt that was coating my stomach, soothing me, and making me well.

“Never saw anyone put away yogurt like that, Bumper,” he said after I finished.

I couldn’t remember this young guy’s name, and wished like hell they wore their names on the gray work uniform because I always like to make a little small talk and call someone by name when he’s feeding me. It’s the least you can do.

“Could I have some buttermilk?” I asked, after he threw the empty yogurt containers in a gleaming trash can behind the counter. The whole place sparkled, being a dairy, and it smelled clean, and was nice and cool.

“Why sure, Bumper,” he said, leaving the counter and coming back with a pint of cold buttermilk. Most of the older guys around the dairy wouldn’t bring me a pint container, and here I was dying of thirst from the booze. Rather than say anything I just tipped it up and poured it down, only swallowing three times to make him realize his mistake.

“Guess I should’ve brought you a quart, huh?” he said after I put the milk carton down and licked my lips.

I smiled and shrugged and he went in the back, returning with a quart.

“Thanks, pal,” I said. “I’m pretty thirsty today.” I tipped the quart up and let it flow thick and delicious into my mouth, and then I started swallowing, but not like before, more slowly. When I finished it I was really fit again. I was well. I could do anything now.

“Take a quart with you?” he said. “Would you like more yogurt or some cottage cheese?”

“No thanks,” I said. I don’t believe in being a hog like some cops I’ve worked with. “Gotta get back to the streets. Friday mornings get pretty busy sometimes.”

I really should’ve talked a while. I knew I should, but I just didn’t feel like it. It was the first time this guy ever served me so I said the thing that all policemen say when they’re ninety percent sure what the answer will be.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, shaking his head. “Come see us anytime, Bumper.”

While driving out the main gate of the dairy, I fired up a fresh cigar which I knew couldn’t possibly give me indigestion because my stomach was so well coated I could eat tin cans and not notice.

Then I realized that was the last time I’d ever make my dairy stop. Damn, I thought, everything I do today will be for the last time. Then I suddenly started hoping I’d get some routine calls like a burglary report or maybe a family dispute which I usually hated refereeing. I wouldn’t even mind writing a traffic ticket today.

It would’ve been something, I thought, really something to have stayed on the job after my twenty years. You have your pension in the bag then, and you own your own mortgage, having bought and paid for them with twenty years’ service. Regardless of what you ever do or don’t do you have a forty percent pension the rest of your life, from the moment you leave the Department. Whether you’re fired for pushing a slimeball down the fire escape, or whether you’re booked for lying in court to put a scumbag where he ought to be, or whether you bust your stick over the hairy little skull of some college brat who’s tearing at your badge and carrying a tape recorder at a demonstration, no matter what you do, they got to pay you that pension. If they have to, they’ll mail those checks to you at San Quentin. Nobody can take your pension away. Knowing that might make police work even a little more fun, I thought. It might give you just a little more push, make you a little more aggressive. I would’ve liked to have done police work knowing that I owned my own mortgage.

As I was cruising I picked a voice out of the radio chatter. It was the girl with the cutest and sexiest voice I ever heard. She was on frequency thirteen today, and she had her own style of communicating. She didn’t just come on the horn and answer with clipped phrases and impersonal “rogers.” Her voice would rise and fall like a song, and getting even a traffic accident call from her, which patrol policemen hate worst because they’re so tedious, was somehow not quite so bad. She must’ve been hot for some cop in unit Four-L-Nine because her voice came in soft and husky and sent a shiver through me when she said, “Foah-L-Ninah, rrrrrrraj-ahh!”

Now that’s the way to roger a call, I thought. I was driving nowhere at all, just touring the beat, looking at people I knew and ones I didn’t know, trying not to think of all the things I’d never do out here. I was trading them for things I’d rather do, things any sane man would rather do, like be with Cassie and start my new career and live a civilized normal life. Funny I should think of it as civilized , that kind of life. That was one of the reasons I’d always wanted to go to North Africa to die.