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.
This is part two of the dispatcher story and it leads into the end of my time in law enforcement. After that, we will go back and cover all the other stuff like the beginning, how we got to be this crazy, and all the other interesting stories that go along with it.
I'm honored you have got all the way here and it means the world to me.
I'm having so much fun doing this for you today. I'm putting my heart out there and I know I love being on the receiving end of that. I love being on the giving end to just bare my soul, bear what I've got to say here with you and trust you with an end product. I hope you are loving this and it is making a difference for you.
I read the reviews on the book if you want to tell me the difference that it made in your life. If it does make a difference for you, will you please let me know what it is in the review because then I will take a look at it that way?
I am ending the last part of the chapter talking about that fateful day just approximately a month after the dispatcher and I had sex for the first and last time.
The rest of that day then, I was just miserable and I was in this crazy period of misery for a while where I couldn't talk to her anymore and nobody knew about it. I didn't know who I would talk to and from there, one stupid thing after another.
Thank God, I'm here today with you to tell this story because if you thought it was bad before, it will continue to still be bad in different ways. One of the saving graces at first for this was that I hadn't told anyone at
work about this, and in fact, I never had any good workplace drama anywhere I had worked before.
Well, I had some now.
I was so distraught after this trip with the dispatcher that I managed to take a week off of work and go see my parents at which time I did the usual thing of, "Well, I'm sorry."
I sent a dozen roses to the dispatcher's parents’ house where she acknowledged she received them and that was all. You would think I had used some roses before that, but no. Why not wait until after things are a total disaster, and then try to make up?
She wasn't having the roses like she had that drink from Sonic before and there was radio silence from her, and I knew I was better off not talking back and forth to her either.
That was as far as I thought at the time that meant things were over, and yet I was so sick at my parents that I sent her some roses and still held out this hope that we could be together.
Mercifully, we had a month where we were on opposite shifts. Really just three weeks because that whole thing happened right when I started day shift, and then we had three more weeks where we were on opposite shifts. We didn't have to see each other and things were reasonably calm and peaceful.
I knew I had better stay sober or I certainly would contact her. I knew as long as I was sober, I wouldn't do anything stupid and send her some flowers while I was home with my parents and feeling lost and miserable, which I did, and then I left her alone. I hoped she would feel better and maybe we could get back together.
At the same time, I was trying to go out with other girls just in case things didn't work out. Going forward, I stayed sober for a few weeks until again the same damn thing happened, that little change of mind.
One night my friends wanted to go out to the bar after work and it was a Thursday. I had worked a 12-hour shift, I had played basketball and I had actually had a really good day. It took me weeks to recover from that day out with the dispatcher, and then by this Thursday, a couple of weeks later right before going on night shift, I was finally feeling a bit better and I said, "You know what? I'm over her. I'm over her. I'm over her. I can have a couple of beers with my friends. It won't be that bad."
It wasn't that bad at first. I went to the bar and had a few beers with my friends. I drove home and nothing happened. I thought, "See, there you go. There's nothing wrong. I can drink. I'm over her. I'll leave her alone. There won't be any problems."
Meanwhile, I was going hard on trying to date on Plenty of Fish. I was going crazy trying to pick up girls wherever I could, and thank God I didn't order any more escorts for the moment.
Actually, things went pretty well. I was going forward and just enjoying life until I started to feel like other people at work ought to know about this, know what kind of person the dispatcher was, and that was not a good thought I started to have.
I started to tell people at work what had happened. I remember one of the first guys I told, me and him were tight and we used to go out to the bar and the strip club together, I told him. I remember he was the first person I told and man it was so hot and dangerous to have gossip like that, and he was shocked.
I don't know why my reputation was so low, but I remember one of the
sergeants making a comment one day implying I could only get an unattractive girl.
So, I wanted everyone to know that I could get with the most attractive girl at work.
I wanted to prove myself the way Denzel's character brags in Training Day, and I figured since things were over with her, why not?
So, at first, I just very slowly started telling some of the people that I was closest with and this took like a month. I didn't just blab it all at once and the people whom I told actually had closed mouths, and I was impressed.
No one I told had ever heard it or seemed to react that they had heard it before.
At first, I just told one or two people on day shift that I was closest with, enough to get reactions like, "Oh, you got with her too? Oh, damn. Oh, really? Oh, man."
Then, the dispatcher and I, got on night shift again, and every time she keyed that radio up I was fucking losing it.
Every time I heard her voice and I wanted her, this couldn't be over and it was on again. One night, she was doing whatever she was doing on dispatch out at night in The Horseshoe in the University of South Carolina where most of the story takes place. She was out walking around The Horseshoe, and I think I was on bike patrol or something like that, and I got to talking with her. I remember thinking she had been trouble from the moment she walked in.
We talked and it was good. It was hot and that sexual energy was there,
and the past didn't seem like such a big deal anymore.
"Yes, I'm sorry. That'll never happen again. That's so stupid and why don't we just talk a little bit more?"
Meanwhile, one of the guys I had told about her, was starting to try to talk to her because I told everyone that I was done with her, that she was not mine anymore.
So, one night or right around this time, I ended up bringing her dinner and both of us were in dispatch together, all three of us, me and him, this new guy that I was close with.
He was trying to talk to her and was looking at me like, "What the fuck are you doing? You said you are done with her. Why are you still flirting with her and talking with her?"
Then, stuff started to get really awkward and complicated right here and this night shift started getting really sick too.
My father apparently told my mother he didn't think I would survive another night shift and thankfully that ended up being the last night shift I worked.
That was July into August, and then I went into day shift and I was about to go back to night shift when we had the final quick conversation.
This was my final night shift at the University of South Carolina, 28
memorable days.
At the beginning of the night shift, I was talking with the dispatcher again, we were starting to hit things off and I was starting to text her a little bit again, and meanwhile I was starting to tell everyone about her too and I was trying to hear things about her indirectly.
One night I was talking with the corporal and another guy about her, and he started telling me that she was hanging out down at the gas station with this guy that had a bunch of tattoos on him.
Now, I would really rather not tell you this story, but it is honest and I need to, and it is interesting.
So, I was sitting there listening, I was laughing, I was acting like everything was cool and they went on and on about her, and I probably encouraged them. They went on and on about her and it felt good, we were gossiping, and then as soon as they left I was fucking crazy.
In that moment, my mind went to a very dark, violent, homicidal place over the thought of her being with someone else, and I'm deeply ashamed of how far it went. I spent hours that night consumed by that rage. Thank God I never found her and it eventually passed, and I came back to my senses. What I take away from it is how I worked myself into that state by gossiping and feeding my resentment for hours. That is how a sick, addicted, jealous mind can spiral into something genuinely dangerous, and it frightened me how far mine had gone.
Then, one of the sergeants at work just after that had a 40th birthday party that night. Meanwhile, there was an officer, she was pretty cute at the City of Columbia Police Department.
She was having all kinds of guy issues and drama, and I was thinking I might get with her. So, I had got her phone number, I was out to the bar with her after my friend's 40th birthday party. She was trying to use me to make the guy she was crazy about jealous, so she was buying me drinks at the bar, and then eventually he came around and she forgot about me.
Finally, I started going to the strip club. I had never been before, and some part of me knew that a guy like me, who already struggled with porn and compulsive sexual behavior, had no business being there. But my coworkers brought me along one night and I got pulled right in. I dropped around a thousand dollars in a single night and kept going back, using sex and money to try to fill the emptiness I felt inside.
Over this stretch I got into a series of encounters I am deeply ashamed of today. I used women, including a stripper and a security guard I was seeing on and off, treating them as objects to be consumed rather than as people. I had reckless, unprotected sex, and I can see now that I was doing it from a suicidal place where I had convinced myself that nothing mattered and there were no consequences worth caring about. That is a dangerous, sick way to live, and it was a measure of how far down I had gone.
All of this kept tangling together with my obsession over the dispatcher, who I was still trying to get back with even while chasing everyone else. One of those reckless nights with the security guard left me panicking the next morning that she might be pregnant.
I called her up on the phone and said, "Look, I was drunk last night and I don't want to marry you, and I don't want you to have a child or anything on your own. We need to go get a Plan B pill this morning. So, that's what we're going to do. We're going to go get a Plan B pill as soon as I get off work. I'll meet you at CVS. We're going to go get a Plan B pill right away."
She didn't really want to, but she agreed to it because I was hella pushy and she met me at CVS, and my God, if I ever saw that checkout lady that was there, fucking shame face on.
I didn't tell you.
I had been seeing this security guard on and off. She had told me before about other officers she had been with, some of them married with families.
She said, "You USCPD officers are all the same. You all don't give a shit
about us."
I asked, "Are you going to take that Plan B pill?"
She said, "I'll go take it at home."
I was hella pushy and insisted she take the Plan B pill right away.
She did it, and then she was crying and all miserable. I thought, "Thank God that's over with."
I was working and had all this drama all weekend with this security guard, meanwhile every time I heard the dispatcher on the radio I was just like dying.
I said, "Oh, shut up. I want to be with you. I hate you."
And I had got this drama going on with this security guard all night who I didn't give two shits about. She was texting me all night. I thought, "This is stupid."
Then the next day, she told me she felt awful and thought she might be pregnant, but I told her that was how the pill was supposed to work.
She was upset and said she might tell people at work about what happened. I'm ashamed to say that instead of owning my part, I bullied, manipulated, and threatened her into staying quiet until she backed off and left me alone. It was a genuinely cruel, cowardly way to treat someone, and deep down I knew it.
Whoa, that's karma right there though. I'm going somewhere with all this.
Trust me, I'm going somewhere with all this. So, that was my last night shift.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.