Is it just me or are people writing books that leave a bad taste in your memory?

You know the kind of thing:

          She walked despondently through the pouring rain, the water staining her torn emerald satin prom dress and trickling down between her heaving breasts like blood cleansed of all color. She thought she knew Terry but after tonight, she could never trust him or the other members of the Greater Yeehaw Gulch Frisbee Golf Club.

Or this:

          I sat on the bed. Eyes shut tightly against the chaos and fury of my parents fighting in the living room. It was a hell of a 16^th birthday but I knew in a few minutes my best friend in all the world would send up a shower of pebbles onto my window. I’d climb out onto the roof trying not to rip my jeans on the Harvest Driftwood GAF asbestos shingles nailed half-assedly into the plywood. Then a slide and stretch toward the big tree limb and I was free and running down the sidewalk with Keith. We were a terrifying and hilarious duo from the age of four through our late 20s. The kind of friends who know what each is thinking. The kind who loads his speeches with buckshot honesty.

“Honey, she’s not healthy for you to be around. When you’re together it looks like you’re tap dancing barefoot on broken glass.”

 If only he hadn’t wallowed in such a swamp of pessimism.

          “Why should I bother with condoms? I’ve probably already got it and I might as well take everybody I can with me.”

          And now there are t.v. commercials for pills that reduce the virus to Nearly Undetectable Levels so I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. I wonder if the Baths are still open in Miami. I used to drop Keith off there late Saturday nights. I really miss him. The talented handsome bastard.

          So why am I different? What makes me think I can write anything that people might want to read?

          I’m not and I don’t know. Let’s just call this a literary reckoning. A dose of salts for the soul. A course of leeches to suck out some of the pressures of a life lived on the edge of an unlicked envelope.

          Things like some of the shenanigans I saw or created during my brief but entertaining career in Law Enforcement. I tried to hit all the tentacles so we’re talking about police work, state probation and parole, dispatch and correctional officer (that’s prison guard to you classicists.)

          Have I killed anyone? My sister says that I killed my husband by sending him on a volunteer Army assignment to a shit NATO tank training base in Bulgaria. We’ll talk about that later. With photos perhaps since Constantin Todorov, the local military police investigator, was kind enough to give me his complete file. Which horrified Army CID.

          Did I shoot anyone? Certainly. Glades Correctional Institution in Belle Glade, Florida. Curtis Horne, the only light-skinned, red-haired, buck-toothed and freckled Black inmate on the compound. Curtis was known for three things: his appearance, his ability to escape and his compulsion to snitch. I was on perimeter patrol in the Cushman when Curtis used the three-foot high water spigot as a trampoline and vaulted onto a shirt that he threw on top of the razor wire. He ran through the cleared area between fences, setting off the microwave alarms and then over the second fence. Linda Tripp in the far Tower shot twice at him but he kept running. I got one shot off and saw him fall forward into the cane muck. He popped back up and hauled ass through the cane fields. I turned toward the dormitories and saw what looked like hundreds of inmates dangerously close to the inside fence. That’s when I truly understood that prisons are allowed to operate by the grace and cooperation of the inmates. If they wanted to storm the fence, I wasn’t going to stop more than a dozen of them if I was lucky. And being the object of their masturbation would be the least of my problems.

          Don’t worry about Curtis. He made it all the way to the East Coast. Where he was picked up during a visit to an emergency room to have buckshot removed from his rear.

          I enjoyed most of my law enforcement jobs. I even fell in love between a few of them. Between police jobs, there was Wackenhut Security. This was when the founder, George Wackenhut (a classic film noir G-man if ever there was one) was still alive and decades before his clean and honorable business of protecting buildings, people and nuclear power facilities turned into the GEO Corporation with its ICE detention centers and for-profit jails and prisons. Maybe it’s something in the Florida water: Publix has no real resemblance anymore to what was important to Mr. Jenkins. Tons of edible foodstuffs are thrown out daily instead of being donated to local food banks: Good Samaritan Food Donation Act be damned.

          Wackenhut hired ex-cops, cop wannabes, ex-military and clean-cut college kids who could show up sober in a decently ironed uniform. I was usually on midnight shift so work didn’t interfere with college and trusted to diplomatically watch over the more expensive subdivisions in Boca Raton.

          Once the local police discovered there was a female guard, I usually had company of varying ranks and motivations. The hours just flew by as we discussed Ayn Rand, paranormal activity or whether it made sense to marry someone just because they gave you the courage to defy your father, the IBM Vice President, and tell him you didn’t want to go into his business; you wanted to stay in law enforcement.

          One night we were sitting car-to-car and talking and Kevin asked me to wake him up in 15 minutes.

“And listen to my radio to make sure they don’t call me.” Not a problem, says I. It was 330 in the morning, the time when only the killer Doberman was awake and patrolling.

          Five hours later with the construction crews whistling and grinning as they walked past, the sun merrily shining on us all, Kevin and I awoke with the knowledge that at least one of us was in a world of shit.

          Don’t worry: he blamed it on a bad radio and I used the excuse of car trouble.

We dodged many things together but we had the worst timing. If I had met him two weeks earlier, he wouldn’t have asked the Supportive Bank Teller to marry him.

At least he ditched his bachelor party early for me. But that’s another story from a time before a girl wearing a scarlet dress could sit on the groom’s side of the church and not cry until she was safely in her car afterwards.

On the other hand, I did send $350 (in 1982 dollars) in white flowers to the church and forgot to pay Exotic Gardens. Kevin paid and evened the score by throwing out all the poems I had sent him before I enlisted in the Navy. Yes, he got married and I went to Boot Camp in Orlando.

Things I discovered while in Boot Camp:

1. Although he was there only two weeks before me, I couldn’t find Rusty.
2. It is impossible to fold a polyester slip into a square.
3. Three-minute showers suck.
4. I invariably had sentry duty from midnight to three a.m.
5. My Training Unit was #3092 and the female in charge of us was named Ascolillo-Buckles. I forget the man’s name but he was very uneasy about the assignment.
6. Females snore.
7. And have a variety of personal odors.

The Navy and I parted company after an enlistment contract dispute. I left as an E-3 with an Honorable Discharge and had no idea that less than a decade later I would be back as an appendage (a/k/a Dependent) for nearly 37 years.

          My newly alcoholic mother refused to pick me up at the Tampa airport but half of my favorite Twin Set (no pearls), Joy, came to get me after her shift at Tropicana ended. Nothing says Welcome Home to Terror like driving over the old Skyway Bridge in a Jeep with no doors.

          Joy was responsible for teaching me one of the most pleasurable activities of my life.

          Behave. She was my friend.

She taught me the joys of driving a manual transmission. She was drunk at the time because that was the best way to ignore or laugh at what I was doing to her vehicle until I developed some coordination.

Driving became one of my favorite things, right after tracking the smell of Brut cologne to its source (that’s a Kevin reference) and doing whatever it is that makes lips feel smugly bruised. It is a source of pride that during training at the Southeastern Institute of Criminal Justice I was able to induce puking in two of three police officers in my vehicle during skid pan and evasive maneuvers. Not just a pretty face: I was a great pair of hands and a right knee that knew how to brace against wild driving.