In the following excerpt from Ultimate Excursions, the protagonist, Tim Lake, has been languishing as a newspaper reporter in New Haven for a decade. Just before arriving in Connecticut, Tim had suffered through a life-changing, traumatic experience. He believes he behaved badly during the ordeal, displaying disturbing traits of cowardice and dishonesty. After a decade in New Haven, he still hasn’t healed.
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New Haven was an ugly town, its charms either subtle or nonexistent. The thought of leaving had rarely crossed my mind.
After several years, I started sending out the occasional packet of résumés and clips. I did it more to appease my ever-fretful, newly-widowed mother than out of any real desire to go anywhere. I even received a few interview offers from papers slightly larger than the Standard Bearer. But I always found a reason not to go. Moving laterally seemed such a bother. And no one from the Times, the Post, or the Wall Street Journal ever called.
SO MY LIFE PROGRESSED, on what you’d have to call a low level. The third-person world had its charms and comforts. It was in the spring of my thirty-third year that the change occurred. I’ve come to believe that, despite what people say, meaningful change is not incremental. You wake up one morning, and you’re different. At first, you expend a lot of time and energy pretending this isn’t so. Eventually you give in to it, perhaps unconsciously. And then it is simply who you are, even if it isn’t who you were just weeks or months before. In my case, I lost the ability to sustain the charade. In an instant, my perspective shifted. No, strike that. It didn’t shift. It was far more than that. It altered radically, irreversibly. I don’t know; maybe what actually happened was that I awoke from a decade’s hibernation. Or, to be more accurate, I was rudely awakened.
It happened on a night like many others, riding around with Officer Sloan, shooting the shit and living the cop’s life vicariously. Over the years, I’d gotten to know Officer Sloan pretty well. He was active in the Fraternal Order of Police. When the police threatened to strike, early in my New Haven career, I’d written a sympathetic story about what a typical cop goes through during a typical shift. I did the story by riding around with Sloan on several night shifts. He was assigned to a section of town that included the Elm Haven projects, a district of looming, abandoned buildings dotted with overcrowded low-rises.
Crack cocaine had just taken hold, and the wonders of the free market were there to behold in Elm Haven. Teens in warm-ups would lounge or huddle (depending on the temperature) in the doorways of the blackened high-rises.
Their clothes were baggy enough to hide an Uzi. Sloan had a cocky air about him, though he freely admitted, when I got to know him, that he felt like pissing his pants whenever he got called to Elm Haven. The lookouts would melt into the darkness when Sloan unfolded from his squad car and started walking across the glass-strewn lot toward their perch. I’d walk a pace or two behind him, aware of how loud our footsteps sounded on the broken glass, and how pretty the sodium vapor lights looked, reflected in the tiny shards. After a few moments, Tyrone or B-Dog or some other mid-level operative would emerge from the shadows in place of the lookout.
“Sloan, what it is, cuz,” he’d say.
“What it is, Tyrone, is that we got a report of shots fired in this vicinity,” Sloan would answer in his nasal twang. “As it is my duty to uphold the law and preserve order, I figured that maybe I’d come inquire about said shots. Would you happen to know anything?”
Tyrone would take off his watch cap and scratch his head. “Well, Sloan, you know, business be hot and we got to watch our backs. No one shot, just claiming our yard is all.”
Sloan would nod and stick out his hand for some complex, multi-faceted handshake. “Okay, Tyrone. Keep the peace.”
The story I wrote ran on a Sunday and won a state journalism award. Sloan never told me he liked it, but after it came out, he stopped treating me with cop wariness. After that, I’d ride with him on a shift every couple of months, just to keep in touch with the streets. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I was thinking that someday I might get a book out of it. But I never bothered to take any notes.
We’d even meet occasionally for a late-night beer. Sloan rarely talked about work. Instead, he’d unburden himself to me about his fucked-up marriage, the woman he was seeing on the side, an ulcer he had developed at the ripe old age of thirty-six. I listened well. Sloan asked few questions about my life, and I volunteered little.
The night of my reawakening began with a call from Sloan, asking if I wanted to ride with him. It was a slow news night, and Daly told me to go ahead, but to keep my pager on. It was an unseasonably warm late March. A fine, light rain
fell, and the air smelled of new life and industrial discharge. Sloan was chewing his usual two sticks of Juicy Fruit, the gum making small crackling sounds as he worked it around inside his mouth. He wore his hair military-short. It had gone gray at the temples, and his forehead had grown over the years. His eyes were blue, and his mouth was thin and straight. He looked a lot like Cal Ripken.
“What’s shakin’?” he said, as I climbed in the squad car.
“More of the same,” I said.“No murder and mayhem to speak of. Unless I’ve missed something.”
“No, it has been quiet for days. That worries me. Especially since we’ve got us a full moon tonight.”
“Wackos on parade, huh?”
“Never fails, dude. Never fails. Just as well if it’s quiet tonight. I had me one fucked-up day on the home front. It has put me in a foul mood.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Nah.”
The windshield wipers on Sloan’s cruiser pulsed intermittently to remove the streaky spray from the glass. The spray was an admixture of sea salt and dirty rain, and Sloan had to use about a gallon of fluid to keep the windshield clear. We rode along in silence, the chatter of the radio and Sloan’s cracking gum the only sounds, other than the occasional squeaking swish of the wipers. I felt drowsy and bored. Sloan’s radio crackled. Even after years of covering cops, I lacked the ability to distinguish the words from the background clutter. Sloan glanced at his watch and mumbled a reply.
“They want me to run over to Elm Haven and check on a DOA. They’re sending a homicide guy in a few minutes, but he’s tied up at the moment. Okay with you?”
I shrugged. “What happened?”
“Sounds like some hop-head O.D.’d. Sampling too much of his own product.”
Sloan swung into an area where all the street lights were out and stopped in front of one of the empty high-rises. He pulled a long-handled flashlight from under his seat.
“I think I’d rather wait in the car,” I said. “I’m not real fond of looking at dead bodies.”
“Not a good idea, given the surroundings,” Sloan said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. And no one said you had to look.”
I followed as Sloan walked toward a small knot of young men gathered in a doorway from which the door had long since vanished.
“Look at the faggot pig and his little bitch,” a voice from the crowd said.
Sloan stopped. A pulsing vein appeared in his temple. “Who said that?”
No one spoke.
“I’ll ask again, nicely. Who the fuck said that?”
Silence. A scrawny teenager opened his eyes wide and mugged for the crowd, making a pissed-off face remarkably like Sloan’s. Sloan saw him out of the corner of his eye.
“So, it was you, punk?”
“No sah, lawdy, lawdy, it wuzn’t me,” he said. The other guys looked nervous, but they couldn’t help laughing.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute,” Sloan said. “You move and your ass is grass. C’mon, Lake, in here.”
The knot loosened as we approached the doorway. I looked away fast, but the picture printed itself indelibly. I can see it still. Lying on the garbage-strewn floor just inside the doorway was a young man in a silk warm-up suit. The left sleeve of his jacket was rolled up, and a syringe protruded from his forearm. Sloan’s flashlight was shining on his face. I caught
a glimpse of wide-open eyes; the whites visible all around the irises. The skin on the man’s arm was light, but his face was a deep maroon. His tongue was hanging out to the point of his chin. The room reeked of shit.
My legs went weak, and I sat down fast, back against the wall. I put my head between my knees and fought for breath. The image was imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, but with Mark’s face superimposed on the dead junkie’s. I could
feel sweat soaking through my clothes. I sat that way until Sloan came over and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, you okay?” He grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. I didn’t look toward the body. “Sorry, man. I didn’t know he’d be right there. It can be rough if you’ve never seen one of these.”
“Yeah, rough,” I said, and headed out into the cool outside air. The knot of guys had moved away about fifty feet. Sloan emerged a moment later. “Hey, punk, get your runty ass over here,” he called to the jokester, who had been cracking up the group with more antics.
“Who, me, massah?” he said.
“You heard me. Now move.”
The kid shuffled over. “Lawdy, lawdy, what’s I a gwine a do?” he said. More laughter.
Sloan threw a beefy arm over the kid’s shoulder, walked him farther away from the group. I followed, maybe ten feet behind. Sloan shook his head at me. I stopped. They walked several more steps. Sloan leaned in close to the kid, as if
to whisper to him. His body shielded the kid from my view. He made a rapid motion toward the kid with his free arm. The kid staggered sideways, holding his neck.
“Motherfucker!” he said.
Sloan grabbed the kid by the front of his shirt and pressed his nose against the kid’s nose. He said something I couldn’t quite hear, other than the word AIDS.
The kid touched a trickle of blood on his neck with a finger, examined it.
“Hey, I’m bleeding! What you do to me, man? You stick me?”
“Life’s a bitch,” Sloan said. “Then you die.”
He strode back into the abandoned building. I stayed close behind him, averting my eyes from the body. Sloan squatted down next to the corpse for a few moments. He stood up and looked around. Two plainclothes cops were
arriving in an unmarked car. The kid was gone.
“Let’s get the fuck out of this zoo,” Sloan said.
Back in the squad car, we sat in silence as the rain intensified. The silence lengthened. We drove toward the lights of downtown. Finally, I turned and looked at Sloan. He was scowling into the windshield.
“What was that all about, back there?” I asked.
“What was what all about, back there?” Sloan said.
“That thing with the kid; sticking him with something.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Lake,” Sloan said.
“Oh, come on, Sloan. I wasn’t that far behind you. I saw something. What did you do?”
“Don’t be an asshole, Lake. I jabbed him with my finger, I guess. I was kind of pissed off. Need to watch the old temper.”
“Didn’t you say something to him about AIDS?”
“He called me a faggot,” Sloan said.
“Sloan, I don’t know how to ask this, so I’ll just ask it. Did you stick him with that junkie’s needle?”
He wrenched the wheel and pulled the car to the curb, turned in his seat and stared at me.
“You need to be very careful about what you accuse people of,” he said.
“That’s what it looked like to me.”
“You’ve got an overly active imagination.”
“He seemed pretty freaked out afterwards.”
Sloan slammed his fist down on the steering wheel. When he spoke again, his voice sounded choked.
“Trust me, pal. I like you, but you don’t want to be pissing me off. Really and truly, you don’t. And you’re beginning to. Just a little bit. It was dark out there. You must have been forty, fifty feet away. You saw nothing, understand? Nothing.”
I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap. They were trembling.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
That was our last ride together, and our last conversation. I thought about reporting him to his superiors. But what could I say?
Who would believe me? Was I even sure what I’d seen? I never told anyone about it.
I couldn’t sleep that night, or for several succeeding nights. I had to anesthetize myself with scotch. Even after the initial shock of that evening wore off—and that took a good ten days—the memory left a sour taste on my soul. My sense of self-loathing rivaled the worst days after Mark’s death, when, like now, the fact of my cowardice cast a huge, chilling shadow. This time, cowardice made me angry. And the anger just kept on building. I had to take it out on someone. Might as well be myself.
