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.
I asked, "Why wouldn't you do that, it's so easy especially if you're not up for regular sex and I like it so much."
She said she wouldn't do that. I remember getting pretty frustrated and bent out of shape over that.
I think I even might have used a condom one of those nights because I was upset about that. I remember we went over, she cooked me a chicken for dinner. The chicken was significantly undercooked, still pink and I ate it anyway, and I didn't even get sick.
We took a shower and I remember she said something about, "I nared
Miss Kitty."
I thought, "What the fuck does that mean?"
Then I was wondering, "Nared Miss Kitty. Does she mean she waxed?"
I was asking myself, "Nared Miss Kitty? Is that what that means?"
It turned out that was what that meant. A cute term for it, "I nared Miss Kitty."
She liked that terminology for it.
I remember going to bed with her and taking all of my mental health stuff out and she was a little surprised that I had my gun.
When my thought was, "I'm off duty. You never know when I could run into someone from work. I got to have my gun whenever I'm off duty."
Especially when I was sober, I figured there was no reason I couldn't always carry my gun because I was a police officer statewide jurisdiction. She was a little surprised I had my gun as I was putting all my stuff on the nightstand: my keys, my wallet, and then my gun.
I went to bed with her that night and I think at some point she had told me she was also having sex with another guy, which looking back was perfectly okay.
She had sex with me on the first date.
Why wouldn't she be having sex with someone else at the same time?
"What's my name? I'm Jerry Banfield, not Slim Shady."
Of course, she was having sex with another guy. I didn't have any
exclusive agreement with her. I didn't have anything that she was my girlfriend. There was no reason she couldn't have been having sex with another guy.
But for some reason, that really put me off.
I don't know if it triggered me on having been cheated on, another BS kind of thing. You can't own or possess another person, although if you do have an agreement with someone, you should honor that preferably before going out on it.
But everyone messes things up. It's okay, right?
If you have cheated on someone, don't feel bad. It's okay.
If you hear all the other shit I've done, it's not a big deal.
I hear some people in AA talking about their fifth step, they had an affair and it was like that was their big thing, that was so bad.
You can see it is very understandable, and yet that doesn't work for me.
I'm faithful to my ex-wife, that's what motivated me to finally get sober. I realized if I wasn't faithful to my ex-wife, it would destroy me, based on the experience I shared with the dispatcher earlier in this book who was similar to this arrangement with this girl.
Therefore, she was perfectly well in her right to be having sex with me and another guy at the same time, and looking back, I think it was nice she talked about it.
But at the time, I said, "All right, I'm done with you. This is not going to
work for me."
I didn't ask her to be my girlfriend and break it off with him or anything.
So, there you go, that was one of the last times I saw her.
A little bit before that, we had an interesting evening. This was right around the time I hurt my back at Mental Health, which I will talk to you about in a minute.
Long story short, I just hurt my back at work and she really wanted to come over and see me anyway even though I was on some muscle relaxers and some mild pain relief medicine like some kind of Motrin.
Nothing heavy like one of my family members takes every day. I am grateful today that things worked out the way they did as you are about to hear.
She came over and we were having sex. I was sober, but I was taking these muscle relaxers, which produced a kind of mild intoxication if you are very sensitive to them.
Now, if you are used to taking muscle relaxers, they don't hardly do anything. But as I took them the first time, and I remember calling my mother, she asked if I was drunk because I was slurring my speech.
All I had done was take the muscle relaxers in the prescribed dose plus like a Motrin and one other minor thing they had given me as well. The muscle relaxers are the ones that produced this inebriated effect. But it only took a few weeks of taking the muscle relaxers for that to wear off.
This was one of the first nights I had taken the muscle relaxers. The girl came over and I was in what you might call a very slightly altered state, a little more relaxed than I should have been.
Well, long story short, she got on top of me after we took showers. She got on top of me, again with no condom, and I was a little relaxed and careless. "Whoops, my bad on that."
It turned out that was right in the middle of her ovulation cycle, right at the time you could get pregnant, and after that, one of the times I went over, she started talking about having a family.
She said she had a dream of having a family with me and I was sitting there thinking, "Why the fuck is she thinking about this shit."
Well, I guess when you have sex with someone who is not on birth control and you don't pull out, they start thinking about having a family with you.
I said, "Well, shit. We need to break this off."
So, that was another thing that happened right before that, which encouraged me to break it off and to use some condoms after that. We had a little pregnancy scare and I remember being so happy when she called me up.
I think at first, I don't know if she called me up and said her period was a little late, but then she said she got a pregnancy test and it was negative.
I said, "Thank God."
Because we barely even knew each other and that wasn't something I wanted to have as a lifelong relationship, and then thank God, she said the test was negative.
Shortly after that, we ended up not seeing each other anymore. She told me she was having sex with another guy, thinking about having a family,
dreams of having a family with me. She was not interested in being physical with me, so I thought, "Well, this just is not going to work, is it?"
Even though I really liked being with her and was attracted to her, I just decided, "I just rather be a free agent at this point and try and date some other girls."
One of the other girls I dated while I was at Mental Health — Well, I don't know if dated is the right word.
I went out on a date or two with her and talked to her a little bit. She actually worked at Mental Health. I think she was a counselor there. We went out on a date and I don't know what it was, but there was just not good chemistry there.
We laughed and had fun, but she was too damn crazy for me, which is funny.
I thought, "She fits right in with the patients here."
She probably thought the same thing about me. This girl was too weird for me.
So, that was one of the other girls I dated while I was there. I also signed up on all kinds of dating sites: Match.com, Plenty of Fish and E-harmony.
Good lord, when I was not at work and when I was sober, I was obsessed with trying to find a girl to date. I was constantly on those dating sites and playing video games on my off time. That was my whole life and occasionally hanging out with my friends up until about February 2008.
So, the first several months I graduated from the police academy at Mental Health, that was what I was doing in my off time. I was trying to date girls and have sex, playing video games, hanging out with my friends
occasionally.
That's a very normal life for a young guy who is a police officer.
The drinking, of course, did not go away. I was able to stay sober for several months. It was one of my longest periods of sobriety ever, especially after how close I had come to the edge sober. That scared me enough to keep me sober for longer than I had been able to do it before.
What happened?
Well, in the process of being a transport officer, one day, we got a call for assistance at a unit. I was probably only out of my field training maybe a month or less. The time was somewhere November 2007. Therefore, I was still pretty new at Mental Health at this point.
I got a call to assist with a unit. We had an out of control patient who needed to be arrested and taken to jail. She was hitting the staff, she was hitting the other patients. They were taking her to jail to press assault charges and to try to get her out of the mental health facility where they were having a lot of problems.
I said, "Sure. I'd be happy."
I was nearby and I would go take this call.
There was a female investigator there, she probably was about old enough to be my mother, maybe a little younger than that.
Now, at the time, I was 24. She could have been my mother. She was probably in her 40s. There was a female officer there who was attempting to arrest her and take her to jail. I was the one that was there to assist in
case things did not go well.
Now, looking back at this, considering the woman we were trying to take to jail had been hitting the staff, hitting other patients, how do you think this was going to go?
I got there all excited.
"Yes, I'd love the chance to get some hands on."
And that's what we did. I got there and the girl we were to arrest was about 5'3 and about 400 pounds.
She was big.
We got there and a police officer at DMH who was the investigator, got there and told the girl what was going on.
She said, "Look, we are arresting you. We are taking you to jail for assaulting the staff and the patients in here."
The investigator went to put the first cuff on and the girl's arm immediately cocked back to punch her. I immediately jumped in and grabbed the girl's arm.
At this point, the girl we were trying to arrest had one hand in the handcuffs. The female investigator was really quick to put that first cuff on, and then therefore, she had kind of that handcuff as a weapon flailing around with it.
The female investigator held on like hell to that hand in the handcuff because she realized that either of us could get whacked in the face with this too. She just put both hands holding on to that one hand with the handcuff.
Meanwhile, I had the whole rest of the girl to deal with. I grabbed this girl's arm and we were in one of these mental health patient kinds of lobbies or rooms with some space to move. We were moving all over this room, the three of us doing some kind of ridiculous dance.
I was in there and I didn't have a gun on or a baton on. All I had was handcuffs myself. I didn't have anything I could use to physically restrain this girl other than bare hands because they did not have tasers at DMH at that time, and we were not allowed to use our batons on the patients, even if they were being arrested.
In this case, it was just hands on.
So I grabbed onto the arm. I tried to yank her one way. I got her off balance a little bit and the female investigator continued holding that other arm, which helped out a lot.
We wrestled around a bit standing up. I finally got a good hold of her right arm. I kind of like went down, a little bit like if you imagine a wide receiver, kind of standing up with knees bent, getting ready to run. I got like that, and then I basically sprinted into her. I went and smashed her up against the wall, and then got her right hand and her other hand around, and we finally handcuffed her.
In the process of doing that, I managed to pull my back, which given how weak and out of shape it was, was pretty understandable. I have written an entire "Speaker Meeting 2017" book if you would like to hear much more about that period.
I'm grateful today, I don't do that.
I was in an epic Alcoholics Anonymous meeting one day where there was a guy talking about back pain. Basically, he was going to work and
what he was doing at work sounded like it was causing a lot of back pain, and from my point of view, the simple solution was to stop doing that for work, and you will stop having the back pain. Instead, he was having a hard time with it.
I raised my hand and shared about how much chronic back pain I'd had in my life from years of strain and being out of shape.
It was a whole bunch of back pain, and having your back that weak makes it vulnerable to being injured more often.
By this time at Mental Health, my back had been weak and out of shape for years.
Still, though, my back was kind of weak from years of strain and from being out of shape, not working out or anything. Therefore, at the time, I considered this completely a work injury, but looking back, I did everything to make this injury possible.
Years of putting all that stress on my back, years of not exercising, being overweight, that put my back in a position to be hurt that day.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.