Chapter Two
Introspections
What I didn’t know was that if I didn’t stand with my back to the wall, Hollywood people would unscrew my ass and sell it down the river.
Joseph Wambaugh
For as far back as she could remember, Jennifer Collins had wanted to be a cop. When she was a little kid just starting out in school, when she fell ill, as happens from time to time, what she remembered most was sitting in the living room and watching TV shows like CHIPs and Adam 12 among the early morning repeats. Her parents, of course, hated these shows, maybe almost as much as they hated cops. Her father was a lawyer, and while he made a decent enough living off of all the damage that followed in cops’ wakes — and, it seemed, wherever they went — all he had to say about them around the dinner table wasn’t fit for conversation with kids present. Not that that stopped him.
Whether or not her mother agreed with him wasn’t really something that ever concerned Jennifer Collins. When she stayed home, which wasn’t really all that often, her mother didn’t bother to change the channel — so an unfettered Jennifer watched all her favorite shows. Then one morning she watched a new show called Emergency!, about the adventures of a new type of fireman working in the LAFD. Paramedics. They were called paramedics, and as far as Jennifer Collins was concerned these new firemen were cooler than cool. They were like battlefield medics, only the war they were fighting was happening right outside her front door.
The Collins household wasn’t, however, really all that close to the action. Not really. Her father’s place, a little ranch style house with thick cedar shakes on the roof, was located on the sliver of land located between Loyola Marymount to the north and Los Angeles International Airport immediately to the south, and Jennifer’s unobstructed bedroom windows looked directly over the airplanes landing and taking-off all day and all night long. When the DC10s and L-1011s started their engines they seemed to let slip a long, low moaning sound as they came smoking to life, and those moans mingled with the pulsing roars of jets reversing thrust just before the next waiting airliner turned onto one of the runways to begin it’s loud sprint back into the clouds.
Jennifer’s first school was located just a few blocks away from that house, just across West Manchester over on Emerson Avenue, a street just like any one of the other tree lined streets close to the college, and there was a Safeway grocery store not too far away from her school, another store just like any one of a number of such stores on the West Side. Her school was one of dozens built just after the war, a little Bauhaus inspired thing that looked like a series of brick boxes that had been stacked one on top of another — until some precocious toddler had come along and knocked them all down, scattering little brick boxes along the edge of Emerson Avenue. And there were days when she felt like one of those bricks, too.
Her father’s house had reddish bricks on the outer walls, but only up to about waist high. The upper reaches were planked and painted sage green, and there were fake white shutters flanking the aluminum framed windows. The grass was green on her father’s lawn and he was fastidious about such things. He mowed the grass once a week, every Saturday morning, and then he edges along the sidewalks and driveway — meticulously. When she was old enough, Jennifer began helping her father, falling more and more, or perhaps deeper and deeper, into the rhythm of his life.
One Halloween, when her mother was helping get her costume situated, Jennifer’s father put a sheet over his body and, pretending to be a ghost, he jumped out in front of the little girl — shouting ‘Boo!’ and almost scaring the shit out of her. In the end his big ‘Boo!’ made her laugh and laugh — and in point of fact more than she had ever laughed before — but it made her father laugh, too. And it was a funny moment between them because after that she increasingly became ‘Daddy’s little girl,’ and Halloween became ‘their time together.’ And after a few years he started calling his daughter his little Boo Angel, and soon she looked forward to Halloween more than any other time of the year.
Because love is funny like that. You never know when or how, or even why…
She started middle school at another Bauhaus brickyard not all that far away from the elementary school she’d attended, this school named for Orville Wright, which made a certain kind of sense given that Los Angeles International was located just a few blocks away. Still, she thought the name sounded kind of stupid. “Really,” she used to say to her friends, “who names a kid Orville?”
And…maybe she had a point. Yet, come to think of it, and, as her father often loudly proclaimed around the dinner table, the teachers at Orville Wright Middle School weren’t exactly churning out test pilots and rocket scientists, were they?
And while Jennifer wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist, she wasn’t a slow learner, either. She hated math but loved science, a rather basic conundrum that might have bothered her teachers — had they cared. She disliked social studies, too, yet she loved English, because, as it happened, she liked to write — and so she did whenever she could. Her writing skills followed her along to high school then on to Cal State Long Beach, where she thought she might major in Creative Writing. She took a couple of screenwriting classes just for fun, but in the end Jennifer decided to opt into the school’s Criminal Justice Program — after another formative experience altered the course of her life.
One of her creative writing teachers had been a cop up in LA, and she dropped by during office hours from time to time — just to shoot the breeze more than anything else — and he talked to her about all those old television shows she had watched when she stayed home on sick days. He talked to her about his own experience of being a cop, too. And these conversations hit a raw spot, or an exposed nerve, you might say, and one thing led to another. She talked to people in the criminal justice department about career options, then one night she went on a ride along.
In South Central.
And the experience shattered her previous way of looking at the world, the colloquially sheltered Weltanschauung of her father’s house. Jennifer was naturally a very empathetic person, and because of her experience of the people she met that night, the literal experience of South Central rocked her world. Because she’d never seen houses like those she saw between Slauson and Vermont — because white girls like her just didn’t go over there. Because it was too dangerous for white girls over there around all those — black people. Yet even more to the point, going on that ride along was an act of open rebellion. That night was Jennifer’s open declaration of independence — from her father — because by that time she just didn’t agree with his take on law enforcement, or even with his take on the people who lived in South Central.
So…she graduated from Cal State Long Beach and by the time she applied to the LAPD her mother wasn’t all that surprised, though her father was, not surprisingly, beyond furious — indeed, he instead went ballistic. In fact, he took her application as a personal betrayal and didn’t speak to her for weeks, then months, and when she was accepted, making it into the January academy — the LAPD Academy located up in the hills that made up Elysian Park — her father was so so angry Jennifer thought he might not ever speak to her again. He in fact talked of disinheriting her, and then came talk of wiping the slate clean, of perhaps maybe even starting a whole new family, and maybe even finding with a new wife — because something had obviously gone terribly wrong with this life…!
But because Jennifer had taken a couple of psych classes she thought she saw her father’s tantrums as symptoms of something much deeper. Like…Middle Aged Crazy, maybe? She met him for lunch a couple of times a few months later and noticed a lot of things that simply didn’t feel quite right to her, like some physiological symptoms just weren’t adding up, so she told her mother about her concerns. Yet her mother was now very deep into the whole five o’clocktail thing and had become, in just four short years, a real non-functioning alcoholic. Her mother, in short, simply didn’t care anymore what her father did, or even with whom he did it.
There was no love left in the little house over by the airport, Jennifer realized. There was no soul. And how could her mother survive living like this, she wondered? Still, something didn’t feel quite right with her father, so despite her own misgivings she called the family’s doctor and made an appointment for her father.
It took only a couple of lab tests to confirm the cancer diagnosis, and it turned out that her father’s pancreatic cancer was so advanced that even a modest intervention was discouraged. In fact, he passed three weeks later, leaving Jennifer in a complete stay of shock, and after that her mother fell into the bottle and hardly ever came up for air.
Yet because her mother had never worked a day in her life, and therefore had not one marketable skill, Jennifer knew that real trouble loomed. Worse still, her mother had not the slightest inclination to do anything other than to sit around the house drinking all day, and at fifty five years old that was not a prescription for enduring happiness. With that in mind, Jennifer moved back into the house by the airport and started taking care of her mother. At least she did until academy began, because both their lives changed after Jennifer first drove up to Elysian Park.
Because that other way of life was suddenly and completely over and done with, and for Jennifer the real work began. But then the real emotional torture began, too, as the essential nihilism of police work began to take root. The endless double-binds of that life grabbed her by the throat and soon made it hard to breathe. And she knew she was neglecting her mother, and that she was going to have to if she was going to, somehow, make a life of her own. But, let’s face it, when Jennifer first arrived at the Academy in Elysian Park, that was also her first real encounter with what was soon to become the central dilemma of her life. The one real fact of life she had ignored up ’til then, and that had, perhaps, been the one central fact of her mother’s life, as well.
Because Jennifer was the odd man out in Elysian Park — from day one. Literally. Because all her instructors were men, and all but one other classmate was male, too, and to make matters worse the other female in her class was a dedicated, hard-core lesbian. Instructors berated the girls, they were belittled horribly in front of their peers, and when those tactics didn’t get them to resign, their instructors began to systematically abuse them, both physically and emotionally. All under the guise of toughening them up to meet the demands that would be placed on them once they hit the street.
Yet Jennifer Collins knew the score. She’d heard all about this shit from her teachers in Long Beach, so she was ready for the assault, even for the duration and intensity of their torture. Because her instructors really weren’t all that clever, and because she realized there was a kernel of truth behind their motivations to destroy her. Female officers were still not at all the norm around LA, not even in the 90s, and in a peculiar way she knew her instructors really were looking out for her. Just like they were looking out for every other cop out there on the street, because the street really didn’t care if you were male or female or if your skin was black or white or any shade in between. No, Jennifer Collins understood that the only thing the street cared about was strength, and weakness. Mental strength, physical strength, and, perhaps a good measure of moral integrity, too; these were the only things that stood between cops on the beat and uncertain death, because every street in Los Angeles was full of death. Every street was an ecosystem unto itself, with apex predators lurking around every corner.
And the weak cops, she understood not long after she hit the street with a field training officer, were like the rest of the little fish around the reef. They depended on the big sharks to leave them alone, and the weakest cops did this by taking payoffs, by being paid to look the other way at just the necessary time of day, or night. Her first FTO was a decent enough cop, and he pointed out the weaker cops and even the various ways they were paid off.
“Why don’t you say something?” Jennifer asked, shocked as reality bit once again.
“You keep your mouth shut and you might just live long enough to understand all the reasons why,” her FTO replied.
And she listened to him, because she wasn’t naive. Because she knew the score, at least she thought she did, but more importantly she knew this old cop did. Because he had been around long enough to have seen reality. To know what reality looks like when you walk around a corner and run into it, face to face. Reality, she soon learned, exists within the split second when reality chooses to reveal itself. Everything else is pure guesswork…and preparation — for that moment.
So…she started keeping notes. Then she started to really think about all the things she saw, and experienced, out there on the mean streets of LA. And, as it happened, it turned out she was a very good observer of the human condition, and, as it happened, she still enjoyed writing. For whatever reason you want to imagine…call it boredom or call it simple human need…she began writing.
+++++
There’s a long history of cops in the LAPD who take up pen and paper to record their experiences, and some notable fiction has sprung from the pages crafted by these cops. Television series have been based on these works, and more than a few movies, too. Powerful stuff, really, about the human condition, and about the costs paid to police the fringes of this so-called condition. And while the LAPD doesn’t exactly frown on the activities of these writers, there are rules. Like — you write on you own dime. If you write fiction it must be easily identifiable as such. You do not discredit the department in general nor anyone who has or who is actively serving on the streets. Jennifer Collins, by and large, agreed with these rules, and she even understood the institutional necessity that had made these rules and procedures a practical necessity, so she wrote — quietly, unobtrusively — in her old bedroom. The same bedroom she had grown up in, the same little room in the same little house over by the airport. Her father’s house, where — if she listened hard enough, she could still just barely hear the faraway laughter of a little Boo Angel running into the open arms of a smiling father.
She’d been with the department and on the street for about five years when she started her very first short story, yet when she finished this effort she filed it away under ‘Too Embarrassing’ and gave up on the whole idea of writing — for a few months, anyway. When she next wrote another story she soon realized the waiting page was kind of like a blank canvas, a hidden place where she could paint in all the broad, dark strokes she found on the street, but then she found that the colors she rendered were more like a release of dark energy, the kind of catharsis she might have expected to find deep inside her nightmares. When she finally understood the nature of this budding relationship she began to spend more time with pen in hand, committing to the page all the feelings she couldn’t express elsewhere. Feelings she’d dared not express to her fellow cops.
So, at some point along this razor thin edge, she realized that almost everything she was writing was in direct contravention of every rule and procedure the department had put in place to prevent being discredited by disgruntled insiders. Yet, she said to herself, I’m not disgruntled. I love the department. I always have, and I always will. It’s just a few bad apples giving the department a bad name. So she kept writing, yet she soon decided she wouldn’t even try to get her works published. Not now, she told herself, and maybe not ever.
And then one night she came home from her shift, and this was after about ten years on the force, and she found her mother in the kitchen, lying face down in a pool of blood and vomit. She called for paramedics and they pronounced yet another woman, her mother, dead at the scene — just one of dozens who passed in the night. The medical examiner’s report concluded her mother had suffered a stroke and had, more than likely, hit her head when she collapsed and fell to the floor, hitting her head on a countertop on the way down; she might otherwise have survived the stroke as the clot was small and the area of the brain affected was relatively insignificant, but it didn’t matter. Her mother fell and was gone and so the woman who carried and brought her into this world died alone, face down in her own vomit. Gee, sorry Mom.
And that’s what Jennifer Collins understood in the aftermath: her mother had died face down in a pool of vomit, drowning in bourbon infused bile. She died alone, perhaps like any one of the other hundred and ten human beings who had died that night — in The City of Angels — only her mother died from neglect. After she picked up her mother’s ashes from the funeral home, and after she mixed them with her father’s ashes, she drove her parents up to the top of the Angeles Crest Highway and held them before the wind’s embrace — and just like, with the passing of a gust, she was alone, really alone in her little corner of the universe. Soon the only human companionship she could find was either in the briefing room at Rampart or on the pages she created at home on her days off.
Yet, another one of those inflection points happened after she spread her parents to the wind. When she got back to her house later that evening she went into the living room and turned on the the big stereo system. It had been one of her father’s prized possessions, she realized, like just about every other item inside this living mausoleum, but — like everything else her father had bought, the hi-fi was perfect. A big old Marantz receiver hooked up to some truly massive JBL speakers, he’d probably bought the damn thing so he could drown out the airliners coming and going — except the houses here by the airport had been built so close together that playing music that loud would’ve earned a visit from the local patrolman.
She didn’t bother changing the station that night, and because he never changed the station maybe she left it tuned where it was so she could listen to the same music her father had. Sinatra. Dean Martin. Perry Como, voices from another time. Voices out of place and out of time but who nevertheless remained ready to fill in the empty shadows in all the lonely hearts out there. Music was a connection to that past and she missed it so much that night it hurt, and when the music came on she sat in the darkness and watched the never-ending string of lights as airliners, strung out like infinite pearls in the night, lined up to land. Soon each light resolved into wings and bodies full of people expecting to run into a happy embrace, then the jet’s engines roared for awhile as the jet slowed to turn off the runway — but then perhaps ten seconds later another jet would line up and streak down runway, leaping into the sky at the last second, still more people in an endless rush to open arms and a loving embrace, each new set of roaring machinery blending into the one before, and the next one after that to the one just before.
Endlessly.
Roaring.
Embrace.
Then — a different song.
Strong, deep bass, a punchy, almost syncopated bass line.
The Beat Goes On. Sonny and Cher. And she hadn’t heard the song in ages. Absolute ages.
Then she listened to the words, something about ‘drums and how they keep pounding a rhythm to the brain.’
Life keeps on coming at you. It never stops pounding away at you. The beat goes on.
The beat goes on and another jet lands. The beat goes on and another takes off. The beat goes on and lost people run into open, outstretched arms — and they are found again.
She turned up the volume to an insane level and the house shook and rumbled, but who could tell, really? One jet after another, the beat goes on. My mother passed out in her vomit and the beat goes on. She died and I just threw her ashes to the wind and still the goddamn beat goes on.
And it ain’t ever gonna stop, is it? Daddy died and he hated Mommy and I just mixed their ashes together and still the beat goes on. On and on and on and on…
But she turned down the hi-fi before her local patrolman stopped by for a visit, yet for the rest of the night that driving bass line never left her. Not once, not for one mother-fucking minute.
+++++
Her first real published novel, published after twenty two years on the street, was titled The Beat Goes On, and for some reason the book sold well. When a glowing review in the LA Times came out, her phone started to get busy. She went on The Tonight Show — not in uniform — and not long after that her agent got a call from a producer over at Twentieth Century Fox.
“Some guy named Taylor, William Taylor.”
“Is he the guy that won an Oscar a couple of years ago…?”
“Yup, he’s the one. Look, he’s made an offer for the rights, and it’s a good one. More than fair for a first book.”
“And? What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing, really. I think you should jump on it. He’s off to Sweden tomorrow but he saw you last night and his people called me first thing this morning.”
“Okay…?”
“The thing is, he’s not sure about you writing the screenplay.”
“So? I’m not sure I could, or even if I should.”
“So…that’s not a problem?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
“You want any creative control?”
“Look, as long as they’re not making snuff porn I could give a good goddamn. I guess I just expect you to get the best deal we can and let me get on with my life. Beyond that…leave me out of all the Hollywood bullshit. I’ve got to make briefing in two hours…know what I mean, Jelly-bean?”
“You open to doing publicity?”
“Yup. Sure. Why the fuck not?”
“And he mentioned something about doing a ride-along — with you.”
“Up to the department, Amigo…not me.”
“Okay, I think I got the contours. I’ll talk to you tomorrow…”
+++++
After nearly a quarter of a century with the department, Jennifer Collins had become sort of a fixture around both Rampart and the old South Central neighborhood in Southwest. Both divisions were regarded with disdain by most officers in and around LA, but to those officers who worked these meanest of the mean streets, being assigned to either was a badge of distinction, if not honor, and the men and women who worked in either were often regarded by outsiders as kind of a different breed. You needed a special kind of iron-fisted empathy to make it in South Central, if only because the population there, especially around the University of Southern California, was about as African-American as any neighborhood in America. And because USC was located in the heart of South Central, and because USC was about as patrician-lily-white as any school in Southern California could possibly be, this rather overt collision between the Haves and the Have Nots had, by the time Jennifer Collins started working there, generated more than it’s fair share of toxic animosity — and it had for well over fifty years. Even the Fire Department’s paramedics wore bullet-proof vest when they worked South Central because, well, it was just that kind of place.
Jennifer was still assigned to Patrol Division, just as she had been right out of academy. She’d been pressured to take the sergeant’s exam — and more than once, too — and while she’d placed at or near the top of each successive sergeant’s list she always turned down the offered promotion. Becoming sergeant would, she explained to a succession of curious watch commanders, taken her away from the street — where she was happiest and, more importantly, where she felt most needed. Perhaps even more important, becoming sergeant would, she said, drive a wedge between herself and the men and women in Patrol, because in a very real sense she’d no longer be ‘one of them’. She would become a supervisor, and that was something she really, really didn’t want to be. It felt, she liked to say — especially when she explained these feelings to her coworkers after a bad shift, — like she belonged out there in a patrol car, out there in the middle of everything, right out there in the middle South Central, mired chest-deep in the human debris of a never-ending, undeclared war. The war she was fighting with the other officers assigned to Rampart and South Central by her side. She couldn’t leave them, she couldn’t let them down. Not now…
Not now…
“Why not now?” William Taylor asked during negotiations to secure the movie rights to The Beat Goes On.
“You, like, read the book…right?” Jennifer Collins replied.
“I did,” Taylor began pleasantly enough — and not at all defensively, “but I’d kind of like to hear your thoughts about all that right now. The book’s been published, and it’s been well received. The men and women working by your side in South Central have praised your work, yet I take it that’s kind of unusual. At least, I think that’s a little more than out of the ordinary, so I’m just curious. More than curious, really, about this bond you describe. This bond between officers.”
“What are you curious about, Mr. Taylor?” Jennifer asked, actually a little confused now.
“Well, actually, I think because I have my own preconceptions about being a cop, and about the camaraderie officers feel, about what it must actually feel like…for you?”
“Were you ever an officer,” Jennifer asked, and when he shook his head she continued. “Were you in the military?”
“No.”
“Ever belong to a group where other people depended on you for their safety, even their very existence?”
Taylor shrugged. “You know, the closest I came to anything like that happened just down the street from here,” he said, pointing in the general direction of the USC campus. “I played football here at ‘SC, then I played up in SF for the Forty Niners, but really, when I look back on those years the time I had here at ‘SC was most like that.”
“Okay,” Jennifer said, unimpressed even though she knew he’d tried to throw her off balance by bringing up the whole professional football player thing, “I get that, but maybe there are a few key differences between what you experienced and what we experience here in South Central — every day…”
“Hell, after reading your book that comes through loud and clear.”
“Well, thanks, I’m glad…but I’m still not clear what’s behind your curiosity?”
He drew in a deep breath and leaned back in his chair, almost like he was studying the ceiling, searching for just the right words…
“Look at my problem this way, if you could for just a moment,” Taylor began again. “I’ve got ninety minutes, maybe one-twenty to get your point of view across. Your book is almost six hundred pages of non-stop action, yet there are really just a handful of key ideas I can convey to our audience in that time. My problem — and I guess it’s kind of your problem too — is which key ideas do you feel — and I mean feel strongly about, like deep in your gut — we need to include in our representation of your work?”
“Okay, I get where you’re going,” she sighed. “First up, you’ll need to paint a picture of LA, and by that I mean the department, before Rodney King, before the verdict and the riots. Up next, and this is crucial, was the return of troops after Desert Storm, in ’91 and ’92, and then the whole George Bush push to get cities to hire troops returning from the war for their police departments…”
“And why is that so crucial?”
“Because police departments have always been “Us versus Them” institutions, but so are military institutions. What happened in the early 90s represented a huge change because police departments, especially out here in Southern California, incorporated more of the military elements into what had been…”
“Okay, I get that. Go on. What’s next, but remember…we’ve can really only cover just so many…”
“You know what, Mr. Taylor…I really need to sit down and think about all this before I…”
“I understand, Jennifer. And I know you didn’t expect to be grilled like this during our first meeting, but I’m off to Stockholm tomorrow and won’t be back until Christmas. I really kind of wanted to get a few of these ideas clear in my mind before I left, but I get it.”
Collins smiled and nodded. “I understand. Really. You know, I took a couple of screenwriting classes…”
Taylor smiled too — while inwardly he groaned. “Good. Look, just thinking out loud here, but why don’t you work on this for a couple of weeks then call my office. If you can swing a week or two, why don’t you come over to Sweden and we can get together with casting and one or two of my writers; we’ll put our heads together and clean up some of these questions…”
+++++
She’d always instinctively shied away from Hollywood types; most cops did…especially the cops who worked the West Side. Too much money, and way too many lawyers, and if you got too close…well, it was moths to the flame. You could get sucked-in by all their drama, all the deals those guys promised but that never seemed to come to anything. Jennifer Collins had heard those stories for years, but when she seriously started to write she began to ask around. Who was dialed in. Which production companies were more inclined to take an interest in another cop story…those kinds of questions. Because this was LA — La-La-Land — and LA would always be all about making movies — she wanted to be ready if opportunity came knocking on the door to her father’s house.
Only now they had come looking for her. And they wanted — Her!
And now here she was, sitting in First Class on a huge SAS Airbus taxiing out to the very same runway she had been looking at all her life. When the Airbus began its charge down the runway she looked out her window and caught a fleeting glimpse of the little house, her home — yet she was struck by how little everything looked as it streaked by. Maybe her life was little too, she thought, just before the airliner leapt away from the earth and began a long, steady climb into the empty sky.
She’d never been anywhere but Mexico before. A trip to Cabo once, with her parents, and a couple of trips to Tijuana with some friends right after academy. Trips to San Diego and San Francisco didn’t count, not really, not if you were from LA — so this was her first big trip — and she was excited.
First Class! What a way to go. A little cabin all her own and a glass of champagne as soon as she sat down. Canapés served before the jet even pushed back from the gate, then a procession of appetizers and entrees that boggled the mind.
‘All because I wrote a book?’ she said to herself. ‘This is crazy!’
But then again it wasn’t. Not really. This was business. She was business. She had created a product and brought it to market, and sitting here in this jet was just a part of the process of becoming a commodity that would be exported all around the world.
Ideas. Her ideas. Her experience.
Her life.
A commodity?
She tried to wrap her head around that idea, but soon found the notion gave her a headache.
Yet champagne, she soon discovered, helped. A lot. So did the Beef Wellington, but by then the surprise had worn off.
+++++
For an American abroad, and really for her first time, Stockholm was a crazy place — and the most crazy thing of all were the prices. Almost ten bucks for a cheeseburger — at Mickie-Ds! — while a Coke, with no free refills — cost almost five bucks. The same thing in South Central was a couple of pennies more than two dollars, and the shock of this hit her street sensibilities like a slap on the face. Her tiny suite at a local chain hotel was costing Taylor’s production company more than five hundred bucks a night, so no wonder he was using as many locals as possible while filming on location. Just how much money could it cost to make a movie? Taylor and one of his writers took her out to lunch her first full day there and the tab for the three of them was just short of four hundred dollars, and they’d only had beer!
But after lunch that first day the writer, a kid from Beverly Hills named Ethan Cohen, took her for a long walk around town — which involved getting on boats, sometimes just to get across the street! Small islands overgrown with trees and ornate gardens also were dotted with a few dozen stately homes, and these islands constituted little neighborhood in and unto themselves, while another island just across a nearby canal was loaded with shops and restaurants. Little boats, actually part of the local transit system, carried people everywhere, and within a few hours she didn’t give a damn about the high prices anymore.
Which almost instantly made her think of Disneyland, down in Anaheim, which was quite possibly the cleanest, most well-kept “neighborhood” in all Southern California…yet from everything she saw that first day, Stockholm was cleaner. People weren’t dropping scraps of paper on the sidewalks as they walked along their little cobbled lanes, and public transit wasn’t splattered in neon paint with the miscreant ravings of deluded gangbangers. By the end of her second day in the city she was thinking of contacting a realtor and renouncing her citizenship.
“You know the ‘love it or leave it’ crowd?” Cohen said at dinner after her second day touring the city with him.
“Who?”
“You know, those so-called patriots who go around putting up billboard that scream — ‘America! Love it or leave it! Those clowns…?”
“I’ve heard about that stuff, but not so much around South Central,” Jennifer replied.
“Yeah? Lucky you. Well, the thing is, most of those people have never been out of the States so they have absolutely no idea how people in places like Europe or Japan or Australia live. As far as these people are concerned the only people who enjoy the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness live in Kansas, well, in truth, only in Red states. Democrats are socialists and so is Europe…”
“And Sweden?” she sighed.
“Yeah. It IS socialist, but only to a degree. And yeah, the taxes are brutal but you don’t need to worry about getting sick or growing old or how you’re going to pay for college. Denmark and Finland are even more heavily socialized than this place, and you know what? They rank highest on the UNs happiness index, and that’s a whole bunch of parameters that measure quality of life and all the little things that make life stress free. The love or or leave it crowd just can’t wrap their heads around the reality that democratic institutions are robust over here, that most people are politically engaged and have voted time after time to keep these social institutions. Talk to anyone here about the cost of medical care and about the biggest gripe you’ll hear is about how expensive it is to park near the hospital. Ask about student loans and people won’t know what you’re talking about. Old age isn’t stigmatized, and old people aren’t warehoused in shitty conditions, basically, you know, left to rot and die. And all this wasn’t rammed down the people’s throats, either. They voted for politicians that created this sorry state of affairs.”
“I’m already thinking about looking for a realtor,” Jennifer said, only half in jest.
“I’m not sure I’d bother. We’re considered damaged goods these days, not really welcome anymore.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I have my ideas, but while you’re here maybe you should ask a few people what they think about what’s going on back at home. I think you’ll find it’s a real eye opener.”
“So, where do you live?”
“The Hills of Beverly, Ma’am, only on the south side of Santa Monica.”
“Ah.”
“What about you?”
“Westchester, over by LMU.”
“Ah, over by the airport?”
“I have a great view of In and Out Burger and the jets on final approach!”
“Man, I’d kill for that view!” he said, but only half-jokingly. “I go over there once a week or so to sit under the lights and feel the jets as they pass by just overhead.”
“And…admit it…for an order of Animal Fries!”
“You know it, man!”
“LA isn’t all bad, Ethan.”
“Never said it was, Officer. I just get tired of the bitching about Europe. To me it’s just ignorance, but it’s also a kind of willful turning away from reality.”
“Willful?”
“Yeah, willful. It’s like these people aren’t even willing to take a look at how other people are constructing solutions to the problems we face, they’re just plowing straight ahead while waving the flag — so they’re not really even aware that they’re running straight for the edge of the cliff, and they’re willing to take all us over the edge with them.”
“So? What’s the solution?”
“Buy a fucking house, in Stockholm.”
+++++
As they walked around the city and all those canals, Ethan Cohen asked Jennifer Collins all kinds of questions about what it was like working around Rampart Division and the South Central neighborhood. “There’s not really a South Central Division, is there?” he asked.
“No, not officially. It used to be called University, and nowadays it’s called Southwest, but everyone knows what you’re talking about. South Central means the area around SC, and the neighborhood around the school has been called South Central for a really long time.”
“Is it still predominantly Black?”
“Ninety percent is the number I keep hearing. It feels higher to me.”
“Jesus…” Cohen sighed. “And is it still really like a war zone?”
Collins shrugged and looked away. “Depends on where you’re coming from, Ethan.”
“Look, Jennifer,” Cohen said, needling her just a little, “I need to know the score. The real deal, so if…”
“I’m not keeping anything from you, kid,” Jennifer sighed. “At least nothing you don’t already know. And I’ll let you in on a little secret, Ethan. I’ve done my research too, ya know? Like you went to high school in Beverly Hills, then you went on to the film school at USC, so you drove the same streets I do everyday. And so here’s the deal, the real scoop: don’t run this ‘I’m Mr. Innocent and don’t know diddly’ con on me, okay? I can smell a con from two miles away, and if you’re going to run one on me right now you might as well get lost.”
“What else did you learn about me?”
“Enough.”
“Like?”
She shook her head. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
He looked at her and shook his head. “I have fucked up a few times,” he finally whispered.
“You have.”
“I guess I should’ve figured you’d run my history. You are a cop.”
“I am indeed, and if I were you I’d take my time before heading back to the states.”
“Warrants?”
“Yup. Two state, one federal.”
“Fuck.”
“You’re a decent writer, Ethan, but you’ve got, as they say, a few issues.”
Cohen nodded. “I wasn’t planning on going home, you know? Thing is, there aren’t many places you can run.”
She shrugged. “None of my business,” she said as she looked around the restaurant. “Ain’t my jurisdiction, if you know what I mean. Besides, you’re a pretty good tour guide.”
“Hey, my new calling!”
“Now, you want to ask some real questions, or you wanna keep tryin’ to blow some more sunshine up my ass?”
“Man…I can’t get a handle on you, Collins.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re like a lemon, before you squeeze it and get all the juice out.”
“How so?”
Well, you’re going to take this the wrong way, but here goes. You’re almost like a woman, but not quite. You’re like a woman that’s had all the feminine squeezed out, ya know?”
She looked down, suddenly no longer hungry, no longer sure she wanted anything at all to do with this whole movie business any more. Because, in a way, she knew he was right. She’d squeezed all those things people called femininity out of her system twenty years ago and it really didn’t matter to her, or at least it hadn’t, because she went to work every day with men and women who counted on her being tough enough to deal with whatever the streets through her way…
“Look, I’m sorry. I knew that was going to come out all wrong…”
She turned and looked at Ethan. “You’re not wrong. As a matter of fact…”
“Look, like I said, I’m sorry.”
“What I was going to say, Ethan, is that I haven’t thought about it much, but I think you just might have perfectly described me. I don’t date because I’m not attracted to people anymore, and I don’t date because when I look around I see people like you everywhere I go. Criminals and perverts hiding in plain sight, and really, I guess I just don’t want anything to do with people anymore. It’s not just because as a human being you’re a total failure, Ethan. It’s because the world is full of people just like you. Always on the run. Always hiding, but you make the mistake of thinking the rest of the world really gives a damn. How could they, Ethan, when everyone is just like you?”
“Jesus, you are a cynic…”
She chuckled at that. “Cynicism is just another way of turning your back on reality, kid…another way of letting it sneak up from behind and stick a knife in your back.”
He nodded. “Were you always like this?”
“No, not really, but if you’d read my book you’d already know the answer to that one.”
“Wanna give me the condensed version?”
“No.”
“Fair enough. Well, how shall we proceed?”
She shrugged, but her eyes were a little like laser beams just then, hard and focused and cutting through his flesh.
“Yeah, well, I guess I’ll leave you to it, Officer Collins,” he said as he pushed away from the table. “You have a nice life.”
“You too, dirtbag,” she sighed as she watched him walk through the restaurant and out into the midnight sun.
+++++
“Ethan tells me you gave him a pretty hard time last night?” William Taylor snarled when he met her for breakfast the next morning.
“You should run background checks on your employees, Mr. Taylor.”
“Oh?”
She shrugged. “Sorry, I’m not at liberty to discuss what I know or learn about people during the course of my duties.”
“Your duties? Are you telling me you’re on duty right now? In Stockholm?”
“I’m a sworn Officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, sir, and not your office assistant. And I take the oath I swore seriously.”
“Maybe too seriously, Jennifer?”
“No such thing, Mr. Taylor.”
“Okay, fair enough, and I understand how you feel about Ethan. Now comes the hard part…can you work with him?”
“Certainly I can. The question you need to ask yourself, or that he needs to think about, is ‘Can he work from the LA County Jail?”
“What the earth has he done to get you so riled up?”
“For one thing, he’s got a federal warrant out for possession of child porn, and I can tell you that much because that’s out of my jurisdiction, but don’t ask me about what else is pending out there, okay?”
“Jesus, are you fucking serious? Kiddie porn?”
Jennifer shrugged. “Not sure what your exposure is to any of this, but if you’ve got a couple of lawyers on retainer you might want to run this by them. At least your PR people should know…”
William Taylor seemed genuinely startled, and she watched as his pupils dilated and as the skin on his face and ears flushed, both pretty good indicators his reaction was genuine.
“You still want me to work with him, sir?”
He shook his head, then backpedaled and shrugged a little. “Hell, Jennifer, I don’t know what to say right now. Ethan has, had, a real good take on your story…”
“He told me he hasn’t read the book yet. Just in case you’re curious.”
Again, William Taylor kind of mentally shuddered to a stop. “He what?”
“It’s more likely he has a problem with cops in general and wanted to use this to work up a nice little hatchet job on the LAPD…”
“Jesus H Christ!” Taylor cried. “That’s all I need!”
“Look, I…”
“Jennifer, I can’t apologize enough. You’ve done me, and, well, the studio one hell of a service by bringing this to my attention…”
“Mr. Taylor…?”
“Would you call me William, please?”
She shook her head. “We’re not there yet, sir. But I would like to call your attention to one more thing before we move on. Ethan is innocent until proven guilty, sir, and if I was in your position I wouldn’t say or do one damn thing to him until he’s proven guilty, or hell, innocent, by a jury. And frankly, sir, if you happen to think he’s the best writer for the job then we’ll just have to work around things until this project wraps up.”
“You know what…? I’m not sure I’ve ever been around anyone quite like you before. You don’t, like, get flustered real easy, do you?”
“The city doesn’t pay me to lose my shit out there, sir. Peoples lives depend on that.”
Taylor shook his head as he took a deep breath. “Ya know, I don’t get it…I just don’t get it. Where do they find people like you?”
She smiled. Then she looked him in the eye. “They don’t, sir. It’s the job. Academy starts the process, then comes training with other, more experienced officers, but all that just sets the stage for what comes next.”
“Which is?”
“The street, sir. The street is the real classroom, and if you live long enough — or if you don’t get religion or get really smart and quit — the street begins to work its magic on you. You begin to see through people, and after a while you begin to realize there aren’t any innocent people out there. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone steals, and more than anything else, sir, everyone you run into out there on the street is absolutely full of hate.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
She shrugged again. “Maybe it sounds harsh, but…”
“No, no… No, I’m just trying to figure out how to get all your intensity onto the screen…”
“If you did that, sir, I can guarantee you that about four people would come to see that movie. And that would be worldwide,” she added, grinning.
“Then…you see my problem. Somehow I’ve got to figure out how to bottle the reality of life out there on the streets…so that other people can…”
“Why,” she said, interrupting his train of thought, “if you don’t mind me asking?”
Taylor leaned back and sighed again. “Okay…I’ll bite. Why’d you write the book you did?”
“Because I think people need to know the human truth behind that life, and the cost people pay to do this job well. And it doesn’t matter if I’m talking about a cop in LA or up in, maybe, a place like Vermont. The job’s the same because the people are the same, like as in everyone, everywhere.”
“Liars and cheats, all full of hate?”
“Yessir.”
“And you don’t, maybe, like think you might be burnt out a little?”
“No sir, I think I’m burnt out a lot, and there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about that, like maybe even when I’m standing in the shower, but even so all that shit gets put away when the uniform goes on. It has to. And when I started on this story I had to figure out how to keep all that anger from getting in the way of the truth I needed to tell.”
Taylor held out his right hand and she took it. “Then it’s my job, Jennifer,” he began, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he pushed back a tear or two, “to help you make this happen, but in order to do that I’m going to have to rely on you to tell me if I stray too far off the path you made for us. In other words, Jennifer, I’m going to need you to be my conscience, that little voice whispering in my ear, and I hope that’s okay with you. Because this is Hollywood, and I’m going to need you to be like a little angel sitting up there on my shoulder, if you know what I mean, helping all of us down the path you’ve set out…