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As a seventeen-year-old kid, just beginning my wandering ways, traveling the country by bus, I sprinted across a busy street in downtown Houston. A motorcycle cop spotted the crime, hurried up behind me, screeched to a sudden stop.
âBoy!â he shouted at me. (I was young, yes, but why do they always have to call you âboyâ?)
âBoy,â he said. âYou better have some ID.â
I handed over my driverâs license.
âYou ainât up north, boy,â he said. âAnd down here we take jaywalking serious.â He kept calling me âboyâ and my heart was beginning to pound. I didnât know why.
âNow thereâs two ways for a boy like you to end up,â he said. âIn jail. Or in the morgue.â He waited. âNow whatâs it going to be?â
âPardon me?â
âPardon me, sir, â he corrected, but I didnât oblige. Looking back on it now, I suppose he wanted me to lower my eyes, bow my head, and apologize. I looked him in the eye instead and frowned seriously. I wondered what jail would be like. He stared back.
Eventually he let me go.
âYou be careful, boy,â he said finally. âAnd from now on cross the street like youâre supposed toâat the light.â
I had forgotten about the entire incident until now, repressed it, the psychologists would say.
Five years later, another situation that I did not so easily forget. The Los Angeles police were not so easygoing.
Once more I was traveling by bus, in the station and trying to buy a ticket to San Francisco. Twelve people stood in line ahead of me and my busâs departure had just been announced over the PA. In a panic I asked each person in front of me if I could skip ahead. But even with their permission the ticket agent refused to sell me a ticket.
âWhy not?â
âBecause you jumped in line,â he said. But no, that couldnât have been it.
âI asked first. You saw me. And everybody agreed.â
I turned to them all for confirmation. They still agreed.
âDoesnât matter,â he said. âNow get back at the end of the line or Iâll call security.â
âGo ahead and call security, you jerk. Iâm not moving until I get my ticket.â
Security came, but what could they do? I still wouldnât budge. But then the police were called. One tough cop kept fiddling, as tough cops like to do, with the pistol in his holster. I thought it might be a good idea to get back in line, but not before I told them all, cops included, what jerks they were.
The line moved quicklyâof course. Without the panic and without the fuss I would have had my ticket by now, been on the bus and gone. And that made the entire incident all the more frustrating.
The cops stayed right beside me. They gloated now about how easy it could have all been if I had just stayed in line in the first place.
âThat didnât take long,â one cop said. âNow did it?â
But I was still angry.
âYou see?â he said. âWeâre not such jerks, are we? Weâre just doing our jobs.â
I saw red.
âCalling it your job doesnât make it right,â I said. âBut no, youâre not a jerk. Youâre very little more than a pea-brained penis-head.â
Now he was the one who saw red. Before I could finish insulting his mother, he grabbed me by the wrist and yanked my arm hard behind my back. He twisted my wrist until the skin burned. I struggled. Together the two cops slammed me to the floor and while one of them held my head against the filthy tile, the other cop handcuffed me. Then they dragged me off and threw me into a little holding room with a couple of drunken vagrants trying to sleep off their DTâs. The room reeked of vomit and urine, the odor of stale alcohol and sweat. The two cops pushed me in and bounced me off the walls a couple of times. They punched me and one of
Learning to Kill: Stories