Rose is white with ginger ears and an extremely alert tail. She weighs seventeen pounds even though she should probably weigh sixteen. She had some angry-looking lesions on her pink belly that made me take her to the vet two months ago. I gave her the prescribed antibiotics wrapped in cream cheese or peanut butter, depending on what was around. But the inflammation lingered and then flared, exacerbated by Rose’s very focused licking, and I decided we should go back and try again. I had heard there was a dog dermatologist in town with a three-month waiting list, but thought it best to give my regular vet another try. I’m quite certain I wouldn’t go to a dermatologist if I had pimples on my stomach, and so I didn’t see why I should make my dog go either.
My grandmother is ninety-four, a mere thirteen in dog years. She lives in an assisted-living facility three miles from my house and four blocks from my vet. Sometimes I take her with us to the vet, even though it is a lot to navigate a scared dog and a mostly blind, very confused grandmother into the waiting room. Still, she likes the excitement of the barking, snuffling dogs, and the chance to comfort Rose, who inevitably trembles with her head pressed beneath my grandmother’s arm. Rose doesn’t like the vet, which would be a point too obvious to include were it not for the fact that my mother’s cat worships his trips to the doctor. They are his fifteen minutes of fame. He purrs for hours after coming home at the mere thought of having received so much attention.
“It’s okay,” my grandmother told Rose last week, and rubbed her ears. “Nobody’s going to eat you.”
But Rose, for all her incalculable wisdom, was still a dog, and we could not reassure her that something really hideous wasn’t about to happen. Maybe she did think that, behind the door of examination room number three, an enormous, drooling animal was waiting to chew her up. She vibrated with fear, tucking her head down and her hindquarters in until she was the size of a grapefruit. How could I explain that this was all for the good, that I would never leave her here, that I would protect her with the same ferocity with which she protects me from the UPS truck? We have such a language between us, Rose and I, but in this case it failed us and all I could do was pet and pet.
My grandmother had told me that her leg had been sore all week. There was a bruise behind her knee, a funny place for a bump, and so my mother and I had kept an eye on it. As soon as my mother flew off for her vacation, I received a phone call from the assisted-living nurse. My grandmother needed to go to the doctor, immediately.
“Are we going to your house?” my grandmother said, once I had wrestled her and her suddenly useless, painful leg into my car.
“We’re going to the hospital,” I told her. “The doctor needs to see your leg.”
“My leg is fine,” she said.
“It’s fine because you’re sitting down. Do you remember it hurting before?”
“My leg doesn’t hurt,” she said.
Her leg was blowing up like a summer storm, dark as an eggplant now behind her knee and getting green in the front. Her skin felt tight and hot. How did it get so bad so fast? After the examination, the doctor said her blood was too thin. She’d had a bleed into her leg, which was better than a clot, and was admitted to the hospital.
If twenty minutes in the vet’s office could turn my bounding, snarling terrier mutt into a cowering grapefruit, three days in the hospital would cast my sweetly confused grandmother down into the lowest circles of dementia.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“In the hospital.”
“Are you sick?”
“No,” I said, leaning over to lightly tap her leg. “You have a sore leg.”
“I’ve been here before.”
“A long time ago.”
“There weren’t all these pots and pans then,” she said. “Not so many red squirrels.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Where are we now?”
“Still in the hospital.”
“Do you feel sick?”
And so we went on in our circle, hour after hour. We had stepped outside of the routine we knew and found ourselves in a place where language was utterly useless. Still, we could not stop talking, the same way I talk to Rose while we wait for the vet. “It’s okay. I’m right here. You’re a beautiful dog. There was never such a good and beautiful dog as you,” I whisper to her over and over again while I pet.
I could not call Rose and tell her I was at the hospital, and I could not leave. I had already found out that IVs could be pulled out much quicker than they could be put back in. Every five minutes my grandmother swung her feet to the floor. “Let’s go now.”
I picked them up and put them back in her bed. “You aren’t supposed to walk.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
Is it wrong to tell a story about your grandmother and your dog in which their characters become interchangeable? My sense of protectiveness for the two of them is fierce. They love me, and because their love is all they have to give, it seems especially pure. I love them too, but my love manifests itself in food, medical care, rides in the car, grooming. On Tuesdays I bring my grandmother to my house and give her lunch, and she always claims to be too full to finish her sandwich so that she can give half of it to Rose, who does not get sandwiches at other times, especially not straight from the table. I look the other way when my grandmother whispers to my dog, “Don’t worry. She doesn’t see us.” My grandmother longs to have the ability to spoil someone again. My dog is the one mammal left who is unconditionally thrilled by her company. I wash my grandmother’s hair in the kitchen sink after the dishes are done and Rose sits in her lap while I blow it dry and pin it up in a twist. Sometimes, when I’ve finished with my grandmother’s hair, I’ll wash Rose in the sink and use the same damp towel to rub her dry. Then they lie down on the couch together and fall asleep, exhausted by so much cleanliness.
Back in the hospital, I covered my grandmother up with a white blanket.
“Your little dog sure did give me the cold shoulder,” she said, her voice full of hurt.
“What?”
“She didn’t even come over and say hello.”
“Rose isn’t here,” I told her. “We’re in the hospital.”
My grandmother’s eyes moved slowly from the window to the door, then back again. “Oh,” she said, glad to know she was wrong. She took the white blanket up in her hands.
Three days later, my grandmother went home, her leg still sore but stable. I tell her she was in the hospital, but she doesn’t believe me.
Rose, on the other hand, remembers her antibiotics. After dinner she sits in front of the counter where the bottle is kept, wagging her tail. She thinks only of the cream cheese, not the medicine, because she knows that part of it is my responsibility.
(The Bark, Winter 2003)
The Wall
IT IS MAY 1992, a month after the Rodney King riots, and on the television, Ted Koppel is picking his way through the wreckage of South Central Los Angeles. Twenty miles away in Glendale, my father and I are in the den of my father’s house, watching, drinking gin and tonics. As Koppel speaks, my father explains. My father knows these people—not the reporters, but the ones being discussed. He knows some better than others. Most of the young ones he’s never met, but he knows their type, and he knows how their type thinks. My father worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for thirty-two years, retiring in 1990 at the level of Captain Three. That was a year before Rodney King was beaten by a group of Los Angeles police officers, before the videotape was shown, before the officers were acquitted after a lengthy trial and sections of Los Angeles went up in flames.
As Police Chief Daryl Gates comes on the screen, my father nods at the television. “There’s a guy who wouldn’t listen to anybody, never wanted to take anyone’s advice. He did a lot of great things for this city and he made a lot of mistakes, but all that’s gone now. Now he’ll on
ly be remembered for one thing.”
I look at my father, who looks at the television, and think that it isn’t just Gates. My father will be remembered for this one thing as well, even though it happened after he was gone, even though he was a good cop and very possibly a great cop who came up in the better days of Chief Parker and Dragnet. My father was still a man who had put in thirty-two years with the police department in Los Angeles, which at the time had meant he was courageous and devoted to serving his city, and which now meant he was a racist thug.
When I was growing up there was no place better than the Police Academy, the stone stairs and red tile roof, the long blue swimming pool stretching out beneath the shade of eucalyptus trees. The Academy is carved into a hillside above Elysian Park. I liked to imagine my father there, years before I was born, young and handsome and running up all those countless stairs to class. We went to the Police Academy for lunch whenever I was in town. It was the first place I wanted to go. I loved the pictures of Jack Webb in the display case across from the cash register in the coffee shop, and I loved the cadets in their navy-blue sweatshirts, eating salads at the counter (salads, my father would tell me, because anything else comes right back up when they had to run twelve miles in the heat of the afternoon). We had tuna melts and french fries and malts. Mostly, I loved all the cops who stopped by our table throughout the meal to pay their respects to my father. For the most part they called him Captain Patchett. A few called him Cap, and fewer still, his equals, called him by his given name. After each one left, my father would tell me his or her story, how this one had just passed his lieutenant’s exam, how the next had done such a brilliant job in juvenile. He would tell me about the cases they had worked on, the risks they had taken, the crimes they had solved. The men and women who came to our table were funny and smart, occasionally dashing. I’m sure this lunchroom exposure was far from fully representative of the entire police department. Maybe the bad ones stayed away from our table, or maybe my father chose not to recount their failings to me. Still, my view of the institution was shaped by my own privileged vantage point, and based on what I saw, I grew up believing that police officers were hardworking and brave, people like my father.
This episode of Nightline would prove to be a blockbuster for ratings. I was hardly the only one ruminating on Los Angeles and its police force at the time. They held a special place in the collective imagination of the country. There is as much comfort in knowing what to hate as there is in knowing what to love, and that summer the LAPD was reviled. Gone were the days when we knew the police from Dragnet and Adam-12. Now we knew them from a minute of videotape that played in a continuous loop on the nightly news.
Just a month ago I had gone into a Baskin-Robbins wearing an old LAPD T-shirt. This was in Tennessee. I had been out for a run, and I hadn’t thought about what I was wearing, but the young Caucasian man behind the counter said he wasn’t so interested in giving me my ice cream. Then he asked me, loudly, if I was a member of the Klan. It was a hot night and the store was crowded and everybody turned to stare at me. I left without ice cream, and ran a little faster on the way home, no doubt giving the man behind the counter the chance to feel he had stood up for what was right. I had seen the videotape. I possessed a full understanding of bad police officers. But my failure to speak up in Baskin-Robbins (and what would I have said, anyway?) felt like a failure to defend my father.
My father, he would be the first to tell you, does not need defending. He was the third of seven children, and the first of those seven to be born in this country after his parents immigrated from England, the first to be born in Los Angeles. The neighborhood where he grew up near MacArthur Park was crowded and Catholic and poor, and the priests and the cops were local heroes. As a young man my father had briefly experimented with the seminary and soon discovered its disadvantages. He then turned to the police. In the years that followed, my father drove a squad car and a drunk wagon. He was Chief Parker’s bodyguard. He was a detective, worked in narcotics, and ran Internal Affairs. He headed several divisions, including Newton in South Central, which is not a job to want. He made the connection between the Tate and the LaBianca murders, and went into the desert for Charles Manson. He picked up Sirhan Sirhan the night Bobby Kennedy was shot and worked the investigation that followed. He served his city, and attended the funerals of friends who had also served their city. The videotape that ran on the evening news told a true story, but it was not the only story.
And yet despite the rage of a nation against a police force, the Los Angeles Police Academy remained the most competitive in the country. People are still lining up to get in. I have always understood why my father had wanted to be a policeman in Los Angeles, but in the present climate I am mystified as to why anyone would want the job now. It wouldn’t be just the people in your own city who would hate you. People in New York and Chicago—homes to notoriously corrupt police departments—would hate you as well. To embark on a career that was both thankless and dangerous does not seem worth the promise of a pension.
This, I think to myself in a snap of revelation, is a great idea for a book. It would be my first book-length work of nonfiction. I’m one gin and tonic down. Ted Koppel is still talking as I begin to outline my idea to my father. I’m making it up as I go.
“You want to be a cop?” my father asks me.
“Not at all,” I say.
“But you want to try out, take the test?”
That he sounds pleased is something of a surprise to me. I tell him yes, I want to take the test, I want to go through the Police Academy, I want to write about it. I am interested in the job these people want, but I am also interested in the job my father had. I am interested in my father, whom I am very close to, but have seen remarkably little of in my life.
At the end of my visit with my father I go back to Cambridge, where I am on a fellowship at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. While Harvard students spend their days in class and their nights in the library, I begin my own course of study. My objective is to find something stronger and sterner in my body than was there before. I swim in the Blodgett pool until I think I’ll sink, and then I run along the Charles River. I come to know the distance between the bridges. I nod briskly at the people I pass at the same time every day. People warn me about running. They tell me to avoid hours that are excessively early or late, to stay away from any path not filled with other runners, but their advice means nothing to me. I am just beginning to see the thing I should be afraid of, which is trying out for the Los Angeles Police Academy.
Studying, which once meant the memorization of battle dates and the order of presidents, now means clearing a six-foot wall. The big sticking point for getting into the Police Academy, especially for women, is the wall, and so I begin to hunt up practice walls around Cambridge, a low one to start. I pick the wall outside the Cambridge Public Library. It is a sunny weekend and, from across the street, I wait for the traffic to clear and then take a flying run at it. It’s not a natural thing, jumping over a wall, and more often than not I smack straight into it. My hands bleed. My legs and arms bruise. A small crowd of interested onlookers assembles and moans at my failures until, finally, I give up. I want what anyone would want when trying to learn how to scale something, which is privacy, but I don’t know of any six-foot walls in Boston built in the middle of a lonely field. The best wall I can find, the height of which I measure with my hand above my five-feet-seven-inch self, surrounds the Harvard Divinity School. I go there late at night, earnestly fiddling with my Walkman until the strolling couples and dog walkers have passed, and then I run as fast as the narrow street allows and I hit it in a jump, my fingers curling around the rough edges. I pull and pull up until, amazingly, I am on the top. I sit for a minute and look down at the gardens on the other side and think about my father at twenty-five, out of the Navy and working in a liquor store, wanting nothing more than to get a good job as a cop in Los Angeles. I am th
irty.
My self-directed course in wall jumping soon becomes second nature. Once I’ve learned how to jump over walls I can do it in a skirt. I impress friends with my cool new trick. Having mastered what is considered the biggest obstacle, I progress to grip strength, because hanging from a bar is another part of the test. Like an inverted bat, I hang as motionless as possible from jungle gyms in children’s playgrounds and watch the tendons pop inside my wrists. A strong grip should one day translate into my ability to shoot a gun. I buy a set of grip strengtheners, two plastic handles on a tight metal coil, and I keep them on my desk and squeeze and squeeze. The high squeak they make, like springs in an ancient, painful mattress, remind me of staying with my father for that one week every summer. My sister and I would know that he was awake when we heard the skreich of the grips that he kept on his bedside table. We would go into the back porch room where, in the early years after our parents’ divorce, my father slept in his father’s house. He would sit on the edge of his made-up bed, wearing a white T-shirt and sweatpants, crunching his hands in a steady rhythm until I can see the strain in his arms. The squeak of the coils in my own room in Cambridge makes me miss him.
“Don’t be fooled,” my father tells me long distance. “The springs on those things wear out fast. You should buy a new set every couple of weeks.”
“They’re killing me just the way they are,” I say, though this is not the point I have called to make. It is the memory I want to talk about, not my grip.
“You think you’re getting stronger, but it’s just that the coils have broken in. Squeeze a quarter between the handles and hold it for sixty seconds,” he says. “That’s what makes the difference.”
And I do, or I try to. I try to hold the coin in place while I stare at my watch but my hands start to shake and I have to let go.