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.
On this particular night, I had asked the dispatcher if she wanted to hang out at approximately maybe 7-8-9 pm. She had not responded at all, which was not unusual on a night off. You never knew what you were getting with her. If she was with the other officer still and having drama with him, you wouldn't hear from her, or if she wasn't, she would be back and forth texting and you might even get a phone call, and then maybe she would try to meet up with you at the bar.
But then, if he wanted to go out with her, you wouldn't hear from her again. Then, there would be some kind of an excuse and a story the next day.
On this particular night, I think she said she was going to hang out with another one of her guy friends and I thought, "That's great. Well, my perfect little plan with my Captain Morgan handle for you is just going wonderfully. I
will just sit here, play Call of Duty: World at War by myself."
I had not heard back from her by one in the morning yet and I was feeling like I would just go to bed, take another defeat in one of the many romantic defeats in my life. It was another loss, another excitement and another night alone to masturbate, watch porn and go to bed.
"It sucks being me."
These were the things I was telling myself, and yet I turned off "Call of Duty: World at War." I had drunk enough where I wasn't drunk, but I wasn't sober. I was just kind of almost normal, you might say. I sent her one more text message at one in the morning.
I said something like, "Hey, do you still want to hang out?" or something like that. She might have said she would hang out with her friend and maybe hang out with me later or something. She also was on night shift like me, so I was hoping it wasn't too late for her.
I got the text message back: "I will be right over." "Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Whoo. Oh, God."
I was so fucking excited. I was just about to cry myself asleep figuratively and feel sorry for myself, and holy shit, she was coming over now. I had literally turned all the lights off and was just about to take my sorry ass to an early bedtime and "Whoo, fuck, here she comes."
I got shit ready. I thought, "Okay. That's good."
I put this ACDC for those about to rock shirt. It was just perfectly cut for my figure with nice wide shoulders, and then with cuts that would hang straight down on me over my love handles.
I thought, "I will put my lucky shirt on, It is going down tonight.
Everything is perfectly set."
Oh, my God.
I suddenly got excited. I think I made myself another drink, I felt like,
"Holy shit. God is real."
She came over like 20 minutes later. I saw her car pull up. She got out. She was wearing these almost knee-high black boots. She had blue jeans on, a beautiful black top where you could see her breasts really well.
I felt like, "Oh, man. Oh, shit. This is really happening right now."
There was an Eminem song I used to play on repeat that fed right into this kind of night.
Do not listen to that shit. I used to listen to that like 10 times in a row at night when I was drinking and that's why my ex-wife was about ready to divorce me and I ended up going to AA.
But that song is like exactly what I was thinking.
Oh, my God, I was so pumped up, and here she was walking up to my place for the first time and I thought, "Oh, fuck, this is good."
I was so pumped. She came up and she gave me a hug to start with.
She said she was hanging out with her friend. I guess he was whining and crying about some girl and she left his lame ass.
I felt like, "Good. We're going to get this done here."
I didn't say that, but I was thinking that.
So, we sat down on the couch and started talking, and she brought a
mixer with her. I think I might have told her that I had her Captain Morgan
or something like that. She brought over a couple of bottles of Coke.
It's amazing the details you can remember on shit like this nine years later.
She brought over a couple of bottles of Coke to mix her Captain Morgan with and she was not fucking around. She got out and poured a shitload of the Captain Morgan in her cup and put a little bit of Coke in and we were drinking together.
Never mind that she was 20 years old.
Never mind that the lieutenant lost his job over this shit.
Never mind that another officer said he was going to shoot anyone who got with her.
Never mind that the corporal on my shift was hung up on her for a while, that he was bringing her flowers and shit.
Never mind all that shit.
I still want to know whether she ended up fucking the corporal or not.
Maybe I don't, it doesn't matter.
She went over and had breakfast.
All right, we are just going to move on. Get back to the story.
She was pouring her Captain Morgan, I got my vodka, my diet Dr. Thunder and strawberry Smirnoff and we sat down to watch a movie, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall."
I didn't hardly see any of that shit.
We were sitting on the coach, we watched a little bit of the movie and we got to talking. We were talking about work, we were talking about everything. We were talking about her childhood and some bad stuff that happened. We both broke down and started crying at one point, and damn, it was beautiful. I had never done this before. Even though I had been with nine girls before it was like this was my virginity, like I was having an actual really exciting experience.
She smoked, so I went out with her. I had a little porch on my apartment. I went out with her and I was trying to just be cool with her and smoke with her. While I usually had a very piss poor sense of timing, I once tried to kiss a girl in high school and she put her finger on my lips, or lots of other times I wouldn't go for it. I was too afraid of rejection, I don't know.
I went for the exact right moment to kiss the dispatcher. I went in and man we made out. It was like an out of body experience. My memory of watching us make out is third person like I see both of us just making out on the porch from the window and I also remember the first person.
"Whoo, man. Oh, God. That was so hot."
We came back inside and kept talking and getting closer. After all the months I had spent fantasizing about this, the dispatcher and I were finally intimate for the first time that night. I'm not going to give the explicit details. What I'll say is that it had been built up in my mind as this enormous thing, and in the moment it felt like the best night of my life. I even had a powerful spiritual experience lying there afterward, feeling completely certain that God was real and that the universe was loving. It was also reckless: I had been drinking all night and we did not use protection, which was exactly the kind of not-caring-about-consequences place I was living in back then. The next morning, when I tried to be with her again, she pulled away.
I remember her putting her shirt back on and just feeling this sense of fear like this was never going to happen again, like I'd had this incredible experience.
"What the fuck am I going to do with the rest of my life after this? How am I supposed to live after this? What am I going to do with the rest of my life after this?"
While mentally I had got this huge achievement notch in my belt, my heart was getting sick right now. I remember her talking about how she didn't want to get married right away or something like that. Looking back, it sounded like she was really hoping I would ask her to be exclusive, to be my girlfriend, and for some reason that just wasn't in my vocabulary at the time.
I was really hurt from my ex who cheated on me and dumped me. I had hit a really dark, low point over it back in the police academy, and I had not even been able to say the word "girlfriend" by that time, a year or two after that.
She ended up leaving my apartment and I had this kind of afterglow on me. I also had this sense of impending doom like, "Oh, my God. That was
amazing. Now what?"
I often tell people, one of the worst things that can happen to you is to get exactly what you want, especially if you have defined your life on something like me as a young, sexually frustrated man, like that's part of your identity.
When you get what you want and you are not a young, sexually frustrated man anymore, and you have been with that beautiful girl, now, who are you?
It is like dying. You don't know who you are anymore. Nothing makes sense. Without that high again, what is there?
I don't even want to live without that anymore. When you see how good life can be, how do you go on when you are not sure when it will look like that again?
This is what started to set in on me. I was not ready for this. When she left we had a very sweet conversation on the phone after that. She said she wanted to be with me again and it sounded like again she wanted me to kind of give her some affirmation.
I said, "Yeah, I definitely want to see you again, hang out with you again."
I remembered a little detail from the night before. She had left her phone in her car all night because the guy she was hung up on before, who was hung up on her and was threatening to kill anyone who was with her, had been calling her all night.
He had probably called 20 or 30 times all night and she hadn't answered.
I knew right then that she had been trouble from the start.
Yep, I know what she was doing all night, my friend. It went downhill from here really good.
After the initial high and getting with her, I was all fucked up and it kept getting worse. It was like I had taken some kind of poison in me that was slowly just killing me and killing my old idea of life. I was starting to just melt and lose my mind.
I remember driving to work on Friday after we had had sex Wednesday night. Thursday was pretty good. I remember driving in Friday, just looking at the traffic lights and thinking, "Oh, my God, I fucked the dispatcher."
At the same time I felt like shit, like, "Am I ever going to get to do this again? What's going to happen next? What is my life now?"
And shit started to get ugly after that because she was still hung up on the other guy. I was incredibly insecure and I didn't know or I had forgotten how to ask her to be exclusive and to be my girlfriend, and we started to have some really bad nights on the phone.
We started to have nights where I would ask, "Hey, can you come over?"
She would reply, "No, I'm hanging out with him."
I would get so mad, drink and get drunk, and just start losing my mind. One night, drunk and out of my mind over her, I did something reckless and dangerous with one of my guns that could have gotten me arrested or worse. I was listening to Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" and playing Call of Duty, just sick and screwed up.
I woke up from that the next morning feeling, "Holy shit. What did I do? Oh, my God, they'll fire me. I might go to jail if they find out about this shit."
They fixed the street lights pretty quickly, which was nice, and it did not get better after that either.
It was two weeks after I'd had sex with her. We had been talking at work, and then one night we had this really epic fight via text message. I ended up saying all these nasty things to her. She wasn't responding and I was really mad. I thought she was ignoring me. I made all this drama up and I made a really stupid decision.
In my rage and drunkenness, I made another shameful decision: I ordered an escort to come over. I'm not proud of telling you this, but it is the truth, and I do not encourage anyone to pay for sex, because of where it took me. I had done it once before, on my 21st birthday. This time I was a 24-year-old police officer who could have been with all kinds of women, and instead I was numbing my pain with a stranger and a lot of alcohol. I even drunk drove to an ATM in the middle of it, and thank God I never hurt anyone with all the drunk driving I was doing back then. When it was over, I just felt like a complete piece of shit.
After that I got a text message back from the dispatcher, she was all pissed off.
She said, "Come on, I was sleeping."
I don't know if that was true or not, but that was what she said. "Come on, I was sleeping. Why are you blowing me up? What's wrong? Why are you being like this? I don't deserve this," or something like that.
Oh, my God, I wanted to die and that was just two weeks after I'd had sex with her, the dispatcher, and it got really ugly for me after that. I was scared to drink.
The next night I went to work. This might have been on a three-day weekend and I remember there was some kind of basketball game on. It might have been the finals. I remember watching it and just wanting to die.
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