“Roscoe Rules handed out towels in the showers at Auschwitz,” the policemen said.
“Roscoe Rules was a Manson family reject-too nasty.”
“Roscoe Rules believes in feeding stray puppies and kittens-to his piranha.”
And so forth.
If there was one thing Roscoe Rules wished, after having seen all of the world he cared to see, it was that there was a word as dirty as “nigger” to apply to all mankind. Since he had little imagination he had to settle for “asshole.” But he realized that all Los Angeles policemen and most American policemen used that as the best of all possible words.
Calvin Potts, the only black choirboy agreed wholeheartedly with Roscoe when he drunkenly expressed his dilemma one night at choir practice in the park.
“That’s the only thing I like about you, Roscoe,” Calvin said. “You don’t just hate brothers. You hate everyone. Even more than I do. Without prejudice or bias.”
“Gimme a word then,” Roscoe said. He was reeling and vomitous, looking over his shoulder for Harold Bloomguard who at 150 pounds would fight anyone who was cruel to the MacArthur Park ducks.
“Gimme a word,” Roscoe repeated and furtively chucked a large jagged rock at a fuzzy duckling who swam too close, just missing the baby who went squawking to its mother.
Everyone went through the ordinary police repertoire for Roscoe Rules.
“How about fartsuckers?”
“Not rotten enough.”
“Slimeballs?”
“That’s getting old.”
“Scumbags?”
“Naw.”
“Cumbuckets?”
“Too long.”
“Hemorrhoids?”
“Everybody uses that.”
“Scrotums?”
“Not bad, but too long.”
“Scrotes, then,” said Willie Wright who was now drunk enough to use unwholesome language.
“That’s it!” Roscoe Rules shouted. “Scrotes! That’s what all people are: ignorant filthy disgusting ugly worthless scrotes. I like that! Scrotes!”
“A man’s philosophy expressed in a word,” said Baxter Slate of 7-A-1. “Hear! Hear!” He held up his fifth of Sneaky Pete, drained it in three gulps, suddenly felt the special effects of the port and barbiturates he secretly popped, fell over and moaned.
There was however one thing which endeared Roscoe Rules to all the other choirboys: he was, next to Spencer Van Moot of 7-A-33, the greatest promoter any of them had ever seen. Roscoe could, when he cared to, arrange food and drink for the most voluptuous tastes-all of it free-for the other choirboys, who called him an insufferable prick.
At first the only thing Roscoe didn’t like about his partner Dean Pratt was his styled red hair. But he soon came to hate his partner for his drunken crying jags at choir practice. There was another thing about Dean Pratt which all the choirboys despised and that was that the twenty-five year old bachelor’s brain became temporarily but totally destroyed by less than ten ounces of any alcoholic drink. Then it was impossible to make the grinning redhead understand anything. Any question, statement, piece of smalltalk would be met by an idiotic frustrating maddening double beseechment:
“I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Or, “Whaddaya trying to say? Whaddaya trying to say?” Or, most frequently heard, “Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”
And so, Dean Pratt eventually became known as Whaddayamean Dean. The first few sessions of the MacArthur Park choirboys found Roscoe Rules, Calvin Potts or Spermwhale Whalen eventually grabbing the lanky redhead by the front of his Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and shaking him in rage with Dean in drunken tears babbling, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Whaddaya mean? Whaddaya mean?”
Yet Whaddayamean Dean became the first policeman Roscoe Rules ever took home to meet his family. Roscoe, one of three choirboys who were married, lived on a one acre piece of ground east of Chino, California, some sixty miles from Wilshire Station. Even the few friends Roscoe had made these past four years would not drive that far to be sociable. Roscoe loved it there and made the daily trek gladly. His children could grow up in a rural setting as he had. Of course they would not have to work nearly as hard. His two boys, eight and nine, only had to hoe and weed and water his corn, onions, carrots, squash and melons. Then after cleaning the animals’ stalls, picking the infectious dung and hay from the horse’s hooves and treating the swaybacked pony for ringbone, they could have the rest of the day for playing. After they studied for a minimum of one and a half hours on weekdays and two on Saturdays and Sundays. And after they took turns pitching and catching a baseball for forty-five minutes on weekends.
Roscoe Rules had convinced both his sons that they would be allstar players their first season in Little League. And they were. And he had convinced them that if they didn’t get straight A’s through elementary school they would get what the recalcitrant pony got when it misbehaved.
Roscoe’s two sons hated riding as much as the pony hated being ridden, but when the pony wouldn’t ride, Roscoe would snare the pony’s front feet, loop his rope around the corral fence and deftly jerk the animal’s legs back toward his hindquarters, catching the beast when it fell with a straight right between the eyes. He wore his old sap gloves with the lead filled palm and padded knuckles (which a sob sister sergeant had caught him beating up a drunk with and which he had been ordered to get rid of). That jerking rope, that punch and the bone bruising force of crashing to earth never failed to tame the pony who would obey for several weeks until the stupid creature forgot and became stubborn. Then he would require “gentling” again. Roscoe Rules believed that animals and people were basically alike: they were all scrotes.
Roscoe was very proud of the clean healthy life he had provided for his sons away from the city He counted the years, months and weeks until he could retire with a twenty year service pension to his little ranch east of Chino and live out his days with his wife Clara (a secret drinker), and raise grandchildren in the same American tradition and perhaps buy them ponies and make ballplayers out of them. And give them all the advantages he had provided for his own children.
Roscoe was, like most policemen, conservative politically by virtue of his inescapable police cynicism but more so because of his misanthropy which had its roots in childhood. He had served in Vietnam and had almost made the Army his career until an LAPD recruiting poster had forced him to compare the benefits of police work to military service.
Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were “doing the chicken” on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney And that if Jesus Christ didn’t have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew Roscoe Rules wasn’t raising his sons to be faggots.
But Roscoe Rules had a sense of humor. He carried in his wallet two photographs from his Army days which were getting cracked and faded despite the plastic envelopes he kept them in. One showed a Vietnamese girl of twelve or thirteen trying gamely to earn five American dollars by copulating an emaciated oxen which Roscoe and several other American cowboys had lassoed and tied thrashing on its back in a bamboo corral.
The second photo, which everyone at Wilshire Station had seen, was of Roscoe holding the severed head of a Vietcong by the hair as Roscoe leered into the camera, tongue lolling, neck twisted to one side. The photo had “Igor and friend” printed across the bottom. The thought of the photo was to trigger Roscoe’s finest hour as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.