This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
I'm getting nervous just about to tell you this story. I don't know if I've ever told the complete story, which is the most emotional story for me in my time in law enforcement. If you are into music, and you listen to Lady Gaga, "Love Game," this will go really well with this chapter.
Yeah, that will go pretty well with this chapter: The dispatcher.
First, let's begin with the day I made this decision. I believe we each have a life where we decide to be here, we are choosing to be here now, we chose to come here, and we choose whenever we leave. We make a lot of the major decisions in our lives.
I remember the exact moment. It was 2009, the beginning of the year sometime. I was sitting at the computer at the University of South Carolina typing some boring burglary report. It wasn't like a violent burglary where anyone got shot. It was just like someone wasn't home and another person came in and stole a couple of things.
I was sitting at the computer, I realized that I had two paths I could take.
In the first path, I would continue being the rising star at the University of South Carolina. The strongly motivated officer who always came into work and looked good, said the right things, was very passionate about law enforcement, knew exactly what the policies were, did a great job on calls
and could be trusted. That person would be the next corporal. I had at least one sergeant tell me that I was looking very good and he expected me to be the next corporal. My sergeant at the time was in the process of training me to be the next corporal.
I remember sitting at that desk with my gun, my badge and my bulletproof vest, my heavy ass on the plastic chair, taking a break from the report thinking: "Hmm, option 1, I can be a corporal, things can go well, but I better stay away from that dispatcher. There'll be no sex with her. Option 2, we can have the dispatcher, but no corporal, because the path you are going to need to take to have the dispatcher will be an ugly one."
"You are going to need to have a downhill dive in your attitude. You will need to do whatever is necessary to get with her and that will eliminate you from the running for corporal."
I thought about these two options. I could see the choices very clearly in my head. I smiled and I said, "Let's go for the dispatcher. Fuck corporal."
And that's what I did.
Now, back to the beginning. When I first saw her, and I will just refer to her as "the dispatcher" lest we have any names, but she is the dispatcher. Anyone else is just a dispatcher. She is the dispatcher.
I remember the first day I saw her. She was walking down the hall with the other newly hired dispatchers and officers at the University of South Carolina. I was walking through the hall on some kind of business, moving one piece of paper to a different location in the department and I looked straight up at her and while a lot of girls, especially very hot ones, don't make very good eye contact, she looked right at me and that fiery passion blazed there.
Wow!
I looked at her. I thought, "Holy shit."
Whoo!
She actually looked at me, noticed me and smiled. Oh, man!
I did nothing about it at that time. There was no follow-up. But whoa, I remembered that heat.
At the time I didn't think I had ever been with a really hot girl and she was a banging perfect 10.
She was blonde, just beautifully built, going to the gym, muscular, and yet not like thin.
She had beautiful breasts and lips. Holy shit!
I can't believe how many times I must have masturbated over her. Yes, this book we get into it.
We are not fucking around in this book.
This book we are telling the truth here awkwardly, ugly and nasty. Because sometimes the truth is very ugly, awkward and nasty.
I was not the first one to notice her. Another guy got all over her right away. They happened to be on the same shift together. She was not on my shift. The way they did the shifts, you had a dispatch that stayed on the
same shift and sometimes rotated, and then the officers rotated so they had even and odd-numbered shifts. While she was on the odd-numbered shifts to start and I was on the evens, this meant that we pretty much never would see each other.
The days that I was working, she was off and the days she was working I was off. Another officer on her shift got very involved right away, and they were going at it full time and it was all over the department, like everyone knew about it.
I was drunk one night walking home from the flying saucer. I lived at an apartment complex where you could walk home from the bar and in the interest of my career as a police officer in December 2008, I was still the rising star at the University of South Carolina, very careful about my career.
I walked home drunk and I found a patrol car for the University of South Carolina in the parking lot, and of course, I walked right up and said, "Hey, what's up? What's going on man?"
It was the guy that the dispatcher was banging at the time. He gave me a ride home over to my apartment complex, which was just a mile or so away, and it was still within the radius of campus because I lived over by the baseball stadium, and therefore, he could just ride on over there and if anything happened, just kick me out really quick and go to a call.
What I noticed on his phone were a bunch of text messages from her and I thought something along the lines of, "What an idiot! Don't you know you shouldn't be messing with her? She's obviously trouble."
Soon enough, one of the lieutenants got fired for something involving her. I believe that she was 19 years old at the time and there had been some underage drinking or something. I believe all the officers had been
out at a bar. I was not there, this was what I had heard.
I believe there was some kind of cover-up and eventually, the lieutenant got fired over it or stepped down and quit his job. I really loved that lieutenant too. It's a shame that happened.
That did not deter me, though. Let me tell you.
One day, a few months later, I don't know how this even began.
Somehow I got her phone number, and for some reason, it's escaping me how I even got it. I think she ended up rotating over onto our shift after having all of that drama with the other officer and the lieutenant. She ended up getting rotated over onto our shift while the other guy stayed over on the other shift.
I guess I must have got her number initially in a professional context because we needed to have everyone's phone number directly.
You didn't want to call in on the recorded lines at the University of South Carolina and talk about every single thing you might need to in the context of your job. Because then, if for example you called in and you were wondering about something, and then a case didn't go very well, that potentially could be evidence then.
"Well, the officer didn't know if that constituted burglary or not."
So, we kept off the recorded lines by exchanging all of our cell phone numbers with each other.
When the dispatcher rotated onto my shift, originally, in a completely professional context, I naturally exchanged phone numbers with her as I had with all the other dispatchers. I had all the officers' numbers and all the
dispatchers' numbers, and most of the higher ranking officers' numbers because communication in policing is essential.
The main way we communicated was cell phones unless there was something urgent or official business, in which case then we used the radio. We would use the radio obviously to get dispatched to calls.
However, sometimes the dispatchers would call us and say, "Hey, I got a call about this. I'm not sure how to dispatch this. Could you head over there while I'm asking and learning how to dispatch this?"
Therefore, I originally got her phone number in a completely innocent context. This was before I made my little decision. I remember being in training one day and we were doing some kind of special training for Hazmat or some kind of forgettable thing like that.
The surgeon, who was on the shift with the officer that had all the drama with her and the lieutenant, was looking over my shoulder. He has actually passed away since I wrote this book.
He was looking over my shoulder. He saw that I was texting her and he warned me. He said something very simple and nice.
He said, "You better be careful, bro."
I laughed and laughed.
I was listening to the Britney Spears song "If You Seek Amy" at the time.
I wasn't trying to hear what he was having to say.
I figured I could handle it and I figured that it was harmless. I was just texting her. It's not like I was fucking her or anything. Although I don't
normally talk that way and cuss like that now, this is how I used to think and I'm sure that's what I thought at the time.
Therefore, it's an interesting balance for me to mix in how I used to think honestly here, and then put that in the language I use today.
I remember his warning very clearly though, and it was just a month or so before I started to get this little idea in my head that maybe I could get with her.
That was a good and a bad idea.
I would see her more since she was working on shift with me. We would see each other at roll call and we talked to each other just about work stuff in dispatch.
As the month progressed, between the sergeants from the other shift who saw the destruction from his officer getting with this girl, then I started talking to her just a little bit more and a little bit more. Then suddenly, my mind got obsessed and that's why I made that decision that day on the burglary report and I said, "You know what, I want the dispatcher and I'm going to have her."
Now, I could sense there was this very negative energy about her, that I would need to get off my little star struck path and I would need to go down and circle the drain at the department. Then, she would be very attracted to me for that kind of negative drama energy, and it worked.
I started really slow, just trying to talk to her a little bit more here and there, and actually, for an impatient guy, I took my time just getting to know her, being nice to her, being likable as much as I could and showing up.
I remember just shortly before things got going, I was sick one day, we
had some kind of training and I didn't want to call out sick.
So, I showed up to the police department in my white t-shirt and gym shorts just looking, as my dad used to say, like a bag of assholes.
I looked sick and I looked pathetic.
One of the female sergeants, maybe the only female sergeant, said that whenever I left the house, I ought to try to look a little bit nicer because you never knew who you might bump into.
And the dispatcher was standing right next to her when she said that and I thought, "Holy shit. Here we go. I got this girl I like and I'm rolling in here looking like shit. Really nice."
So, I went back home, I got to feeling better and we got started on this path together. I imagined it happening. I fantasized about it a whole bunch of times before it happened. I've kind of conveniently forgotten that now, nine years later.
I kept imagining it happening. I had this certainty that would happen, which is funny, because up until this point my luck with girls had been terrible.
Now at this point, I think I'd had sex with nine girls before and only one of them I had paid to have sex with, and most of the girls were kind of average looking or fat.
I had struggled to get with girls I thought were really beautiful. I had kind of a low opinion of myself as some kind of pervert, porn watching masturbator that was an alcoholic who didn't really deserve to be with a good woman, and for some reason, this dispatcher, I knew it was going to happen.
As I kept going along, these things happened that seemed like coincidence at the time. But I knew somewhere in my head, I knew this wasn't an accident. When I was about to go visit my family, I got really upset with some of the stuff that was going on at work. Some of the pointless things we did as a police officer, some of the BS policies.
Like I said, as soon as I made that decision to be with the dispatcher, my whole mindset, I knew I needed to go negative because she was drawn to that negative energy and I needed to get into hating things, not liking things, and that's what I did.
I started complaining about things going on at the department and I left for a week-long trip. My sergeant and the rest of my team was finishing up something late at work and I was out on the back porch.
I said, "You guys done?" and I don't know, the sergeant gave me some short kind of comment, "Yeah. If you think we're done, you can go."
So, I left and I said, "Cool. I think we're done."
It was after the shift and I thought, "This is BS. I'm not getting overtime. I am not getting paid anything extra for this. I don't care about this stupid report. I'm done. I'm out."
I left.
It was after the shift had ended and I went on this week-long trip. I was thinking about and talking with the dispatcher, just texting her, not too much, just kind of normal, casual.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.