Confessions of a Blood-Stained Twit

Notice to readers: names of the individuals in this story have been changed to protect the innocent, and the stupid.

In early 1990 I was a young rookie cop walking a beat in New York City. I was part of a field training unit sent out to patrol a housing development in upper Manhattan. It was a four-to-twelve shift on a January evening and I was deployed with a group of about twenty other rookies and a training sergeant to cover an area in Harlem. While patrolling alone, I rounded the corner at 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue and I was confronted by an extremely tall man, well over six feet in height. He was wearing a long white jacket with a white, brimless cap, and he was covered with deep, red blotches of blood. My initial suspicions were immediately quelled when I realized he was a worker from the nearby meat packing plant. The man, whom I’ll refer to as Ned because I like that name for this story, was talking on a payphone and hung up when he saw me approaching.

“That was fast, I just called you, Officer.” He said.
“You just called me? I didn’t get any calls.” I checked the volume knob on my bulky, police-issue, handheld radio to see if I inadvertently left it off.
“I just called nine-one-one.” He told me. It was at the moment that the central dispatcher alerted my unit to this individual at our location. I answered and informed the dispatcher that I was on the scene. My sergeant, a street smart young woman, Sgt Wertz (I like that name for her) responded also that she was on the way to that location to meet me and she ordered all other training units to respond as well. It was a slow tour, and I knew that she wanted to instruct us young cops on how to write a proper field report, and nothing more.

Confident that I could handle this situation myself, I opened my memo book and took the cap off a ball point pen and started to interview my “complainant.”

“Why did you call the police?” was the obvious question.” Ned smiled and placed his hands on his blotchy, maroon and white butcher’s coat.

“Okay Officer, it’s like this. You see, I’m a bookie. Now, I know that’s against the law, but I had an argument with a woman who owes me money, and it might have gotten a bit out of control, and I might have pushed her a little, and I just wanted to call you guys and set the whole thing straight before she did.”

I put the memo book back into my back pocket and took another look at the blood stains on his uniform. Precisely at the moment when he completed his pitch to me about telling his side to the story which hadn’t been reported yet by the other person involved, Sgt. Wertz and a small platoon of cops turned the corner where I came from and appeared behind me. I’ll never forget Ned’s eyes widening and saying “Whoa” out loud.

Sgt. Wertz took command. After a few moments of questioning, Ned told a tale of asking a woman he knew for the sum of forty dollars which she allegedly owed him for betting on a ball game. Ned was enlightened enough to understand that cops tend to make sort of a frowny face when it comes to illegal gambling; but, as an otherwise law abiding citizen, he enlisted the aid of the police to assist with this somewhat thorny issue involving him and one of his betting clients.

“Where is this woman now?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Ned took a few steps westward and pointed to one of the corner buildings on the opposite side of the development. She allowed Ned to lead the way as we all escorted this young entrepreneur who suddenly became quiet. We learned what floor the woman lived on and what apartment she was in and Sgt. Wertz asked me and two other cops in my squad to accompany her to the apartment. She ordered the rest of the squad to wait in the lobby, all sixteen of them, and keep and eye on Ned.

The woman’s apartment was on the sixth floor at the end of the hallway. We knocked, and knocked again, and waited. As we were about to leave, someone’s eye appeared in the peephole. The door opened abruptly. There was a woman living there as Ned informed us, and she looked to be about one hundred years old if she was a day.

“How did you know that I needed you?” she asked. Sgt. Wertz looked at me. I shrugged.

“Do you need the police for any reason?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Cops always ask questions we know the answer to. It’s a method to catch people in a lie, though in this case Wertz was asking out of habit.

“Why yes, Officer. I don’t have a phone, and I couldn’t call.”

“Do you know a tall man wearing a white jacket and a hat?”

“Yes, yes. You have him? He’s the one. He did it to us.” Then the old woman turned around and shouted, as only an extremely elderly person can “Henry! It’s the police!” Henry turned out to be her husband who was older than his wife. No kidding, the woman was ninety three and the husband was ninety four. They had a very different story to tell than Ned did.

For about three or four days, Ned, who worked in the meat packing plant nearby as I deduced from his attire, confronted the woman and her husband while he took his lunch break and they were sitting in the bench in front of their apartment building. Each day, he’d ask them for money, and they’d tell him to get lost. Only, Ned didn’t get lost; and on that day, he followed them into the lobby of their building as they tried to escape his persistent and increasingly menacing presence.

The woman and her husband shuffled onto the elevator together and watched as the door closed on Ned’s face. That didn’t stop clever Ned as he ran up the stairs and met them as they came off the elevator. She screamed and fought as Ned tried to rip her pocketbook off her shoulder. Her husband pushed and shoved at him too and Ned knocked her over and dragged her down the hallway by the pocketbook strap. When he was able to yank the pocketbook free, the husband started beating Ned about the head and shoulders with his cane. Ned wisely dropped the bag and ran fled, unable to subdue a couple in their nineties. The first thing he did was to locate a payphone and call the police to get his side of the story in first before they did. That’s where we came in.

Sgt. Wertz heard enough and contacted the other officers guarding Ned in the lobby. “Put him in handcuffs” was all she said. The cop who answered said “10-4” but left the radio keyed long enough for us to overhear Ned in the background saying “Hey wait, I called the police, I called the police.”

I rode in the back seat of the patrol car with Ned, as he writhed in discomfort with his hands cuffed behind his back. The cop driving the RMP (that’s NYPD cop terminology for a police car: Radio Motor Patrol) ignored Ned as he ranted and complained to me, the senior officer behind the wheel, and to anyone who drove past us oblivious to his plight.

“You can’t lock me up, I’m the one who called the police.” He kept repeating.

“That’s right, you called the police, and we thank you.” I said.

“No Officer, I called you guys, so you can’t lock me up.”

“What? No way, you don’t think…” The other officer and I laughed out loud. It was clear that Ned truly believed that if a person called the police first, he was immune from being arrested no matter what he was accused of. Though Ned was the first person I encountered in my police career who acted under this misapprehension, I met many more folks like him during the course of my career who believed that they would be absolved of their crimes if they called nine-one-one before the other guy did.

“Hey hey, Ned, knock it off, you’re way too loud.” The other officer said. He stopped the car and chirped the siren at a garbage truck which was blocking the side street we were on.

“No, no. I’m not supposed to get arrested, this is wrong.” He griped. I couldn’t believe it. I never met anyone so dim-witted.

“What’s wrong is that you robbed somebody and called the police on yourself.” he turned around and looked Ned in the eye. “You have the right to remain silent…use it.”

Ned was a dumb guy, but he knew useful legal advice when he heard it. Not a word came out of his mouth and he drove with us the rest of the way to the precinct with his chin in his chest. Poor Ned, maybe he would have been a better bookie than a robber; but I’m willing to bet he never called the police again.





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A Semi-Gloss Kind of Love

When I met my wife a little over twenty years ago, we were dating exclusively. Ever the doting boyfriend, I bought her gifts, flowers, and took her out on expensive dates, even though I still lived at home with my parents at twenty-three. I had moved out of state for a while and lived with some friends until circumstances were such that I had to move home again to New York. My mom and dad were happy to take me back in, not only because they were wonderful parents who would do anything for their child, but because I became their house boy. Still, she looked past all of that and dated me, anyway. I’m a lucky guy to still have her, especially after a certain incident which occurred after we’d been dating for about a month when she saw me in my underwear. It’s also worth noting that I was in my parents’ backyard then.

On the date in question, it was summer, and I returned home from work to my parents’ house. That evening I was supposed to take my girlfriend out to an expensive restaurant. My dad confronted me as I was about to climb the stairs to my old room with Led Zeppelin posters still hanging on the walls from high school and told me I wasn’t going anywhere until I painted the outside windows. He meant the ones on the second story at the rear of the house. One didn’t argue with my six-foot tall, muscular, father with the deep voice which scared the hell out of all of my childhood friends. I think I said something like “But, dad, I’m going on a date.” And he replied with something like, “You’ll have a date with the dentist if you don’t get on that ladder right now.” Maybe those weren’t the exact words, but I didn’t squabble over it because I didn’t think she would date a homeless guy.

Outside, I sized up the daunting task of hoisting my dad’s rickety, aluminum, extension ladder up against the rear of the house. There’s a wooden deck under the window and the ladder had to stand on top of it. After moving an outdoor table and chairs, I grabbed the paint can, brush, and a couple of rags and scaled, rather cautiously, this flimsy ladder which I’d propped up against the eaves of our Cape Cod-style home with a rear-facing dormer.

It is at this point I must state that I actually enjoy painting. I just don’t like painting in a location where I would be safer doing the job while leaning out of a blimp. In that location, I would paint about a foot of space, climb back down the ladder, move the ladder, worm my way back up to the top, careful not to shake the aluminum frame too much, and paint another few inches of window frame. The sun was still bright in the sky at that hour. It was about six o’clock in the evening, my girlfriend was due to arrive at about seven o’clock, and I was hoping to finish at least one window, change out of my cut-off jeans shorts and white tee shirt, shower, and be ready for my hot babe of a girlfriend to pick me up because I didn’t own a car. As I write this, I am still wondering why she stuck it out with me.

Towards the end of the job, I became frustrated. The paint can dripped all over the new deck below which meant I had to get down there quickly and clean up the spots before they dried or my father would add my blood stains on the deck in some sort of morbid, Jackson Pollack, outdoor scene. As I held the open paint can in one hand, the paint brush in two fingers of the other, I began the descent from the ladder to the deck about ten or twelve feet below me. That’s when the ladder slipped. It stopped, caught at the edge of the extended eaves, the shingles of the roof barely holding onto the tiny safety hooks at the top of the ladder frame. I grasped onto the sides of the ladder for my life, completely covered in paint.

When the paint can hit the deck, all the paint inside erupted back up at me in a Warner Brothers cartoon style and splattered me from toe to forehead. My glasses became opaque. Paint found its way up the legs of my shorts and into my Fruit of the Loom underwear. My tee shirt suctioned itself to my torso, cold and wet with Benjamin Moore’s Antique Semi-Gloss White. When I breathed, the ladder slipped a millimeter or two more. If it fell, I would have at least broken my arms and legs. My father would have finished the job and crushed the rest of my skeleton.

After what seemed like a day, but was more like five minutes, I moved in slow motion to the bottom step of the ladder, with paint dripping into my eyes and down my entire body. When I eventually reached the bottom, I picked up the ladder and threw it across the yard with all of my strength. My parents, who were always aware when I had the TV on at a whisper at three o’clock in the morning in my room, somehow were oblivious to my cursing and swearing as I damned the ladder and the paint can to an eternity in Hell.

My shorts and tee shirt were dripping all over and I had to strip them off and then run to the side of the house in my underwear and retrieve the garden hose. I gave the deck a good dousing and the paint came off better than I thought it would. When I was satisfied that no permanent stains were going to result from my near-death experience, I aimed the nozzle at my body and showered myself in high pressure, very cold water. That’s the moment she showed up.

“What the…” She walked into the backyard attracted by my yelling and cursing at the ladder, only to witness her boyfriend taking a bath with a garden hose to clean off several coats of all-weather paint. If the neighbors heard me hollering and cursing, they covered their ears when she laughed her head off. To this day, I’m still explaining this one; not to my girlfriend turned wife, but to my father.

“Next time, anchor the feet with rubber.” He said. Dad wasn’t angry, but it wouldn’t have been in his character to not at least give me instructions on how to avoid killing myself the next time out. He waited until he was in the next room to laugh at me. I took a lesson from all of this, though. I proposed to her so at least I can say “hey, you married me” if she told anyone the story later on in life. As soon as I bought my home, I invested in vinyl siding.

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Red & White and Christmas Lights

Dear Readers,
I wrestled with whether or not I should post this on my blog. Briefly, at around 1:30 a.m. on December 2, 2007, I published this piece with a few more details than what is present now, and I received a very supportive and very insightful comment from an excellent blogger and new reader to Mr. Grudge. My reluctance to share this story overpowered me and I removed the post and graciously contacted the author of the comment and explained the removal. After further contemplation, I edited out identifying details and I decided to post this story again because I want to make a statement regarding the need for all of us to cherish what we have and to not take our lives or our families for granted. Thank you. -Mr. Grudge

December 2, 2007, 12:57 a.m.: It is late and I am writing this piece because I cannot sleep. I’m sitting across from our Christmas tree and the colorful lights are reflecting off the screen of my laptop, as well as blinking lights from outside our window. In order to try to fall asleep, I thought I would write about my day.

December 1, 2007, 10:30a.m.:
When my father heard me coming in is door of his home this morning with my children, he greeted us with the same giant hug he always did even when my mother was alive. Our plan was to help my father move some furniture and then eat lunch together while unbeknownst to the kiddies, my wife sneaked off to the store to buy the final, “big” present that Santa Claus will be bringing them this year.

My wife and I had a somewhat delicately timed plan to get the thing into our house. After leaving my Dad’s place, I was to take my daughter home first and then drop my son of at his friend’s house for a play date, and my wife was going to bring our daughter for her violin lesson, and I was to then go to the store alone and pick up present, and then high-tail it back to our house to hide the box in our garage. Then, I was to go back and retrieve our son, and we were all going to meet back home and then go out for dinner. Sounds like a plan, right?

At around 2:00 p.m., we said our good byes to my dad and my wife called on my cell phone to confirm, as only a wife would, that I understood everything I had to do, and that I had the receipt, and I wouldn’t be dopey enough to blurt out that I was going to pick up their gift which is supposed to be from Santa Claus to our kids.

I ended the call with her and decided to call her back and tell her that I would drop our son off at his friend’s house first and then take our daughter home so I wouldn’t have to crisscross the neighborhood and I could do everything in one shot. As my wife listened, she stopped me and said “Let me hang up, there’s something going on outside. I’ll call you right back.”

Moments later, my cell phone rang. She told me that it looked like there was some sort of accident in front of our neighbor’s home a few doors down from us. This particular family has children the same age as ours and our eight year old son is friends with their son. The same thought went through both of our minds as we feared that the boy may have been hit by a car. I asked a lot of questions, forgetting who my audience was in the back seat, and my son started to worry aloud. “Is that my friend, daddy? Is Jared alright?” I assured him that Jared wasn’t hurt, although I wasn’t actually sure, and my daughter chimed in with her own questions. I held my hand up to my daughter to quiet her down so I could hear my wife. Ordinarily, she’s pretty calm under pressure, but she sounded anxious.

“Hold on, I can’t hear you,” she said “there’s a helicopter, its right over the house. I have to go. I’ll call you right back."
It’s about thirty minutes to my father’s house from ours. The ride back is the same, of course; but after this series of cell phone calls, it was turning into a ten minute drive and I was cutting people off to get home. All sorts of images were popping into my head about someone’s poor child laying in the street and his or her parents in anguish. I tuned the radio to my kid’s favorite station and pretended everything as just fine.

About five minutes later, my cell phone rang again. I could tell that my wife was on her cell phone and not the cordless one in our kitchen. The sirens in the background were a dead giveaway that she was outside.

“Try not to react,” she said in the same serious tone one uses to deliver bad news. “Some one was killed...murdered...across the street.”

The details were sketchy, but about eight houses down the block, a person, (I am not going to reveal names or my relationship to this family, and I am deliberately keeping out certain details) was dead, murdered apparently by an intruder. I was even queasier than when I believed one of the neighbor’s kid’s was hit by a car.

“Don’t come up our block,” she said “The whole street is blocked off. They’re still looking for whoever did it.”

In record time, I made it home, even after having to take a lengthier route though the crowded mall. In a bizarre scene in our quiet town, police were everywhere, swarming our yards, stringing up crime scene tape within just a few feet from our home, and several officers had police dogs which were sniffing the immediate area around the residence where the murder took place. All of my years of police experience meant nothing. This is my block, and they were folks I knew. Nothing can harden me to the fear of a killer stalking around my house evading the police.

December 2, 2007 1:31 a.m. update:
Around eight o’clock at night I called my father and told him what happened and he was shocked and frightened for us. I told him not to worry because there were an army of cops on the street and it was unlikely that anything would happen to us. My father said he’d pray for the victim; but, what surprised me was that he said he would even pray for the killer as he somehow has this evil within him, and that it is only right to help him with our faith. I am getting ready to turn off the Christmas tree lights now; but the red and white lights of the police car at the end of my driveway will flash all night outside.

Author's note: I am not in the habit of writing journal style posts like this of my every day life. Writing, as I've discussed often in this space offers a sense of closure, or therapy if you will, at times when one is in grief or turmoil. I did my best to leave out the pertinent details such as names and the particulars of the crime. There will be no further updates to this story. Thank you all for reading.

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New Design, New Domain Name, New Problems

Hi Readers,
I want to thank all of you for your positive comments regarding my new template. However, I am not happy with it for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it does not load properly into any browser. More accurately, it just does not always load on the first try. I've been experimenting with this theme and I have to hit the refresh button way too many times. I have no choice but to stick with this template until I can move over to something else. I appreciate your patience.

On a brighter note, I registered the domain name mrgrudge.com. As the Internet is the world's largest network, it may take time for this new domain name to propagate throughout all of the root DNS servers and various search engines. In the meantime, Blogger still resolves http://mrgrudge.blogspot.com to http://www.mrgrudge.com. It may take a while to iron out these wrinkles too. I had to re-submit my blog for review at BlogCatalog and I will be offline there for a short time. Also, I have to update my URL on a few more places on the Internet.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to visit here and read my posts. I value all of the wonderful bloggers, writers, creators of art, and purveyors of information who have come here to see what I have to offer. This is a tiny bump in the road, but I look forward to a future of continued friendship with my readers. Thank you.

First Dance, Final Goodbye

A lot goes into choosing a wedding song. For many couples, they know right away what to play for their first dance, for others they don’t make a big deal of it, and for my wife and I, we chose something we thought would be special. We both knew the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack and thought it was ideal for us. We imagined ourselves at our reception, embracing on the dance floor and gently swaying as the band played our song. Just talking about it made my then fiancé teary eyed with anticipation

During our long engagement of almost two years, my bride-to-be kept a loose leaf binder full of all the details, orders, plans, and receipts and the like for our giant, New York wedding. There were to be almost two hundred guests, a big band, bridesmaids and ushers, and everything you’d expect for such a festivity. However, we didn’t know that someone very close to us would not be there for our nuptials.

My fiancé’s Mom and Dad were invited over to my parent’s home for dinner so they could finally meet. My folks were much older, but my father and my fiancé’s Dad bonded right away. They shared blue collar values and had similar childhoods as they each grew up in New York City, and they were both in the military. My father told me later after they went home that he noticed something wasn’t right when talking my future father in law.

“Here’s a man who worked hard his entire life, and he told me he just didn’t want to go to work in the morning.” he said.

“Yeah, but Dad, you say the same thing.” I told him.

He shook his head and looked away from me. “No, this is different. He kept holding his stomach.” Then he got up and went into the kitchen. To tell you the truth, I never gave his comments much thought.

Days later, my fiancé called me from work.

“My dad has a doctor’s appointment.” She was worried, I could tell. Her voice lacked that certain confidence she always had. Sure, she had the right to be anxious when it came to her father and his health. But, she works in the medical field. Her job is to diagnose people with diseases; and her specialty is cancer.

I’ll never forget the day her father returned from the last battery of tests to diagnose his problem. For months, he’d been unable to eat or sleep, and he had a feeling of extreme “discomfort,” as he described it” My fiancé did her best to keep from bawling out loud when learning of his prognosis. Yet, it was difficult to hold back.

He had a very curable form of Lymphoma; but he went without symptoms for so long, it was too late to do anything. Because of his relative youth, he was only fifty two years old, they tried chemotherapy, but to no avail. Hope and constant care turned to grief and worry. Soon enough, we kept a vigil at his bedside. In September he lay dying, and we were to marry the next July. I asked my fiancé if we should marry in his hospital room and just have the reception which was already booked and paid for when the time came. She cried and hugged me and said she’s would run the idea past her Mom. The answer came the next day; and as only a father could put it “My daughter will have her day, and I will be there.”

On our last day on Earth, we all want something special to happen. Maybe we want to see angels in our final moments. Or, some look for loved ones who passed away earlier. My father in law quietly fell asleep with his family looking on. My fiancé hurried into the busy hallway just outside his door in tears. She held on to me and sobbed. It was at that moment I heard music.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.
She looked up, as the source of the song playing came from loudspeakers in the ceiling over our heads.
“Oh no,” she said. “Daddy, oh daddy…” Again, she fell into my arms and cried hard. I stood with my bride to be and listened to the last piece of music I never imagined would be playing at that moment; and that was “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack, our wedding song.

We eventually chose a different song for our wedding day as neither of us could bear to listen to a tune which played at the exact moment my bride’s father passed away. After all of that, I like to believe something special did happen for my father in law at the moment of is death. As he arose from his body to his final place of rest, he looked down and saw his daughter embraced in the arms of the man she would marry, swaying back and forth to their wedding song.

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Pardon Our Appearance! Mr. Grudge Is Having A Makeover

Pardon Our Appearance! Mr. Grudge Is Having A Makeover. I am adding space with a third column and should be up and running by the end of the day. Thanks for your patience.