Joseph Wambaugh - The Choirboys

Roscoe walked over to Whaddayamean Dean, pulled him aside and whispered, “This spade’s the troublemaker far as I can see. I think he’s got a leaky seabag. Dingaling. Psycho. You can’t even talk to him. Look what the motherfucker did to my shoe!”

“I think we can quiet them down,” Whaddayamean Dean said as Roscoe stood on one foot like a blue flamingo, rubbing his toe hopelessly on the calf of his left leg.

“Can I talk to you?” Whaddayamean Dean asked the Mexican, walking him to the other end of the hall while Roscoe Rules hustled the silent black thirty feet down the stairway.

“I don’t want no more trouble, outta you,” Roscoe whispered when he got the hod carrier to a private place.

“I ain’t gonna give you no trouble, Officer,” the black man said, looking up at the mirthless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules which were difficult to see because like most hotdogs he wore his cap tipped forward until the brim almost touched his nose.

“Don’t argue with me, man!” Roscoe said. His nostrils splayed as he sensed the fear on the man who stood hangdog before him.

“What’s your name?” Roscoe then demanded.

“Charles ar-uh Henderson,” the hod carrier answered, and then added impatiently, “Look, I wanna go back inside with my family I’m tired a all this and I just wanna go to bed. I worked hard…”

But Roscoe became enraged at the latent impudence and snarled, “Look here, Charles ar-uh Henderson, don’t you be telling me what you’re gonna do. I’ll tell you when you can go back inside and maybe you won’t be going back inside at all. Maybe you’re gonna be going to the slam tonight!”

“What for? I ain’t done nothin. What right you got…”

“Right? Right?” Roscoe snarled, spraying the hod carrier with saliva. “Man, one more word and I’m gonna book your ass! I’ll personally lock you in the slammer! I’ll set your hair on fire!”

Whaddayamean Dean called down to Roscoe and suggested that they switch hod carriers. As soon as they had, he tried in vain to calm the outraged black man.

A few minutes later he heard Roscoe offer some advice to the Mexican hod carrier: “If that loudmouth bitch was my old lady I’d kick her in the cunt.”

Twenty years ago the Mexican had broken a full bottle of beer over the head of a man for merely smiling at his woman. Twenty years ago, when she was a lithe young girl with a smooth sensuous belly he would have shot to death any man, cop or not, who would dare to refer to her as a bitch.

Roscoe Rules knew nothing of machismo and did not even sense the slight almost imperceptible flickering of the left eyelid of the Mexican. Nor did he notice that those burning black eyes were no longer pointed somewhere between the shield and necktie of Roscoe Rules, but were fixed on his face, at the browless blue eyes of the tall policeman.

“Now you two act like men and shake hands so we can leave,” Roscoe ordered.

“Huh?” the Mexican said incredulously and even the black hod carrier looked up in disbelief.

“I said shake hands. Let’s be men about this. The fight’s over and you’ll feel better if you shake hands.”

“I’m forty-two years old,” the Mexican said softly, the eyelid flickering more noticeably “Almost old enough to be your father. I ain’t shaking hands like no kid on a playground.”

“You’ll do what I say or sleep in the slammer,” Roscoe said, remembering how in school everyone felt better and even drank beer after a good fight.

“What charge?” demanded the Mexican, his breathing erratic now. “What fuckin charge?”

“You both been drinking,” Roscoe said, losing confidence in his constituted authority, but infuriated by the insolence which was quickly undermining what he thought was a controlled situation.

Roscoe, like most black-glove cops, believed implicitly that if you ever backed down even for a moment in dealing with assholes and scrotes the entire structure of American law enforcement would crash to the ground in a mushroom cloud of dust.

“We ain’t drunk,” the Mexican said. “I had a can of beer when I got home from work. One goddamn can!” He spoke in accented Cholo English: staccato, clipped, just as he did when he was a respected gang member.

Then Roscoe Rules pushed him back into an alcove away from the eyes of those down the hall who had made their own peace by now and were preparing to go back into their apartments to fix dinner. Roscoe pulled his baton from the ring and hated this sullen Mexican and the glowering black man and even Whaddayamean Dean whose nervousness enraged Roscoe because if you ever let these scrotes think you were afraid…

Then Roscoe looked around, guessing there were a dozen people between them and the radio car, and started to realize that this was not the time or place. But the Mexican made Roscoe Rules forget that it was the wrong time and place when he looked at the tall policeman with the harder crueler larger body and said, “I never let a man talk to me like this. You better book me or you better let me go but don’t you talk to me like this anymore or… or…”

“Or? Or?” Roscoe said, his hairless brows throbbing as he touched the small man on the chest with the tip of his stick. “You Mexicans’re all alike. Think you’re tough, huh? Bantamweight champ a this garbage dump, huh? I oughtta tear that oily moustache off your face.”

Then the flickering eyelid was still and the eyes glazed over. “Go ahead,” the Mexican barely whispered.

And Roscoe Rules did. A second later the Mexican was standing there with a one inch piece of his right moustache and the skin surrounding it in Roscoe Rules’ left hand. The raw flesh began to spot at once with pinpoints of blood.

Then the Mexican screamed and kicked Roscoe Rules in the balls.

Suddenly Whaddayamean Dean found himself trying to get the Mexican’s neck in the crook of his arm, to squeeze off the oxygen to the brain, which would make him lose consciousness and flop convulsively on the ground, thus “doing the chicken.”

The Mexican’s erstwhile black enemy was experiencing a deep sense of guilt and outrage at the Mexican’s plight.

“You honky motherfucker!” the black hod carrier yelled when he finally exploded. He tossed a straight right at Whaddayamean Dean which caught him on the left temple and knocked him free of the Mexican and over the kneeling body of Roscoe Rules who was hoping desperately he wouldn’t puke from the kick in the balls.

Roscoe aimed a spunky blow at the black hod carrier’s leg with his unauthorized, thirty-four ounce sap which pulled his pants down when he wasn’t careful to keep his Sam Browne buckled tightly.

Hit em in the shins. They can’t take that, thought Roscoe, swinging the sap weakly, relying on folklore to save him now that he could not stand up.

But the hod carrier did not seem to feel the sap bouncing off his legs as he and the Mexican took turns punching Whaddayamean Dean silly.

The redhead had lost his baton and gun and was bouncing back and forth between the two men. “Partner! Partnerrrr!” Whaddayamean Dean yelled, but Roscoe Rules could only kneel there, look up in hatred and wish he could shoot the nigger, the spick and his puny partner.

Then Roscoe fell over on his back, nursing his rapidly swelling testicles, spitting foam like a mad dog.

It ended abruptly There had been men, women and children screaming, encouraging, cursing gleefully There had been bodies thudding off the walls, doors slamming. Then silence.

Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean Pratt were alone in the hallway. Both on the floor, uniforms half torn off, batons, hats, flashlights, guns and notebooks scattered. Whaddayamean Dean lay moaning, draped across an overturned trash can. Roscoe Rules felt his strength returning as he struggled to his feet, keeping his balls in both hands for fear if he dropped them they’d burst like ripe tomatoes.