The Choirboys

FIVE

7-A-85: ROSCOE RULES AND DEAN PRATT

Probably the most choir practices were called by Harold Bloomguard of 7-A-29. Probably the least choir practices were called by 7-A-85. Roscoe Rules just didn’t seem to need them as much.

One choir practice however was hastily called by Dean Pratt of 7-A-85, five months before the choir practice killing. It was on the night Roscoe Rules became a legend in his own time.

Henry Rules was nicknamed “Roscoe” by Harold Bloomguard at another midnight choir practice when Rules, who had just seen an old Bogart movie on television, finished telling the others of a recent arrest: “This black ass, abba dabba motherfucker looked like he was gonna rabbit, so I drew down and zonked him across the gourd with my roscoe.”

For a moment drunken Harold Bloomguard looked at his partner Sam Niles in disbelief. Rules had not said “gun” or “piece” or “.38” but had actually said “roscoe.”

“Oh, lizard shit!” cried Bloomguard. “Roscoe! Roscoe! Did you hear that?”

“You mean your ‘gat,’ Rules?” roared Sam Niles, who was also drunk, and he rolled over on his blanket in the grass, spilling half a gallon of wine worth about three dollars.

From then on, to all the choirboys, Henry Rules became known as “Roscoe” Rules. The only one to call him “Henry” occasionally was his partner Dean Pratt who was afraid of him.

Roscoe Rules was a five year policeman. He had long arms and veiny hands. He was tall and hard and strong. And mean. No one who talked as mean as Roscoe Rules could have survived twenty-nine years on this earth without being mean. His parents had been struggling farmers in Idaho, then in the San Joaquin Valley of California where they acquired a little property before each died in early middle age.

“Roscoe Rules handed out towels in the showers at Auschwitz,” the policemen said.

“Roscoe Rules was a Manson family reject-too nasty.”

“Roscoe Rules believes in feeding stray puppies and kittens-to his piranha.”

And so forth.

If there was one thing Roscoe Rules wished, after having seen all of the world he cared to see, it was that there was a word as dirty as “nigger” to apply to all mankind. Since he had little imagination he had to settle for “asshole.” But he realized that all Los Angeles policemen and most American policemen used that as the best of all possible words.

Calvin Potts, the only black choirboy agreed wholeheartedly with Roscoe when he drunkenly expressed his dilemma one night at choir practice in the park.

“That’s the only thing I like about you, Roscoe,” Calvin said. “You don’t just hate brothers. You hate everyone. Even more than I do. Without prejudice or bias.”

“Gimme a word then,” Roscoe said. He was reeling and vomitous, looking over his shoulder for Harold Bloomguard who at 150 pounds would fight anyone who was cruel to the MacArthur Park ducks.

“Gimme a word,” Roscoe repeated and furtively chucked a large jagged rock at a fuzzy duckling who swam too close, just missing the baby who went squawking to its mother.

Everyone went through the ordinary police repertoire for Roscoe Rules.

“How about fartsuckers?”

“Not rotten enough.”

“Slimeballs?”

“That’s getting old.”

“Scumbags?”

“Naw.”

“Cumbuckets?”

“Too long.”

“Hemorrhoids?”

“Everybody uses that.”

“Scrotums?”

“Not bad, but too long.”

“Scrotes, then,” said Willie Wright who was now drunk enough to use unwholesome language.

“That’s it!” Roscoe Rules shouted. “Scrotes! That’s what all people are: ignorant filthy disgusting ugly worthless scrotes. I like that! Scrotes!”

“A man’s philosophy expressed in a word,” said Baxter Slate of 7-A-1. “Hear! Hear!” He held up his fifth of Sneaky Pete, drained it in three gulps, suddenly felt the special effects of the port and barbiturates he secretly popped, fell over and moaned.

There was however one thing which endeared Roscoe Rules to all the other choirboys: he was, next to Spencer Van Moot of 7-A-33, the greatest promoter any of them had ever seen. Roscoe could, when he cared to, arrange food and drink for the most voluptuous tastes-all of it free-for the other choirboys, who called him an insufferable prick.

At first the only thing Roscoe didn’t like about his partner Dean Pratt was his styled red hair. But he soon came to hate his partner for his drunken crying jags at choir practice. There was another thing about Dean Pratt which all the choirboys despised and that was that the twenty-five year old bachelor’s brain became temporarily but totally destroyed by less than ten ounces of any alcoholic drink. Then it was impossible to make the grinning redhead understand anything. Any question, statement, piece of smalltalk would be met by an idiotic frustrating maddening double beseechment:

“I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Or, “Whaddaya trying to say? Whaddaya trying to say?” Or, most frequently heard, “Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”

And so, Dean Pratt eventually became known as Whaddayamean Dean. The first few sessions of the MacArthur Park choirboys found Roscoe Rules, Calvin Potts or Spermwhale Whalen eventually grabbing the lanky redhead by the front of his Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and shaking him in rage with Dean in drunken tears babbling, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”

Yet Whaddayamean Dean became the first policeman Roscoe Rules ever took home to meet his family. Roscoe, one of three choirboys who were married, lived on a one acre piece of ground east of Chino, California, some sixty miles from Wilshire Station. Even the few friends Roscoe had made these past four years would not drive that far to be sociable. Roscoe loved it there and made the daily trek gladly. His children could grow up in a rural setting as he had. Of course they would not have to work nearly as hard. His two boys, eight and nine, only had to hoe and weed and water his corn, onions, carrots, squash and melons. Then after cleaning the animals’ stalls, picking the infectious dung and hay from the horse’s hooves and treating the swaybacked pony for ringbone, they could have the rest of the day for playing. After they studied for a minimum of one and a half hours on weekdays and two on Saturdays and Sundays. And after they took turns pitching and catching a baseball for forty-five minutes on weekends.

Roscoe Rules had convinced both his sons that they would be allstar players their first season in Little League. And they were. And he had convinced them that if they didn’t get straight A’s through elementary school they would get what the recalcitrant pony got when it misbehaved.

Roscoe’s two sons hated riding as much as the pony hated being ridden, but when the pony wouldn’t ride, Roscoe would snare the pony’s front feet, loop his rope around the corral fence and deftly jerk the animal’s legs back toward his hindquarters, catching the beast when it fell with a straight right between the eyes. He wore his old sap gloves with the lead filled palm and padded knuckles (which a sob sister sergeant had caught him beating up a drunk with and which he had been ordered to get rid of). That jerking rope, that punch and the bone bruising force of crashing to earth never failed to tame the pony who would obey for several weeks until the stupid creature forgot and became stubborn. Then he would require “gentling” again. Roscoe Rules believed that animals and people were basically alike: they were all scrotes.

Roscoe was very proud of the clean healthy life he had provided for his sons away from the city He counted the years, months and weeks until he could retire with a twenty year service pension to his little ranch east of Chino and live out his days with his wife Clara (a secret drinker), and raise grandchildren in the same American tradition and perhaps buy them ponies and make ballplayers out of them. And give them all the advantages he had provided for his own children.

Roscoe was, like most policemen, conservative politically by virtue of his inescapable police cynicism but more so because of his misanthropy which had its roots in childhood. He had served in Vietnam and had almost made the Army his career until an LAPD recruiting poster had forced him to compare the benefits of police work to military service.

Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were “doing the chicken” on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney And that if Jesus Christ didn’t have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew Roscoe Rules wasn’t raising his sons to be faggots.

But Roscoe Rules had a sense of humor. He carried in his wallet two photographs from his Army days which were getting cracked and faded despite the plastic envelopes he kept them in. One showed a Vietnamese girl of twelve or thirteen trying gamely to earn five American dollars by copulating an emaciated oxen which Roscoe and several other American cowboys had lassoed and tied thrashing on its back in a bamboo corral.

The second photo, which everyone at Wilshire Station had seen, was of Roscoe holding the severed head of a Vietcong by the hair as Roscoe leered into the camera, tongue lolling, neck twisted to one side. The photo had “Igor and friend” printed across the bottom. The thought of the photo was to trigger Roscoe’s finest hour as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Whaddayamean Dean hated being the partner of someone as mean as Roscoe Rules. He knew his own physical limitations and rarely talked tough on the street unless he was absolutely sure that the other person was terrified of police, in which case he allowed himself the luxury of tossing around a few “assholes,” or “scrotes” to please Roscoe.

“Know why niggers survive serious wounds, partner?” Roscoe Rules asked Whaddayamean Dean.

“No, why, Henry?” asked Whaddayamean Dean, using the given name abhorred by the other choirboys.

“They’re too dumb to go into shock.”

Whaddayamean Dean giggled and snuffled and looked up from his driving at the browless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules, and at his freckled hands which would nervously grab at the crotch, especially when the conversation turned to women. Roscoe was one of those policemen who would sit bored in a radio car in the dark and quiet hours and talk of his incredible sexual encounters in Vietnam or Tijuana and knead and squeeze his genitals until his partners got nauseated.

Working with Roscoe Rules was many things but it was never dull. He was what is known in LAPD jargon as a “Four-fifteen personality,” 415 being the California penal code section which defines disturbing the peace. Indeed, Roscoe Rules had turned many bloodless family fights or landlord-tenant disputes into minor riots by his presence. He had been transferred around the department more than any member of his academy class, had been the subject of many complaints of excessive force from citizens and even from a few police supervisors, who generally do not challenge the techniques of policemen like Roscoe Rules. Not if they respond promptly to radio calls, write one moving traffic violation a day and stop at least three people daily for field interrogations.

During their first week as partners, Roscoe started a small riot. It was in 7-A-77’s area, but Calvin Potts and Francis Tanaguchi were handling a call in 7-A-29’s area, while Harold Bloomguard and Sam Niles were handling a call in 7-A-1’s area, while Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate were parked in an alley near Crenshaw Boulevard, Spermwhale receiving a listless headjob from an aging black prostitute whom he had known from his days at old University Station.

The call had originated as a neighbor dispute, and by the time Roscoe and Whaddayamean Dean arrived, what had been a potentially dangerous situation in an unhappily mixed apartment house on Cloverdale had pretty well petered out to the name calling, face saving phase. There were two tired men involved: a black and a Mexican who did not really want to fight for the honor of their bickering wives or anything else.

“Took a report here one time,” Roscoe observed as they climbed the stairway at nine o’clock that night. “Some abba dabba made a report that one a her cubs was missing. Had so fucking many milksuckers running around she forgot the police department summer camp was taking care a the little prick for a week. That’s what kind a people we run our kiddie camps for. Didn’t know he was gone till she had a head count!”

Whaddayamean Dean shivered as he saw a team of roaches charge on a chunk of slimy red hamburger which lay rotting on the landing.

There was a sign on the manager’s door which said: “No loiterers in this building. Due to lady tenants being kidnapped, molested and robbed the LAPD will arrest loiterers.”

On the second landing they passed a staggering wine reeking black woman who ignored them. She was barefoot, wore pinned black slacks and an extra large dirty blouse which hung outside. The blouse was hiked in the back because of the lopsided hump which bent her double and reduced a woman who was meant to be of average height to a misshapen dwarf.

Roscoe tapped the hump as he passed, winked mischievously at Whaddayamean Dean and said to the stuporous woman, “I got a hunch you’re for me, baby!”

Roscoe was still giggling when they found the remnants of the once smoldering neighbor dispute. The rival factions were almost evenly divided. Two sets of neighbors, including husbands, wives, teenage and preteen children, backed the play of each injured party. Mexicans backed Mexicans, blacks backed blacks. There had been twenty-two people screaming and threatening at the height of the dispute. Now there were just the husbands of the aggrieved women. The black man had a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth where the Mexican had accidentally bumped him when they were pushing and shoving, preparatory to doing battle.

The black man, a squatty hod carrier with enormous shoulders and a wild full natural hairdo, looked relieved by the presence of the bluesuits and shouted angrily, “You made me bleed, motherfucker! You gonna pay I’m gonna kick ass for this!”

“Anytime, man, anytime,” said the Mexican, a slightly shorter man, a member of the same hod carrier’s local, who had been on many jobs with the black man and was almost a friend.

The Mexican, like the black man, was dressed in dirty work pants and was shirtless to unnerve his opponent. He did not have such an intimidating physique in terms of musculature, but his chest, back and rib cage were crisscrossed with many scars: some like coiled rope, some like purple zippers, from old gang wars in East Los Angeles where he had fought his way through the elaborate gang hierarchy to emerge as a seasoned veterano covered with battle wounds and glory But then the Mexican had gotten married, fathered seven children, lost his taste for street war and in truth had not faced a foe for many years.

“What started the beef?” Roscoe Rules asked, deciding to talk to the Mexican.

The Mexican shrugged, touched his hand nervously to the drooping Zapata moustache, lowered his eyes and turned his scarred back to the two policemen.

The black hod carrier’s wife spoke first. “The problem is, Officer, that this broad and her daughter always has to hang clothes on the same day that I’m hangin mine. And that ain’t no big thang, cept they got no respect and just throws other folks’ clothes on the ground like pigs. And I has to put another quarter in the machine and wash my clothes all over agin.”

“That’s a lie,” said the husky Mexican woman, throwing her long sweaty brown hair back over her shoulder. “Her and her daughter are the ones that don’t have no respect. Animals, that’s what they are.”

“Go back to Mexico, bitch,” the black woman said.

“I was born here, nigger. Go back to Africa,” the Mexican woman said, and Whaddayamean Dean stepped between them as the black woman lunged forward, bumping Whaddayamean Dean into Roscoe, who fell against the black man, who accidentally stepped on Roscoe’s plain toed, ripple soled police shoes, which he had spit shined every day for the eight months he owned them.

“Goddamn it!” Roscoe yelled, holding his arms out between the two women, eyeballs white with disgust. “I heard enough!” he thundered, arms still extended, knees slightly bent, face twisted in agony like Samson straining at the pillars.

Then Roscoe dropped his hands to his hips and walked in slow circles. Finally he paused, looked at the people like a sad but patient uncle, nodded and said, “I heard enough!”

“Looky here, Officer,” said the black man, “I don’t mean no disrespect but I heard enough a you sayin you heard enough. You’re makin me nervous.”

Roscoe walked over to Whaddayamean Dean, pulled him aside and whispered, “This spade’s the troublemaker far as I can see. I think he’s got a leaky seabag. Dingaling. Psycho. You can’t even talk to him. Look what the motherfucker did to my shoe!”

“I think we can quiet them down,” Whaddayamean Dean said as Roscoe stood on one foot like a blue flamingo, rubbing his toe hopelessly on the calf of his left leg.

“Can I talk to you?” Whaddayamean Dean asked the Mexican, walking him to the other end of the hall while Roscoe Rules hustled the silent black thirty feet down the stairway.

“I don’t want no more trouble, outta you,” Roscoe whispered when he got the hod carrier to a private place.

“I ain’t gonna give you no trouble, Officer,” the black man said, looking up at the mirthless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules which were difficult to see because like most hotdogs he wore his cap tipped forward until the brim almost touched his nose.

“Don’t argue with me, man!” Roscoe said. His nostrils splayed as he sensed the fear on the man who stood hangdog before him.

“What’s your name?” Roscoe then demanded.

“Charles ar-uh Henderson,” the hod carrier answered, and then added impatiently, “Look, I wanna go back inside with my family I’m tired a all this and I just wanna go to bed. I worked hard…”

But Roscoe became enraged at the latent impudence and snarled, “Look here, Charles ar-uh Henderson, don’t you be telling me what you’re gonna do. I’ll tell you when you can go back inside and maybe you won’t be going back inside at all. Maybe you’re gonna be going to the slam tonight!”

“What for? I ain’t done nothin. What right you got…”

“Right? Right?” Roscoe snarled, spraying the hod carrier with saliva. “Man, one more word and I’m gonna book your ass! I’ll personally lock you in the slammer! I’ll set your hair on fire!”

Whaddayamean Dean called down to Roscoe and suggested that they switch hod carriers. As soon as they had, he tried in vain to calm the outraged black man.

A few minutes later he heard Roscoe offer some advice to the Mexican hod carrier: “If that loudmouth bitch was my old lady I’d kick her in the cunt.”

Twenty years ago the Mexican had broken a full bottle of beer over the head of a man for merely smiling at his woman. Twenty years ago, when she was a lithe young girl with a smooth sensuous belly he would have shot to death any man, cop or not, who would dare to refer to her as a bitch.

Roscoe Rules knew nothing of machismo and did not even sense the slight almost imperceptible flickering of the left eyelid of the Mexican. Nor did he notice that those burning black eyes were no longer pointed somewhere between the shield and necktie of Roscoe Rules, but were fixed on his face, at the browless blue eyes of the tall policeman.

“Now you two act like men and shake hands so we can leave,” Roscoe ordered.

“Huh?” the Mexican said incredulously and even the black hod carrier looked up in disbelief.

“I said shake hands. Let’s be men about this. The fight’s over and you’ll feel better if you shake hands.”

“I’m forty-two years old,” the Mexican said softly, the eyelid flickering more noticeably “Almost old enough to be your father. I ain’t shaking hands like no kid on a playground.”

“You’ll do what I say or sleep in the slammer,” Roscoe said, remembering how in school everyone felt better and even drank beer after a good fight.

“What charge?” demanded the Mexican, his breathing erratic now. “What fuckin charge?”

“You both been drinking,” Roscoe said, losing confidence in his constituted authority, but infuriated by the insolence which was quickly undermining what he thought was a controlled situation.

Roscoe, like most black-glove cops, believed implicitly that if you ever backed down even for a moment in dealing with assholes and scrotes the entire structure of American law enforcement would crash to the ground in a mushroom cloud of dust.

“We ain’t drunk,” the Mexican said. “I had a can of beer when I got home from work. One goddamn can!” He spoke in accented Cholo English: staccato, clipped, just as he did when he was a respected gang member.

Then Roscoe Rules pushed him back into an alcove away from the eyes of those down the hall who had made their own peace by now and were preparing to go back into their apartments to fix dinner. Roscoe pulled his baton from the ring and hated this sullen Mexican and the glowering black man and even Whaddayamean Dean whose nervousness enraged Roscoe because if you ever let these scrotes think you were afraid…

Then Roscoe looked around, guessing there were a dozen people between them and the radio car, and started to realize that this was not the time or place. But the Mexican made Roscoe Rules forget that it was the wrong time and place when he looked at the tall policeman with the harder crueler larger body and said, “I never let a man talk to me like this. You better book me or you better let me go but don’t you talk to me like this anymore or… or…”

“Or? Or?” Roscoe said, his hairless brows throbbing as he touched the small man on the chest with the tip of his stick. “You Mexicans’re all alike. Think you’re tough, huh? Bantamweight champ a this garbage dump, huh? I oughtta tear that oily moustache off your face.”

Then the flickering eyelid was still and the eyes glazed over. “Go ahead,” the Mexican barely whispered.

And Roscoe Rules did. A second later the Mexican was standing there with a one inch piece of his right moustache and the skin surrounding it in Roscoe Rules’ left hand. The raw flesh began to spot at once with pinpoints of blood.

Then the Mexican screamed and kicked Roscoe Rules in the balls.

Suddenly Whaddayamean Dean found himself trying to get the Mexican’s neck in the crook of his arm, to squeeze off the oxygen to the brain, which would make him lose consciousness and flop convulsively on the ground, thus “doing the chicken.”

The Mexican’s erstwhile black enemy was experiencing a deep sense of guilt and outrage at the Mexican’s plight.

“You honky motherfucker!” the black hod carrier yelled when he finally exploded. He tossed a straight right at Whaddayamean Dean which caught him on the left temple and knocked him free of the Mexican and over the kneeling body of Roscoe Rules who was hoping desperately he wouldn’t puke from the kick in the balls.

Roscoe aimed a spunky blow at the black hod carrier’s leg with his unauthorized, thirty-four ounce sap which pulled his pants down when he wasn’t careful to keep his Sam Browne buckled tightly.

Hit em in the shins. They can’t take that, thought Roscoe, swinging the sap weakly, relying on folklore to save him now that he could not stand up.

But the hod carrier did not seem to feel the sap bouncing off his legs as he and the Mexican took turns punching Whaddayamean Dean silly.

The redhead had lost his baton and gun and was bouncing back and forth between the two men. “Partner! Partnerrrr!” Whaddayamean Dean yelled, but Roscoe Rules could only kneel there, look up in hatred and wish he could shoot the nigger, the spick and his puny partner.

Then Roscoe fell over on his back, nursing his rapidly swelling testicles, spitting foam like a mad dog.

It ended abruptly There had been men, women and children screaming, encouraging, cursing gleefully There had been bodies thudding off the walls, doors slamming. Then silence.

Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean Pratt were alone in the hallway. Both on the floor, uniforms half torn off, batons, hats, flashlights, guns and notebooks scattered. Whaddayamean Dean lay moaning, draped across an overturned trash can. Roscoe Rules felt his strength returning as he struggled to his feet, keeping his balls in both hands for fear if he dropped them they’d burst like ripe tomatoes.

Roscoe was finished for the evening. He was content to limp down the stairs to sit in the radio car and wait for the arrival of other units after his partner staggered to the car and put out the “officers need help” call. Roscoe could not return with Whaddayamean Dean when he went back into the building with some sixteen policemen and began breaking down doors in a vain search for the two hod carriers who had escaped and were not arrested for two weeks.

“Give em a few licks for me, partner,” Roscoe had whispered to his partner as he shuffled slowly to the ambulance, walking bowlegged, holding the enflamed swollen testicles in both hands as though he had a double handful of heavy bullion or precious gems. Which indeed he did as far as he was concerned. He thought at that moment that he might lose them forever and nothing ever seemed as precious. He refused to release the handful of damaged flesh even to step up into the ambulance, and just stood there, bowlegged, holding himself while two ambulance attendants lifted him up in a seated carry.

Before they closed the ambulance door, he called weakly to his battered partner, “Give em one for me, Dean! One for your partner! And get em in a wristlock! Bend em down! Make em bite their own balls! Then play catch-up with your stick! Then kneedrop them! Puncture their kidneys! Rupture their spleens! Make em do the chicken!”

Five people went to jail that night for various charges ranging from resisting officers to plain drunk. The black man was picked up two weeks later at the Hod Carriers Local. After five court continuances he spent ten days in jail which he was permitted to serve on weekends because of his work and large family The Mexican hod carrier who also had a large family was given a longer jail term because of his youthful record of violence. All but fifteen days were suspended.

Both men were heroes with their families and neighbors for some time to come, and the Mexican, who had been experiencing a diminished sex drive, discovered after his release from jail that he was like a young stallion. His wife said she never had it so good.

After Roscoe Rules recovered from the beating at the hands of the hod carriers he was anxious to get back to the streets and make the citizenry of Wilshire Division pay for his wounds and humiliation. There was no shame in the injuries themselves. On the contrary Roscoe wore his scars as proudly as the Mexican wore the mementoes of his youthful gang fights. What humiliated Roscoe was that they got punched and stomped two on two. When he told the story to other officers the number of assailants grew in number until even Whaddayamean Dean wasn’t sure just how many people had a piece of him. Roscoe never did know. The entire experience was blurred in his mind what with vomiting and painful fearful days in the hospital when he erroneously thought his manhood would be forever compromised. He admitted to his partner that he had no clear recollection of what had happened and even after his total recovery referred to the experience grimly as The Day My Balls Blew Up.

But from then on, Roscoe was more cautious than before. If a suspect even looked as though he might be anxious to cause trouble he would find himself wearing Roscoe’s unauthorized sap in his hair. During his one month convalescence Roscoe was unable to raise what Harold Bloomguard called a “diamond cutter” or even a “blue veiner” due to the shooting pains in his groin. His wife told a sympathetic neighbor she never had it so good.

But Roscoe never lost his sense of humor. While he was off duty recuperating he invited Whaddayamean Dean to his ranch east of Chino for a down home pit barbecue.

“Not like that nigger slop you see in all these greasy spoons in town,” he promised, but a real barbecue, worthy of the Middle American farmers Roscoe had sprung from.

When Whaddayamean Dean asked Roscoe if he planned to return to the Midwest when he retired from police work, Roscoe said, fuck no, that those redneck maggots like to read their Bibles over you while they screwed you in the ass. Once when waxing philosophical he admitted that he had only truly been happy in Vietnam, and that if he hadn’t been dumb enough to knock up his old lady and get married young he’d have loved to have gone to Africa and hired out as a mercenary.

“Imagine getting paid to kill niggers,” he mused.

Then he proved that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor when his eight year old son Clyde came crying into the yard where Roscoe and Whaddayamean Dean sat drinking beer from the cans and working on a radio controlled airplane which Roscoe Rules had bought for his son’s birthday two years ago and not let him play with because he wasn’t old enough. Roscoe loved to sit in the yard and terrorize the pony by divebombing it with the roaring little airplane. It was a Messerschmitt with authentic German insignia and an added touch of a swastika on the tail.

“Daddy!” said his son Clyde. “Look at Pookie!”

“What’s wrong with him, son?” asked Roscoe solicitously as the boy held the little box turtle in his hands. The creature’s head drooped, obviously near death from some reptile malady.

“It’s a goner, get rid of it,” Roscoe said without touching the turtle.

“No, Daddy!” cried the boy “He’ll be okay! Pookie’s gonna be okay!”

“Give him here,” Roscoe said, winking at Whaddayamean Dean. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Then he snatched the little turtle from the child’s hand and with the cutting pliers he was using to repair the gas engine of the Messerschmitt, snipped the head of the box turtle off at the base of the shell, the feet kicking frantically in death.

“Now we can use him for a paperweight,” Roscoe said.

He told the story all over Wilshire Station the next day, claiming it proved he was the meanest, baaaaadest motherfucker that ever wore a blue suit in Wilshire Station, while Whaddayamean Dean unknowingly used exactly the phrase which had been used by Roscoe’s last five partners. He whispered that Roscoe was an insufferable prick.

Roscoe Rules continued pretty much as before despite his Waterloo at the hands of the hod carriers. He asked to return to 7-A-85 so he could be in the south end of Wilshire Division in the thick of the action. And since Roscoe arrested so many drunk drivers and wrote such an incredible number of traffic tickets he was still the darling of those police supervisors who believe that writing one moving traffic violation a day is tangible proof of good police work.

Roscoe also arrested more drunk drivers than most traffic cars. Of course, he also went to court more than any traffic car because he booked the “borderline” drunk drivers. In fact, he wrote the “borderline” tickets.

“All I see and some I don’t see,” as Roscoe put it.

On the night that Roscoe Rules was to become a legend he and Whaddayamean Dean had been trying to catch a drunk driver by staking out a bar on West Jefferson frequented by hard drinking blacks who wasted no time with fancy drinks, but nightly consumed gallons of Scotch, gin and beer. Roscoe had hoped to find a drunk sleeping in his car in the parking lot at the rear and wake him gently, telling him that he had better go home and sleep it off. Then they would wait down the street in the darkness and arrest the grateful motorist for drunk driving as he passed by.

Some policemen become legends by virtue of accumulated felony arrests which propel them into the category of instinctive policemen, who doglike smell or sense when something is wrong: when a suspect is lying, when a turn of the head or clicking of eyeballs means more than just another case of black and white fever. When one knows which cars to stop, which pedestrian to talk to, most importantly, which one to believe, since most policemen eventually conclude that in addition to being hopelessly weak the human race is composed of an incredible collection of liars who will lie even when the truth would save them, and more often than not haven’t the faintest idea of what the truth really is.

But there are other ways to become police legends, that is, by a single action or reaction which is so outrageous that within twenty-four hours it is the subject of every rollcall in the city Roscoe Rules was about to become that kind of legend.

That fateful night started pretty much as every other night with Roscoe driving and discussing the merits of fast cars, hotshot chase driving, devastating weapons and ammunition, and even women, since his wounded testicles were once more intact and functioning. As he talked, Roscoe as always unconsciously squeezed, kneaded and pulled at himself.

The salmon smoggy sun had dropped suddenly that evening. They were driving through their district at dusk, looking for traffic tickets which Roscoe believed in writing at the beginning of the watch. Often, a motorist could blow a red light at eight miles an hour during the busy late hours and Roscoe would ignore him or not even see him if he had already written his ticket for the night.

They passed a construction crew building a new elementary school in a black neighborhood near Washington Boulevard, and Roscoe yelled “Building new cages, huh?” to a white man in a hard hat who grinned and raised a hammer.

“The air’s quiet,” Roscoe remarked, lighting a Marlboro. “Not too many radio calls in Wilshire, but I got a feeling it’s gonna be a busy Thursday night. Animals got their welfare checks today Should be lots a action.”

A battered Texas Chevrolet driven by a grim looking white man with faded eyes pulled up next to them at a red light. The woman passenger, gaunt and weak, had difficulty rolling down the window. She was holding a baby in her arms, and one of the four blond children in the back seat helped her.

“Suh,” she said, “kin you tell us where the Gen’ral Hospital is?”

“Sure,” Roscoe answered. “Just go straight on this street to the Harbor Freeway and turn right. Keep going ten miles. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank ye,” she smiled, and again battled the window which was jammed in the bent frame.

Whaddayamean Dean looked at his partner quizzically and Roscoe explained, “Fuck this white trash. They’re worse’n niggers, coming here and making us pay for their little milk-suckers. General Hospital, my ass. Wonder what they’ll say when they find themselves looking at the ocean?”

Roscoe then spotted a black man in a business suit walking on Western Avenue with a young white woman in a green tailored jacket and skirt. She was obviously not one of the white prostitutes who worked the area so Roscoe kept his voice low when he drove by looked in their direction and said, “Price of pork what it is, and a spade can still buy a white pig for ten dollars?”

“You know, I never drove in a pursuit,” Whaddayamean Dean observed as he saw an LAPD traffic car zooming past them to overtake a speeder on Olympic Boulevard.

“Remember one thing, babe,” Roscoe said, his voice dropping an octave as it always did when he assumed the role of training officer, “don’t never try to overtake a fast car on the outside when you’re going in a turn. Most cars’ll flip on a piece of spit. Hit him on the inner rear fender and he’ll eat the windshield. I once saw a freeway car drive a motherfucker right into an abutment by doing that. Sucker’s car blew up like a howitzer shell. Took four pricks off the welfare rolls permanent. And you gotta know when your engine’s gonna flame out. These hogs probably only top out at a hundred ten so you push it very long you’ll probably throw a bearing, drop a rod and blow the engine. That’s embarrassing in a good pursuit. Makes you feel stupid.

“In addition to knowing your car you gotta know all your equipment,” Roscoe continued, “like that peashooter you’re carrying. I wish I could talk you into buying a Magnum and carrying some good, gut ripping hollow points in it. I want a gun that’ll stop some scrote when I need him stopped. After the prick’s dead I’ll worry about the ammunition being department approved. I ever tell you about that abba dabba burglar my partner shot when I used to work the Watts car? Ripping off a gas station when he set off the silent alarm. We were carrying those peashooters like you got. That sucker could run the hundred in ten flat till my partner shot him, and then he ran it in nine-nine. So I made a vow to get rid a this worthless ammo and get me some killing stuff. I made a study of velocity and shock.”

And then they got their first bloody call of the night. “Seven-A-Eighty-five. A possible jumper, Wilshire and Mariposa,” said the communications operator. “Handle the call code three.”

Roscoe preferred working an extra car, called an “X-car,” because instead of saying “Seven-X-Eighty-five” or “Seven-X-ray-Eighty-five,” he could improvise by saying, “Seven-Exceptional-Eighty-five,” or “Seven-Exciting-Eighty-five.”

Roscoe was falling in love with the voice of the radio operator on frequency ten whom he had never seen. So Roscoe picked up the mike, pushed the button to send, made three kissing sounds and said, “This is Seven-Ay-ya-Eighty-five. I say Seven-a-for-Atomic-Eighty-five, rrrrrajah on the call.”

Then he released the button, turned to Whaddayamean Dean and said, “That’ll make her wet her pants.”

And the radio operator, who was a fat, fifty-nine year old housewife with six children older than Roscoe Rules, turned to the operator on her left and said, “That guy on Seven-A-Eighty-five sounds like an insufferable prick.”

• • •

A janitor named Homer Tilden had placed the jumper call when a twenty-two year old receptionist named Melissa Monroe returned to the office some three hours after the building closed and demanded to be let in on the pretext of having left an important document there.

“I never shoulda let her in, it’s my fault, all my fault,” the plump black janitor later sobbed to detectives.

Then the janitor pictured the pert smiling girl with the jazz age bob, who always yelled “Night, Mr. Tilden!” when she left at night, and he burst into tears like a child.

When Roscoe Rules and Dean Pratt arrived, red lights flashing and siren screaming, there was already a small group of morbid onlookers who had come across from the Ambassador Hotel. Homer Tilden led the two policemen to the elevator and up to the twenty-first floor where the young woman sat on the window ledge of her own office, feet dangling, looking down curiously at the crowd gathering. In the distance the wail of a fire department emergency vehicle trapped by Wilshire Boulevard night traffic three blocks west.

“Don’t come near me,” the girl said calmly her hair blowing wispily around her tiny ears as the two policemen ran from the elevator and burst into the office.

“Go downstairs,” Roscoe said to Homer Tilden who was holding his chest and panting as though he had run the twenty-one stories instead of taking the elevator.

“Maybe I…”

“Go downstairs!” Roscoe repeated. “There’s gonna be other people coming.”

And as the janitor obeyed, Roscoe Rules began to imagine a picture and write-up in tomorrow’s Los Angeles Times if he could save the beautiful jumper. She was a fox and would surely rate an inside front page photo, along with her savior.

“Look, miss,” Roscoe said and stepped forward. But the girl moved inches closer to her destiny, and Roscoe froze in his tracks.

“Maybe we better back off, partner,” Dean whispered, looking for the moment far younger than his twenty-five years, his freckles swimming in streams of sweat.

“We don’t back off nothing,” Roscoe whispered back. “She’s a dingaling, and there’s ways to handle them.” Then to the girl Roscoe said, “Nothing’s as bad as that. Come on in. Let’s jaw about it.”

He said it fliply with a grin and stepped forward, stopping when the girl moved forward another two inches and now teetered on the very edge, framed against the faded smoggy night sky of the Miracle Mile.

“Oh no!” Dean said. “No, miss! Don’t go any closer! Come on, partner, let’s go downstairs and give this lady a chance to think!”

But as Roscoe Rules saw a Times write-up and perhaps a police department medal of valor slipping through his fingers, he decided to try a different approach. He had seen Charles Laughton or someone do it successfully on an old TV movie. You could shame a jumper into surrendering.

“All right then, goddamnit!” Roscoe shouted to the girl. “You got your audience. It’s your life. If it ain’t worth a shit to you, it ain’t worth a shit to us. Go ahead, girl. We can’t stay here all night babying you. We got other things to do. Go ahead, girl! Jump!”

And she did. Without a word or a tear she looked at Roscoe Rules and Dean Pratt and in fact never took her large violet eyes off them as she let herself slip from the ledge and fell at thirty-two feet per second squared, legs first, with a scream that was lost in a woosh of air and rustling skirt which had blown up over her face.

What was left of Melissa Monroe was being covered by a sheet when Dean Pratt stumbled by on his way to the radio car.

“Let me make the reports, partner,” Roscoe Rules said, and for the very first time Dean heard Roscoe’s voice quiver with uncertainty.

Then Whaddayamean Dean looked at Melissa Monroe and said later it was as though God in Heaven was displeased with dessert and had hauled off and threw it at the Ambassador Hotel but missed and splattered the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard. Skull and body had exploded. Organs and brain littered the pavement. She was white and yellow and pink, covered with lumpy red sauce and syrup. Melissa Monroe had been turned into a raspberry sundae.

Dean Pratt was very quiet for the rest of this bloodiest of all nights of his life. He thought they were finished when at the station Roscoe Rules finished writing his 15.7 report: that indispensable police document which handily covers all those police situations which do not conveniently fit into a category such as robbery burglary or vehicle theft.

“Remember, partner,” Roscoe warned as they sat alone in the station coffee room, “as soon as the janitor left, she just jumped. Nothing was said by nobody. She just jumped!”

Dean Pratt nodded and sipped at a soft drink, longing for a water tumbler of straight bourbon as he had never longed for anything in his life. He hoped there might be some downers left in the bottom of his closet at home where his girlfriend left a small cache. He was terrified by barbiturates since drug use was an irrevocable firing offense. But he wanted to get loaded and sleep.

At 11:00 P.M. Roscoe Rules dragged his partner out of the coffee room and said, “Come on, partner, let’s go do some police work.”

“Huh?”

“Come on, goddamnit, let’s hit the bricks.” Roscoe grinned. “We ain’t through yet. We still got forty-five minutes.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Dean.

“Come on!” Roscoe commanded, his grin vanishing. He took Whaddayamean Dean very firmly by the arm and walked him out to the radio car.

“Don’t go cuntish on me!” Roscoe snarled when he drove away from the station. “As far as I’m concerned we handled that call just right. If that whacko bitch wanted to take gas, fuck it, it ain’t our fault.”

When Dean didn’t answer Roscoe became angrier. His hairless brows puckered and whitened. “Fuck it! Who cares if all these rotten motherfuckers take gas. They’re all shit sucking, miserable scrotes anyways. What the fuck’s a life anyway, less it’s yours?”

Still Dean did not answer and Roscoe unconsciously pulled at his crotch and raged on. “You bust a good felony and you tell him to throw up his hands. He don’t do it and there’s no witnesses, I say put him down. Understand? Shoot em down like birds that shit on your roof. Remember that nigger and spick The Night My Balls Blew Up? I’m gonna get them someday And I’ll worship the ground they’re laid under. You’d like to blow em down, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so,” Dean nodded.

“One nigger plus one spick equals a Mexi-coon!” Roscoe shouted. “That’s my hard charging partner! One a these nights we’ll get a couple a scrotes who wanna go the hard way. We’ll show some a these so called cops with their withered nuts how a couple a honest to God hard chargers do it! We’ll perform a little retroactive birth control and blow the motherfuckers right outta their shoes with my Magnum and your little peashooter!”

“I guess so, Roscoe,” Dean mumbled.

Roscoe was unconsciously pushing the radio car eighty miles an hour on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading nowhere, feeling the rush of cool wind, stroking himself while Whaddayamean Dean watched the speedometer.

And then they received the last radio call of the night.

“Seven-A-Eighty-five, Seven-Adam-Eight-five, assist the traffic unit, Venice and Hauser. Code two.”

“Seven-A-Eighty-five, roger,” Dean responded, banging the mike back in the holder, disgustedly jotting the location on the notebook pad.

“Shit fuck!” said Roscoe Rules, an expression he seldom used anymore since a former partner convinced him that it made him sound like a Central Avenue nigger.

“I’ve had enough for one night,” Dean grumbled. “I was ready for code seven.”

“Coulda used some chow myself,” said Roscoe. “Don’t the scrotes at communications have another car they can pick on? Shit fuck! Give her the handcuffs, partner.”

Dean Pratt, as Roscoe Rules had taught him, opened the bracelet of his handcuffs, holding it next to the hand mike, and squeezed the bracelet through five or six times, making a ratchet sound very like a large zipper being ripped open and closed. Roscoe was convinced that the sound would be magnified in the operator’s radio headset.

“Sounds like the jolly green giant opening his fly, don’t it, partner?”

Whaddayamean Dean nodded, suddenly a bit carsick. He hadn’t had a thing to eat for almost twenty-four hours. He had been in court all day and had come straight to work after testifying. And Roscoe Rules sitting there pulling on his dork wasn’t doing anything to settle his queasiness.

“I ever tell you about that slopehead we used to gang-bang in Nam, partner?” Roscoe asked, in a downright jovial mood since this would be their last call.

Even if it was a quickie he intended to make it an “end-of-watcher,” by “milking” the time out and failing to clear when they were finished.

“Don’t think you told me that one,” Dean sighed, by now deciding that he would rather have four fingers of bourbon than a hamburger.

“This little gook was about fourteen, but retarded. Had the brain of a chicken and nearsighted to boot. We got a translator to tell her that fucking was good for her eyes. She was ugly as a busted blister. Just a little better than jacking off. Best part wasn’t the pussy, it was cleaning her up ahead a time. We used to get these fifty cent rice paddy whores like her and throw them in this big wooden tub and eight or ten of us would get hot water and GI brushes and scrub the stink off them. Goddamn, that was fun! We’d lather them up and scrub every inch. Shit, we’d take our clothes off and fall in the water and drink beer and wash those bitches. Seems kinda weird but it was more fun washing them than gang fucking them.”

Dean nodded and leaned back while Roscoe drove west on Venice Boulevard and dreamed of thin young yellow bodies in soapy water. He had had many a lay but never had a more exciting sexual experience than scrubbing and lathering the rice paddy whores. Even now he got a blue veiner every time he held a bar of soap.

“Shit fuck!” Dean observed. “There it is!”

And there it was! Traffic was snarled six blocks in every direction. Fifty people were milling around like ghouls, and two frantic traffic officers in white hats were trying to lay down a flare pattern to divert east- and westbound traffic. Every east-bound lane was blocked by the wreckage of a spectacular four car collision.

Roscoe pulled on his red lights, crossed the center divider and parked the wrong way on Venice Boulevard.

“Glad you got here,” said a heavy middle aged traffic policeman who came running up with a handful of flares and spots of ash on his uniform. “Worst goddamn crash I seen in a long time. Drag race. Two cars laid down sixty feet of skids before they plowed into a northbound station wagon and knocked it clear back into the eastbound lanes.”

“What station wagon?” Dean asked, adjusting his hat, getting his flashlight ready as he and Roscoe jogged back toward the wreckage where several souvenir hunters were already starting to prowl.

“Get the hell out of here or you’re going to jail!” the traffic officer shouted to the unkempt teenagers.

“Everybody gone to the hospital?” Roscoe asked, waving his flashlight violently at a car which was trying to get past the wreckage to go south on Ridgely Drive.

“Two ambulances been here,” the traffic officer said. “You’re the only radio car to show up. The fucking fire department hasn’t even been here yet and there’s two dead bodies jammed inside that station wagon!”

“Will someone tell me where the hell the station wagon is?” Dean asked, holding a handful of flares, preparing to lay a pattern fifty feet south of the corner and divert the horn blowing cars through an east-west alley.

“That’s it! That’s the station wagon!” the traffic officer said, pointing to a small heap of mangled steel which had knocked down the light standard, plunging the intersection into darkness. “It was cut in half!”

“Blow it out your ass, pizza face!” Roscoe shouted to a sputtering acned man in a white Cadillac who was honking his horn and yelling as though he thought the policemen could magically sweep away ten tons of scrap metal and let him continue about his business which was to get to a west Hollywood bar before it closed and try to pick up a thirty-five dollar prostitute.

By now a dozen of the trapped cars were flashing their high beams in the policemen’s faces and blowing their horns while Roscoe violently waved them toward the alley where Dean Pratt was laying flares.

“Terrible wreck,” the traffic policeman muttered. “A woman in the station wagon was decapitated. She’s one of the ones still inside.”

“Yeah?” Roscoe said. He crossed the street, flashed his light at the heaps of debris in his path and stood beside the half of the station wagon, trying to make sense of the pile of mutilated flesh which had been a young couple. The tin cans and “Just Married” sign were still tied to the bumper.

And then Roscoe Rules was reminded of one of the two hilarious photographs he carried in his wallet from his Vietnam days.

“Oh yeah!” said Roscoe Rules excitedly. “Move the flares, partner!” he shouted to Dean, who was angrily waving his flashlight at the string of cars to get them moving through the alley, as at last the fire engines’ sirens could be heard.

“What for?”

“I want them to pass by the wreck here across the gas station parking lot.”

“What for?”

“I think it’ll be easier to divert them down the alley.”

“Okay” Dean shrugged, moving the line of flares, and then Roscoe Rules stood quietly on the far side of the station wagon, hoping the fire trucks or another ambulance wouldn’t get there too quickly and spoil things.

The first car to pass Roscoe was not suitable. The driver was well dressed, prosperous, just the kind of prick who’d call in and make a complaint, Roscoe thought. Neither was the second car. The traffic was crawling by, most of the drivers gawking hungrily for a glimpse of blood.

The twelfth car in the line was perfect. It was a late model Dodge containing a man and two women. The bulging luggage rack, travel stickers and Ohio license said they were tourists passing through and not likely to take time to stop and complain about a policeman, no matter the outrage.

When the station wagon crawled by, Roscoe, still standing half hidden beside the wreckage, smiled encouragingly at the pudgy woman on the passenger side. Her window was down and she said, “Quite a wreck, eh, officer?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Roscoe answered, and he knew this was the one.”

“Over here, partner!” he called to Whaddayamean Dean, since every legend needs a Boswell.

The woman shook her head sadly and clucked. As her husband was revving the engine and the creeping traffic was starting, she said to Roscoe, “Anyone hurt bad?”

Then Roscoe Rules came from behind the wreckage and stepped to her window, lifting the dripping, severed head of the young bride, and said, “Yeah, this one got banged up a bit.”

The woman from Ohio drowned out the fire engines’ sirens with her screams as her husband drove into the flow of traffic.

Dean Pratt told the story to at least thirty policemen before going home that night. Roscoe Rules had achieved a place in police folklore, and was a Legend in His Own Time.