yes, this is what happened

I’m just going to share Gratton’s version of the Fraternal Order of Police story from Chicago, because it resembles my own experience, though it was a woman who always called me so I didn’t get the full “Da Bears” experience:

“So I moved to Chicago and about a week after getting there, I got this phone call… The guy had seriously the voice of the ‘Da Bears’ guys from circa 1990s SNL skit. Actually it was even worse. I can’t do the voice over email, but just picture that voice with all the pauses to suggest he needed extra time to breathe in or just to finish swallowing his brat. I can still hear his voice: ‘So, uh, Gratton [yes, that was kicker–simple last name], I’m a callin you taday to let youse know abat dis, uh, ahpoortnity to help out your local poe-lice [slight breath between Poe, as in the author, and lice]. Will ya do dat today Gratton?’ And yeah, it’s like a mob scam: do you like those windows you have? But first, I really thought it was a friend putting me on. I gave him a few snarky answers (‘come on, what have the police done for me?’) before asking who it was. It was quite unsettling to find out that was a real voice, and I only heard something like it a few other times while living there.”

I never received a call from exactly that sort of person, but did see more than a few “Da Bears”-type guys in convenience stores on Belmont. The stereotype was not far from the reality.

As for the Chicago police, I did ride around with them one night. I was out for a walk in the summer of ’92 and two guys pulled a knife on me at about 3 AM. I didn’t have any money on hand and thus lost nothing, but the police drove me around looking for them. I learned a few things from that experience. One is that there are a lot more unmarked police cars in a city like Chicago than you might realize. Certainly I never realized it. I was in a marked squad car, but every time we drove past an unmarked car they would exchange waves. And the people in the unmarked cars looked like fairly convincing non-police types, often a man and a woman to look like a harmless married couple about for a drive.

As far as I know they never caught the two guys, though there were numerous incidents at the same time in a radius of several blocks, right around Belmont/Kenmore (just west of Sheffield Avenue) where I initially lived. We “staked out” the house where they thought the guys lived, but no one was seen entering or exiting. The police I dealt with were fine. A bit sarcastic and hardboiled, à la the big city cop stereotype, but they seemed to be just doing their jobs.

One thing about Cairo that I don’t ever want to start taking for granted is that it’s extremely safe. I can’t imagine any other city in the world of this size is equally safe.

In Chicago, there were:

*the aforementioned 1992 knife incident

*another 1992 incident in which someone leapt a fence, got onto my back porch, and stole most of my clothes

*a 1994 break-in where I lost my first Macintosh, which the insurance company did replace after much foot-dragging

*an incident in Bucktown where I saw a gang member shooting at members of another gang across a park (it was night, and there were actually flames coming out the barrel of the gun); no one was shot, and the shooter was arrested before my eyes

*an even worse incident two blocks from us, somewhat famous, in which a married couple were murdered and their baby stolen on behalf of another woman who had lied to her husband for 7 months about being pregnant; the baby was later recovered in another part of the city, after the new “mother’s” friends became suspicious of it being so large for a newborn; that was right around the corner from us, in fact