Make em do the chicken

Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were 'doing the chicken' on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney. And that if Jesus Christ didn't have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew. Roscoe Rules wasn't raising his sons to be faggots.

That is Roscoe Rules, one of the ten LAPD patrolmen in The Choirboys. I wanted to excerpt this because it's one of those rare passages that is so funny I had to wait for the shakes to subside before I could read anymore. Rules is generally regarded as an 'insufferable prick' by everyone he works with, and they only socialize with him because he's always able to score free booze from the liquor stores on his patrol route.

The Choirboys takes place in 1975 and follows the five pairs or partners as they try to deal with LA's dangerous, insane and grotesque. Most crime novels center on a big case, or at least a single crime family. The Choirboys has a structure more like a ride along with certifiable patrolmen, which lets Wambaugh (himself a 14-year veteran of the LAPD) tell stories that are almost never told. Wambaugh's experience mean it's full of little details that I love, like the fact that they park thirty inches deeper into traffic when they pull someone over. That way both men can approach the car without getting run over by a motorist behind them driving H.U.A. (Head Up Ass.)

If you're a fan of Homicide (and you should be) The Choirboys is worth checking out.