The Bowery (NYC Beat Cop)

As promised here is the story my cousin Andy Mavraganis wrote about bewing a beat cop in New York. It's my favorite story to so far grace this blog. Andy followed his father into the NYPD, and it's especially haunting for me to read this and think that this was his peek at what made up his father's world.
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Thanks and Happy Halloween, KLJ
PS: Send me your job stories.

I was assigned a foot post on Bowery Street, that section of New York City made infamous by its' squalor. I suppose there are sadder places in the world, where people lie dying in the streets, of starvation and disease. Then again...those places are an indictment of humanities sadistic criminality, of its' greed. Such places inspire in me anger, as much as sadness. That such conditions exist demands the word "altruism" be stricken from the books...it doesn't exist. It’s so easy to stop physical hunger, if less simple to cure disease. How do you feed a persons soul? What can you say to someone who's felt too much pain? To one who suffers from "too much”? The "Bowery" was the saddest place i'd been.

It was about ten in the morning. I’d just shared a breakfast counter with four black prostitutes, one of whom offered me a free sample of "the funky jiff" she had risin' in her "breadbox” after two days in jail. I asked for a rain check and stepped out to have a smoke on Bowery and Grand. A man with raging eyes and "Hells Angels" tattooed across his once impressive, presently shirtless chest growled menacingly "Gimme a smoke"! I asked him if he was still an "Angel" to which he replied "fuck them"! "I'll kick all their fuckin' pussy asses and yours too!" making sure i knew he meant it. I smiled with my teeth, leered with my eyes, gave him the smoke and said "You're welcome", making sure he knew i wasn't looking for a fight but was all ready to bash his fucking brains in if it would please him. He laughed his crazy man laugh and stampeded off, his gait befitting a man on the deck of a destroyer rolling out to sea, looking for a wall to walk through.

It was late July and, though early in the day, getting hot, humid and sweaty. I crossed to the shady side of Bowery St. and looked in the direction the ex-"Hells Angel" had stomped off in, half surprised he hadn't paused to crush somebody’s face when "Good morning officer, could you spare a cigarette" eased my tension. Not that giving out cigarettes had been therapeutic for me. It was the voice, the quality of it, its' noble gentility. He was somebody, who and how long ago i had to ask, “A lawyer? Wall Street?” Still wearing the pinstriped suit he disappeared in or so it seemed, he didn't like my question, if a sudden facial contortion and simultaneous eye glazing were any indication. Just as suddenly i felt the heat of regret expose me. As i lit his smoke and was thinking what to say next, the radio dispatcher called for an available unit to handle a possible D.O.A. (dead on arrival) on Bowery and Hester. “Perfect timing" i thought, excused myself from his eloquent if tortured presence and took the assignment.

The dispatcher informed me a bus (ambulance) was on the way and the desk clerk at the S.R.O. (single room occupancy) would bring me to the specific room wherein the possible D.O.A. was located. We always had to say "possible" D.O.A. If some poor bastards head is across the street from the rest of himself, he’s a "possible" D.O.A. It's a legal technicality, all radio and paper communications being matters of court record. Only an E.M.T. or M.E. (medical examiner) can legally pronounce someone, or his or her parts, dead. As i walked south on the Bowery i took a mental run through the paperwork and order of notifications. My graduation from the police academy which seemed so long ago was in fact only a month behind me. I tried to imagine what i would encounter...would there be a crowd, a distraught relative(s) or friend(s)...would it be a homicide, an accident, an overdose?

I opened the door and looked up the stairs, two stories straight up to the caged and bulletproof front desk. I climbed up to the window and was greeted by a nervous, disheveled clerk who says "I called you officer and i'm coming right out". When he joins me i ask "are you sure he's dead"? He lowers his head and nods, frowning. “Please follow me".

We walk through a big doorway to our left, taking us into a very large, loft like space, with high ceilings. The walls were milk chocolate brown half way up, with eggnog yellow binding them to the ceiling. In the center and to our left and right is a room within a room. This "room within" has doors all along, about ten, ten feet apart, each with a number on the door. The inner rooms' walls do not reach the ceiling; i assume they were about eight feet high. We walk to the left, pass a few doors and stop. “He’s in there.” pointing to one of the closed doors. I asked if he'd touched the doorknob "in case there was foul play" to which he answered yes. I pulled out my shirt and opened the door, just like in the movies, saw the foot of the bed to the left, the end of the room on my right, stepped into the room and went stiff. He was right next to me, almost touching my left shoulder, almost drooling on me, hanging by his neck, from one of the 2x4's to which the wire mesh ceiling was fastened, like his neck, to keep things "out”. I stepped back and tried to look like i bumped into the door jam purposefully. Cockroaches crawled all over him, his blue face too, sticking its' tongue out at me, all purple and swollen, like his lips, as if to taste the slime oozing over them, down to his chest from his nostrils. The room stunk from the shit that dripped out the bottom of his gripes stained pant leg onto the floor, where the flies were feasting. His shit speckled thick yellow toenails were like talons. His white t shirt hadn’t been white for a long time. There was a note "safety" pinned to his holey grey cardigan, apologizing for any inconvenience he would cause. That was all it said...all he had to say, his epitaph. The bare light bulb was soft white, a warm, if perverse, contrast to his cold blue flesh. The "room" is about ten feet wide and six feet deep, just enough space for a single bed, a foot locker, a dresser on which his Crawley hot plate rested and his self strangled corpse.

The desk clerk kindly brought me a chair on which to sit right outside the room and start my paperwork. I was angry. I thought the clerk could have...should have warned me. I didn't let on. Not 'cause i'm considerate, or even professional, I just had to act hard to compensate for my too young to have seen much face. I was twenty two. As the hours ticked by, the EMTs, detectives and medical examiner come and go as do the inhabitants of this sad place. Some of their faces are hidden behind empathetic masks; others i just wished were hidden. I’m wet with sweat, tight like a knot, tired and depressed. Ah, finally, the morgue guys show up. In a few minutes i'll be out of this hell hole, out in the sun, out where the roar and stink of truck and cab traffic, the stench of sun baked urine will be as refreshing as talcum powder after a shower. They wrap the black rubberized plastic "body bag" around him like a dry cleaner would a hanging whatever, zip it from the bottom up to the neck and cut the rope. He hits the floor in a deadened thud. They close the top, noose and all, drag him into the hall and put him on the stretcher. They pick him up and we're off. I follow them. Left to the big doorway, right to the stairs and ah...almost done now when...they throw him...literally just toss him crashing down the straight, two story stairs and he hits the bottom with a final earsplitting bang! I freeze. I must not show the shock on my face...i must act hard, unaffected, fearless! The sudden alarming noise confirming what my eyes refuse to believe, the sight of what was just a few hours ago a human-being being thrown down two flights of stairs! I'm blazing mad! I want to smash those fucking scumbags with my nightstick, over and over again...for scaring the hell out of me with the sudden, unnecessary noise and sickening me with this horrific vision! I swallow it and don't let on. This is just more than i'd bargained for! Alright, the guy IS fuckin' dead,(i'm telling myself),he's got no relatives, no-one gave a flyin' fuck about him while he was alive, certainly no-one cares now...but what about all the "other" no-ones here? Don't those fucking morgue wagon ghouls think their throwing that guy down the stairs will crush any of them? Maybe not...what the hell do i know...forget it man, just get the hell out and walk as fast as i can, back to the locker room, outta this monkey suit and outta this fuckin' neighborhood.

I didn’t think about this day again...or wouldn’t, until about fifteen years later, about eight years ago. It was about six in the morning, the twenty-eighth and last day of my stay in an alcohol rehab, perched on a mountain top with panoramic views of New Hampshire’s' Green Mountain range. Nine years after my first rehab. A detective who'd been drinking a quart of Jack Daniels a day at work and another when he got home and a commercial fishing boat captain/magician whose' coupe de grace made a ninety foot, two million dollar trawler disappear through the tip of a crack pipe, had asked me to share a coffee and a sunrise with them before i returned to "civilization"(hahahahaha) the next morning. After coffee and the sunrise, a fellow lunatic handed me a poem about the penniless, alcoholic death of the composer of "Camp town races”. I read it, excused myself, got in the shower and it all came back. More accurately, i was still there, in that S.R.O....i cried so hard, for forty five minutes i cried in the shower, for that old man, for the morgue wagon guys, for the detective, the captain, the murderers, the starving, for myself, for everyone who's cared enough about life to ask "am i doing enough?" (because we never do)... and especially for those who haven't.


Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE
My Cousin's brutal tale of being a beat cop in NYC is HERE
Swimming with dolphins in Gay Hawaii is HERE.
Being Will Ferrell is HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
and my home page is HERE.