Riding with the 72nd.

I went on a ride with the police the other day and we had to write a memo about it. This is what I wrote:

Pulling out knees jammed in, ‘oh fuck here he comes,’ ‘what the?’ Looking over and in the sunlight the captain is jogging over the station forecourt holding two yellow flaps or something. Officer Marrero stops the car. The captain’s holding the two pieces of a bullet proof vest. The brand is “Point Blank.” No one seems to mind which piece is for my front and which is for my back. “Show him what we do boys.”

Pull up alongside a pair of dealers, standing there straight up on the avenue, hands deep in the jeans pockets, hoods over their faces. “People have been calling in about you,” says Officer Cracchiola, “get out of here.” They look at each other. Let’s go this wa-y… No, the other one jerks his head, this way. They go. Marrero notices a car parked by a hydrant. Out comes the summons. “Look at that, so many fucking spaces… that’s an expensive trip to the supermarket.” Hundred and five for the man who comes out and protests with a smile.

“Man unconscious.”

Up the stairs which are red lino and spat-on white, cream walls, grey sludged across the bottom, Marrero climbing in front of me, white socks showing between his small shoes and dark blue trousers. “Every time there’s a 911 they call us as well, whenever they call out the EMS they get us as well, I’m like there’s a heart attack? What the fuck am I going to do about it? I don’t fucking know.” Up the stairs to the top, small line of people around the top landing, quickly, seconds quickly, Marrero says over his shoulder, plainly, “He’s dead.” Paramedics looking tired. One of them is tall and blond with her kit over her neck and shoulders, she seems in the middle of a huge long shrug. The rest of the people look on. In the banisters rests the body of a bike, stripped out, two old wheels and a saggy tyre. Someone, absently, stuck an orange $3.99 price label on the stairs.

Light comes from above. Blue and bright through a skylight. There are family. The sister, who has black hair and glasses, her friend and her daughter, the dead man’s niece, who wears a Montgomery Fire and Rescue sweatshirt baggy over her grey leggings and her ragged red hair. They are milling around the door to the tiny room. Looking in there is a blind over the window and cutting the beautiful afternoon into yellow slats and the long slope down to the water and the tops of the industrial buildings and the line of watertowers and clouds and the strip of grey sea cut narrowly again and again. He’s dead on the bed. Scratchy black hair with its strings of white, feet folded quietly over in their white socks, grey sneakers together at the end of the bed. He’s wearing dark comfortable clothes and he’s facing the wall thank god. The carpet is brown the room is so small you can touch all the walls and there is a stripy towel hanging ever so neatly from a hanger on the cupboard where the dead man’s clothes are. Other cops have arrived. The big man Fusco from community affairs and a small sallow faced sergeant who has seen it all before. The Sergeant comes through and thinks about using the towel for something but the towel is small and so neat and the family are standing right there on the threshold whispering so he doesn’t.

Marrero has got some plastic gloves on, he walks in and out the room, Cracchiola has been down to the car, he’s doing the paperwork on a metal clipboard, getting names and physicians and dates of birth as the door occasionally swings to and open with the slats of the blind and the afternoon sun and the quiet white socks of the dead man sometimes glimpsing through the creased elbows, tie clips and badges of the NYPD. The dead man’s story is coming in bursts and trickles from the family, “methadone…. social security… he just cashed it.. no we’re from out of state…. he goes to… his mother… she’s in a home.. near.. he goes everyday… then she… he stopped… she rang us.. we came… well… we borrowed the key and… we called… funeral parlour? will they need an autopsy… he was on pretha—pros—propan—pretel--adone… I don’t know… the doctor’s name… what?.. we saw it on the bottle.. his meds… is this it? Is this his room?… where’s all his stuff?… 1952… 51”

Facing the dead room, a door is open with a long corridor reaching into the apartment, a stream of people come in and out, a long Mexican family, children with their gameboys. Another woman emerges with a corgi and stands there looking knowing until… “murió?? murió? Henry murió? Quando… ayy,”

“I fucking hate these,” says Marrero standing there in his gloves, “I fucking hate these it’s not our sector but you got to hang around for fucking hours the detectives got to come and see if there was anything suspicious. Then the fucking M.E., they come and sometimes they’re real quick but sometimes they’re fucking, they come in, they flip the body do all this shit and they poke it with their fingers one time I saw this huge guy with the belly all out and you hear all the squelches all the bbraghs and then the smell, the shit they do, man forget about it. We’re lucky this one’s fresh and it’s cool now, man, sometimes they’re in there and they’re cooking, you know what I’m saying, they’re cooking.”

Down by the car, Marrero is still going. Debbie, the dead man’s niece is smoking a long cigarette, two kids are playing, throwing a half pumped mini basket ball against a wall and then throwing it up and letting it bounce on the plastic canopy of a minimarket.

“All this shit, you see what I got to do,” Marrero pulls off the gloves and cleans his hand with a wipe, “fucking gloves and wipes and now they’ll take him down to the morgue and they’ll saw him open cut him up…eergh-urggh-eerghg-urrggh… when we were in the academy they took us down there all these dead bodies and they took out a hand and said, fucking look, here’s a hand.”

The dead man ties up another squad car and we go driving around. Marrero and Cracchiola have been partners for a couple of months. Cracchiola has got a shaved head and narrow forehead which turns straight into a pointy nose with a freckle on it. His eyes are blue and his sentences collapse into “and-we-were-like-oahh.” He’s the scribe of the two, filling out the forms, working his way across, the endless names and dates and zipcodes and phone numbers. He knows a lot about small quantities of time. “And then I’m like talking to the XO and we’re there and Lovitz is there as well and I’m telling him, I was-like-we-were-oahhh, and it took fucking 2 point 3 seconds that’s what I’m telling him you know what I’m saying?” Marrero is younger. He looks young but he drives and he’s slicked down chest out walk with me you seen this shit kid we’ll suit you up and that was fucking legit you wait till it gets dark and then fucking forget about it this shit it’ll be a miracle if we don’t get a collar tonight and no one wants to be a cop no more cos there’s no money and all this paperwork but the Mayor says crime is going down so crime is going down.

Marrero and Cracchiola talk fast in half conversations. They’ve spent a lot of time on these streets listening to classic rock on the radio, heads quietly nodding in time, visible through the grille, lit up by headlights or silhouetted against the lights of stores, swaying into rhythm on the country numbers, rocking forward in Thunder Road and Sympathy for the Devil. They don’t finish sentences. Everything is coordinated for minimum effort.

“What’s next?”
“Depends on…”
“doesn’t depend on shit, let’s just do whatever…”
“you don’t care?”
“just tell me, you got the.”
“Yeah, I got the..”
“so let’s just,”
“ok, five seven oh nine on fifth…”

And Cracchiola turns the music up.

They sit very still when “Central” calls them and despatches them on a job. Moving without thinking their hands slip under the sun visors and pull down pads and pens. Marrero’s goes straight in his mouth as they take the “10-10” or the “10-32” or the MVA we went to with a slight bash to the woman’s car door or the stolen radio and hack license from the Lincoln town car driver in the car park at Home Depot.

The goal is to “clear the board.” Get these waiting jobs cleared off, the “stories” filled out and ready to drop off, the list of incidents and complainants and particulars that take the place of people and their problems in the boxes on official forms. Get these jobs, tickboxes and crime numbers squared away, stuffed under the sun visor or on the clipboard and they’re done. These officers don’t see the consequences. You should have seen them squirm when the family of the dead man wanted to call them the next day, “Can I call you and give you the name of the doctor tomorrow…?” “No, No, mam, we’re just here and then we move on, you give it to him [gesturing towards the detective], you give it to them, they’re doing this now.” They just do the scene and move on. Marrero turned around one point and said, “one time I don’t how the fuck it happened but I’m fucking driving along and I look over on the other side of the road [we’re on busy long fourth avenue and Marrero is pointing to the other side], I look over the other side and this car’s all flipped over and I’m like fuck so I go over and it’s all flipped and the guy’s inside he’s unconscious and bleeding and shit.” Was the guy ok? “I don’t know, the ambulance came and they got him out…. I don’t know… sometimes you want to know what happens next….”

After the dead man another squad car sorts out a knife fight and makes an arrest so suddenly it’s just Cracchiola and Marrero. They’re the only car out in the 72nd. It’s about eight o’clock at night. Call comes in about a burglary. A boy, twelve or so, opens the door and we climb up. These steps are worse than the last ones. Chipped wood stairs, just coming off in chunks, handfuls of dustyfluff caught between the rails under the banisters. White walls slapped in places with blue. Holes stuffed unevenly with plaster and a stool on the plastic floor. Up to the top apartment and into the tiny kitchen. A young boy is at the table eating cheerios soggy in milk, the cereal box huge in front of him on the table. The mother is there, Mexican and speaking Spanish to Marrero, Cracchiola is filling out another form. The doorbell rings. It’s another cop, the finger prints man. What’s missing? $250 in cash, where from? The freezer. The free-ze? “Fugese,” says Cracchiola plainly as he fills out the form. He likes the sound. “Fugese. Someone had to know it was there.” Then he says, “Roaches are the real problems in places like this, fucking horrible.”

The perp came through the window which leads on the fire escape. The mother, looking tired but calm and sagging around her hips, mimes people running over roofs. The TV, the computer, the cds, they are all stacked on a unit not quite facing the brown sofa that runs most of the length of the room. Only the cash is gone. The finger print man has arrived. He’s older, in his forties, grey streaks in his hair, grunting as he climbs on to the fire escape and starts dusting and dabbing with a brush at the dirty dirty window. “Fucksake,” he says, “sometimes you luck out but…” Otherwise he needs something that the perp picked up, the freezer handle won’t do, neither will the drawers. Then the nephew appears. 16 or so Mexican looking with a black ponytail, fuzzy moustache, long jeans shorts that stretch down to mid calf, he’s wearing a red hooded top, “You got robbed?” Cracchiola, Marrero and the fingerprints man look at each other quickly. We leave. Fingerprints man says, “always the top floor” and we pass the nephew and his friends all smirking on the landing. Walking over to the car, Cracchiola says, “when the story’s straight you just want to get straight out of there as fast as you can, write it out in the car where it’s more comfortable.” Beautiful economy.

Then for some tacos and we sit on a quiet street and Cracchiola calls his girlfriend and we turn up the classic rock and turn down the dispatcher and for a few minutes, to the sound of eating and the crunching of foil wrappers and sucking on snapples, Sunset Park is defenceless.

Darker and darker with the long avenues stretching down to the Verrazano bridge and the lines of reds and greens at the stop and go lights. The calls lessen and we cruise to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, heads gently rocking as the next precinct over takes a shooting but they can’t find the body only some blood and Marrero tells me about the Chinese gang killing last weekend. Three men killed a man with a sharpened broom handle. Stabbed him in the liver, “ran for his life for half a block and then dropped down dead.” Then a man exposes himself on eighth avenue. “This is what we’re reduced to.” Pearl Jam come over the radio and Cracchiola is unwilling to let the music down as he takes the complaint off a man in the street, “you call the cops? uh huh, uh huh, you see him? ok… what does he look like… ok… which way did he go…?” We drive around slowly but their hearts aren’t in it. It’s past nine. Any booking now is going to take until two o’clock in the morning. “I want to get home on time,” says Cracchiola. Down onto fourth avenue again, they drop me at the subway.