I regained consciousness on the floor of a subway car. I tried to pick my head up but it felt awfully heavy and as I peeked out of what I could see through a very puffy right eye of mine (the other seemed lost in a fog), I could see a large puddle of fresh blood flowing away from me and growing in size; was it from me? My right cheek felt sticky and cool laying against the subway floor. I could see a ring of people round me; they seemed to be subway riders and then they are backing away.
A policeman is breaking through the people and then he backed away and I could tell now I was the center of attention and this wasn’t good. I slowly scooted my legs up under me in preparation of getting up but the policeman stepped forward placing a strong hand on my shoulder telling me to stay down –
“Don’t move.”
Much as I don’t like cops bossing me around, it seemed a reasonable order. I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth, everything tasted of blood but evidently I had all my teeth. I groggily tried to make sense of how I ending up down on the floor, vaguely recalling a huge black fist crashing into my face. Everything smelled of blood, that’s all I could smell, and taste, then the cop is clearing a hole in the platform, everyone seemed to be out of the subway car and I thought I heard an announcement crackling, the train is out of service, and then a guy in blue and green scrubs and a woman following behind rushing in through the hole then everything smelled like alcohol, hospital alcohol, and then I could taste the alcohol stinging my tongue as the man in scrubs is roughly wiping my face with a cold wet cloth and pinching my nose and Jesus that hurts and I let out a shaky groan and he says it is going to hurt and we have to stop the bleeding and then I thought I gasped OK but I can’t be sure and then I forget what happened.
The next thing I realize I am in a bed, a hospital bed as I slowly, cautiously glance around me, realizing my lonely surroundings and I know I have to go to the bathroom and sure as hell I am not going to add insult to obvious injury and piss myself and who knows what else in this bed.
I tentatively edged my legs over to the side of the bed – ok – they worked. Dropping them to the floor, slowly lifting my heavy head, letting the dizzy light headiness fall away and with some cautious intention shuffled over to where I figured, hoped, the bathroom might be. I passed through the door, shakily flipping the light switch and found myself facing a mirror reflecting back at me. My head so swollen, bloody, so big; blue black orange streaks and bruised violet, an ugly distended basketball facing me. The rosy blooming lumpy knot on the ridge of my big nose is pulsing and throbbing, framed by two red black blue angry crescents, each sliver topping each cheek giving me the mark of a raccoon, except for my two nostrils, which had flared in size and expanded in openings now resembling the snout of a black horse or a mean angry hog. Even as I turned away from the ugly vision of my bruised face, and the growing awareness of my aching bruised ribs, I was more concerned of the future, of my growing and perhaps more long lasting bruise to my delicate metallic manly ego and that I could now already taste that resentful scourge of fear mixing with the blood still dripping into the back of my mouth. I could smell the sour bitter scent of fright and anxiety rising off my body, off my bruised face, powerful vapors inundating, clearing for a moment my blood clogged nostrils – would I ever be free of it; riding the subway?
I lay in this hospital bed for two weeks watching my black blue bruised ballooned face slowly subside, turning yellow, then turning a more familiar rosy pastel surprisingly free of dark bruises – the body is an amazing place; I had lost a lot of blood, one step from transfusion they told me – this ain’t war – is it?
Gratefully laying in my hospital bed watching Law & Order day after day, and every time the nurse coming in complimenting me on my growing handsomeness and complaining
“Not Law & Order again! Law & Order again?!”
I suggested, perhaps we could do with a bit more of it.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Felonious Mopery
Often in NYC events conspire to present exciting adventures, often times ending way into the next day, unplanned of course, sometimes filled with elation, other times often filled with tiredness and anxiety. Three Dog Night wrote of such a feeling, "Mama Told Me not to come".
Anyway in such a city as NYC such events are happening spontaneously, or are happening in a way out that seems out of one's control or like "Shit happens" - to assholes...and some nights I am sure all of us, can lay claim to just such events occurring...happening, as I make my way as a "free white Christian man in America?"
One also has to if still alive, or conscious, reflect on such events for meaning: is the "it", or "God" sending it or if I'm in a different mode, is it "meant to be?" Or perhaps it's laid out on your meager table to gobble up - insights which you are still not ready to accept or formulate. You are unable to read the signs and messages being sent, as in those who have eyes and cannot see.
I had found myself unable to sleep. I'm not that familiar with being unable to sleep. Getting to sleep; staying asleep: and arising refreshed is something I have been generally very good at over the years. This has been the case in the most unsettling of circumstances. Take my word for the circumstances - as under the third wire of an aircraft carrier as the jets are landing; bombs away. Sleeping in the church shelter is not very different than sleeping in a jail dormitory, but the snoring is getting to me this time.
So one evening I decide to go to the nearby Duane Reade store and purchase a "sleeping aid" some "over the counter" pills, tablets, jells, the shelf is filled with them stacked and labeled sleep aids. I am new at this having only briefly viewed some TV commercials for prescription sleeping pills e.g. Ambien. Looking over the shelves I find the cheapest one, whose brand label name bringing back warm childhood TV memories: "SOMINEX". The fact that it the cheapest is the most important - the fact that it bringing back sleepy/exciting childhood memories only adding to the impulse buy. I recall there is a floating genie involved; how bad can these pills be? We, oh brothers will see. I immediately purchased the smallest box - 24 tablets, plastic cardboard/aluminum cellophane wrapped for $5.99. As I walking out of the store, actually I lie, while in the store and awaiting on the payment line I opened the box and looking at the perforations, lines outlining each tablet noticed immediately the correct dosage. The way it designed, it can possibly even work for those who cannot read. I scraped open the package and swallowed 2 tablets, then paid for the entire box.
Anyway those two tablets worked pretty damned good. They kicked in after about 20 minutes. Even though they promise no after night hangover, I can attest to two after night hangovers. The first the next morning, after having taken those first two and more importantly for the purposes of this story, the second hangover occurring later on into the second night.
You see for the first night the reason I purchased the alluring blue and white box. It is mostly blue, and I am figuring that is not by accident, as hyper as I am, I still love the color blue. I am living out of a NYC shelter and each night we catch a beat up yellow school bus which brings us to various, rather warm and comfortable “church beds” in the city. The real estate is ‘tres chic’ and the food and the beds certainly more than suffice. I call the experience "urban camping", which surely it is. One disadvantage of this camping experience is some of these guys snore as loud as a tea kettle or a steam boiler about to explode. Ergo, 2 SOMINEX pills seemed the solution.
I usually like to take the bus to the church, I get to see the city sights; it takes about an hour because we have to pick up and drop off all the other various vagrants and ne’er-do-wells, and try harder’s etc, etc, to various church beds. When we get to the church I am now usually going to, I have found a coy canny ability to sit on the couch and control the TV; it is important to me. Almost always I can keep it on channel 13, while the ravenous black and Spanish mob toss around the dinner table for food. We have already been fed less than 2 hours before, but somehow they are still ravenously hungry. Anyway, this evening, the 2 SOMINEX pills are hitting the mark and I can hardly stay awake for the 1 hour (it might have been 2 hours) of a ‘brain show’ Channel 13 showing on primitive emotions, fear in particular, and our unfortunate inability to control said emotion, in a day and age when the emotion many times results in more bad than good. The show suggesting this may be a problem with many of our social institutions and all.
Enough background for the writing of this story.
The next evening I am waiting in front of the shelter on 30th street in midtown Manhattan which has been my central living establishment since getting out of jail; first out of jail I was riding the rails and sidewalks of NYC and then through a help of a friend landed in this shelter which had been only a few months before exclusively ‘women only’ so there still are a number of decent women in the shelter or hanging around outside.
I’m smoking a cigarette which I only do when I drink. I actually drink very little now, but I am in anticipation of this extraordinarily tattooed, young, large, Puerto Rican, loud snorer, sleeping next to me. Interestingly this boy/man has a rather beautiful, young, curvy, Puerto Rican homeless girlfriend - who gets the luck! He assures me she having lots of problems. I thinking perhaps his primitive strategy keeping other wolves at bay.
Watching the yellow school buses line up for us unfortunate, homeless, a young woman approaches me and asks for a light. She strikes me as about 25, perhaps Dominican, pretty enough and dressed almost as the other homeless women in the shelter. I've never seen her before. There are often others even less fortunate than I, and others inside or on the outside, hanging around the edges of the building and the door, cursing or fighting or grateful, tattered, hoping to get in or at least get a smoke.
“You got a light?” She waving her unlit cigarette in front of me.
I offered her my lit cigarette as a light and she backed away which I found rather strange. I didn't dwell on it. There is no way I would be digging into my pocket for a matchbook and go through the tedious process of getting a match lit long enough to light a cigarette, especially in this wind howling through the streets. I forced my lit cigarette on her and oddly she did not put her unlit cigarette to her mouth to suck in the burning sparks and glow of my lit cigarette to do the lighting quickly and efficiently but instead held it out to my cigarette tip as I sucked mine bright enough to get hers lit. I liked her, decent enough to look at - it was kinda dark.
We’re smoking now, I’m watching the buses and she asks me if I have any “trees”? I looked at her saying hesitantly, not sure why she would want “Christmas trees?” asking, a bit baffled.
“No stupid.” She says, “Christmas is over.”
Yeah, I’m thinking Christmas is over but I’m thinking she might be looking for some old used Christmas trees to make money. There is no invention that surprises me as to how these criminals or homeless, or other people come up with, to make money. I was a little miffed that she calling me stupid ‘cause I did like her; “well” I says “there ain’t no other trees around here that I know of”. I did give a fleeting glance in my mind as to the Floral District that used to flourish just 2 blocks away and maybe she talking about trees from what is a lost era but I figured she way too young for that memory of a bustling floral and some trees district, or at least she is coming way too late for that experience.
So I say again, “There ain’t no trees around here that I know of", perhaps yearning to find something new I missing.
“No” she said, “you got any bud?”
Ohh, I’m getting the idea, “No, there ain’t no bud around here now” and I answering her honestly; A few months ago some kids here had some. I know, I smoked some good bud in St. Bart’s on Park Avenue and ran around with those homeless kids in the cupola of that beautiful church, on the top of the world screaming and laughing, but that’s another story.
She says to me: “You got any pills?”
I’m thinking: where’s this girl coming from, she want to fuck me? It possible sometimes, but there is no way, and anyway, she way too young. I mean don’t get me wrong but I am waiting for a bus to take me to a church bed and there is no way I am going to miss that.
“No”, I says, “I ain’t got no pills.”
“Sticks?” she says.
I says to her “Sticks?” I am thinking this still may have something to do with ‘trees’. I still may not be properly understanding.
“Vicidens; Percisets, Zanex!”
”Oh! Felony stixs? Why do you want to do them?”
The reason those particular pharmaceutical pills are called “stixs” is because the shape of them is rectangular and sort of skinny so you could imagine them as a stick shape as oppose to say ‘a round aspirin’ shape and the felony we knows.
She has maneuvered herself behind me, leaning against the darkened slightly lighted building, “Makes me woozy”, she wavers her hips and waist smiling on the wall half closing her eyes. These homeless do have seductive ways which, given circumstances.... perhaps in younger years, but not now in these days; not tonight.
“They call them felony stixs ‘cause it makes the guys wild and do felonies." I says to her; looking at her sleepy sexy eyes and thinking truly that she is possibly homeless cause she is talking shit about the ‘Open Door’. The ‘Open Door’ is a harder core shelter in the back of the Port Authority and the gossip that it be closing for the winter. I told her the gossip is ridiculous because there is no way as big an establishment as that homeless shelter would ever be closing in the winter. She agrees clapping her lips and flapping her hand in front of my face “People yapping, people talking, right?”
“Yes!” I say; “It’s ridiculous”, agreeing with her enthusiastically. “Why do you want to do stixs?” I ask, curious, wondering if stixs have different effects on a young woman. I have seen other drugs – street or pharmaceuticals having considerably different effects according to gender.
“I like when it makes me sleepy, woozy…” wavering at the hips and half closing her eyes.
I am thinking about her not getting into this shelter tonight and sleeping at Penn Station and doing a couple of sleeping pills, making the dozing off easier. Makes perfect sense to me, nodding leaning against rich marble walls laying on clean terrazzo floors for late night, early morning sleeping in NYC. Good enough rest, warm enough and usually safe too for an evening or two.
So I am mulling on this and then a thought strikes me, a really good (fortunate even!) idea, I says to her excitedly: “I’ve got some sleeping pills.” remembering that purchase of yesterday.
You see this is the difficult conundrum I mulling always over always forming and setting in my mind that I would be purchasing a rarely purchased item in my life and then immediately, the next evening, I meet, really what are the chances? When the last time I meeting a young woman jonesing for a mellow sleepy evening? Never. It is situations as these I wonder, ponder more deeply than usual: Is there a God?? Or are these types of events just cosmic jokes or unintended coincidences?
She looks up to me excitedly, “Ambien?” her brown eyes getting wide in anticipation of something good about to happen. I guess at that moment I still missing the point of what is good, the difference between a girl and a boy.
“No, no not ‘Ambien'”, though I do remember recent dreamy commercials on TV announcing a better prescription only sleeping pill. I must admit, I noticed, but missed the significance of her interest in a prescription only sleeping pill labeled ‘Ambien’ or the ‘trees’ she interested in earlier. I said to her “No, no, no, no prescription here, this is old school." Given the effects of two SOMINEX pills on me even I could not believe one can buy SOMINEX over the counter.
I told her, “You don’t need a prescription, this pill on TV before you born" and that is when she asks me how old does she look. It is a treacherous, scorned, a crying out when a girl – as much she pretending to be a woman – is asking.
“25” I says and she says to me looking approvingly, “You are very smart!” A lot of people say that to me now, old as I am, and as much money been spent on me you would hope have to hope have to believe I’d be smart. As much accumulated life giving protein spending experiences one would hope so.
“Give me a minute", because that is all I needed to get her 2 SOMINEX pills. "2 minutes" I say, as I run from her, knowing it might take more than a minute to navigate through that homeless shelter of which I am rather familiar. Didn’t want this possible homeless girl to face another lie.
"Give me 2 minutes," Believe me I would have done this favor for a man as well.
I went into the shelter, hiding my excitement, giving someone else, a sort of pretty woman in need, especially, an asset that I had recently acquired, something I had gotten for myself, that was now coming to use for someone other than me. This is how I think, maybe I’m crazy! Maybe I should blame it on my upbringing.
I go into the shelter and carefully bring out my bag of the most important stuff I’m carrying around - my writing, the rest of it, including the SOMINEX. The SOMINEX ain’t all that important, but for this moment in time, it is pretty important to me - a Christmas present sort of, or an unintended New Years gift at least.
So I lug out this black gym bag, and it really shouldn’t be this heavy or full. And it is not that full or heavy anymore as you will see.
I drop it on the ground and unzipper a side end pocket and she asks again, kinda excitedly, is it “Ambien?”, and I tell her again “No, it isn’t.”.
I am a bit curious as to why she is so interested in that brand name, yet I assure her these 2 SOMINEX tabs will do the trick - I am thinking, sleeping in PENN Station.
Then she says, “Can I have four tabs?”
I am taking the silver encased cardboard mounted pills out of the box and says to her, “Of course you can have four tabs” but I caution her again, “Trust me all you are going to need is 2; why do you want four?”
She says to me, "The other two are for my girlfriend” and I am wondering if she is trying luring me to a threesome.
Cool I’m thinking as I take the pill aluminum encased card out of the small box ripping off four and giving it to her and ripping off another two pill tabs because all I’m thinking is that it's about time to do my 2 tabs, cause last night worked out damned good.
I’m doing some good in this fool ‘cruel world’ and then she says to me, “Let me pay you, take this money” as she pushes into my chest a crumpled bill in her tight fist,
I says to her, ”There is no way! No way! Take what I gave you! I do not want your money; you are ridiculous – it’s four tabs of SOMINEX (for God’s sake)!”
“Take it” she says to me, pushing punching her tight little fist holding a crumpled green bill that I can really barely see pushing it into my chest.
I push her punctuating hand with crumpled bill away, “No. I don’t want it. It is not necessary!” Goddamn pills cost pennies. Even if they were a dollar apiece there is no way I would be asking her or a homeless man for money from them. It is fucking ridiculous!
“Take it” she insists.
She says it with such pleading eyes, and you never can tell or scout homeless women, I’m not saying they are different than men, just the way I’ve been brought up, looking into those pleading eyes, feeling the push in my chest of that fist clenching bill. I relented - hell it seemed I would be doing her a favor by taking it, but I still could not see why she would insist I take that crumpled bill. She pushed her clenched fist into my chest again.
Ok, I took it and told her this bill would be waiting for her when and if we saw each other again God willing, this her money I holding for her– I ‘didn’t want, it, ridiculous! I took the bill from my chest and as I looked down, she disappeared.
"Son of a bitch” I thought, one strange girl looking at the crumpled bill now unfolding in my hand; it was a 20 dollar bill and I said to myself: “What the Fuck?” and 7 plain clothes man cops, monsters, pounced. I think—please – you tell me if I am wrong – “God Bless America! You fucking assholes!"
I screamed “Are you fucking with me??” Pulling at me, handcuffing me, ripping out my pockets, dumping all my shit on the dirty sidewalk, invading me. I had at least the peace of mind to screech to all of these mother fuckers the girl/bitch was long gone, “What are you arresting me for??!!”
The man carrying me to the van, my arms sturdily handcuffed in steel from behind, answering me quite officially and calmly, “Felonious Mopery”.
“Felonious Mopery” I screamed at him, “You have to be fucking with me, talking gibberish to a mark - Pig Latin!” I scream at him in handcuffs as we bounce around NYC streets.
“No” the young undercover “Officer”, and I do use that word facetiously - give me a fucking break! Un-uniformed terrorists is more like it!
“I am not fucking with you," he said,
"it is in the Penal Code Chapter 9” he states assuredly, attempting to give me some confidence that my arrest is within the limits of a free and fair and just society.
Do you, my brother and reader, really think so? Do the strong arms, fourteen of them and counting, really give you confidence that your tax dollars are justly spent?
And as I handcuffed, jostling radically in the paddy wagon to the hoosegow, reminded them, “When you badge laden club and gun allowed assholes make mistakes; it reverberates a lot farther than when some normal citizen makes a mistake."
One of those young cops, is, as usual, getting to like me, says to me – “Hey it is just like the butcher – there is always an asshole."
I told him he still does not get it, although the butcher example was good, given the affection with a deadly instrument. The police man is allowed to lie and cheat and do bodily harm in the effort and pursuit of good – it is in the Penal Code – in the Law. The butcher is not allowed to lie and cheat in order to find the proper truth – humph, maybe he ought to be allowed, given all his sharp allowable blades?
“What does it mean, if it is not gibberish?” Later in the week I asked uniformed cops on the street the meaning of “Felonious Mopery” and they affirmed, other than one cop knowingly smirking.
Well, I screamed at them handcuffed in the back of the van. I was so outraged and still am, all the way to the precinct. Offering me a smoke, I took it no hands I got available pulling with my angry lips on the but. They said/confided to me that I am funny and that I reminded them of Steve Martin. I told them that is an insult since the last time Steve Martin was any good was before he got married, which was probably before they were both born. But hey, that's the gulf between generations and social interests in the midst of a NYC latter New Years experience.
What comes to me is a serious consideration of an “American Fairness Doctrine” Oh my brothers: love of country? Love of tribe? Love of a peculiar fairness doctrine.
All things considered, I am still getting out alive, and relatively un-tortured, though the idea that this experience can and does exist is torturing enough for me. But hey - maybe I’m a pussy. I dare you though! Would you consider this an adequate allowable litmus test?? Is this how you would teach/prefer your children to laud the American police/justice system? Do you really think I am lucky enough to be telling you one obscure police/US justice story gone awry? Oh yes, I was released 27 hours later…no apology, no piece of paper explaining why they held me for 27 hours, no justification for the/my personal goods being ransacked and only getting half of my personal goods back. They took my fucking toothbrushes!!
During those 27 hours on the ‘inside’, I had to fend off an attack in the pen from one black man who I would guess was guilty of whatever he in the pen for. Regardless of the past, he was not going to be guilty of effectively assaulting me because he wanted my space and my peanut butter sandwich. Fuck him - "My Nigga!” I'm pretty good in jail now.
A young correction officer opens the gate telling me I’m getting out (scott free! No charges); I scream at him (not that loud maybe) that I want an apology; I deserve one! (I demand one!). He stops me – his hand on my chest, I am at the threshold – he says to me “I ain’t feeling the love; maybe you’re not ready yet to get out – maybe you need to stay in here a little while longer.”
Yeah I’m ready to get out I tell him, (sometimes I can turn into a pussy; for what? Freezing cold night air?) You see what happens next is the Correction Officer (I don’t mean to pontificate here for a few pages on the corrections needed here and now on ‘Corrections Officers’ (I mean how many Federal Government Reports do we need on this damn issue?)) grabs my arm and I keep my mouth shut as he leads me across the threshold and out.
The way you get out of these cages is you come out from behind where the judge is sitting pontificating in his courtroom – walking out into that court room with the corrections officer holding me tight (still handcuffed!) wanting so much to scream at that judge, for him to understand as he believing he is right then judging another nigger, so busy at his work (God’s work?) and I wanted to so much let him know what injustice his gang (him and his gang) did me tonight and how little do I know what more injustices and insults would be afforded to me by ‘We, the people’ – but yet I walked silently from the back to the front of the justice’s court aiming for the door as the young Correction Officer feeling the tension rising in my arm he was holding tight whispering in my ear: “You want to get out of here tonight right?”
He is escorting me towards the exit of the downtown 100 Center Street Central Booking, escorting me, out of the cages where much more unfortunate souls still lay. Most of them maybe actually probably did something criminal?! It does happen sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. He is whispering in my ear, “You want to get out of here, right?"
And yes I did; I held my tongue and walked silently out of that court room somewhat embarrassed (still embarrassed) at my lack of courage and voice.
I am so fucking pissed at this old dilapidated prison maze, “Right?” and, I, pussy, as sometimes I can be, nodding to him. He escorting me into the last room placing me in front of a big breasted black sergeant across the counter and her holier-than-thou and ‘I hold the keys to your heavenly of freedom’ attitude.
And let us not forget, oh my brothers, I am innocent through this whole process. Trust me, it is not that big a leap from the big breasted black woman and the system of ‘We, the People’ that she represents; she represents me.
The young CO escorting me to freedom, knows what I want. Although, sometimes, I have been and am still willing to give it all up just to yell in deaf ears, but not tonight. Whispering in my ear he says, “Do not offer anything, do not say anything, except yes and no”.
Ahh but this is just the beginning of a New Year's story. I am so lucky to have the experience of hanging out on a side street in front of a lowly homeless shelter or bower, if one prefers, to understand, or try to understand the beauty of freedom and mistakes and badges and collateral damage. Oh my brothers, I am a free white man in America, for others, who knows?
Let out left out in the middle of the night, here I am, way downtown, with no money, no nothing but my ‘freedom(?)’ and some light clothes on my back in the middle of a freezing winter – no legal place to go, especially given the idea of ‘Felonious Mopery’. I’m liking to rob somebody, or at least jump a turn style to get some warmth!
God Bless America and our felonious ways. I so want my fucking two SOMINEX pills back, YOU! ‘You, The People’, fucking thieves, took from me, a homeless fellow with nothing. Or I want the 20 dollars that fraudulent entrapping bitch forced on me - but that story is for another day regarding my efforts to retrieve my former possessions. This is a free capitalist place after all.
Upon telling this story to a few of my shelter colleagues, one scoffed at my stupidity/ignorance saying, "You should always say to anyone you don't know: Are you a cop?, because they have to answer you truthfully" And I'm thinking, Is that the only thing they have to do truthfully??!! Another one of my shelter colleagues advised against that approach, saying he was sure that is not a good idea. Of course, I am saying: "That is what I am going to do! Ask everyone who comes up to me – knowin’ them before or not, because they could have always been made ‘to turn’ since last I saw them, “Are you a cop?!"”
A few days later I had my opportunity. Talking to a ‘friend’ in front of a subway entrance, a young black man approaches me and asks me something. The first thing I say is: "Are you a cop?!"
He gets all mad and starts screaming at me, "How dare you call me a cop!! I'm a fucking gangster BLOOD!" I notice he is wearing quite a bit of red, “I'm going to turn you upside down you mother fucker!!" Yeah whatever I widen my stance, readying for an onslaught that would allow me to vent my rage, something, for some reason, has been building inside me these last few adventurous exciting days. My associate pulls me away. So, I guess it is chancy to ask someone ‘you a cop?’. My shelter friend is correct it seems after all.
Of course without these tender mercies of the NYPD, I would have never felt the striking, bracing feeling of ‘entrapment care’ of the ‘NYPD undercover ladies swarming the night’, or come across the astounding phrase of which this story is titled: Felonious Mopery.
Anyway in such a city as NYC such events are happening spontaneously, or are happening in a way out that seems out of one's control or like "Shit happens" - to assholes...and some nights I am sure all of us, can lay claim to just such events occurring...happening, as I make my way as a "free white Christian man in America?"
One also has to if still alive, or conscious, reflect on such events for meaning: is the "it", or "God" sending it or if I'm in a different mode, is it "meant to be?" Or perhaps it's laid out on your meager table to gobble up - insights which you are still not ready to accept or formulate. You are unable to read the signs and messages being sent, as in those who have eyes and cannot see.
I had found myself unable to sleep. I'm not that familiar with being unable to sleep. Getting to sleep; staying asleep: and arising refreshed is something I have been generally very good at over the years. This has been the case in the most unsettling of circumstances. Take my word for the circumstances - as under the third wire of an aircraft carrier as the jets are landing; bombs away. Sleeping in the church shelter is not very different than sleeping in a jail dormitory, but the snoring is getting to me this time.
So one evening I decide to go to the nearby Duane Reade store and purchase a "sleeping aid" some "over the counter" pills, tablets, jells, the shelf is filled with them stacked and labeled sleep aids. I am new at this having only briefly viewed some TV commercials for prescription sleeping pills e.g. Ambien. Looking over the shelves I find the cheapest one, whose brand label name bringing back warm childhood TV memories: "SOMINEX". The fact that it the cheapest is the most important - the fact that it bringing back sleepy/exciting childhood memories only adding to the impulse buy. I recall there is a floating genie involved; how bad can these pills be? We, oh brothers will see. I immediately purchased the smallest box - 24 tablets, plastic cardboard/aluminum cellophane wrapped for $5.99. As I walking out of the store, actually I lie, while in the store and awaiting on the payment line I opened the box and looking at the perforations, lines outlining each tablet noticed immediately the correct dosage. The way it designed, it can possibly even work for those who cannot read. I scraped open the package and swallowed 2 tablets, then paid for the entire box.
Anyway those two tablets worked pretty damned good. They kicked in after about 20 minutes. Even though they promise no after night hangover, I can attest to two after night hangovers. The first the next morning, after having taken those first two and more importantly for the purposes of this story, the second hangover occurring later on into the second night.
You see for the first night the reason I purchased the alluring blue and white box. It is mostly blue, and I am figuring that is not by accident, as hyper as I am, I still love the color blue. I am living out of a NYC shelter and each night we catch a beat up yellow school bus which brings us to various, rather warm and comfortable “church beds” in the city. The real estate is ‘tres chic’ and the food and the beds certainly more than suffice. I call the experience "urban camping", which surely it is. One disadvantage of this camping experience is some of these guys snore as loud as a tea kettle or a steam boiler about to explode. Ergo, 2 SOMINEX pills seemed the solution.
I usually like to take the bus to the church, I get to see the city sights; it takes about an hour because we have to pick up and drop off all the other various vagrants and ne’er-do-wells, and try harder’s etc, etc, to various church beds. When we get to the church I am now usually going to, I have found a coy canny ability to sit on the couch and control the TV; it is important to me. Almost always I can keep it on channel 13, while the ravenous black and Spanish mob toss around the dinner table for food. We have already been fed less than 2 hours before, but somehow they are still ravenously hungry. Anyway, this evening, the 2 SOMINEX pills are hitting the mark and I can hardly stay awake for the 1 hour (it might have been 2 hours) of a ‘brain show’ Channel 13 showing on primitive emotions, fear in particular, and our unfortunate inability to control said emotion, in a day and age when the emotion many times results in more bad than good. The show suggesting this may be a problem with many of our social institutions and all.
Enough background for the writing of this story.
The next evening I am waiting in front of the shelter on 30th street in midtown Manhattan which has been my central living establishment since getting out of jail; first out of jail I was riding the rails and sidewalks of NYC and then through a help of a friend landed in this shelter which had been only a few months before exclusively ‘women only’ so there still are a number of decent women in the shelter or hanging around outside.
I’m smoking a cigarette which I only do when I drink. I actually drink very little now, but I am in anticipation of this extraordinarily tattooed, young, large, Puerto Rican, loud snorer, sleeping next to me. Interestingly this boy/man has a rather beautiful, young, curvy, Puerto Rican homeless girlfriend - who gets the luck! He assures me she having lots of problems. I thinking perhaps his primitive strategy keeping other wolves at bay.
Watching the yellow school buses line up for us unfortunate, homeless, a young woman approaches me and asks for a light. She strikes me as about 25, perhaps Dominican, pretty enough and dressed almost as the other homeless women in the shelter. I've never seen her before. There are often others even less fortunate than I, and others inside or on the outside, hanging around the edges of the building and the door, cursing or fighting or grateful, tattered, hoping to get in or at least get a smoke.
“You got a light?” She waving her unlit cigarette in front of me.
I offered her my lit cigarette as a light and she backed away which I found rather strange. I didn't dwell on it. There is no way I would be digging into my pocket for a matchbook and go through the tedious process of getting a match lit long enough to light a cigarette, especially in this wind howling through the streets. I forced my lit cigarette on her and oddly she did not put her unlit cigarette to her mouth to suck in the burning sparks and glow of my lit cigarette to do the lighting quickly and efficiently but instead held it out to my cigarette tip as I sucked mine bright enough to get hers lit. I liked her, decent enough to look at - it was kinda dark.
We’re smoking now, I’m watching the buses and she asks me if I have any “trees”? I looked at her saying hesitantly, not sure why she would want “Christmas trees?” asking, a bit baffled.
“No stupid.” She says, “Christmas is over.”
Yeah, I’m thinking Christmas is over but I’m thinking she might be looking for some old used Christmas trees to make money. There is no invention that surprises me as to how these criminals or homeless, or other people come up with, to make money. I was a little miffed that she calling me stupid ‘cause I did like her; “well” I says “there ain’t no other trees around here that I know of”. I did give a fleeting glance in my mind as to the Floral District that used to flourish just 2 blocks away and maybe she talking about trees from what is a lost era but I figured she way too young for that memory of a bustling floral and some trees district, or at least she is coming way too late for that experience.
So I say again, “There ain’t no trees around here that I know of", perhaps yearning to find something new I missing.
“No” she said, “you got any bud?”
Ohh, I’m getting the idea, “No, there ain’t no bud around here now” and I answering her honestly; A few months ago some kids here had some. I know, I smoked some good bud in St. Bart’s on Park Avenue and ran around with those homeless kids in the cupola of that beautiful church, on the top of the world screaming and laughing, but that’s another story.
She says to me: “You got any pills?”
I’m thinking: where’s this girl coming from, she want to fuck me? It possible sometimes, but there is no way, and anyway, she way too young. I mean don’t get me wrong but I am waiting for a bus to take me to a church bed and there is no way I am going to miss that.
“No”, I says, “I ain’t got no pills.”
“Sticks?” she says.
I says to her “Sticks?” I am thinking this still may have something to do with ‘trees’. I still may not be properly understanding.
“Vicidens; Percisets, Zanex!”
”Oh! Felony stixs? Why do you want to do them?”
The reason those particular pharmaceutical pills are called “stixs” is because the shape of them is rectangular and sort of skinny so you could imagine them as a stick shape as oppose to say ‘a round aspirin’ shape and the felony we knows.
She has maneuvered herself behind me, leaning against the darkened slightly lighted building, “Makes me woozy”, she wavers her hips and waist smiling on the wall half closing her eyes. These homeless do have seductive ways which, given circumstances.... perhaps in younger years, but not now in these days; not tonight.
“They call them felony stixs ‘cause it makes the guys wild and do felonies." I says to her; looking at her sleepy sexy eyes and thinking truly that she is possibly homeless cause she is talking shit about the ‘Open Door’. The ‘Open Door’ is a harder core shelter in the back of the Port Authority and the gossip that it be closing for the winter. I told her the gossip is ridiculous because there is no way as big an establishment as that homeless shelter would ever be closing in the winter. She agrees clapping her lips and flapping her hand in front of my face “People yapping, people talking, right?”
“Yes!” I say; “It’s ridiculous”, agreeing with her enthusiastically. “Why do you want to do stixs?” I ask, curious, wondering if stixs have different effects on a young woman. I have seen other drugs – street or pharmaceuticals having considerably different effects according to gender.
“I like when it makes me sleepy, woozy…” wavering at the hips and half closing her eyes.
I am thinking about her not getting into this shelter tonight and sleeping at Penn Station and doing a couple of sleeping pills, making the dozing off easier. Makes perfect sense to me, nodding leaning against rich marble walls laying on clean terrazzo floors for late night, early morning sleeping in NYC. Good enough rest, warm enough and usually safe too for an evening or two.
So I am mulling on this and then a thought strikes me, a really good (fortunate even!) idea, I says to her excitedly: “I’ve got some sleeping pills.” remembering that purchase of yesterday.
You see this is the difficult conundrum I mulling always over always forming and setting in my mind that I would be purchasing a rarely purchased item in my life and then immediately, the next evening, I meet, really what are the chances? When the last time I meeting a young woman jonesing for a mellow sleepy evening? Never. It is situations as these I wonder, ponder more deeply than usual: Is there a God?? Or are these types of events just cosmic jokes or unintended coincidences?
She looks up to me excitedly, “Ambien?” her brown eyes getting wide in anticipation of something good about to happen. I guess at that moment I still missing the point of what is good, the difference between a girl and a boy.
“No, no not ‘Ambien'”, though I do remember recent dreamy commercials on TV announcing a better prescription only sleeping pill. I must admit, I noticed, but missed the significance of her interest in a prescription only sleeping pill labeled ‘Ambien’ or the ‘trees’ she interested in earlier. I said to her “No, no, no, no prescription here, this is old school." Given the effects of two SOMINEX pills on me even I could not believe one can buy SOMINEX over the counter.
I told her, “You don’t need a prescription, this pill on TV before you born" and that is when she asks me how old does she look. It is a treacherous, scorned, a crying out when a girl – as much she pretending to be a woman – is asking.
“25” I says and she says to me looking approvingly, “You are very smart!” A lot of people say that to me now, old as I am, and as much money been spent on me you would hope have to hope have to believe I’d be smart. As much accumulated life giving protein spending experiences one would hope so.
“Give me a minute", because that is all I needed to get her 2 SOMINEX pills. "2 minutes" I say, as I run from her, knowing it might take more than a minute to navigate through that homeless shelter of which I am rather familiar. Didn’t want this possible homeless girl to face another lie.
"Give me 2 minutes," Believe me I would have done this favor for a man as well.
I went into the shelter, hiding my excitement, giving someone else, a sort of pretty woman in need, especially, an asset that I had recently acquired, something I had gotten for myself, that was now coming to use for someone other than me. This is how I think, maybe I’m crazy! Maybe I should blame it on my upbringing.
I go into the shelter and carefully bring out my bag of the most important stuff I’m carrying around - my writing, the rest of it, including the SOMINEX. The SOMINEX ain’t all that important, but for this moment in time, it is pretty important to me - a Christmas present sort of, or an unintended New Years gift at least.
So I lug out this black gym bag, and it really shouldn’t be this heavy or full. And it is not that full or heavy anymore as you will see.
I drop it on the ground and unzipper a side end pocket and she asks again, kinda excitedly, is it “Ambien?”, and I tell her again “No, it isn’t.”.
I am a bit curious as to why she is so interested in that brand name, yet I assure her these 2 SOMINEX tabs will do the trick - I am thinking, sleeping in PENN Station.
Then she says, “Can I have four tabs?”
I am taking the silver encased cardboard mounted pills out of the box and says to her, “Of course you can have four tabs” but I caution her again, “Trust me all you are going to need is 2; why do you want four?”
She says to me, "The other two are for my girlfriend” and I am wondering if she is trying luring me to a threesome.
Cool I’m thinking as I take the pill aluminum encased card out of the small box ripping off four and giving it to her and ripping off another two pill tabs because all I’m thinking is that it's about time to do my 2 tabs, cause last night worked out damned good.
I’m doing some good in this fool ‘cruel world’ and then she says to me, “Let me pay you, take this money” as she pushes into my chest a crumpled bill in her tight fist,
I says to her, ”There is no way! No way! Take what I gave you! I do not want your money; you are ridiculous – it’s four tabs of SOMINEX (for God’s sake)!”
“Take it” she says to me, pushing punching her tight little fist holding a crumpled green bill that I can really barely see pushing it into my chest.
I push her punctuating hand with crumpled bill away, “No. I don’t want it. It is not necessary!” Goddamn pills cost pennies. Even if they were a dollar apiece there is no way I would be asking her or a homeless man for money from them. It is fucking ridiculous!
“Take it” she insists.
She says it with such pleading eyes, and you never can tell or scout homeless women, I’m not saying they are different than men, just the way I’ve been brought up, looking into those pleading eyes, feeling the push in my chest of that fist clenching bill. I relented - hell it seemed I would be doing her a favor by taking it, but I still could not see why she would insist I take that crumpled bill. She pushed her clenched fist into my chest again.
Ok, I took it and told her this bill would be waiting for her when and if we saw each other again God willing, this her money I holding for her– I ‘didn’t want, it, ridiculous! I took the bill from my chest and as I looked down, she disappeared.
"Son of a bitch” I thought, one strange girl looking at the crumpled bill now unfolding in my hand; it was a 20 dollar bill and I said to myself: “What the Fuck?” and 7 plain clothes man cops, monsters, pounced. I think—please – you tell me if I am wrong – “God Bless America! You fucking assholes!"
I screamed “Are you fucking with me??” Pulling at me, handcuffing me, ripping out my pockets, dumping all my shit on the dirty sidewalk, invading me. I had at least the peace of mind to screech to all of these mother fuckers the girl/bitch was long gone, “What are you arresting me for??!!”
The man carrying me to the van, my arms sturdily handcuffed in steel from behind, answering me quite officially and calmly, “Felonious Mopery”.
“Felonious Mopery” I screamed at him, “You have to be fucking with me, talking gibberish to a mark - Pig Latin!” I scream at him in handcuffs as we bounce around NYC streets.
“No” the young undercover “Officer”, and I do use that word facetiously - give me a fucking break! Un-uniformed terrorists is more like it!
“I am not fucking with you," he said,
"it is in the Penal Code Chapter 9” he states assuredly, attempting to give me some confidence that my arrest is within the limits of a free and fair and just society.
Do you, my brother and reader, really think so? Do the strong arms, fourteen of them and counting, really give you confidence that your tax dollars are justly spent?
And as I handcuffed, jostling radically in the paddy wagon to the hoosegow, reminded them, “When you badge laden club and gun allowed assholes make mistakes; it reverberates a lot farther than when some normal citizen makes a mistake."
One of those young cops, is, as usual, getting to like me, says to me – “Hey it is just like the butcher – there is always an asshole."
I told him he still does not get it, although the butcher example was good, given the affection with a deadly instrument. The police man is allowed to lie and cheat and do bodily harm in the effort and pursuit of good – it is in the Penal Code – in the Law. The butcher is not allowed to lie and cheat in order to find the proper truth – humph, maybe he ought to be allowed, given all his sharp allowable blades?
“What does it mean, if it is not gibberish?” Later in the week I asked uniformed cops on the street the meaning of “Felonious Mopery” and they affirmed, other than one cop knowingly smirking.
Well, I screamed at them handcuffed in the back of the van. I was so outraged and still am, all the way to the precinct. Offering me a smoke, I took it no hands I got available pulling with my angry lips on the but. They said/confided to me that I am funny and that I reminded them of Steve Martin. I told them that is an insult since the last time Steve Martin was any good was before he got married, which was probably before they were both born. But hey, that's the gulf between generations and social interests in the midst of a NYC latter New Years experience.
What comes to me is a serious consideration of an “American Fairness Doctrine” Oh my brothers: love of country? Love of tribe? Love of a peculiar fairness doctrine.
All things considered, I am still getting out alive, and relatively un-tortured, though the idea that this experience can and does exist is torturing enough for me. But hey - maybe I’m a pussy. I dare you though! Would you consider this an adequate allowable litmus test?? Is this how you would teach/prefer your children to laud the American police/justice system? Do you really think I am lucky enough to be telling you one obscure police/US justice story gone awry? Oh yes, I was released 27 hours later…no apology, no piece of paper explaining why they held me for 27 hours, no justification for the/my personal goods being ransacked and only getting half of my personal goods back. They took my fucking toothbrushes!!
During those 27 hours on the ‘inside’, I had to fend off an attack in the pen from one black man who I would guess was guilty of whatever he in the pen for. Regardless of the past, he was not going to be guilty of effectively assaulting me because he wanted my space and my peanut butter sandwich. Fuck him - "My Nigga!” I'm pretty good in jail now.
A young correction officer opens the gate telling me I’m getting out (scott free! No charges); I scream at him (not that loud maybe) that I want an apology; I deserve one! (I demand one!). He stops me – his hand on my chest, I am at the threshold – he says to me “I ain’t feeling the love; maybe you’re not ready yet to get out – maybe you need to stay in here a little while longer.”
Yeah I’m ready to get out I tell him, (sometimes I can turn into a pussy; for what? Freezing cold night air?) You see what happens next is the Correction Officer (I don’t mean to pontificate here for a few pages on the corrections needed here and now on ‘Corrections Officers’ (I mean how many Federal Government Reports do we need on this damn issue?)) grabs my arm and I keep my mouth shut as he leads me across the threshold and out.
The way you get out of these cages is you come out from behind where the judge is sitting pontificating in his courtroom – walking out into that court room with the corrections officer holding me tight (still handcuffed!) wanting so much to scream at that judge, for him to understand as he believing he is right then judging another nigger, so busy at his work (God’s work?) and I wanted to so much let him know what injustice his gang (him and his gang) did me tonight and how little do I know what more injustices and insults would be afforded to me by ‘We, the people’ – but yet I walked silently from the back to the front of the justice’s court aiming for the door as the young Correction Officer feeling the tension rising in my arm he was holding tight whispering in my ear: “You want to get out of here tonight right?”
He is escorting me towards the exit of the downtown 100 Center Street Central Booking, escorting me, out of the cages where much more unfortunate souls still lay. Most of them maybe actually probably did something criminal?! It does happen sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. He is whispering in my ear, “You want to get out of here, right?"
And yes I did; I held my tongue and walked silently out of that court room somewhat embarrassed (still embarrassed) at my lack of courage and voice.
I am so fucking pissed at this old dilapidated prison maze, “Right?” and, I, pussy, as sometimes I can be, nodding to him. He escorting me into the last room placing me in front of a big breasted black sergeant across the counter and her holier-than-thou and ‘I hold the keys to your heavenly of freedom’ attitude.
And let us not forget, oh my brothers, I am innocent through this whole process. Trust me, it is not that big a leap from the big breasted black woman and the system of ‘We, the People’ that she represents; she represents me.
The young CO escorting me to freedom, knows what I want. Although, sometimes, I have been and am still willing to give it all up just to yell in deaf ears, but not tonight. Whispering in my ear he says, “Do not offer anything, do not say anything, except yes and no”.
Ahh but this is just the beginning of a New Year's story. I am so lucky to have the experience of hanging out on a side street in front of a lowly homeless shelter or bower, if one prefers, to understand, or try to understand the beauty of freedom and mistakes and badges and collateral damage. Oh my brothers, I am a free white man in America, for others, who knows?
Let out left out in the middle of the night, here I am, way downtown, with no money, no nothing but my ‘freedom(?)’ and some light clothes on my back in the middle of a freezing winter – no legal place to go, especially given the idea of ‘Felonious Mopery’. I’m liking to rob somebody, or at least jump a turn style to get some warmth!
God Bless America and our felonious ways. I so want my fucking two SOMINEX pills back, YOU! ‘You, The People’, fucking thieves, took from me, a homeless fellow with nothing. Or I want the 20 dollars that fraudulent entrapping bitch forced on me - but that story is for another day regarding my efforts to retrieve my former possessions. This is a free capitalist place after all.
Upon telling this story to a few of my shelter colleagues, one scoffed at my stupidity/ignorance saying, "You should always say to anyone you don't know: Are you a cop?, because they have to answer you truthfully" And I'm thinking, Is that the only thing they have to do truthfully??!! Another one of my shelter colleagues advised against that approach, saying he was sure that is not a good idea. Of course, I am saying: "That is what I am going to do! Ask everyone who comes up to me – knowin’ them before or not, because they could have always been made ‘to turn’ since last I saw them, “Are you a cop?!"”
A few days later I had my opportunity. Talking to a ‘friend’ in front of a subway entrance, a young black man approaches me and asks me something. The first thing I say is: "Are you a cop?!"
He gets all mad and starts screaming at me, "How dare you call me a cop!! I'm a fucking gangster BLOOD!" I notice he is wearing quite a bit of red, “I'm going to turn you upside down you mother fucker!!" Yeah whatever I widen my stance, readying for an onslaught that would allow me to vent my rage, something, for some reason, has been building inside me these last few adventurous exciting days. My associate pulls me away. So, I guess it is chancy to ask someone ‘you a cop?’. My shelter friend is correct it seems after all.
Of course without these tender mercies of the NYPD, I would have never felt the striking, bracing feeling of ‘entrapment care’ of the ‘NYPD undercover ladies swarming the night’, or come across the astounding phrase of which this story is titled: Felonious Mopery.
Felonious Mopery (Continued)
Mopery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Mopery is a vague and obscure legal term, used in certain jurisdictions to mean “walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose”. Like loitering and vagrancy laws, it is sometimes used by law enforcement to detain individuals seen as “unsavory”, as the police believe they have prevented them from committing a clearer or more dangerous crime.
In 1970, in Columbus, Ohio, mopery was defined as “loitering while walking, or walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose”, and was used by police to harass counterculture “hippies” who were regarded as unsavory. Some of those arrested were aggressively prosecuted by public prosecutor Karl T. Chrastan.
The word “mopery” has been used in this sense by authors Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man), among others, for whom it is usually a comic accent. In Catch 22 (Joseph Heller, 1961), the mildly rebellious Cadet Clevinger is court-martialed by three angry officers, who accuse him of “breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart-guy, listening to classical music, and so on”.
In discussions of law, “mopery” is used as a placeholder name to mean some crime whose nature is not important to the problem at hand. This is sometimes expanded to “mopery with intent to creep”.
The word is based on verb “to mope,” which originally meant “to wander aimlessly”; it only later acquired the overtones of “bored and depressed”. The word “mope” appears to have first been used in the 16th century, and appears in Shakespeare's works.
[edit] Exposing oneself
The 1944 comic novel Low Man on a Totem Pole by H. Allen Smith contains this line: “The girls stop at nothing short of mopery to get in the papers, mopery being the old English misdemeanor of exposing oneself in front of a blind man on a public highway”.
This may have been the source for similar definitions in later works:
Raymond Chandler in his 1949 novel The Little Sister uses the term, making Marlowe, whilst in police custody, say of a murder victim (Orrin Quest): “If he'd lived long enough you'd have had him up for mopery”.
Woody Allen claims he was convicted of mopery in the 1969 film Take the Money and Run and claims it means “exposing yourself to a blind man”.
In the 1973 film The Mackintosh Man, a convict claims to be incarcerated for mopery, explaining that it means that he “exposed himself to a blind person”.
Mopery was explained in an episode of the 1975-85 television show Barney Miller as “exposing oneself to a statue or blind person”.
In Robert Bloch's short story The Unforgivable Sin, mopery is the titular indiscretion.
In the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, a suspect is arrested for mopery, defined as “exposing yourself to a blind person”.
Kurt Vonnegut further described mopery in the 1996 novel Timequake: “Mrs. Wilderson suspected plagiarism. Zoltan confessed, thinking it was a funny rather than serious thing he’d done. To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, ‘indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex’”.
Former mob boss John Gotti was known to make fun of some of his dimwitted mob associates.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Mopery is a vague and obscure legal term, used in certain jurisdictions to mean “walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose”. Like loitering and vagrancy laws, it is sometimes used by law enforcement to detain individuals seen as “unsavory”, as the police believe they have prevented them from committing a clearer or more dangerous crime.
In 1970, in Columbus, Ohio, mopery was defined as “loitering while walking, or walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose”, and was used by police to harass counterculture “hippies” who were regarded as unsavory. Some of those arrested were aggressively prosecuted by public prosecutor Karl T. Chrastan.
The word “mopery” has been used in this sense by authors Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man), among others, for whom it is usually a comic accent. In Catch 22 (Joseph Heller, 1961), the mildly rebellious Cadet Clevinger is court-martialed by three angry officers, who accuse him of “breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart-guy, listening to classical music, and so on”.
In discussions of law, “mopery” is used as a placeholder name to mean some crime whose nature is not important to the problem at hand. This is sometimes expanded to “mopery with intent to creep”.
The word is based on verb “to mope,” which originally meant “to wander aimlessly”; it only later acquired the overtones of “bored and depressed”. The word “mope” appears to have first been used in the 16th century, and appears in Shakespeare's works.
[edit] Exposing oneself
The 1944 comic novel Low Man on a Totem Pole by H. Allen Smith contains this line: “The girls stop at nothing short of mopery to get in the papers, mopery being the old English misdemeanor of exposing oneself in front of a blind man on a public highway”.
This may have been the source for similar definitions in later works:
Raymond Chandler in his 1949 novel The Little Sister uses the term, making Marlowe, whilst in police custody, say of a murder victim (Orrin Quest): “If he'd lived long enough you'd have had him up for mopery”.
Woody Allen claims he was convicted of mopery in the 1969 film Take the Money and Run and claims it means “exposing yourself to a blind man”.
In the 1973 film The Mackintosh Man, a convict claims to be incarcerated for mopery, explaining that it means that he “exposed himself to a blind person”.
Mopery was explained in an episode of the 1975-85 television show Barney Miller as “exposing oneself to a statue or blind person”.
In Robert Bloch's short story The Unforgivable Sin, mopery is the titular indiscretion.
In the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, a suspect is arrested for mopery, defined as “exposing yourself to a blind person”.
Kurt Vonnegut further described mopery in the 1996 novel Timequake: “Mrs. Wilderson suspected plagiarism. Zoltan confessed, thinking it was a funny rather than serious thing he’d done. To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, ‘indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex’”.
Former mob boss John Gotti was known to make fun of some of his dimwitted mob associates.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Felonious Mopery Concluded
Felonious Mopery Concluded (Where's My Money?)
The next morning I showed up at the precinct where the under-covers first brought me to be caged. Having been awake for 2 nights, spending 27 hours in jail and after a bit of vodka and writing Felonious Mopery, in an all night Korean internet cafe during my first night of freedom, I was a bit hung over. I entered the precinct rather disheveled and rumpled. I was tired and generally irritable over the last 2 days of events, who could blame me? The cops could, apparently - but fuck them.
I stride into the precinct waving my three pink slips, the noted property slips, and the desk sergeant perks up and says "Whatta got there?"
I say "No! Whatta you got? You got my shit and I want it back!"
Well that did not go over too well with the rank and file ‘unis’ gaggling in a corner readying to go out on the beat and they stopping their casual chuckling, which usually involves what perps they heard hooked the shift before (or whose bitch they fucked).
"Whoo whoo", the desk sergeant says "you goota settle down in here."
I'm thinking I'm ready to burn this place down, and I point over in the back to the entrance of the cages across the way and say, “You entrapped me, you put me in those cages in there! And you took my stuff! I'm coming here to get my stuff back!”
I would have loved to say "my shit; my fucking shit!" but fuck that - I'm a coward - right? And then, one of those unis in the corner perks up and says "Maybe you ain't ready to come out of that cage yet."
What? He figuring he be getting his first collar early today? I’d give ‘em a good reason now I’m thinking.
I told ‘em, I told them all, “Your damn undercovers entrapped me for nothing and I'm pissed off as hell and I want an apology!”
And one of the unis says, "You must have done something wrong, and thank you for doing that 'cause that keep us in business’."
The same mother fucking attitude the CO’s have in jail.
And I told ‘em "You don't get it, what a cancer this attitude is on society.”
I could tell the air is getting a bit electrified and for some reason the desk sergeant decides to intervene, slow things down, maybe that's why he's the sergeant and he says to me, “Those undercovers are not part of this precinct. They operate totally on their own and just pick the nearest precinct to house their collars while they go back out trolling for the next bad person until their shift ends and they cart the whole unruly mess downtown to Central Booking.”
I told him, in a very frustrated manner, “They totally fucked up” and he says he understands, and I told him it was an absolute waste of our tax dollars and so corrupt.
He says he totally understands while the gaggle of uni's snickered, can you believe it! Fuck them!!
And the sergeant says he knows it’s corrupt and that's the way it is and they have to make their numbers and so sometimes (a lot of times?) it’s just a game so they look like their doing something and I am astounded; I said,
"But it is so fucking corrupt!"
And he says, "Yeah, but that's the way it is."
And I said, "You OK with that?"
And he says, “What were you arrested for?”
And I say, “Felonious Mopery" and he smiles and says there is no such thing and I says those two cops assured me there was, in Section 9. And he says no, and do I have any paperwork, - my arrest record. I said I ain’t got nothing they didn't give me nothing and then he said to give him my pink property slips.
He takes them, and returns with two clear plastic bags with all my stuff - well half my stuff - and he says to sign these two slips authenticating all my shit has been returned. I'm thinking I can already see there isn't but half the shit I used to have in those two plastic bags. But fuck it - what am I going to do, argue with him that I had stuff in there, that is no longer there - my tooth brushes for God's sake! Yeah my tooth brushes.
Anyway fuck it, right? "Where's my money?"
"Oh" he says, “We don't have your money."
I said "What do you mean, you don't have my money, I need my money! You took my money!"
He said we don't keep the money here. I have to go downtown to get my money at the Property Room.”
I said "You have got to be shitting me; I need my money!”
And what, no metro card to give me to get downtown on this cold winter day and me in a light shirt to get my money that you - ok - not you - some - some of your more nefarious corrupt colleagues took?!
Well no, no Metro Card given me. But you know that - right? You are good with it, right? I mean unless it happens to you which it never will happen to you – right; the cop is, the cops are your next door neighbor, neighbors after all? So I took what I could get and somewhat thankful not putting me back in those bright cages, for this time surely they surely would have good reason all ganging up on me (I would have given them one).
OK, so now I have to make my way back 2 miles downtown to the city's Property Room, which is hundreds and hundreds of yards from where they caged me in Central Booking.
Am I insulted enough? Have they insulted me enough – have you? Do I start to add this time and expense that I am enduring in the aftermath of an entrapment?
When I finally found the building which is not as easy as I thinking would be; as large as the building is and as long the line snaking in front; apparently other people been able to find the building ‘cause the line curls way outside and I thanked God for my few blessings today as I entering on the end. I thanked God it wasn't raining because I could easily see I would be otherwise standing for quite sometime in the rain - it was way too cold for rain though - it would have to be snow, snowing, blowing snow.
Eventually, I made my way to the metal detector and the conveyor package screener and was pointed to another large building across an open courtyard and stopped at another large round counter by two police - a man and a woman sitting in the middle of a circular island. I showed him my pink property form - he took it and looked at it and told me I couldn't pick up my money, that I needed a release form from the DA's office.
I told them - I pleaded with them, really, that Desk Sergeant at the precinct where they first illegally caged me, told me I must come here to get my money!
Does a cop ever tell the truth ever anymore??!
He, nor the woman cop seems to care a wit. He tells me I would have to go to the DA's Office and get a release form.
"Where’s that Office?"
"100 Centre Street."
Where Central Booking is; I am really not a fan of that place.
Wary now, asking him what the hours of the DA's Office are and now the woman pipes up, "They are on flex time - they are in and out all the time."
"You mean", I said "if I went there right now they might not be there to give me this release form? And I would have to wait?"
She seemed to enjoy this "Yep." The other cop handed me back the/my pink slip.
"For how long would I have to wait?" I asked. She shrugged her shoulders.
I was worried about something else now,
"How long do I have to get my money back before they confiscate it completely, forever?”
"It's on the back of the sheet" she says.
I turn over the pink paper. The size of the type is miniscule as on the very bottom of a prescription wrapping. In this dim lobby light printed against a flimsy, thin, pink sheet, so flimsy thin, the printing from the other side bleeding through, these letters so compactly printed instructions, covering the entire page in dim, lobby light, might as well be Chinese.
Somewhere in that dim mess of characters, is the information I need.
“I can’t read this” frustrated.
“You can read it” she says.
“I can’t read it – it’s too much, so much information here, I just want to know how much time I have to pick up my money; a week? Five business days?”
“You can read it, (I’m not going to tell you).” she says.
Why does a woman cop have to be such assholes, always trying to show they can be/are bigger assholes than their real bigger cop buddies?
“It is impossible to read here.” I say.
The policeman takes the sheet back glancing at the back and says, “You got 120 days.”
The woman cop pipes in again, “And you got a lot longer than that if it’s money; they’ll keep it almost forever.”
So the bitch does know. I couldn't go on anymore that day, dealing with another building and another search and another group of people who treated this outrage as just another day at the office - just acceptable business as usual with what seems to me, nor care or even empathy - in fact just the opposite it apparent - and that quip I hearing earlier that morning still reverberating in me - thanks to me and my plight, they keep their jobs, they have jobs, thanks to me, and as far as they are concerned, the system, and me, should keep churning the good/bad work.
Straight Assholes
I decided to make my way back to the shelter and regroup, although this shelter for the homeless, the final safe refuge for me and others, I’m not feeling it, feeling quite a bit differently. I had a sneaking suspicion, and later verified, when the under-covers need some collars, good or not, who cares, they go to the shelters and mine and troll and dig; entrap victims. They can always count on the shelter system to deliver and make no noise about it. Should I hug my beautiful cops – kiss ‘em on your dime or mine and scream “I love them!”?
I wonder how many shakedowns and collars made, at or very near, these shelters turn in the end to be ‘good’ collars? Who really cares, right? We got bigger fish to fry. Hell, I got no fish and no money - yet. Where's my money?
The next morning, I go back to 100 Centre Street, the building where the DA’s Office is. I get there early since I do not want to wait in the back of another line. This is the same building where those under-covers first brought me bound the other night in tight steel hand cuffs; they brought me here to the criminal entrance; and now I am standing in front of the ‘Public Entrance’.
That sign brings to mind a very large mural I had seen, a long time ago, in the entrance of a Torrance California court house entitled ‘Shrine to Freedom’. The point of the mural seemed to be a sort of realistic, you know California and their painters, right(?); children jostling about, a teacher pointing (really she has no idea of the killing fields); the wild wild west and all that inspiration of how this country created and still creating, and how important a role ‘Justice’ plays? You know? Right?
This giant mural covering almost the entire building lobby wall; kind of inspiring in a ‘propagandaish (propagandisical)’ kind of way, with Washington crossing the Delaware in garish colors, and the forever scales of justice, and Army men rushing a shore, and a judge, why are they never ever smiling, or laughing, always a mystery to me; & a gavel punching down. I couldn’t help to wonder of the niggers and spics stuffed in grimy cages, the basements full of that building, still in some idea of long ago considered innocent, or this one, or another one and the reluctance or downright rebellious jurors sitting on cracked broken plastic cafeteria chairs really not wanting to be here or there, and the fat cat judges sitting in plush chairs up above with lawyers/prosecutors all, kick’n back in plush chambers puffing on fat Havana stogies, those days you can still smoke; in some of these rooms you probably still, making back room deals and I couldn’t help to chuckle - ‘Shrine to Freedom’.
Anyway, I get to the Public Entrance early that morning, at 7:30 AM and am told by the guard I would not be allowed in the building until 8 o’clock. I went across the street to a small park and fed the pigeons with crumbs in my pockets.
At 8 o’clock I am the first into the building – went though the metal detectors and conveyor package scanner, emptying all my pockets again. This time I gets up to the 7th Floor where I am directed quite easily. Everywhere I go is empty of people, there is a sort of excitement and anticipation that this would go quickly and smoothly, but as I get off the elevator at the 7th floor and crossing the short elevator lobby I am stopped at a gate by an Indian looking guard who tells me I can not enter this area.
I see ahead of me long hallways, shadowy mazes and warrens of offices; I am pretty sure all these warrens, or at least one, holding a key to me, to my getting my hands on my money, but not until 9 o’clock this short dark Indian tells me. I have to wait, another hour, no wonder this place empty.
Luckily, someone had seen fit to locate 2 wooden benches in this elevator lobby, here on the 7th floor; something you rarely see. The morning sun is streaming in from the east; through large cleaned polished windows and I am drawn to the sun, the shining sun streaming in and she is not fucking with me as she can with her glare, it is perfect, and I am looking out warming myself, looking out, looking out, relaxing surprisingly, in this building on my quest to get my money in this gross grody building, looking out at it all, all the beauty, all this beautiful, warming myself in these cold corridors, and sure as I know cold cold corridors up ahead of me I would be having to pass through next to get my money, but at this moment, this instant, I am drawn to a streaming sun God giving warmth. Looking below out this clean almost invisible window in this exquisitely unexpected not quite sure real feeling of relaxation feeling without anyone coming on me or anticipation of what to be or what tithe to pay; staring now with no hesitation or wariness looking out this clean clear window feeling warm and for a moment relaxed looking out the clean window, seeing watching below in silence Chinese women practicing their morning Tai Chi in a park and, for a moment, I actually feeling good and relaxed and it is warm in this elevator lobby with the sun streaming in and I am alone – which is very rare to be given such a quiet lonely situation (well you might always feel lonely) in the shelter system and the sun shining in on me and I sitting down relaxing.
About five to 9 I had to go to the bathroom and decided, on a whim, to ask the guard if there is a bathroom on this floor. He checked the time – just a few minutes left. I am still all alone here, he says he will take my ID and start filling out the paperwork to let me in, and I can go down the hall to go to the bathroom.
When I come back he points me way down to the other end of the hall and I arrive at a thick scratched plexiglass window with holes drilled through the thick plastic at about mouth level, someone else’s mouth, a bit shorter than me. The sign on the wall clearly states office open 9 AM- 5 PM and I sure it after 9 AM.
Inside I can see 3 grey desks and grey chairs formed in a ‘U’ shape with high grey file cabinets behind the desks, at least six feet high, blocking any vision to the larger office space within this cozy ‘U’, three desks and chairs are located with tall grey file walls protecting concealing a larger space.
On the other side of this scratched plexiglass, her fat black ass sitting firmly on a chair directly across from me languidly picking greasy McDonalds morning home fry bits from a white plastic dish and casually talking on the phone. She turns away sideways, leaning back on her chair. Surely, she can see me.
I consider tapping on the window, waiting a few minutes, thinking maybe I wrong, maybe she can’t see me; but no I’m thinking, just another angry black nigger bitch on my dime. As I getting the courage, I deciding against my anger; What if she becomes insulted at my tentative soft knocking and turns her back and cuts me off for another half hour, no matter my yelling and her calling security, and waiting for a line to build behind; I sure.
I stop and decide to wait as I watching her languidly eating and talking. What is happening to me? I go from an outraged citizen to a meek mouse afraid to tap on a window for the services – my services – clearly due me – I am a Free White Man In America!! Fuck it! I throw caution to the wind and tap on the window a bit harder than I first considered. She doesn’t turn at all and yells over the wall of the grey file cabinets. So that’s what it takes in here.
I waited, somewhat satisfied, I thought I may be recognized as a waiting customer, although, I couldn’t be sure, since I could not hear what she yelled.
As a few minutes passes and nothing happening and as I considering my next move, wondering to take a rash chance a man in a suit rounded the corner of the file cabinets and looking at me through the scratched plexiglass. I angrily pushed the pink paper through the bottom slot of the plexiglass and explained what happened to me and that I wanted an apology and I wanted my four SOMINEX pills back or failing that, the $20 that the fraudulent bitch had given me. He said neither is possible – or at least extremely doubtful or rather unlikely.
I said “They are thieves!” And he said it police policy not to return blah, blah, blah,
my stolen toothbrushes did not even enter my mind,
maybe it is the drug addict in me.
I said “I don’t give a shit about ‘police policy’. It is a policy of thieves! They’re thieves!”
And the guy turned to me and said “Settle down.”
He seemed to at least get the idea, as the desk sergeant a few days earlier, was it days(?), seemed to get the idea. Then a voice to my left says
“You’re right.”
I turned and I am looking at a small man – a Jewish lawyer I figure, who is pushing official looking papers through a nearby thick plexiglass window, with the sign “Court Filings”.
“You are right”, he says to me again.
“They fucking entrapped me!”, I said, “And stole my shit! Giving me some bullshit about ‘Felonious Mopery.’”
“I know.” he says smiling.
“I want my stuff back! And an apology!”
“You can spend thousands of dollars and sue them and probably get nothing, no broken bones, right?”
No, I nodded.
“Or, you can bring them to Small Claims Court.”
“Yeah! That’s what I am thinking!”
He is turning to leave now,
“You may win,” he says, “depending on the judge and vagaries of justice.”
“But -”, he says,
”There is quite a leap between getting a judgment and collecting.”
and with that, he turns, walking away. Over his shoulder, he says to me,
“Bring them to Small Claims Court, at least you will make the City pay for a lawyer they will have to put there for your case. You’re right, they are thieves.”
And I am thinking ‘Is this what it has come to?’ Spend more of my/our tax money to put an uncaring NYC lawyer sent from an uncaring, ‘We, The People’ system? Ah ‘Fuck it’ I said to myself.
The guy behind the thick plexiglass shield says “Here’s your paper.” Pushing my pink slip and another piece of paper under the window through the slot.
“The Release Letter”, he says.
I took the papers.
“You want a letter for the DA saying no charges were brought?”
I said “Why the hell would I need that for?”
He said “I don’t know what is going on in your life.”
And I thought about what is going on in my life and I couldn’t imagine why I would need more paper, but the hell with it – the City giving me something for free in this process – I said
“OK.”
He left me for a few minutes, as I stood alone in this quiet empty hall. He came back with two 2 page letters of the DA’s statement of bringing no charges and how my photos and fingerprints would be destroyed and my file would be sealed.
There was no mention of the DNA they took from me in that same building underground, why is that? Should I bring an additional theft to Small Claims Court? Embossed, raised, official DA stamps are on all the pages.
So I left that day; now it was time to make another assault/approach on the building that houses the Property Room and my money, really, pretty much the only money I have; I’m homeless – remember?.
I found my way back through the maze of downtown city blocks and tall official looking buildings and get on the back of a long snaking line I had been the day before and again thanking God for few blessings I can count – like it wasn’t pouring rain on me, it was too cold to rain, and I finally got to the metal detector and the conveyor package scanner.
I had to take off almost everything. Maybe the system is especially sensitive that day or maybe my skin is electrified with thoughts of actually getting my hands – actually getting my hands on my money. I would have stripped naked and bent over, feeling so close to my money.
I collected my stuff, got dressed, making my way to that big round counter with the two cops. I pull out my pink slip and my DA’s Release Letter and the cop looks at the papers skeptically, he looks at me, and demands my ID again and looking at all the papers and forms and pictures and stamps and finally, stubbornly, it seems, waves me through, pointing to a stairwell I should take to the bottom; seems about right.
I found my way to the basement Property Room and the essential line – except in this room there are two lines. One is a line of undercover cops lounging around on benches and chairs with plastic crates filled with personal goods, their collar’s goods, taken from people like me. I watched them joking about one collar or another and hooking this or that skel or talking about who shot some perp last night.
On this other line are people like me picking, retrieving their stuff. Can’t vouch for the other people on my line as to whether their shit taken illegally or legally or according to policy, police policy, but I can certainly vouch for me and at least a few I sure on that other line and the fact that our line moving a hell of a lot slower than the under-cover’s line right next to me who would, from time to time glance at us - at me – disdainfully. Because sure as hell I staring – boring – my eyes in outrage at them.
I had to start making an effective effort to calm myself since I could see I was about to be in this rather excruciating excitable environment for quite a time. There weren’t any seats or benches for my line to sit on. Why is that? And I am getting mad. Pull a stunt?
Why is that do you think? Standing, watching under-covers sit and joke pulling at my craw as we people inching along every few minutes.
You see, there are only a few clerks behind the scratched thick plexiglass panels to serve all these people from various walks of life, and society on the two lines and the clerks always having to decide how to divvy their time between the cops and us and you know how these decisions go.
So I slowly winding my way around this line. I had plenty of time to read the signs pasted all up and down the walls and one sign catching my attention: ‘To get any property you must have photo ID and proof of address’. This striking me because until this point my photo ID – my Passport, my identification (if you can call it that) serving me admirably through all this rather gruesome process of living life.
One of the beauties of the passport and one quite apropos to my condition is that it contains no address and since I am homeless, it is accurate – but now I am having troubling thoughts – a rumbling in my body a grumbling in my empty stomach – could it be? I would be this close – and not getting my money? Ah no, pushing that thought out of my mind – there would be no way – is no way - impossible – I am finally at the window.
I pushed the pink slip under the slot at the bottom of the thick plexiglass – then the DA’s Release Letter. She looks at the papers and my passport and then she says “You need proof of address.” I said I am homeless and she shakes her head and she says I have to bring back proof of address as she pushes the mess back at me under the thick plexiglass, through the slot, and for a moment I freeze – I can feel my skin getting icy and a thought hits me,
“Wait – wait!”
saying bending down rummaging through my bag recollecting those embossed papers the DA issued about me being – about him not pressing charges and the guy in the suit saying to me, “I don’t know what is going on in your life (and whether I would need such a letter)” and I seem to remember there is an address on those embossed pages.
I grabbed the papers and opening to the 2nd page there is an address – it the shelter address – the fucking cops – the under covers, must have assumed it where I come from and I thanked God, and pushed the whole mess back at her. There is no way she can argue with all these embossed seals; much as she might/liked.
A few minutes later holding a check in my hands for $172.00! I quickly bounding up the stairs leaving all those sad sacks behind and as I hit the turn style arm to exit, pushing with my leg, I banged it so hard I still have a bruise. I staggered back, rubbing my thigh – the fucking turn styles are locked, preventing you or even me from leaving before they inspect you or even me- again! – shit – this place is surely hell.
OK, a few moments later, I am outside, still rubbing my thigh, it hurt like hell, with a bruise so big with a check in my hand. It an official NYC check, drawn on Chase Bank. There are plenty downtown in Chinatown and I finding one; now waiting expectantly on another line and finally signing the check and pushing my passport & the check to the teller in a slot under another plexiglass shield – a lot less scratchier, and the teller types some stuff on a key board and says she can not cash it.
I say in disbelief, “What do you mean? It is a NYC check?”
“I can’t cash it.” She calls over the supervisor.
The woman speaks to me through the thick plexiglass in heavy Russian accent, looking at the computer screen, she says, “I can’t cash this and I can’t over ride this, they won’t let me. You have to put this into your checking account.”
But I am homeless, I said to myself – I don’t have a checking account, no bank account – I’m home -, then everything went blank.
Epilogue
You know sometimes I think, what if I had shiny gold coins in my pockets – very old – very valuable coins, that an eccentric well dressed old man had given me when I was begging on Park Avenue. You know the kind of coins that sometimes show up in a Salvation Army bucket and everyone gets excited and the TV cameras come in fawning over the valuable/expensive coins and the anonymous donor,
“Where is he??”
What if those coins are in my pocket when I entrapped? Those beautiful gold coins given lovingly by that eccentric old man – perhaps as a cosmic joke? Would I have gotten those coins returned to me as my special property or just a City check for their apparent face value – a check I could not cash?
Then I get to thinking about property rights and rule of law and police policy and shrine to freedom and then my mind wanders away thinking about my God’s green acre and getting warm in the morning sun.
The next morning I showed up at the precinct where the under-covers first brought me to be caged. Having been awake for 2 nights, spending 27 hours in jail and after a bit of vodka and writing Felonious Mopery, in an all night Korean internet cafe during my first night of freedom, I was a bit hung over. I entered the precinct rather disheveled and rumpled. I was tired and generally irritable over the last 2 days of events, who could blame me? The cops could, apparently - but fuck them.
I stride into the precinct waving my three pink slips, the noted property slips, and the desk sergeant perks up and says "Whatta got there?"
I say "No! Whatta you got? You got my shit and I want it back!"
Well that did not go over too well with the rank and file ‘unis’ gaggling in a corner readying to go out on the beat and they stopping their casual chuckling, which usually involves what perps they heard hooked the shift before (or whose bitch they fucked).
"Whoo whoo", the desk sergeant says "you goota settle down in here."
I'm thinking I'm ready to burn this place down, and I point over in the back to the entrance of the cages across the way and say, “You entrapped me, you put me in those cages in there! And you took my stuff! I'm coming here to get my stuff back!”
I would have loved to say "my shit; my fucking shit!" but fuck that - I'm a coward - right? And then, one of those unis in the corner perks up and says "Maybe you ain't ready to come out of that cage yet."
What? He figuring he be getting his first collar early today? I’d give ‘em a good reason now I’m thinking.
I told ‘em, I told them all, “Your damn undercovers entrapped me for nothing and I'm pissed off as hell and I want an apology!”
And one of the unis says, "You must have done something wrong, and thank you for doing that 'cause that keep us in business’."
The same mother fucking attitude the CO’s have in jail.
And I told ‘em "You don't get it, what a cancer this attitude is on society.”
I could tell the air is getting a bit electrified and for some reason the desk sergeant decides to intervene, slow things down, maybe that's why he's the sergeant and he says to me, “Those undercovers are not part of this precinct. They operate totally on their own and just pick the nearest precinct to house their collars while they go back out trolling for the next bad person until their shift ends and they cart the whole unruly mess downtown to Central Booking.”
I told him, in a very frustrated manner, “They totally fucked up” and he says he understands, and I told him it was an absolute waste of our tax dollars and so corrupt.
He says he totally understands while the gaggle of uni's snickered, can you believe it! Fuck them!!
And the sergeant says he knows it’s corrupt and that's the way it is and they have to make their numbers and so sometimes (a lot of times?) it’s just a game so they look like their doing something and I am astounded; I said,
"But it is so fucking corrupt!"
And he says, "Yeah, but that's the way it is."
And I said, "You OK with that?"
And he says, “What were you arrested for?”
And I say, “Felonious Mopery" and he smiles and says there is no such thing and I says those two cops assured me there was, in Section 9. And he says no, and do I have any paperwork, - my arrest record. I said I ain’t got nothing they didn't give me nothing and then he said to give him my pink property slips.
He takes them, and returns with two clear plastic bags with all my stuff - well half my stuff - and he says to sign these two slips authenticating all my shit has been returned. I'm thinking I can already see there isn't but half the shit I used to have in those two plastic bags. But fuck it - what am I going to do, argue with him that I had stuff in there, that is no longer there - my tooth brushes for God's sake! Yeah my tooth brushes.
Anyway fuck it, right? "Where's my money?"
"Oh" he says, “We don't have your money."
I said "What do you mean, you don't have my money, I need my money! You took my money!"
He said we don't keep the money here. I have to go downtown to get my money at the Property Room.”
I said "You have got to be shitting me; I need my money!”
And what, no metro card to give me to get downtown on this cold winter day and me in a light shirt to get my money that you - ok - not you - some - some of your more nefarious corrupt colleagues took?!
Well no, no Metro Card given me. But you know that - right? You are good with it, right? I mean unless it happens to you which it never will happen to you – right; the cop is, the cops are your next door neighbor, neighbors after all? So I took what I could get and somewhat thankful not putting me back in those bright cages, for this time surely they surely would have good reason all ganging up on me (I would have given them one).
OK, so now I have to make my way back 2 miles downtown to the city's Property Room, which is hundreds and hundreds of yards from where they caged me in Central Booking.
Am I insulted enough? Have they insulted me enough – have you? Do I start to add this time and expense that I am enduring in the aftermath of an entrapment?
When I finally found the building which is not as easy as I thinking would be; as large as the building is and as long the line snaking in front; apparently other people been able to find the building ‘cause the line curls way outside and I thanked God for my few blessings today as I entering on the end. I thanked God it wasn't raining because I could easily see I would be otherwise standing for quite sometime in the rain - it was way too cold for rain though - it would have to be snow, snowing, blowing snow.
Eventually, I made my way to the metal detector and the conveyor package screener and was pointed to another large building across an open courtyard and stopped at another large round counter by two police - a man and a woman sitting in the middle of a circular island. I showed him my pink property form - he took it and looked at it and told me I couldn't pick up my money, that I needed a release form from the DA's office.
I told them - I pleaded with them, really, that Desk Sergeant at the precinct where they first illegally caged me, told me I must come here to get my money!
Does a cop ever tell the truth ever anymore??!
He, nor the woman cop seems to care a wit. He tells me I would have to go to the DA's Office and get a release form.
"Where’s that Office?"
"100 Centre Street."
Where Central Booking is; I am really not a fan of that place.
Wary now, asking him what the hours of the DA's Office are and now the woman pipes up, "They are on flex time - they are in and out all the time."
"You mean", I said "if I went there right now they might not be there to give me this release form? And I would have to wait?"
She seemed to enjoy this "Yep." The other cop handed me back the/my pink slip.
"For how long would I have to wait?" I asked. She shrugged her shoulders.
I was worried about something else now,
"How long do I have to get my money back before they confiscate it completely, forever?”
"It's on the back of the sheet" she says.
I turn over the pink paper. The size of the type is miniscule as on the very bottom of a prescription wrapping. In this dim lobby light printed against a flimsy, thin, pink sheet, so flimsy thin, the printing from the other side bleeding through, these letters so compactly printed instructions, covering the entire page in dim, lobby light, might as well be Chinese.
Somewhere in that dim mess of characters, is the information I need.
“I can’t read this” frustrated.
“You can read it” she says.
“I can’t read it – it’s too much, so much information here, I just want to know how much time I have to pick up my money; a week? Five business days?”
“You can read it, (I’m not going to tell you).” she says.
Why does a woman cop have to be such assholes, always trying to show they can be/are bigger assholes than their real bigger cop buddies?
“It is impossible to read here.” I say.
The policeman takes the sheet back glancing at the back and says, “You got 120 days.”
The woman cop pipes in again, “And you got a lot longer than that if it’s money; they’ll keep it almost forever.”
So the bitch does know. I couldn't go on anymore that day, dealing with another building and another search and another group of people who treated this outrage as just another day at the office - just acceptable business as usual with what seems to me, nor care or even empathy - in fact just the opposite it apparent - and that quip I hearing earlier that morning still reverberating in me - thanks to me and my plight, they keep their jobs, they have jobs, thanks to me, and as far as they are concerned, the system, and me, should keep churning the good/bad work.
Straight Assholes
I decided to make my way back to the shelter and regroup, although this shelter for the homeless, the final safe refuge for me and others, I’m not feeling it, feeling quite a bit differently. I had a sneaking suspicion, and later verified, when the under-covers need some collars, good or not, who cares, they go to the shelters and mine and troll and dig; entrap victims. They can always count on the shelter system to deliver and make no noise about it. Should I hug my beautiful cops – kiss ‘em on your dime or mine and scream “I love them!”?
I wonder how many shakedowns and collars made, at or very near, these shelters turn in the end to be ‘good’ collars? Who really cares, right? We got bigger fish to fry. Hell, I got no fish and no money - yet. Where's my money?
The next morning, I go back to 100 Centre Street, the building where the DA’s Office is. I get there early since I do not want to wait in the back of another line. This is the same building where those under-covers first brought me bound the other night in tight steel hand cuffs; they brought me here to the criminal entrance; and now I am standing in front of the ‘Public Entrance’.
That sign brings to mind a very large mural I had seen, a long time ago, in the entrance of a Torrance California court house entitled ‘Shrine to Freedom’. The point of the mural seemed to be a sort of realistic, you know California and their painters, right(?); children jostling about, a teacher pointing (really she has no idea of the killing fields); the wild wild west and all that inspiration of how this country created and still creating, and how important a role ‘Justice’ plays? You know? Right?
This giant mural covering almost the entire building lobby wall; kind of inspiring in a ‘propagandaish (propagandisical)’ kind of way, with Washington crossing the Delaware in garish colors, and the forever scales of justice, and Army men rushing a shore, and a judge, why are they never ever smiling, or laughing, always a mystery to me; & a gavel punching down. I couldn’t help to wonder of the niggers and spics stuffed in grimy cages, the basements full of that building, still in some idea of long ago considered innocent, or this one, or another one and the reluctance or downright rebellious jurors sitting on cracked broken plastic cafeteria chairs really not wanting to be here or there, and the fat cat judges sitting in plush chairs up above with lawyers/prosecutors all, kick’n back in plush chambers puffing on fat Havana stogies, those days you can still smoke; in some of these rooms you probably still, making back room deals and I couldn’t help to chuckle - ‘Shrine to Freedom’.
Anyway, I get to the Public Entrance early that morning, at 7:30 AM and am told by the guard I would not be allowed in the building until 8 o’clock. I went across the street to a small park and fed the pigeons with crumbs in my pockets.
At 8 o’clock I am the first into the building – went though the metal detectors and conveyor package scanner, emptying all my pockets again. This time I gets up to the 7th Floor where I am directed quite easily. Everywhere I go is empty of people, there is a sort of excitement and anticipation that this would go quickly and smoothly, but as I get off the elevator at the 7th floor and crossing the short elevator lobby I am stopped at a gate by an Indian looking guard who tells me I can not enter this area.
I see ahead of me long hallways, shadowy mazes and warrens of offices; I am pretty sure all these warrens, or at least one, holding a key to me, to my getting my hands on my money, but not until 9 o’clock this short dark Indian tells me. I have to wait, another hour, no wonder this place empty.
Luckily, someone had seen fit to locate 2 wooden benches in this elevator lobby, here on the 7th floor; something you rarely see. The morning sun is streaming in from the east; through large cleaned polished windows and I am drawn to the sun, the shining sun streaming in and she is not fucking with me as she can with her glare, it is perfect, and I am looking out warming myself, looking out, looking out, relaxing surprisingly, in this building on my quest to get my money in this gross grody building, looking out at it all, all the beauty, all this beautiful, warming myself in these cold corridors, and sure as I know cold cold corridors up ahead of me I would be having to pass through next to get my money, but at this moment, this instant, I am drawn to a streaming sun God giving warmth. Looking below out this clean almost invisible window in this exquisitely unexpected not quite sure real feeling of relaxation feeling without anyone coming on me or anticipation of what to be or what tithe to pay; staring now with no hesitation or wariness looking out this clean clear window feeling warm and for a moment relaxed looking out the clean window, seeing watching below in silence Chinese women practicing their morning Tai Chi in a park and, for a moment, I actually feeling good and relaxed and it is warm in this elevator lobby with the sun streaming in and I am alone – which is very rare to be given such a quiet lonely situation (well you might always feel lonely) in the shelter system and the sun shining in on me and I sitting down relaxing.
About five to 9 I had to go to the bathroom and decided, on a whim, to ask the guard if there is a bathroom on this floor. He checked the time – just a few minutes left. I am still all alone here, he says he will take my ID and start filling out the paperwork to let me in, and I can go down the hall to go to the bathroom.
When I come back he points me way down to the other end of the hall and I arrive at a thick scratched plexiglass window with holes drilled through the thick plastic at about mouth level, someone else’s mouth, a bit shorter than me. The sign on the wall clearly states office open 9 AM- 5 PM and I sure it after 9 AM.
Inside I can see 3 grey desks and grey chairs formed in a ‘U’ shape with high grey file cabinets behind the desks, at least six feet high, blocking any vision to the larger office space within this cozy ‘U’, three desks and chairs are located with tall grey file walls protecting concealing a larger space.
On the other side of this scratched plexiglass, her fat black ass sitting firmly on a chair directly across from me languidly picking greasy McDonalds morning home fry bits from a white plastic dish and casually talking on the phone. She turns away sideways, leaning back on her chair. Surely, she can see me.
I consider tapping on the window, waiting a few minutes, thinking maybe I wrong, maybe she can’t see me; but no I’m thinking, just another angry black nigger bitch on my dime. As I getting the courage, I deciding against my anger; What if she becomes insulted at my tentative soft knocking and turns her back and cuts me off for another half hour, no matter my yelling and her calling security, and waiting for a line to build behind; I sure.
I stop and decide to wait as I watching her languidly eating and talking. What is happening to me? I go from an outraged citizen to a meek mouse afraid to tap on a window for the services – my services – clearly due me – I am a Free White Man In America!! Fuck it! I throw caution to the wind and tap on the window a bit harder than I first considered. She doesn’t turn at all and yells over the wall of the grey file cabinets. So that’s what it takes in here.
I waited, somewhat satisfied, I thought I may be recognized as a waiting customer, although, I couldn’t be sure, since I could not hear what she yelled.
As a few minutes passes and nothing happening and as I considering my next move, wondering to take a rash chance a man in a suit rounded the corner of the file cabinets and looking at me through the scratched plexiglass. I angrily pushed the pink paper through the bottom slot of the plexiglass and explained what happened to me and that I wanted an apology and I wanted my four SOMINEX pills back or failing that, the $20 that the fraudulent bitch had given me. He said neither is possible – or at least extremely doubtful or rather unlikely.
I said “They are thieves!” And he said it police policy not to return blah, blah, blah,
my stolen toothbrushes did not even enter my mind,
maybe it is the drug addict in me.
I said “I don’t give a shit about ‘police policy’. It is a policy of thieves! They’re thieves!”
And the guy turned to me and said “Settle down.”
He seemed to at least get the idea, as the desk sergeant a few days earlier, was it days(?), seemed to get the idea. Then a voice to my left says
“You’re right.”
I turned and I am looking at a small man – a Jewish lawyer I figure, who is pushing official looking papers through a nearby thick plexiglass window, with the sign “Court Filings”.
“You are right”, he says to me again.
“They fucking entrapped me!”, I said, “And stole my shit! Giving me some bullshit about ‘Felonious Mopery.’”
“I know.” he says smiling.
“I want my stuff back! And an apology!”
“You can spend thousands of dollars and sue them and probably get nothing, no broken bones, right?”
No, I nodded.
“Or, you can bring them to Small Claims Court.”
“Yeah! That’s what I am thinking!”
He is turning to leave now,
“You may win,” he says, “depending on the judge and vagaries of justice.”
“But -”, he says,
”There is quite a leap between getting a judgment and collecting.”
and with that, he turns, walking away. Over his shoulder, he says to me,
“Bring them to Small Claims Court, at least you will make the City pay for a lawyer they will have to put there for your case. You’re right, they are thieves.”
And I am thinking ‘Is this what it has come to?’ Spend more of my/our tax money to put an uncaring NYC lawyer sent from an uncaring, ‘We, The People’ system? Ah ‘Fuck it’ I said to myself.
The guy behind the thick plexiglass shield says “Here’s your paper.” Pushing my pink slip and another piece of paper under the window through the slot.
“The Release Letter”, he says.
I took the papers.
“You want a letter for the DA saying no charges were brought?”
I said “Why the hell would I need that for?”
He said “I don’t know what is going on in your life.”
And I thought about what is going on in my life and I couldn’t imagine why I would need more paper, but the hell with it – the City giving me something for free in this process – I said
“OK.”
He left me for a few minutes, as I stood alone in this quiet empty hall. He came back with two 2 page letters of the DA’s statement of bringing no charges and how my photos and fingerprints would be destroyed and my file would be sealed.
There was no mention of the DNA they took from me in that same building underground, why is that? Should I bring an additional theft to Small Claims Court? Embossed, raised, official DA stamps are on all the pages.
So I left that day; now it was time to make another assault/approach on the building that houses the Property Room and my money, really, pretty much the only money I have; I’m homeless – remember?.
I found my way back through the maze of downtown city blocks and tall official looking buildings and get on the back of a long snaking line I had been the day before and again thanking God for few blessings I can count – like it wasn’t pouring rain on me, it was too cold to rain, and I finally got to the metal detector and the conveyor package scanner.
I had to take off almost everything. Maybe the system is especially sensitive that day or maybe my skin is electrified with thoughts of actually getting my hands – actually getting my hands on my money. I would have stripped naked and bent over, feeling so close to my money.
I collected my stuff, got dressed, making my way to that big round counter with the two cops. I pull out my pink slip and my DA’s Release Letter and the cop looks at the papers skeptically, he looks at me, and demands my ID again and looking at all the papers and forms and pictures and stamps and finally, stubbornly, it seems, waves me through, pointing to a stairwell I should take to the bottom; seems about right.
I found my way to the basement Property Room and the essential line – except in this room there are two lines. One is a line of undercover cops lounging around on benches and chairs with plastic crates filled with personal goods, their collar’s goods, taken from people like me. I watched them joking about one collar or another and hooking this or that skel or talking about who shot some perp last night.
On this other line are people like me picking, retrieving their stuff. Can’t vouch for the other people on my line as to whether their shit taken illegally or legally or according to policy, police policy, but I can certainly vouch for me and at least a few I sure on that other line and the fact that our line moving a hell of a lot slower than the under-cover’s line right next to me who would, from time to time glance at us - at me – disdainfully. Because sure as hell I staring – boring – my eyes in outrage at them.
I had to start making an effective effort to calm myself since I could see I was about to be in this rather excruciating excitable environment for quite a time. There weren’t any seats or benches for my line to sit on. Why is that? And I am getting mad. Pull a stunt?
Why is that do you think? Standing, watching under-covers sit and joke pulling at my craw as we people inching along every few minutes.
You see, there are only a few clerks behind the scratched thick plexiglass panels to serve all these people from various walks of life, and society on the two lines and the clerks always having to decide how to divvy their time between the cops and us and you know how these decisions go.
So I slowly winding my way around this line. I had plenty of time to read the signs pasted all up and down the walls and one sign catching my attention: ‘To get any property you must have photo ID and proof of address’. This striking me because until this point my photo ID – my Passport, my identification (if you can call it that) serving me admirably through all this rather gruesome process of living life.
One of the beauties of the passport and one quite apropos to my condition is that it contains no address and since I am homeless, it is accurate – but now I am having troubling thoughts – a rumbling in my body a grumbling in my empty stomach – could it be? I would be this close – and not getting my money? Ah no, pushing that thought out of my mind – there would be no way – is no way - impossible – I am finally at the window.
I pushed the pink slip under the slot at the bottom of the thick plexiglass – then the DA’s Release Letter. She looks at the papers and my passport and then she says “You need proof of address.” I said I am homeless and she shakes her head and she says I have to bring back proof of address as she pushes the mess back at me under the thick plexiglass, through the slot, and for a moment I freeze – I can feel my skin getting icy and a thought hits me,
“Wait – wait!”
saying bending down rummaging through my bag recollecting those embossed papers the DA issued about me being – about him not pressing charges and the guy in the suit saying to me, “I don’t know what is going on in your life (and whether I would need such a letter)” and I seem to remember there is an address on those embossed pages.
I grabbed the papers and opening to the 2nd page there is an address – it the shelter address – the fucking cops – the under covers, must have assumed it where I come from and I thanked God, and pushed the whole mess back at her. There is no way she can argue with all these embossed seals; much as she might/liked.
A few minutes later holding a check in my hands for $172.00! I quickly bounding up the stairs leaving all those sad sacks behind and as I hit the turn style arm to exit, pushing with my leg, I banged it so hard I still have a bruise. I staggered back, rubbing my thigh – the fucking turn styles are locked, preventing you or even me from leaving before they inspect you or even me- again! – shit – this place is surely hell.
OK, a few moments later, I am outside, still rubbing my thigh, it hurt like hell, with a bruise so big with a check in my hand. It an official NYC check, drawn on Chase Bank. There are plenty downtown in Chinatown and I finding one; now waiting expectantly on another line and finally signing the check and pushing my passport & the check to the teller in a slot under another plexiglass shield – a lot less scratchier, and the teller types some stuff on a key board and says she can not cash it.
I say in disbelief, “What do you mean? It is a NYC check?”
“I can’t cash it.” She calls over the supervisor.
The woman speaks to me through the thick plexiglass in heavy Russian accent, looking at the computer screen, she says, “I can’t cash this and I can’t over ride this, they won’t let me. You have to put this into your checking account.”
But I am homeless, I said to myself – I don’t have a checking account, no bank account – I’m home -, then everything went blank.
Epilogue
You know sometimes I think, what if I had shiny gold coins in my pockets – very old – very valuable coins, that an eccentric well dressed old man had given me when I was begging on Park Avenue. You know the kind of coins that sometimes show up in a Salvation Army bucket and everyone gets excited and the TV cameras come in fawning over the valuable/expensive coins and the anonymous donor,
“Where is he??”
What if those coins are in my pocket when I entrapped? Those beautiful gold coins given lovingly by that eccentric old man – perhaps as a cosmic joke? Would I have gotten those coins returned to me as my special property or just a City check for their apparent face value – a check I could not cash?
Then I get to thinking about property rights and rule of law and police policy and shrine to freedom and then my mind wanders away thinking about my God’s green acre and getting warm in the morning sun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)