Scenes from Trans Policework: Someone Has To Clean Up

It wasn’t until he shat that I reflected on how long I’ve been doing this law enforcement thing. One of the security guards, no tyro himself, laughed in revulsion and said, “Oh my GOD! He took a DUKE in the CORNER?” My reaction, by contrast, was (to myself), “So much for hoping it was just talk. Time to get him out of the room before it occurs to him that his shit could be both fingerpaint and projectile.”

We got him into the adjacent bathroom and “got housekeeping in to clean up”, by which we meant that a phlegmatic old woman who had seen it all and wasn’t paid enough cleaned up the shit, and the soda he had poured everywhere, and the styrofoam and bread remains of the lunch he had asked for. Then she mopped the floor. As she left, she commented over her shoulder that she would scrub and sterilize the walls after he’d gone.

Later, he asked for soda again. We told him he could have water. He didn’t want it.

I was posted outside one of the isolation rooms in our local hospital. The security staff was short-handed, and their patient was angry and bored because he had been waiting five days for a bed to be available at a state mental hospital, where he was going to be evaluated. Your tax cuts at work. If you “contain costs” by cutting the number of beds available, severely mentally ill people just, I don’t know, go away, right?

No. They sit in isolation rooms in local hospitals. If they’re lucky. And someone has to keep them from hurting themselves, and everyone else, so some hospital security officers and police officers get pulled away from other things they could be doing, like investigating the burglary of your house.

He was diagnosed bipolar, and had anger issues, and other issues, and was not able to keep himself in check, but they didn’t want to sedate him prior to his transport. About every thirty-five minutes he completed a cycle. He went from being curled up on the bed to pacing the room and talking about how he wanted us to shoot him, or how he should jump from a building to kill himself, or how he’d like to get in a fight at the state mental hospital, with a shank, or how he shouldn’t feel an urge to kill us, but still, he did. Appeals to fairness or reason did not work. When he poured soda on the bed and floor and I pointed out that someone else was going to have to clean it up, he retorted, “Good! They SHOULD clean it up.”

He was not in restraints because I had enough sense not to set a boundary unless I meant it, and he had enough sense to know that I meant it when I said it.

Several times he addressed me, impatiently, as “Lady”. This is what it is to be a transsexual woman: when I am detailed to control a muscular, manically hostile man, whose judgement should not carry any weight with me, I feel an involuntary twinge of satisfaction when he validates my gender presentation. And then I feel both foolish and a little dirty. It only mattered a little bit, but yes, it mattered.

At one point he put his back to the wall, his hands to his head, and slid slowly down the wall into a squatting position, talking to himself. “That’s what I’ll do,” he said, getting softer as he spoke, drawing into himself. “Find out your deepest, darkest secrets, and then tell everyone, tell everyone your deepest secrets.”

I did not bother to comment that I had already revealed my deepest, darkest secret to the world almost a year prior, and now there was really no way he could hurt me with it. Yay, living authentically. Go, me. And yay for what passing privilege I have, that I didn’t have to listen to the tranny-hating which would surely have ensued had he “clocked” me.

The transport officers arrived. They were old hands. I briefed them. When I mentioned his defecation, they commented, “Good, that’s out of the way.” They made friends with him, agreeing to play the radio for him on the way, politely apologizing for having to shackle him. We walked them out to the car. They drove away. I drove away. I thought about good conversational gambits for getting the willing compliance of emotionally disturbed people. That’s an important skillset in my line of work. Then another call came in, and I forgot about the incident until later, when I was trying to write something else entirely, and this thing kept shoving in between the keyboard and me, demanding to be written before I wrote anything else.

I never heard if he managed to make the trip in peace or if he reared back in his seat and drove his forehead repeatedly into the metal of the cruiser partition, spraying blood across the back seat, like the first disturbed person I arrested in my career, many years ago, when I had to pull over, roll out of the driver’s seat, rip open the rear door, and grab the long, greasy, bloody hair on the back of his head with my un-gloved hand to hold him back from his eleventh hit against the cage.

I don’t think about that incident very often anymore. But sometimes something reminds me.

Grace