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Hardluck Jersey |
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The Thing is, I was Guilty At the end of World War II the United States took a U-boat load of German scientists who were working on atomic bombs and V-2 rockets, and set them up to work for us against the Red Menace. The US Government provided a big budget and orders to build up our arsenal. Of course there were pardons and exceptions made to our new think tank. A little know aspect of this German contribution to the Cold War is their role in the design of the Uniforms of New Jersey State Troopers. Anyone who has had the pleasure of being pulled over by one of these custodians of morality in the most corrupt state in the union knows what I’m talking about. The black pants with yellow stripes, the grayish-blue military style jacket, and matching hat: being part German I’m loathe to admit that I sometimes have to hold my right arm down with my left hand whenever I have to deal with a trooper, much like Dr. Strangelove in the movie. It’s an embarrassing ethnic tic I have mostly under control. Time was, before affirmative action, you couldn’t even apply to be a State Trooper unless you were over six feet in height. These thoughts were in my mind as I watched the trooper walk down the shoulder of the road, wondering what type of drugs my friend Joe, seated in the passenger seat, might have on him. I was pretty sure we had smoked all of it the night before at my friend’s dorm room, but my brain didn’t seem to be working at full capacity at seven in the morning in 1988. I-95 in New Jersey runs from Belmar on the Atlantic Ocean to the State Capitol of Trenton. This is the stretch of road where they first place the rookies. I don’t know what it is, the steroid injections, the initial heft of an automatic on your side, maybe something about the salt water in the air close to the shore, but boy, those guys sure are enthusiastic. They always ask the same question within the first couple of seconds of the conversation as they are looking over the car. “Do you have any guns or drugs, or anything I should know about?” I’m thinking: ‘I don’t have any guns, or conventional weapons of any type. A man bent on world domination such as myself has to think outside the box. I’ve got a Zaghnal (a hammer/ pick/ axe combination weapons favored by Gurkah warriors) a couple of tins of mustard gas, a water filled plastic bag containing a candiru fish, (Amazon river denizens notorious for following a urine trail to it’s source, through the urethra and into the bladder) that I won at Wack a Mole at the State Fair. “My penchant for drugs tends towards the dramatic. I’ve got some mandrake root extract and a few sprigs of yage. You’ll find it in the back seat, under the ‘Anarchist’s cookbook’.” “As for anything you should know about. I’m a Capricorn with a slight speech impediment and an aversion to jail, or any place where there is a chance of getting an errant candiru fish ripped out of my bladder by means other than surgery.” I didn’t say any of this of course, as another cop car pulled up. This one was local, and goddamn it if he wasn’t wearing a Smokey the Bear hat. I asked Joe if he was holding anything as the two cops had their little conversation about which one of them would have the privilege of sorting through the musty clothing, decaying fast food parts, yellowing newspapers and other assorted artifacts of suburban burnout culture occupying the back seat of my primer gray 1975 Monte Carlo. I loved that car, and I had big plans for it. I’m talking exterior wood panels, a replacement of the 8-track player, an upgrade of the dice hanging from the windshield from a conventional six-sided model to a twenty-sided pair that would make Gary Gygax proud. The hood was so long that, if it wouldn’t have interfered with my vision more than the amount of drugs I was doing at the time, I would have put a bi-plane on it, and installed a crane on the roof to move it on and off like they used to do on some subs in WWII. The trooper evidently won the coin toss, and wound up leaving me and friend forty five minutes later to sort through the junk strewn over the shoulder of the road. New Jersey State troopers have a long history of profiling, mostly based on race. I can’t begin to count the times I have seen a black or Hispanic group of people sitting on a shoulder of the Tunrpike waiting patiently while a Gestapo look alike tears their late model cars apart. For a brief period of time in my early twenties I was a stoner, the whole works, pot, hash, the occasional acid trip to keep me honest. And I looked the part. I’ve only been pulled over a few times since I cut my hair and started wearing clothes bereft of tye dye and holes. But the thing is, at the time, I was guilty, and every cop in the state of New Jersey new it. After the cop left, Joe produced a small baggie with five hits of acid in them. He explained it to me. When he first saw the cop he grabbed the floor mat. There was a slit in the side of it, and he had slipped the drugs in the middle. We’d gotten lucky. I wrote about the German Scientists co-opted to our side after WWII. They were guilty, as was our government for using them. I just read Richard Marinick’s excellent Boyos. One of my favorite crime books I’ve read in the last year. Marinick has a must read personal opening essay where he details how he became a writer. The guys done it all, ex-cop, robbed armored cars, went to prison. I’ve read several interviews where people ask him if he fells guilty that he has had some writing success based on his admittedly criminal behavior. He served ten years in prison, earned a couple degrees, learned to write. The man knows what he’s writing about. Everyone is guilty of something, whether it’s making atomic bombs, pardoning nazis, hiding acid from state trooper, robbing armored cars, whatever. And as crime writers, we are all feeding off the horrible things people do to each other. If there was no crime there would be no crime writing. And everyone I know has been touched by, or committed a crime of some type. It’s just a matter of degree and what you put down on paper. Pat Lambe Copyright(c) 2005 by Pat Lambe
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