Headin' Downhill
I don’t like to talk about the bird patch too much—there’s more to life than a badge and a gun and a paycheck.
But even so, I started 15 years ago yesterday.
March 31, 2011.
I was 23 and had no idea what was in store for me, but then, do any of us ever really know what we’re getting into?
I remembered that today, as I walked through the all too familiar metal doors of headquarters—through the tunnel of the parking deck that crosses under the courtyard.
I thought back to that young man who came in this same way and walked this same hall at 23.
Who begrudgingly came up the same stairs I still take today (you can’t take the elevator as a recruit. Now I just do it for my health).
I wondered ‘bout him.
‘Bout the dreams he dreamed of the life he’d have—
I wondered if he was here with me today—what he’d think.
If he’d be disappointed.
If he’d look himself in the eyes—eyes on the other side of loved and lost—and think, dear God. What the hell happened to you?
Would the white picket fences of a new world—one where you can just be who you are—look different?
Would they still be his end game, or would they just be a barrier to the pastures beyond—
to where the long grass blows in the wind by the creek,
the creek that bends round the way,
and where the tree branches stretch overhead like a woven canopy,
where the horses can’t walk—but where two kids, feet in the silt, watch crawdads and the minnows—
where the biggest worry was gettin’ back across the field before the sudden thunderhead’s lightning caught ‘em.
We don’t talk about that enough—
Gay people, I mean.
You just live this act for so long.
Oscar worthy.
You know?
Just bebopping along like everything‘s fine. Fine as frog hair, split three ways.
But there’s this nag—
This snag.
This jerking.
A pulling of the wheel off the road, like a tire unaligned from too many potholes.
And you fight it—
but it’s there.
It’s still pullin’.
When I was 23, I had just come out.
And it was hell at home and I felt sick.
Sick to my core for having told the truth.
It was like having a hangover—the bad kind, where you almost accidentally killed yourself on spiced rum,
the kind where you just wretch until that bile comes up.
That bitter yellow stuff no amount of toothpaste can make you untaste—
but every day.
And then one day, down the line, there was this—
Lift.
This lightness.
Just—
Better or worse, here I am.
I remember thinking to myself, is this what people just feel like all the time? Is that what it is to just be? To be free.
Daddy gets a lot of credit for that.
I had signed up for the military and the police department.
Partially because I needed a job in the worst way and cashiering at the hardware store just wasn’t gonna cut it.
I remember when I told him I was going to the Marine recruiter, Daddy looked at me and said, “You know, boy? (he calls me “boy.” And I’ve always loved that)
You don’t have to prove yourself a man to anyone. You just are.”
I climb the HQ stairs up to the 5th floor.
Left at the Chief’s suite, past the kitchenette, down the hall, and a second left to my office—
A familiar walk.
I sit at my desk and give a moment to the man I am today.
And I wonder…
I wonder what he’ll think when he’s looking back at 38 from 53.
I wonder if he’ll be disappointed or proud at what he sees.
My ole homicide partner Vannah taught me how to play spades.
Life’s kinda like that, you know?
You’re just playin’ cards.
Just, “hopin’ (as she would say with a laugh) that black bitch, queen of spades, doesn’t renege ya’.”
You play your hand best you can.
Trust your partner to have your back.
Maybe you win this hand and maybe you don’t.
Maybe you still laugh either way.
And maybe you find as you look down from the hill crest—
that the old guy at the bottom winks to the boy at the beginning,
and maybe they both smile up at the man at the top—
still findin’ his footing.
Just makin’ his way down.