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.
My friend had a room in a friend's house that he stayed in. His friend just had bought this new house and my friend had a room in it, but he didn't stay in it because he lived almost all the time with his girlfriend. Therefore, they just moved into this new house. I actually had helped them move in maybe a month or so earlier into the house.
He said, "Hey, dude. Yeah, you can stay in my bedroom."
I arranged for this girl to go to a house that I've only been to once like a month before, my friend arranged to give me a key to the house or a lock code, then I arranged to get a haircut and have sex with this girl at the house the next day.
I was sexting her the whole way down and acting completely recklessly behind the wheel, doing things on the interstate that put myself and everyone around me in danger. It was insane, addicted behavior.
It's important to remember things like this, so when I see other people doing crazy shit, I remember and I know what that's like. I don't do that, I don't do crazy stuff like that anymore, but I know what it's like and I have done it, so I can relate.
So, yes, I was being completely reckless on the way down to visit this girl. Somehow God must have looked out for me. I got down there, I got absolutely annihilated drunk with my friend that night, and had a horrible hangover.
Meanwhile, I was trying to date a different girl online. I remember sending her a message with a whole bunch of nasty things in it because she had just confessed that she had dated a gang banger in the past and we hadn't even met yet, and it probably had some racial slurs in it.
I've had a lot of different experiences with race in my life. When I first grew up, I loved every one of all people and I had a special affinity, I felt really comfortable and loved being around black people.
I lived in Alabama and I just loved all the black kids. I might have been black in my most recent past life and I felt right at home. My daughter seemed to be this way with Asian people like any Asian person was her family member. She was immediately comfortable with anyone Asian and it was really funny.
Then, I started hating people who hated at some point, maybe as a teenager. I started hating anyone. If you were any kind of a racist or any kind of a bias or bigot, I hated you for hating, and I would tell you how much I hated you and how horrible of a person you were for hating anyone.
"Racists are disgusting people who deserve to die" or something like that, is what I would have said before. Then at college, I went to the University of South Carolina where I thought this place was going to be filled with a bunch of fucking racist redneck dickheads.
That's what I thought when I went to go down there and it's true. It's totally true. I ended up making friends with a bunch of the racist redneck dickheads.
At one point we were eating dinner and they were telling one racist joke after another, using racial slurs I won't repeat here. They all cracked up and laughed, and I was sitting there thinking, "That's not funny. You're making fun of people. You're hating." I wouldn't say any of this out loud, and I was getting so disgusted by all the racial jokes that I was about to vomit.
Then all of a sudden, this switch happened inside me. I realized I either
got to choose to stop being friends, I got to let all the new friends I had made and that I loved hanging out with go and be done with them, write them all off as racist dickheads, or I just needed to become racist myself and I would fit right in.
I don't even remember like consciously making that decision, but all I remember is that all of a sudden the joke started to be funny.
"Oh, my God. California got first pick. Oh, my God. That's so fucking good."
At that point, I just took on the identity, "I'm racist now."
I started using racial slurs and fell into a dark, hateful phase. For a while in college I got really into white-power and Nazi material, which I am deeply ashamed of today. I told myself all kinds of sick justifications for it.
So, I was at the tail end of this when I was a police officer. I had gotten serious about it in college, but I was slowly letting it go.
When I would get drunk, especially playing video games online, I was still an equal-opportunity hater who would spew hate at anyone, any religion, any gender, whoever was on the microphone. I am not proud of any of it.
Thank God, when I began dating my ex-wife I started exiting out of this circle of hate completely. For the first time since I was a child, I exited completely out of the circle of hate.
See, if you are in the circle of hate, you are hating someone. Love and tolerance is loving and accepting. I understand the racist guy who has got whatever symbols you want to put with it. I almost said "Confederate flag" straight up, but I realize that can just be pride. It doesn't have to be racism.
So, I understand the guy who is racist, who hates a certain people for a certain reason. I understand something like the genocide in Rwanda where they wiped out a million Tutsis just because of very small racial differences comparable to being Jewish in Germany, and I understand that one really well from a past life regression where I was a Nazi.
I also understand thinking you are better than other people because you don't hate race based on race or gender, but then you hate people that do.
So, I understand judging and condemning people who also hate on race and seeing that it is not any better of a point of view, that's just hate in a different direction. Love tolerance, true enlightenment, in an ascended point of view is to understand everyone's point of view.
I understand the racist who is hating, I understand the person who hates the racist for hating and I understand the person with love and tolerance
who is just cool with everyone and that's who I am today.
"God, Jerry, this is a long tangent to say that you mentioned or called a girl racial slurs in an email. What about this girl you were trying to have sex with and get a haircut?"
All right, so we are back to that.
So, yes, it was memorable, and shameful, sending such a hateful message full of slurs in that dating email. Meanwhile, I was hooking up with this girl the next day.
I woke up with a god-awful hangover, not just physically, but emotionally, because there was this girl I kind of liked online that I was hoping to date, and then I sent her a hateful message full of slurs when she mentioned she'd dated a gang banger before. She didn't say what race the gang banger was, I just assumed.
All right.
So I was getting up and I had this god-awful hangover. I went to meet a guy I was friends with from college at Moe's across the street from USC, which I was a little nervous, because at this point, I was trespassed from USC for all the dispatcher stuff.
I was not allowed to even step foot on campus, still to this day, I'm sure I could call up and get that fixed now since as far as I heard, the dispatcher does not work there anymore and it has been almost 10 years, but I digress for the like fiftieth time in this.
Now, where were we?
We were at Moe's and I had lunch with my friend, then I went over and got in the house. I was thinking we were just going to have sex. I hadn't seen this girl in a year.
She was damn near, but not quite old enough to be my mom. I think I was 25 and she was 34, so she was like nine years older than me. She said she had had four kids and I was thinking, "All those? Damn. You're not even going to feel my dick go in."
I was thinking all that dumb stuff when that was going down.
So this girl gave me a legit haircut, but it was not a good haircut. She clearly hadn't been cutting very many haircuts at this point. I think I needed to go get another haircut not long after that to fix the haircut she gave me.
She sat down and gave me a haircut in my friend's kitchen. She said the haircut was like 20 bucks and I think I felt so generous that I gave her like a
$15 tip or some shit, which was like twice as much as I usually gave.
Then, I asked, "All right, you're ready to have some sex?"
She said, "Well, there's a little problem."
I said, "Oh, yeah. What's that?"
What followed was the kind of reckless, unprotected encounter that defined my drinking years, and I am not going to detail it. Again, I'm glad the STD tests came up negative a little while later. There was no AIDS or anything permanent. I was really lucky. I didn't even get genital warts.
I'm very grateful that I didn't get anything from all that crazy shit.
I met this girl while I was at USCPD and I had gone to the strip club one night while I was there, but that's how that ended up.
So, that was another one of my little bar stories from USCPD. "God, Jerry. This book sucks."
This book is funny.
I'm laughing at this and someone must be laughing at this shit too.
This is crazy.
I live a very calm life today.
I'm faithful to my ex-wife. I haven't had sex with anyone, but my ex-wife since we first started dating in 2011.
These stories I'm telling you sound crazy to me. It is like I'm talking about someone else's life right now.
So, it is possible to have some dramatic change in life. Do I have any more good bar stories for you?
I went out to the bar a bunch.
Oh, yeah. I got another one. I got another one for you.
There was a guy, an officer, when I first arrived, he had been at USCPD
for a while and he kind of trained me, hung out and I looked up to him.
Well, I became that for a new guy. He joined up and we became friends. I became the guy he looked up to and knew what was going on, and we got to be pretty close.
"You guys are like bunk buddies."
Not that close.
We went out to the bar together one night and I remember going out to Five Points with him. We were sitting at the bar drinking and I remember just feeling like I was happy. I was out drinking with him, but kind of just like that little discontent and we decided, "Hey, let's go to the strip club, right?"
But I said, "No, no. I've dropped thousands of dollars at the strip club."
I've told you a bunch of these dumb ass stories that have happened at the strip club.
I said, "No. I can't go to the strip club anymore. I'm burning up my paycheck hooking up with strippers."
It was just one stripper, but I said, "No, I can't go to the strip club anymore."
He said, "Look, look. I really want to go. What if we just don't go to the champagne room?"
I said, "Shit. That might be all right. If we go up there, we're not going to go in the champagne room or anything."
He said, "Okay, let's go to the strip club."
We both drove separately after each of us has had at least five liquor drinks, maybe more. This guy was about my age too and I guess he was a friend of one of the captains as well.
So we both drove up there across town and it was at least a 10-minute drive through the expressway. We both drove up and met up at the strip club.
Well, we changed our minds about the champagne room.
He found this girl that was all over him similar to the stripper that I had had sex with, probably by this point a month or two earlier, and who was not there anymore.
I guess they asked her not to come back anymore after they caught her having sex with me.
I guess they asked her not to come back, which makes sense.
So, I went up there with him and he got this stripper who was all over him and he tried to set me up with her friend.
Her friend was just not in the right mood for this and there was no vibe.
She was like trying to go home or something. She was in all kinds of a mood and he tried to set me up with her friend, but I said, "I'm not paying to go to the champagne room with this girl. She is a bitch. I'm not taking this bitch into the champagne room. No fucking way. She's not into me."
But he took his girl into the champagne room, and I got pissed off, or I didn't know what I was doing.
I left though.
I said, "Fuck this. I'm out of here."
We had both promised each other we wouldn't leave each other at the strip club.
I thought, "You know what? I don't get any action here. You're getting fucked. Good. Have fun."
He went in there with this stripper and here is what he said happened.
He said he hooked up with her in there, and I guess she spilled a drink all over him or something like that though. She went to get a towel to clean it up and he had left all the cash for her, but when she left, she didn't take the cash.
So, he just pocketed the fucking cash. He thought she left it on purpose for him. I guess she just got a towel and just left because she felt bad that she messed up what he was wearing when she spilled a drink all over him.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.