A Hell of a Place to Visit, or One Reason I Don’t Trust Cops: A True Story

              New York City is a hell of a place to visit. You never know what you’ll see, where you’ll go, who you’ll meet. The possibilities, as they say, are endless. Perhaps you’ll attend a Tony Award winning musical starring that actress you used to like from that show you used to watch way back when. Or maybe you’ll find yourself hypnotized by an oil painting, a self-portrait by Gustave Courbet, on display for a limited time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or, if you’re extremely lucky, you might end up in the backseat a police car, which is flying down 5^th Avenue at twice the recommended speed limit, its siren echoing off the surrounding skyscrapers, its flashing lights bestowing everything with a hue of red and blue. Lucky? You say. What kind of sick son-of-a-bitch would consider himself lucky to be in the backseat of a police car? Let me tell you a story.

            I’m in New York City to play in a rugby tournament. It’s on a Saturday, but I take the train in a week early to see the sights, to visit my old friend Tex. Tex lives New York City, and as it turns out, if you want to live in New York City, you have to work all the time. So, for five days I barely see him. I spend the majority of my time doing touristy things, at least the ones that don’t cost very much money. Mostly I just walk around the streets, looking at whatever’s in front of me, or to the side, or up, always searching for cheap food and beer. On Friday afternoon I hit the jackpot—“$2 Draughts until Five.” Now, if you’ve never been to NYC, I will assure you that this is just about the best deal you will ever find (most bars charge up to five times that). So, there I am, in this bar, throwing back two dollar beers, when I get a call from Tex.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

            “Drinking two-dollar beers.”

            “Two-dollar beers!” he shouts. “Where?”

            “I don’t even know,” I say. “Let me ask somebody.” I wave down the bartender. “Where am I?”

He tells me the name of the bar. I tell Tex. Tex has never heard of the place. “What neighborhood are you in?” he asks.

Again, I ask the bartender. The bartender tells me. I tell Tex. “Ohhh,” he says. “Let me call you right back.”

I set the phone on the bar but it doesn’t ring, it makes that annoying beeping sound alerting me that I have a text message. I open the phone. It’s Tex: That’s the gay neighborhood. You’re in a GAY bar…

I raise my head and slowly look around—yep, he’s right, not a single female in sight. Screw it, I say to myself, two-dollar beers! I wave to the bartender to bring me another.

The beer is almost gone when my phone rings. It’s Tex. “Where are you now?”

“Same place.”

“Didn’t you get my text?”

“Sure did,” I replied.

“Then why are you still there?”

I can answer in three words: “Two-dollar beers.”

“But it’s a gay bar?”

“So what? I’m not gay.”
            “But what if somebody sees you inside?”

“For two-dollar beers, I don’t care who thinks I’m gay.”

Tex goes on to tell me that he has the night off from work, that I should start heading downtown, to meet him at a bar  to grab some drinks. On my way there I get a hold of another friend, Robbie from Long Island. He says he knows the bar, that he’ll meet us there.

The place is swank, no two-dollar draughts, so the three of us find ourselves throwing back over-priced mixed drinks with heavy pours. We tell a few stories, have a few laughs. I get a text from a friend on my rugby team—they’ve finally arrived in New York City, they’re at a bar across town. “Well,” Tex says, “let’s go. I’ll call us a cab.”

“Wait just a minute,” Robbie says in his thick Long Island accent. “I can get us a ride.”

“What do you mean, you can get us a ride?”

“I have a friend, he’s a cop. I’ll give him a call.”

Fifteen minutes later a police cruiser pulls up in front of the bar, and not on the street, right on the sidewalk, right in front of the glass doors. Robbie and the driver exchange pleasantries and the three of us cram in the backseat.

Robbie’s cop friend hops back in the car and swings around so he can see us. “Where you guys headed?”

“How far can you take us?” Robbie asks. “I mean where does your jurisdiction end?”

“Jurisdiction?” The driver laughs, before slapping his partner on the shoulder. “Tell them.”

The cop in the passenger seat swings around. “We’re fucking cops,” he says. “We can go wherever the fuck we want.”

And with that, the siren starts, the lights on the roof begin to swirl, and the driver shifts out of park and floors it. We’re off the sidewalk in an instant, jumping the curb, and fishtailing it down some odd-numbered avenue.

“Where we going?” the driver asks again.

I tell him the name of the bar.

“Yeah, I know that place.” The driver looks over to his partner. “Didn’t you get a blowjob there, that redhead if I remember?”

“In the girls’ bathroom,” he smiles.

“Hey Robbie,” the driver says. “What’s the fastest way there?”

“I think if you take Fifth up to…”

The driver stops him mid-sentence. “Wrong!” he yells. “Madison Avenue—it’s a straight shot from here to there.”

“Madison Avenue is one-way,” Tex alerts him, having learned the area well over the past five years.

“You guys want to see something cool?” The driver asks. “We call this the parting of the Red Sea.”

He cranks the steering wheel and turns down Madison Avenue. We’re suddenly going the wrong way down a one-way street. Though we’re forced to slow down considerably, it still feels like something out of an action movie. Horns are beeping, the sirens screaming, oncoming headlights are swinging left and right as we crawl through Friday evening traffic. All of us in the back seat are having a great time, but Tex is absolutely ecstatic, like a child on a roller coaster, with an ear to ear grin, slapping the back of his hand against my chest as if to say, “Are you seeing what’s happening?” As if I’m not there or something. Robbie is trying to keep a straight face, trying his best to convey that things like this happen to him all the time, but I can see right through it, I can see the excitement in his eyes, for all three of us know that this is a once in a lifetime experience. Hell, criminals don’t even get to go for rides like this. I know, I’ve been a “criminal” before, and let me assure you, there are no lights or sirens when they’re taking you to the police station, which is almost certainly your destination.

The driver swings a left and just like that, the greatest experience of our short lives comes to an end. But the show’s not over yet. He flips the siren off but leaves the lights on the roof flashing. He pulls up next to a spanking new white Escalade. The woman behind the steering wheel is big-city pretty, like those woman you see on the cover of the glossy magazines you’re bombarded with every time you’re waiting in line at a grocery store checkout. The kind of girl that would appear unrecognizably different if she was living on a farm in Nebraska.

The cop in the passenger seat rolls down his window. We can hear the hip-hop music pouring from the inside of her SUV. And this isn’t the kind of music you’d hear at church, no, these lyrics are very sexually explicit, yet somehow this white cop sitting in the passenger seat knows every word. He grabs his handheld microphone and raps along with the music, his voice amplified through a speaker mounted on the outside of the car.

In any other line of work this would clearly be sexual harassment, but this is New York City, and these guys are cops, and this is post-9/11, pre-Smartphones—where everybody has their own video camera—that decade in time when men in uniform could do no wrong, when the entire country still believed they were the heroes we grew up with on the television shows.

“What are you up to later?” the cop asks after finishing his rap routine. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She laughs and tells him the name of the club she’s going to, and he says he’ll meet her there, but we all know this will never happen, not with this chick—sure, he’s a cop, he’s cool, but he’s not millionaire-cool, he’s not Wall Street rich, he’s not in her league.

We pull up to a bar across the street from Central Park. Again, right up to the bar, right on the sidewalk. The driver hops out and opens the back door so we can climb out. As he gets back into his seat, I say to him, “You know, for the rest of my life, every time I see a cop car with its lights flashing and its siren whaling, I’m just going to assume that it’s just some guy giving his friends a ride to a bar across town.”

The driver laughs, floors the gas pedal, speeds down the road, flips the siren back on, and spins the car around, a complete 180, the kind of maneuver that can only be done by jerking the steering wheel and pulling the emergency hand brake at the same time. The car flies by the bar and I watch as its lights disappear down the street. I take in the city skyline for a moment before heading into the crowded bar, where half my rugby team is staring at me in disbelief. Did they just see that right? Did I just crawl out of the backseat of a cop car? They look at me for an answer.

“A hell of a place to visit,” I say. “A hell of a place to visit.”