Hero To Zero 2nd edition (21 page)

Several stores developed the “one final check” practice to deal with the issue. After checkout, there is one final check by a trusted, usually older employee. This person checks each receipt to ensure that all the items in a cart have been paid for. This is not to imply that the store doesn’t trust its customers; in reality, it doesn’t trust its own employees.

On this occasion, the arrogant chief took the request as sign of disrespect. As the chief of police, he should have instantly been recognized. Obviously, he was above the brief inspection. He was not a thief! How could the frail old man not have recognized him immediately?

The fact is that this kind of inspection happens every day at places like Costco, Wal-Mart, and Target stores all over the nation. If the chief had been paying attention during his many part-time jobs instead of sleeping in changing rooms and utility closets, he would’ve known this.

Chief Prevost at first said no to the request for his receipt and pressed on, ignoring the frail old man. The doorman was not intimidated; he was a WWII veteran and was not about to be treated like a doormat. He sounded the alarm.

Within moments, employees and then a manager surrounded the chief. His arrogance had caught up with him, and he exploded in a tirade of “Fuck you!” and then, “Do you know who the fuck I am?” No—they neither knew nor cared who the fuck he was. It was company policy, and the manager would do whatever it took to keep his job as one of the “common people” the arrogant chief had so recently graced with his presence.

The local police were called when the chief escalated his verbal abuse. Unfortunately for Chief Prevost, he wasn’t in “his” city. He was eventually given a citation in lieu of being arrested, and the incident made national news. The store had video of the entire incident, and no matter how the chief tried to paint it as not being his fault, the video didn’t leave any doubts.

Just ten short days later, Chief Alan Prevost was relieved of his position by the same city council that had hired him. He made sure to leave them with a small taste of the verbal abuse he’d unleashed on the aging WWII veteran, the guy who’d dared ask for his receipt.

The chief went from his self-imposed status as hero straight to zero in the time it took to inspect a receipt at the door of your local retail store.

REGGIE STILLS WAS BORN THE
son of a cop, and grew up in the shadow of his father’s police uniform. Everywhere he went as a child, people knew his father. Every store they went into to buy groceries, every restaurant they ate in, every movie theater they went to, there was someone who knew his dad and would make a comment or say a thank-you for something his dad had done for them.

That is the reality for cops’ kids. Your cop parent is known everywhere and by everyone—usually for doing something good, sometimes for not-so-good things. Always, though, people will come up and talk, and then ask, “Is this your son/daughter?”

Reggie knew what it meant to grow up in a fishbowl with everyone watching your every move. It made him a little more rebellious than most kids in his peer group, and he got into a little more trouble than most.

He was lucky, though. Dads who are cops are not always the best parents. Reggie had a dad who was the exception to that rule. His dad would take him camping and fishing, and was involved in coaching his little league teams.

When Reggie grew older and started to sow some wild oats as a high school-aged kid, his dad sponsored parties at his home. He made sure that kids didn’t drive if they were drinking, and when parents asked who would be supervising the party, he would take a day off work and make sure the party was safe for all involved. He was that kind of dad, realistic and grounded. He knew that his son would be drinking and, rather than ignore it and stick his head in the sand and pretend that it wasn’t happening, he stepped up.

When Reggie graduated high school, he decided to go into the Marine Corps. His dad hadn’t been a Marine, and this made Reggie want to make his own mark and prove himself on his own terms. His dad told me one day while we were on a break getting a drink how proud he was when his son told him that he had enlisted in the Marines. He said that he knew it would be difficult, but he also knew from watching his son that he was strong enough to handle the training and he felt that he would excel. He wasn’t disappointed, and when Reggie completed his enlistment and decided to come back home, his father welcomed him.

Reggie returned home with an honorable discharge in hand and a new-found confidence. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about the man that his father was, and when he came home he decided to try his hand at law enforcement as well.

He got a foot in the door by first getting hired by the sheriff’s department. Working in corrections gave him a view of the streets from watching and dealing with captured criminals and learning from them on a day-to-day basis. Most cops will tell you that correctional officers make the best street cops, because they live with the arrested criminals of a city for forty hours or more a week. Making sure they are fed three meals and receive medical treatment, and breaking up the inevitable fights that occur, gives you a life experience that few others will ever have. It makes you seasoned in the streets before you ever set foot in a patrol vehicle and start making your own arrests.

Reggie excelled at the job, and in a couple of years tested for the very few open positions in his father’s department. He was selected on his second attempt at testing, and passed the police academy easily. Compared to the Marine Corps boot camp, the state police academy was a walk in the park. In no time Reggie was on the streets, working next to his father. His dad couldn’t have been more proud.

Father and son were different people. Dad had been married once and stayed married to the same woman for fifty-two years before he died. Reggie was more like me. He couldn’t seem to find a woman who could grow with him and deal with the stresses of being a cop’s wife. He was married and divorced as many times as I was, maybe more. I never asked. We both worked a lot of overtime trying to stay on top of bills.

Reggie was as gifted on the streets as Billy Webster or Ray Fossum, though he was much more subdued and quiet. He didn’t draw a lot of attention to himself or the things that he did.

Reggie applied his marine training to the job and applied for the department’s SWAT team. He was accepted and did well. He excelled at the tactical training, and grasped the concepts better than most of the team leaders. This made him a target, and it wasn’t long before he was asked not so politely to leave the team. The powers that be didn’t like that he was an independent thinker and quite capable of improvising the tactics they thought of as carved in stone. They were black-and-white thinkers, while Reggie saw the world in shades of grey.

Reggie left the team and quietly disappeared onto the midnight shift, where the target that always seemed to be present on the back of his head was less visible to others. Reggie layed low, did his job at night, and like his father, did a great job of taking care of his kids. He coached them at soccer and frequently would come to briefing before shift beaming at how well his little girls had done at their games.

He was seriously much more proud of what his girls did in sports and school than I ever saw him at anything he did at work. He accomplished a lot in the streets, but nothing brought him the joy he experienced coaching and watching his girls. It would be no exaggeration to say there were tears in his eyes more than once while he bragged about them. He was a very proud father. We both were—and like me, he was a horrible husband.

Reggie decided to take a turn in the floundering gang unit and made a huge impact there. He gathered intelligence on the local gangs in a manner that had never been seen or attempted before. To say that he had a gift was an understatement. He could find out what had happened during a particular incident in very short order. Unlike the previous gang detectives, he listened to everyone, gang members and cops alike. He was able to put some amazingly difficult cases together just by doing what he did best: listening and being an exceptional cop.

Reggie and I rolled through divorces, one after another, and would often joke in a painful way about our fucked-up lives. We each would meet our soul mates soon enough, but not yet.

Reggie finally met what he thought was the perfect woman one night in the emergency room. He was bringing in the latest drunk, or perhaps he was called up there on the latest stabbing or shooting victim to have been dumped off at the emergency room doors. I don’t really know, but I do know that is where he met the dark-eyed nurse. She was a beauty, seriously, and I envied him. She was married, and her marriage was going to shit, as was Reggie’s.

Cops and emergency room nurses live life without the rose-colored glasses that most of us take for granted. The rest of us read in the paper about one-tenth of the horrors that really go on in the streets. You might read about one rape that occurred the previous night, or one fatal crash. Cops and emergency room nurses see all of it—not just the single case that gets printed but the dozens that don’t.

They don’t just read about it, they live it. The screams of the helpless and wounded in pain: the smell of blood, brains, and shit of the near-dead and dying. They see and experience it all and come back the next night for the next installment of what the rest of us rarely even realize is going on, every day, all day long.

Reggie was sitting in a waiting room when the nurse came in. Beautiful as ever, she looked at Reggie and smiled. There was something in her eyes that night that made the smile look more like a grimace of pain than a greeting. Reggie noticed it immediately, and started to talk to her. He was genuinely concerned, wondering if she was okay. The two groups, cops and nurses, spar a lot, but also genuinely care about each other. There is no one else in their worlds who understands what they see and the toll it takes.

Reggie talked to her while she did her work of checking blood pressure and assessing a patient’s health. He watched like only a good cop can, noticing little changes in the facial expressions and posture that clue you in that something isn’t right. Later, he made a point out of coming back up when he knew she would be at lunch. He sat down uninvited, again as only a cop will, and began to coax the nurse to talk to him.

In a few minutes, the normally hard-as-stone emergency room nurse was in tears. She told him of her disastrous marriage and her fear that she would be alone. Then she dropped the bomb on him: she was addicted to pain pills and had been stealing them from the emergency room. She admitted that she couldn’t sleep without them. The nightmares of the damaged bodies she saw night in and night out made sleep impossible without the prescription drugs she skimmed from the emergency room pharmacy.

She had worked her way through nursing school with no scholarship and no assistance. It was hard, but it had been her dream to be a nurse and to make a difference. Now she felt like it was all falling apart. Her job as a nurse, her marriage, basically her entire life, it was all going to shit because of the addiction. Reggie listened carefully.

Cops talk to people who are at their wits’ end every day. They spill their guts to cops much like a person might to a priest. It is a cleansing moment, I suppose, to release all of the fears and emotion to someone you feel you can trust. Good cops have an innate knack for knowing when to push, and when to sit in silence and listen, and Reggie was an excellent cop.

He sat and listened till she was done; relieved and exhausted, she thanked him for listening. He gave her his cell phone number and told her to call anytime, day or night, if she needed to talk. They parted ways that day and the hook was set.

To this day I am really glad she talked to him and not me.

Reggie took more and more of the beautiful nurse’s burdens on his shoulders. He was going through his own painful divorce, and was busy keeping his kids’ lives together in the daytime. Meanwhile, he helped the emergency room nurse out as much as he could. Eventually she was caught stealing from the emergency room pharmacy, and was put on a probation for addiction. She was exceptional as a nurse, and the hospital administration hoped that she would be able to be salvaged.

They decided to give her one chance at proving herself worthy of their trust. She had to complete a drug rehab program, and an extended probation period. She had to submit to random drug tests, and couldn’t work as a nurse until she had completed the probation, rehab program, and drug tests. The administration made it painfully clear that one slip, and she was done in the profession. Period.