I circled right, the hole opening up, a clear path to the end zone. Then fate and the Ole Miss tackle, Virgil Stapes, came out of nowhere and hit me high, then a linebacker came off a block and caught me low. To this day I can still hear the sound of my right ankle snapping, shattering in three places as Virgil Stapes stood over me laughing and grinning like a Halloween jack o lantern.
There would be no glory for me that day, just a lifetime sentence of pain and suffering. Twelve seconds doesn’t sound like a long time in a man’s life, but it was enough time for me to lose everything: the Heisman, a pro career, my identity, my family.
After graduating in 1985, I tried my hand at law school. Never a remarkable student, I had to apply myself for the first time in my life. When I was a football star, I always got the break, the benefit of the doubt when it came to grades. Professors spit out grades that I’d never really deserved. Not anymore, I had to earn them. I was no longer a favorite son of the south just a broken down has been with a nickname. Almost everyone I met or came into contact with started their conversation by offering me condolences for my injury. You’d have thought I’d lost a loved one. The pity was hard to swallow and by my second year in law school I was deep into a valley of depression and self-pity. My way of coping was by hitting the bottle hard. It got so bad that I had to take the first semester of my last year off, so I could dry out at a clinic. Somehow I made it through rehab and scraped by, graduating near the bottom of my class. I joined my father’s law firm in the summer of 1989. Rather than working with him in Baton Rouge, he sent me over to their branch office in New Orleans down in the French Quarter. The old man said he sent me over there so I could apply myself: reasoned that there would be less pressure and I could spend more time getting ready for the bar exam. In truth, it was little more than a no show job. Maybe he was trying to help me, but I never bought his line. I thought he was embarrassed by my very presence, trying to hide me from his partners like you would a crazy aunt. Looking back, it was probably just my own insecurity and paranoia. Counselors told me years later that the low esteem I felt was what probably led me back to the bottle. Of course, working in the French Quarter wasn’t the best spot for a man with a drinking problem and money in his pockets. More times than not I’d spend my lunch hour down at the Ugly Dog Saloon. It served up the best Po’boys and gumbo in the ‘Quarter’. It also served up healthy shots of Jack Daniels backed up with cold beer chasers. When you’re around other drunks, it’s easy to find a fight and, to my regret and shame I found myself in the middle of more than a few barroom brawls. The only reputation that I was cultivating was that of a drunk and one of the best barroom brawlers in the French Quarter. Not helpful for an attorney. Needless to say, my time spent at the Ugly Dog didn’t prepare me for the bar exam and I came up short the first two times. Finally, the third time was a charm and I passed. But by then, it was too late, my father was barely even talking to me. Around that time, I also noticed that my parents started to drift apart. I always assumed my aberrant behavior had gotten between then and was the cause of their problems. What was once a storybook family had now been torn apart and I felt responsible.
Over the Thanksgiving Day weekend of 1990, I came home for the holidays in an upbeat mood. I hadn’t taken a drink in a little over six weeks. Things were starting to work out; I was actually handling some real cases and not doing badly. I was in high spirits when I got home that Wednesday night. My mood quickly changed forever that evening when I noticed the tenseness in the house between my parents. Later that night after I’d turned in, I overheard an ugly argument between them. I couldn’t make out the words from where my room was, but it was loud and from the tone, bitter. For the rest of the weekend they remained at each other’s throats. I felt at blame, they deserved better. It was time for me to go.
Next morning, I packed my bags and headed to Chicago hoping for a chance at a new start; blindly searching to somehow find a way to once and for all exorcise my demons. By years end, I had joined the Chicago police department, got in a twelve-step program and cleaned up my act. In early 1991, I was looking forward to going back home for the Easter weekend to show my parents how their boy had changed. I was looking for redemption in their eyes; somehow I thought that would make everything all right. But I never got the chance. Mama called just before I left for the airport to tell me that my father had been killed in a car accident.
The plane ride back home for the funeral was the worst three hours of my life. Together we made it through the ordeal, but I sensed her sorrow and anger at loosing him. The car accident that took his life was just a freak occurrence, nothing more than hitting a telephone pole at forty miles per hour. He was out that night running a few errands for Mama, picking up a few last minute items for Easter dinner. She never said anything, but I sensed that she blamed me for his death. Maybe if I was at home and hadn’t been a drunk, it never would have happened. I handled it poorly and for the next two years went back to the bottle and the demons that only a hopeless drunk knows.
My job suffered, but nobody on the force took the time to notice that I was out of control. Most of the men I worked with were drunks and worse. Frankly, I’d never had much use for the other detectives in my department; as a class, I found most of them to be dumb, pompous, self serving and crabbed of disposition, except for my partner, Miles Bowman. Miles was smart, modest, generous to a fault and kind of heart. He and his wife, Abbe, were the ones responsible for getting me back into the program. That was eight years ago and I’d been clean and sober ever since.
Since I got back on track, I’ve been going back home every Christmas for the holidays. Mama always cooks a big dinner and we say all the right words, but they’re devoid of any true, honest emotions. Once a year Mama flies up to Chicago to visit me and her cousins and we routinely spend a couple of days together. Our visits are always the same: cordial, cool, and antiseptic. That’s about it, not much to show for a decade of living in a cop shop.
SECTION ONE
DARK SIDE OF THE BADGE
‘We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of life.’
Cyril Connolley
CHAPTER ONE
Chicago, 2002
It was a little after 5:30 p.m. when I parked my old caddy over in the parking lot about a block and a half south of the station house. The clouds were growing darker and the wind was biting as I walked down Vandelear Avenue, just like I had a hundred times before. The snow and ice crackled under my weight like breaking glass. God, it was cold! The street venders, school kids and usual pedestrian traffic had packed it in for the day. Although the streets were deserted, it didn’t matter to me; in fact, I welcomed the solitude. Most days I walked past the same people but there was little chance that I could give you an account of any of them. To me they were faceless drones that meant little. Rarely did I even bother to raise my head to meet their gaze.
When I hit the front steps of the station house, I stopped and asked myself the same questions that had been plaguing me for the past ten years, ‘Do I want to go in there? Is this really all there is for me? Is this the best that I can do?’ The questions, as always, went unanswered as I walked up the final steps into the old building. Three paces in, I stopped and surveyed the room. The large hall was cheerless and poorly lit, devoid of any trace of hope or humanity. The scene was always the same, blue uniforms with paste on smiles, perps and hookers with frowns. The air was ripe with the smell of alcohol, cheap perfume, stale sex and puke. What a mosaic.
Over to my left a couple of uniforms were mustering out the hookers brought in the night before in the usual Friday night round up. I’d seen most of them before and was relatively confident that I’d be seeing them again. A guy in work clothes was over to my right sitting on an old oak bench, bleeding from his nose and a cut above his left eye. I didn’t know his story, he could have been a perp, could have been a victim; the only thing I knew for sure was that the droplets of blood from his nose were bouncing off his new white sneakers like a leaky faucet off a porcelain sink. Over in the far corner near the stairs was a sixty-year-old guy shaking from the DTs. No one bothered
