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.