The Police Blotters

There’s a hold-up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights.
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev’s due in Idyllwild,
“Car 54, where are you?”

Like the New York boroughs patrolled by flat-foots Francis Muldoon and Gunther Toody, Chicago and its suburbs are a frigging cesspool.

Hold-ups, murders, muggings, batteries, sex crimes, burglaries, shoplifting, identity theft and drunks freezing to death in their apartments because they left their windows open all night in the middle of winter – I’ve seen it all in my ten years of compiling police blotters in my glamorous job as a news stringer.

I’ve learned a lot doing the police blotters, like never arguing with a desk sergeant and how not to become a crime victim. In 2002, I successfully profiled the Washington, D.C. snipers thanks to criminal-profiling techniques I acquired covering a series of Petco armed robberies in Chicago’s north suburbs. An armed bandit was forcing Petco employees and customers to strip down to their underwear after locking them in a storage closet, then helped himself to cat toys on the way out. I even wrote a profile, pegging the bandit as a male who had most likely been sexually abused as a child (i.e., humiliating his victims by making them strip); had a decent-paying day job (i.e., he drove a nice, later-model Nissan); and owned at least two cats, one of which was probably very ill. I gave my Cat Toy Bandit profile to the village police chief, but he wasn’t interested, in fact, he pretty much regarded me as a whack job after that.

I predicted that the Washington, D.C. snipers were a father-and-son shooting team, because I figured that for two people to be responsible, one of them had to hold a particular sway over the weaker member. I fell off my chair when they arrested the bastards and learned that it was a stepfather-stepson duo.

I really enjoy doing police blotters even though most reporters consider blotters to be a dreg job that is usually assigned to newbies. It’s a lot like reading someone else’s personal mail, perusing reports of stupid criminals’ worst and lowest moments. Now I know why the Bush administration enjoys wire-tapping so much.

There is a discernable difference between suburban police reports and the urban reports. Suburban crimes are much more sublime, even absurd, like this one guy who broke into a shuttered restaurant and tried to hook up the phone line so he could make free long distance phone calls to Poland. Or the pair of heavy-set Russian women accompanied by three preschoolers who ripped off 500 pairs of Victoria’s Secret underwear at a local shopping mall.

The city police reports are a lot more violent. Most street muggings take place between 10 p.m. and 2 p.m., when yuppies are staggering home drunk from the bars, or listening to their Ipods full blast and can’t hear someone creeping up behind them before some punk shoves them face down on the pavement. Most cops include a footnote, “victim was intoxicated when crime occurred.” If this sounds like you, take a cab home.

What’s really sad, is that most offenders’ descriptions read, “male, 16-25, black and/or Hispanic.” There are a lot of lost boys out there, but yet we continue to cut afterschool programs and force parents (usually single, female heads of households), to work two or three crappy, low-paying jobs just to make rent and put Kraft mac and cheese on the table, instead of having quality time to spend with their children.

Some of the stations I go are like the Palmer House, where I work in conference rooms with wide, comfy chairs and good indoor air quality. Other stations are like walking on to the dilapidated set of “Car 54 Where Are You.” Apparently a hundred years ago, when most of the older cop shops were built, female perps must have been rare because these stations don’t have women’s restrooms. I can only assume that any hookers or husband-killers being held for bail or questioning, must have had to pee in their pants. I almost always have to pee while making my rounds of police stations, because I’ve usually consumed one or two extra-large Dunkin’ Donuts hazelnut coffees. I either have to ask some male cops to watch the door to men’s room while I pee which are disgusting, or sneak around and find a john in the police women’s locker room.

It must be fun to be a cop, because most of them are goofing off when I arrive to do my reports. They’re usually surfing the net or making long, involved personal phone calls. And God forbid, some cop should miss a Burger King run. Frankly I don’t know how any police work gets done in Chicago. Most of the cops manning the city police stations look like they’re going to keel over with a heart attack any second exerting themselves crumpling their Burger King wrappers after they’ve finished off a Whopper, let alone chasing some perp down the street.

My favorite police reports are bank robberies, or any small retail store or fast food place. For example, I noticed a definite uptick of Starbucks' robberies around the Christmas holidays. There is this one Starbucks on Wrightwood in Lake View that gets hit all the time. I like to think that the robbers are just trying to get a little money so they can buy their Baby Mamas and kids Christmas presents, but most likely the proceeds are going to buy crack. I’ve also read some incredible descriptions of ballsy business owners fighting back at the armed robbers, grabbing their wallets while fighting over $56 in the cash registers and turning the robbers' ID over to the cops.

It takes about eight burglaries per day for a crack addict to fund his or her habit, according to one cop I talked to at Dist. 20 in Chicago. Someone of the burglars will even steel the garbage and empty the contents of ash trays while robbing someone’s home. I once asked a review officer why in the world someone would do this, and he told me the perps are drug addicts looking for used syringes such as from a diabetic, and will steal cigarette butts from ashtrays to roll their own, especially if the butts are menthol

I love the exchanges between perps and victims. You couldn’t write dialogue like this if you tried. This past week, some teacher scared off a mugger by telling him that if he robbed and shot him on Easter, “you will be on freight train straight to hell.” The perp actually got back into his car and left the guy alone.

I enjoy a great rapport with the various review officers that I encounter. Usually I am allowed to just go into the files and pull out reports. I could spend hours reading them. A lot of the cops can’t spell, so I am constantly spelling words out for them, like “delinquent,” or offering TV trivia, like who played the second Darrin on “Bewitched.” As you can see, a lot of idle chit-chat goes on while the cops are watching the clock so they can fly out the door as soon as their eight-hour shifts are up.

A few weeks ago, this other reporter for a competing neighborhood rag that most of the cops on my rounds can’t stand, demanded to see my police press pass. “You mean I need a pass,” I asked her. She started ragging to the other cops that I shouldn’t be allowed in because I didn’t have a proper press pass, and how it wasn’t fair. There has never been a station where I haven’t been able to talk my way into. The cops just told me to ignore her.

I’m a very hard person to shock, but one of the most shocking police reports that I ever encountered involved an exhibitionist at the Lincoln Town Mall in Lincolnwood. This guy was caught whipping his spooey down on women’s heads from the upper level food court. He shoplifted a pillow from a Target, then cut the padding out and put it in his pants to catch his cum. He went to all these young sales associates at Carson’s, the Piercing Pagoda and J.C. Penney and had them fit him for watches and rings, while he surreptitiously masturbated himself with his other hand inside his pocket. The mall’s security was after this guy for a long time, until they finally caught him. I learned from other cops that this type of thing happens all the time, guys masturbating in plain sight without most people even noticing them. Now I can’t go to a mall without looking around for potential perverts.

Have you heard the good news?

I used to think that Jesus died at exactly 3 p.m. U.S. Central Standard Time. If I happened to be in view of a clock, I’d stop whatever I was doing – riding my bike, flattening pennies on the railroad tracks, hanging out in the Kmart snack bar – and contemplate how Jesus had a really crummy weekend for our sins. This was back when my parents still celebrated Easter. They weren’t practicing Christians by any means. Their ideas about Christianity meant dumping us off at church or Sunday school and coming back a few hours later to drive us home.

Easter was a day when my grandparents would come in from the city and my mother would cook a big dinner. The dinners were usually unpalatable, leg o’ lamb, which I hated. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating an adorable baby lamb so I’d spit out the chunks of meat into one of my mother’s good napkins, or sneak into the bathroom and flush the lamb down the toilet.

To me, the most fascinating thing about Easter was Good Friday. Our church would cover its giant statue of Jesus on the altar with a black bag. We were Lutheran, so our particular statue of Jesus wasn’t some bloody, gory mess like you’d find in a Catholic church, but a fully clothed, clean Jesus in a seamless robe floating in front of the cross with his hands clasped in prayer. Otherwise, I never looked at that statue of Jesus during the rest of the year, only on Good Friday when it was stuffed inside a body bag.

For the past few years, I’ve been telling people to “Have a Good Friday.” I don’t know why I think this is so funny. It doesn’t matter who, co-workers, friends, strangers. I especially like telling non-Christians, like the Indian clerks at Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Eleven, to “have a Good Friday.” I’m usually greeted with a wide smile and the clerks replying, “Well, you have a good Friday, too.” I know that for the rest of the day they will be telling their customers to, “Have a Good Friday” and that someone will get pissed.

Several years ago I felt compelled to rent one of those bunny costumes with a big head. The Nazis were going to march in Cicero, and I thought I’d show up in the bunny costume and try to spread a little sunshine and happiness, but the head weighed about 60 pounds and I didn’t think I’d be able to outrun the brown shirts in case they decided to stomp on me with their hobnailed boots. Instead, I ended up wearing it to my niece’s birthday party. I was a big hit among all her little friends. Everyone was having a great time at the party dancing to the Spice Girls. The head had a screen over the mouth that allowed me to see. During my appearance as the bunny, my mother kept coming over and asking which of the party guests was my sister-in-law’s psychiatrist, or if I thought my brother was gay. I couldn’t wear the rabbit head for more than five minutes without wanting to pass out. Frankly, I don’t know how those fake Easter bunnies at the shopping malls do it.

This year I am making a big ass, honey-baked ham for Easter dinner. It’s the one time of year that I can practice my extremely limited skills as a homemaker. Last year, portions of the spread were either burning off the roof of people’s mouths, or were stone cold. This year, I’m determined not to get drunk while cooking dinner and get everything to come out hot at the same time. Today when I showed up at the Honey Baked Ham store to pick up the ham, people were cued up outside of the building. I had to wait in line for 45 minutes. There was this big fat guy who weighed about 400 pounds standing ahead of me. He was so obese, that his arms wouldn’t lay flat at his sides like a normal person’s, but were bent at the elbows resting on his flab like one of those thalidomide babies with the flipper arms from the 1950s.

It was 20 minutes before we even got into the building. I felt sorry for all the workers behind the counter because people were screaming at them about how long they had to wait in line. The store had set out tiny plastic cups of food samples in an attempt to appease the angry mob. The fat guy grabbed like ten cups of the scalloped potatoes and started gobbling them down with the little plastic spoons. Then he grabbed 20 toothpicks of turkey samples and started scarfing those down. Finally I said, “Hey, Tubby, how ‘bout leaving some for the rest of us who’ve been standing in line for 45 minutes.” I’m no skinny-mini myself. I could stand to lose a few pounds, we all can. But I’m not so obese that I couldn’t walk down 56 flights of stairs in case I had to escape a high-rise building after a plane crashed into it. This guy was so fat and rude he was knocking over elderly women trying to reach the food samples. No wonder the rest of the world hates us.

Anyway, if my guests don’t want to eat the ham on Sunday, it’s okay with me. I’m not going to force them to eat it the way my parents used to force me to eat leg o’ lamb. No one has to spit it out into a napkin, or flush it down the toilet. That’s not what Easter is all about.

Vespers

Things have been quiet with my father – too quiet. He’s had a busy winter: showing up drunk New Year’s Eve at the nursing home where my mother lives; getting caught cheating on the written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles; closing the living trust we had set up for him and my mother so Uncle Sugar doesn’t rape them on taxes; and arriving bombed out of his gourd at my niece’s middle-school basketball game. So quiet, that I knew we were overdue for another Dumbo-drop. Be careful what you wish for.

A week ago I was having a quiet evening at home, laying on the couch with the dog and watching some crappy Ben Afleck movie on Comcast On Demand, when the phone rang around 9:30. The caller ID read some cell phone number with an unrecognizable Illinois area code. I had no idea who the hell it was. When I answered the phone, it was some paramedic from Kane County, saying they had found my father 70 miles from home driving his car through a corn field.

“Does your father drink,” the paramedic asked. “He seems very confused and disoriented. Does he suffer from dementia?”

For those of you who have kept up with PDD, you’ve read about how my father had decided it would be a good idea to become an alcoholic at age 79. He’s had a rough couple of years and it’s taken a toll on him, being the main caregiver for my mother who is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, until we placed her in a nursing home two years ago this month.

I didn’t want to say too much to the paramedic, because no doubt my father had decided to take a drive along with a fifth of vodka. Instead, I told the paramedic that my father had been showing signs of dementia. I could hear my father screaming “fuck you” in the background.

“Your father is very vocal,” the paramedic said.

I asked if anyone was hurt. My father was okay, except for a light pole he hit in Elgin on his way to the cornfield. The paramedic put a Kane County deputy sheriff on the phone. He said they weren’t going to charge my father with a DUI, but were going to take him to a hospital in Geneva, Ill.

“Do I need to bring bail money?”

The cop said no, they would put down the cause of the accident as dementia and low blood sugar. I’m sure that all my father had to eat that entire day was one of his favorite Healthy Choice meatloaf microwave dinners washed down with half a fifth of rot-gut vodka. I have to say that for cops, the Kane County sheriff’s police were pretty darn nice.

“Uh, you’re not going to let him drive any more, are you,” the cop asked.

I assured him that my father’s days on the road were officially over. My boyfriend let me borrow his truck and cell phone, in case my own ran out of juice, which had just enough power left to play my “Chico and The Man” ring tone. I called my younger Romberg to deliver the news: “They found dad driving through a fucking cornfield.”

I scribbled on the first of many tiny pieces of paper and backs of envelopes that would accumulate over the week with phone numbers for doctors, social workers, insurance adjustors, desk sergeants, banks, cab companies, senior care services and psychiatrists. I stopped at 7-Eleven on my way out of town and bought myself a jumbo-sized coffee, and set out for the middle of Ass Fuck, Ill., having no idea where I was going.

I got lost getting off the toll way, making a wrong turn and driving about five miles out of my way. I learned an important lesson: Mapquest sucks and is not to be trusted. I turned around in an office building’s parking lot, where another Kane County deputy sheriff was parked trying to catch speeders. He must have heard about my father driving through the corn field, because he told me I was about twenty miles away from the hospital where they had taken him.

I turned around and headed into the right direction and got lost again following some directional signs for another hospital. (Ironically, it was the hospital I was born at.) My “Chico and The Man” ring tone kept going off, and I was weaving all over the road fielding calls from my sister-in-law and the security guard who had been stationed in the emergency room to watch my old man. I got pulled over by the same cop that I had asked directions from about fifteen minutes earlier.

This cop was also really nice. He stopped traffic so I could make a U-turn and get back on the right road, heading in a southerly direction. “Just keep going. You got a long way.”

I finally made it to the hospital. When I arrived at the emergency room, I could hear my father singing at the top of his lungs, “Barnacle Bill the sailor.” I could smell the vodka when I entered the curtained exam room. “’Ey, whooge dish gurl?”

My father was wearing a hospital gown and the security guard handed me a plastic bag from the hospital gift shop containing his clothes and shoes. “He had a little accident.”

My father insisted he had no memory of driving through a corn field, or hitting the light pole in Elgin. He kept asking, “What accident? I wasn’t in a fucking accident!” And then, “I loved that car.” I told him his driving days were over, and he started screaming and swearing again.

The security guard glared at me, “I had him calmed down. He was talking about the navy.”

I looked a bit like a raving maniac myself, wearing my cheap $8 winter jacket and in dire need of an evening of beauty. I spoke to this adorable, young, emergency room doctor, who told me he was waiting for the results of a cat scan. He told me that my father was very confused. “Yeah,” I thought, “crazy like a fucking fox.”

The doctor told me my father’s brain exhibited dark spots consistent with the early stages of dementia and that he had a B/A of 2.17, which is more than twice the legal drinking limit in Illinois. Eventually, the security guard helped get my father into scrubs and skid-socks so I could take him home.

It took two security guards to pile my dad into my boyfriend’s truck. “WHAT’S THIS FUCKING CAR YOU HAVE!” Then my father insisted that we had to go back and get his car. My dad is a big guy. The security guards told me to turn around and drive him back to the hospital if he started giving me a hard time. I had asked the emergency room doctor earlier if he could sedate my father and I’d pick him up in the morning, but the doctor told me to get him the hell out.

I was going to take my dad back to my house, but he was so belligerent, I decided to drive his ass back to his own place. It was black as pitch on the country roads, and I kept getting lost. I kind of knew where I was going and relied on my Zen method of finding places, which drives most of my family and friends crazy. (“Don’t you know where the hell you’re going?”)

The moon hung in the sky like a shiny peach quarter. My father kept remarking on it. I grilled him about how he ended up in Kane County, if he was going to Good Templar Park, a Scandinavian summer retreat where his mother and my mom’s mom had owned cottages, and where my parents had first met as teenagers. I could only surmise that he was taking a trip down memory lane in his big old Chrysler Concorde which was now totaled, with Artie Shaw blasting on the CD player.

I finally found a road that I was familiar with. I asked him if he needed to use the bathroom. He insisted that he didn’t, but ten minutes later he was screaming at me to pull over to the side of the road. “IT’S RUNNING DOWN MY LEG!” I pulled over and reminded him that he was wearing scrubs and had to pull them down. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY PANTS?” The last thing I wanted to see was my father’s shriveled-up, 80-year-old ball sack. I told him to hurry up before another cop pulled us over.

I finally got his ass home about 2:30 a.m. While he was trying to fit his key into the lock, I removed his driver’s license and Visa from his wallet because he was talking about renting a car the next day. I got him into the house and peed for the ride back home. I was exhausted from my trip through hell and just wanted to get home, pop a beer and go to bed.

On the way home, my “Chico and The Man” ring tone went off again. It was my father. “Someone came into my house and stole my vodka!”

Since last week, I’ve spent about nine hours a day on the phone or driving the 30 miles back and forth to my father’s house. My brother and I took him to see his own doctor and we admitted him for the weekend in another hospital, where he was sedated so he could safely detox from alcohol. I’ve filled up my gas tank about five times, paying $2.78 per gallon. I’ve talked to a million doctors, including my father’s own physician, who’s about as useless as tits on a pig and looks as if he spends 90 percent of his time in a tanning booth. Between all this, I’ve done some incredible multi-tasking, writing an article about a slum lord in Rogers Park who’s been jerking around his mostly poor tenants in a covert condo conversion for the paper that I freelance for. I’m exhausted.

I spent all day with my father yesterday, who is incredibly remorseful, taking him grocery shopping, trying to line up transportation options for him for his new life without a car. Today, I called the Kane County sheriff’s office, making sure that they had cited him for reckless driving so my old man can never get another driver’s license.

I’ve arranged a play date for my father at an adult day care program at a hospital near his house next week. We’re going to try that for awhile until my brothers and I can figure out what the hell we’re going to do with him. I’m sure that within a few weeks, my father will manage to get his ass kicked out of there, too.

I drove home yesterday hating myself. It is so fucking sad. My father used to be this powerful, capable guy. He always made me feel like a princess, even when I was a fat and ugly kid. I thought about better days: my father making paper airplanes out of the Cubs’ scorecards and floating them from upper grandstand at Wrigley Field, one of them even landing once on home plate during a game at Ernie Banks’ feet when he was up to bat. Lot’s of funny, crazy stuff like that.

I thought about Vespers, how my father’s world keeps shrinking and fading, and the encroaching dusk that is darkening his mind, like vapors rising off a pond.