My first roll call was worse.

Introduced to the watch by the muster sergeant, I got no applause and a wide assortment of fisheyes, evil eyes and averted eyes. After the reading of the crime sheet, seven men out of the fifty-five or so stopped to shake my hand and wish me good luck. The sergeant gave me a silent tour of the division and dropped me off with a street map at the east edge of my beat; his farewell was, “Don’t let the niggers give you no shit.” When I thanked him, he said, “Fritz Vogel was a good pal of mine,” and sped off.

I decided to kosherize myself fast.

My first week at Newton was muscle rousts and gathering information on who the real bad guys were. I broke up Green Lizard parties with my billy club, promising not to roust the winos if they fed me names. If they didn’t kick loose, I arrested them; if they did, I arrested them anyway. I smelled reefer smoke on the sidewalk outside the gassed hair joint on 68th and Beach, kicked the door in and drew down on three grasshoppers holding felony quantities of maryjane. They snitched off their supplier and fingered an upcoming rumble between The Slausons and Choppers in return for my promise of leniency; I called in the info to the squardroom and flagged down a black-and-white to haul the hopheads to the station. Prowling the hooker auto dump got me prostitution collars, and threatening the girls’ johns with calls to their wives got me more names. At week’s end I had twenty-two arrests to my credit—nine of them felonies. And I had names. Names to test my courage on. Names to make up for the main events I’d dodged. Names to make the cops who hated me afraid of me.

I caught Downtown Willy Brown coming out of the Lucky Time Wine Bar. I said, “Your mother sucks a mean dick, Sambo”; Willy charged me. I took three to give six; when it was over Brown was blowing teeth out his nose. And two cops shooting the breeze across the street saw the whole thing.

Roosevelt Williams, paroled rape-o, pimp and policy runner, was tougher. His response to “Hello, shitbird” was “You a whitey motherfuck”—and he hit first. We traded shots for close to a minute, in full view of a cadre of Choppers lounging on front stoops. He was getting the better of me, and I almost went for my baton—not the stuff of which legends are made. Finally I pulled a Lee Blanchard move, rolling upstairs-downstairs sets, wham-wham-wham-wham, the last blow sending Williams to dreamland and me to the station nurse for two finger splints.

Bare knuckles were now out of the question. My last two names, Crawford Johnson and his brother Willis, operated a rigged card game out of the rec room of the Mighty Reedeemer Baptist Church on 61st and Enterprise, catty corner from the greasy spoon where Newton cops ate for half price. When I came in the window, Willis was dealing. He looked up and said, “Huh?” my billy club took out his hands and the card table. Crawford went for his waistband; my second baton blow knocked a silencer-fitted .45 from his grip. The brothers crashed out the door howling in pain; I picked up my new off-duty piece and told the other gamblers to grab their money and go home. When I walked outside, I had an audience: bluesuits chomping sandwiches on the sidewalk, watching the Johnson brothers hotfoot it, holding their broken paws. “Some people don’t respond to civility!” I yelled. An old sergeant rumored to hate my guts yelled back, “Bleichert, you’re an honorary white man!” and I knew I was kosherized.

The Johnson Brothers roust made me a minor legend. My fellow cops gradually warmed to me—the way you do to guys too crazy-bold for their own good, guys that you’re grateful not to be yourself. It was like being a local celebrity again.

I got straight 100’s on my first month’s fitness report, and Lieutenant Getchell rewarded me with a radio car beat. It was a promotion of sorts, as was the territory that came with it.

Rumor had it that both the Slausons and the Choppers were out to do me in, and if they failed, Crawford and Willis Johnson were next in line to try. Getchell wanted me out of harm’s way until they cooled off, so he assigned me to a sector on the western border of the division.

The new beat was an invitation to boredom. Mixed white and Negro, small factories and tidy houses, the best action you could hope for was drunk drivers and hitchhiking hookers soliciting motorists, trying to pick up a few bucks on their way down to the niggertown dope pads. I busted DDs and thwarted assignations by flashing my cherry lights, wrote traffic tickets by the shitload and generally prowled for anything out of the ordinary. Drive-in restaurants were popping up on Hoover and Vermont, spangly modern jobs where you could eat in your car and listen to music on speakers attached to the window posts. I spent hours parked in them, KGFJ blasting be-bop, my two-way on low in case anything hot came over the air. I eyeballed the street while I sat and listened, trawling for white hookers, telling myself that if I saw any who looked like Betty Short, I’d warn them that9th and Norton was only a few miles away and urge them to be careful.

But most of the whores were jigs and bleached blondes, not worth warning and only worth busting when my arrest quota was running low. They were women, though, safe places to let my mind dawdle, safe substitutes for my wife at home alone and Madeleine crawling 8th Street gutters. I toyed with the idea of picking up a Dahlia/Madeleine lookalike for sex, but always quashed it—it was too much like Johnny Vogel and Betty at the Biltmore.

Going off-duty at midnight, I was always itchy, restless, in no mood to go home and sleep. Sometimes I hit the all-night movies downtown, sometimes the jazz clubs on South Central. Bop was moving into its heyday, and all-night sessions with a pint of bonded were generally enough to ease me home and into a dreamless sleep shortly after Kay left for work in the morning.

But when it didn’t work, it was sweats and Jane Chambers’ smiling clown and Frenchman Joe Dulange smashing cockroaches and Johnny Vogel and his whip and Betty begging me to fuck her or kill her killer, she didn’t care which. And the worst of it was waking up alone in the fairy tale house.

Summer came on. Hot days sleeping it off on the couch; hot nights patrolling west niggertown, bonded sourmash, the Royal Flush and Bido Lito’s, Hampton Hawes, Dizzy Gillespie, Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon. Restless attempts to study for the Sergeant’s Exam and the urge to blow off Kay and the fairy tale house and get a cheap pad somewhere on my beat. If it weren’t for the spectral wino it might have gone on forever.

I was parked in Duke’s Drive-in, eyeing a gaggle of trampy-looking girls standing by the bus stop about ten yards in front of me. My two-way was off, wild Kenton riffs were coming out of the speaker hook-up. The breezeless humidity had my uniform plastered to my body; I hadn’t made an arrest in a week. The girls were waving at passing cars, one peroxide blonde gyrating her hips at them. I started synchronizing the bumps and grinds to the music, playing with the idea of pulling a shakedown, running them through R&I for outstanding warrants. Then a scraggy old wino entered the scene, one hand holding a short dog, the other out begging for chump change.

The bottle blonde quit dancing to talk to him; the music went haywire—all screeches—without her accompaniment. I flashed my headlights; the wino shielded his eyes, then shot me the finger. I was out of the black-and-white and on top him, Stan Kenton’s band my backup.

Roundhouse lefts and rights, rabbit punches. The girl’s shrieks out-decibeling Big Stan. The wino cursing me, my mother, my father. Sirens in my head, the smell of rotting meat at the warehouse, even though I knew it couldn’t be. The old geez blubbering, “Pleeese.”