Chapter 2

Officer Apples reflects on his upbringing, as well as his hatred of hip hop music and culture.

Every once in a while, in the deepest, darkest hours of night, Officer Apples would lie awake, pontificating, his mind a maze of racing thoughts...

Like a lot of cops, he came from a cop family. His dad, uncle, older brother, aunt, cousin, all cops. And that was all he ever wanted to be. A policeman.

As a small child he’d played with toy cop cars and had a huge poster of Dirty Harry on his bedroom wall, right next to his Reagan-Bush ‘84 campaign banner.

And while other kids dreamed of being baseball players or astronauts, he dreamed of donning the blue uniform, saving damsels in distress, going on high-speed chases ... having shootouts with bank robbers ... putting bad guys behind bars...

Officer Apples had loved everything about the police and loved any book, magazine, cartoon, comic, TV show, or movie about cops. He even loved those goofy Police Academy flicks. He’d pictured his life being something like that, like a Hollywood movie, like something between Heat and Police Academy.

But reality had been so much different. On most days, he felt more like a nanny with a gun, a babysitter, or a bouncer more than anything else.

Much of his work had consisted of drudgery like dragging an irate drunk from a bar, breaking up screaming match domestic disputes, assisting firefighters to rescue a housecat from a tall tree, or helping an old lady pack groceries into her car. Then there were the mountains of paperwork, the bureaucracy, useless meetings...

Then there was this. These kids...

Officer Apples had hated going after stupid teenagers for shoplifting, spray-painting ... Having to break up house parties was especially brutal ... At first, it’d make him feel so old, banging on doors, turning off loud music, facing down pissed-off, booing crowds full of angry faces.

Sometimes the kids were terrified, too, looking like they saw a ghost. Kids scattering in every direction, simply at the mere sight of the police. Kids dashing off into residential streets, running fast as athletes at a track meet.

As time went on, though, so much of that ... just ... bothered him less and less.

But what Officer Apples struggled to accept was the recent increase in hostility toward the police. The slander. The lack of respect from society. Most all he and his partner got these days were stink-eyed, dirty looks and passive aggression.

Not to mention the ever-increasing number of insta-lawyers, amateur journalists, and brazenly cantankerous fucks, assholes talking back, making George Floyd quips, brandishing smartphones, and pointing fingers, flapping their gums, lecturing cops on how to do their jobs, and blabbering about horseshit like “defund the police.”

Of course there’d always been entitled assholes being plain belligerent, yelling stupid crap about how “MY TAXES are PAYING YOUR salary!” But somehow, in the 2020s, it was different ... worse...

So this is what we get for putting our lives on the line, every day, to serve and protect?

Officer Apples remembered the days following 9/11, the outpouring of respect for police, first responders ... Random people wearing NYPD baseball caps ... What happened to that?

Nowadays it often felt to him as if his badge had become a talisman of illegitimacy and ignominy, a haunted vessel, a magnet of hatred. A festering wound ready for a sprinkling of salt.