My Years of "Arrested" Development

Many moons ago, as a kid-journalist, I worked as a reporter at the Kansas City Star.

I covered the cops.

The job sounded romantic. After all, Ernest Hemingway had once worked the beat, but things had changed since Papa typed his last  -30 - postscript. 

By 1984, Kansas City had gone from Midwestern cow town to a sprawling metropolis along I-70, a major artery on which the dark loners and serial killers skulked into town, committed their atrocities and then tumbled-weeded onward to find their next victim.

The crimes I covered were heartless, brutal, senseless.

They stained your sensibilities, made you sleep less soundly at night.

One year, I worked with fellow reporter Tom McClanahan to chronicle a year of death in KC, a sad litany of jealous husbands and drug deals gone wrong, but one stuck with me.

One inner-city hoops player killed another because he coveted his sneakers.

Now that took “Just Do It” to a whole new level.

Other stories were even more disturbing.

A  woman was sexually assaulted by a gang of thugs in a Kansas City park. When she asked one why, he told her plainly:

“Because you’re pretty.”

Then there was the man who exacted his revenge on an ex-girlfriend he believed had done him wrong.

By burying her alive.

At one point, as he was piling dirt on this poor bound-and-naked victim, he stopped his grim work to light a cigarette.

Then he started to cry.

She was somehow able to escape, and went running naked from the woods into the arms of a KC police patrolman.

That story made the front page.

The Star was an afternoon newspaper, which made my job a challenge.

Before dawn each day, I'd show up at my tiny third-floor cubicle deep inside the bowels of the gothic Kansas City police building.

I never knew what mayhem would greet me, those grim tidings from a night on Kansas City’s merciless mean streets.

Coffee cup in hand, I’d trundle down a flight of stairs to the second floor office where the detectives held court. I’d open the door and face a wooden half-wall with a swinging gate behind which lurked three cubicles — homicide, robbery and sex crimes.

I was such a frequent visitor I could normally just breeze past the secretary, check the night’s police reports and make make my rounds among the detectives.

Looking back, I realize now that I was a standup comedian working a pretty tough crowd. Because many of these cops were Midwestern to the core, country boys who’d come to the big city looking for intrigue. 

I was an interloper from the East Coast.

To them, I might as well have been from Mars.

“Well, here comes the reportah,” one would drawl as I entered.

I had no choice but to perform, tell self-effacing jokes because my worth as a journalist depended on these men and women talking to me.

They didn’t have to spill their details, if they didn’t like you or the stories you wrote, if they didn’t like how you portrayed them to the reading public.

The way I saw it, I was a gritty urban storyteller and these folks were my tour guides, my raw materials. I couldn't tell my tales without them.

So I aimed to please.

One day, not long after I started my beat, I walked into the robbery cubicle, where a couple of good old boys were shooting the breeze.

One motioned me to the window to point out a distant building, handing me a pair of binoculars. 

And so I looked. And looked.

Everyone was stifling laughs, until a desk sergeant pointed to his eyes. I looked into the mirror and realized that there had been ink on the binocs, and that I had two Rocky Raccoon rings around my eyes.

The boys had set me up, which meant they liked me.

As time passed, I socialized with my sources, meeting them at their Friday night watering hole. I'd buy a few rounds of drinks and keep my ears open.

Loose lips were a staple of the reporting trade an I got lots of good material.

One cop revealed how to surreptitiously follow a vehicle in dense traffic: use a pin to prick the tail lights and the resulting beam of white emanating from the red will show the way.

Another thing I learned is how many cops wielded black humor to help cope with the ugly violence they encountered every day.

Seeing too many dismembered corpses can change the way a man looks at the world.

Bad jokes were their coping mechanism.

On weekends, with only a skeleton staff on duty, you never wanted to be the last cop to show up at the medical examiner's when the latest homicide victim was brought in.

Because some wise guy lurking beneath the sheets on a gurney in the corpse cooler would jump out as you walked by.

Funny, huh?

The prank gave me goose bumps, but I laughed anyway.

Then I made a near-fatal assumption.

One day before Christmas, I walked into the robbery unit when I spotted the holiday ornament from hell.

Sitting on a file cabinet was a forlorn pine-tree branch propped up inside a coffee can. Like ornaments, Polaroid shots of some of the most-frightening images cops had seen all year were hung for all to see.

One showed a severed burned hand.

Another was a mug shot of a suspect beat so badly his eyeball hung form its socket, under which some wag had written, “I’ll be keeping an eye out for you this Christmas.”

Well, I wrote a front page story about the forlorn little tree, a piece that examined how police used dark humor to cope with the stress of their often-thankless work.

Looking back, I don’t know what I was thinking.

My newsroom colleagues only saw the unsavory image and wrote off the cops as boorish pigs, a gang of uniformed thugs suffering from “arrested” development, high-school-minded jerks who never grew up.

God knows what readers felt. 

But I do know how the cops took it.

They hated it.

The next morning, when I made my rounds, I was stopped outside the swinging wooden door. The boys had shut me out because I had broken an unwritten code..

For days, maybe a week, I had to make do with only police reports, until one morning I as suddenly made whole again.

The cops forgave me. They allowed me to stroll back into those cubicles, to hear their grim stories before rushing to make my deadline.

I'd lived to write another day.

Papa would have been proud.