thoughts of black lab puppies

It was springtime and Littlegircop had boys on the brain. He had a hard time focusing on much else the past few days. Maybe that was because of the general deficit of other important things for him to think about; or the way the warmth of a spring days worked on his primordial self. More likely, it was the lonely feeling Murphy got first thing in the morning when he realized he was waking up alone again. It's the time of year, thought Murphy, to fall in love a dozen times on the walk between the corner coffee place and the office. And while these crushes weren't always happening by the dozen, some blocks they washed over him like ocean waves.

At times these momentary crushes lingered. Yesterday night on his drive home from the Athletic Club Littlegirlcop was picturing his wedding, puppy rearing and retirement years with the clean cut fellow he saw that evening in the sauna. This man was someone murphy had only seen a few times before and he didn't know his name. He really only knew two things about him. He knew he had a good report with Dan and Andy, two of the old-guy regulars. And he knew he had one of those perfectly proportioned bodies that when photographed out of context would seem to belong to a man of slightly above average height who wore a slightly above average size forty four suite.

In the case of this fellow, he was smaller, looking like he might have been caught in a copy machine set on eighty five percent. The image of this man that lodged in Murphy's head, the image that fueled the thoughts of black lab puppies, and fall walks on New England beaches was the image of the man in profile sitting on the bench next to the sauna's window. The profile of the man and the way the evening light diffused through the thick matt of hair of the mans chest spurred images of both passion and domestic bliss.

He must have his faults, thought Murphy, like the guy at work who leaves his empty sugar packets next to the coffee pot in the station house kitchen. The sloppiness was turned into a cowardly act, he thought, by the smallness of the mess and that he only left it when he was alone.

beautiful in her day

Littlegirlcop sat on the deck, late on a mid-week afternoon, enjoying fifteen minutes of sun between work and the start of his workout. Murphy had changed into his shorts and a t-shirt that wasn't quite fresh but didn't smell too bad. His sneaker sat beside his chair with a pair of white sox sticking out of one of them, his toes moving free in the breeze. The deck was almost empty, just one other person, a sunday painter, and a painting of Shavone in her usual spot on the deck.

If it was a sunny afternoon you could pretty much bet you'd find Shavone sitting on the sun deck of the Athletic Club eating her bag lunch. There she sat, her sun glasses on, her shorts rolled up a bit to expose more leg to the sun, her feet up on a chair. A gaggle of old guys around her. Shavone didn't exercise, it's not clear if she ever did really, but she'd been a club member for a long time, as long as the club has admitted women. Before that she was a frequent guest of several of the male members. She was beautiful in her day and surely she had many admirerers.

The painter recounted how earlier that day the old men teased the model. Teasing her that she should pose nude then that she definitely shouldn't. Later one of the old guys listed off the names of Shavone's boyfriends to the younger painter. Murphy simultaneously did and didn't want to know the names of the old woman's lovers. He really didn't want to picture Shavone having sex. It wasn't quite as bad as thinking of your mother having sex, thought Murphy, but it was at least as bad as picturing an old aunt in flagrante delicto. But after a few minutes curiosity got the best of him and he asked.

Around the club, on the photo covered walls, are several copies of the same photo of Shavone. It's a picture of her looking sporty sitting on the hood of a car, her hair then stylish, coal black and teased high, the same color and shape it is today. Murphy had often thought one of those photos would look great in his apartment.

the woman was a spy

Littlegirlcop had a large slice of chocolate cake for breakfast and he washed it down with a cold glass of milk. Few things could be better before work on a sunny summer morning: Sitting in the kitchen next to an open window eating cake in your pajamas. The frosting was thick and the cold milk cut it's sweetness. For a moment all was right with the world. The breeze from the window made him think of a poem that a coworker taught him a dozen years ago. It was a french poem which makes perfect sense because the woman who taught him the poem was french too.

Murphy used to like to pretend the woman was a spy because she was very smart, fun, beautiful and open to life's adventures, at the same time she seemed a bit cold and closed off. He used to like to think about her going from the bed of her lover to a quick political assassination (usually the scenario was some sort of poisoning) to a microfilm hand off on a crowded chinatown street, all in the course of a morning. On second thought it wasn't as much a poem as a bit of an Edith Piaf song, a song about the kiss of a nameless sailor from a ship that would be lost at sea.

Le ciel est bleu, la mer est verte, Laisse un peu, la f'nêtre ouverte.

The sky is blue, the sea is green, Leave a little, the window open.

out on the streets

Last weekend, from a Peckinpah movie, Littlegirlcop learned that no price can be placed on the bounty of the lord but the devil's bounty, on the other hand, is never free and rarely inexpensive. Murphy fantasized about delivering "the bounty of the lord" speech to some john or junkie he'd arrested right after reading them their Miranda rights. Sadly, these days, he never got to arrest anyone. Sometime they'd invite him to ride along on a bust but that too a was a rare occurance. That was the biggest problem with working in the online crimes devision. He and Marty and the other geek cops did have their share of fun and excitement, but all there stake-outs happened on their monitors, and there investigations involved sifting, crunching and surfing their way thought piles of data. If they chased a perp down an alley, it was virtually.

If he had to, Littlegirlcop could beat most of his colleagues on a chase down an alley, and he was a pretty good shot too, better than most, even though his gun was almost always at home in the gun safe, save for a twice monthly trip to the shooting range and some regular cleanings. While Murphy knew his work was appreciated by the boys downtown, he couldn't help be jealous of his coworker out on the streets, because when Murphy decided to be a cop, when he was a kid, that was what he saw himself doing.

That weekend Murphy also learned that asymtotics was the study of mathematical functions when the input values approach infinity. Not in a million years would that young cop wanna-be think he'd be reading math books for fun. Or kissing boys for that matter.

in the style section

Hobo, tramp, or bum, he thought? Littlegirlcop stood reading at a gift book display at a big chain bookstore killing time after lunch. Up until then he had used the words interchangeably. Here he learned hobos traveled and worked and were the noblest of the three. Tramps traveled but avoided work and bums just tried to do as little of both as possible. While Murphy by nature was a hard worker he might tell you he'd rather be a tramp than a hobo. And while he never had hopped a freight, the romantic notion of riding the rails did appeal to him. What also appealed to him was the idea of buying those one hundred and sixty dollar french swim trunks he saw in the style section of the Times that morning.

Maybe it was these conflicting notions that kept Murphy in check, that and the fact that he didn't like breaking rules and he really enjoyed a hot shower. Littlegirlcop walked back to the station house thinking about the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ads of his youth. The ads where two guys bump into each other saying, "you got chocolate in my peanut butter." "Hey you got peanut butter on my chocolate." Was the world ready for tramps in french swimwear? Maybe it was just Murphy.

an odd dream

Then on a sudden the music changed,
    so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean
    of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved;
    that her love was a devil's lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you
    was to crawl away and die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair,
    and it thrilled you through and through --
"I guess I'll make it a spread misere,"
    said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

--Robert Service
(from The Shooting of Dan McGrew )

Littlegirlcop woke up at 4:28. It was dark as he shuffled to the bathroom for a pee and a drink of water. His alarm wouldn't go off for another hour and two minutes and it was rare for him to wake before it. What an odd dream thought Murphy, Joey Kowalczyk was reading me a Service poem. The combination of the DA's soothing baritone, his thick mustache, the Service poem and the fact that it'd been three weeks since he spent the night at the DA's house explained the snugness in Murphy's pajama bottoms. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, thought Murphy, I'll have to give Joey a call later. Maybe he'd be up for hike on Sunday.

in that forum

Littlegirlcop didn't usually blush but he knew when Denny O'Malley had a circle around him in the lockeroom all bets were off. Almost with the same breath that Denny apologized for speculating about the family background of the new office manager (apparently for Denny money and class were still taboo) he explained in great detail how he fulfilled a lifelong fantasy for a terminally ill man he met in a gay bar in Santa Fe. Denny never wasted an opportunity to tell a filthy personal anecdote. Murphy would have apologized about telling the gathering of people that he tied a man up then urinated on him but Murphy and Denny rarely saw things exactly the same way.

The telling of the story would've seemed completely appropriate, thought Murphy, if it were just a few gay guy. But he felt a mixed crowd wasn't the best place to start discussing one's kinks. Though he was sure some of the straight guys had kinks, he was sure they wouldn't discuss them in that forum. His partner Marty, the father of three, joked that he had much experience getting pee'd on but saw none of the erotic appeal. In his house it wasn't called water sports it was called a diper change.

good men never hunt trouble

Littlegirlcop would be moderately embarrassed to read in a blog that he loved old Louis L'Amour paperbacks. He'd be more embarrassed if it said he read Harlequin romance books: which he doesn't. And he'd be much less embarrassed if it said he read old crime paperbacks: which he has but only rarely. What Murphy loved about these books was what he loved about police work: in the end, good triumphed over bad. He also liked the orderliness of their universe where the world functioned in structured and explainable ways. Littlegircop loved that the good guy got the girl. He loved that these women were both beautiful and strong. He liked that they were described as someone you'd ride the river with. He liked the men too. The bad ones were tough but the good guys were tougher. The good men never hunted trouble, but they never shyed away from it when confronted. Murphy thought these good guys were the kind of men any guy would want to be and any gay man would want to be with. They had names like Sandy Bob, Buster Jig and William Tell Sackett. If Murphy ever had a son (or a black labrador retriever) he'd want to give him a name like that. While he knew that the cowboys of the nineteen sixties books and country songs were much more fiction than fact, when he heard Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings sing about them, he felt in a small way they'd seen inside him.

On his drive to the station house that morning he sang along to the tape of "Mamma's don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys" and he felt a cut above the countless thousands trapped with him in the morning commuter traffic. If you cut Murphy at that moment, he'd have bleed cowboy blood. For that moment he was someone to ride the river with, well that's at least what he hoped.

a banquet of sage

The ice cream started going soft, but that wasn't so bad, thought Murphy. He didn't mind soft ice cream. The warming of the freezer did become intolerable when the ice cream turned to soup. Well the first morning after he discovered the soupy ice cream his coffee never tasted so rich and creamy, but the joy of that was short lived.

Littlegirlcop called the landlord, the landlord called the repair guy, the repair guy said it was hopeless and the landlord bought a new refrigerator. That all was simple enough.

What wasn't simple was removing hundreds or maybe even thousands of little magnetic words off his refrigerator. Over the years Murphy had bought multiple set of refrigerator poetry magnets. He had food words, and words of local interest, he had a set of big unpronounceable sixty four dollar words, he had some dirty words, some Italian words, and he also had cowboy words. The cowboy words were his favorite, and he was proud of the resulting cowboy poems.

All the unused words went into a big plastic bag and then Murphy carefully removed the finished poems from the refrigerator. He wrote out the poems on envelopes and placed the magnetic words inside, saving them for what he was never sure.

~-~-~

fear my ornery hitch
you rodeo cheatin' varmint
desert bones cry
raw critters bleed
can't saddle a scream

~-~-~

above a dream motel
sky manipulates range
the old cowpoke lights out
hankering a banquet of sage
brave woman beauty
and rumorous red treacle

~-~-~

that mad pickle dash
howling down a slick bridge
man did we tour heaven

~-~-~

feel'em buck
thunder round & bite
eat trail pardner

~-~-~

in rough weather &
hard mountains
our sourdough glow
ropes late summer romance
& prairie land sanctity

more relevance than they merited

Murphy didn't usually go to the Sunday beer busts at the bars. He said it was mostly because it was too damn crowded, but the fact was anything that felt like a frat party made Littlegirlcop feel like a square peg. He went out that night because he met a nice guy online and he knew if he went to the Sunday evening event he might meet this fellow in person. He also went because he needed to put himself out there more, that's what people always told Murphy, you need to put yourself out there more. As far as a Sunday night at the bars go it was a pretty good night for Murphy. He had a nice conversation with a big strong guy with a wrestling fetish who was visiting from Florida. The wrestler was trying to pick up Murphy and while Murphy told him he wasn't going to leave with him he was flattered by the offer and he enjoyed talking with the man about an article they had both read in the Thursday Style section of the Times.

Murphy also met the nice guy he ventured out that evening hoping to meet. This surprised Littlegirlcop because the bar was very crowded making the meeting less likely, but also because even if they did meet each other; one or the other of them might not seem as interesting in person as they did online. Happily this was not the case, thought Murphy. The bearded man with the sweet smile and sleepy eyes seemed very nice. While his soft kisses were unexpected, they weren't unwanted, and they infused the rest of Murphy's evening with a lightness and optimism he hadn't felt for some time.

That night Murphy had the good sense not to bring the sweet faced man home; later in the week, on the back patio of the same bar, after more conversation and more soft kisses his judgment wavered. Littlegirlcop awoke the next morning wonder if the the nice man he said goodbye to in the middle of the night was just a nice man or was he "the" nice man. Murphy really wanted him to be "the" nice man. When Murphy's messages went unanswered. He was disappointed for the expected reason and disappointed in himself for giving the warmth and softness of the kisses more relevance than they merited.

The following Sunday, almost a week later to the hour Littlegirlcop saw two men walking down the street with a stroller, The effect on him was always the same, Murphy felt both hopeful and very alone. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, thought Murphy, and the back patio of a gay bar on a warm spring evening is about as close to Vegas as you can get in this part of California.

meet the death angel

OK Fourth wall be gone!.. I'm feeling a bit constrained writing about the imagined life ofLlittlegirlcop. I'm feeling blocked. I need to get some real details out of my head before I can write pretend – vicarious living is the only way to go – details for my man Murphy.

Fact one. I had a crappy job interview. I walked into a start-up yesterday, it was a south of market loft, an open office with the expensive version of the old school late nineties door-desks, ethernet cable webbing the exposed concrete ceiling. From the guy I met with I got the feeling that he had no Idea what he needed to do to launch the commercial website he was in charge of launching and he didn't have people in place that did: Strike one. He kept me waiting for almost a half hour, he was kind of rude and he kept trying to negotiate down my price and convince me their stock had value: Strike two. The room was full of old white men and their product was targeted at a young market: Strike three. I was trying to make a sentence about what I was feeling that fit into the world of Littlegirlcop but I couldn't figure out how to shoehorn it into Murphy's story. I like the sentence but kept hanging up on who it was describing:

If he tried hard enough Littlegirlcop could almost smell flesh rotting. He wasn't walking into the morgue or the forensics lab. He was walking into the office of <-- insert character here --> The offices seemed modern enough with up-to-date furniture; it was clean with lots of light. The place looked modern. It wasn't the musty smell of an old building, it was the stagnation of ideas he was smelling.

Fact two. My boss it nuts and it seems like he's constantly having his meds adjusted. Just today he talked about having a computer virus cause his computer to say "meet the death angel" over and over slowly fading out. He told me about an art school friend who was a chronic masturbator, her record was six times in twenty minute. She might have documented this as a conceptual art piece or not; it wasn't clear why he was telling me. It was almost like his brain full of creepy stories sprung a leak. He had another art school friend who's father set his own chest hair on fire after asking his children if they wanted french toast. Again the point was unclear, But it didn't make me feel comfortable, warm or fuzzy. He went on to talk about his alter ego Eric, the name he uses at starbucks when he orders coffee, this didn't seem so weird until he started describing Eric's extremely potmarked face (but he and Eric share the same face and his skin is clear) He also talked about Eric's stable of lover's: three men and three woman. These descriptions seemed to be crossing from fantasy and pretend into the land of multiple personality. He had a doctors appointment this afternoon, thank christ. I didn't want to dump this all on Littlegirlcop but it needed to get out. Now it's out. Devil be gone.

the open spreadsheet

Littlegirlcop was having a very difficult time doing much of anything. The combination of the warm spring day and the lack of anything pressing made the afternoon a labor, but it was a labor of nothingness, a battle to fight off sleep, a struggle to look productive. Was the open spreadsheet on his screen convincing when Murphy's slouch told a different story.

This inactivity was punctuated by thoughts of endings and beginnings. His supervisor's father's recent hospitalization; the passing of a friends mother after a long fight with cancer; Murphy's mother's Alzheimer's. The lengthening and warming of the days; his niece's prom; the sweet bearded man that kissed him last night at the bar. Do the next months hold promise when the last few did not?