The signs say long haired freaky people weed not apply
Foot patrol. As counterintuitive as it may seem for those who know me, it has always been a highlight of The Job.
Meeting people in good situations or bad is the essence of police work in my meaningless opinion. The further you get from the human element, the further you get from core mission and once the joy of the job exceeds the paychecks, you need something to hang on to. I would bear this in mind when the weather was crappy, or I was out and about while trying to tuck away some mental luggage from the call before.
I was doing just this while walking down East Main Street on a tepid spring evening. I was killing time on a power shift that gave me the run of the city and I wanted to see something other than red brick projects for a while, so downtown it was. I intentionally sought out areas I once considered “the frontier” when my leather was still new and I still had cartilage in my knees, and I was not disappointed in the least.
Some people complain about gentrification but I could change some minds with before-and-after pics had I snapped any back in the day. There were no trees growing out of the red brick walls I was passing, no visible signs of Steel Reserve malt liquor cans strewn about. And I’ll be damned, but there was no one asleep on the sidewalk! Just…people. Probably with jobs, and smiling whether employed or not. And what was that…?
I paused to inhale deeply, head tilting back and eyes closed. Not even a hint of urine in the air? I was flabbergasted. Not “Hillary Clinton November 9th 2016” flabbergasted, but still experiencing a healthy degree of shock at this also-unexpected development. East Main in the 1990’s…you just don’t understand.
Alas, the pause for cause was short lived as another old familiar smell hit the scene: Sweet, sweet weed.
At this moment, this was the worst problem I’d encountered in the last hour and I was okay with it. This town, you see, does not have a “weed problem” (in proportion to the “crack/meth/shooting/homelessness/ad nauseam” problems I prefer to focus resources on), but still…you can’t be smoking the ganja in public without putting Officer Friendly on the spot. And I’ll be damned, there the culprit is about twenty feet ahead of me.
I fast walked along the nearly empty sidewalk, passing only a young couple who knew what was up but were unable to signal the Burning Man up ahead as they watched me pass and close the distance.
“Excuse me,” I said to the young man with the dirty blonde manbun and the fluffy black Patagonia jacket. He was still ahead of me a few feet but I may as well have been a mile back.
I put a hand on his shoulder—fingertips only really—and repeated myself, this time catching his attention.
He turned around, eyes barely open, and I let him take a moment to drink the situation in (with an intentionally friendly smile) since his brain was on a two-hour snow delay. He managed to squint even more than he already was, and as he scanned my garb I believe the contrast of the brass badge against the nearly-black polyester behind it finally triggered something, and he brought up his right hand, still holding the joint.
He slowly looked at it and dropped it into the gutter (though this was only coincidentally where it landed). It was barely visible and by this point likely only paper but that’s not what interested me. What interested me was him slowly raising his left hand and pointing to my lips—nearly touching them in fact—and going “Shhhhhhhh” with closed eyes, before slowly turning back around.
My smile never left, and I watched my Ganjanaut sail off into his own starry night, my job being concluded in my mind.
Have I told you how much I love an occasional walking beat…?
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.