A Police Cadet in 1970s D.C.
By Michael Brian O’Keefe
ROLL CALL
I suspected the booze-breathed cop at the Metropolitan Police Department’s property division warehouse intentionally gave me the wrong size uniform as part of a hazing ritual—not that I had any choice but to accept. About a week later, suited up in my ill-fitting blues, I stood before the bathroom mirror trying without success to get comfortable with the unrecognizable image staring back at me, my once-shoulder-length hair now cut to regulation specs. It was late August 1974, and I was a 19-year-old newly sworn-in D.C. Police cadet, hoping to survive until age 21 so that I could grow up to be the real thing.
Me, a police cadet? I felt the need to explain and apologize to my friends. They reminded me what I already knew: I had a juvenile felony arrest record, I had been a runaway, and, most relevant, I had never expressed much tolerance for cops or any desire to be one.
I had hoped that my friends might add that I was too cool, too laid-back, and too smart to be a cop, but when I announced my plans they just kept waiting for me to deliver the punch line. I couldn’t blame them; I was nearly as shocked as they were. I tried to say it had something to do with the movie Serpico, which I had seen a few months earlier and which sold me on the unicorn notion of the Good Cop. But the truth was, after dropping out of college and working a meaningless warehouse job for almost a year, I just wanted to help people.
Still, I found it extremely difficult to walk into my first duty station, the Second District Headquarters, near Massachusetts and Wisconsin avenues. My legs were shaking inside my baggy pants after I coaxed myself off my motorcycle and walked through the station’s rear door, the one reserved for authorized personnel. If the sergeant manning the station desk inside hadn’t been friendly, I’m certain I would have fled. I was still trying to summon courage when I opened the door to the roll call room and found 20 cadets and officers inside, seated in half-desk chairs facing my way.
One of the cadets sprang up to greet me. He was about my height but so thin it was almost painful to see. He wore his hat low over his forehead, chewed a toothpick, and sported mirrored aviator shades, clearly working hard to look macho—and failing. I introduced myself as the new recruit, to which he retorted, “No shit, Sherlock!” I suppose he meant to come across as some kind of tough guy. I couldn’t help but laugh, though, and that seemed to be the icebreaker for the others who came over, introduced themselves, and told me not to mind that guy—he was so neurotic about his size that he was always trying to make up for it with his mouth.
I quickly sized them up. A third were officers closing in on retirement. They joined the squad for the cake hours, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, with no expectation of making arrests. The rest were cadets like me, hired at 18 or 19 with the promise of promotion to the academy at 21. Most never made it. Starting pay was $6,408 a year.
Sgt. Daniel Zaludek walked in two minutes after my arrival, and everyone immediately took a seat and shut up. I knew the basics from the personnel office: that Sgt. Z was a no-nonsense guy and a Korean War hero who already had enough years on the job to retire. Something told me I should approach him and introduce myself right away, but I hesitated, too nervous to speak. He scanned the now-silent room until his glare froze on me.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
I swallowed hard, then stumbled through a combined answer and apology.
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Don’t ever fucking apologize on this job,” he said.
CONNECTICUT and K
At roll call four days later, after I’d spent the previous three shadowing another cadet, Sgt. Z assigned me to a solo foot beat and an intersection, Connecticut and K, where I would direct rush hour traffic in the afternoons. He said he’d meet me there at 4 p.m. so he could teach me the basics. The aviator shades cadet told me it was the worst possible assignment, that there was no way I’d be able to handle it on my own, and that Sgt. Z must hate me. I didn’t know what to think.
I stopped by Sgt. Z’s desk before heading for the bus stop to catch the L3 to my newly assigned beat and listened while he listed his rules.
Show up for work.
Don’t call in sick.
Be on time.
Work hard.
Care about the people on your beat like they’re your best friends, because they will be.
Protect the underdog, the weak, the innocent, and the helpless.
Write your parking tickets every day, walk your beat all shift, control your temper, and don’t let your rush-hour intersection clog.
I raced through the the morning and early afternoon of that first solo day, making sure I issued double the unofficial quota of parking tickets and signed double the unofficial quota of bank logbooks on my beat—skipping lunch to make that happen, also because I was unnerved that every person I walked past that day seemed to be staring at me, making me too nervous and self-conscious to eat.
Z arrived at Connecticut and K at precisely 4 p.m. and I made sure I was already in the middle of the street directing traffic when he got there. I had been tempted to wait as he’d ordered but decided a few minutes before 4 that the best training was doing. I also suspected that it was a kind of test, and Z wanted me to be in the intersection when he arrived.
I learned quickly: How to blow on the metal whistle that I gritted between my teeth and do it loud enough to be heard over the roar of constant traffic. How to dodge the side-view mirrors of passing trucks and buses. How to stop jaywalkers in their tracks. How to let just the right number of cars advance in the 12 lanes under my control without blocking the box. How to make my intentions calmly yet emphatically known. How to ignore heat of summer, cold of winter, snow, sleet, thunder, lightning, and, hardest of all, crazy cab drivers who may not have been born on this planet.
At some point that first day, panic receded, and I found an odd sense of purpose and enjoyment in the focus required to direct traffic. Sgt. Z, after observing me for an hour, nodded once, as if in approval, and then mounted his Vespa and drove away.
THE SEVENTIES
The economy was in recession. Crime, inflation, interest rates, and gas prices were high. The political divide was enormous, with an unpopular war still going on, even after most American troops were brought home. A controversial president had resigned, replaced by a good and likable man whose competence was under attack. All these helped create an edginess in the public square. A lot of angry people were acting out.
Cadets took plenty of risks in those days walking solo foot beats that put us in harm’s way. We were unarmed, yet our uniforms looked like the ones officers wore—except they had revolvers, mace, radios, and handcuffs, while we had only parking ticket books, silver-plated whistles, and brass call box keys. Our look-alike uniforms could just as easily cook our behinds as save them.
A cadet I worked with was run down by a cab while directing traffic. He suffered a compound femur fracture and never returned to work. The first female D.C. police officer killed in the line of duty in the United States was executed by a fleeing would-be bank robber who put a bullet into her after stepping from behind a concrete pillar in an underground parking garage. It happened on my beat while I was a block away. We had no radios, so we couldn’t call for help or even monitor in-progress incidents. We had to be careful not to walk, unaware, into danger.
Our only means of calling for help involved hoofing it, usually two or three blocks, to one of the randomly located blue badge-shaped D.C. Police call boxes and hoping that the station clerk who was supposed to be monitoring it was not taking a break. During my 20 months walking my beat, I twice had to drag angry and violent men all the way to a call box, fighting them the entire distance, after they assaulted me for issuing parking tickets on their unoccupied cars. Both times the station clerk sent a scout car my way while I honored the cop code that no one puts their hands on you with impunity.
Cadets made mandatory bank checks under the theory that our uniformed presence might dissuade holdups in an era when bank robberies were epidemic. We witnessed plenty of street crimes—purse snatches, assaults, robberies, larcenies and fights—and, though we had no arrest powers and no weapons beyond brain and brawn, we were still expected to act.
NIGHTMARE on K STREET
The intersection at Connecticut and K, where I directed traffic every weekday afternoon from 4 to 6 and sometimes during noon traffic surges, stood a good hundred feet above the gestating Farragut Square Metro station. The lower deck of the steel grid that lay under my feet supported the brand-spanking-new concrete ceiling of the underground station below. If they ever finished building the delay-plagued subway system, the upper deck of that same support grid would bear the weight of a beautiful asphalt street with actual lane markings. But during my time there, the intersection was a lane-impaired no-man’s land spanned by slippery-when-wet creosote-treated wood timbers fitted loosely onto that steel grid. Relying on those huge timbers to support me—plus all the cars, trucks, buses, cabs, and pedestrians that crossed over them—was an act of great faith, especially given what I already had figured out about the competence level of D.C. Department of Transportation inspectors.
I basically took up surfing one of those seesawing timbers while directing traffic because one end of it was located bull’s-eye right on top of the sweet spot in the middle of the intersection. Buses and trucks regularly crossed the opposite end of the timber, levering up my end about 4 inches. This disturbed me at first, but I made peace with it and learned to enjoy the effect. I also liked seeing what my life would have been like at 6 feet, 7 inches.
Farragut Park, on the south side of K Street, made my intersection a poster child for flawed urban design. The park’s K Street sidewalk, curb, and gutter jutted out to the edge of the two eastbound K Street main travel lanes. Everywhere else along the busy K Street corridor there were bus corridors, separated from the main travel lanes by a curb and gutter apron. But at my intersection, all the eastbound buses that should have just cruised nicely along in those bus lanes—and there were several hundred each rush hour—were forced to merge into the main travel lanes.
Directing traffic there involved controlling the four main travel lanes of K Street, the four bus lanes that narrowed on one side to zero at the park, and the four lanes of Connecticut Avenue that entered my intersection diagonally. Throngs of pedestrians surged across the four crosswalks at lunchtime and during the afternoon rush hour, complicating matters even more. It was insane, and exhausting, trying to control it all.
Also insane were people who targeted my intersection to proselytize the end of the world, or advocate for the escalation or the end of the war in Vietnam. And that wasn’t all. Very serious men in bow ties from the Nation of Islam came most Thursdays to hand out pamphlets and glare, while on Fridays four uniformed Nazis with black swastikas on their red-banded biceps shouted full-throated N-word and K-word slurs. The Nazis ranted with such saliva-spraying gusto that my head and my heart ached, mostly because they often directed their malice at a 10-year-young Black kid, James, who sold the Evening Star at the intersection every afternoon. I helped James with his homework whenever I could and bought up his unsold papers at the end of the day. He soon became about my favorite person in the world, even though he insisted on calling me Elvis.
The same four Nazis always worked my intersection, one on each corner, and over time I got to know one of them them a little. He was a young blond kid about my age who worked the same corner as James. I didn’t even want to know his name, but I did want to understand the source of his hatred. So I spoke with him for a few minutes most Fridays. His father manned one of the other corners and was the leader and a real zealot. It became clear over time that the son, who James and I called the Little Blond Nazi, wasn’t a true believer, and I came to view him as a victim of an abusive father. I couldn’t quite forgive him for the racist and antisemitic epithets he screamed, but I felt sorry for him.
About eight months of Fridays into my cadet tenure, I was directing rush hour traffic as usual when screams and people pointing sent me racing from my intersection perch to the still-open subway station airshaft under construction on the sidewalk in front of the Casual Corner store halfway up the odd side of Connecticut toward L Street. I pushed my way through the crowd, crawled under the barricades surrounding the air shaft, and knelt beside a raging middle-aged man with the fading tattoo on his forearm of a Holocaust survivor. His two fists were filled with brown uniform shirt, and he was holding Little Blond Nazi over the edge, threatening to throw the kid down onto the subway station floor a hundred feet below.
The Little Nazi had pissed his pants and was missing one jackboot and his hat. Just moments earlier, he had been hurling expletives on the corner about Black people and Jews, just like he did every other Friday afternoon; except this time the man kneeling beside me and dangling the kid over the side of the shaft—a man who had probably walked through the intersection and ignored the antisemitic ranting countless times in the past—had finally snapped.
I don’t remember what I said to him, just that I started talking as calmly as I could, pleading with him over and over not to drop the kid. The Little Nazi wailed nonstop, emphatically nodding to everything I was saying, his eyes bulging out of his face like Marty Feldman’s in Young Frankenstein. Finally, the Holocaust survivor took a deep breath, pulled the kid back from the edge, and deposited him on the sidewalk. Then he left without a word while the Little Blond Nazi hugged me and sobbed his tearful thanks.
The kid’s Nazi dad arrived minutes later, and immediately started hectoring me to arrest the man, who he referred to with the ugliest of antisemitic slurs. It was all I could do not to toss him down that airshaft, but instead I happily informed him that I had no arrest powers. Zero, nada, zip. I might have added “asshole” for effect.
The Little Blond Nazi quietly thanked me for that throw-away comment, and I felt a very strange kinship with him afterward, as the sons of angry fathers. I never saw him or the other Nazis after that day at the intersection of Connecticut and K or anywhere else, and I never missed them.
I did see the never-elected president of the United States once, though. Gerald Ford’s clumsiness made for good parody on Saturday Night Live but, unlike the trickster whose resignation had handed him his job, Ford had a keen sense of humor. I learned this one day when he leaned over to peer out from the driver-side window of the D.C. Police cruiser in which he was riding shotgun and told me to “keep up the good work.” I’d just allowed a bus or two too many to enter the traffic box ahead of his limousine motorcade. His speech at the Mayflower Hotel, a block and a half away, would have to wait.
I’d always figured the Secret Service and the Special Operations Division of MPDC that assisted with presidential motorcades were clever, but I never suspected that they’d have Gerry Ford hiding in a cop car instead of the presidential limo.
FOOT PURSUIT
I went to work each shift not knowing what might happen. One minute I could be directing traffic at Connecticut and K and trying to take in everything around me—the hundreds of people on the sidewalks, rushing to and from lunch or to catch a bus; the sunbathers and Frisbee tossers in Farragut Park who battled for space with hung over bums; the guy I called Ice Cream Eddie, who paid his UMD tuition by ringing up summer sales from his Good Humor truck every June, July and August day; and Mr. Tony, the 80-year-old security guard at 1000 Connecticut who let me stash my raincoat behind his lobby desk, hopping off the M2 bus right on time and ready to start his shift. A minute later, though, I might abandon my traffic post to chase a purse snatcher.
That’s what happened the day I spotted a heavyset police officer named Killjoy doing the armless cop waddle down the sidewalk—in not-so-hot pursuit of an agile young man with a fuchsia purse that clearly didn’t match his outfit tucked like a football under his arm. I was in the middle of the intersection at the time, at the apex of my surfing pendulum, when I saw them. I couldn’t help laughing at the sight of Killjoy holding onto his holstered gun with one hand and his still-belt-looped nightstick with the other, trying but failing to turn what looked like a walrus waltz into a half respectable cop-trot.
At the next apex a few seconds later, I saw that the bad guy was staying his course along the K Street sidewalk instead of veering up Connecticut, so I took off after him, applying what I’d learned in Mr. Umbeck’s geometry class at Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria as I angled sharply west to cut him off.
I enjoyed the chase at first. The purse snatcher and I raced up K toward 18th, cut through the alley between K and L, and then both of us butt-slid across the same car hood as we crossed a line of vehicle stopped on L Street at the Connecticut Avenue traffic light. In the end, when I tackled the guy, we were both so winded that we just lay there for a few minutes in a weird embrace.
Until I looked up and saw the sketchy guy pointing his big gun at me.
“Hands up, asshole!” he yelled, and I complied in world-record time—palms open, arms high over my head.
He studied my face, clown-smiled, and said what at that moment sounded like the sweetest words ever: “Not you. The other asshole.”
His monster gun morphed into a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Police Special, a reminder of what I should have already known—that the sketchiest-looking guys are almost always cops.
That night I promised myself two things as I rode home through a heavy thunderstorm on my Kawasaki 360 Enduro motorcycle. First, I was going to buy my friend’s dead grandmother’s 1968 Falcon that had 21K granny miles on its odometer so I wouldn’t have to keep riding in the rain. Second, I was going to get into shape. I never again wanted to feel as vulnerable as I did when I tackled that purse snatcher. So, I ate a quick dinner, ran a couple of miles around my apartment complex in my Chuck Taylors, and vomited.
COPS AND ROBBERS
Some lessons teach you about what you’re willing to do, and some teach you about what you’re not willing to do. Others just confirm to you what you already know, like how badly you truly want to live. And, if you’re lucky, during this revelatory process you find out that you believe in goodness and that you care about others, despite all the reasons to the contrary. And what a gift that is, because it helps you to love and value yourself, even and especially when sometimes it seems that no one else does.
I didn’t have a close family; quite the opposite, which was what drove me from my childhood home, fueled my distaste for attending college, and brought me to the corner of Connecticut and K. That was where I found my own way to help people, as the shepherd in me awakened under Z’s guidance, and I began stitching together discarded people into some sort of quasi-family that, without design or warning, soon became especially dear to that tender and callow me.
Shoes, Crash, and Pierre were homeless guys who lived on my foot beat. They slept in alleys, in doorways, and on heating exhaust vents. They’d been locked away in the local looney bin, St. Elizabeth’s, until a class action lawsuit de-institutionalized them and hundreds of others, discarding all of them ill-prepared onto the streets of Washington, D.C., and into the lives of people like me. Most people pretended they didn’t exist, but I figured they were my responsibility now so I should get to know them.
Shoes never wore any. He was the hairiest person I’d ever seen, right down to his toes. Maybe that helped him in winter. He was also a Vietnam veteran who never made it all the way home from the war. Getting high was his thing, and petty theft was his game. He seldom made much sense when he spoke, but I chatted with him most days to confirm that he was a threat only to himself and to let him know he was not the Invisible Man.
Pierre sold fruit and flowers at my corner. He sported a French-style beret but was not French; in fact, his name wasn’t Pierre, but he had already discarded his past life and name, so he readily accepted it when I gave him the nickname. He was quite the gentleman unless he was tanked. Periodically checking out on reality was his coping skill of last resort, when all else failed to blot out the memory of his toddler daughter’s lifeless face still underwater when she drowned on his watch while he was distracted by the radio airplay from another room of an early Muhammad Ali fight. Pierre was living proof that time does not heal all wounds. Yet he was gentle and kind, despite sleeping most cold nights in his employer’s unheated warehouse beneath carpet remnants.
Crash always wore an off-white motorcycle helmet because he was epileptic. When he fell, he fell hard; and he fell often. His family had abandoned him as an infant because that was what some folks did back then with an “imperfect” baby. He looked so much like Frankenstein that those who didn’t fear the mere sight of him openly made fun of him. He rarely uttered a word and hid in various places around my beat. Only Shoes seemed to know how to consistently find him, and find him he did at least twice a day when they shared a free meal at Sholl’s Cafeteria on the even side of the 1000 block of Connecticut Avenue. I think Evan Sholl, the owner, must have been an actual saint because he fed everyone who walked in his door, whether they could pay or not. Many could not.
I wasn’t exactly shocked when Shoes and Crash tried to rob the bank on my corner at Connecticut and K using a one-shot wooden zip gun that Shoes probably had found discarded in an alley trash dumpster where he scrounged for discarded food. The gun accidentally discharged and its nail projectile dinged Inga, the bank’s receptionist, as she locked the lobby doors at Shoes’ demand. I had just left the bank when it happened and turned to the sound of her sharp scream that somehow carried though the plate glass window to where I stood 25 feet away, helping James with his math homework.
Inga was sort of my friend, and I had an innocent crush on her. She was 10 years older than me, beautifully blond and Swedish. She’d met her husband when he walked into her family restaurant while he was on leave from his U.S. Army post in Germany. He was a homicide detective now, and a very nice guy. He didn’t mind that I chatted up Inga for a few minutes most days when I did my obligatory bank check. He knew that even an unarmed police cadet might be a deterrent against bank robbers in D.C. back then.
Unfortunately, Shoes and Crash weren’t keen on the nuances of these concepts. They’d actually said hi to me as I held the bank lobby door for them moments earlier as they headed in and I headed out. So I truly believed they meant no harm that day and were innocents in their own way. But innocents get killed all the time in big cities, and I knew they would probably end up dead if I didn’t resolve this crisis before the scout cars and scooter men rolled in.
Shoes unlocked the door after I yelled at him from outside. He stuttered incoherently yet apologetically, saying he just wanted 10 bucks so they could eat at the new Burger King on K Street instead of Sholl’s. He also said he didn’t think the zip gun could fire. When he handed it to me, it looked more like a failed arts and craft project than a gun. I told him to take Crash to Pierre’s fruit and flower stand and wait for me there.
Inga looked up at me with worry in her eyes. Her head was flat on her desktop, cheek down in a small but growing pool of blood. Both of her hands were pressing against the side of her throat, applying as much pressure as she could to what looked like an arterial wound.
I carried her out of the bank, assuring her that she would be OK, and that my fellow cadet Freeman, trained as a paramedic, happened to be sitting across the street at Best of the Wurst right then, chatting up the owner’s daughter Mandy. Freeman didn’t hesitate when I walked through the door and laid Inga on the counter between him and Mandy. He grabbed metal tongs from the dish drying rack below the counter and fashioned a makeshift arterial clamp that stopped the bleeding right away.
Inga had already recovered from her shock by the time the ambulance crew arrived and spirited her away to the hospital. Freeman, ever the smartass, held his index finger and thumb a quarter inch apart after she was gone and complained that he had been “this close” to getting a date with Mandy. He said I owed him big time, plus there was the matter of damages for dry cleaning his bloody shirt and his ruined kosher bratwurst special, not to mention his supposed pain and suffering—the usual cop banter in the aftermath of traumatic events.
It was barely noon and already I was feeling like I was in over my head in my job, something that wasn’t entirely new. There was a steep curve for suburban kids like me, and I wasn’t always sure my coping skills were up to the task. So I fled to the Christian Science Reading Room a half-block up Connecticut, where I sat in silence for awhile to ease my anxiety. There was no one else there. In fact, I’d never seen anyone go in or out of that small reading room. I would retreat there often during my cadet days, taking time out in those quiet moments to remind myself that all I could do was just walk my foot beat and try not to think about what had just happened.
The day-work section sergeant grilled me about the bank incident, of course. He wanted to classify it as a bank robbery and arrest Shoes and Crash because technically I suppose that’s what it was, but mostly so that his squad could pad its stats. I stood firm that it had been an accident, though, and that I had been a witness. Inga also insisted that no charges be filed. She knew Shoes and Crash, too, and didn’t want to see them behind bars.
The two friends went to the station lockup first and were later taken back to St. E’s on a 90-day psych hold. Otherwise, they’d have been sent to the Central Cellblock and then to D.C. Jail, where they would have been easy prey. I never saw them again, but hoped I’d done right by them and that they would fare better in St. E’s than on the street.
Inga would return to work three weeks later, and I would be back in the chair next to her desk for a few fleeting minutes most afternoons after that just before my 4 o’clock traffic duties started. James would be selling his papers, and his melodic sales pitch—“Star, sir? Star, ma’am?”—would once again rise like a hymn at the intersection of Connecticut and K, a soothing relief to me in a busy world that otherwise offered me just an awful din. Pierre would still be hawking fruit at his stand, trying to push sorry looking carry-home flowers on guilt-ridden office drones who perhaps had had one too many at lunch or had spent some low-quality time at one of the nearby strip joints along 14th Street. On Fridays, the Nazis or their successors would scream racial and ethnic epithets at the top of their lungs not 20 feet from James, and I’d be balling up my fists and reminding myself that free speech could be ugly yet was still protected under the law.
WHITE TOWER
Sgt. Z seemed genuinely bothered on Black Friday 1975 when he told me I was being reassigned the following Monday to MPDC Headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. to spend four weeks working the annual Christmas detail. I was touched and a little surprised when Z tipped his feelings about me, because he was a tough-love guy. But I knew what he meant to me. He was the father figure who had guided me from boyhood to manhood. I didn’t fully appreciate it then, but he was the best motivator and smartest boss I’d ever have, much more effective with his high school diploma and his combat and cop experience than the Ivy League-educated bosses I would work under later in my law enforcement and legal careers.
The Christmas detail intersection where I was assigned—13th and H, NW, a quarter-block away in two directions from New York Avenue—was near the Town Theatre, a movie house that occupied the triangle formed by the intersection of the three roads. Scream Blacula Scream played throughout my four-week assignment and was a source of entertainment for me too, even though I never actually watched the film. The entrance to the theatre was on 13th Street, but the lines were long, and they wound past my traffic-directing sweet spot and along the theatre’s H Street brick façade. High on that façade, a gigantic billboard displayed in un-living-color a still shot from the movie where the title character with fangs bared was lusting after either Pam Grier’s left carotid artery or her breasts, all of which were bared.
The patrons waiting in line were in the Christmas spirit and perhaps under the influence of distilled spirits too. In any case, they seemed happy, and readily engaged me in conversation. I had numerous raucous exchanges about subjects ranging from my supposed resemblance to Elvis and lack of rhythm while directing traffic to how much we all lusted after Ms. Grier’s, uh, landscape. Humor helped me redirect my focus from how cold my feet and ears were, and it also made me feel like I was a part of the community.
My assignment was in an economically depressed area, with empty and burned-out buildings, a common hangover in parts of D.C. from the 1968 riots spurred by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It was an almost all-Black neighborhood, with a mix of small businesses and apartments that catered to Black residents, though most days I only saw white faces in the cars that drove through my intersection. There were no banks, no paper boys, no fruit vendors, and no Nazis, but there was a warm sense of community there, similar to what I’d felt and experienced back on Connecticut and K.
The Christmas detail had two purposes. The official one was to promote downtown Christmas shopping at stores like Hecht’s and Woodie’s, whose six-story buildings and plate glass storefront windows filled with mechanized Christmas scenes were struggling to attract shoppers. More convenient suburban malls and the upswing in inner-city crime were making it difficult for the downtown stores to compete. The theory was, if you put a cop on every corner and/or a cadet in every intersection, people would come, and they would shop.
My intersection was an outlier. There were no department stores nearby, and it wasn’t a key traffic intersection. I realized after a few days that my real purpose there was to keep the drug and prostitution trade around the nearby Greyhound Bus terminal from bleeding into the department store shopping district. My uniform presence, knitted together with a string of cadets and officers posted on other nearby corners, was a warning to the various predators who were attracted to shoppers with money to spend.
I suspected there was a third reason for the detail as well, which was to weed out cadets. We were expected to be visible at our intersections all times. There were no lunch or bathroom breaks. There was essentially no backup help if problems arose, which they always did. Sergeants drove by several times a day to check on us. If we weren’t visible, they’d wait five minutes, not six. Either you reappeared from whatever you were secretly doing—eating, peeing, or just getting warm—or you got written up. Three write-ups and you were fired.
1975-76 was one of Washington’s coldest winters ever. Wool socks and long underwear were the only acceptable additions to the standard winter uniform that consisted of a long-sleeved shirt, cardigan sweater, and reefer jacket. Earmuffs were outlawed. I stuffed white socks under my required orange rubber traffic directing mitts, but nothing worked against the unrelenting world of concrete, shadows, wind, and frigid air.
The first thing I did on the day that I landed at my intersection was walk into the White Tower restaurant that fronted the southeast corner and ask the manager if I could store my extra gear there. She was a matronly Black woman who came across as stern, businesslike, and unblinking when she replied no. Her answer caught me by surprise. About 20 people sat atop stools that ringed the grill area, and in the two-tops along the front glass-plate window. All were Black and all had ears on the conversation.
I explained my dilemma—that I was going to be around all day every day for four weeks, and that there was no other business close enough to my intersection. She kept refusing until finally an old guy said, “C’mon Mabel, give Elvis a break.” Laughter erupted and the tense moment faded as she led me to a janitor’s closet where I deposited my raincoat, socks, extra shirts, gloves, and foodstuffs that I hoped would get me through the frozen day. I thanked Mabel, and she barely grunted some sort of acknowledgement as I headed back outside.
My routine never varied. I checked in with Mabel at the White Tower on arrival each day, periodically popping in to warm up or use the bathroom for three-minute breaks that were never enough time to thaw my fingers, toes, and ears. Once a day, I’d order soup and a grilled cheese. She’d put the soup in a cup and wrap the sandwich in wax paper. I’d come back to pick them up and then eat them while standing on the corner, keeping a wary eye out for the sergeant’s car because eating on assignment was also against the rules. Most of the time, I was in the middle of the intersection, waving my arms to stay warm and limber, and fighting lower back spasms that crept up each day from standing for hours on end in one spot.
Mabel never warmed to me, but her regulars and I got along well. They got a kick out of calling me Elvis, and I laughed along with them. They’d watch me direct traffic from their warm stools, and wave to me coming and going, while I found myself most of the time facing the White Tower and checking out the activity inside the big window. I even caught Mabel watching me a few times. When I did, I’d give her a wave, which she’d dismiss with a wave of her own.
A week into the detail, Mabel stopped charging me for my daily soup and sandwich. I always left her a hefty tip, even though she told me it was just store policy, and “certainly not my idea.” After awhile, whenever I went in to drop off my stuff, she’d find some issue to discuss with me, and I was flabbergasted one day when she asked me if I knew a “little monster named James,” her neighbor’s boy who sold newspapers down at Connecticut and K. She told me that James was a good boy, but his mother was a junkie, and she feared for his future. She thanked me for being kind to James. She said white police weren’t usually nice to Black boys.
On Christmas Eve, as darkness fell and I headed out for my final two hours directing traffic on my last day there, I stopped in to thank Mabel and the gang. They collectively said they thought I was all right, which gave me a warm feeling that I carried with me back out into the cold. I figured I’d likely never see any of them again, and, crazy as it was, I realized I was already going to miss them and the detail. But God knows I was ready for my first day off in almost five weeks.
Christmas Eve traffic was heavy, so I wasn’t letting drivers make left turns due to the backups that would cause. Most knew to make three rights instead, and took the news in stride, but one guy didn’t. He showed me a badge identifying him as a guard at Lorton, D.C.’s prison across the Potomac over in Virginia. I kept standing where I was, blocking the turn, and told him I was sorry but I just couldn’t allow it. He cursed at me, calling me a “motherfucking cracker,” then floored the gas pedal and rammed into me. I went up and over his hood and landed hard on the asphalt, stunned.
He advanced all of two car lengths before the facing traffic forced him to stop, and when he glanced back and saw me looking up at him, he rolled down his window and started cursing at me again. Only one thing came to my mind in that moment—the N-word—and I shouted it back at him as loud as I could.
It was a word I heard often at work, uttered by white and Black cops alike, but it was the first time I’d ever used it. There was so much traffic noise that not even my intended target heard, but I knew what I’d said, and I was ashamed of myself—glad at least that James, and Mabel and the gang at White Tower, hadn’t been there to hear it. I couldn’t help wondering what it said about me, though. What did it mean that when threatened I had reverted to some sort of tribal instinct that I thought I had long ago rejected?
I didn’t have any answers in the moment. And then I fell into darkness.
I don’t know how long I lay there between traffic lanes with cars passing by, awake but only semi-conscious. At some point, one of the White Tower regulars, George Murray, saw what had happened and rushed over, carrying me by himself to the sidewalk. An ambulance arrived, and so did one of the Christmas detail sergeants, who was ticked at me because he had other plans that Christmas Eve and I’d managed to ruin them for him.
They took me to D.C. General Hospital, which department lore held was the last place anyone should ever take a cop. But I spent the evening in the ER, and it seemed like any other ER. Mabel showed up with James in tow, and so did Z. Mabel shared cookies and hot chocolate. Z brought single malt scotch and insisted that everyone but James raise a shot glass in a toast for peace. I was able to forget about shouting the N-word—for a little while. Z drove me home after I was discharged, and I told him about it on the way. He thought it over, then said that what mattered wasn’t what I’d done, but what I did next, and what I would do going forward.
He also told me, “Welcome to the human race,” and said he didn’t want to see me again until after New Year’s.
OVER AND OUT
I woke up late Christmas Day in fog, but looking forward to the week off and excited about returning to Connecticut and K to finish out my cadet tenure. I knew Z was right about focusing on being a better person going forward, but I kept reliving that Christmas Eve encounter. No matter how much I wanted to erase it, I couldn’t. It did happen, I did say it, and it sure felt like I meant it at the time.
All I knew to do was trust that everything would be okay once I was back on my beat. What I couldn’t know, sitting at home recovering on Christmas Day, was that in mid-January I would find Pierre dead and frozen solid in the alley behind Sholl’s, and that James’ mom would die from an overdose a month after that.
James asked me—actually he begged me while crying the biggest tears I’d ever seen—to adopt him. I wrestled with that decision across several days and sleepless nights, but I couldn’t find the courage to try to be someone’s father when I had no confidence in or experience with being anything more than someone’s fair-weather friend. James hadn’t heard me say the N-word, but when I told him I couldn’t take him in to live with me, it felt the same as if he did.
A week before I headed to the academy, in mid-April 1976, Z invited me to meet him for lunch. I found him waiting for me with his back to the rear wall, cop-style, in the Mama and Poppa Italian Restaurant on his old foot beat near the National Zoo. Mama and Poppa themselves served us, and I saw right away that he was still the shepherd and the people in this area were still his flock.
He told me he was proud of the man I had become—not the cop, the man. I wasn’t used to personal compliments. I’d grown up under a heavy-fisted father and a cold mother. And I didn’t feel like much of a man. He urged me to go back to college, and if I couldn’t leave police work, to at least leave MPDC behind. He knew about James and Pierre, and he told me that I had helped them in their lives, but that I wasn’t responsible for their fates. He said that James and Pierre were perfect examples of why police work was soul-crushing, and that I should try to find my real purpose in life, and that I should start by going back to school.
I thanked him for his advice, but I didn’t listen, hell-bent as I still was on being a D.C. cop. I graduated from the academy, started working in one of the high crime districts, and pretended that I was happy—racing from call to call and locking up bad guys. Young cops thrive on that adrenalin stuff, and I was no exception. But morale was low, we were poorly equipped, and there was too much dead wood among the ranks. I soon came to realize that I couldn’t count on half the cops on my own squad, a dangerous and depressing truth.
I lasted two years, then left to join the Fairfax County Police Department. I also started taking college courses. Z and his wife, a nurse, both retired and opened an antique store in Montgomery County. He died 20 years later, not long after returning to his hometown in western Pennsylvania, where he’d once worked in the coal mines before joining the Marines to fight in Korea. He had no children to mourn him, but I did and still do.
James disappeared into the system, though I have no idea if he did in fact disappear, or whether it was just his paperwork. Either way, I was never able to find him again. I still remember him in my prayers, and once in a while if I meet a Black man named James of a certain age, I’ll look deep into his eyes, hopeful for some hint of recognition. I sure wouldn’t mind being called Elvis again, and finding out that despite everything he turned out OK.
***
Michael O’Keefe was raised in Alexandria, Virginia, where he specialized in unintentionally driving his parents bonkers with reptiles and amphibians he carried home from his daily haunts of creeks and ponds. As a college dropout, he did time as a D.C. and Fairfax County cop before injuries led him back to college, on to law school, and into private practice and public service as a lawyer. Happily married for 38 years, he has three grown children and three grands. Most hiking seasons will find him wearing his backpack and on the go somewhere in Ireland or along the Colorado Trail.
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