The LAPD, Corruption, and Me
When I first shifted into LA in 1968
my friend Alfredo steered me to a beatnik-style coffeehouse called Foster’s
Blue Grotto, which was then in its second location – on Melrose
in what I suppose could be called East Hollywood or West
Silverlake , just north of Koreatown – in a slightly shabby but
certainly not slummy neighbourhood. Foster and Alfredo were old and dear
friends, so Foster welcomed me there warmly.
It had plain, home-cooked food,
non-alcoholic beverages, a good jukebox, a couple of pinball machines –
although I’m uncertain of my memory about those – an agreeable clientele, and
plenty of non-designer atmosphere. It also stayed open all night, which was
convenient for me, as someone had referred me to a pill quack on Sunset in Echo Park
About a year later I was a Hollywood
rock & roll type, working for Zappa’s Bizarre, Inc. and hanging out with
other Hollywood types. One late evening I
drove three of my associates, Bizarre’s publicist Jonathan Kundra, his
girlfriend Cathy, and my friend Jon Keliehor, then a drummer in a rock band and
now a respected composer, to Foster’s in my 1966 VW bus for some
here’s-a-place-you-might-like.
After a couple of cups of coffee and
some atmosphere we left in a laughing good mood. Jonathan was carrying Cathy
piggyback across the street when a police car with its lights off cruised by
and a cop yelled out its window, “Hey! If you’re gonna grabass don’t do it in
the middle of the street!”
Cathy jumped off Jonathan’s back and
we all hustled to the other side of the street. The cop car did a tyre-squealing
u-turn and screeched to a stop right next to us. The cops jumped out, with the
shorter one shouting, “Don’t run away from me when I’m talking to you!”
They did the full routine, searching
us – well, searching Jon and Jonathan and me whilst hitting on Cathy for what
was she doing with low-lifes like us – taking our IDs and calling in for any
outstandings, and so on.
For some reason I had my car
registration in my wallet. The shorter of the two cops, who seemed to be in
charge, or at least was the more belligerent one, looked at this and then at my
van parked nearby and asked, “Is that your vehicle?”
Looking at my registration in his hand
and then at my license (US
He went to use his car radio and
returned to inform me that I had an unpaid parking ticket. This was news to me.
“Do you mind if I search it?” He
actually asked me that.
“Does it matter whether I mind or
not?”
He proceeded to enjoy a bit of a
Volkswagen ransack and came up with a small pill vial with three benzedrine
tablets in it. Since the pill quack prescribed a thousand tablets at a time I
decanted a few from their large container into a smaller one when I went out.
The portable vial didn’t have a prescription label.
I gave my minibus’s key to Jonathan.
The cops weren’t interested in impounding it. I suppose that would’ve taken too
much time away from more lucrative, or at least abusive, activities. They did
handcuff my wrists behind my back, way up near my shoulder blades, and bundle
me into the back seat of the copmobile.
My perceptions went into blur mode. I
was aware of the pain in my arms and wrists, but I told myself it wouldn’t last
forever. As I know now, any kind of restraint triggers powerful post-traumatic
stress reactions due to a form of torment my older brother enjoyed inflicting
upon me when we were kids, but I was able to shift my mind into neutral and
feel nothing inside. The city outside the car windows seemed to me to be
uncommonly black, with thousands of tiny points of city lights, whizzing by as
we zoomed a short stretch along the Hollywood Freeway.
At the LA Central Jail they marched
me, still in blur mode, from some interior drop-off spot along some forgettable
corridors, then decuffed me in front of a counter topped by a glass barrier,
behind which clerical staff were busy at desks. I gave them prints, I think,
and turned in the contents of my pockets through a slide-hole under the glass
barrier, maybe not in that order, then they searched me again and escorted me
into a drunk tank, floor covered with piss and vomit, of course. I found a
relatively dry place on the bench that was affixed to the wall along three
sides of the smallish (my memory is inexact here – as I recall it was about
three metres by three-and-a-half) concrete walled-and-floored room. A couple of
drunks were sleeping on other parts of the bench. I stayed in neutral.
After a hazy amount of time they took
me into a large room filled with a few dozen double-decker bunks, already
inhabited by 20 or so other detainees.
Somewhere along in the blur – maybe it
was at the booking counter, maybe when I left the drunk tank, maybe when I
entered the dormitory lockup – they let me make my phone call. I phoned Herbie,
my boss, at home. He sounded tired, in an oh-no-not-this-shit-again way – after
all, he had been Lenny Bruce’s
manager – and told me to say nothing to anybody and he’d do something in the
morning.
It was well after midnight but most of
the detainees in the big lockup were still awake. I got to pick my own bunk. I
found a bottom one, but determined not to go to sleep. Self-preservation was
the obvious motive all around.
At one point somebody on the other
side of the room suggested that we go around the room and say what we’d been busted
for. He, I think, was there for assault and battery. The voices popped up
around the room, going generally clockwise: fighting, armed robbery, more
assaults, auto theft, more fighting, dealing heroin, a homicide (‘Shit!’ I thought. ‘Where the fuck am I?’),
and so on.
When it came my turn I mumbled,
“Possession.” I didn’t think that an unpaid parking ticket would have gone over
well.
The sun came up a couple of hours
later and I was still there and still awake. Somebody brought me a plate of
some runny, watery yellowish stuff that was probably supposed to be scrambled
eggs and some soggy-looking thin-sliced budget white bread that had been
toasted a long time earlier. I failed to identify it as food and left it there.
From time to time a screw would appear
at the lockup’s entrance and call a name. The morning was well advanced when he
called mine. I went with him. He showed me my rap sheet. It had “D.A. Reject”
stamped on it with a rubber stamp. A rubber stamp. Illegal harassment busts
were that common.
At the counter with the glass barrier
a uniformed person returned the contents of my pockets to me and asked me if I
wanted my pills back, too. I told him he could keep them. Then I made a phone
call and Jonathan came for me in my van. Having entered from inside the police
garage, I left out the front door.
The two cops who’d busted me had been
from the notorious Rampart Division, some years later revealed in a big scandal
as the most corrupt group of cops in the Los Angeles Police Department, an
organisation well-known for endemic corruption and abuse of power throughout
its ranks citywide.
I later found out that those two had
been trying to shake Foster down for protection money, he had refused to pay
them, and so they were serially stopping and hassling Blue Grotto customers as
they – in this case we – were leaving the establishment. I don’t know how long Foster
stayed open after that.
Oh well, it would’ve been worse if
we’d been black or Chicano.
With liberty and justice for all.
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