Currently Idle

Strange Neighbors

What do you make of this — since I’ve started to get up at 5am to have a few hours of peace & quiet before the morning chaos, I’ve noticed the same thing happening every day right around 6:30am.  A car drives up, pulls into my neighbor’s driveway, immediately backs out of the driveway, and drives back in the direction it just came from.

What is that?  Newspaper?  Stalker?  If it is newspaper, I must say, they get much better service than we do.  Our carrier barely gets it in the proximity of our front yard.  Honestly, I’d be more inclined to return the SASE he sends me every Xmas season for “gratitude” if he got the damn thing ON or NEAR our porch.

I like to think it’s a stalker.  Former lover of the wife of the house, just letting her know he’s still out there, and can flash his headlights into her bedroom window any damn time that he wants.

Probably, though, it’s just the New York Times.  I hate the f’ing New York Times, like I hate all things that make me want something I didn’t want five minutes ago.

Anniversary

Well I’ll be. I could have sworn we began this blog after the New Year’s bash of last year, but no, our first post was November 20, 2005. Hell, I’m still writing 1998 on checks. My sense of minute (mine-oot) time is actually quite uncanny (quick, ask me what time it is!), but anything past a day and I’m lost.

Anyway, I was hoping to find some more recent action here. But no, June seems to be the last posting. It’s kind of liberating, though, to be here alone, and I wonder if anyone still checks in here. I’ll just sit a spell and whistle…then write something really profane, when I’m sure no one’s looking.

Quien es el muy macho?

I had an experience yesterday that left me simultaneously a bit shaken, a bit regretful, a bit proud, and a bit confused. I’m not one overly concerned with being real tough, or macho, or the alpha male, or the big dog, or any other description or cliché for the biggest dick in the room. I’m just fairly comfortable with who I am on the manliness scale.

So comfortable, perhaps, that until I just wrote that, I’m not sure I realized that there was a manliness scale. I would imagine such a scale might have, say, Richard Simmons at one end and, oh, who, John Wayne at the other end? I don’t like that. I don’t know Richard Simmons, and I shan’t sit here and assail his masculinity; and I didn’t know John Wayne, but the little that I do know, he was neither my type of guy nor any icon of definition of masculinity. So I neither worry about being a man—or “the man”—or what or who else may be so, either.

I was running a little late to work yesterday. Once every ten weeks our supervisor asks us to be the first guy in the office, at 9 AM. It’s a testament to the blessed nature of my job that getting my ass to the office by 9 AM still unerringly causes me to run late. It is also hopefully a testament to the seriousness with which I take the luxury of rolling in whenever I want the other nine weeks that I motor when it’s my week in the barrel.

So I was on a straightaway piece of road and I got stuck behind a septic tank truck. I had a dashed yellow line, and though the septic truck was moving okay, not overly slow, I had to get a little gas—just a few gallons to get me to work, not even planning to waste the time to fill up—so I swang around the septic tank truck, as there was no oncoming traffic, and passed him in the left lane and then swang back in front of him.

Before I even got back in our lane he blew his horn at me, and I was struck by how some people get so offended when you pass them. I had caused him no danger nor cut him off, but hey, some people are just grumpy assholes. I kept a good eye on my rearview to make sure that he wasn’t the type of guy that wanted to escalate things and start riding my bumper, and I enjoyed an interview with Sebastian Junger on the radio.

I pulled into the gas station about five minutes later, thinking that the septic tank trucker had not made a turn I had made, and began to get my gas. In a moment that can only be described as suddenly, a man was stalking across the gas station lot, from where he had parked his septic tank truck, and he was staring hard at me.

“You know, you drive like an asshole!” he shouted.

He continued walking towards the convenience store of the gas station and I stared hard at him.

“You should know from assholes, motherfucker. I’m not taking driving advice from a guy who drives a shit truck,” I yelled back at him. That stopped him and he cut and turned towards me.

I stopped pumping my gas and stepped towards the front of my car, at which point he saw what I knew he would see: I was wearing heavy work pants, a t-shirt, hiking boots, and my t-shirt was untucked but for the right hand side, which was tucked between the butt of my handgun and my body, lest it dig into my side all day. This half-t-shirt tuck allows the gun to ride clearly visible, along with the shiny gold badge on my waist.

His eyes caught the gun and the badge and he slowed down. I put my hand on my gun and unsnapped the holster and looked at him expectantly.

“You want some of this, you little bitch? You wanna get down with me, motherfucker?” I asked him.

He sneered at me and cursed me out again.

“Fuck you, just cause you’re a cop, think you can drive like an asshole.”

“Turn around and go inside, little man. Go inside the store, you little shit truck driver,” I instructed him.

“Fuck you,” he said again and turned and went into the convenience store.

I continued to gas my vehicle, collected my receipt for the office accounts envelope, and returned to my Sebastian Junger interview.

* * * * *

Okay, I’m sorry. Part of that story isn’t true. I didn’t curse back at the man, and I didn’t repeatedly call him a shit truck driver. The story was true up to this part:

“You know, you drive like an asshole!” he shouted.

He continued walking towards the convenience store of the gas station and I stared hard at him.

Now, this is the truth: I continued staring at him as he walked to the store and he kept staring back at me, and when he got to a certain distance and angle, he saw the gun and badge on my waist, which were indeed exposed well before I got out of the car, because the gun really does dig into my side without a t-shirt buffer.

“You a cop?” he yelled.

I just continued staring at him, giving what I now think was a barely perceptible nod.

“You a cop?” he yelled again. I still didn’t answer, just stared back at him. “Well good, cause I’m gonna get your license plates and make some calls!” With that he went into the convenience store.

Now, I was running late, and I only needed ten bucks worth of gas, but now I couldn’t leave without a full tank. I didn’t want to encourage further conflict with this guy, but nor could I be sure in my self that I wasn’t leaving with only a few gallons just for expediency; I might worry to myself that I was leaving to avoid the angry driver, and I would not allow myself to to do that.

I filled up the tank and saw him pointing me out to the owner of the convenience store. He walked out as I was finishing with the gas and he yelled at me again.

“You from New Amsterdam? You from New Amsterdam?” he yelled, which is the local state police barracks, for whom I do not work. I think I smiled, though I might have had a blank look, and gave again what I self-perceive as a nearly imperceptible movement, this time a head shake “no.”

I got in my ride and pulled away. I slowed as I passed the side of his truck and rolled down my window, thinking I might say something rude, but I didn’t. I drove off to work, second guessing myself.

* * * * *

As I drove to work, I meditated on what it means to be a man, to be tough, to be strong, to fight back, to stand up, to yell “go fuck yourself, motherfucker!” back at someone.

I wondered if I had handled it incorrectly. Most of my colleagues would have engaged him, and without resorting to finger-fucking their guns for emphasis as I did in my fictionalized version. Most guys I know—correct that, most guys I work with—would have gotten right back in this guy’s face, armed or unarmed. That doesn’t make it right, but my daily culture would have certainly understood a “fuck you” back.

I thought of an older agent I used to work with, one of the more belligerent guys, a man brazenly willing to tell anyone to fuck off at any time, without regard for rank, supervision, or anything at all. He had a gas station incident a few years ago where a young punk yelled at him and they squared off face to face, until the young guy actually tapped him under the chin and went back to his vehicle.

This older agent told the story with great pride at his exhibition of an extraordinary amount of restraint, as he called the state police barracks and had a trooper come over and arrest the kid, who had an outstanding warrant. He told the story in our bullpen and emphasized for us younger guys the lessons learned—you gotta keep your cool. He could have punched the shit out of the kid, and possibly been in the right—the kid touched him first—but he didn’t. He said, you young guys, remember, stuff like this is gonna happen. Keep your cool.

I like to think that’s what I did. I also respected my badge. Not that anyone would know or see, but I wear my badge with pride that I don’t want to denigrate by getting into a shouting or shoving match with some angry asshole at a gas station.

And if I hadn’t been armed, or on duty, or in a work car? I would have handled it the same way. I’m clearly not engaging some raging asshole under most any circumstances, least of all without a gun. And I carry my sidearm off-duty somewhere between never and never-ever.

My wife says I handled it the right way. But there’s a dirty little secret: I was little afraid, the guy scared me a little, and perhaps I didn’t refuse to engage him out of any exalted sensibility of self-control, respect for my job, or healthy self-confidence in my masculinity. I think I was a little afraid, and perhaps, less afraid, I would have yelled back at him. But I chose not to, and I don’t know if I’m mature or a coward.

No. Man’s. Land.

“Do you see him?”
“I see him.”
“He’s moving funny.”
“He’s riding a bike.”
“Oh, that’s it.”
“Yeah.”
“How old is he?”
“He looks like a fucking child.”
“He’s like, ten.”
“Probably twelve.”
“What the fuck is he doing out there?”
“Out for a ride.”
“I hear that.”

James Ohler and Tim Henderson could not have been more different, in many ways. In thumbnail sketch, Jimmy was an old-money New Englander who should have been at a pricey East Coast college, studying history or philosophy, wearing chinos and penny loafers and a pink oxford, listening to Dave Matthews and drinking bottles of Rolling Rock. By contrast, Tim—T-Dog to everyone, including his mother—was a Southern redneck good ole’ boy, who should, in a better world, have been driving a battered pickup, a can of Schlitz between his legs, a Confederate flag in the rear window, Toby Keith blaring on the radio, gunning down a dirt road late to work at a poultry farm.

Instead, due to a perfect storm of lies, half-truths, irrefutable truths, obfuscations and crystal clear realities, decisions, defaults, paths taken and paths not taken, Jimmy and T-Dog were together, dressed nearly identically, doing roughly the same job, on the ninth floor of a building on the eastern outskirts of Tikrit, Iraq, a building which four years earlier housed a mid-level government bureaucracy devoted to agriculture, and which now belonged exclusively to Jimmy and T-Dog. Instead of a college boy and a country boy, they were both now Marines.

Jimmy was a sniper, armed with a sixteen pound bolt-action M40A3 rifle with a five round magazine and a 12×50 reticle scope, which, in combination with having graduated in the middle third of his basic sniper class at Camp Pendelton nine months earlier, meant that Jimmy was capable of finding a target one thousand yards away—ten whole football fields end to end—and putting a .308 caliber bullet in that target’s face or chest, which would then leave the target’s body through a grapefruit-sized hole in the back of his head or body, along with, presumably, his soul. T-Dog was Jimmy’s spotter, who was armed with a standard issue Colt M-4 .223 rifle, a pair of powerful binoculars, and a range finder to assist Jimmy both in sighting his targets and confirming kills.

Jimmy and T-Dog had been partners since sniper school, and had lived in this office building with only one another for company for a month, seeing only one member of a small resupply team who came by once a week with food and water. Their days were spent unmoving, clad in handmade ghillie suits, in an elaborate redoubt that they had constructed in what was formerly a corner office for a government bureacrat, and which offered a broad and expansive view of a wide swath of desert and dust. It was the eastern approach to the city, and it was a no man’s land, and it was their job make sure it stayed that way—no man’s land.

Jimmy and T-Dog were responsible for ensuring that no insurgents launched rearguard attacks against the platoons already operating inside the city, and twenty four hours a day, sleeping in shifts and working the overnights with night vision goggles, they constantly scanned the rough network of roads, decrepit shantytowns, dry canal beds and bombed out trucks on the horizon before them to ensure that no living thing approached the city. They moved only to urinate or defecate and to eat twice a day, at which time they escaped into the relative cool and freedom of the hallway behind the office. Though their job was to locate, observe, and exterminate any insurgent who might try to creep into the city, they also carried the traditional sniper’s worry—a countersniper would make their position and put that grapefruit-sized hole in the back of their heads. It made for a perpetual unease.

“What’s a child doing out here riding a bike?”
“Beats the shit out of me.”
“What kind of bike is it?”
“Looks like some piece of shit mountain bike.”
“Yeah.”
“That ain’t my sweet Kona.”
“That ain’t my sweet Fisher.”
“Probably some piece of shit Chinese piece of shit from Wal-Mart.”
“Wal-Mart?”
“Fuckin’ Iraqi-Mart.”
“My mom doesn’t let me shop at Wal-Mart. Says they treat their workers like shit.”
“Yo, my mom works at Wal-Mart.”
“Oh. She like it?”
“No, she fuckin’ hates it.”
“What is this kid doin’?”
“I don’t know, it looks like he’s . . . oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Aww, shit.”

The boys had scored their first confirmed kill a week earlier. A convoy of vehicles screamed along a rutted road leading directly into the eastern access point of the city. They were ragged trucks, not the shiny white Suburbans that were the trademark of global aid groups, American intelligence, or diplomats. Jimmy and T-Dog presumed they were insurgents; they clearly weren’t legitimate, and if they weren’t legit, there was only one option. T-Dog called in an airstrike and was notified that an Air Force sortie would bomb the shit out of the caravan in less than fifteen minutes. Once the roar of the bombers was audible, Jimmy put a few rounds through the windshields of the trucks in the front. They went careening off the road and halted the entire convoy; when the airplanes arrived, they dropped five hundred pound bombs on the trucks and the boys watched through binoculars as the insurgents were incinerated. One bailed and ran several hundred yards away from the trucks and wasn’t killed by the bombs. Jimmy shot him as he ran.

“I killed him.”
“No shit, son. Nice work. Real neat work.”
“I killed him.”
“I know. It’s all right, Jimmy. You had to.”
“I killed that poor motherfucker dead.”
“Yeah. Your first confirmed kill.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody ever told him.”
“What?”
“Don’t run. You’ll only die tired.”
“Yeah.”

In six months in Iraq, Jimmy and T-Dog found that they held very little in common. They disagreed politically. They disagreed both about the purpose of the war they were waging, the reasons it had been started, and how and whether it should be stopped. They disagreed about books, music, movies, cars, and television shows.

The little they did share in common was a desire to go back to their homes, an appreciation for girls and beer, and a passion for mountain biking. They were randomly assigned to one another as sniper and spotter in sniper school, and it did not take long for them to determine that the other would not be, in the civilian world, a friend, or even, quite possibly, someone the other would acknowledge hanging out outside the Piggly Wiggly or at a frat kegger. In fact, it wasn’t until the second week of scout/sniper school, during an eight mile movement to learn stalking and tracking, along a narrow foot trail, that T-Dog whispered “this here’s some sweet singletrack, baby.” Jimmy’s ears perked up and when it was reasonable to do so—as the chief warrant officer leading the stalk had moved ahead several yards—he whispered back to T-Dog.

“You like singletrack, T-Dog?”
“You mountain bike, son?”
“Dog, I’m all about mountain biking.”
“Sweet, son.”

They made it back to the barracks and thereupon discovered that they shared a passion for riding sweet singletrack, gnarly downhills, lung-busting climbs, scenic views, launching over logs, drop-offs, hydration packs, Clif Shots, baggy shorts, oversized jerseys, Oakley sunglasses, Crank Brothers pedals, and riser bars. They discovered a number of differences, as well, including an affection for full suspension (T-Dog) and an affinity for singlespeeds (Jimmy) that the other didn’t share, but from one whispered comment on a mossy trail was born a connection and depth of trust that neither thought he would ever share with the other. Thereafter everything from training runs to hunter/quarry ops became fodder for a running commentary on how each would appreciate, navigate, ride/jump/bunnyhop/barrel over any obstacle they passed.

“I’d pop that log.”
“I would too. And I’d hit that rock right there for a little off-camber launch.”
“Nah. I’d build up speed and flow into this little roller here, though.”
“I’d pedal right through this.”
“I’d soul my way through and then shoot out the other side, churn up this mother right here, pick a line right around this boulder and mountain goat my ass right up this.”
“Fuckit, I’d be walking here, son.”

And on they went, from California to Iraq, bypassing the architecture of the ordinary soldier’s camaraderie, built on boasting about cars, females, and beer, and instead found a soft place in which they could share thoughts and dreams of a passion which wasn’t competitive, or built on bragging, or lying, or fronting machismo. Their conversations laid clear that Jimmy would be most likely to do a fifty-mile “fun” ride, and T-Dog would be most likely to contest the Sport class downhill. T-Dog would never ride a singlespeed, and Jimmy would never do a dual slalom. But they had no doubt that together, given an afternoon, their bikes, and some Clif Bars and water, they would have a great time out in the woods.

“Why you say ‘oh, shit’?”
“Jimmy, you ain’t gonna like this.”
“What are you seeing that I ain’t seeing, T-Dog?”
“Look-ee what’s peaking out his backpack.”
“What is it?”
“In Alabama, I tell you, the quads tear the trails up, so for singletrack, we gotta hide the entrance to the trails. We walk in an’ we walk out, just like stalking, leave no trace. Carry the bike in and then we ride so no hillbilly four wheeler follow me in and ruin my trail.”
“That look like ordnance.”
“You would love my local trails outside Montgomery, son. I’m gonna take you there, you’ll see. Miles and miles of sweet ribbon singletrack, roots, logs, rocks, rollers, pitches, huff-a-puff climbs, gonna burn your little New England ass to the seat, Jimmy.”
“T-Dog, do you think he’s got shells in that backpack?”
“We’re gonna hit the trails, ride for like, four hours, then we’ll catch up with my sister and her horny little girlfriends and go the bar downtown, play pool till closin’ time. Listen to some Allman Brothers, yeah. Some Skynrd. ‘Eat a Peach”"
“Dog, talk to me. What you see in that backpack?”
“Those are shells, son. You gotta take the shot, now. Line it up, I’ll check the minutes.”
“That’s a fucking child, man.”
“You got nine hundred yards.”
“I’m not shooting a child, T.”
“Tell me about your favorite trail. Mine’s called Hot Pussy.”
“You ain’t got no trail named Hot Pussy.”
“I call it that. It’s all bends and curves, it’s like four bowls linked together, up and down and up and down, just like a fine ole’ girl, big ole’ curves, a nice big ole’ ass, big ole’ titties, a little something fat to slap anyway you got her, from behind, on top, side to side. That’s what this trail is like, sweet curves any way you run it. Eight hundred and fifty yards, son. He’s carrying a ton of ammo on that there bike.”

Jimmy bit his lip and sighted his scope on the boy. He watched him as he continued to careen crazily and Jimmy realized for the first time that the weight of the materiel on his back was what was making him bob and weave on the bike, not the rutted roads. He acquired a bead on the front wheel and went through his ritual, exhaled, emptied his mind, became one with his rifle, gently feathered the trigger. His shot rang out and upon recovering from the recoil he sat back and scanned the horizon with naked eyes instead of immediately reacquiring a sight on his target as he had been taught.

“You done knocked him off his bike, Jimmy.”
“My favorite trail is called Rolling Thunder. It used to be called the Log Jump Trail but the little local access group thought the name sucked, which it did, so we made a sign and re-named it.”
“The little fucker’s getting up again. Trying to wheel the bike.”
“You would love New England riding, T-Dog. You bring that five inch front and back squish machine up by me, you’ll be like pudding on our trails. I’ll take you on Rolling Thunder. No less than forty log crossings, everything from four logs built up you need to get up and over, to little four inch saplings you can bunny hop, everything you can imagine. Nothing but long climbs, logs, roots, moss, steep downhills, you’re gonna love it. We got a microbrewery, makes the best damn beer from scratch out in the barn behind the bar, beer so rich and good it’s like eatin’ a loaf of fresh bread. Little Grateful Dead on the stereo, maybe play some foosball. Have another pint of porter, Dog.”
“Jimmy, the little fucker’s running now. Dumped his bike and he’s still moving right towards us. He’s at eight hundred twenty yards.”

Jimmy acquired another sight and exhaled again.

“We’re gonna do a few this time, Dog.”

He shot four rounds in rapid succession eight feet in front of the running boy. The child fell to the ground and cowered and didn’t move for several moments.

“Come on now, son. Turn around and go home to Mama.”
“Come on, boy. Drop the bag and go home.”
“Go have some hummus, pal, little babaghanoush with Mom, now.”
“Yeah, go eat some pita, kid. Be a normal fuckin’ Iraqi kid and go eat some pita and throw rocks at soldiers, okay, kid, come on.”

The child could not hear them, and did not listen. He eventually got up and scanned the buildings at the edge of town as if he might make out the sniper’s nest. At this point he rationally knew that to advance forward was to invite death. The front wheel of his bicycle had been mangled beneath him and the sniper had then either missed him quite poorly or chosen to shoot ahead of him. The boy looked at the gutted buildings ahead of him and thought of the rotten road, the bombed out trucks, the skinny goats behind him. He wanted to take a step backward, wished that his bicycle would still ride, wished that he could get on it and dump this heavy backpack his uncle had given him and simply ride, ride without hands, ride without worry, ride without fear, ride with the wind. His uncle promised him virgins in the city. He stifled a tear and sniffed snot up into his nose and looked defiantly at the horizon. He moved forward.

“Oh, shit.”
“He’s like, twelve.”
“He’s twenty.”
“He won’t be twenty for ten years, Dog.”
“You know what you gotta do, Jimmy. Eight hundred yards.”

James Ohler sighted the boy in and focused the crosshairs of his thousand-dollar scope on the boy’s chest. He was wearing a Nike t-shirt, with the famous swoosh and the legend Just Do It. Jimmy began to empty his head of all effluence, aiming for the Zen calm that the sniper teachers counseled. You’re not taking a life, they taught; you’re saving your brothers’ lives.

Just Do It. Just Do It. Jimmy noticed how thin and narrow the boy’s chest was, thought back ten years to when he was eleven or twelve and skinny as a rail, just like this kid. He remembered how he wished then that he could be buff and muscular, like Will Smith in Bad Boys. He noticed that the kid had ratty sneakers on, and was sweating, and his pants seemed to be made of some rough hewn material. He watched as the boy’s thin chest heaved from the exertion of his running.

Just do it, he thought. Just do it. Let all the other thoughts drift away. Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Just do it.

Jimmy pulled the trigger and the boy’s chest exploded.

The Ballad of Silky and Dubbs

I recently had the distinct displeasure of being made to look like a bit of an ass in front of a room full of people. Now, I’ll be frank that I’m no great stranger to looking like an ass in front of people, and it’s no salvation to say that it’s usually my own fault; I set in motion the chain of events that led to this recent incident myself, but unlike usual looking-or-acting-like-an-ass events, neither wine, beer, vodka, or a combination of any or all of those three in concert with a failed attempt to be funny was to blame. Instead, I had truly noble intentions, but as the prosecutor said to me, making cases can be a lot like making sausages; you may like the results, but you don’t want to see how it’s done.

In this case, I surreptitiously recorded myself and another investigator interviewing a guy in prison in which I reasoned, cajoled, coerced, prodded, pushed, argued, and ultimately, according to the judge who spent thirty days crafting a forty-five page opinion devoted solely to a legal dissection of my behavior, “overwhelmed” this young man. The nice thing about recording things in my job is that when a guy says “I had that gun for a minute”, it’s committed to magnetic tape and constitutes an admission of guilt. The not nice thing, as you can imagine, is when you say “listen, fucko, me and you both know you had the fucking gun, and it’s gonna hurt a lot more if I have to ram it up your ass than if you just admit that you had it and let me help you out of this mess”, particularly when you had no intention at all of “helping him out of the mess” but instead of using his own words to help you, well, jam it up his ass.

Okay, I’m proud to say, that’s not a verbatim quote of what I said, not the least reason of which is that I neither call people “fucko” or threaten to shove things in their asses. Well, I don’t threaten shoving things in people’s asses, anyway. My language does sometimes get a little salty.

But that’s all besides the point. What happened was this: a young man more or less freshly out of prison, on parole, needs some money. He figures a good way to get it would be to take it, possibly from some old Italian guys who have a weekly poker game where the pot grows into the thousands. He gets a gun and a buddy and they run into the game to stick it up. Nothing new or exciting there. The old Italian guys, though, aren’t impressed. The robber, in this case, weighs about a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, so even with the added heft of a cheapo Hi Point .380 caliber handgun, the old Italians start smacking him and his friend, a shot rings out, the old Italians stomp the young black guys, subdue them, and call the police.

An arrest for the young man ensues, as does a dawning realization that since he is smart, has a keen memory, and has been present or very near to dozens of homicides, robberies, stickups, gun deals, shootings, and assorted acts of mayhem, as well as the leadership of a violent street gang, he has a lot more to offer the government—in the form of various detectives, agents, and prosecutors who are eager to get inside his brain—than desire to go serve a ten to fifteen year sentence for mistakenly trying to pick off the wrong card game.

So he starts talking. And talking, and talking, and talking. I can think of at least three fairly distinct cases on which I’ve gone to him for information, and each time he’s had a little tidbit to offer—if not a giant missing puzzle piece, at the very least a nugget of information, such as who may be kin with another, who might have a relationship with a certain woman, whose brother had a gun just like the one the shooter in some case supposedly had—some helpful little puzzle piece. He knows a lot.

And in one case, he happened to have a distinct memory of three days four years ago when he was released from jail before being picked up on a parole violation seventy two hours later, a time period in which he was at home, with a girl and their child, and two other men came over, showing off a gun. He grew annoyed at their callous behavior—there was a child present, after all—and so the three of them went down to the porch to smoke some marijuana, and one of the men said how he had “got a body the night before” and the other concurred that it was a “heart stopping moment.”

Four years later, I’m investigating a homicide at a drug house that occurred—you guessed it—the exact night before which my friend’s criminal history shows a gap of three days in which he was not incarcerated four years ago. So his information has credibility.

Because these facts are hard to keep track of when you’ve been working the investigation for years, I might as well utilize some names for the players. But first, a note about street names. There is no one involved in the game who does not use a street name. It’s not uncommon, in fact, for longtime friends or even cousins to not actually know one another’s “government names.” I won’t give up the actual street names of the people involved in this case, though trust that the names I utilize will be close enough in terms of realism.

My informing friend who failed to take off the poker game and instead turned into the single best source of criminal street knowledge my district has had in the past several years shall be called Black. He’s still a cooperating witness and Black is perhaps the single most common street name out there, so let’s use that for him. The man who confessed to the murder shall be called Dubbs. His “heart pounding moment” colleague is to be called Silky. (Black, Dubbs, and Silky are all names of other guys on the street that I know, but not related enough to the caper being discussed here as to feel inappropriate to use their appellations as noms de guerre for the characters herein.)

Anyway, so Black tells us that Dubbs confessed to a murder and Silky said something that made him think he (Silky) was there when it happened. That’s what we already thought—Silky himself had, on one fateful ocassion three years earlier, for the one single time in his life, discussed the murder in question, and knew facts that only a witness or someone who had firsthand information from the shooter would know.

As to the murder—a nineteen year old man who was visiting his cousins at their house, from which they dealt marijuana, answered the door during the Knicks game in June of 2001 and saw some men with guns standing at the door. He tried to push the door shut and for his trouble received a 7.62×39mm round in his neck, courtesy of a Chinese made piece of shit AK-47 knock off which Black tells us was dubbed “the chopper” by Dubbs and Silky and the others in their gang. The victim was dead before he hit the floor, which for better or worse means that the second man at the door, who we’ll call Gunna, missed when he fired his sawed off twelve gauge shotgun at the already-falling young man.

This young man’s death became intertwined, two years later and courtesy of me, with the shooting of a New York City police officer in Brooklyn. The cop and a bad guy got into the mix and the bad guy shot the cop, who shot him back. Neither died, though one is now serving life in prison, and the firearm that he was carrying fell to the ground. A search on the serial number showed that it had been reported stolen a few years earlier. Follow up with the local police department a few hours away showed that the burglar—let’s call him Soldier—who stole the gun had pled guilty and indeed given a statement that the gun had been in turn stolen from him by our friend Silky. As it so happens, he also confessed to another burglary in which he stole an AK 47, which was also stolen from him, by unknown parties, though he suspected it was the brother of Dubbs, who we’ll call B-Money.

B-Money is currently serving his own life sentence for killing a man we’ll call G, because G had been having sex with Dubbs’s girlfriend while Dubbs was in prison. For what it’s worth, Black thinks that one of the reasons that Dubbs may have killed the man at the weed house was because B-Money had asked him to “put something in the paper for me” and advised him to “get his stripes up”, the former being a term referring to committing an act that the newspaper would find newsworthy, and the latter meaning to just do something violent to grow his hierarchy in the gang. Dubbs apparently listened. Dubbs also, for what it’s worth, went on to have sex with his brother B-Money’s girlfriend once B-Money blew trial and went away to prison for life, and had a child with her.

Not incidentally, when the cop and the bad guy had their shootout in Brooklyn, and the cops traced the provenance of the bad guy’s gun back to the statement in which Soldier said that Silky had taken the gun from him, the cops started to look for Silky. Lo and behold, he was in jail in New York City. What would he be doing so far from home? Why, running away from a trial subpoena to testify for the prosecution at B-Money’s trial, since he was widely regarded as having been present when B-Money killed G. (In that case, Black was lucky enough to stay back at the house where he, B-Money, G, Silky, and another man named C-Murder had all been hanging out; he testified for the prosecution in that case, as did the woman who bore children to both B-Money and Dubbs. She is also Gunna’s aunt, though none of the people I’ve discussed here are twenty five yet, and bear in mind that most of the events I’m discussing date back to to 2001 or 2003, so they were all nineteen or twenty at the time of this madness.)

The police investigating the cop shooting go to talk to Silky, and he admits that he had the gun used in the cop shooting but tells them that it was taken from him by Black and B-Money. He had never been caught with the gun, and was never charged with its possession, and he didn’t have anything to do with it getting into the hands of the man who had the shootout with the cop. Being good investigators, they ask him if he knows of any other violent acts or murders. He tells them that a man named Dubbs killed a boy on Second street in our fair city with an assault rifle they all called the chopper.

The NYPD sees to it that this nugget of information makes its way up to the detectives a few hours away, and a few months later the local homicide detectives went back to Silky to try to get his story down on paper. He couldn’t remember any of what he had previously said and refused to speak to them. End of story.

Or maybe not. A few years later I got up to speed on this caper, did a few interviews, talked to some people, made myself a little flow chart to see who knows who and who’s related and who’s fucking and who’s committing homicides together and who’s got what criminal charges and you know what I notice?

Silky never paid for that gun. Not just never paid Soldier; he never did any time behind it. I looked deeper into his record. He caught his first felony at age sixteen and oddly, it wasn’t “YO’ed”, or hidden on his record as a youthful offense (still a felony, but never shows up on the record.) Most sixteen year olds get this the first time around. But he didn’t; so he was a felon when he got that gun. Then I checked the dates on his acquisition of the gun from Soldier; he was over eighteen, a mandatory for prosecution by my job. And when was it? Four years, eight months ago. Statute of limitations coming up quick.

And that interview by the cops in new york city? No Miranda warning. He was in jail. You need Miranda when three things are in play: Cops. Custody. And questioning (which could lead to vulnerability to prosecution.) They were cops; he was in jail, though on different charges, so it would be up to the lawyers to decide if that was “custody” or just his home at the time; and they were asking questions, though not to develop information about his own bad deeds, but about the cop shooter.

In any event, it didn’t seem to me that that NYPD detective’s scrawled notes would be the necessary ballast on which to hang my case; because what I decided to do was build this old gun charge into a fresh new prison bid to stick on Silky, in hopes that it would compel him to talk to investigators about the murder and in so doing reduce his time on the new gun charge.

I needed to get a new confession out of Silky. And so I did. I went up to the prison, with a prison investigator, and I hid a tape recorder in the drawer, and I interviewed him. Asked him all about the gun he had for “just a minute” back in 2003, reminded him how he’d already admitted to this gun to the NYPD back in 03, and when he asked “are you going to arrest me?” I said “it’s not in my interest to arrest you if you’re honest with me.” I convinced him that I was an investigator just “doing follow up” for the cop shooter case, and that he wasn’t in any other way involved. He grudgingly admitted that he had the gun briefly before he “threw it away by some train tracks” and that Black and B-Money then went and retrieved it.

I thanked him for his time and went home, to undertake the literally dozen hours of painstaking effort to create a nearly perfect transcription of the recording, since the tape recorder had been secreted in a drawer and Silky kept kicking the desk.

For those of you who might be interested, we were inside the prison, which means that we were quite obviously not armed, left our guns at the gate and took a little green shuttle van driven by an inmate in his green jumpsuit over to the dining hall where we waited in a little room for Silky to come down; he wasn’t handcuffed and again you could argue that he wasn’t in custody. But I read him his Miranda rights anyway, telling him that I was doing so because “we were in a facility.” Typically—or more accurately, when done properly—Miranda is not only administered but the investigator is then supposed to obtain an express consent of waiver of those rights to continue the interview. I gave him his rights, and then checked that he understood them—you understand? Yeah. All right, I’m here to ask you about a gun . . .

I didn’t exactly get the express waiver, but a subject’s willingness to talk after Miranda can override the lack of the waiver. It was my hope that the subject’s willingness to grunt grudgingly would also override the lack of the waiver.

Anyway. I now had a tape recorded confession from Silky that he had, indeed, possessed a handgun, which was in police custody (I picked it up from the Brooklyn DA’s office after the cop shooter’s trial was over), at a time at which he (Silky) already had a felony conviction, less than five years earlier. Good enough for about five more years in prison after his current sentence runs out.

But I like to play fair, so a few weeks later, I went back to see Silky, this time accompanied by the local homicide detectives who had unsuccessfully interviewed him a few years earlier after he told the NYPD about how Dubbs killed the boy on Second Street. “Hi Silky, remember us? Tell us again about Dubbs and the murder on Second Street.” “Nope.” When I tell you that absolutely nothing else of consequence was exchanged in that interview, I am being honest. I am also honest when I tell you that it lasted at least three hours of round and round. He just kept repeating “I ain’t a snitch.” “I ain’t a snitch.” “I ain’t a snitch.”

Remember, at this time, going on what Black had told us, we thought that Silky was present at the murder, but unlike Dubbs and Gunna, hadn’t shot at the victim (only AK 47 and shotgun rounds were found at the scene.) So we could vaguely understand him not wanting to throw himself into a murder, though why he ever talked about a murder he was present at in the first place would then be a big mystery. Though I have met many smart men caught up in the game on this job, I’ve also met some who are as dumb as salt shakers. Silky might be a little brighter than a salt shaker, but not by much, bless him.

So we eventually said, hey, if we had some lawyers here and some immunity for you would you play ball? He grunted what appeared to be affirmative, and we went home and set up a public defender to handle an immunity deal. But the defender sat with us, on the day we pulled Silky out of prison (six hours away—six hours he had to sit shackled in a bouncy van from an unexpected 3 AM wakeup to his 9 AM meeting with us and our Starbucks) and told us, if he really has any vulnerability on a murder, only total immunity would do—which we don’t offer, we only do “qualified limited use immunity”, which means we won’t use your words against you, but if someone we like more cooperates with us and nails you for what you told us, we may hit you with it.

But with total immunity off the table, and a pissed off inmate refusing to talk to us, we told the defender that we had no choice, and that his new client Silky would be back for an arrest in a few weeks, which he was.

But rather than the magic bullet of a new arrest with five years hanging over his head loosening his tongue, Silky just continued to say “nope.” His defense counselor reported that his only question was “how long?” and the defender said, well, maybe about five years. And Silky said Five years? Damn. I can do five. I ain’t got nothin’ to say.

So the lawyer, being crafty (I guess that’s redundant) started to think that my watertight, tape recorded confession might have some holes in it. The aforementioned lack of a waiver, my overwhelming of his poor client’s will, etc. So he starts in on motions intended to suppress the recording from potential usage at a trial.

We, meanwhile—myself and the homicide detectives—get corrections to separate Gunna and Dubbs, who are both doing bids on different charges incurred after the murder (Gunna doing seven flat for shooting a man in the ass, though investigators think he may have taken the weight for Dubbs actually doing the shooting; Dubbs for a gun possession which had a ballistic match to a shooting in which he shot a man through a door in the stomach while trying to stick up yet another weed house, though he doesn’t know about the ballistic match yet—I’m planning to arrest him on that in a few months, if all goes well, which, as you can see by now, it doesn’t necessarily.)

Anyway, Dubbs and Gunna are now in separate facilities and since Gunna is younger and according to Black and Silky not the actual death-shot shooter, we go at him first. And tell him how we just came from Dubbs telling us that he, Gunna, had the AK 47.

Damn, he says. That low down motherfucker, he must be thinking, because he proceeds to give us a full confession, draws us a little map as to where he was standing and where Dubbs was and where the vic was, and then, for the homicide investigator’s coup de grace, accepts our offer of a piece of paper and a pen. “so you might write an apology note to the family.” Which he does, and which basically says “I’m sorry for what I did”, and though I could share more details of it, there is something so intimate about taking a murder confession that even I have a smidge of good taste that prohibits me from further mining this young man’s apology note for entertainment.

The actual next day we go to Dubbs, and say hey man, we know you did that murder, let’s talk, Gunna’s already talking. To which he responds, and here I will quote verbatim, “Man, I’m outta here. I wanna go back to my cell and smoke a cigarette.” We don’t have any right to make him sit there and listen to us yell at him about how he’s a murderer, so off he went, and he and Gunna have since been arrested and indicted for the murder.

But the last question we asked Gunna was “who else was with you and Dubbs?” And he looked at us like we were crazy. Nobody, he said. You got a third man there, you gotta split the take three ways. He was kind enough not to add “you crazy white fools!”, but the sense was there.

So here we were, with one confession in hand, one murderer smoking in his cell, and Silky under arrest for the old gun charge when he wasn’t actually at the murder. I thought this was a good development, and happily told his defense counsel hey, we don’t even think he was at the murder any more! Get him to talk now!

Still, from Silky: Nope. I ain’t a snitch.

Now, just because we don’t think he’s at the murder back in 01, he still clearly knows about it—in 03 his telling the NYPD that it was Dubbs did the killing was the first anyone in law enforcement had ever had a clue about what was already a cold case. So whether he was there or not, he knows that Dubbs did it, somehow, maybe just from the confession at Black’s house the day after the murder, when he made the “heart stopping moment” comment to try to get a little street credibility and latch onto Dubbs’s murder for that, or maybe even Black’s memory was wrong. Who knows? One thing is for sure: Silky still knows about that murder.

Black tells us that for a hot minute back in 04 both Dubbs and Silky were on the street and Dubbs was trying to kill Silky but never got the chance because he thought that Silky had given the cops information on B-Money’s murder (remember, he ran away from the trial subpoena, and you don’t catch a trial subpoena unless the prosecution has reason to believe that you have some good damning evidence on the defendant.)

We told Silky’s lawyer, tell him, Dubbs wants him dead! We’ll make these gun charges go away! Nope. Okay, I say. He doesn’t have to testify, just sit down with me, fill me in on the scene back that summer, maybe he knows where the chopper went, knows something we can use, we’ll make the charge go away. Nope. We’ll see you at the suppression hearing.

So we go to the full hearing, a courtroom, a very no-nonsense judge, the best prosecutor in my district and a very talented public defender. Who between them have their own history, because when the public defender got out of law school and joined the PD’s office, all fresh and bushy tailed, in his first week he had a few nice victories, according to him, until he came up against this prosecutor, who at the time was already a veteran with the DA’s office, and who jammed a hard deal for one of the PD’s defendants down his throat and knocked the rookie PD back on his ass.

The prosecutor throughout this case bemoaned to the PD, you’re not letting your guy cooperate because you’re still mad at me for jamming you with a guilty plea fifteen years ago! The PD laughed and said he didn’t even remember the case, but me, as the impartial observer? I think he remembered it. And I like this PD, I think he does a bang up job for his clients. I don’t think he wasn’t letting Silky cooperate because of something that happened fifteen years ago. But I think he didn’t mind the chance to stick one back to the prosecutor.

So we go to the full hearing, and naturally, I’m the star witness. The corrections investigator who was present for the interview takes the stand and immediately gets aggressive and belligerent with the PD. Bad move. Never, never, never let them make you mad. Everything must be, yes, counselor. No, counselor, it wasn’t like that.

I take the stand and on direct examination give my version of events. I think I do an okay job on cross, also, allowing the defense to land some punches—you have to let them get some punches in, there’s no way not to without appearing like a totally bellicose and defensive prick, so you nod dumbly and shrug thoughtfully and stick to your guns on the important matters, namely, I read him his fucking rights! Did you read it from a Miranda card you carry? Yes. (You can hear me on the tape fumbling for the card in my wallet.) Can we see it? Sure. Your honor, defense exhibit number 1. And you read him lines one through four, but then you didn’t read lines five and six, “are you willing to speak to me at this time” and “are you willing to waive your right to an attorney at this time?” Blast! He got me! But you always get a re-direct to rehab your fuck-ups on cross. So the prosecutor goes over with me how we segued naturally into conversation and makes the plea that this, clearly, constitutes a waiver.

But the point at which I felt like an ass was when we all—me, the corrections investigator, the prosecutor and defense counsel, the judge, Silky, and the stenographer—all put on headphones and listened to my half hour interview with Silky. Remember, at that point, the judge doesn’t know I’m there on a mission from God to try to jack up a new charge on a guy I think knows about a murder in order to trade him his knowledge of that murder for five years of his life—I fear I just look like an agent who’s chasing a nearly five year old gun case on a young kid who’s already in prison. So I felt like a big ass. Again, not a particularly new feeling, but I’ve usually got a little buzz to take away the pain. The judge doesn’t allow merlot or microbrews during testimony, naturally, so I had to sit there, looking over at Silky, who barely acknowledged me, listening to my own words for the maybe fiftieth time.

You know how you always think you sound a little off and odd when hearing yourself on a tape recording? Yeah. That was in full effect.

To my salvation, on my direct examination, my pursuit of Silky’s case in order to flip him, or convert him into a witness against Dubbs, became apparent to the judge. I trust it was apparent to Silky. I caught his eye at one point and nodded at him. I don’t think a man is shit if he can’t look in the eye of a man he’s arrested, at any time—on the street, in court, at trial, in jail, wherever—and give him a direct nod. I just had a trial and it wasn’t until the second or third day that I caught the defendant’s eye and nodded and said simply “hey, James.” He nodded, as did Silky, and I like to think that they know that we both have a code, and that, to quote the title of a great album by rap pioneers EPMD, it’s always business, never personal.
And speaking of codes, Silky certainly has his. And I have my theory. Here is a young man—twenty two—on his second bid in prison. He has nothing. When he comes out there is no money, no one to take care of him, no education to fall back on, no real friends to speak of (not in the way I have friends, men and women who would be there for me in any way I needed at any time I needed, no matter what.) Nothing. Dad’s gone, mom’s sick, sister has her babies. I’ve seen his visitor’s list in prison; no one. Phone calls? Ain’t no one out there paying MCI’s highway-robbery collect call rates to listen to him for a half hour talk about what’s going on in prison.

He has nothing but his code, which says “don’t snitch.” Clearly, for this young man, who has nothing, that is all that he has. His code. It doesn’t matter to him that Dubbs would have him killed just for knowing what he knows, whether he talks about it or not. It doesn’t matter to him that he could walk away from five years in prison, another five years of his life, for just sitting down with me for an hour and saying, yeah, Dubbs told me he shot that boy, I think he brought the gun down to his cousin in such-and-such a city. Christ, he could have come in and said, I heard Dubbs shot that kid from a guy in jail, I don’t remember his name, I heard he threw the gun in the river. Totally made up, and we’d still out of some sort of ethical obligation probably let him walk away from the charge.

But, as it turns out, after thirty days, the judge spoke, and he wrote a very long opinion, in which he determined that I “overwhelmed” Silky’s reticence to speak to me, and that his entire statement should be suppressed on the grounds that it was coerced and not given of his own free will. In fact, his language was so pointed about my tactics and behavior that he actually included a footnote which admonished my agency to note that the language he was using was legal language and though it wasn’t necessary he wanted to include a “softening note” to show that he was aware that law enforcement occassionally needs to utilize extreme measures and subterfuge and deceit and his suppression of the statement wasn’t meant as a criticism of me personally.

Gee, thanks, your honor.

So what happened? We decided we didn’t want to go to trial on this case. It was now clear that nothing but nothing was going to make Silky talk about Dubbs’s murder, and we have more important things to work on. The prosecutor also has a 100% conviction rate, as do I, and we weren’t about to go to trial on this guy and waste our time and risk our stats. But before dropping the case outright, the prosecutor dangled a guilty plea to time served and immediate release in front of the defense counsel. A trial would take months more of incarceration before it began, and though he might win, he’d probably eat another half year in the can. He took the guilty plea to time served and we technically won, though clearly no one won anything.

A week or so ago I was waiting to meet someone at Starbucks when I saw the defense counsel go by. I hadn’t seen him since the decision had come down so I chased him down the street to congratulate him. We talked about Silky and how he is now on parole and how he has to get out of town. The defender said that he just feels so bad for him, that he got to know him a bit and learned how he saw his father shot in front of him when he was a kid and his mother has AIDS, etc. He acknowledged that he doesn’t see Silky in the same environments that we do, on the streets, with the guns, present at or aware of multiple murders, shootings, robberies, etc. And I acknowledged that I know that a young man like him has a really difficult life, with tragic and overwhelming odds against him and any chance at success or true happiness or fulfillment.

There wasn’t much else to say and I said I’d see him again soon on another case and went back to my coffee and he ran off to the bank.

Throughout this case I felt like a piece of shit for secretly recording someone who is empirically not bright as I badgered him into admitting something which was true but which only my charm and persistence overwhelmed his common sense and allowed him to admit having that gun, not to mention my near-assurances that “it’s not in my interest at this time to arrest you.” It just felt shitty.

But I kept telling myself, and I still do, that if someone murdered my darling little boy—if he at nineteen God forbid goes to watch a Knicks game at the house of some asshole friends who are selling weed at their house and answers the door and an armed robber shoots him in the neck and the armed robber’s friend won’t help the police—well, I hope that an investigator somewhere will stop at nothing to jack up anybody available on any charge available in hopes of breaking the case on the shooter wide open. So that’s why I do what I do, and for that, I guess, I’m willing to feel like an idiot and a bit of a shit.

Where are they now? (Just like the end of eighties teen movies, only with criminals!)

Black is in jail awaiting a very short sentence for the card game robbery, vastly diminished thanks to his cooperation. He’ll likely testify at Dubbs’s murder trial.

Dubbs and Gunna are both in prison on their old gun charges, but under indictment for the murder; the case is what it is, not as strong as it would be with Silky, not good but not impossible.

Silky is now a three time felon with another violent (gun) felony on his record, out on parole from the state charge he was serving when I interviewed him.

Soldier is in on a state charge which was reduced thanks to cooperating against Silky.

B-Money remains in prison as he will for the rest of his life for the murder of G.

Me? I’m on to other cases, and I’m hoping to jack Dubbs up on the other shooting where he didn’t kill the kid which would be like a fifteen to twenty year charge, in case the murder doesn’t work out or maybe to help force a plea on both to a concurrent sentence.

And even without any tape recorders around, I’m still finding ways to look like an ass.

Poetry from a spammer

Got this in my mailbox, from a spam address:

evening want wakeup
right cut eat
awake fit start
eat forget eat
search do allow
do not talk draw
open count know
Or rain go
To shut watch
our sing translate
eat spend buy

Hey, That really IS the first rule of Currently Idle!

Oh, and when the people around here tell you not to bring up any posts at the dinner table, THEY REALLY MEAN IT.

Mea culpa, compadres. I couldn’t help meself.

Glad none of us were packing our sig sauer for pizza night.

Aura

Train

The sun sets over the Hudson river and peace settled in for the ride. The soundtrack reaches an earbud delivered crescendo and it goes movie-fuzzed and unreal. God goes walking on the winter bare branches, catching up with the antique iron dragon, then falling back, toying with the too human attempt at speed.

Next to me, the fur coat infected by a human parasite stares at the humming blue screen. On the screen, a serene Indian moves through the postures of a long lost art breathing in and out of impossible form. The fur coat’s finger is firmly on the fast forward button, each pose a stop motion jerk of black and white dinosaur movie.

Inner Peace in half the time. Long languorous stretches for fur coats in a hurry.

The first rule of fight club.

The first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club. Lucky for me, being the sociological excavator/investigator that I am, a man I met recently seems to have forgotten the first rule of fight club. We made our acquaintance as I’ve made the acquaintance of many men, which was that I opened his car door for him, pointed a .40 caliber sig sauer P229 at his head, and screamed at him to show me his hands and get out of the fucking car. I then put my hand on the back of his neck and pulled him out of the car and pushed him to the ground and another man jumped on top of him, then we handcuffed him, and then we found the machine gun in the glove box, and shortly thereafter we all became new best friends. He had mistakenly made a deal to sell that gun to a very good friend of mine, who happened to be acting in an undercover capacity. That’ll get ya every time.

The night started fairly normally—it was a Sunday, and I was getting ready to go to the birthday party of the child of close family friends. My cell phone rang, and it was an agent with an agency that we don’t like or trust and whose former leader liked to wear dresses, but we work with them anyway. Forgive me, but what happened was that they got the opportunity to run a gun deal, and didn’t know what to do, so they called the professionals, and we moved in and showed them how to run the show. (Not that it was our finest hour, but we got the job done.) I went to the party for about an hour and then it was time to go to work. I arrived at the set (our parlance for the theater of operations, or the area we are controlling within our perimeter) just as the undercover and the informant were headed to the deal. This is not how we like to operate, but some deals go by the seat of your pants.

I made out a car with two men sitting inside it and pulled up and rolled down my window. I didn’t know them as they worked for that other agency. They rolled down their windows and I said “are you guys here for the same reason I am?” They nodded and laughed and I said I would drop my car further back in the parking lot and then jump in their car. our set was a starbucks with an adjoining barnes and noble.

I parked my ride and crouched by the side of it to put on my ballistic vest (it ain’t bulletproof; it’s ballistic, meaning it will stop some rounds. They’re worthless if your opponent has a long gun, or a caliber larger than .45, which isn’t common but nor is it illegal or rare.) by the time I was going to rejoin the two other guys I saw my boss, jumped in his ride instead, tried to make out what was going on on the wire (monitoring the undercover and the CI) and realized I desperately, desperately had to pee. I held it stoically, for about thirty seconds, and then said, hey, I’m not being safe to go into a takedown needing to pee, so I ran into barnes and noble and took care of business and then ran back outside. Fortunately the deal had not yet gone down.

Eventually the bad guy showed up—I don’t really think anyone is bad, it’s just a turn of phrase—and they started haggling over the price. We made out what was going on as best as possible on the monitor the UC was wearing. It absolutely never fails to amaze me that humans have walked on the fucking moon, but the technology to clearly listen to a conversation taking place several hundred feet away still eludes us. This is standard two man cover team conversation while the undercover is doing the deal– “Did he say gun?” “I think he said ‘I don’t have the gun.’” “Wait, did you just hear that, he’s saying to follow him.” “No, I can’t make out any of this, are you getting this?” “Shut up!” “Well he’s not going to go with him, should we take this down right now?” “Did he give the signal?” “What was the signal again?” “Where’s the bad guy parked?” (Midway through this, of course, the various cover teams start to cell phone or chirp each other asking if other parties have a better line on just what the fuck is going on in there. If CI’s knew how little we could actually hear, they’d probably worry more than they already do. Undercovers basically discount the cover team. If shit breaks bad, it’s the gun on your waist that’s going to shoot you out of the mess, not some guys screaming across a parking lot in a tinted out Impala, trying to save your ass.)

Well, we were able to understand that he wanted our guys to follow him to get the gun, but we don’t let our players move off the set—they falsely agreed to follow him to a predetermined spot, he led out of the parking lot, and though they pretended they were going to follow him, he really had a much larger party in play behind and in front of him. When he came around the driveway into the back parking lot of the store he suggested, they weren’t there yet, but we were. Cue guns, screaming, and putting our man on the ground. When we finally picked him up he had a large wet spot at the front of his pants. It’s become legend amongst the takedown team that he wet himself, but I give him the benefit of the doubt that there was snow on the ground. Also, I don’t like laughing at people’s fear. Also, I know for a damn fact he could have kicked the living shit out of any of us.

We spent several hours that night talking about how he had come to have that gun he was trying to sell, and spoke many more times in the days and weeks that followed. (I saw him at court today.) whenever I interview someone I make a point of asking lots of personal questions unrelated to guns, drugs, gangbanging, shooting, robbery, etc. I ask about kids; girls; parents; jobs; anything to get them talking about things that are personal and meaningful and to put their minds into the space of the things that matter to them, the better to massage them into realizing that the quickest way back to the warmth of those children, that girl, that job, is to cooperate with me, help me get more guns or more bad guys, and in turn help himself. (ah, shit, I admit it. I also just like hearing about other people’s lives. I’m fascinated not, as some say, by the human condition, but by humans themselves—the things we do, the stories we tell, the actions we commit, especially when our actions are so at odds with the things that are meaningful to us, or at odds with human decency or even, most commonly, at wild, disparate odds with common sense.)

So anyway, it turns out that my new friend—I’ll call him Manny—fights for a hobby. Goes to fight clubs. But not existential philosophical fight club like the movie, which, if I read it right, was all about revelling in the pain, basking in the human warmth of getting your ass kicked—no, my man Manny fights for real, in illegal, underground, unsanctioned ultimate fighting bouts.

Three five minute periods, though they rarely go that long. Nothing on but shorts. A few ways to end the brutality—tap out; have the ref (yeah, they’ve got refs and paramedics standing by) stop the match because somebody’s getting choked out or excessively bloody or lost teeth; or have it naturally end because one of the parties has indeed, visibly lost consciousness. They put pads down, and are typically held in halls, like a VFW hall. There is an underground network of e-mails and phone lists, and the matches are aligned roughly according to weight, though manny, built like a proverbial fireplug, is only about 5′8 and goes probably 160, told me that he usually fights guys bigger than him. The winner gets about $1500, or a percentage of the door. The loser, clearly, gets stitches, scars, dental work, or internal bleeding. Manny told me that his signature move is the rear naked choke—getting behind the guy and then hopping up on his back and choking the shit out of him and riding his head into the ground, to the detriment of his nose, eye sockets, and teeth.

I asked if he’d ever been beaten—he said absolutely. He said, you’re not shit if you haven’t had your ass handed to you. but he wins most of the time. He described how there’s a little spot right on your chin where one solid, perfectly placed punch will knock the recipient down so hard that he’ll be unconscious before hitting the deck. He also described how he instantly attacks at the whistle, and begins with blistering fast punches to the face and instead of drawing his fists back for more blows, instead follows up with his elbows, using them like knives to serrate his opponents face.

He said he loves the rush. The money is good, but it’s mostly about letting off steam. I said, what the fuck is wrong with a nice beer, bro? Nope; he doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do drugs, never been arrested—the whole selling an illegal gun thing was really, he got the gun from a friend and thought he could sell it for him and make an easy grand two weeks before christmas—”I know I fucked up, I just saw dollar signs and I wasn’t thinking straight.” Yup. I know that story. But essentially, not a bad guy. I’ve got a long diatribe about bad guys that I’ll save for another day.

He told us, as he sat chained to the wall later that night, that whoever the first guy to pull him out of the vehicle was, if he had wanted to, he could have knocked the shit out of that guy with his elbow because of how he was pulled out. Uhm . . . that was me. And it’s not like he would have gotten shot if he’d elbowed me in the mouth and destroyed my face, either, because I would have reeled backwards, and another agent would have moved up on him and taken him out more effectively, but generally, we don’t shoot people for punching us. I made a tactical error that night. We had been on the set and waiting for the takedown for about an hour, we were all jacked up on adrenaline, and when that car finally came onto the second set there was no hesitation, just run around to the driver’s side and open that door and put the man down.

But I left myself vulnerable to his elbow, and in hindsight, once I saw his hands, I should have taken the pace way down. Once the car was in park and his hands were outside the door of the vehicle, it was time to slow way down, make sure I had cover, and then dynamically remove him from the car. fortunately he didn’t elbow my teeth out, which is one of the nice intimidatory factors of having a gun–they think you’ll shoot them, even if the rules of engagement don’t really cover having your ass kicked—it’s really gotta be more about-to-get-killed before we start shooting people.

But man, he coulda knocked the shit out of me. I’ve tried to imagine what it must be like—to stand in a pair of shorts, in front of another man you’ve never met but who, for the sake of discussion, is probably muscular, looks tough as shit, and at the very least has the self confidence to be standing in front of you with every intention of beating the living shit out of you. and then another man blows a whistle and there are no rules. Just mayhem and pounding.

I stepped into a boxing ring once at a police academy almost a decade ago. Headgear, big gloves, just a few thirty second rounds. I didn’t last past the first round. The other fellow had boxed in the navy or something. He landed about four punched in really quick succession and I just wobbled around the ring. I did not fall down or get knocked down; I kept my hands vaguely up, and I remember one of his punches knocking my own fist into my headgear-clad face; I crossed my legs over, which is about the least sensible thing you can do when trying to fight; and at the end of thirty seconds, my lip was bleeding and an instructor asked me some rudimentary question and my answer made no sense, so they called it. Thank god. I would have gone down in the next round.

It remains one of the finest lessons of my life. Getting punched in the head is no fun, and it rarely happens just once; anyone who knows what he’s doing will unleash a flurry of punches, and they will be fast, and furious, and brutal, and have an incredible force behind them. My thirty second boxing match was with padded gloves and headgear. Manny gets onto a mat without any protective gear, and nobody to stop the affair until it gets really bloody, and no rules. They kick, they go to the ground, they grapple, they punch, choke, gouge, tear, slice—any way that the human body can wreak havoc on another corporeal vessel, that’s what they do.

I don’t have it. I don’t have the balls or the guts, to say nothing of the skill, to step nearly naked onto a mat to prove (or disprove) my physical mettle against another man. I would fear for my nose, my teeth, my body; I sit here and I gently punch myself with my knuckles right on the chin, looking for the “button” that manny described. I punch myself slighly harder, and slightly harder again. It hurts; when I catch a knuckle right at the bottom and outermost tip of my jaw, it hurts, and these are little baby punches I am delivering to myself. I cannot imagine what it must take to step onto that mat. Is it just confidence in your skills? Is it guts, or balls, or anger, or a desire for a rush more powerful than any I’ve known? I fear physical pain. I hate to admit that, but it’s true. I really never want to have the shit kicked out of me, and seeing as I don’t really have the self-defense or -offense skills necessary to insure that it will never happen, I studiously avoid it.

But I am fascinated by a man who would court it—nay, seek it, revel in it, move towards it. or perhaps i’m not even so fascinated by him–it’s not so important what makes him tick, if this is what relieves his stress, so be it–but it’s how far removed i am from being capable of that primal, primeval, medieval, base desire or ability to meet another man and let the viking roar and fight to the end. i wish i could. i wish i could stand on a mat and take all comers, unafraid of losing, but willing to bet that i have the raw muscle, the balance, the talent, the speed, the strength, the violence and economy of motion–to defeat another man. i wish i could do that, but i can’t.

“i try to fight at least once a month” he told me. He had a scar, looked about seven stitches, on his forehead. (Hitting the ground with someone on his back.) as we parted ways after court today I called to him as he went to his car. “been fighting lately?” “Next month, in New Jersey,” he said. “Hopefully. If the court will let me leave the state.” good luck, my friend.