Apprehensions & Convictions: Adventures of a 50-Year-Old Rookie Cop

1

What Are You?

Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

—attributed to George Orwell

I’m just a few days out of Mobile’s Police Academy, my third night in the Third Precinct riding with my FTO, Porter. Sarge had just dismissed us from roll call, and we were in the precinct parking lot loading and fueling up Porter’s squad car. It was 1815 hours on a sweltering mid-September evening.

Porter had told me the first night, Get this straight, up front: I don’t know you and don’t wanna know you. Don’t give a damn about you, your life’s story, your wife and kids, what you did before this, and why you wanted to work in this fucked-up department, especially at your age, Grampa. You’re not my buddy, and you won’t be after this month is up. He had punctuated this declaration by slamming the squad car trunk, where I’d just stowed my shotgun.

"I never volunteered to be a field training officer and don’t get paid any extra for all the goddamn paperwork. I hate rookies. Even though you’re old enough to be my pawpaw and you look like Clint fucking Eastwood—in Blood Work, not Dirty Harry, have you seen that yet? Then you know what I’m talkin’ about: he’s so old, he has a heart attack in the first scene—you’re just another goddamn rookie to me. All I ask is that you don’t bug me, don’t try to talk to me, or ask a million stupid-ass rookie questions. Just stay the fuck outta my way and don’t do anything to embarrass me."

Yes sir, I’d said that first night, an academy reflex. I’d been told before of my resemblance to Clint but without Porter’s specificity. This time it kinda stung. I had just seen Blood Work. After the opening-scene foot chase ends with Clint’s heart attack, for the rest of the movie everybody tells him how bad, how sick he looks. Wasn’t Eastwood like seventy-five? I had just turned fifty.

Jeee-zus, Porter had said, blowing smoke and shaking his head in disgust. He’d then thrust his plump round face into mine, his sneer exposing teeth crying out for orthodonture. He barely has whiskers, I’d noticed, and a sparse, utterly pathetic mustache darkened his upper lip. I’d gotten a pungent whiff of coffee and nicotine from his breath but resisted pulling my head back.

You see any fucking stripes on my sleeve, Pawpaw? He’d raised a thick bicep, pulling at the sleeve. First rule: Don’t call me ‘sir’!

I’d felt my mouth forming the y of yessir but aborted it, leaving my chin slightly jutting, in what I’d hoped might be taken as defiance, or determination. It was taken as neither. Porter wasn’t even looking at me as we’d pulled out of the precinct and into the night. He was on a roll.

Second rule, he had announced. Forget all that crap they taught you in the academy. It’s useless. Horseshit. Has nothing to do with how it really is out here on the streets. Just watch what I do, and the other guys on the squad. Except that worthless piece of shit Whatley. Do exactly the opposite of anything he does. I had wondered, what makes Whatley a piece of shit? So much for the brothers-in-blue thing.

But Portly Porter droned on, his self-importance reminiscent of Deputy Barney Fife condescending to deputize Gomer Pyle in Mayberry. Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open, then maybe, just mayyybe, we’ll get along and you’ll survive this month. He grabbed the radio mike and put us 10-8 (in service), as a one-man training unit. I didn’t count—even as a man, much less a cop—and wouldn’t for another ninety days.

I remember thinking, you fat fool, you’re a walking cliché, giving me that tired, world-weary-veteran-to-recruit spiel. You’re maybe half my age. Former Marine? Big whup. Do you really think I haven’t watched that scene you’re playacting, in maybe a million movies, most of ’em made before you could even talk?

But I was used to rookie disdain as the default setting of department veterans by now, having been razzed and lorded over and called crazy for the past six months by old cops, young cops, female cops, fellow recruits, academy instructors, my wife, and most of our family and friends ever since I’d abruptly quit my old job heading up Mobile’s United Way for a 75 percent pay cut and hired on with the department. I just sucked it up and held my tongue. I’m not one for much conversation, anyway. And if I ever do come up with a snappy comeback, it’s several days late.

Porter liked to write tickets. Traffic enforcement is my least favorite part of policing. But for Porter, it justifies parking the squad car on the roadside behind some bushes and just sitting there until the radar whines. I’d sat in obedient silence for two twelve-hour shifts, trying to focus on the radio, listening for our unit number to be called. Porter had mostly chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and talked for hours on his cell to some female in Arkansas he’d met online: What’s your favorite thing at Taco Bell? Dontcha love those new Gorditas, with extra sour cream! I was beginning to believe that old saying about police work: 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror. I was craving the terror. And thinking maybe this was a really dumb career move, after all.

But third night out, as the day’s thick heat slowly rose up out of the asphalt while the blazing Alabama sun eased beyond the horizon, we finally get dispatched to a hot call, a domestic: white female caller, assaulted by known white male subject armed with a knife. Both parties still on scene. At last! I think. We get to rescue a damsel in distress!

Dubovitch will back us. (A reminder to me that even to the dispatcher, I don’t exist, at least not as sufficient backing for Porter.) I try to picture Dubovitch. From what little I’ve gathered, if he’s the guy I’m thinking of, he seems pretty squared away, based on his bearing at roll call and how the others regard him. A little cocky, maybe, but (I’m beginning to think) who of these guys isn’t? Dubovitch has been on about as long as Porter, seven or eight years, and is about the same age, late twenties, maybe thirty. At least he’s not fat and loud like Portly.

We pull into the rundown motor court, a place that charges by the week and month (and probably by the hour). That old jukebox chorus pops unbidden into my head: I’ll even tell you that I love you if you want me to. Third rate romance, low rent rendezvous. The Amazing Rhythm Aces.

The dozen-room Bama Pride motel’s neon sign has a nearly burnt-out, flickering P and so alternately reads Bama ride. It’s a long, sad-looking, one-story cinder-block building with peeling lime-green paint, sagging eaves, missing shingles, and broken windows held together with duct-taped cardboard. Room numbers are nailed all cattywampus to the splintered, scarred doors. Its weedy, cracked, and heaving parking lot is littered with cigarette butts, flattened malt liquor cans, broken glass. There’s a lone, battered, and rusty eighties-model Ford pickup, mostly faded blue but with a primer-gray door, parked at the far end of the lot. Evidently, most of this motel’s guests don’t own vehicles.

Dubovitch is already there, leaning against his squad car smoking a cigarette next to an agitated, anorexic, bedraggled, hard-looking woman talking fast and loud. Our damsel could be the Bama ride herself. She had likely been attractive, in a lascivious sort of way, in a previous incarnation. A large near-empty wine bottle is on the ground next to her.

She’s carrying on about how the thum-bitch came at me with a knife! A goddamn knife! She seems more pissed off than scared or hurt. She’s maybe mid-forties, her lisp the result of gaps in her frightfully discolored teeth. Strands of greasy, sweat-soaked hair stick randomly to her forehead, cheeks, and neck; she’s wearing a soiled, stretched wifebeater (barely containing her drooping, braless breasts), neon-pink short-shorts with white piping, no shoes, filthy bare feet. Tattoos, mosquito bites, scratches, scabs, and welts adorn her arms and legs. Dubo’s not even looking at her while she rants on with punching and parrying motions and points to the door of room number five. As Porter and I approach, I can smell her. It’s not a pleasant scent: a yeasty, sour odor similar to dirty sweat socks but sharper.

Dubovitch smiles and says, Hey Porter, check out her tattoo. Show him your tat, darlin’. The woman stops mid-sentence and proudly displays her upper right arm.

Porter reads aloud the faded greenish lettering, FUCK MEN, then grins.

Is that your attitude, ma’am, or your job description? Good one, Porter, I concede, grudgingly. He’s still a pompous ass, but I’ll grant him points for wit.

I don’t need no thit from you, ath-hole! our complainant spits through her gaping teeth. I want him arrethted! Prothecuted to the fulleth exthtent of the law! I know my rightth! A devotee of TV court dramas.

No injuries, Dubo says, ignoring her, but those two over there witnessed the whole thing. He nods toward a couple of gray-haired black men sitting on lawn chairs at the end of the parking lot, under the generous cool shade of a massive, moss-dripping live oak, whose roots are responsible for the crumbling, upheaved asphalt. Guy did have a knife, they say, and he started it. It’s her old man. They both been drinking and fighting all day, according to the witnesses, and she confirms it. He gestures to the wine bottle at her feet. When I look their way, the witnesses nod in affirmation. I swell up slightly and nod back with my most serious countenance: a man on a mission. At least they think I’m a cop. He retreated to the room when she smacked him upside the head with the bottle.

You got her information, Dubo? Porter asks.

Dubovitch nods. "I just gotta get her signature on the DV* form, and the witness statements. Why don’t you and your rookie go fetch him. He’s still in the room. No backdoor. Still has the blade on him."

C’mon, Pawpaw, Porter says. Let’s go get Mr. Slingblade. He strides toward the door, which is partially open, to room number five. I notice he unsnaps the holster of his Glock and do likewise. My heart is pounding and my hand is trembling and I’m relieved nobody seems to notice. We stand on each side of the door. Porter gingerly pushes on it, calling out MPD as it swings open. We peer inside.

Naked except for darkly stained shorts, a man sits on a bed, propped against the wall. Blood covers him from a gash on his swollen forehead. He’s bald, except for long wisps of gray hair around the ears, bound into a ponytail behind his ruined face. The tangled sheets around him are soaked with gore.

Spying us, he snarls, Arrest that bitch! She damn-near killed me! Looka me! I want that bitch chained down in Metro!

Settle down, Pops, Porter says, waving off his demands as we enter. My eyes are popping at the sight of him. Porter’s eyes sweep the room, and mine follow. It’s all torn up. A nightstand next to the bed has been knocked over, its lamp shattered on the floor. A chrome-and-plastic chair lies on its side among broken dishes, scattered French fries, half-eaten hamburgers, and Sonic Drive-In wrappers swept off an overturned kitchenette table. Beer cans, wine bottles, and dirty clothes cover the floor.

Where’s the blade? Porter demands.

What blade?! Mr. Bloodyface snaps. Wha’d that bitch tell you? She fuckin’ conked me with a bottle! I want her arrested!

The poor bastard clearly got the worst of it. Who’s the real victim here, I’m wondering. Porter approaches him. Get up and put your hands behind your back, he orders, unsnapping his cuffs from his duty belt. The bloody man is outraged and bellows, "I’m barely fucking conscious! You put that bitch in cuffs, not me! Why are you idiots taking me? What’s the charge? I have a right to know the charge! I demand you arrest her! Get me a motherfucking ambulance!"

Unfazed, Porter jerks him upright from the bed and quickly cuffs him despite his twisting and shouting.

You started it, Pops. Got witnesses. You’re the primary aggressor, so shut the fuck up and quit buckin’ on me or I’ll bloody you some more. Then with equal contempt for me, mute and immobilized at the tableau, Don’t just stand there with your mouth open, rookie. Search his pockets!

The man is still attempting to jerk free, despite Porter’s firm grasp of his cuffed wrists. Careful of the blood, rookie. He might have AIDS. You got the Bug, Numbnuts?

I pull a small folding knife from a pocket of the blood-sticky shorts. Hang on to that, Pawpaw. Evidence. Porter marches our arrested subject out the door to the squad car. He’s dog-cussing us, calling us pigs, calling her a nasty dogfucking whore. His victim returns the barrage, taunting, Yeah, motherfucker! Who’th the tough guy now? Dubo has to restrain her from lunging at him as Porter stuffs the bloody man into the cage. He’s demanding our badge numbers, demanding justice. I drop the knife into my breast pocket and follow like a heeling pup.

At the hospital, bloody Lester Puckett shouts and struggles all the way into the ER intake bay, where Porter plops him down in front of a desk occupied by a soft-spoken matronly administrator. (Metro won’t accept anybody in Lester’s condition without a medical release. A doctor has to deem him fit for incarceration, so Metro doesn’t get sued if he croaks in its custody.) Regular people, seated in the room awaiting loved ones, feign averting their eyes from the spectacle. One woman actually covers her kid’s ears and turns his head away.

The intake specialist asks Puckett for his information, calling him Mr. and Sir. After a thoughtful pause, Lester grunts, I ain’t gotta talk to no nigger bitch. She seems remarkably unperturbed, but Porter apologizes for him anyway and provides her Lester’s info, gathered by Dubo from the FUCK MEN tat lady, and from his squad car’s mobile display terminal when he’d pulled up Lester’s rap sheet. Dubo had cleared from backing us and returned to his own beat.

Once she enters all Lester’s data into her computer, the lady explains to Lester that she will need him to sign the treatment authorization form. Porter unlocks the cuff on Lester’s right wrist so he can sign the form, warning him not to try anything stupid. He keeps a firm hold of the freed cuff, still attached to Lester’s left wrist. Lester calmly, tenderly rubs his freed right wrist.

Then he explodes, rising up and pounding the desk. Paper clips bounce, knickknacks dancing. I ain’t signin’ nothin’! he screams. The startled administrator pushes back away from him in her chair. Porter jerks Lester backward with the loose handcuff, knocking Lester’s chair into me. With his other arm, he hooks Lester around the throat from behind, sweeps him up off his feet, and slams him down hard on the floor. You can hear the thud as the back of Lester’s skull and shoulders hit the tile. The wind’s knocked out of Lester, he’s gasping for air, eyes bugging out. Porter pins Lester to the floor by the throat. Lester’s feet are kicking, arms flailing away like he’s drowning. The normal citizens clear the room.

Yer gonna sign the fucking form, shitbag! Porter growls.

Lester’s sucking air, sputtering, and grunts, No . . . I . . . ain’t! He keeps kicking.

Porter tightens his choke hold. Lester’s turning purple. Making gurgling noises. Porter puts his full (considerable) weight on Lester with a knee to the chest. Still Lester fights.

Porter shouts over his shoulder to me. Grab an arm! We’re gonna cuff him to a gurney and sedate the motherfucker! We each lift him by an armpit as he kicks and wheels his feet like those cartoon characters in midair when they’ve run off a cliff. Lester’s shorts fall to the floor. He writhes and curses, buck-naked, as we carry him down the hall to the trauma bays, nurses and orderlies scattering in our wake. We slam him on the first empty bed and cuff a wrist to each rail. Lester keeps kicking and fighting as Porter orders a nurse to give him a shot. With the sedative pumping into him, he quits resisting. Porter tells the nurse to go fetch the intake lady’s paperwork. Lester’s fading fast. Nurse comes back with a form on a clipboard, and Porter puts a pen in Lester’s limp fist, passes it over the treatment authorization form, inking an illegible scrawl on the appropriate line. Then he barks, Keep an eye on this piece of shit, Pawpaw. I’m gonna grab a smoke.

When I see Porter exit the building, I slink down the hall and retrieve Lester’s blood-caked shorts. Delicately (for my own sake) I slip the crusty, stinking drawers up his bruised, bony legs, under his skeletal trunk, and over his shriveled genitalia. He nods at me. Moments later, Lester’s out cold, but at least he possesses a shred of modesty, if utterly lacking in dignity. Later a nurse’s aide wipes the dried blood off his face and head as he snoozes fitfully. Then a doctor examines the gash in his head. A few butterfly bandages close the wound. Lester snores and shivers, covered with goose bumps. I find a blanket on a closet shelf and put it over him. His shivering stops but not his snoring. I sit at his bedside, awaiting Porter’s return. Nearly an hour passes. I figure he’s yammering on his cell to his Arkansas taco belle.

I remember the knife I’d taken from Lester and fish it out of my shirt pocket. I can’t believe what I see. Just then, Lester stirs, snorts, and opens his eyes a slit. His cuffs clank against the bed rails, startling him. He blinks hard and groggily studies his shackled wrists, then the blanket, then me, with no apparent comprehension. Thanks, he murmurs, falls silent again, and closes his eyes.

Still no Porter. I study the knife’s familiar fleur-de-lis emblem and work the blades. They’ve got a good edge to them, well honed. The knife is clean, oiled, maintained. I wonder . . .

Finally, I clear my throat loudly. You awake, Lester? He rouses and grunts. Mind if I ask you a question? Another grunt I take to mean okay.

Your knife, here, the one I took off you? For evidence? Lester nods, eyes still shut, silent.

Did you know it’s a Boy Scout knife?

’Course I do, he says hoarsely. ’Smy knife, ain’t it?

Just wondered if it was actually yours, or you just found it somewhere. Silence.

You ever a Boy Scout, Lester? ’Cause I was, long time ago.

Yeah, Lester croaks. Long, long time ago an’ a long ways from here.

Really! How far’d you get up the ranks?

Eagle. I’m a Eagle fuckin’ Scout.

I’m speechless. After a long silence, I declare, utterly amazed: Me, too! And my son—he’s grown now—made Eagle, too.

Yeah? My daddy was the goddamn scoutmaster. Lester’s eyelids flutter to a squint, as if he’s straining to pull up a distant memory. Or maybe he’s just wincing in pain. But there seems to be a faint trace of interest stirring him. He was also a deputy sheriff in Manatee County, Florida, ’fyou can belee’ dat, he says, punctuating it with a sneer and a faint head shake.

I’m struck mute for another long moment. My jaw drops, brows arch. What? No, I snort, shaking my head. No, a deputy? I trail off. Lester offers nothing further. Minutes pass in silence.

Finally, in the most amicable tone I can muster, I say, So tell me, Lester, if ya don’t mind my asking, how the hell did you go from Boy Scout, Eagle Scout, son of a deputy, to— I turn my palms up, gesturing toward him: beaten, battered, shackled.

To this sorry fucked-up mess? Lester’s eyes are open and he’s looking right into mine. Zat whatcha wanna know?

I don’t reply. Just hold his gaze.

I ask myself that. Lester pauses, sighs. He takes a long, deep breath. This is how it went: I graduate from high school, right? Daddy helps me get a small fishin’ boat. Work hard, eventually put something down on a little trawler, makin’ pretty decent coin. ’Nuff ta hire me a couple crew. They even called me Skipper. A hint of pride.

Then one day somebody says to me, ‘Lester,’ he says. ‘This is chump change. You could be pullin’ down serious bank if you was to dee-versify,’ he says. All I gotta do is pick up a little cargo fer ’im from time ta time. So I start tran-sportin instead a trawlin’. He pauses, frowning. Hell, it was smugglin’ is what it was, straight up. Sometime it’s weed, usually it’s flake, sometime guns and wetbacks. Coupla times, all a that in one load. I’m makin’ more fuckin’ money in a run than my ole Daddy makes in a whole month. But then, a course, I start samplin’ the goods. He shakes his head. Stupid as shit, I know. Like a bad fuckin’ movie. But here I am: a lowlife cokehead. A fuckin’ loser, who gets his ass kicked by a dirtyass coke whore and then gets locked up for it.

Long silence. We both look elsewhere. Then:

Hey, Lester. Y’ever try to kick? Listen, I know a guy, personal friend, runs a rehab. Twelve-step program, you know? Live-in, set you up in outside day jobs, stay there as long’s it takes.

Lester’s silent. Shaking his head.

Seriously, man, the guy’s a buddy of mine. A real professional. Lots of support, just pay what you can, when you can. He’s recovered himself, and I know he’d open up a spot for you if I asked.

Porter steps in the door. He takes in the scene, his eyes passing from Lester to me and back to Lester. He must have been eavesdropping outside the room. He fixes his accusing gaze on me at Lester’s bedside. Porter’s lip curls into a look of horrified revulsion, eyes narrowed, shaking his head in disbelief. "Wha . . . what are you, some kinda fucking social worker?"

I shrink back in my chair, eyes dropping to the floor. I have no retort. I can’t deny it. But I can’t really own up to it, either. I force my eyes to meet Porter’s and thrust my jaw out in defiance. Still unable to speak, I just hurl mean thoughts at him: Yeah, I was a kind of social worker, Porter, but you didn’t want to hear about any of that, I recall. So fuck you, Portly, you fat ignorant oaf. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Porter turns and marches down the hallway. I mobilize and fall quickly in step behind him.

A month later I rotate to the Second Precinct and a new FTO. I never saw Lester Puckett or his FUCK MEN gal again, not even in court. Both failed to appear; the tatted coke-whore victim no doubt ignored her subpoena because she had subsequent active warrants for sordid assaults on human dignity and public decency. A fresh bench warrant was issued for Lester for bail skipping.

Skip on, Skipper, like the wind across the Gulf.

*Domestic violence.

2

The Turd in the Punch Bowl

You don’t hafta be drunk to be useless.

—Anonymous (heard at a Twelve Step meeting)

Some two decades earlier, the lights are dimmed and the slide show begins in the crowded hotel banquet hall. The narrator’s voice sets the scene as the pictures and music tell the story.

It was a day like any other. Manny Gonzalez and his Colorado Power crew were doing routine maintenance on the power lines in a quiet Manitou Springs neighborhood, the voice-over intones.

The screen shows Manny, a barrel-chested, middle-aged lineman in coveralls, hard hat, and the elbow-length insulated gloves of electrical workers. He’s thirty feet up in a brilliant blue Colorado sky, working at the top of a power pole in his bucket truck on a sunny spring afternoon. The majestic Rocky Mountains tower in the background.

The slides show Manny distracted from his work on the lines. His attention is drawn to something on the ground, in a backyard below, several houses away. The camera zooms in on Manny as he leans out of his high bucket, transfixed by something puzzling, offscreen. We see his gloved hand pushing back the brim of his hard hat, then another, tighter shot of his weathered, lined face, his eyes straining to grasp the scene on the ground, and then a wide-eyed realization, a look of alarm on Manny’s face.

The point of view switches to a couple of shots from Manny’s perspective downward. From on high we see a quiet working-class neighborhood, a series of modest homes with fenced-in backyards. The camera zooms to one backyard, where children are playing on a swing set. A closer shot reveals what Manny has spied: seven-year-old Lupita Rivera has gotten herself tangled in the chains of her swing. She’s struggling to free herself from the tightening loops around her neck as her feet kick in the air, several feet off the ground.

The screen flashes rapid-fire shots of Manny lowering his bucket, jumping from the truck to the ground, and shouting at his crew to call 911, intercut with shots of the struggling Lupita flailing and kicking. The beefy lineman is seen sprinting down the sidewalk, then bounding over the chain-link fence enclosing Lupita’s backyard. The scene cuts to a young Hispanic woman looking in utter panic out her kitchen window. It’s Lupita’s mother, alerted by the shouts of Lupita’s playmates in the backyard. She flings open the backdoor and reaches her struggling child just as big old Manny Gonzalez scoops her up in his arms, putting slack in the chains. Mrs. Rivera untangles the chains from around her daughter’s neck, her face contorted in terror as Lupita’s head flops, her body limp in Manny’s arms.

Lucky for everyone, Manny knows CPR, the narrator says, as the screenshots show Manny kneeling, laying the lifeless body of little Lupita in the grass, Mrs. Rivera kneeling beside the large lineman, tears streaming down her stricken face, desperately holding her daughter’s hand.

He had learned it through a lifesaving class provided free to Power Company workers by an agency of your Pikes Peak United Way, continues the voice-over as the screen is filled with Manny’s huge hands doing chest compressions on little Lupita, then Manny’s whiskered, leathery face breathing life into her. The American Red Cross trains thousands of county residents each year in lifesaving and emergency first-aid, the narrator declares. It wasn’t just luck that saved Lupita Rivera’s life that day last spring. It was your fair-share gifts to United Way, which fund Red Cross programs like Manny’s CPR training.

The music swells as we see a revived Lupita being lifted up from the ground by the burly Manuel Gonzalez, his big lineman’s arms tenderly passing the child to her mother, the child hugged tightly by her grateful mom, then several closing shots of the three of them in the Riveras’ backyard, Lupita and Mrs. Rivera kissing a smiling Manny on each cheek, a couple of shots from the Annual Red Cross Heroes Banquet with the three of them onstage, Manny looking a little abashed and uncomfortable in a Sunday suit as he’s presented a medal and a framed proclamation of his heroism.

The audio track of the slide show switches from the familiar narrator’s voice to Mrs. Rivera’s. I truly feel God was looking down on my little Lupita that day, through the eyes of Manny Gonzalez. He was an angel sent to us by God.

I’m so glad I knew what to do, says Manny. Without the Red Cross training, it could of been a tragedy.

Music swells. The final face on the screen is a smiling little Lupita Rivera, as we hear her say, "Thanks to Mr. Gonzalez, thanks to Red Cross, thanks to you, it works for all of us, the United Way."

Little Lupita’s smiling face fades into the United Way’s multihued rainbow of hope over the support-offering hand of charity, holding in its palm the human figure with its upstretched arms simultaneously signifying supplication and triumph.

I switch off the synchronized projector and sound track and cue the stage lights. Vic Jackson, president of First National Bank of Colorado Springs and chairman of the 1983 campaign of the Pikes Peak United Way, is center stage.

With us here today are Lupita Rivera, her mom, and our hero, Manny Gonzalez.

The thunderous applause is immediate, the crowd comes to its feet, shouting, cheering. I look around in awe from my projection post at the rear of the hall; the room’s reaction makes my eyes well up, gives me goose bumps.

Campaign chairman Vic Jackson shares the mike for some brief, upbeat banter with the slide show’s stars. Mrs. Rivera and Lupita reiterate their gratitude, not just to Manny but to everyone in the room. Manny is modest, self-effacing, nervous, and utterly genuine. "I’m no hero, I just did what anybody in this room woulda done, if you woulda had the training like I did. And I wouldn’ of had the training, if it wasn’t for everyone giving to United Way, so I just wanna say thanks to you."

Following my script with perfect poise and timing, Vic Jackson then calls to the stage Hugh Woolsey, southern regional vice president of Colorado Power, who presents Jackson with the first Pacesetter corporate gift to the campaign, a giant-size mock-up of a check for $103,223, which, Woolsey explains, is the first-ever dollar-for-dollar corporate match of employee pledges, meaning that Colorado Power’s total gift to the campaign will be $206,446. More thunderous applause. Vic thanks Hugh for the check, and Hugh says they were all inspired by their coworker, Manny Gonzalez, who exemplifies the Colorado Power spirit of caring.

Vic then closes the kickoff luncheon with an exhortation to "give till it helps, to this year’s United Way campaign."

Then he departs from the script.

And before we leave, I’d like to recognize Mark Johnson, United Way’s campaign and public relations director. Mark put together this wonderful audiovisual presentation. Isn’t it great? More applause. I think he did a heckuva job. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been volunteering for United Way my whole career. Mark, stand up! He’s in the back by the projector. Stand up, Mark. Wave so we can all see you. The crowd turns to look at me, and the applause increases. My eyes well up with emotion, as they do still, decades later, at the mere memory of it.

I had always dreamed of being a hero, just like the heroes I watched each week on the family TV of my childhood: Roy Rogers, Sky King, Sea Hunt, Dragnet. As an adolescent, my favorites were 77 Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, and Adam-12. In my early teens I loved Vic Morrow’s Sergeant Saunders in Combat! and wished I had been a part of World War II.

Eventually, of course, I outgrew childish dreams of heroics. Realizing the long odds of saving lives as a cowboy, a cop, or in combat, I settled for the more modest aspiration of just making a difference. As a Boy Scout, I had earned the God and Country Award, which required service work in the church. I became president of my church youth group and was elected a deacon at age sixteen. I got to know my pastor, Mr. Huey, and began giving thought to following in his footsteps. At his suggestion I became an inner-city Head Start volunteer at a program housed in an urban church, and through friends I made there, I visited other downtown congregations. I was transported by the fiery, rhythmic delivery of the Word by black preachers and by the spontaneous, joyful response in the pews. I loved clapping and swaying with the choirs.

As I advanced into my later teen years, however, I encountered a major stumbling block to making a difference by aspiring to the clergy: sin. Lust, to be specific: the temptations of the flesh.

As a college freshman majoring in architecture, I dreamed of making a difference in the blighted neighborhoods I had come to know in my Sunday morning sojourns to the rough neighborhoods of north St. Louis: I would redesign urban housing. The infamous Pruitt-Igoe towers in the worst part of the St. Louis ghetto were nationally reviled for their filth, crime, and spirit-deadening uninhabitability. I knew people who lived there. Through outreach, citizen input, sensitive active listening, and revolutionary design, I would make a difference in the inner city by transforming urban housing, thereby restoring community, dignity, and civility, and probably eradicate poverty and racial strife in the process.

However, in the second semester of my sophomore year in the School of Environmental Design, I encountered a major stumbling block to my dreams of urban renewal through architecture: calculus.

Although I eventually passed calculus, I gave up architecture. Discouraged, disoriented, despairing, and by then utterly dissolute (having discovered the instant ease and comfort produced by a cold pitcher of Coors and a bag of weed), I informed my folks that I would no longer waste their money on tuition and instead would join the Marines to serve my country in the jungles of Viet Nam. I secretly hoped the corps would turn me into a hero, or at least a man (if not a casualty).

Alas, I encountered yet another stumbling block to my dreams of battlefield sacrifice and glory: Dad. He insisted that I carry on, at least until I earned a diploma in something, and then if I still wanted to join the Marines, fine. With a degree, I could be more useful to the corps and make a greater difference, as an officer. I switched majors to English Lit (which had been my favorite subject and in which I’d always excelled) and justified it with vague dreams of making a difference by touching the hearts and minds of men through authoring the next great American novel.

By the time I had graduated, Viet Nam was over. With no sense of direction, I stumbled into a series of jobs that offered little sense of mission, usefulness, satisfaction, or pride (especially to one of such grandiose and narcissistic aspiration), and my drinking accelerated. The drinking, of course, steadily degraded my job performance and undermined my young marriage to Nancy, who was really the only one who had any remaining hope for me.

In my fourth job since graduating (after six months in Brussels, Belgium, at a corporate-kickback job arranged for me by Dad, then six months driving a cab and a year as a short-haul delivery trucker in Denver), I wrecked a company car in the Oklahoma Panhandle, which wasn’t even in my sales territory. I wiggled my way out of that mess with the help of an understanding (and equally alcoholic) boss, then switched jobs and got fired from that one six months later, when Nancy was just weeks away from delivering our first child. I wrote freelance stories for the Rodeo Sports News, and Nancy got me some assignments at the weekend magazine of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, where she worked as a full-time reporter. Together, we made just enough to stay above water.

Then I got a break, just a month before the birth of our first child, Peter. The Pikes Peak United Way needed a PR director—mostly, just someone who could write brochure copy, speeches, and press releases with a decent command of grammar and a willingness to work for $14,000 a year. I had minimal knowledge of United Way: a vague notion that it ran an annual campaign for nonprofits like the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross. But I had always assumed (mistakenly—as do many) that all nonprofits were by definition run by volunteers.

At last, I had found a way to make a difference. The phrase was at the heart of the United Way mission and permeated the corporate culture. I was meeting real-life, everyday heroes, like Manny Gonzalez. It was my job to give the Mannys of the world the recognition they deserve, and to inspire others to emulate them, and to support their heroism.

My life turned around, my sense of purpose, my sense of myself, restored. I even stopped drinking, so grateful was I to be useful to something good, something important, something greater than myself.

It had been a good run, for more than two decades. But then I found myself looking at fifty, and it didn’t seem to be working any more. Pete was grown and gone, as was my daughter, Kate, born just eighteen months after Pete. United Way seemed neither united nor the way to make a meaningful difference, in my life or anyone else’s, much less in the wider community.

After seven years of steady growth and success at the Pikes Peak United Way, I had been pushed out of the nest by my boss and mentor to become an executive director of my own local United Way. I had landed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee. Eight more successful years passed, as my little family grew and my annual campaigns reached ever-higher goals.

But I grew restless. I had lived the first five years of my life in a little Mississippi River town just outside New Orleans. Sweet, tender memories of Gulf Coast life in Luling, Louisiana, beckoned. After suffering through seven brutal Wisconsin winters, I longed for warmer climes, more diversity, and the simple, gentle rhythms of the Deep South. Several interviews for exec director openings in other communities around the country (including a disastrous one with the United Way in Baton Rouge) eventually resulted in an offer that seemed made for me. Despite Nancy’s lengthy crying jag, we decided we would decamp from the suburbs of the upper Midwest for Mobile, Alabama.

Isn’t that a really backward place? all our friends had asked. For me, it was a calling, a mission. For Nancy, it was foolhardy, and very scary. Her first instinct was to call the synagogue in Mobile.

Is it okay being Jewish in the Deep South? she inquired.

Sure, they’d said, amused. So south we came.

Now after eight years at the helm of the United Way of Southwest Alabama, I’m sitting in my executive office, seething. My face is red, heart pounding, hands trembling with rage. I’ve just returned from the monthly meeting of United Way’s board of directors. And I’ve got issues.

The reason Mobile’s United Way doesn’t work like