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.
He was putting his feet over his face and this is probably exactly what I said, "You put your fucking feet over his eyes again and I'm going to come back there and choke the shit out of you."
And sure enough, here came the feet after like a minute of nothing, right back over my friend's eyes. I don't even know how I did this to this day, but somehow I dove out of the passenger seat into the back seat. In one jump I just leaped back there on top of him, I got my hands around his throat and choked the shit out of him until he couldn't breathe. Meanwhile, he got his thumb in my eye and gouged the shit out of my eye.
All this was going on while my friend was driving and we went to work in the back seat for a while because he kept getting out of my choke hold. I got my hands around his throat and started choking him. He kept getting out of my choke hold, and then finally we arrived at the destination.
My friend who drove us was watching us fight. He started pissing on the tire of his own car as he was watching me and his other friend. We were fighting in the back seat and the car was just rocking back and forth while it was parked.
Finally, while the car was stopped I was able to get a good hold on my friend's throat. I choke him out until he finally gave in, and then we all went back inside and played a game of "NHL Hitz" while the friend who did the shot for shot started passing out and puking.
We carried him over in the bathtub and put him face down so he could basically just puke in the bathtub while he was passed out without choking on his own vomit. We put him on his side so he could kind of just puke into the drain.
Meanwhile, we were drinking more and playing "NHL Hitz" when all of a sudden we heard the shower come on. We went in there and our friend was just taking a shower in the middle of just waking up from passing out. He took a shower and came out wanting to know what went on that night.
That was one of the most interesting nights to tell. That was fairly typical of how my drinking nights with my friends went, although there was a little more fighting and craziness than usual.
We had a whole lot of crazy nights like that, which to me I thought was so much fun because who could have imagined all that stuff would happen?
We had a great time. We tore up the town, we got home and got away with it. There was just some piss on my friend's tire, and then when he went to get in his car the next day, he said it looked like a war zone back there. I guess someone had started bleeding. There was blood all over his back
seat, and then everything was just askew all over the place.
That was funny.
I remember waking up the next day wondering why the hell my eye was hurting. My eye was screwed up for like a week after that before it healed up, thankfully, pretty quickly.
That, as you can see, led to things going downhill with the girlfriend. Then, we did another week in the police academy
The next weekend, my girlfriend was sick and she called me up and said, "Jerry, I'm really not feeling good. Would you come over and make me some tacos like we talked about and help me feel better?"
I said, "No, are you kidding? I'm in the police academy. I can't afford to be around you and risk getting sick. Because if I get sick in the police academy and I can't do my physical training and I can't complete my classes and do these tests I'm going to get sent home. And you see, if I get sick that's going to cost me at least three, maybe six or nine weeks before I can go back to the police academy and that is going to screw everything up in my life. So no, I can't see you at all this weekend."
As you can imagine, she didn't take that very well either, and looking back, it has a certain logic to it, but at the same time, I was that sure that just being around her I would get sick. I didn't have much confidence in my own immune system.
Today, I go around and I have confidence when people are sick. I think I'm immune to that and I don't need to get sick. Even if I'm not immune, you can give me a little bit of that and I will become immune. I won't even get sick and have symptoms out of what's causing you so much trouble because I take such good care of this body that it has a ferocious immune
system that can swat just about anything without even having symptoms.
It is possible to think like that.
Going forward in the police academy the next few weeks was pretty easy. You just did physical training and I eventually got nominated to be a squad leader. This meant basically for physical training, formations and marching that I got to be the squad leader, which I was comfortable with, which gave me a representation of the squad to the class leader, and then the class leader to whoever the instructor was, or leader of our class that actually was at the police academy.
Over the next few weeks, we got into firearms and driving around week four, after a bunch of academics and classes on the law and things we needed to know as a police officer. We started the driving and the firearms the fourth week.
Now, I had a past life regression recently where I remembered going back and being a German soldier in World War II, where I was very proficient and skilled at using weapons, and this lifetime I've seen it very easy for me to just use firearms like if I already knew how to use firearms, or maybe it was from playing a lot of video games.
Whatever it was, I was one of the best shooters in the class, even though I had had almost no experience in my life with firearms outside of a few training sessions in Army ROTC with a rifle, and then I had gone to the range a couple of times with a pistol myself that I had bought just after college.
Incredibly then, I was one of the front runners for the expert marksmanship in the class despite having almost no training or practice with it. I was up against people who had been shooting guns their whole lives. I think one or two guys had even been in shooting competitions
before.
It was funny.
I remember this one guy who was trying to win the expert marksman medal for the class. He was sitting down next to me and like trying to size me up as his competition, which I thought was hilarious. We had the training for it where I found it very easy and natural to just shoot. You didn't need to hardly tell me what to do. I just knew how to point the gun and have it hit what I wanted to hit.
Where I struggled was the driving.
The driving part of the police academy was very difficult for me because I had never kind of done anything more than stupid drunk driving to kind of push the limits of what I could do in a car.
And here they were giving us a Crown Vic telling us that we had to complete this obstacle course in this exact time. I think it was three minutes and 40 seconds. There were a bunch of things you needed to do. There were hundreds of cones, like orange construction combs, that were set up to create the obstacle course and if you hit one of those construction cones you failed the test.
This was the hardest test or exam thing I've ever been through in my life.
You got three days of driving to prepare for it. It was not all day in the car either. You were lucky to get a few sessions in the car each day because everyone else in your class needed to drive the cars as well.
Therefore, you only got to practice this course in full, maybe six or seven times in total before you actually had to do it. The course started off with a tight parallel parking you needed to back into. Then after you did the parallel parking, you would go into the pretty easy first thing, which was just
a turn.
You just needed to make a couple of turns, but you also had to complete it in the time, and in order to do that, what you needed to do is basically floor it on every single straightaway, slam on the brakes on every single turn and on any turn that wasn't sharp, you needed to figure out exactly how fast you could take the turn without hitting a cone, and therefore, sliding off the course and failing.
Every single time I took this practice test, I failed it. I hit a cone or I did not pass the time every single time I did it all week, and I was sweating that thing hard.
We had a couple of smaller tests that you also had to pass. What they did, they would give you two chances to pass it. Then, if you did not pass the smaller tests, you got a remedial where they would give you an instruction, show you how to do it again, and then you had one or two more chances to pass it and if you failed it, then you failed the whole driving and had to go home. I barely passed one or two of the other driving things before the main driving event.
There were smaller driving things like where you needed to get going fast down the straightaway, and then do a really quick sharp turn and there was also a slide pad where you had to go through this little obstacle course, and then they had a slippery section of pavement where you would basically slide the car around, and you had to get control of it and straighten it up again.
I got through all those, and then finally came the day where I had to pass the big test. The big test day was very memorable and I'm grateful to have a chance to share this experience with you today because I was so ridiculously stressed out over this, so afraid that I would fail it and have to
go home, and you had to do the whole week over again as well, which you would hope you would be able to pass it after that.
This is how it went down.
You had a whole bunch of officers doing this exact same test on the exact same day. Therefore, you were standing around, essentially a little mini race track with all these cones and obstacles set up. You were watching the other officers do their tests. You were watching other people pass it.
Most other people were passing it, but you watched people fail it too. There was a girl, I think she failed it. She came out of it crying and had to go home, and there was a couple of guys just having their heads hung, who had failed it and they had to go home too.
This driving test, it was easy for some people and it was really hard for others of us.
I got in the car and I had a nice instructor who was there to guide me through it and I'm grateful that it went down this way. You got two runs to go through it basically, and then I'm not sure if you got a third or a fourth one or not. You definitely got two tries to pass it. I think you got at least three, and then maybe four with a remedial.
On my first try, on the very first thing I did on the course, I hit two cones. Therefore, before I even hardly started the course, on the very easiest part, I knocked several cones down immediately and failed it, the very first try, on the first test.
Now thankfully, this gave me the opportunity to drive the rest of the course without being afraid.
What could I lose?
I had already failed that try. What difference did it make?
I could really push the limits on the driving.
I could really see what the car could do and so what if I hit a cone? I had already failed it.
Therefore, I drove through the entire course, I got a really good practice running and my God, I was tense for that second run, and somehow I got in the zone. I tore the course up the first time I had ever done it out of all the practices. I ripped through the whole course, did not knock a cone down and I came in just one or two seconds under the required time.
I was trying to do just the delicate balance of driving as fast as I could without losing control of the car and I erred on the side of caution because I had been driving too fast going into the very first try on the very first turn.
That's why I had ended up knocking the cones down, I had got going too fast.
But on that second try on the test, I felt so good. I just tore up the test and passed it. Walking out of that car having passed the test, I felt like it was the high point of my time in the police academy.
I knew I could pass the rest of the police academy given what I had already done. I knew that there was nothing that was going to be more difficult than that driving test. The firearms test was easy, but I did not end up winning “Expert.” I ended up not shooting perfect and someone else did, so they ended up winning the firearms.
We did the firearms and the driving in close proximity to each other, and
once I got that done, I was so pumped, I was home free.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.