Fiction or nonfiction? I want to tell this story. It’s about a cop, it’s about a river, it’s about a father, it’s about a boy.
When you’re a cop you get to do this, volunteer for additional training, spend eight weeks in a classroom, earn three credit hours from the Chicago City Colleges. As if you were going for a degree.
The mothers in these slides don’t just smoke cigarettes, they put them out on their children’s bodies. You get to see the results. You get to see the characteristic welts left by extension cords. You get to see the consequences of dipping a naked child into boiling water. You get to see the way some parents break out their children’s front teeth with spoons. “Eat that, damn you!” You get to see the blackened eyes, puffed lips, bruised ribs, broken bones. You get to see what a three-year-old kid looks like after her father rapes her. Cops have pictures of everything.
And people fishing.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If you’re a cop without a whole lot to do, sometimes you walk down to the water and ask one of the fishermen how the luck is. He’ll lift up his stringer and there it will be, a big yellow carp with bulging eyes and a hose for a mouth.
A word about mopes. If you were to take a week and spend it driving around the Cook County forest preserves, you would notice how certain spots seem to belong to certain groups. The gang that hangs out in this shelter, the crowd that stands by that picnic table, the bunch you always find at a certain bend in the road. There are certain cars forever present, certain faces that have become part of the scenery.
Other cops do the same.
