This Life Lesson Brought To You By the Police

In January of 2002, just a few months before I resigned my position as a parole officer for the 19th Judicial District of Pennsylvania, I arrested a hooker with the improbable name of Moonbeam Riddlemoser. I initially thought the first part of her handle was a street tag, but no, not a bit of it, her parents had actually named her Moonbeam. Perhaps this small act of artistic cruelty contributed to her addiction to crack and the prostitution she engaged in to pay for it; I never knew. What I did know was that I had promised her mother that, before I left to take an investigative position in the District Attorney's Office, I would get her daughter off the street.

This proved to be a little easier said than done, for though the town I worked in was not very large, it seems as big as Manhattan when you are trying to serve a parole warrant on someone with no fixed address, who has no particular desire to be found. Nevertheless, it came to pass that one bright cold day in January, with snow laying thick on the ice that lay even thicker on the potholed streets and shattered pavements of what passed for downtown, I found myself standing outside a motel room which reliable sources informed me contained the bundle of joy known as Moonbeam Riddlemoser.

Accompanying me -- and this is actually the crucial part of the story -- was a city detective named Ashley White. If there is a prototypical police detective in film and fiction -- the cynical, vulgar cigar-chewer in the stained and crumpled suit and worn-out brogans -- Ashley White was the precise opposite. He was a friendly, soft-spoken man in his late 30s who dressed casually, doted on his family, brewed his own beer and tended to avoid profanity. If memory serves, it was Ashley who had tracked Moonbeam down; allowing me to take the collar was an act of professional courtesy, mingled with charity, on his part, for he knew about the corny but reasonably sincere promise I'd made to Moonbeam's mom.

We found the Beam in bed with a john (a "trick" in street parlance), a still-warm crack pipe lying on the nightstand next to them. The john was only too happy to take the pass we gave him and hustle out the door into the freezing cold winter air while still half-dressed -- I will never forget the sight of his very black skin contrasting absurdly with his white cotton tube socks, which he had worn with him to bed -- but the girl was going with us. In handcuffs.

I ought to note here that, outside of my training and various refresher courses, I handcuffed very few people in my brief (26 month) career as a parole officer. It was almost never necessary. Parole violators, on my caseload anyway, were a remarkably placid, docile lot, content to turn themselves in on command or surrender meekly to the deputy sheriffs I sometimes brought with me as muscle when taking the field. Though I carried handcuffs as part of my field equipment, they were really more ornamental than useful, like my acrylic raid jacket or the soft body armor I wore beneath it. Today, however, I had to use them to restrain Moonbeam before her ride to County Jail, and it was not as easy a task as it sounds. People tend to think of crackheads as cadaverous and weak, lacking the strength even to lift the pipe to their cracked and blistered lips; in my experience most of them were, if anything, overweight. Perhaps I caught them in the earlier stages of addiction. In any case, Moonbeam must have weighed a good, well-fleshed 150 lbs, and she still had the strength and sass of youth. Wrangling her, even after the cuffs were in place, was not an easy task. I can vividly remember how she kept trying to twist away from my guiding hand as we marched down the icy steps of the motel's exterior stairwell to the parking lot below: I was terrified that she would slip, crack her head open, and sue the city for everything in its coffers, including my next 20 paychecks.

I didn't start to relax until we had her loaded into the Arrestmobile -- an almost unbelievably old sedan with a shitty radio hanging from the dash, an iron grille separating the front from the back seats, and an enormous whip antenna, rather like the mast of a ship, which nodded on the trunk, threatening to put someone's eye out. I drove; Ashley rode shotgun, and Moonbeam glared at both of us from the rear passenger seat. With the roads a fusion of snow and ice, we proceeded to the jail at a sluggish pace, which gave Moonbeam plenty of time to vent her spleen at both of us. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

MOONBEAM: What I want to know is who gave me up? Who the fuck told you I was at that hotel? 'Cause I know you didn't find me your damn self.

ME: There are people who care about you that want you off the street. Leave it at that.

MOONBEAM: Awwww, shit! You don't mean Moms, do you? Fuck! My Moms told you? I can't fuckin' believe it! Fuckin' bitch! Fuckin' selling me out!

ME: Maybe she thinks jail is better for you than smoking crack and sucking cock for a living.

MOONBEAM: Who the fuck is she to tell me to do anything?

ME: She's your mother.

MOONBEAM: Fucking snitch is what she is! Bitch snitch! Piece of shit slut!

ME: You're the one that lets complete strangers fuck you for money so you can buy crack. Maybe you ought to ease up on the judgements. Your mother loves you. She doesn't want you getting AIDS, or gang-raped, or murdered, which is exactly what is going to happen to you if you stay on the street. Is that so wrong?

MOONBEAM: Bitch. Slut. Fink. Slut. Cunt.

This went on for the rest of the journey. I kept trying to get Moonbeam to grasp the fact that behind "Moms" seeming act of betrayal lay the purest of motives -- a mother's love. I also tried to get her to understand that a life of hard drugs and peddling ass had no future at all, and not much of a present, either.
She was having exactly none point none of it, and I grew extremely angry at her obstinacy, possibly because in my own way I, too, am a very obstinate son of a bitch. Truth be told, the time I shoved her into the hands of the corrections officers at County, I could scarcely fill out the paperwork, so badly was my hand shaking from the desire to close around her windpipe. But the paperwork was eventually finished, Moonbeam disappeared into the Women's Wing of the jail, and Ashley and I climbed back into the Arrestmobile to make the long, slippery trip home.

As I've said, the detective was a gentle sort, and not prone to cartoon cop behavior such as browbeating less experienced officers for stupidity. After waiting a decent interval, he simply said, in a calm, relaxed voice -- as if he were commenting on a more efficient way to sharpen a pencil:

"Miles, you can't fix in a half an hour what took twenty-five years to break."

I don't remember another thing about the day in question. A few vague images, perhaps; a sort-of memory of closing the file on Moonbeam Riddlemoser and informing Moms that her daughter was safely in the iron bosom of the County Jail. What Detective Ashley White told me, however, I remember as vividly now, fourteen years later, as on the day he said it, not just because it is one of life's harshest and most fundamental truths, but because it is a truth which runs contrary to everything I had been previously taught.

You see, like most Americans, I was deeply if subconsciously influenced by the morals and structure of the television shows I watched while growing up. And on television, everything, even the stories with unhappy endings, came in a neat 25 to 53 minute package. Problems were introduced, quantified, grappled with, and resolved, all in a series of short, commercially-punctuated acts. Processes which in real life might take days, weeks or months, ran their course in the space of a single hour or half-hour, with the neat and slightly brutal efficiency of an oven or an assembly line. The heroes on TV, whether comedic or dramatic, could and did fix what was broken within the tight parameters of a script, and even when they failed to fix it per se, they always obtained closure. By sheer repetition I had inculcated the belief that the quick fix was not only possible, but actually standard operating procedure. My frustration with Moonbeam stemmed largely from the fact that the tactics of television had not worked in the real world. I could not and did not "fix" Moonbeam with a half an hour of tough love, impassioned speeches and cold logic. In fact I made no impression at all. Whatever had led her to the crack pipe and the condom had taken years; it could not be reversed in the time allotted to an episode of Three's Company.

This might seem pathetically obvious to you, but to me it came as a cold and nasty shock, for it also exposed a second and much larger lie to my naive eyes: belief in the climactic ending.

Have you ever noticed that in most epic stories, whether penned by George Lucas or J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien, there is at the climax a final and enormous battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil? This apocalyptic fight, in which both sides throw in all their chips and commit their last reserves, may be many years in the making, but when it finally occurs it is reasonably swift and the very definition of decisive. One side is completely triumphant, the other utterly defeated, and the war comes to an unambiguous and final end. And I do believe that there resided in my mind, until I was at least 29 yeas old, a belief that this sort of denouement was actually possible in real-life situations. It was the logical extension of the other belief, that complex problems of long standing could be knocked down with a solid half-hour of intelligent effort.

It's worth noting that in real life struggles, there are certainly decisive moments, but they almost never bring the conflict to an immediate close. The outcome of the American Civil War was almost certainly decided at Gettysburg, but the war dragged on two more bloody years, with the majority of the killing and dying coming after, and not before, those terrible three days in Pennsylvania. Likewise, the decisive battles of WW2 did not bring that conflict to a close; indeed, the majority of the killing lay on the other side of Midway and Stalingrad. It's like that in our everyday lives, too. We may win decisive battles, but those decisions do not necessarily bring an end to the fighting. Sometimes, in fact, they simply signal the beginning of it. Had my words somehow reached Moonbeam Riddlemoser, had I somehow found the right phrase to shock her into the realization that she had to change her ways if she wanted to survive, all the heavy lifting would have lay in her future -- kicking the cocaine habit, shedding her "friends" on the street, repairing relationships within her family, learning to live within the law. That journey would have taken months, years, possibly a lifetime. And television shows, like illusions, don't last a lifetime. After the lights are switched off and the cast and crew go home, the basic struggle continues, off camera, in the dark, where nobody but you and God can see it. It's ugly and inglorious, and neither Rowling nor Lucas nor Tolkien will write much about it, but it's where the war is won.

Or lost.