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...presents...
Son of a Gun-Toting Momma
by Reid Fleming
__//////\ -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- /\\\\\\__
__ Grand Imperial Dynasty __
Est. 1984 \\\\\\/ cDc paramedia: texXxt 425-08/15/2024 \////// Est. 1984
___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ __
|___heal_the_sick___raise_the_dead___cleanse_the_lepers___cast_out_demons__|
I had always wanted to learn a little sign language, so I signed up for
an adult education class with a friend of mine. It was a night class, and I
would go pretty much straight after work. Sometimes I was tired. One night
I was especially tired, so I had an espresso before class. I rarely even
drank coffee, so the espresso made me wired and jangly.
I always made sure that my friend and I sat in the back of the room
because I was invariably anxious about the possibility of getting called on.
The teacher, who was himself deaf, would have you come up to the front of the
class and attempt to demonstrate what you should have learned so far. It was
painful to watch, because nobody took the class seriously enough for the
teacher. He always seemed disappointed after the student inevitably mangled
their signs, and it was difficult for the class to guess what the unfortunate
person was trying to communicate.
That was the night that the teacher called on me. I went to the front of
the room. My hands were shaking because of the caffeine, which made me even
more nervous and so my hands shook even more.
The assignment was to describe your family. I thought about it for a
little while, then began my presentation.
I made the sign for Father, and then made my hand into the letter "C" and
tapped it twice on my chest. Then I made the sign for Mother, and repeated
the "C" thing. Finally I made the sign for Brother and did the "C" thing one
more time.
Some people in class expressed sounds of confusion, because we hadn't
covered that particular sign. They asked the teacher. He went to the
chalkboard and wrote the word:
"Cop"
One of the students said, "That can't be right."
My friend piped up. "It's right. His whole family are cops."
Some people in the class were incredulous. I wasn't surprised by their
reaction at all. I was very used to it.
- x X x -
Growing up, becoming a cop had never crossed my mom's mind. She did what
a lot of girls did in those days: grew up, got married, had kids, got
divorced, and hit hard times. She was a struggling single mother living in a
bad neighborhood with two preschool-aged boys, working low-paying jobs,
dependent on food stamps, and hoping something better would come along.
Eventually she gave up and we found ourselves living in my grandmother's
garage for a couple of years.
At some point she heard about open positions within the local law
enforcement agency, jobs with good pay and benefits including health
insurance. Out of desperation and with no better options, it seemed like her
only path toward financial independence. She told her friend about it and
they both applied.
The agency where my mom signed up ran an academy, which served dual
purposes:
1) They taught you the basics of how to be a cop: fundamentals of
criminal justice, the penal code, how to handle interrogations,
filling out police reports, and so on.
2) They weeded out applicants who were unfit for service, whether in
terms of basic judgment, psychological disposition, or physical
fitness. My mom struggled with that last one. She was overweight and
out of shape. Luckily for her, however, the agency was in dire need
of officers to staff the women's jail. So they cut a lot of slack for
the females in the class.
Nevertheless, my mom was expected to make an actual effort at the
physical challenges. One weekend she brought my brother and me to the
academy's obstacle course so that she could practice dealing with her nemesis:
climbing over the wall. Looking back, I figure it was about 8 feet tall. We
were there for at least an hour, with her eventually figuring out how to scale
the thing. Meanwhile, my brother and I were bored. There was nothing to do
but sit and watch. We were too small to play on the obstacles ourselves, and
anyway Mom had told us to sit against the wall of the adjoining building so
that she could keep an eye on us.
At some point I noticed that we were sitting next to some kind of vent.
It had an opening large enough for me to easily fit my hand into. I reached
in. There was a cavity big enough to accommodate my entire arm. I felt
around and found a loose object. It was smooth and oddly-shaped and very
heavy for its size. I pulled it out. Today I would have immediately
recognized it as a pair of brass knuckles, but I was so young that I thought
it must be a component of some machine, like perhaps a motorcycle engine. I
thought it looked cool but wasn't sure what to do with it, so I slipped it
into my mom's purse. Then I reached back in and felt around again. Something
else was in there too. That one was even more confusing. It was small and
there was some burnt residue at one end. I didn't recognize the marijuana
pipe either, and I put that in her purse too. Eventually Mom finished
practicing at the wall and we went home.
The next morning, my mom brought me a piece of paper and the objects from
her purse. She asked me where I had found them, and told me that she needed
to file a report. She had me draw a picture of the vent that I pulled them
out of. Decades later I remembered the situation and asked my mom what those
things were doing in the vent. I figured they were planted for a training
exercise. Mom agreed that it was possible, or maybe it had been stashed there
by a trustee's conspirator so they could smuggle them into jail. She didn't
have an answer.
It remains a mystery for the ages.
- x X x -
My brother and I never believed in Santa Claus. In fact, we never had
the chance. Mom had sat us down before we were school aged and broke the
news. Looking back, I think she was just trying to spare us the inevitable
heartbreak. We celebrated Christmas each year like normal, had presents and a
big tree, all of that stuff. But we never put out cookies for Santa or
anything else like that because we understood the situation. So I never
experienced the disillusionment that most kids go through.
My own personal disillusionment came later.
Mom had been a cop for almost as far back as my memory went. So when I
was little, she was my model for what a law enforcement officer was like. She
wore a uniform, had a gun, and went to work to handle bad guys. She made the
community a safer place.
And being a little kid, I grew up watching television. And a lot of TV
featured shows about cops, and from time to time cops would show up in other
non-cop shows. We weren't allowed to watch late night TV, or R rated movies,
so every depiction we got of police officers on screen was very cop-friendly.
They were always portrayed in ideal terms: effective public servants with a
strong moral center.
So it took me years to become aware that there were people who had
disdain for cops. Some people even hated them. Then I started to hear
stories about cops in real life acting in ways contrary to society's ideals.
It was a slow realization that took me years to accept a more nuanced
outlook regarding my parents' profession. A few cops abused their power and
made the world a worse place; some were racists, or committed terrible crimes.
As it dawned on me, it became increasingly horrifying to learn.
So in a strange way, I sort of had a taste of what it must feel like for
a kid to discover that there is no Santa Claus.
- x X x -
At first I didn't know how different my life was. It seemed totally
normal to me, because that's just how it is when you're growing up. So it
took quite a while to realize that there was anything unusual about my family.
It finally sank in at middle school. Somehow word got out about my
parentage, and some random kid I didn't even know came and asked, "Are both of
your parents really cops?"
I said yes, wondering why this interaction was happening.
"That must really suck for you," the kid said. I shrugged and he walked
away.
I struggled to process the interaction. The face on that kid seemed to
convey -- what was it, exactly?
Finally I put my finger on it. It was pity.
- x X x -
Mom met her second husband on the force, which is how my brother and I
ended up with two cops for parents.
"Interrogative: Where's the garlic salt?" my mom asked.
"It's outside, on the barbecue," my dad responded. She went and got it.
They sometimes talked like this, using cop jargon at home. For instance:
they always used the word "female" instead of "woman," and whenever it was
mentioned that so-and-so was a "narc," it didn't mean snitch. It meant they
were talking about a narcotics officer.
Their vocabulary probably wasn't the most obvious thing a visitor would
have noticed, but other clues that this was a cop house were everywhere.
Probably they would have spotted the Maglites charging on the counter. Or the
"officer of the year" plaque on the wall that my mom received from the small
town she patrolled.
Not to mention the coffee mug in the kitchen filled with .357 rounds. Or
if they were tall enough, they would have on occasion seen Mom's service
weapon sitting on top of the fridge (we never had a gun safe). There were
subtler clues on the bookcase: _Thomas Guides_, police training manuals, and a
copy of _The Anarchist's Cookbook_ (required reading in the academy).
We had policies like keeping the doors locked even during the day. We
also kept the door to the garage locked. Mom had worked some hot prowl
burglaries which would have been avoided if the victims hadn't left everything
unlocked.
We consumed cop media: my parents were into police procedural novels, and
we watched TV shows like "Hill Street Blues" and "Cagney & Lacey" as well as
the BBC's "Prime Suspect" and "Inspector Morse".
It's not like our whole lives revolved around police culture or anything.
But it was their careers, after all. So how could they have totally separated
their home life from their jobs? We lived in a cop house, that's just how it
was.
- x X x -
Cops work rotating shifts: Day, Night, Dawn. I never understood which
shift corresponded to which hours of the day. Thus I never knew when my
parents were supposed to be home, or if they would be sleeping all day, or
whatever.
This also meant that for a lot of the time, my brother and I were
latchkey kids. We would sometimes come home after school with no parent in
sight, cook our own TV dinners, do our laundry, do our homework, and enforce
our own bedtime.
Occasionally there were no TV dinners in the freezer, so instead there
would be money on the kitchen counter and a note for us to walk to McDonald's.
That was kind of a long walk for two unaccompanied minors, but hey --
McDonald's.
- x X x -
Like every new officer, Mom started in the jail and spent a compulsory
year there. It was generally unpleasant for everyone involved. Mom had an
atypical attitude about the place, which she shared with us:
"You have to treat everybody fairly. Because someday they all get out.
They're not going anywhere. You're going to see them around town. They're
going to recognize you. So don't mess with people, don't make enemies."
She told me about one time she was in the grocery store and a woman came
up and said, "hi." She had been an inmate and remembered Mom. They had a
brief but friendly interaction.
"You never know when you're going to bump into people," Mom told me.
After her stint in the jail, Mom went to patrol. They assign you a
training partner for a while, until you get the hang of things. And then
you're on your own. You in your unit driving around, with your most important
piece of safety equipment being the radio. Very few women stuck it out in
patrol. Usually they got reassigned to some other work after about a year.
When she got her first assignment, the men told her that she wasn't going to
make it. Mom proved them wrong and lasted several years on patrol. It meant
that she spent a lot of time going on calls, writing reports, issuing tickets,
and so on. She knew practically every street and alleyway, and it seemed like
all of the store owners and other prominent people in our small town. So it
wasn't very surprising when she received that "officer of the year" award from
the city council.
Eventually though, she grew bored with patrol and found a position in the
crime lab. Technically it was known as the Bureau of Identification, so they
always called it "B.I." Her duties in B.I. involved taking photos at crime
scenes, collecting evidence, processing the evidence, and writing reports. So
she saw a lot of bad shit: murders, suicides, and so on.
Part of her job was picking up dead bodies. One time she got her photo
on the front page of the local newspaper, as part of the group of cops
carrying a body bag away from a crime scene. We kept that one on the fridge
for a few months.
- x X x -
At some point B.I. got a new director, a guy with impeccable credentials.
Pretty quickly, Mom got a weird feeling about him.
One day he mentioned being an Eagle Scout. Since my brother and I were
both Eagles, Mom knew a lot about that. She asked him about his Eagle Scout
project, which is a requirement for the badge. He changed the subject. This
seemed very odd.
One day, Mom was walking through the crime lab parking lot and spotted a
license plate with a strange-looking registration sticker. She stopped to
take a closer look. It was clearly a crude counterfeit. Someone had forged a
fake tag using a piece of colored electrical tape and some black sharpie.
Mom had never seen anything like it. She went into the office and
immediately pulled the vehicle registration. Surprisingly, the car belonged
to the new lab director. It soon was revealed that the man was a total fraud,
his resume filled with lies. Many of his credentials were fake.
They fired him without public fanfare, so as not to hurt the lab's
credibility. Who knows if he got another job in the criminal justice system.
- x X x -
As mentioned, my brother and I were in a Boy Scout troop. Part of the
deal was that your mom and dad were expected to be active in the parents
committee.
So Mom signed on to be a merit badge counselor for the Fingerprinting
merit badge. This was pretty popular with the boys because it was kind of a
rare badge to get.
One of the requirements was getting your own fingerprints taken. Mom
seemed to take satisfaction from rolling kids' fingers in the ink and pressing
them on the paper. Then she would show them their freshly-filled out card and
inevitably tell them, "You have very clear prints. You should never become a
criminal."
- x X x -
The Boy Scouts had a special program called "Explorers" for young adults
18 and up to get a small taste of certain public service careers. For
instance, they partnered with the police for young people who wanted to be
cops someday. These teenagers had special uniforms and would go on patrol
ride-alongs, and do stuff like help out with traffic control at special events
such as the county fair.
My brother and I had zero interest in ever becoming cops (ironically in
his case), so obviously we had less than zero interest in joining the
Explorers program. Nevertheless, Mom put her foot down and forbade us from
ever joining. She thought that there's something wrong with a kid who grows
up always wanting to be a cop. They probably looked at the job as a way to
satisfy their power fantasies. So she didn't trust those kids and refused
to mentor any of them.
- x X x -
Driving around town with Mom gave us a glimpse into the mind of a patrol
officer. She was constantly on the lookout for traffic violations and
couldn't help but point them out to us, as if that kind of information were
interesting or useful to us in any way. "See that license plate? It's got
an expired registration. That's a good ticket."
Stuff like that made an impression on me. Decades later I still look for
expired tags on license plates. And for what? Same deal with scofflaws who
drive around without license plates. What am I supposed to do with that?
("I'm calling to report a white Tesla with no plates in the Wal-Mart parking
lot." "Thank you, citizen. We're dispatching someone immediately.") I live
in the big city nowadays where the cops are dealing with real crimes.
When we were old enough to drive, her being in the car was like having a
driving instructor with you. Even to this day whenever I roll through a stop
sign, I hear my mom's voice quoting the vehicle code for the thousandth time:
"A full and complete stop behind the limit line." Thanks, Mom.
This didn't stop after she retired from the force, either. Occasionally
in traffic she would say, "I wish I had a ticket book right now," whenever we
witnessed something particularly egregious on the road. She meant it.
- x X x -
One year I had a role in a high school play, playing a police detective
of all things.
Anyway, I had a driver's license by that time. One night I drove myself
to school for a performance. I had taken the family car.
A couple of hours before showtime, I got a call from Mom. "Listen, I
left my service weapon under the driver's seat. Don't touch it and be sure to
keep the doors locked." Okay, no problem.
Then shortly before the curtain was to go up, I was backstage getting
into makeup and a couple of drama techs approached me. They had forgotten
some pieces of wardrobe and needed to borrow somebody's car to go fetch them.
They knew I had driven there. There was no one else to ask, and the
performance was hanging in the balance.
I knew that if it ever got out that I had allowed someone to drive the
family car, it would absolutely incense my parents. I couldn't even imagine
the punishment.
They were staring at me expectantly, hoping that I would hand over the
keys to some kid whose name I didn't even know, and who definitely wasn't
covered by our auto insurance.
And then I remembered the loaded gun under the car seat. My mind reeled.
Somebody said, "So can we please borrow your car?"
Very, very, very reluctantly I handed over the keys. I figured if I
mentioned the gun, there was a chance that the boy would get curious and play
with the thing. So I decided not to tell him, cross my fingers, and hope for
the best.
The boy returned with the keys and wardrobe. I looked him over for any
signs that he might have discovered the hidden weapon. I didn't have time to
run out and check under the seat, so for the entirety of my performance I
couldn't help thinking about the gun. Thankfully, when I finally got back to
the car, it was still under the seat.
To this day, I shudder to think of all the possible ways that situation
could have gone wrong.
- x X x -
I was home from college for just one day, and Mom wanted to take me out
to lunch at a sushi place we both liked. I drove over and met her at the
place. As I pulled up I saw the crime van parked at the curb, so I knew she
had beaten me there.
Our lunch was cut short when she got a call on the radio. They needed
her to process a crime scene. She said: "Hey, you should come with and see
how it's done."
So I left my car at the restaurant and hopped in the van.
Eventually we arrived on scene. It was the parking lot for an apartment
complex, and there were a few police units parked at the entrance. Mom took
one look at the situation and realized that it was some kind of major crime.
"Stay in the van," she said, and popped out to meet with the officer in
charge.
I sat in my seat for at least 15 minutes before Mom came back. "Okay,
you can get out. Just don't cross the [police] tape." She didn't explain
what was going on. She grabbed a camera bag and a bunch of evidence markers,
then ushered me around the corner where all of the action was. Almost the
entire parking lot was cordoned off with tape. There were a couple of cars
stopped askew in the lot. One of them had clearly visible bullet holes in the
driver's side door.
Mom took lots of pictures of the crime scene, from a variety of angles.
At one point she requested a fire truck. It arrived a few minutes later and
she got in the bucket. They lifted her about 40 feet and she took more photos
from that vantage point.
At some point, it got explained to me what was going on. This was an
officer involved shooting. Some cops in an unmarked car had been following
suspects in another car. They pulled into the parking lot and the two groups
exchanged fire. One of the cops got lucky and shot the driver of the
suspects' vehicle. The suspects were then apprehended. The driver with the
gunshot wound was taken to the hospital.
Eventually, Mom was finished documenting the scene. By then the
lieutenant on scene realized that they needed to get the unmarked car back to
the police station but they didn't have an extra driver. Mom volunteered me.
The lieutenant asked me if I was a safe driver, and if I could operate a
manual transmission. I said yes. Then he told me to follow the van back to
the station, which we did.
It was the only time I ever got to watch my mom at work, and this
impromptu Bring Your Child to Work Day was way more eventful than either of us
had expected.
- x X x -
Deep down Mom was an idealist which is a rare thing to find in any
profession, or in anyone at all for that matter. But I suspect it's
especially rare in law enforcement officers.
Most people have a natural tendency to become increasingly jaded as they
grow older. It's just a function of aging and watching society change in ways
that catch you off guard. This phenomenon is maybe more prevalent for police.
They deal with a lot of rough situations and so it's understandable that they
might develop an "us versus them" attitude.
Mom retired after 20 years on the force. She and Dad both got out before
the "Defund the Police" movement took off. Mom surprised me when she told me
she was in favor of the idea behind Defund. "These institutions are
structurally racist," she said. "Everybody needs to be fired so the agencies
can be rebuilt from the ground up."
Needless to say, this was an extraordinary position for an ex-cop, and she
didn't share it freely. She didn't want it getting back to her retiree
friends.
- x X x -
Just for the record, my dad spent 29 years as a cop. Mom and my brother
both did their 20. None of them, in their combined 69 years of policework,
ever fired their weapon in the line of duty.
___________ BLATTA---NON EST----VACCA ___________
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