A story from a vagrant

Every once in a while, I stop and talk with one of the bums that populate the benches in Fourth Ward Park. I usually learn something interesting. For instance, some live in makeshift tents in the wooded patches scattered around the area. Others have let me know that a good number of them sleep in the Elmwood Cemetery, which I can only hope has led to schoolchildren declaring it haunted. But I recently met an unhappy drunk man with the most memorable story yet.

(Obviously, none of this has been verified; just a passing conversation that I couldn't politely end, because he wouldn't stop shouting.)

A Vietnam vet who had lost his home about a year ago, the man wore camouflage cargo pants, a hooded sweatshirt, and a puffy black vest. He had a bottle of wine in his hand, shaggy graying hair, and a matching beard. Partly because of the wine, partly because he was cold, and partly because of what he described as heavy-handed treatment from a certain local officer (we'll go with Lieutenant Murtaugh; five cool points for whoever gets the reference), he was spitting mad.

A few days back, he had gotten sick--too sick, he said, to really move--and called the police to ask that they take him to the local shelter. The man did have a cell phone; he seemed to be talking into it before I walked by and my dog started barking, which is what struck up the conversation in the first place. When Lieutenant Murtaugh found him, instead of bringing him to the shelter, he arrested him for improper use of a 911 call. And he did this roughly, slamming him against the car, and pressing the cuffs into his wrists.

At this, the man shot his wrists in my face to show me the marks, and I jumped back in surprise. He was missing the thumb of his right hand. I assumed it was from the war, but he told me he'd been robbed one night and had the thumb bitten off in the process. I'm not sure if this is even possible, but the thumb definitely wasn't there.

So he'd spent three sick days in jail with his sore wrists, and had just gotten out and gone on his drinking binge. Apparently Lieutenant Murtaugh had a history of abusing him, and when he'd complain to all the other cops about this, they'd always just shake their heads and say, yup, that's Lieutenant Murtaugh for you.

He had a solution to it all, which is really what made the whole encounter stand out, aside from the missing thumb. A football game, right there in the park. Him against Lieutenant Murtaugh in the open field.

"We'll see who's the real man without all the equipment on," he said. Then he went through a surprisingly detailed account of all the different weapons a police office carries: gun, club, flashlight, mace, cuffs.

At this point I began to notice that the other dog-walkers were altering their normal courses off of the brick path and through the minefield to avoid getting near what was becoming a real scene.

"Now I'm not trying to go out and hurt somebody," he continued. "Just a game of football. Man against man. Hell, we could even charge money for people to come and watch. And the money could go to support the kids..."

He repeated his plan over and over again, talking about the beauty of a tackle football game played between men on a level playing field, and the nobility of helping the kids. Listening to him talk about it, I'd have paid to watch it happen.

Of course, I didn't have in me to tell him that this idea had been made, twice, into a movie called The Longest Yard, and that people had indeed paid good money to go and watch. Maybe that's where the idea came from in the first place. Or maybe it really is what a guy dreams about when he spends his time getting bullied, at least from his point of view, by police.

In any case, in the interest of the children, let's put this thing together already.