Our Land – You’re a Cop

Hi, all! Do you know Don from Don of All Trades? He’s hilarious, occasionally warm and fuzzy, and overall pretty awesome. He’s a daddy, a fried chicken protector, a cop, a kickass storyteller, and has become one of my favorite friends.  He’s given me this amazing Our Land today, and I know that you will adore him as much as I do after you read it. So well, here you go.

Our Land – You’re a Cop

“You’re a cop,” she said as matter of fact as though she was expecting me. I had just sat down on the opposite side of the bench from her.

“Why do you say that?” I answered. “Because I’m at a bar half drunk on a Tuesday night,” I half-ass joked.

“I know who you are, Officer Don. We all do.”

She had a raspy, throaty voice that I’m ashamed to admit that I think I’d find sexy in another woman’s body.

I judged her to be in her fifties, maybe even her early sixties. I was a couple of years away from thirty myself, and still living life like a single man should. I was in a relationship with the woman I knew I’d spend the rest of my life with eventually, but I still liked hanging out with old farts in taverns way too much.

I’d bought a bucket of beers and walked out of the crowded bar I was in because the karaoke was absolutely unbearable.

I was on the back patio drinking through my bucket and minding my own business, when I noticed her across the street. I think she was watching me.

It was a cold night and she was alone in an open area of the closed farmer’s market where many local, homeless people congregate during the day. They generally create a nuisance for the vendors and shoppers looking to avoid eye contact and guilt for not giving handouts to these people who they know will simply spend it on draft beer at Joann’s Shop right there in the same market plaza. The area is technically a park and closed after dark.

She was trespassing.

I don’t know why, but after knocking back a couple of my beers, I’d decided to walk across the street to speak to her.

“I’m not working right now,” I said. “It’s my turn to be a jackass for a change.”

At this point, she was sitting on a bench staring straight ahead. The light from the street lamps was bright enough that I could see the lines on her face clearly. She had a hard face for sure, but there was a softness to it as well. The woman sitting with me on that bench was rough looking, no doubt from some tough living, but her eyes were uncooperative in making it an ugly rough look. That’s how I recall thinking about describing her. Her hair was a tangled mess of thin, sandy blonde strands. Her face was wrinkled and tight, her lips were pursed and trembled at the edges. I knew she was a smoker and wondered if she was a drug abuser.

Her eyes were affixed to nothing in particular that I could tell. I sat there waiting for her to say something.

“Will you arrest me if I break the law right now?” I’m pretty sure she knew the answer and was being sarcastic, but I didn’t know this woman from Eve.

“You are breaking the law right now, actually. The park closed at ten and it’s pushing midnight,” I answered.

She turned towards me and smiled.

Her smile was unexpectedly beautiful.

When she smiled, she looked decades younger than the 60ish I thought she was. Her tight, wrinkled skin relaxed towards the edges of her face and her green eyes sparkled in the artificial lamp light. I’d been face to face with hundreds of down on their luck people over the course of the few years I’d been working in that area of the city, and almost every one of them had defeat on their face. Every encounter with a police officer was an understandable chore for them. Looking into their eyes was like looking down a well. They grew darker the deeper you looked. This woman’s eyes were not dark. They sparkled with a brightness and hope that was almost shocking to me. Her circumstances made them seem even queerer than I think they’d otherwise be. Were this woman trying to sell me perfume from a Clinique counter in a department store, her eyes would still be outstanding, but in this dark, cold Tuesday night in the middle of winter, trespassing in a city park, they were sensational.

She suddenly turned her smile into a brief fit of laughter that sounded sincere, but pushed to the brink of insane just a tad as well. She stopped after several seconds and spoke again.

“So you’re not interested in arresting me?”

“I told you I was off. Plus I’ve had a few beers,” I said while pulling a Bud Light bottle from my coat.

She stared ahead again, into the darkness somewhere beyond the lamp light.

After a moment of silence, I started to feel foolish for having come over to talk to her at all. What was the point? I wasn’t going to shoe her away or risk getting into a confrontation over something as stupid as a trespassing while I’d been drinking. My buzz had suddenly faded and I was feeling guilty that I didn’t at least have any money to give her.

She reached towards the ground on the other side of our bench and pulled a bottle of vodka from somewhere and pressed it to her lips. Country Club was the brand, I remember that. She took a healthy swig and returned the bottle to the ground before looking off into the darkness again.

We sat there for a few minutes. She stared ahead and I wished I was anywhere else on the planet but on that bench, or at least that I was a smoker. I’d have something to distract myself, if I smoked.

Finally, to break the silence I asked her if she was wearing contacts.

She continued staring into the darkness somewhere beyond the street lamps for several more seconds. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out an already smoked on cigarette and put it between her lips. She lit the cigarette with a lighter I never saw, inhaled deeply and then held the smoke in her lungs as she suddenly averted her gaze upwards towards the stars. I noticed a tear fall down her cheek as she exhaled. It was followed by another and then another. She wasn’t sobbing or anything. She was just having what looked like one of those good, cathartic cries a person suddenly gets when they hear a certain song or watches a touching video.

“No,” she finally said. “I used to wear them, yes, but look at me. I can’t afford such a thing anymore.” She reached into her pocket again and pulled out a pair of glasses which she promptly put on her face. She looked at me again with a cocked head and made what the young people today might call a duckface before pointing to her head with a gun shaped hand and pretending to blow her brains out with her hand pistol.

It was done with a sort of school aged girl silliness that made me laugh out loud.

The glasses were missing one lens and were taped up on the one side that did have an arm. The lens that was in place was scratched up pretty good.

“You like my glasses, do ya?”

“I asked you if you wore contacts because your eyes are really green. They’re brilliant.” I drank from  my beer, pleased that in my mind, I was being nice.

Mercifully, she smiled what I recognized as a smile of gratitude and I wondered how long it’d been since she was complimented. Everyone likes to be complimented from time to time.

“Thank you,” she said.

We sat on the bench, drank and talked for a little bit longer.

She was very engaging , not like most of the people who hang out in this park after hours or even during open hours. She was sharp, obviously intelligent, I could tell.

At some point, she mentioned her husband and I cut her off.

“You have a husband?” I had assumed not. I had assumed that she was homeless since she was hanging out alone drinking Country Club Vodka on a park bench at midnight on a cold winter night.

She took a last drag on her cigarette, exhaled and then sighed a little bit.

“I had a husband,” she said.

She grabbed her bottle again and took a huge swig. I wondered how much she could drink and still stand up because she was hitting it pretty hard tonight.

She offered me a swig which I refused appreciatively.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “Cheers.” She raised her bottle to her lips and finished that fifth off right then and there. She had nearly half  a bottle left when I first saw it and it was gone now in just a few drinks. I was impressed.

Silence again for a few more moments and then she started to say what I assumed she was wanting to say the entire time we shared that bench.

“I was a fairly successful saleswoman. My company was having a celebration in Orlando for some of the top sales people in the central Florida region that year. It was going to be a great weekend away and we were all looking forward to it. My husband and daughter were going to join me as soon as he got off work on that Thursday Night. He was a nurse in an emergency room. I’d been telling my husband to quit that damned job for years. It was too stressful for him and I was making enough money that he didn’t have to work, but he loved it.

I was in Orlando to celebrate selling more pharmaceuticals than anybody else did that year for my company, at least in my region, when my phone rang. I ignored it because I didn’t recognize the number. The same number then showed up almost immediately on my pager so I returned the call.”

She looked ahead for a bit and made that duckface with her lips again, but it wasn’t a playful face. There was something about that look that made her cute. It was her thinking face, perhaps. Her glasses were still on her face, the side closest to me missing that arm that rests on your ears. The duck lips were being used to keep from blubbering; I recognize that now. She sucked her upper lip behind her lower teeth and sighed again. She looked towards me, but not really at me. She was looking through me at something I’d never be able to see. She blinked herself back onto the bench and tried to take a great big swig from her empty bottle.

“Fuck,” she whispered to nobody in particular.

She finally looked at me and seemed almost surprised to see me sitting there still. She walked the empty bottle over to a trash can and kissed it before tossing it in.

“Good night, sweet friend,” she told the most recent, empty love of her life.

She sat back down and continued a story that I could already have predicted the ending to. It was really just a matter of how.

“He died in an accident on the way to Orlando that weekend. He and my daughter both. A friend of my daughter’s was hurt just a little bit. Thank God she was ok.”

I inhaled deeply, exhaled loudly through my nose and told her that I was sorry for her loss.

I was younger then and admittedly sucked at being supportive in situations where humor is wholly inappropriate. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t have a wife or kid yet so I didn’t appreciate the loss she must have felt like I do today, reflecting on her story.

We talked a bit more and I told her that I’d like to meet her at our bench again while I was working so I could help her out somehow.

“It’s not charity; it’s my job. I WANT to help.”

She agreed to meet me at our bench on a designated date and time.

“Well, you know my name somehow, so what’s yours?” I asked her.

“Somehow? No, here’s how. The other homeless people talk. They talk about you and the other cops sometimes. Fuck, you’re here on your bike everyday for Christs’s sake. You’re ‘that bike cop, Don. That’s what they call you, bike cop Don. They mostly like you as much as they can a cop, if you can believe that.”

“I’ll take that any day,” I said. “So, yoouuuuuuuu…?”

“Katy. My name is Katy.”

I must have looked confused because she asked me if that was ok.

“Oh, sure, yes. Sorry. You just don’t look like a Katy to me.”

She chuckled. I may have offended her, I have no clue.

“What did you think my name would be?” She asked.

“I had you pegged for an Alice or maybe a Marilyn for some reason.”

“Those sound like grandma names. I’m only forty-one years old you know?”

“Hmmm, I thought you were maybe in your early thirties,” I lied. “I’m no good with ages, obviously.”

“You’re no good at lying either, kid.” She said as she was walking towards that darkness she kept staring into earlier.

She never did show up to the bench as we had agreed, and I never saw her again.

—

I know. Right? He’s pretty fantabulous. Here’s a bit more about Don: