Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

After the supervisors and Gert Von Braun were gone, Dan Applewhite’s twenty-two-year-old boot turned to his shaken partner and said, “Want me to drive tonight?”

Wordlessly, the older cop handed Gil the keys to their shop. Phantom pains were already burning Dan’s left hip and running down into his femur. He wondered if this would lead to eventual hip replacement. He’d heard horror stories of staph infection that crippled patients after hip surgery, and he got a terrifying mental picture of himself trying to negotiate the steps to his apartment with a walker.

Unhappily for the older cop, but happily for his young P1, the ER was jammed with patients who had real injuries that needed treatment. LAPD officer or not, Dan Applewhite was told that he’d have to wait an hour, maybe more, before a doctor could see him.

“How’re you feeling now?” Gil asked his partner, whose lean body was twisted gingerly onto his good hip as he sat contorted.

A six-year-old Latino boy whose mother was experiencing contractions was watching Dan Applewhite. Finally he said to the wiry cop, “Why do you sit down so funny? You look like a blue grasshopper.”

Dan Applewhite ignored the kid but said to Gil Ponce, “Let’s get the hell outta here. But if anything happens as a result of this, I want you as witness. I’m in pain from my hip…”

“To your lip,” Gil said, then with his FTO glaring at him added, “Sorry. Just trying to cheer you up. Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

Like Hollywood Nate, Doomsday Dan was one of the Starbucks cops and would rather endure severe caffeine deprivation than ever set foot in a 7-Eleven for a cuppa joe. Gil Ponce couldn’t understand that, given the price of Starbucks coffee, but his field training officer was a partner who would often buy coffee for both of them, and sometimes even a meal at Hamburger Hamlet or IHOP. Generosity was one of Dan’s saving graces that everyone appreciated, and it made working with him tolerable when he was in a dark mood. Gil figured that maybe it was his FTO’s way of compensating.

Dan Applewhite was called Doomsday Dan by the other cops because he lived in constant anticipation of calamity, with permanent frown lines and an inverted smile on his lips. He could be assertive and fearless, but after the fact he’d lapse into a funk and imagine the horrors that might befall him for his actions. He’d reach ungloved into a resisting doper’s mouth to pull out a five-gram stash of rock cocaine but later conclude that if he was lucky, he’d only contract staph from the encounter, instead of the AIDS virus. He was forty-nine years old and had one year to go before retirement, but he was morbidly convinced he’d never make it. Or if he did, the stock market would crash and bankrupt him, and there he’d be, a retired cop, begging for quarters on Hollywood Boulevard.

“I heard that Donald Trump carries a sterilizer for when he has to shake hands with lots of people,” Flotsam had said to Gil Ponce. “If I had to work with Doomsday Dan all the time, I’d buy him one. It gets embarrassing when he’s on a real downer and you go for a Fat Burger and he gloves up to spritz the table and scrub it down with paper napkins.”

Gil Ponce had hoped that a supervisor would move him to another training officer, but being a P1 with so little time left on his probation, Gil had resigned himself and felt lucky when deployment considerations put him with other partners. Despite Doomsday Dan’s pathological pessimism, the older cop had taught Gil a lot, and the twenty-two-year-old boot never doubted that Doomsday Dan was dependable and instructive.

More than once the older cop had lectured Gil on ways to take advantage of his Hispanic status in the diversity-conscious LAPD, especially now that the city of L.A. had a Mexican American mayor with political topspin.

“You’re Hispanic,” Dan had reminded him. “So use it when the time comes.”

“But I’m really not,” Gil Ponce finally said to his partner one evening when they were cruising the side streets in East Hollywood, looking for car prowlers. “Let me explain.”

Gil Ponce had been named after his paternal grandfather, who had immigrated with his parents to Santa Barbara, California, from Peru. All of their children, including Gil’s grandfather, had married Americans.

Gilberto Ponce III told Dan that he wished his mother, whose ancestry was a mix of Irish and Scottish, had named him Sean or Ian, but she said it would have dishonored his grandfather, whom young Gil loved as much as he loved his parents. Yet Gil had always felt like a fraud, especially now, when this FTO kept harping about the diversity promotions that a name like his could facilitate in Los Angeles, California, circa 2007.

“Having a Hispanic name is bogus,” Gil finally said that night to the senior officer.

“Read the nameplate on your uniform,” Dan Applewhite retorted. “You’re Hispanic. That means something today. Look around Hollywood Station. Except for the midwatch, white Anglos are in the minority. Half of the current academy class is Hispanic. L.A. is on the verge of being reclaimed by Mexico.”

“Okay, look at it this way,” the probie said. “What if my Peruvian grandpa had come from neighboring Brazil, where they have Portuguese names and don’t speak Spanish? Would I still rate diversity points?”

“Don’t make this too complicated just because you been to college,” Dan said. “It’s all about color and language.”

Gil said, “I know about as much Spanish as you do, and my skin is lighter than yours and my eyes are bluer. If you wanna work out the math, I’m exactly one-fourth Peruvian, and I don’t think any of that is mestizo in the first place.”

“You overanalyze,” Dan Applewhite said, wishing this college boy wouldn’t debate every goddamn thing, thinking it really was time for him to retire.

Gil said, “And if I had the same Peruvian DNA on my mother’s side with no Hispanic surname attached to me, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And should Geraldo Rivera’s kids rate diversity points? How about Cameron Diaz when she has kids? Or Andy Garcia? Or Charlie Sheen, for chrissake. He’s as much Hispanic as I am!”

The conversation was forever ended when Doomsday Dan pulled their shop to the curb, put it in park, and, turning to face his young partner, said, “This ain’t the city of angels, it’s the city of angles, where everybody’s looking for an edge. There’re hundreds of languages spoken right here in Babelwood, right? It’s all about diversity and preferences and PC. So if the lottery of life gave you an edge, you’re gonna accept it and be grateful. Because even though you’re a nice kid with potential, I’m telling you right here and now that if you don’t shut the fuck up and act like you been somewhere, as your FTO I’m gonna decide that you’re too goddamn stupid to be a cop and maybe shouldn’t even make your probation! Are you tracking?”

Then Dan Applewhite started to sneeze and had to grab his box of tissues and his nasal spray. “See what you did,” he said, sniffling. “You stressed me out and activated my allergies.”

When the older cop got his sneezing under control, his young partner thought things over, looked at his training officer, and said in English-accented high-school Spanish, “Me llamo Gilberto Ponce. Hola, compañero.”

Wiping his dripping nose, Doomsday Dan said, “That’s better. But you don’t have to overdo it. You Hispanics always tend to gild the lily.”

Leonard Stilwell was a thirty-nine-year-old crackhead with a mass of wiry red hair, a face full of freckles, and large, unfocused blue eyes that would have looked believable on a barnyard bovine. He had served two relatively short terms for burglary in the Los Angeles county jail system but had never been sentenced to state prison. The last conviction resulted from Leonard’s having tossed his latex gloves into a Dumpster after successfully completing his work. The cops later found the gloves, and, after cutting off the fingertips, the crime lab had successfully treated the inside of the fingertips and got good latent prints. After that conviction, Leonard Stilwell began watching CSI .