Chapter One
Wanna play pit bull polo, dude?” “What’s that?”
“It’s something I learned when I worked Metro Mounted Platoon.”
“It’s weird thinking of you as a cowboy cop.”
“All I know about horses is they’re assholes, man. But we got
the overtime there. You know my little Beemer? I wouldn’t have that
if I hadn’t worked Metro. My last year in Metro I made a hundred
grand plus. I don’t miss those crazy horses but I miss that OT money.
And I miss wearing a Stetson. When we worked the mini-riot at the
Democrats convention, a hot little lobbyist with nipples big enough to
pack up and leave home said I looked like a young Clint Eastwood in
that Stetson. And I didn’t carry a Beretta nine then. I carried a six-inch
Colt revolver. It looked more appropriate when I was sitting on a
horse.”
“A wheel gun? In this day and age?”
“The Oracle still carries a wheel gun.”
“The Oracle’s been on the job nearly fifty years. He can wear a
codpiece if he wants to. And you don’t look like Clint Eastwood, bro.
You look like the guy in King Kong, except you got even more of a beak
and your hair is bleached.”
“My hair is sun-streaked from surfing, dude. And I’m even two
inches taller in the saddle than Clint was.”
“Whatever, bro. I’m a whole foot taller on the ground than Tom
Cruise. He’s about four foot ten.”
“Anyways, those pacifist demonstrators at the convention center
were throwing golf balls and ball bearings at our horses, when twenty
of us charged. And dude, when you get stepped on by a fifteen-hundred-pound animal, it sucks bad. Only one horse went down. He
was twenty-eight years old, name of Rufus. That fried him. Had to
retire him after that. One of those Jamba Juicers threw a lit trash
bag at the one I was riding, name of Big Sam. I beat that bitch with
my koa.”
“Your what?”
“It’s like a samurai sword made of koa wood. The baton’s about as
useless as a stalk of celery when you’re up there on a horse seventeen
hands high. Supposed to strike them in the clavicle, but guess what, she
juked and I got her upside the head. Accidentally, wink wink. She did a
loop de loop and ended up under a parked car. I saw a horse get stuck
with a knitting needle by one of those tree fuckers. The horse was fried
after that. Too much stress. They retired him to Horse Rescue. They all
get fried sooner or later. Just like us.”
“That sucks. Sticking a horse.”
“That one got a TV interview at least. When cops get hurt, nothing.
Who gives a fuck? When a horse gets hurt, you get on TV, maybe
with that Debbie D-cup news bunny on Channel Five.”
“Where’d you learn to ride?”
“Griffith Park. A five-week course at the Ahmanson Training Center.
Only horse I ever rode before that was on a merry-go-round, and I
don’t care if I ever ride another one. Got the job ’cause my sister-in-law
went to high school with the platoon lieutenant. Horses’re assholes,
man. An RTD bus can pass you three inches away at sixty miles an hour
and the horse doesn’t blink. A little piece of paper blows in his face all
of a sudden and he bucks you clear over a pile of tweakers and base-heads sleeping on a skid-row sidewalk at Sixth and San Pedro. And you
end up in Momma Lucy’s shopping cart with her aluminum cans and
refundable bottles. That’s how I got a hip replacement at the age of
thirty. Only thing I wanna ride now is a surfboard and my Beemer.”
“I’m thirty-one. You look a lot older than me.”
“Well I ain’t. I just had a lot to worry about. They gave me a doctor
that was so old he still believed in bleeding and leeches.”
“Whatever, bro. You might have progeria. Gives you those eyelid
and neck wrinkles, like a Galapagos turtle.”
“So you wanna play pit bull polo or not?”
“What the fuck is pit bull polo?”
“Way I learned, they trailered ten of us down to Seventy-seventh
Street on a night when they decided to sweep a three-block row of
crack houses and gangsta cribs. Whole fucking area is a crime scene.
Living next to that is what razor wire was made for. Anyways, all those
Bloods and Crips have pit bulls and rotties and they let them run loose
half the time, terrorizing the ‘hood and eating any normal dogs they
see. And the whole fucking pack of gangsta dogs flew into a blood lust
the second they saw us coming in and they attacked like we were riding
T-bones and ribeyes.”
“How many did you shoot?”
“Shoot? I need this job. You gotta be richer than Donald Trump
and Manny the plumber to fire your piece in today’s LAPD, especially
at a dog. You shoot a human person and you get maybe two detectives
and a team from Force Investigation Division to second-guess you. You
shoot a dog and you get three supervisors and four detectives plus FID,
all ready to string yellow tape. Especially in the ‘hood. We didn’t shoot
them, we played pit bull polo with the long sticks.”
“Oh, I get it. Pit bull polo.”
“Man, I rode through them, whacking those killer bulls, yelling,
‘One chukker for my team! Two chukkers for my team!’I only wish I
coulda whacked their owners.”
“Bro, a chukker is a period of play. I know ’cause I watched a special
on the Royal Family. Horny old Charles was playing a chukker or
two for Camilla with big wood in his jodhpurs. That old babe? I don’t
see it.”
“Whatever. You down with that or not?”
“Yeah, I’m down. But first I wanna know, did anyone beef you for
playing polo with the gangsta bulls?”
“Oh yeah, there’s always an ABM who’ll call IA, his councilman,
and maybe long distance to Al Sharpton, who never saw a camera he
didn’t hug.”
“ABM?”
“You ain’t a ‘hood rat, are ya? ABM. Angry black male.”
“Spent my nine years in Devonshire, West Valley, and West L.A.
before I transferred here last month. ABMs ain’t never been filed on my
desktop, bro.”
“Then don’t go to a police commission or council meeting. ABMs
are in charge. But we don’t have hardly any living in Hollywood. In
fact, nowadays most of south L.A. is Latino, even Watts.”
“I been reading that the entire inner city is mostly Latino. Where
the fuck have the brothers gone to? I wonder. And why is everybody
worrying about the black vote if they’re all moving to the suburbs?
They better worry about the Latino vote, because they got the mayor’s
office now and they’re about one generation away from reclaiming California
and making us do the gardening.”
“You married? And which number is it?”
“Just escaped from number two. She was Druid-like but not as
cuddly. One daughter three years old. Lives with Momma, whose lawyer
won’t be satisfied till I’m homeless on the beach eating seaweed.”
“Is number one still at large?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to pay her nothing. She took my car,
though. You?”
“Divorced also. Once. No kids. Met my ex in a cop bar in North
Hollywood called the Director’s Chair. She wore a felonious amount of
pancake. Looked too slutty for the Mustang Ranch and still I married
her. Musta been her J Lo booty.”
“Starter marriages never work for cops. You don’t have to count
the first one, bro. So how do we play pit bull polo without horses? And
where do we play?”
“I know just the place. Get the expandable baton outta my war
bag.”
The Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS-13, began at Los
Angeles High School less than twenty years earlier but was now said to
have ten thousand members throughout the United States and seven
hundred thousand in Central American countries. Many residents
of state prison displayed tattoos saying “MS” or “MS-13.” It was an
MS-13 crew member who was stopped on a street in North Hollywood
in 1991 by Officer Tina Kerbrat, a rookie just months out of the
LAPD academy, who was in the process of writing him a citation for
drinking in public, nothing more than that, when the MS-13 “cruiser”
shot her dead. The first LAPD woman officer to be murdered in the line
of duty.
Later that evening a besieged Mexican resident living east of
Gower Street called Hollywood Station to say that she saw an LAPD
black-and-white with lights out driving loops around a dirty pink
apartment building that she had reported to the police on several occasions
as being full of Mara Salvatrucha gang members.
On the other occasions, the officers at the desk kept trying to
explain to the Mexican woman about gang injunctions and probable
cause, things she did not understand and that did not exist in her country.
Things that apparently denied protection to people like her and her
children from the criminals in that ugly pink building. She told the officer
about how their vicious dogs had mauled and killed a collie belonging to her
neighbor Irene, and how all the children were unable to walk safely in the
streets. She also said that two of the dogs had been removed by people from the
city pound but there were still enough left. More than enough.
The officers told her they were very sorry and that she should contact
the Department of Animal Services.
The Mexican woman had been watching a Spanish-language channel
and was almost ready for bed when she first heard the howling that
drew her to the window. There she saw the police car with lights out,
speeding down the alley next to the apartment building, being pursued
by four or five barking dogs. On its second pass down the alley, she saw
the driver lean out the window and swing something that looked like a
snooker stick at one of the brutes, sending it yelping and running back
into the pink building. Then the car made another loop and did it to
another big dog, and the driver yelled something that her daughter
heard from the porch.
Her daughter stumbled sleepily into the tiny living room and said
in English, “Mamá, does chukker mean something very bad, like the
F word?”
The Mexican woman called Hollywood Station and spoke to a
very senior sergeant whom all the cops called the Oracle. She wanted
to say thank you for sending the officers with the snooker stick. She
was hopeful that things might improve around the neighborhood. The
Oracle was puzzled but thought it best not to question her further. He
simply said that he was glad to be of service.
When 6-X-32’s lights were back on and they were cruising Hollywood
Boulevard, the driver said, “Dude, right there’s where my career with
the Mounted Platoon ended. That’s where I decided that overtime pay
or not, I was going back to normal patrol.”
His partner looked to his right and said, “At Grauman’s Chinese
Theater?”
“Right there in the courtyard. That’s where I learned that you
never ride a horse on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
“Bad juju?”
“Bad footing.”
Sid Grauman’s famous theater seemed somehow forlorn these
days, dwarfed and sandwiched by the Hollywood & Highland Center,
better known as the Kodak Center, containing two blocks of shopping
and entertainment. It was home to the Kodak Theatre and the Academy
Awards and was overrun by tourists day and night. But the Chinese
Theater still held its own when it came to Hollywood weirdness.
Even this late, there were a number of costumed creatures posing for
photos with tourists who were mainly photographing the shoe and
handprints in the famous forecourt. Among the creatures were Mr.
Incredible, Elmo, two Darth Vaders, Batman, and two Goofys, one
short, one tall.
“They pose with tourists. Pix for bucks,” the driver said to his
partner. “The tourists think the creatures work for Grauman’s, but
they don’t. Most of them’re crackheads and tweakers. Watch little
Goofy.”
He braked, making the nighttime traffic go around their black-and-white.
They watched the shorter of the two Goofys hassling four
Asian tourists who no doubt had refused to pay him for taking his
photo or hadn’t paid enough. When Goofy grabbed one of the two
Asian men by the arm, the cop tooted his horn. When Goofy looked up
and saw the black-and-white, he gave up panhandling for the moment
and tried to disappear into the throng, even though his huge Goofy
head loomed over all but the tallest tourist.
The driver said, “The subway back there is a good escape route to
the ‘hood. Dealers hang out by the trains, and the hooks hang around
the boulevard.”
“What’s a hook?”
“A guy that approaches you and says, ‘I can hook you up with what
you need.’ These days it’s almost always crystal. Everybody’s tweaking.
Meth is the drug of choice on the Hollywood streets, absolutely.”
And that made him think of his last night at Metro, which was followed
by the replacement surgery and a right hip more accurate than a
barometer when it came to predicting sudden temperature drops and
wind-chill factor.
On that last night in the Mounted Platoon, he and another
mounted cop were there for crowd suppression, walking their horses
along Hollywood Boulevard all calm and okey-dokey, along the curb
past the Friday-night mobs by the subway station, moseying west,
when he spotted a hook looking very nervously in their direction.
He’d said to his partner, who was riding a mare named Millie,
“Let’s jam this guy.”
He dismounted and dropped his get-down rope. His partner held
both horses and he approached the hook on foot. The hook was a
sweaty, scrawny white guy, very tall, maybe even taller than he was,
though his LAPD Stetson and cowboy boots made him tower. That’s
when it all went bad.
“I was talking to a hook right about there,” he said to his partner
now, pointing to the sidewalk in front of the Kodak Center. “And the
dude just turned and rabbitted. Zip. Like that. And I started after him,
but Major freaked.”
“Your partner?”
“My horse. He was fearless, Major was. Dude, I’d seen him chill in
training when we were throwing firecrackers and flares at him. I’d seen
other horses rear up on their hind legs and do a one-eighty while Major
stood his ground. But not that night. That’s the thing about horses,
they’re assholes, man.”
“What’d he do?”
“First, Major reared clear up tall and crazy. Then he bit my partner
on the arm. It was like somebody cranked up his voltage. Maybe a
tweaker shot him with a BB gun, I don’t know. Anyways, I stopped
chasing the hook, fuck him, and ran back to help my partner. But
Major wouldn’t calm down until I made like I was going to climb in the
saddle. Then I did something very stupid.”
“What’s that?”
“I climbed in the saddle, intending to ride him back to the trailer
and call it a night. I did that instead of leading him back, which anybody
without brain bubbles woulda done under the circumstances.”
“So?”
“He freaked again. He took off. Up onto the sidewalk.”
The moment would be with him forever. Galloping along the Walk
of Fame, kicking up sparks and scattering tourists and panhandlers
and purse snatchers and tweakers and pregnant women and costumed
nuns and SpongeBob and three Elvises. Clomping over top of Marilyn
Monroe’s star or James Cagney’s or Elizabeth Taylor’s or fucking
Liberace’s or whoever was there on this block of the Walk of Fame
because he didn’t know who was there and never checked later to
find out.
Cursing the big horse and hanging on with one hand and waving
the creepy multitudes out of his way with the other. Even though he
knew that Major could, and had, run up a flight of concrete steps in his
long career, he also knew that neither Major nor any horse belonging
to the Mounted Platoon could run on marble, let alone on brass inserts
on that marble sidewalk where people spilled their Starbucks and
Slurpees with impunity. No horse could trample Hollywood legends
like that, so maybe it was the bad juju. And very suddenly Major
hydroplaned in the Slurpees and just … went … down.
His partner interrupted the sweat-popping flashback. “So what
happened, bro? After he took off with you?”
“First of all, nobody got hurt. Except Major and me.”
“Bad?”
“They say I ended up in John Wayne’s boot prints right there in
Grauman’s forecourt. They say the Duke’s fist print is there too. I don’t
remember boots or fists or nothing. I woke up on a gurney in an RA
with a paramedic telling me yes I was alive, while we were screaming
code three to Hollywood Pres. I had a concussion and three cracked
ribs and my bad hip, which was later replaced, and everybody said I
was real lucky.”
“How about the nag?”
“They told me Major seemed okay at first. He was limping, of
course. But after they trailered him back to Griffith Park and called the
vet, he could hardly stand. He was in bad shape and got worse. They
had to put him down that night.” And then he added, “Horses are such
assholes, man.”
When his partner looked at the driver, he thought he saw his eyes
glisten in the mix of light from the boulevard-fluorescence and
neon, headlights and taillights, even reflected glow from a floodlight
shooting skyward-announcing to all: This is Hollywood! But all
that light spilling onto them changed the crispness of their black-and-white
to a wash of bruised purple and sickly yellow. His partner wasn’t
sure, but he thought the driver’s chin quivered, so he pretended to be
seriously studying the costumed freaks in front of Grauman’s Chinese
Theater.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Hollywood Station
by Joseph Wambaugh
Copyright © 2006 by Joseph Wambaugh.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
LITTLE, BROWN
Copyright © 2006
Joseph Wambaugh
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-06614-1
