“Jim, I can’t do it. I can’t be a police officer.”
“What are you talking about, Devonte? Spielberg and Rigo were your drinking buddies at home, right?”
The only laws Devonte Best had ever purposefully broken in his whole life were related to drinking. At age 17, his Hebrew School friends Leah and Caitlin went on a trip to California. While walking the boardwalk on Venice Beach, they got fake ID’s, in order to get medical marijuana cards. It was only on their return to Oak River that they both realized they could go to bars. They encouraged Devonte to get one too. On a community service visit to Little Village, he stopped by a Palestinian live animal butcher who ran a sideline producing incredibly high quality fakes for undocumented immigrants. Two weeks later, he had his first drink in a bar.
There was only one independent bar in Oak River. Devonte, Leah, and Caitlin went to T.J. Eckleburg’s (with an appropriate giant sign outside) every Thursday evening after Hebrew School and discussed the lesson over a pitcher of whatever craft wheat beer the tap of the week was. Once, a guy named Rigo was at the bar, heard them, and came over to discuss the Talmud. He declared himself a connoisseur of great religious texts, who wanted to be more informed in his discussions at work. He became a regular in their discussions.
It was only when he was at a college party broken up by the University Police that Devonte learned that Rigo’s job was University of Chicago Policeman.
It was awkward explaining to a policeman that he had, in fact, been drinking with three underage people for a year and a half at that point. It was more awkward when Rigo took out his ticket book to cite Devonte. Rigo broke the tension “Ooo, I had you going there! But now you owe me a pitcher at Jimmy’s, son.” And so it was that at 1:30 on Sunday afternoons, after the Morning shift was over, Rigo and his partner Spielberg (a moniker earned from a childhood of selling pirated VHS tapes in the Ida B. Wells Homes) would sit down in the famous campus bar Jimmy’s and eat bad cheeseburgers and discuss Chicago politics with a kid they knew was underage.
“Jim, I can’t be a police officer in Oakland,” said Devonte, back from his reverie.
“Dude, you were basically a police officer in Chicago.”
“Man, you know the police are used to oppress my people, though. I can’t do that. I’m not urban, or hip, or hop, but I’m not Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson either.”
“Hah. Ben Carson. There was a school for crazy people.” Jim gazed out the window, conjuring the Brewsters and the Renaissance Center and the Riverwalk in a pastel memory of the most idyllic swaths of his childhood. “I grew up in Detroit. I know what you’re talking about. But let me tell you something about something I saw in Chicago. I was working at a community center at 76th and South Shore, you couldn’t possibly get more ghetto except in the Dirty Hundreds. There were two safe places in the neighborhood for kids. One was the community center, and the other was the house next door.”
“Ya? Did the police come to the community center and say something nice to the kids before they pumped them through the school-to-prison pipeline which I avoided by accident of birth into a higher social class out away from the urban core?”
“No. The police never came to the center. The house next door, though, there was a policeman there every day. You wanna know why?”
“CPD racism?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be surprising if that was true, he did have the Pan-African flag out with the American flag out front. But no. It was because that house belonged to a Chicago policeman, who had dug out his backyard and turned it into a basketball court and skatepark. If we’re gonna just get random jobs, we could probably find some crap at restaurants that would maybe barely add up to rent and food. Or we could get stacks on stacks while being like that guy.”
“I’ll fill out the paperwork. I’ll go to the interview. But I make no promises. I’ve got an interview lined up at a profoundly fancy German restaurant later. They might make me beer sommelier.”
“Das is gut. But while you’re making that happen, I’ll be putting einigkeit und recht und freiheit on the streets of Oakland.”
“Pass me the motherfucking computer.” And it was with that that Devonte Best and Jim Brightest got down to work answering the questions required for an applicant to the position of Police Officer Trainee in the city of Oakland.
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