Posts I decided not to post in the past four weeks:

1. The Update

The Guy didn’t call. And I guess it was pretty stupid to talk so openly about my love life since the only response I got was from The Stalker. Like four times. In like two days. Oy.

I guess I knew somewhere in my head or heart that The Guy wouldn’t call. I saw a quote by Liz B. Browning on a Starbucks cup the other day – “Whoso loves / Believes the impossible” – and that seemed about right to me. You know, the impossible part. (But how wondrous the words her lover wrote to her: “Grow old with me! The best is yet to be. / The last of life, for which the first was made.” A little bit different than the top I also saw in Starbucks that day: “I brought sexy back and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”)

2. Greatwhatsiters In The World

3. Things I Personally Have Swallowed:

4. Ode to Newman

You curl
into me
in the night
Your snoring
is the sweetest white noise
Your every look in the morning
uncloses me
And even though
Your breath
slays me
You double me
We make two instead of one
Forgive me
As I leave the house
the apt
As my two feet take me out in the day
and you are
left
On all fours.

5. Why Not A Salad Bowl?

In my lack-of-structure fall, I became, unbelievably, a bit of a college football fan. I had been looking forward to “the finals,” to Ohio State playing USC or even Michigan again (what a great game), until UCLA rearranged things a bit. There are still some things I don’t understand about the game, both on and off the field, like the way they pick “the best” team. It’s not like college basketball, where you fill out the cool flow-stream charts tracking whether Duke gets knocked out in the sweet sixteens or makes it to the final four and is then crushed by U Conn. With college football, you wait til 6pm the next day for a computer to spit out its match-ups. Everyone can guess what’s going to happen, but you don’t know until the computer says so, and suddenly Ohio is playing… Florida. I say, go LSU!

6. Gimme Shelter

I have been shot at; I have been killed. By a kid – maybe a fourteen-year-old with something wrong with him. Mentally. He was slow. More than a little off. He didn’t listen as I asked him first gently and then yellingly to put the gun down. He was holding it like a toy – in fact I thought it was a toy at first. But then he raised the gun. At me. And I couldn’t pull my trigger. I couldn’t shoot a kid. And so he shot me. I was dead.

Fifteen minutes before I died, I shot a fellow police officer. I had run into a house and found a man holding a woman hostage. She was screaming at me to help her. He transferred her tiny wrists into one of his large meaty hands as his other hand reached behind his back and into his waistband. He was yelling at me but I couldn’t understand him over my own yelling at him to PUT HIS HANDS UP NOW. I think at one point I actually shouted FREEZE MOTHERFUCKER. He kept his hand behind him and as he brought his hand up, before he could aim his gun at me, I shot him, narrowly missing his hostage.

Turns out he was the undercover cop, reaching for his gun to cover me from the screaming woman’s boyfriend who was coming at me from the other room.

These were two of the nine real-life event simulations I experienced as part of firearms training at the FBI in Los Angeles. I’ve been thinking a lot about this experience as I go to the newstands; for the past two weeks Sean Bell’s death rings through every paper’s front page. Fifty shots were fired at him on the day of his wedding as he left a strip club with a group of friends. Fifty shots seem like a lot. But even in a fake scenario, where death is not immanent, adrenaline takes over clear thinking.

In Sunday’s Times, Gabriel Cohen wrote a (far more) eloquent essay about his own experience with the Firearms Training Simulator. FATS lets you participate in a very real video game as your ‘gun’ fires a laser beam at different scenarios projected onto a large screen. After one scenario similar to my own hostage situation, Cohen guessed that he had fired three times. According to the Simulator, which tracks every pull of the trigger, Cohen had fired six times. Witnesses to Bell’s murder thought maybe 10 or 12 shots had been fired. Not 50. Five officers had fired their guns at Bell, but when first questioned, some could not say for sure that they had fired their guns at all, including one detective who investigators later learned had fired 31 shots. This means that this detective emptied his 9mm Sig Sauer pistol, and then reloaded during the chaos. He reloaded and he didn’t know if he had fired his gun?

Of course the case – white detectives, a black victim – echoes the Diallo case of ’99, though I’m not sure Springsteen will write a song for Sean Bell (though Courtney Love is now free or maybe even Bill T. Jones will create a dance about his death). The Bell case also reminded me of the death of Suzie Peña, a 19-month-old who was killed last year by the LAPD during a shootout with her father. Another awful shooting; another community outraged. Her father, Jose, was coked out and yelling that he was Tony Montana from Scarface. Jose used his daughter as a human shield against the LAPD and screamed, “I’m going to hell. Me and the baby will go to hell before I ever leave this baby with my wife.”

I found it troubling that this bothered the wife less than the idea that the LAPD officers involved in the shootout were not going to be punished. “I did not get justice,” she said. She has since filed a civil suit against the city “to get justice.” Lady, your husband hated you. That’s why your kid is dead.

The day Suzie died was a horrible day for everyone, including the LAPD officer who has to live the rest of his life having shot a 19-month-old.

The Hot Seat of this week’s Time Out New York features Charles Rangel saying Sean Bell’s case resembles the Diallo fiasco in that it is “what appears to be the unwarranted shooting of innocent people.” Was Sean Bell high and shooting at the NYPD? It seems he wasn’t. The five detectives were at the strip club in the first place because they were part of an initiative that began after a woman was attacked and killed after leaving a nightclub in July. Somehow, these cops felt threatened or provoked enough to use deadly force, which is a rare occurrence; many many officers will go their entire careers without firing their pistols. I can’t explain why someone would have to reload their Sig Sauer, except to say that “contagious firing” happens often in combat situations, but I can understand why they would fire the first shot – so that they can make it home to their wives and their children.

Prejudice against the police is understandable; there are the same percentages of bonehead cops as there are bonehead people in the world. And obviously, no one can underestimate how big a role race plays. But for me – and this even includes the traffic cops that prey upon me without mercy, I try to give police the benefit of the doubt. I get pulled over; I reach over to turn my radio down. From their point of view, I could be reaching for a gun. I listen to their commands best I can. I keep my hands where they can see them. Life on the streets is no simulation.