Fritz

Fritz

Over the years I worked with a couple of police officers that were real psychopaths.  I met one of them in my annual “Racial Sensitivity Class". We were all required to take this class each year to make us more sensitive. The class lasted an entire day and consisted of different speakers, usually social workers and psychologists. There was also a great deal of audience participation.  Mainly the police department was covering its rear end just in case there should be any kind of racial incident. The department would be able to say that we all had “Racial Sensitivity” training. We all thought these classes were really dumb, especially the black officers that had to participate. They were a waste of time. Since we were getting paid for sitting around we didn’t mind too much. We pretended to pay attention and tried to keep from laughing at some of the stuff they told us.  One part of the course was when a black girl social worker would sit in a chair in the middle of the classroom and we all got in a line and had to walk by her and touch her afro. This was so we could see that her hair was really very soft and not rough or course like most white people think a black persons hair is. “Like we had never touched an afro before, what did they think we held on to while we handcuffed them?” 

Jim Ring was in this class with me. He was called “Ding Dong” by most of us.  He was one of those dangerous psychopaths or sociopaths, I get them confused, that made you wonder how he got by all the psychological tests to be hired. Jim was a very scary individual.  He was only 5’9” with a slight build and coke bottle glasses with heavy black frames, but he was the scariest guy I ever met.  Jim was very unpredictable.  I saw him pull his pistol in the police locker room, put it up to another officer’s head and cock it. He was just horsing around, but it was very scary.  He liked to use his gun to knock on doors and to knock on people’s heads. He was always using excessive force on some prisoner or when he was making an arrest, but the high ranking officers were so afraid of him that he got away with it. They were afraid that if they disciplined him that he might sneak into their house one night and kill them in their sleep. I once saw Jim push an old crippled guy in a wheel chair down a flight of stairs, because he wouldn’t tell him where his son was hiding. 

“Ding Dong’ had a very effective method for finding out information.  He would knock on the front door of a house with the butt of his pistol and when the person he wanted to get information from opened the door, he would knock him down with his pistol butt and ask the guy questions as he slammed the door repeatedly on the guys head. They not only always told Jim everything they knew, but from then on every time they saw him, they would tell him anything new they might have learned ...

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Big Pink

Big Pink

Donnie Bridger was a big guy. He listened to rock and roll on his car radio and snapped his fingers to the beat. I thought he was really cool when I was thirteen years old. He really fooled me.  I know, I thought I was too smart to be fooled too. I had met Donnie a couple of times when my mom and her girlfriends were entertaining all these unobtainable gay men in her basement apartment she rented out to the gay guy.

I remember, I was home alone one Saturday afternoon, I think I was ironing my clothes in the kitchen, when I heard a loud knocking on the front door.  It was Donnie looking for either Jim, the gay guy, or my mom and seemed desperate to find one of them.  He came inside and told me he needed to find one of them right away.  I explained that I had no idea where to find them, but he kept hanging around waiting for one of them to return.  He finally told me that he really needed some money fast and wanted Jim or my mom to loan him twenty five dollars.  After watching me iron for about an hour he decided to ask me if I had twenty five dollars.  He said, “I only need it until tomorrow and I will bring it back to you then. I promise”.  I usually don’t lend money, mainly because I don’t want anyone to know I have any. I figured Donnie was a cool guy, so I let him have the twenty five dollars as a one day loan.  I didn’t see him again for many years.  I really felt like a fool and tried to think of it as a learning experience.  What kind of asshole borrows money from a hard working little kid and then rips him off like that? Oh well, I didn’t complain or tell anyone.  I just filed it away in the back of my mind for when I got a little older and smarter.

The police radio dispatcher gave me a disturbance call at the “General Greene Grill”, a famous gay bar in the downtown area.  The “General Greene Grill” was named after the famous Revolutionary War hero that won the battle with Cornwallis. Our city of Greensboro was named after this famous general as well. The bar was on my beat in the downtown area. It was a minor trouble spot, so I always patrolled it, especially on second shift and I would occasionally walk through the bar just to let them know I was thinking about them.  It was particularly interesting on Halloween night with all the queen and princess costumes.  Whenever I would walk into the bar, all the guys would start kissing and fondling each other to see if they could gross me out. Little did they know that I was raised in an extremely artistic environment...

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The Wall

The Wall

I was twelve years old and I was making some real good money with my lawn mowing enterprise. After beer and cigarette expenses each week I had a lot of extra money to stash in my sock drawer. 

After Dr. Scott’s unexpected sudden demise, my mom was going through her “I have a lot of gay friends” period. Dr. Scott had bought us a great house on East Lake Drive across from Lake Daniel Park. It was a large house with a finished basement apartment.  Mom had insisted that they have the large upstairs attic area finished into a giant art studio. Dr. Scott almost always complied with her wishes. When it was finished it was actually a pretty cool attic, I have to admit. There was an inside staircase with a locking door and an outside entrance with a deck and steps down to the back driveway. High ceilings, a full bathroom and a lot of natural light made it perfect for an art studio. Mom would have visiting artists come in to teach and started her own business “The Attic Art Gallery”. Mom was a founding member of the “Petty Coat Painters” a group of middle aged women that liked to do artistic things in the community. They had monthly luncheons and meetings. Mom made money from art lesson commissions and art shows in her gallery. She had a lot of famous artists teach classes including John Brady and Marcus Blahov a famous portrait artist from New York City.

After Dr. Scott’s death she kicked the art thing up a couple of notches. Dr. Scott actually was a smart man after all.  He left everything in a trust to mom so she couldn’t run through the inheritance in one year. She had lifetime living rights to the house and a monthly allowance for expenses.  When mom died, all of Dr. Scott’s money and the house we lived in would go back to Dr. Scott’s real kids in Georgia.  Dr. Scott’s children were all older than my mom. They owned and operated the bank in Georgia that controlled the trust fund that Dr. Scott had set up.  Mom had to beg them for any extras she needed. I figured they were ripping her off somehow, but I wasn’t old enough or smart enough to figure it out. So I filed that information away for when I got a little older and smarter. When I did get older and smarter, I sued the bank owned by Dr Scott's relatives for violating their fiduciary responsibility and got a settlement of almost $100,000.

Mom rented the very cool basement apartment to a nice gay guy named Jim.  He was a very well dressed and fastidious homosexual that looked a lot like Rock Hudson and did not act very effeminate. Mom and her lady friends swooned over him and would spend hours partying with him on weekends.  It was pretty obvious to me what the situation was and I didn’t mind since it freed me up to do pretty much what I wanted to do.  Jim was a nice guy and was always friendly to me, the landlady’s kid.  I am sure they all thought I was clueless as to what was going on.  I have always tried to keep a low profile and act like I wasn’t aware of grownup things.  Mom and her girl friends, some married and some, would fawn over Jim and I am sure they thought they could make a romantic conquest.  I figured that they might as well have been searching for the Holy Grail. 

Jim had several gay male “friends” that came over to his apartment frequently.  Most were nice guys and some of them sort of surprised me.  They didn’t look or act gay. I was pretty wise to the ways of the world by then. One of Jim’s friends was a locally famous professional hockey player. Bobby, the hockey player, was really a pretty cool guy with a tooth missing in front.  He used to give me hockey tickets to all the Greensboro Generals Hockey teams home games and some friends and I would go to the Greensboro Coliseum to watch all the fights on the ice. For a gay guy Bobby sure could fight...

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The Stakeout

The Stakeout

When I came to work for third shift the sergeant told Dale and me to report to the Shift Commander, Captain Gibbons, in his office right after lineup.

We always held Lineup before starting each shift in the Patrol Division.  This was when we learned about anything of interest that had occurred on the previous shift and what to be on the lookout for during our shift.  The first thing we did in line up was of course to line up at attention. I was good at this since I did go to military school so I could graduate from school. The Sergeant would then inspect us to be sure our brass was polished and we had our badge and gun. Sometimes he would make us open the cylinder on our revolvers to be sure they were clean and loaded. Amazing as it sounds; every now and then someone would have forgotten to load their revolver or their bullets had turned green.

The most entertaining lineup I was ever privileged to participate in was when Trevor and Mary told the Sergeant that they wanted to make an announcement to the entire squad. Trevor and Mary were partners in the same squad car. Mary was one of the first female police officers ever hired by the department. Women were just starting to come out in the world and do jobs mostly performed by men. Things were very different back then. She and Trevor had been riding together for about six months now. She was very hot, especially in her uniform. There were two types of new women police officers. One type was scared to death, so they acted all tough and mean. The other type was not scared at all and did a very good job. Just as good as any man could do. Mary was like the first ones I mentioned. “Damn, she looked good in that uniform”. Trevor and Mary stood up in front of the squad and held hands as they announced that they were divorcing their spouses and going to marry each other. After the initial shock of the announcement, I thought that they had to be the dumbest two people in the entire police department...

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Fun With Winos

Fun With Winos

“It takes a sorry son of a bitch to arrest a man”

Wild Bill Hurley 1980

No one else wanted my beat in the downtown area, because it was mainly just dealing with winos. A wino is what we called, career alcoholics, that had reached the very bottom of the barrel. They drank “Richards Wild Irish Rose”, “Mad Dog 20-20” or some other brand of fortified cheap wine” and slept in abandoned buildings or cars. They begged for money or stole things to buy wine. Some were funny and some were mean. Some would kill another wino for his wine, money or just for fun. I liked messing with winos. When other beats were boring, I always had winos to mess with. I knew all the regulars like Wild Bill Hurley, Box Car Ruby, Clyde “Bionic Leg” Hall and Gay Ray Rachel. I had arrested them all, numerous times, for public drunkenness and many other crimes. Over the years I had been punched, kicked, vomited on and had them throw things at me. One rainy night my trainee, “killer Diller’, didn’t search Wild Bill as well as he should have. On the way to jail, Bill got mad and threw a small jar of instant coffee that he had hidden in his coat pocket against the Plexiglas shield and it got all over us in the front seat. When we got out of the car into the rain our white shirts percolated.  Box Car Ruby, a woman wino, came after me on the street one afternoon. She was as big as a box car and knocked both swinging doors off the hinges of Jim’s Lunch when she came after me. She charged  like a drunken bull with her teeth snarling and her finger nail claws swinging wildly. One good thump between her eyes with my night stick and she went down like a sack of potatoes. I never found out why she decided to attack me. Then there was Gay Ray Rachel, he was an ex professional boxer and he was flaming gay. Many people made the mistake of messing with him. He once told me that the only thing he liked better than having gay sex was kicking ass. I changed his words around some, but you get the picture...

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