My Dark Places - James Ellroy [75]
They started fighting. Ann wanted all of his time. He wanted all of her time precisely synced to his schedule. The L.A. County Sheriff’s demanded most of his time. Something had to give.
They fought. His marriage turned into his parents’ marriage with the volume up and lots of “Fuck you”s. Ann had this abandonment complex. Her mother left her and shacked up with an armed robber. The guy took Mom with him on a cross-country heist spree. Ann had this overtly screwed-up childhood.
They fought. They reconciled. They fought. He resisted scads of cop-chaser women out to throw him some trim. The LASD hovered as his potential divorce co-respondent.
He loved patrol work. He loved the flow of unexpected events and the daily mix of new people in trouble. Norwalk was a “gentlemen’s station.” The population was white and the pace was slow. The county ding farm was on his beat. The dings wandered off and pulled amusing stunts stark naked. The Norwalk deputies ran a ding taxi service. They were always running some ding back to the farm.
He enjoyed his Norwalk tour of duty. The system worked and crime was containable. Some of the older guys saw hard times coming. The Miranda decision was fucking things up. The balance of power had shifted from cops to criminal suspects. You couldn’t log confessions with sweat-box tricks and phone-book shots to the kidneys.
He didn’t hold with those tactics. He didn’t pack black-leather sap gloves with 16-ounce palm weights. He wasn’t a violent guy. He tried to reason with unruly types and only fought when he had to.
He flipped his patrol car in mid-pursuit and almost died on the spot. He tangled with a teenage glue sniffer and took some heavyweight lumps. He responded to an accident call and swooped down a two-vehicle pile-up. A man was dead in his truck. His head smashed into the radio dials and kicked the volume way up. You could hear the song “Charade” for blocks around.
Norwalk gave him some wild moments. They were bush league compared to Watts in August ’65.
Ann was eight months pregnant. They were driving north on the Long Beach Freeway. Their view was high and expansive. They saw a dozen fires blazing.
He pulled off the freeway and called Norwalk Station. The watch commander told him to suit up and report to Harvey Aluminum. Harvey was deep in a labor-management conflict. The LASD had a command post set up there already.
He dropped Ann off and blasted over to Harvey. The parking lot was jammed with black & whites and deputies in full riot gear. The command post was dispatching four-man units. He grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and three temporary partners.
The deal was 12-hour shifts. The deal was go bust looters and firebugs. The deal was scour Watts and Willowbrook—the flashpoint of all this nigger voodoo.
He went into it in broad daylight. The heat was somewhere up in the 90s. The fires added some heat. His riot gear added some more. South L.A. was all heat and frenzy.
Looters were gutting liquor stores. Looters were guzzling brand-name stuff right there. Looters were pushing shopping carts down the street. The carts were chock-full of booze and TV sets.
Gunshots popped continuously. You couldn’t tell who was shooting who. The National Guard was out in force. They looked young and dumb and scared and plain trigger-happy.
You couldn’t patrol logically. Too much came at you too fast. You had to snag looters at random. You had to work by whim and the stimulus of the moment. You couldn’t gauge the direction of gunshots. You couldn’t trust the guardsmen not to spray rounds and kill you with ricochets.
It was uncontainable disorder. It grew in direct proportion to their attempts to control it. A deputy was pushing a crowd back. A looter grabbed his shotgun. It discharged and blew his partner’s brains out.
It went on and on. The action dispersed and reconstellated unexpectedly. He worked three whole days of it. He shagged dozens of looters and lost weight from heat exposure and adrenaline overload.
The action tapped out from some kind of mass exhaustion. Maybe the