Coffeehouse Chronicles …Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? - Part Deux

Good Morning Chroniclers! Got yer cup?

So as promised in the last Chronicles, I'm gonna tell you the story of how I was listed as a suspect in my very own arson report. I am confident that once you hear what really happened, you will understand and agree with me, ONE, who the ‘REAL’ suspect should be and TWO, that your hero should have been listed as the VICTIM of this crime and not the suspect.

Sergeant Sailorman checked in with me after he’d perused the last Chronicles. He related to me that while he remembers meeting Sadie the Strawberry on Vermont and then again on the steps of the very famous and never-to-be-duplicated ‘Runway Oh-Three, he has no independent recollection of any fire that may or may not have taken place in the Watch Sergeant's office in March of 1988. 

Sergeant Sailorman further indicated that if my writing skills had been as rapier as they are now, there may never have been a need to call for a fire truck. Now if you ask me, that sounds an awful lot like a spontaneous utterance, but I digress. 

On the date and time indicated, I was a field trainee at arguably the best station to work within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. As a newbie in patrol, you spend your entire shift patrolling the streets, looking for miscreants that prey upon the weak, relieving the guileless of their cars, jewelry, and other hard-earned goods from their homes, businesses, and/or persons. When you're not doing that, you're handling numerous, seemingly never-ending radio calls for service. You are so busy during your workday that at the end of the shift, you’re up to your eyeballs in deferred reports. 

You sit in a room with four other forgotten souls, all of you staring at your big fat leather basketweave-covered field notebooks. You’re culling the events of the day in your tired, stressed-out brain, searching for clues on what in the world just happened to you in the last eight hours that has you seven to ten reports down.

Lennox Station was one of the Department’s older stations at the time. It was so old that the report writing and briefing rooms were actually located outside the main station house adjacent to the parking lot and garage, where the mechanics worked on the fleet of black and whites that belonged to the station. The rooms were set up next to one another in a red brick building, each with a west-facing door and window.  Trust me, it was an absolute dream during the winter and summer months. The briefing room was later named the “Tack Room” in honor of Bill Tackaberry, who worked at the station for googobs of years and had the honor of attending a ridiculous amount of briefings in that room. Bill was a streetcop's streetcop. That guy was so good at being the police that he had to be forced out of his radio car and into being a detective. And guess what? Yep. He was a pretty dang good detective also.

Anyway, on one particular night, it was about an hour and a half after my shift had ended, and I was one of three trainees still left in the report writing room. The room was deathly quiet; aside from the occasional din of a commercial airliner loudly passing overhead on approach to LAX at about three to four-minute intervals. The only thing you could hear was the furious scratching of pencil lead on paper. We dared not speak with one another because the dude next to me was just as dazed and confused as I was. Furthermore, while the Watch Sergeant was reading and hopefully approving our reports, we didn’t want to risk not hearing our names called out over the station’s PA system.

At some point, as my head was down, my eyes bleary from my attempts to decipher my own quickly jotted-down hieroglyphics, I heard static and tones as someone pressed a number on the phone several times, announcing that someone was about to speak. 

All four of our heads lifted simultaneously and tilted slightly toward the door as if we were puppies listening to an unfamiliar sound.  

“TRAINEE SAUNDERS! TEN-NINETEEN THE WATCH SERGEANT! AND BRING A FIRE EXTINGUISHER!” We heard the speaker squawk (10-19 is the radio code we use for return to station).

I looked around the room at my fellow trainees with a quizzical expression on my face. I was pretty sure that I’d never heard my name, or any other trainee’s name for that matter, and those words all lined up in a sentence together for one of us to be beckoned to see one of our supervisors before. 

I was shaken from my reverie by one of my quick-thinking peers, “DUDE! YOU BETTER GET IN THERE! I THINK THE SARGE IS BURNING YOUR PAPER!”

I jumped from my seat, ran from the room, bounded up the back stairs, in through the back door of the station, and ran down the station hallway at a full sprint. I grabbed the watch sergeant’s door jamb in order to slow my roll and steady myself, coming to the position of attention in front of the open office door. I arrived just in time to see Sergeant Sailorman, who was seated behind his desk, flicking his Bic lighter to ignite the corner of several sheets of paper. Paper, which at the time, I could only assume was one of the reports that I had no doubt spent probably an hour perfecting. Just like when we were in the academy, our paper was expected to be neatly printed in upper case block lettering, sans grammatical error and any detectable erasures. 

Standing in various positions inside and around the Watch Sergeant's Office was one other sergeant and three training officers, including mine, taking in the show and all appearing slightly amused at my discomfort. 

Sergeant Sailorman waited until approximately one-third of my report was properly ablaze, then looked over his artwork at me and said slyly, “Well?” I took this to mean, “Come get this mess,” and approached the sergeant and took possession of the small inferno that used to be my report and began to back out of the office. 

I was only able to take two steps away because the breeze caused as I walked fanned the blaze in my hand, and I was forced to throw the conflagration to the floor and stomp on it to extinguish it. Initially, I was stomping fast and furious, but as I came to the realization that there were several sets of eyes on me, the pace of me tamping down on the remnants of my report slowed to a stop. I looked up to see the TO’s and the second sergeant all staring at me, their mouths agape.

Sergeant Sailorman was standing atop his desk, which brought him to eye level with me, and every other average-sized human being, for that matter, his fists on his hips, bent slightly forward at the waist to establish dominance. “WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU DOING, TRAINEE?!?” He demanded, glaring at me.

What Sergeant Sailorman failed to take into account is that your hero’s has a very healthy respect, yes, some might categorize it as fear, of fire. I was let go from my first job at Straw Hat Pizza, because I let too many pies turn to ash. My refusal to allow myself to be set on fire meant that I was forced to watch as my stuntman union card was cut into very small, itty-bitty pieces. My very dear friend, Brian Askari banned me from Station 14, repossessed my red plastic helmet, and red suspenders, and snatched the honorary firefighter sticker badge he had bestowed upon me off my uniform. All of this, I tried to keep secret, but Sergeant Sailorman had unmasked me.

As I was bent over to gather the scorched earth that had been my report, Sergeant Sailorman jumped up and down, and screamed that I’d tried to burn down the station He insisted that I write a report of arson, listing myself as the suspect. He also threatened to elevate the crime to the attempted murder of a police officer, listing everyone in the station as victims.  

Oh, the humanity!

Man! That was a very long night for your hero.

The next day, I returned to the scene of the crime to run an arrest by a different Watch Sergeant (thank goodness) and to find that the Watch Sergeant’s desk had been moved. It now conveniently covered the 3” diameter scorch mark that some poor hapless trainee had left in the carpet the night before. 

Bee Tee Dubs: the county carpet crew had been out to Lennox the week prior with six trustys changing the carpet throughout the whole station. Oops. New carpet. Who knew?

Drink ‘em if you got ‘em!

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