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 went home to the hospital, and then he was done with the police academy for a while until he healed up. I was, of course, terrified of doing something like that and I took the course as fast as I could while not
hurrying through it, so I wouldn't fall or break or do anything dumb like that.
I went up the stairs, which was one of the first things you did. You came in, there were some little hurdles, you went up these little stairs you came around. There was something I think to crawl underneath. You had another like little couple of hurdles or two. There was something like a fence you needed to get over, which I remember having a lot of anxiety thinking whether or not I could get over the fence.
I will tell you that when you are all fired up and really want to do something, your body can do a whole lot more than you think it can.
I remember when I was drinking in college once, somebody said the police were there, and the police were there which is why somebody said it.
I remember hauling ass out the back door of the house. I vaulted over a six-foot-high wooden fence. I didn't even think about it. I just knew I was jumping that fence. If I would have thought about it, I would have been
scared, but I didn't. I just ran straight at it. I threw my whole body over head first. I just jumped, pushed on top of the fence once I got up and threw myself headfirst over that fence into the woods, and then ended up hiding there while the police were in the house.
Ironically, I remember jumping that fence twice in the same night because the police came back, then I ended up throwing up in the toilet and passing out with my arms around the toilet that night.
Nothing like waking up hugging a toilet thinking, "Oh God. This again."
Therefore, I put some of that same magic into the fence jump at the police academy, except a little less crazy this time, and I was easily able to hop over the fence that they had for us to jump there. We also had a window we needed to climb through, which when you saw a guy who was
in good shape doing it, it was a beautiful thing to watch.
There was one guy there who was in absolutely incredible shape who ripped through the obstacle course. He literally just hopped through this four-foot window. He kind of hopped-crouched and just jumped straight through the window. He did the whole exam in like 30 to 45 seconds less than I did it. It was beautiful to watch him take the test.
I jumped up a bit, stood my foot on there, climbed through the window pretty easily. After the window, you had to drag this hundred or something pound sack that was supposed to simulate dragging a human being. I dragged that pretty easily, ran out of the course and finished it at least 30 seconds earlier than the time I needed to.
It was quite comical then after the relief I felt experiencing finishing a physical fitness test, to watch people fail it.
There was one girl who was so big she literally could not fit through the four-foot window and there was an amazing 30 seconds to one minute where she got stuck in the window and was trying to push herself through the window, and she could not get through it forward.
My God, there was a lot of us laughing on the sidelines at that.
Today I applaud that girl’s courage for giving that a try because I'm not sure that's how I felt about the whole thing. I was afraid that was going to happen to me. If I had been weighing about 80 more pounds, it would have.
I also remember at the time criticizing the police department saying, "How could they send an officer to the police academy like that knowing that they had to pass this physical fitness test and do physical training every day at the police academy."
At the time, I was one to criticize almost everyone and everything in an
effort to avoid looking inward.
I'm grateful today that I did pass the physical fitness test and I got started successfully in the police academy on that note. The police academy had rooms and was a live-in facility five days a week.
Therefore, you got in on Sunday night and you would wake up Monday morning for training and breakfast. You stayed there until Friday afternoon, in which case you would look out on the interstate as there were police officers from all over the state of South Carolina, not actually certified police officers, but people who were about to be police officers, driving fast and looking to get home for the weekend.
I'm grateful that I lived just down the street.
So, when we got off at 4:30, I literally could have walked back to my house. I remember the very first weekend, I got off the police academy after five days of doing the live-in training, it was start to finish. The whole day was the police academy. You would wake up at about five or so in the morning, you had a run or a gym workout that you were responsible to show up at.
Most of the time the runs were pretty easy, looking back on it. I was often in the B group. So there was an A, B and C group. The B group being the middle speed, the A group being the fastest, and the C group being the slowest.
I usually ran with the B group, which leads me to think today that it was pretty easy considering how overweight and out of shape I was, that I could run with the middle group. I fell behind on a couple of the runs, but most of the physical training, while it was challenging, I got through it pretty easily.
I remember feeling great and eating massive meals in the police
academy as well because it was an open buffet where you could eat all that you wanted. I would often get two full plates just stuffed high with bacon, eggs, sausage, mashed potatoes or grits or whatever there was. I would just pile my plate high.
Even though I was using a lot of calories on the physical training, I was actually eating way more calories in the police academy than I was burning.
I thought, "Hey, look at all this free food. I might as well stuff my face," as obviously, I had done a lot before that.
When you got done with physical training and had breakfast, then you had classes almost the whole rest of the day. For me as someone who enjoyed school and got mostly A's, that was great.
I got all A's up until 12th grade when I started playing "World War II" online, and then I got a few B's and C's in college as I got into drinking and slacking off and playing a lot of video games.
The police academy was pretty easy academically. If you simply paid attention in class, listened to what they said, and then actually studied the material, it was pretty easy. The downside was if you failed something, if you failed even a single test, that was it for you.
I remember we had several people who were really likable and they would fail the test and that was it. You wouldn't see them anymore. They got sent home. I remember the terror of being sent home in shame of having to come back to my department saying I had failed the police academy.
I put all my study skills to work. I paid good attention in class and I thought these classes were really fun. They were teaching about things you might actually do on the street and the things you might really need to know
to be a good police officer versus a lot of the classes I went through in college and high school thinking, "When am I ever going to use this in real life?"
These classes were fun.
When there were lessons on domestic violence, while at the South Carolina Department of Mental Health or DMH, obviously I didn't know exactly what scenario I might use that in there, but the entire career of law enforcement obviously these were good things to know because lots of officers ended up going to work at other departments.
I imagined it was possible I might work somewhere else eventually and I studied and paid attention to everything even if I didn't think it would relate directly to what I would do right away because I wanted to make sure I passed all those tests.
I didn't come close to even failing any of the paper tests that they gave us on just the book study. Those were really easy to do and I got mostly in the 90s on the test. You just needed an 80 or something to pass the test. Maybe it was even a 70 on some of them. I got well above whatever the passing was.
In fact, I even got a big ego about trying to get the highest score on many of the tests. After the first week at the police academy, I was back to drinking. I had been drinking for around a month or so, and that was what was on my mind. After being essentially locked up at the police academy for a week, my friends said they were going out downtown to drink and that's all I could think about.
Meanwhile, my sweet girlfriend wanted to hang out with me. I hadn't seen her all week because I had been at the police academy as well. She
wanted to come hang out and all I wanted to do was have sex.
So, I managed to negotiate her coming over for an hour, and then despite her protest, kicking her out and saying, "Look, I'm going to drink with my friends. I'm going to be out all night. Sorry!" and that's exactly what I did.
I can see right there after she had just tried to break up with me, I had planted the seeds for the end of the relationship. At the time, I wasn't concerned with that at all. As long as I had sex then I wanted to just hang out with my friends the rest of the night, and that's what I did.
I drove to my friend's house and he drove downtown because I was pretty big at this time to not being the drunk driver. If my friends drove drunk, that was fine. I just didn't want to be the one who could potentially get a DUI, especially with being a police officer.
Now, of course, that would change in a little while as I started to feel like Denzel Washington from training day. But never mind that, we will get into that in a little while.
At this point, I was trying to keep my life as straight and narrow as possible most of the time, and therefore, I would have my friends drive drunk whenever we went out.
I went to my friend’s house and we drove downtown. We picked another friend up. We went out to Wild Wings, I think it was in the Vista in Columbia, South Carolina, and we were getting pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea. We were laughing and having a great time. I was telling them about the police academy and they were enjoying hearing it.
We went then to go down to Five Points, on the other side of downtown, and I ended up laughing until I cried in the back of the car.
Well, I was in the front of the car. My one friend was in the back of the car and somehow he left the bar without taking a piss and suddenly as we were en route, it was only a 10 or 15-minute drive from the Vista to Five Points, he realized he urgently needed to take a piss.
He said, "Quick, give me a cup or something."
He got this cup in the backseat and started pissing in it and the sound of him pissing in this cup was just killing us after we had had a few pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea, and he yelled out, "Hold on. Stop, stop, stop."
We stopped the car, he threw the cup of piss out the back window, then proceeded to fill it up again and threw it out the back window again. We were laughing it up having a great time. Then we ended up downtown in Five Points in some bar that I don't even remember the name of.
We got in there and we kept going hard on shots. All of a sudden, one friend who was really small and probably like 120 pounds or so, maybe like 5'3, he started doing shots with this guy who was a marine and they started going shot for shot.
This was ridiculous because the marine was way bigger and probably hadn't been drinking as much that day as my friends and I had from all those pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea, and all that we had before we even started doing this shot for shot.
I think my other friend and I bowed out, which was nice, "No. I'm not doing shot for shot with some dude I don't know."
My friend and the marine started going shot for shot. My friend finally got the marine to fold after ordering him some disgusting Goldschläger and Tango Ray mix shot.
The bartender said, "Oh, you really want that?"
The marine finally spit the shot and couldn't handle it. My friend ran off celebrating. He went into the bathroom and nearly got into a fight with a guy coming out of the bathroom.
Then, he went outside and there was some huge white power looking dude that my friend had started screaming at and was just about to get into a fight with, and he was just throwing up outside as well in front of the bar.
My other friend and I managed to go scoop him up really quick and started driving back home. While we were on the way for a 30-minute drive back to my friend's place who was driving and where I parked my car, the friend who was drunk and had gone shot for shot with the marine started putting his feet over my friend's face while he was driving, in the car at 60 plus miles an hour on the interstate.
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