my mom never calls me

(This story is dedicated to my “other” mother, Marge Lewis… she loved hearing it and asked me to tell it to her many times.)

I am so old, that I worked before the invention of cell phones. I never considered it a problem. I would find a pay phone, drown it with Lysol,  and radio dispatch the number (yes, I carried Lysol with me). They would call it/me and then connect me to the other party. Easy peasy.

Then came the cell phone. I was so excited. My first cell phone was a “bag phone” weighing in at about nine pounds. The hand-held receiver was just like the phone at home. All the weight was in the battery, in the bag, and when it rang it sounded the same as your home phone, ring, ring, ring. No fancy ring tones, flashing lights, or animated screens, just RING.

My mother loved calling my cell phone on the weekend evenings when I was working. I think she enjoyed both the idea of a mobile call and the fact that she could talk to me while I was driving around in a police car.

These weekend phone calls from her became a regular thing between us which, turned out to save me from an extra-large ass kicking.

The district that I was normally assigned was an old place. Most of the homes there were built in the 1930s and 40s as summer vacation cottages around a group of several small lakes. 

When I was working there, (circa.1980), these summer vacation cottages were now all low-income dwellings. This area was about four square miles with four hundred and four named streets, two unpaved “roads” both of which nobody bothered to name, and a crap-ton of dive bars, biker bars, strip clubs, after-hours haunts, and mini-marts. It was a densely packed, high-volume location. 

If you wanted to be a proactive police officer, you could stay as busy as you wanted to be in this area. I enjoyed this assignment because I loved staying busy. As a result of being regularly assigned there, I got to know many residents and several, shall we call them, “local celebrities.”

On this particular Saturday evening, I was in my happy place. The weather was tolerable, and the radio traffic was light, so I could make my pre-dark rounds to check that all things in my little world were as they should be (relatively).

It wasn’t dark yet, just turning dusk when the first bar fight call came in. This call was such a regular event, that I knew that the neighboring district car, the float car, and probably the sergeant would all three be at the bar at about the same time as I got there, and they were. 

Mostly the fight was over when we arrived, and it had spilled out of the bar onto the parking lot. The only difference was that almost all of my “local celebrities” were in agreement that this stranger (all of them pointing at a face I had never seen before) was the cause of the disturbance. At first glance, I could see why they had all decided to vote this guy off of the island. He was the least damaged of all of them, and for good reason. This guy was a tank. Gym muscles bulging everywhere, a hall-of-fame linebacker with a no-neck build, Popeye forearms, and legs like a medium Sequoia. Holy crap!  This human was one of those types that take two sets of handcuffs to put on, because his arms were so big they would not reach behind him and touch.

Soon, Big-boy was all neatly searched, cuffed, and folded into the back seat of my car as my help all went back to whatever they were doing before this call. I was still sitting in the now-vacant parking lot writing a report, so I did not have to do it when Sasquatch and I got to the jail.

And that’s when I felt it. Like someone had bumped into the car. Looking in my two outside rear view mirrors I saw nothing. Looking at my inside rear view mirror I saw nothing….. wait a minute, hold on, where did my double X Squash go? He couldn’t get out because the two back doors don’t open from the inside. He was not in front with me (at the time we did not have cages in our cars).  As I half turned around to further investigate how this big lump had disappeared, he reappeared after wiggling the double set of handcuffs under his legs and now in front of him. (That was the motion I felt the car make).

It’s funny what your mind does in stressful circumstances. At that moment my thought, my tactical plan, was to put this angry Neanderthal in the seatbelt so that I could better control him. He did not agree with that idea at all. Now that he had his meat hooks in front of him, he thought that exiting my car from the front seat where he could open a door was in his best interest. I took exception to his plan, and buddy now the fight was on.

As fights or really any strenuous exertions go on, it often seems that time gets out of wack. What can feel like two hours is really only a minute and a half. Such was the case now with me and the man-mountain. Me in the front trying to keep him in the back and into a seatbelt.  Him in the back determined to get into the front, out and gone.

Right then; that’s when it happened. Ring, ring, ring. Ring, ring, ring. 

I went to college, and I remember being taught about Pavlov’s dog theory. You remember…. classical conditioning is a behavioral procedure in which a stimulus is paired with a previously neutral stimulus. 

Thank goodness Mr. Pavlov was a dog lover because just as sure as God made little green apples and freckle-faced girls with pig tales, when that bag phone started ringing, Gigantor and I both stopped our respective efforts. 

After all, a ringing phone must be answered right? That or, Mr. Olympus was not expecting to hear a phone ringing. Whatever the reason, the ring brought this WWF mismatch to a temporary pause. Now the only question for me was, do I alter my now failing tactical seatbelt plan in favor of clobbering Andre the Giant over the head with my nine-pound bag-o-phone, or do I enjoy this time-out and answer the call?

….

“Hello. 

Hi mom…

Really? That’s great. Glad to hear that dad’s doctor’s appointment got moved up to Monday. Yes, of course, I will be there.

Listen, mom, can I call you back later? I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.

Sure, sure I will. I promise. 

I love you too mom.

Bye.”

Remember earlier I mentioned time being a funny thing? That’s also the case at this moment. I just knew that this brief reprise was going to end when I hung up the phone and O.K. I guess, here we go, round two! I even thought about holding on to the large receiver and clubbing King Kong over the head with it, like a baby seal, but oh brother, what if mom hadn’t hung up immediately? Nope. I put the phone down, grabbed all the air I could, and ready, steady, here we go…. except that’s not what happened. 

What I saw was Thanos, sitting back in his assigned seat, rubbing his eyes with both of his chained hands. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and quietly said …

“My mom never calls me.” 

“I’m sorry about that man. Getting a call from mom is a wonderful thing.” I said.

He cried the rest of the way to jail and no I didn’t bother with the seatbelt.

Thanks, mom. Whewwww.