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.
Then, I came back from this week-long trip. I think I had left on a
Thursday and I came back the next week.
It was so beautiful.
I was sitting down in roll call and the sergeant looked at me and said,
"Banfield, you are going to be in dispatch tonight."
I was so pissed. I thought, "You got to be kidding me."
That was one of those kinds of informal punishments you could get as an officer, to be stuck in dispatch all night, because while the other officers were out being real police officers, here you were sitting in dispatch like a dispatcher.
I was pissed and he said, "You and the dispatcher will be in dispatch tonight."
I thought, "Oh, my God, you've got to be shitting me. This is exactly what I needed. 12 hours of alone time with a beautiful girl. I'm going to absolutely seal the deal now. Thank you."
I wanted to just stand up and celebrate because he could have put me in with her co-worker and that would have sucked, but he liked me and I liked him.
He liked me and he wanted to punish me a little bit. I don't know if he saw that I wanted to hook up with her and he wanted to make it happen. I don't know, but this is one of those things like Gabrielle Bernstein writes, "The universe has your back."
If you want something, the universe will give it to you. The question is, what are you going to give up whenever you want it?
That was the night. That was the thing that happened that sealed the deal because up until this time, it was very hard for me to get any time with her.
I think I had tried to meet up with her at the bar one night drunk a little
while before this, and she ended up not showing up or something like that, and she went out to some other bar, and I had called her on the phone.
By this point, I was trying to hang out with her off-duty, but so far, I had not worked anything out yet. All I had done was struggle to get any alone time with her and here my man, the sergeant, was punishing me with giving me exactly what I wanted.
Thank God he didn't put me in there with that other dispatcher all night because most of us used to make fun of her and didn't like her. He knew that would have been a nasty ass punishment right there. I would have had to get him back if he had done some shit like that.
So, he stuck me in dispatch all night with the dispatcher, and I had an unusual confidence, I knew I could seal the deal with 12 hours alone with her, and I did.
I remember as a police officer learning about body language too. I was getting very good at reading people's body language, whereas before with a mother in the army, and a very manly father in a lot of ways, except that he stayed home with the kids, I remember often struggling to read or know anything that girls were doing.
I very much remember with the dispatcher all night in there, she would just constantly play with the button on her shirt. Buttoning and unbuttoning her little dispatch shirt, and I knew.
I thought, "She wants to fuck me. She absolutely wants me. Holy shit. This beautiful, perfect 10 looking girl wants to have sex with me. Oh, my God."
I remember looking at everything she wanted to do and talk about, and I was just having the time of my life getting punished in dispatch with her.
I remember listening very carefully too because I think she was 20 years old at this point and she said that her favorite thing to drink was Captain Morgan. I locked that away, and the plan was coming together.
I thought, "I got this. All I need to do is invite her over to my place. I've got the Captain Morgan, we will both get drunk and have sex, and then we will be a couple after that or wherever we're going to go from there. That will happen."
After a night in there with dispatch, I was hooked really hard and so was she. It got hot after that. That weekend, I went to a party with the other guys from work. We had this USCPD house party with a bunch of people from the police department and some people that were not from the police department, but also worked at the university.
That weekend, the dispatcher was not invited to that party. I guess it was a good idea after the drama before not to invite her to any parties where there would be underage drinking and someone might have to quit their job over it.
There was the other very attractive female officer at the police department there and I was trying to hook up with this other girl at the same time. I went buck wild at the university. I tried to have sex with absolutely any girl who would let me in there. I took full advantage of being a police officer and being in uniform, trying to pick up girls, and yet I was delicate and careful with it.
Another of my friends, I guess, got seven complaints on him before he had to quit. I was pretty careful most of the time if I was sober, about being polite, being professional and taking things slowly.
At this party, things got awkward because I wanted to hook up with the officer there and I wanted to hook up with the girl who I think was a
residence hall director or something like that at the university, a graduate student.
So, I had two girls there and I ended up talking a lot with the one officer.
I guess the residence hall director there got really jealous and mad, and then she wouldn't even talk to me anymore. I was hanging out with the other officer so much. I got really drunk at this party, like by the time we did shots of Patron in this guy's house, I had banged down a ton of jello shots.
I don't even know how many beers I had and I probably was somewhere
15 or 20 drinks deep in just a few hours and I was wasted.
I was an alcoholic and I normally could drink and maintain pretty well in terms of being able to drink a lot and still function.
I went right over that in this party and got wasted. I had been driven there by the corporal that I was on shift with. He had actually come over and we had played a bit of Halo and had pre-gamed before the party, and I'd had probably two to four shots of vodka before the party, and by the end of it, I was wasted and screaming all kinds of belligerent, ugly garbage.
This was during the period of my life when I went through a hateful, racist phase that I am deeply ashamed of today. I had been raised to hate racism, but in those years I fell in with people who normalized it, and I let myself become someone ugly. I was still climbing out of that while I was a police officer. It was one of the sickest, most shameful chapters of who I was, and I'm grateful I grew out of it completely.
Anyway, by the end of this party, I was wasted. I was screaming
everything stupid you could imagine, "fuck this," all of that. I kicked over a trash can, I punched a dent in a car on the way out of the party and one of the officers, thankfully, threw me in his pickup truck and gave me a ride home from that party.
I face planted on the concrete as I got out of his car like I literally fell face first and smashed right down on the concrete. I looked up and there were three people in my apartment complex that I was about to become the police officer in just a month or a few months. I yelled up to them, "Fuck you assholes," after I had just face planted.
I went to the front door. My friend who brought me home closed the door behind me. I passed out face first right in front of the toilet. I woke up the next morning, I was laying in my bed and I was thinking, "Thank God.
Nothing bad happened last night. I'm in my bed."
I got up to go take a piss in my apartment. My bedroom, if you got straight out of bed and made a left, there was one long hallway that had the front door on the right, and then on the left was the bathroom, there was a toilet right in front of it.
As I went to step out into the hallway, the floor was soaking wet and there was a puddle of puke in it and the wall next to it was also all wet. I said, "What the fuck happened here?"
I went to take a piss, and then I came back and I had this kind of weird flashback, but I still didn't really remember it. I guess I was in a bit of a blackout.
I realized I had passed out, I puked, then I woke up and took a piss on the wall, even though I literally could have rotated and pissed in the toilet. I pissed on the wall and it ran down into all the puke, and then I somehow
climbed back in bed.
This was what I did on the weekends as a police officer. That was actually not that bad of a night. After the chaos from that, I started working on night shift and it was time for me to work my magic with the dispatcher.
After we had been in dispatch all day together, we had been texting and calling each other a whole bunch and we had a Monday-Tuesday working together at the end of May in 2009.
We had been talking and texting like all night. It was so hot, I felt like I had such an incredible secret, that I was being hella stealthy because she was still hung up on this other officer and the word on the street was, or maybe it was from her, that if anyone else got with her, he was going to shoot them.
So, I was being hella careful and no one knew this was going on. Maybe that one sergeant suspected, but I was ultra-secretive. I felt like the guy on "Fire at Work," texting her all night during the shift. I bought the Captain Morgan handle for her on the weekend and I knew it was only a matter of time to get her to come over one night when we were both off. This night shift was just perfect for it and I smelled the victory coming. I was so excited about it.
Wednesday night, after we worked Monday and Tuesday night, I got up on Wednesday. I went out to the bar with my friends as soon as I got up.
I wasn't normally the kind of alcoholic who would drink first thing in the morning. The problem with night shift is it shifts your night and day. The only way I could reliably work night shift was to just sleep inverted where I woke up at usually like 4 or 5 in the afternoon, just like it was four or five in the morning for day shift, and then I would stay up until 10 or 11 in the morning the next day and I would go to bed. I just lived inverted and this
then led me to drinking first thing when I got up, which was a really bad thing for me.
My friend was going to be getting off work at 5:30 pm right when I woke up and I would head over to the Flying Saucer to drink with them before I had even had breakfast yet, which normally I wouldn't have done if I was working day shift.
There was no way I would have gotten up and had a beer at six in the morning, but since I was on night shift and my friends were getting off work I figured, what the hell?
I went over and there was a sandwich shop next to the Flying Saucer, the bar we used to go to. I had a big foot long sub there, and then I would knock out four, five or six beers with my friends and I would often get them to give me rides back and forth unless I was having like three or four beers, in which case I would just drive myself.
I figured, "It's only a couple of miles away. I got my badge. If anyone pulls me over, there's a good shot, I might know them. I can get away with it."
We went out to the bar that night and I had a normal three or four beers because they had this little special. If you had three beers, you could get this 200 beer plate party, but you could only have three. It basically encouraged you to go have three beers every day, and then you could get this free epic party, which really was just 100 dollar gift card, which is pretty damn stupid if you think about it.
You are paying $6 for a beer. You have 1,200 dollars’ worth of beers, and you drink these extra beers that are disgusting, that you wouldn't want to drink otherwise, then you get a damn hundred dollar gift card. It is really
total BS, but that's the kind of way I was thinking back then.
So, I went there, I had my three beers working towards my plate party, I drove back home and I was playing some "Call of Duty: World at War," and I had the vodka, the strawberry Smirnoff vodka, 70 proof. They had knocked it down slightly from the 80 proof and put a bunch of strawberry flavoring in it.
I used to mix that up with diet Dr. Thunder, and on a good night, I would stick to putting a reasonable amount in, and on other nights I would free pour and there would be like three or four shots in with some diet Dr.
Thunder, sometimes every single cup.
I would sit there, my lonely ass on my couch in my apartment all by myself, and I would drink and I would play "Call of Duty: World at War," and I called that fun.
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