---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “And Then He Moved” cc&d (v250) (the July / August 2014 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book One Solitary Word the cc&d July - Dec. 2014 collection book		get the 402 page July - Dec. 2014 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Tea Party Punks Part One

Joshua Copeland

    I work as a professor of Lit at The University of Pittsburgh. I was teaching a class on Shakespeare’s Tragedies around 2007 when I received the midterm below. The writer was an old man, about sixty, but muscular and big boned. He was “difficult.” He acted hostile towards a lot of the class, and also towards me, as you’ll read below. What you should also know is The US Justice Department had to sue the Pittsburgh Law Enforcement, because the police were “open to overdo the physical aspect of arresting.” And the cops in this city still throw morality out the window. For example, when a huge crowd came out in 03 to protest the Iraq War, the cops beat the bejesus out of them (And they taped over their badges, so no one could identify them). They corralled the protestors, arrested them with plastic cuffs, kept them in jail for a few days, and sleep deprived them at night; every hour or two a cop would walk by the cells and bang his baton on the bars. The paper this student wrote about was Hamlet.

In Defense of Claudius

By Robert Crackleton

    I am just a retired LE (Law Enforcement) auditing your course; point being I am not an expert on literature, like you and a lot of your students. But I tell you now, I swear, if you believe anything I say, believe me when I tell you Claudius was the hero in Hamlet. You don’t know how wrong you are when you say Claudius is evil and cunning.
    I have to be careful about what I write here, statute of limitations and all such useless crap. So what I write about here I write about in theory. But...first of all, you and your class have got to understand it pays to cheat and play dirty. One night, when I was on Narc Squad in the South Side, me and my partners spotted a Mercedes with tinted windows, parked in the alley by Cupka’s. Possibly a dealer’s car. Our cars were unmarked. So we parked and got out and tried to look in the car with our flashlights. Turns out it wasn’t a dealer’s car. You could see that the instant the car owner appeared: Some pretty boy who had never known a hard day’s work in his life, comes screaming out of Cupka’s. Our ears pricked up. He’s all yelling we’re trying to steal his car, someone call the cops, etc.
    “We are the police, faggot,” I say.
    “Well show me your badge then.”
    Law dictates if someone asks to see your badge you have to oblige and show it to them. But the law doesn’t dictate you have to hold it out long enough for them to read it. HAHAHAHA!!!! You can just flip it out and shut it quickly. So I proceeded to do as such. “Now,” I say, “You still got something to say to me, faggot?”
    He began to mouth off, and I threw him down on the ground and stepped on his neck, cutting off his air. He just lay there, squirming like a fish out of water. So he gagged, and then...hypothetically...my boys began one of the nicest beat downs I’ve ever seen. It started in the alley, then it moved out in front of Cupka’s, like in the street. The patrons ran outside to watch. This was The South Side, on a Friday night, so all the bars and restaraunts and sidewalks were packed. These college twits who watched were whining, “Guys, haven’t you done enough to him already?”
    “You want to go to Jail too? Then you best shut up.”
    The South Side substation showed up, and we told them not to break it up, that this punk had gotten fresh with us. So get this! They began to direct traffic around the beat down! They didn’t try and break it up or anything! EM’s arrived, we wouldn’t let them in. Finally, the dude was like slush in winter, but not slush in snow, but slush of flesh and red blood and white bone. I lit a cigarette, tapped a few ashes on him, laughed, and drove off. We had to peel this fucking kid off our shoes. In theory.
    The incident made the papers. So you and your class think, “Aha, you got busted! There ARE consequences to your behavior! You had it coming!”
    Far from it. None of our boys were stupid enough to take down the names of the witnesses, either in the bar or out in the street. So it’s just the kid’s word versus ours. The owner of Cupka’s saw everything, but the LCB (Liquor Control Board) paid him a visit and said if he wanted to keep his liquor license, he best shut up, lip stitched to lip. Or so it seemed. The Post Gazette photographed the owner, he looked anxious with his hand over his mouth.
    And then there’s the CRB—The Civilan Review Board. In different cities you get these cops who think it’s the end of the world when the city establishes a CRB. Bullshit. I advise the cops, “Don’t stress about it, you control the evidence the boards sees, and if you play it right, you can stop certain witnesses from testifying.”
    So our CRB had very little to work with. Many of the LE who had seen it said the kid wouldn’t stay down, that’s why they kept clubbing him. Even after the Taser he tried to fight back. A total lie. Yeah...Many a day I’ll just throw my head back and guffaw, “This is a state of nature, survival of the fittest. Call me Tarzan.”
    During Sherman’s March to the Sea, the liberated slaves followed behind the soldiers, and this hindered the North’s war effort. When the soldiers came to a lake or river they’d put out pontoons over the water to cross it. So Sherman ordered his colonel, Colonel Colby, to pick up the pontoons after the army was across, leaving the slaves stuck on the other side of the water. So the numbnuts slaves were so afraid the Confederates would catch up to them, that they jumped into the water, and, having no idea how to swim, drowned.
    Keep in mind the slaves hampered the North’s war effort. War is hell; you and the class seem to forget that. And orders are orders. Don’t say, just do. Many times life is a choice between the lesser of two evils. So all the squeaky clean Northern citizens heard about the drowning, and there was an uproar, a total misunderstanding of war, and Lincoln was forced to fire Colby. There never was a more misunderstood soldier.
    You and your class seem to think war and policing—the same thing—are like a tea party. Now, I don’t mean the political group, not that tea party. I mean, “My Greetings, Mrs. Lillibridge. How would you like to come over? Do you prefer Darjeeling, my dearest? Winston will be attending. He prefers Oolong.”
    That type of tea party.
    Lincoln fired Colby for fighting the good fight. Colby played outside the ROE—The Rules of Engagement. Pssst...Just between you and me, by the way, ROE is an oxymoron.
    I guarded a few at County many years ago. Their convicts were spoiled brats. They get fucking free college classes down there. I did not have the money to put my own kid through college. The Pitt professors volunteered to teach.
    Now, if you guard, you need utter, complete law and order, down to the T. One con eyeballs another con, it’s a slippery slope, soon they’ll be trading words, then they’ll roll up their sleeves, and it is on, then a lockdown, and everything goes South. So at the slightest infraction you have to come at the man with both barrels blazing. One tiny infraction is all it takes to ignite an inferno.
    So I walked by the classroom one night and I saw Prentice—who’s a wife beater—had one button loose on his top collar, and those collars are supposed to be buttoned all the time. I walk into the room, get up in Prentice’s face, slam my fist down on his desk, and scream at him to button the Goddamn top collar button. He was flustered, everyone was flustered, and the lady professor was outraged I’d do such a thing. Another mapmaker. Afraid to get down and dirty.
    Now, about Shakespeare and Claudius. Shakespeare plotted out Claudius’s fall. The king slowly loses control of his kingdom, and at the climax all hell breaks loose. Shakespeare means for you and your students to root for Hamlet. All you guys hope Claudius dies. But you forget. Claudius is the boss. Governments need marionettes and puppets in order to work. Not this crap. So, though you don’t believe me, Claudius is the actual hero...Instability threatening him on all sides like a ship in a storm.
    Claudius was totally within his rights to order Hamlet’s execution in England. Hamlet makes me want to puke. Blaaaah! He was a mommy’s boy, look how his mommy wiped his face when he got all sweaty at the final duel. He’s like these gloomy Gen Xers today who always complain about politics and war. I say, Go to hell, Mr. Melancholy Dane, if you don’t like the country you live in and its government, you dumb punk, leave, go back to Wittenberg. You hear me, buddy? Your dad died. He was killed. So what? Get over it and stop wearing black. Look at all the wealth and power you still have.
    I stress this: Hamlet is an Ivy Leager, straight out of Wittenberg U, one of the many dumb pricks we on the force couldn’t stand. These punks are all mapmakers. All their smarts are book smarts. I hate to tell you and your students this, but if you think you’re actually teaching them something, you’re not. There is the life of the library, and then there’s real life. Real life is mud. Many of your students, no disrespect to you, are like the faggot commentators on MSBNC. They’re not grunts. The world is so ugly and ungodly, and enforcing the law is not a tea party. It’s rough. Me and my pals, we didn’t need a satellite photo to let us know what the weather was. We were up to our necks in blood.
    I got to be careful writing about the next incident. Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was night out. I was cruising, and I noticed the car ahead of me swerving (Point is, this was not a Fuck You pull over) so I squealed my sirens, and we both pulled over. The driver turned out to be a lady, early thirties, a mirror cracker—that’s a girl who’s not a treat to look at, and kinda big around the ass. Her bad looks will be important later.
    Her Blood Alcohol was twice the legal limit. She cussed me and my partner out like crazy, she spat at us, tried to scratch us, the works. Like Disrespectful with a capital D. Other cop cars arrived on the scene. And we talked, we’re like, ‘Okay, we can pull this off. We can take her back to the station and break her in. We’ll snap her spine like a twig.”
    We got back to the House (Our station), we sat her at a table and cuffed her to a chair. I sat down across from her. “Who’s your daddy?” I asked. You say, ‘You are my daddy, Mr. Police Officer,’ I’ll take you back to holding and you can sleep this all off.” But she wouldn’t say it. She kept trying to spit at us, even after we put on some makeshift spit guard—they didn’t manufacture those back in them days—she kept screaming at us. So, ha ha, I shoved the table at her, knocking the cunt and her chair over. I picked her back up and sat down across from her and asked her to say what we wanted her to say, but she wouldn’t say it. So I shoved the table at her again, and down she and her chair went again. Or someone might theorize something similar to that happened.
    And then—I did not see this coming—I sat her up and again I sat down across from her, and she pushed the table at me, and my chair and I went down. I stood up, tore off my shirt, and screamed, “Come on, bitch! Let’s go! I’ll whoop your ass!”
    She cried, “Fuck you, fucking pig.”
    We beat her in places that didn’t bruise, we knocked the wind out of her, we tossed cold water on her and sat her in a room with the AC on high. She was a tough cookie to break.
    So my partner, I’ll call him Bacon McPig, he was like, “Rob, it’s time to bring out the big guns.” That quieted her.
    “Get out the diapers,” I said. “And the video camera. We’ll make an advertisement for adult diapers.” It had been a long time since we tried this particular shtick. We had to wrestle with her to strip her naked and put a diaper on her. “Don’t think this is a turn on, honey, with you and your face it’s far from a dick raiser. It’s just a job.” We handcuffed her to the shower curtain bar. I left for the utilities closet and came back, wheeling in the MS. “Wa La,” I say like I’m a magician, “Lady, do I got a treat for you. Muscle Stimulators. This is gonna hurt. And please remember, you’ll waste your time if you go to the hospital or DIA (Department of Internal Affairs) about all this, cause these are the Zinc Oxide brand, they leave no marks.” She didn’t say anything. The calm before the storm.
    I grabbed the stimulator and said, “I am standing right behind you, I’m positioning myself, I’m switching on the power, there, the power’s on, it’s going to rev up a bit, okay, let the countdown begin, come on, count with me, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, .....and.....BLAST OFF! Her screams came from deep within her, like an animal, a howl of pain and agony and outrage. Like she was on fire, like the gooks we napalmed. She was no longer human, but something caged that wanted out, something leashed.
    After a bit someone yelled, “Hey Bobby! I got an idea. Put them on the gooch. This goes on the gooch!” The gooch is the spot of skin called the perineum, it’s between the sex organ and the rectum. We had to take off her shitty diapers to do it, but the trouble was worth it. Man, did she bellow, like there was no tomorrow. While writing this I had to go through my thesaurus for the word “Scream.” The yelling usually shook up the rookies, but you do this enough the howls and the shouting become like static, like background noise, a song you can fall asleep to. Or so I speculate.
    I’ll leave it there. I don’t want to shock you; after all, you are a professor, a featherweight.
    We had to drag her back to Holding. She couldn’t walk. “Come on, lady,” I said, “It can’t be that bad. It’s a job. We got to do what we go to do.” She sobbed all night and she didn’t sleep at all. So noon came around, I clock out as Derrick, a black cop, clocks in. We told him what went on. He walked up to her cell and said, “Bitch, tonight you are mine. Come sundown, you are all mine.” I’m gonna ream your ass all the way to China.”
    And she called him a nigger. “Fuck you, fucking nigger.”
    “Alright,” he said, “We’ll see.”
    But the LT intervened. He said she’d had enough, and told McPig and me to drop her off at Lakeside Behavioral Health Systems before we went home. That would ruin any credibility she might have. It’s the M.O., if you beat down an arrestee, many times you drop them off at Lakeside. When I arrived I chatted with one of the techs there for a bit. I took the cuffs off our victim, turned her around to face me, and I winked at her and made a clicking sound with my tongue.
    Sometime later I brought into Lakeside another arrestee and again made conversation with one of the techs. He said, “You know who we see a lot of? She’s a revolving door patient. That crazy woman bitching about muscle stimulators.”
    “I remember her,” I said. “Man, that was a long time ago. Like last year.”
    “The cops don’t bring her in. She keeps coming in on her own. She cries easily. She’s obsessed about getting a US Marshall. She thinks they’ll protect her from police brutality. We’ll be in the TV room, and all of a sudden she’ll yell, ‘I’m getting a US Marshall!’ and she’ll storm out of the room in tears.”
    Claudius knew you had to play dirty if you’re the boss. Not only in war and politics, but the whole spectrum. As far as you and your class goes, with the threat of terrorism, we need a muscle head in the driver’s seat. Fighting is not all daisies and marijuana. It’s tough work, and as a country, our backs are up against the wall. Things have got to be in order, from A to Z. Ruler straight. GBW, I’m with you all the way. We need, IN ALL CAPS, TO REPSECT THE KING, no matter if he’s in the right or in the wrong. Look at our choices: When you’ve gone all the north, all the south, all the east, and all the west you can go, you got only two directions left: up or down. I tell you this, I have spent decades looking down the throat of life, and I know all I say is true.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...