My Blog
Dazed...
Sat, May 3, 2008 - 9:12 AM
“Oh, Fuck...”
‘Congratulations! You are among the candidates who passed the P.O.S.T. Entry-Level Law Enforcement Test Battery for the position of Police Officer Trainee...’
I’ll explain. I need a gig, and in that happy manner of someone who’s tumbling off of a cliff, I’m grabbing at any shrubbery growing on that surface to slow my fall into obscurity. I saw the ad for officers (70k a year starting salary!) and decided to take the shot at the test. This is along with doing handy guy work, lining up a gig doing a kinky-smutty comic book for hire, tutoring a friend’s kid on fiction writing and history, and taking a Flash Class. Spreading the net wide, far, and thinly, so to speak.
A little about me. Dad was a bullfighter, as was a long line of my that side of my family. I’m not a adrenaline junkie, I don’t live my life like I’m in a Mountain Dew commercial, but I’m very good under pressure. I’m great in a tight squeeze or bad situation. I’m genetically programmed for it. Also I don’t want to be bored...
And I’d be paid. And there’d be a chance of a pension. And Oakland would be a challenge. And I know it’s insanity, suicidal, and all the rest, but it’s an open door. And I’ll take it. For now.
The handy guy stuff is fun and somewhat lucrative, but it’ll end in a while, the smutty comic book gig was supposed to start last Monday (’I swear you’ll have the scripts in the morning’) and kids eventually grow up and don’t require the tutoring thing, so...
It’s an option.
Meanwhile I’m currently looking for a place to crash in a month or so in SF or Oakland/Berkeley, so anybody who needs a slightly sane Non-Smoker to rent to, let me know...
Sat, May 3, 2008 - 9:12 AM -
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Sat, May 3, 2008 - 2:52 PM
What do you REALLY want to do? Do you need that much money and are you willing to risk your life for it?
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Tue, May 6, 2008 - 5:14 PM
I'm torn between concern for your welfare, and thinking how hot you'd look...
You know, I hadn't thought about it being in Oakland...
The Oakland police were kind to me once after I was in a major traffic accident, in which my car was totaled, and a man was killed right in front of me. A guy got pulled over on a routine traffic stop in a stolen car full of drugs; he freaked and started speeding ahead on W. Grand Avenue, careening into my car as I drove home from work. I managed to end the cell phone call to my parents, figure out that I needed to steer against the direction he was dragging my car to avoid hitting a telephone pole, and wrestled the car to a stop before I entered the intersection of Adeline and W. Grand. Then I looked up. The guy had pulled right and torn off the right front corner of my car, and sped right into a car that had been turning left from Adeline onto West Grand, hitting the driver square-on from the side. I saw the cars hit, saw the spray of windshield glass arc through the air, saw the freaked-out guy back up and try to keep going, til he hit two elderly black ladies in a sedan, and his car wouldn't go any farther. Somehow he jumped out and started running to the left, down the street. Seconds later two cop cars screech to a halt behind me, and officers jumped out and started running after the guy; they caught him. I sat in my car and breathed, just kind of intensely not being in the intersection, and not wrapped around the light pole a foot my left. I wasn't injured, and I thought about trying to help the people in the other cars, but the police were already there and doubtless calling ambulances in. An Asian officer came up to my window and asked if I was okay; I told them I was fine. After a couple more check-ins to see if this was true, and after contacting my insurance company for me, he came by and took a statement. It took forever for the tow truck to arrive, and then it turned out that they needed to call in a flatbed tow truck, since my car wasn't even in towable condition (the right front wheel and half the front axle were torn off... the wheel was about 50 feet away from my car, which made for great camera footage on the nightly news). I ended up having to wait a couple of hours for a ride and for the second to truck to arrive and agree to tow my car to Pacifica (he was afraid that he wouldn't get paid, even though I had AAA and coverage for it); it was getting dark, I really had to go to the bathroom. I somewhat embarrassedly confessed my plight to one of the police officers standing around, measuring and taking notes and talking to people; he said that normally he might suggest that I walked to a local gas station, but this was Oakland, and it was getting dark. So he gave me a ride to the Grand Avenue Market (which has since gone out of business), and back to my crippled car. The officer who'd taken my statement had baseball cards of himself - cop cards, I guess, not actually baseball cards - that he was handing out to curious kids lingering about the edges of the "Crime scene - do not cross" tape. He said that the Oakland police had had made up as a way to improve their image with the local youth, as a way to make the police seem cool, like sports stars; they handed them out when they went to schools, and things like that. While waiting for the 2nd tow truck, I ended up getting interviewed by several different news crews who had come out to cover the event... people I hadn't seen in years were calling me up the next day, saying "Oh my God, I'm so glad you're okay!", because they'd see me on the news. Eventually the tow truck came, and I made it home. And got insurance money to buy myself a replacement car. And had to testify as a witness at the freaked-out guy's trial... But I thought that the police were very nice, and very competent. The TV reporters actually kept trying to get me to say that I'd felt in danger from the cop's high-speed chase of the perpetrator on city streets, and how did I feel about them endangering the public, anyway? But I refused to give them a quote; I said very clearly that I hadn't observed anything like that happening, but that I had appreciated how quickly the police had showed up after the accident happened. None of that made it on the air. Lengthy personal narratives aside, I'm pretty sure that the police academy is a paying gig. You could stick your toe in the water and get paid to start getting wet, and get more of a sense of what the job might actually be like, before having to commit long-term, couldn't you? I spent a year with a guy who was an ex-San Francisco cop who seem to think his whole first year was pretty great, even though he ended up deciding that it wasn't really for him and left the force. The most lasting mark it left on him, that I could tell, was that he always had to sit with his back against a wall at restaurants, so no one could sneak up on him. (I developed a habit after that of always offering to my dates the choice of sides of the table whenever we went to a restaurant...) |
