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 managed to avoid that poker game, but I got some resentment. You see, staying sober was causing me to miss things I would really have liked to enjoy in my life. Staying sober was starting to suck. This was where my head really started to spin off after that time at home. I focused back on the job again as much as I could and we had lots of interesting calls and cases.
I remember a call to a unit where you walked in, and a whole bunch of girls were just all punching the shit out of each other. Just fists and arms flailing and you just grabbed whoever was the craziest, and dropped them down on the floor.
There was one girl, she was just flapping and punching the shit out of everyone. Four officers jumped on her and the nurse came in with the Thorazine, and hit her like four or five times. We all got off her. This girl stood back up after a bunch of Thorazine shots and turned around and
started swinging at us.
Damn girl, I would have passed right out if I had gotten hit with that. But again with the tolerance, she probably got hit with those a whole bunch of times. She stood right up and started swinging again after four Thorazine shots. Then, she ended up going to bed shortly after that.
We got a bunch of calls like that and actually, it was hit and miss. It was as if there was something in the air like a full moon. Some days you would get like four or five of those calls. It would just be crazy as hell and it was scary because some of those patients had AIDS and you had a nurse with a needle.
I heard a story of an officer right after I worked at DMH that the nurse stuck the patient with the needle to give the patient a shot. The patient was bucking, the officers were going crazy, and then accidentally, the officer got stuck with the AIDS needle from the patient by the nurse. The officer then had to take the AIDS medication to try to prevent it from happening.
All kinds of nasty stuff happen in those mental health units. I heard the investigator telling me all kinds of disturbing things about what went on in those units. I know I've made kind of light of it, but those mental health units were brutal in there.
You went in there without any gun or any kind of baton, just your hands and you had to be safe in there. Those were much more dangerous most of the time than those DJJ units I worked on.
I didn't spend nearly as much time in the mental health units, but I generally came in at the worst times because I was a transport officer, and I came in when things were the craziest.
Most of the time things were pretty laid back, but I loved getting the calls
too. Most of the days, especially sober, I had all this restless, irritable and discontent energy and anytime we would get a call I felt so useful and helpful, and I also could kind of get out that energy.
A good fight, a good wrestling with a patient, that often would help me kind of get all that extra energy out of my system and kind of feel able to relax a little bit.
I know it's sick. I know. That's how it was.
I used to love getting a call or two for a fight. I said, "Yes, let's go."
I used to wear these black gloves too and people would laugh. They told me I shouldn't wear them because the patients were dirty, that I should wear latex, but the black gloves worked better for just a casual scrape or cut because the latex wasn't going to protect you from like a fingernail scratching or cutting you.
So I used to wear these black leather gloves and I would come all hard up in the unit saying, "Let's go. What's up?"
I loved to get into the physical altercations. I loved going into those crazy calls. I paid very close attention to wherever that nurse's needle was going. When the patient was getting stuck, I watched that nurse's needle. That was the only damn thing I would keep an eye on.
"Where's that needle going?"
Because I knew that could be life or death right there. You move, you don't pay attention to that needle, and you get stuck with it. You could have AIDS and die, that could be it for you.
I'm grateful that didn't happen to me while I was there.
Now, I was very reliable as an officer. If you called me in, I would jump right on the patient as soon as we needed to go hands-on and I would not back down or back off.
Some of the other officers would get scared. Especially if there were a couple of scared officers together, things could go really wrong. I was always so cocky and gung-ho and ready to get into the action. That never happened with me because I was in so hard. Everyone else, I guess, felt safe.
I would go right in, dive right in for the patient's legs. I would tackle patients. I would do whatever the hell I needed to while trying to minimize injuries to the patients. I tried to make sure the patients did not get injured or hurt at all. I tried to use the maximum force to get the job done and the minimum force necessary to do it effectively.
Therefore, I always avoided injuring patients.
I never hit any of the patients in the head on purpose at least and I always tried to just get the job done without anyone getting hurt, and the only person that got hurt in any of the calls I went on that I know of was me, and I'm grateful today that it wasn't that bad.
A lot of the most interesting moments at DMH was getting those calls because you would come in, someone would be restrained and you would have to move them or someone would be violent and you needed to get them in the car.
Whatever energy I had about me, and I usually saw the patients as people even though sometimes there were sacrifices for me to get out my desire for violence on or whatever, when I was transporting them I saw
them as people, and patients generally were very cooperative with me.
I respected that they could get crazy and cause problems, and they generally respected me back that I didn't want any problems with them. I had mostly very smooth rides back and forth to mental health facilities.
The one day that stands out is remembering taking that boy who must have been sixteen years old, he was incarcerated in the mental health facility in Charleston, and we spent like eight hours that day in the car together.
It was a two-hour trip back and forth to Charleston each way and I was being hard in my mental health patrol car trying to act like I was going to pull people over too, when I didn't have him in the car. I was totally bluffing trying to act like I was a real police officer on the highway. If I would have pulled anyone over, they would have not been very happy about it at DMH, if not have told me to give up on it completely, and I didn't even have a ticket book.
So, what the hell was I going to do if I pulled someone over beside taking them to jail and make a mess?
I drove and picked the boy up in the morning, and I took him up to his appointment, and we had kind of a moment of connection, I guess, after his appointment.
He didn't talk much about his life or what he had done, and I don't know if I asked or made myself open or talked about my life, but we had kind of a nice day together.
It came lunchtime, and he said he was really hungry. I said, "Well, what would you like to eat?"
I had a lot of empathy for him, being in one of the mental health facilities he didn't get exactly a lot of the good food in there.
So I asked, "What do you want to eat?"
At the time, I had gotten through my not tipping thing. I realized a little bit that giving to others would leave me feeling good, and this left me feeling good.
He said, "McDonald's."
I said, "Okay. You can get some things off the dollar menu. You can get a couple of things off the dollar menu and you can get a drink too."
He got a burger and fries plus a drink, and I didn't have to do that. I spent my own money on it. I didn't get any money for it, but I just did it because it felt right. It felt like the right thing to do and it left me feeling really good.
I got him lunch and he didn't give me any problems all day. This was probably a boy that had been in for doing who knows what that got him into the facility, but he didn't give me any problems all day. We had a really smooth day and drove him back.
I thought that was just a great day. I liked working days like that at Mental Health where I had something to do all day. It was the days I didn't have anything to do that were hard days. When I didn't have an assignment, when I had things just to do like patrols and check buildings, I would get bored.
Boredom was generally my biggest obstacle at that point in my life, which is funny because my life is so full of action today. The idea of being bored seems ridiculous. There is always something I can do. There is always something I can think about at a minimum. There are always people
I can think about or talk to. The idea of being bored in my life today, more than 10 years later, seems ridiculous, and yet at DMH that was my biggest problem.
I remember one night in February 2008, I was sitting there restless, irritable and discontent. Everything in my life was going so well that I couldn't stand it. I had girls that were wanting to date me online, which was a huge thing for me at the time, and I had had the girl that I had sex with, and then told her I didn't want to see her anymore. I stopped responding to her messages or whatever. I felt good about myself and my prospects dating and I was so restless with my career.
I said, "This is too easy. This is too boring. I'm not going anywhere."
I remember I was on second shift the night I'm thinking of. I was driving around patrolling the main mental health estate downtown and I was just bored out of my mind.
I said, "My life is too easy. There's no drama. There's nothing complicated. It's too boring. I go to work. I do my job. It's smooth. There are no problems. There's no drama. There's no gossip. Nothing is wrong. I'm getting my paycheck. Everything is going great at work. I've got girls that I'm talking to online, dating not going perfect, but going well enough.
Making progress. Talking at least."
Even though dating was consistently frustrating, I knew I was trying, I was doing my best at it.
I was thinking, "I can't take this boredom. I can't take sitting and driving around in these cars bored to death."
Lots of times, probably about half the times on the shift at Mental Health,
almost nothing happened.
That's why I got so excited whenever we got called to a unit. I felt like,
"Yes, here's a chance to actually do something."
Most of the time, nothing happened. At least 50% of the time nothing was going on. No one needed to be transported. There was no crime.
There was simply things like buildings to patrol, routine checks, which was boring.
I remember having a very clear choice that I needed to make, which is funny because why were these the only two options?
I remember thinking, "Either I'm going to go in the Air Force, or I'm going to drink. Those are my kind of destiny options."
Because I realized if I drank life would get more interesting as it always had. Then, I probably wouldn't be bored and I would have something I was really excited about.
I'm an alcoholic because the ability to enjoy alcohol so much is there. It is never hard to give anything up you don't like and enjoy. That's why abusive relationships can be really difficult and I had an abusive relationship with alcohol.
There were a lot of what I thought at the time were really good times with it, and yet it abused me like no person has ever abused me. It abused my body and left me in states to do the craziest things and many of which I've described and will continue describing.
For some reason, those were the only two life choices I could see, that I either was going to go in the Air Force, that maybe that would satisfy my desire. I felt like there was something I needed to do and I thought, "I can't keep living this boring life in Columbia."
I had already done Army ROTC a couple of years in college. I nearly
went into the army. I had grown up in an army family who were often on Air Force bases and I got the idea that Air Force was nicer than the army in my head. I figured I could go in as an officer with my criminal justice degree and probably be a military police, although I was not in shape to do that very well. Maybe they would have got me in shape.
Today I see that I just wanted to drink again, or I wanted to go on to my next destiny point. I was ready. I had essentially checked off wanting to be a police officer and that was not good enough anymore. I got what I wanted, and many of the unhappiest points in my life have been right when I got what I wanted.
I decided right around then, "You know what? I might as well drink. I'm missing out on a lot of fun."
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.