A Few "Regular Customers"

Police officers everywhere have a number of people they deal with regularly among their clientele. Most are mentally ill, and quite a few are essentially homeless, having “no fixed address”. Some have alcohol and/or substance abuse problems. Many had normal lives at one time until some traumatic event or the normal progression of an addiction caused them to lose their way. Not all those I dealt with ended up in jail; some were merely public nuisances.

Today, I’ll write about several “regulars” I dealt with in the “public nuisance” category, as the wino category is a story all its own.

There was one middle aged woman of uncertain hygiene who used to come and hang around the police station on a regular basis. She’d always have a wide gap-toothed grin on her face, and would stop everyone who passed, asking them to buy her a soda. For years I didn’t know her real name. Most of us called her “Buddy Buddy” because that’s how she addressed everyone: “Hi Buddy, can you buy me a Pepsi?” I usually would buy her a drink, so she’d go sit somewhere downwind. After tolerating her for awhile, we’d make her leave because she didn’t respect anyone’s privacy or anyone being busy. She never minded; she’d leave good naturedly and come back again a few days later.

Another regular was a Vietnamese woman whom some soldier had married and brought home after the war. For about a year, she came to the station every day and sat for hours. She was convinced that her brother had sent her a bus ticket and a suitcase that she had to pick up from the police station. It didn’t matter how many times different officers told her this wasn’t so; she’d spend hours waiting each day, anyway.

I hated pulling desk duty when she was at the station. She’d not sit quietly minding her own business, but would stare at the desk officer to the point of moving her head back and forth to mimic the officer’s movements. Sometimes, she’d even come to the window and press her face against the glass to get a better view. During that year, I had a new understanding of how animals in the zoo must feel.

One woman, who came in several times a week, was a paranoid schizophrenic. She was neat, well dressed, drove a nice car, and looked perfectly normal. But as soon as she opened her mouth, the mystery was over. She had an obsession about people taking pictures of her in public places trying to frame her for child molestation. One complaint I remember vividly was her claiming that a neighbor’s child had a camera in her tricycle to take pictures of her with so that her parents could frame her.

Unlike most of these people, she wasn’t satisfied with a few reassuring words. She’d go on and on in detail about her paranoid fantasies for several hours if you’d let her. It got to the point where she was so disruptive that just the sight of her crossing the parking lot to the building caused officers to scatter and hide. I can remember one officer working desk duty who would grab the portable phone and answer calls from the men’s room until she went away.

Others were less disruptive, but no less peculiar. There was a mother and son duo who wandered the streets all hours of the night, though they had a government apartment. The woman had been taken advantage of by someone when in her 20s and had borne a son that her family had taken away from her. When he became a teenager and they realized that he was just like his mother and would never be any different, they dumped him off at her apartment. It turned out as well as could be expected under the circumstances, as they had each other, if no one else wanted them.

I remember one time driving down the main drag coming upon them around 3 am hauling an old, battered couch down the middle of the street. I stopped and asked them what the deal was and she said someone had given them the couch and they were taking it home. It hadn’t occurred to them that the middle of the street wasn’t the place to be carrying it, nor was 3 am the ideal time to be doing it. Not to mention that their apartment was at least a mile away.

There was another schizophrenic who wandered the streets at night. He’d come in the department and sit in the public phone alcove on the floor smoking cigarettes while muttering to himself. Sometimes he’d have enough money to rent a room in a seedy rooming house. One time he’d dropped his ring down the toilet. In a fit of rage, he uprooted it and threw it out the fourth floor window where it landed on the hood of a passing patrol car, shattering into a million pieces…

Another was a tall skinny middle aged fellow who used to walk up and down the several blocks of the shopping district. He didn’t bother anyone or do anything all that odd, except for the way he looked. One day, you’d see him with a huge clock hanging around his neck, another day, he’d have a three foot high plastic baby bottle strapped to his back, and the next, he’d be lugging a teddy bear almost as big as he was.

I have quite a few more stories like these I could tell, but I’ll leave them for another day.