He kept talking, but I wasn’t taking it in. Instead I was imagining myself in a role very different from the one I’d been playing, an essentially administrative role. I wouldn’t be walking a stroll alongside Prospect Park, handing out my minimalist business cards to whores and pimps and junkies and unclassifiable mopes.

  No, I’d be making peace between partnered patrolmen who’d begun rubbing each other the wrong way, and fielding citizen complaints of overzealous meter maids, and adjusting schedules so that this officer could get a morning off to go to a funeral and that one could get to a wedding in Yonkers.

  “And you reach a point,” I heard Vince say, “when what it’s mostly about is asses.”

  Huh?

  “Which ones to kick,” he said, “and which ones to kiss.”

  Politics. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it, but of course that would become an element. Getting along by going along. Playing the game.

  I said I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted to be a cop and keep on doing what I was doing. Next time somebody asked me about the Sergeants Exam, I’d say I wasn’t interested.

  He shook his head. “What you say,” he said, “is that you’ll be able to get down to studying for it when things ease up a little at home. You don’t want to sound like a man who lacks ambition.”

  “Even if that’s what I am?”

  “That’s not what it says on your business cards.”

  “All it says—”

  “What it says is here’s a man spending his off hours lining up snitches so he can crack cases that don’t even exist yet. What’s that if it’s not ambition?”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to go home.”

  “There’s easier ways to stay out of the house. You’re out on Long Fucking Island, you could spend every free minute on a golf course and half your working hours talking about it.”

  “Like Simmons,” I said, naming a cop we both knew who wanted to be Sam Snead.

  “What was that he said the other day? ‘So I whipped out my niblick.’”

  “Sounds like indecent exposure.”

  “Jesus, it does at that. Matt, you got an ambition, whether you know it or not. You want to be a detective. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Of course you have. You’re a patrolman, you bump into something that turns out to be interesting or important or complicated, next thing you know some clown with a gold shield takes the case away from you. ‘Thank you very much, Officer, and we’ll let you know how it all works out.’ That doesn’t have to happen too many times before you start wanting to be the clown with the gold shield.”

  I said I didn’t know how to make that happen. He said what I already knew, that there was no exam to take, no application to fill out.

  “What you do,” he said, “is what you been doing. You don’t have to press any harder than you’ve been pressing.”

  “Okay.”

  “And keep your nose clean. The commendations in your file can get offset in a hurry by anything negative. Put in your time in the bars and on the street corners, but walk away before the shit hits the fan. You’re a man who likes a drink.”

  “Not when I’m on the clock.”

  “Never?”

  Maybe once or twice. But Vince himself—

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “I’m a veteran patrolman finishing out my twenty, and I’m not on a fast track or even a slow track, and if every once in a while I take a drink, nobody feels the need to call attention. For you, not so much as a glass of beer while you’re on duty.”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t go over the line even when you’re not. My personal opinion, you haven’t got a problem. I’ve seen you make your load plenty of times, and I haven’t seen you stagger or talk too loud or tell the same story over and over.”

  “Jesus, I hope not.”

  “But if I was to worry, it’d be about that long drive home to Whatchacallit.”

  “Syosset.”

  “Breezing along on the LIE, trying to make time. How many times you been pulled over?”

  “There’s no record of it.”

  “Once? Twice?”

  “Twice, both times for having a heavy foot.”

  “Speeding.”

  “Once I was close to fifteen miles over the limit. The other time I wasn’t doing more than keeping up with traffic, but I guess the guy had a quota to make.”

  “And both times you showed your badge and apologized for being over the limit, and professional courtesy carried the day. Is that about right?”

  It was. Being a law enforcement officer had certain side benefits, and one was a general dispensation from traffic laws. That was a long time ago, but I don’t imagine it’s changed much. If the guy who ran the stop sign turned out to be your fellow officer, were you going to write him up for it? No, probably not.

  “If you’d hit something,” Vince said, “like anything at all, there’d all of a sudden be a gap in the solid blue line, because whoever showed up would have no choice. Even if some asshole was going westbound in the eastbound lane and smacked into you from out of nowhere, somebody’d have to cover his own ass by giving you a field sobriety test. And you’d flunk it.”

  So. Don’t go over the speed limit, or break any traffic laws, because there was always the chance you’d run into the rare bird who didn’t buy the idea of cops looking out for their brother officers, and who maybe had a hard-on for the NYPD and New Yorkers in general. And a few other things to look out for—and, most important, if you’d drunk enough to feel it, don’t drive anywhere. If you absolutely had to get home, take a train. Otherwise, spare yourself an uncertain hour behind the wheel and sleep it off in your apartment.

  Because wasn’t that the real reason you paid the rent each month? You didn’t need a machine answering your phone, you could pretend you were an actor and get yourself an answering service. And most of the women you were likely to walk out with had their own place, and in an emergency you could always find a hot-sheets hotel.

  But if you wanted to sleep off a drunk, you really needed somewhere to lie down.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It was good advice, and I recognized it as such the minute I heard it. And I took it to heart, and I followed it.

  Mostly.

  Not a hundred percent, because it’s hard to be a hundred percent of anything once there’s whiskey in the jar. First the man takes a drink, as one hears it said, and then the drink takes a drink. And even if that’s where it stops, before the third step of and then the drink takes the man, it’s way too easy for something to go wrong.

  Sometimes you forget what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes you remember, and decide to make an exception. Just this once you’ll make a night of it. Just this once you’ll drive home even if you know better.

  Just this once.

  I got away with it. I got pulled over three more times that I remember, once in my own precinct in Brooklyn, twice on the Long Island Expressway. In the Seven-Eight, the fellow who stopped me apologized for not having recognized my car; on the LIE, professional courtesy let me skate both times, no problem, you have a good night now.

  And one night there was a fender-bender on an access road, another poor son of a bitch who was at least as drunk as I was. He thought the accident was all his fault, when in fact it was probably about sixty percent mine. I identified myself as a police officer, and he thought I was about to arrest him. We established that damage to both cars was minimal, and the important thing was to find a rug that we could sweep the whole thing under.

  So he went his way and I went mine. No harm, no foul.

  That episode of Bumper Cars got my attention. The other incidents might have put my hopes for a gold shield in jeopardy, but breaking a perfectly arbitrary speed limit wasn’t necessarily unsafe, and I could make the same argument for driving with an elevated blood-alcohol level. Just numbers, and they might get me in trouble, but what real harm was I doing?

  But this time I’d hit a car. I didn’t hurt it much, my own car came out of it worse than his, and neither of us wound up with a scratch, so if you were going to have a collision this was the kind to have.

  And I guess I learned from it. I won’t contend that I never drove drunk after that, but I never got in another accident or attracted the attention of another traffic cop—at least not until after I got bumped up to detective, at which point I figured I could take the whole business a little easier.

  Because what you did behind the wheel might stand in the way of a promotion, but it wouldn’t countermand it. Once they gave you that shield, you’d have to do a lot to make them take it away.

  So you could say I was lucky.

  Lucky.

  Today’s my birthday. September 7, 2022. That’s ten or eleven weeks after I started writing whatever this is, and an even eighty-four years after I was born. Elaine asked me what I’d like for a birthday breakfast, and I suggested we make an occasion of it and go across the street to the Morning Star. We sat at an outside table. She ordered French toast and I ordered blueberry pancakes and we shared the two dishes, along with orange juice and coffee. She makes better French toast than the cook at the Morning Star, and better pancakes, although the blueberries were a nice touch. The sun was out but the air was still comfortably cool, with a light breeze blowing in off the Hudson. If it wasn’t a perfect morning, it wasn’t off by much.

  Then we came home and I sat down at the computer and read what I wrote yesterday, which is how I generally get started. And I read the last sentence, So you could say I was lucky, and thought about it for a while.

  And hit the return key twice, and wrote: Lucky.

  And that’s where I am.

  It is pointless, I sometimes tell myself, to wonder about what might have happened—because it didn’t, did it? What actually did happen, the great stream of yesterdays that resolved themselves into today, now bear an appearance of inevitability. Whether or not one’s destiny was written in the stars, the present reality is indelibly written in the here and now.

  Pointless to echo John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet:

  For all sad words of tongue and pen,

  The saddest are these: “It might have been.”

  I had to Google it to get the words just right and make sure who wrote them, but they’d stayed with me since high school English. I wound up reading the whole poem again, over a hundred lines of bouncy rhymed couplets. Boy encounters girl, and each has secret thoughts about the other, and they go their separate ways forever, but neither of them really gets over it. It has the feel of doggerel now, and maybe it always did, but I was a less critical reader seventy years ago.

  In its day, I learned, the poem was enough of a success to inspire a response from Bret Harte, whose name I know although I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of his work. But I just now read his parody, an echo of Whittier’s original, in which boy gets girl, to their profound and enduring mutual disappointment:

  If, of all words of tongue and pen,

  The saddest are, “It might have been,”

  More sad are these we daily see:

  “It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”

  How does an old man get through the days? I’ll tell you, it’s not that hard, not with Google and Wikipedia, not with a cyberworld so quick to branch off into so many paths, all of them leading in different directions.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Still thinking about luck.

  It’s not uncommon, in AA meetings, for someone to speculate on what might have been had he gotten sober earlier. Gifted with a little more perception and little less denial, isn’t it possible things could have turned out differently?

  A couple of years ago, when perception edged out denial on a rather different field of battle, I went to an audiologist and learned, to neither her astonishment nor my own, that I needed hearing aids. Before I left, I speculated that I probably could have used them a couple of years earlier.

  “Ten,” she said, and went on to tell me that was how long it took on average for age-related deafness to prompt a person to do something about it.

  That struck me as an uncommonly long time to spend asking people to speak up, but it was probably ten years earlier, or close to it, when ambient noise started to be a problem. There were certain restaurants where other people’s conversations drowned out one’s own. Dialogue was hard to catch in some movies and TV shows, especially British imports.

  Ten years. And how much sooner might I have been well advised to put the plug in the jug and swap the barstool for a folding chair in a church basement?

  Say what? Speak up, will you? It’s hard to hear with all this noise.

  Back again.

  Something kept me away from my desk for a few days. It’s been a week since I turned 84. Last night Elaine and I went downtown for dinner with Ray Gruliow at the latest incarnation of a restaurant a few doors down Commerce Street from his house.

  Ray had stayed active as a defense attorney longer than Elaine or I had clung to our respective careers, but he’s been retired for a while now—although once in a while a colleague will drop by for a consultation. “I think it’s to impress the client,” he said. “‘Hard-Way Ray suggested’ sounds authoritative, doesn’t it? And I get paid a few dollars for my wisdom, which is probably more than it’s worth.”

  It was just the three of us. I can’t remember when his most recent marriage ended, or the name of his most recent wife. We lingered at table longer than one usually does at an alcohol-free dinner, and at one point he labeled himself as being between marriages, which was a phrase Elaine and I recalled on our way home.

  “First of all,” she said, “shouldn’t it be among marriages? Given that we’re talking about more than two?”

  I said she might have pointed that out, as almost everyone enjoys having his grammar corrected.

  “I think it’s diction, not grammar. Anyway, I didn’t think of it until just now. And he used the right word after all, because he’s between his most recent marriage and his next one. I was just being snotty.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m not sure what he was being. ‘Between marriages.’ He’s not seeing anyone, is he?”

  “If he were, he’d have brought her along.”

  “If it was even close to serious.”

  “Or even if it wasn’t.”

  “To show her off. You’re right. I guess he was being ironic, and why can’t I leave it alone?”

  “You’re worried about him.”

  “He didn’t look good, did he? And once or twice he seemed to drop a stitch. He caught it and covered it, but still.”

  He’s older than I am, though only by a couple of years. We’re both of us old enough, and see each other infrequently enough, to wonder on parting if we’ll see each other again. Or if, by the time we do, one of us will have forgotten who the other is.

  There they are again, McGuinness and McCarty.

  Elaine knew Ray before I did, although I’m not sure he’s aware of it. He was, on one or two occasions, a client of hers, which is to say that he spent some time in her bed and left some money on her nightstand. She told me as much when Ray became a principal in a case I was working, and by the time it had resolved, he and I had become close.

  Did he recognize Elaine when he met her? I don’t know. Nobody ever said anything. And what did it matter?

  Ah, Jesus.

  Well, it got me to my desk this morning. I think I let myself get mired in a world of What If, wondering whether it was in fact good luck or bad that let me get away with driving drunk. What difference does it make? What happened is what happened.

  So this entry and the one before it will be something to cut at some future date. For now I’ll just get on with it.

  But not today.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  For a while there, the gold shield was my green elephant.

  My father, when I was nine, ten, maybe eleven years old: “How’d you like to make ten dollars, Mattie? You can do it without saying a word or moving a muscle. All you have to do is spend the next ten minutes without thinking once of a green elephant.”

  I guess nowadays they’d call that a Dad joke. I was young enough to make an effort, and of course I couldn’t manage it, because to try not to think of something is perforce to be able to think of little else. I gave my mind things to do, I ran through the Yankees batting order and the seven-times table, and, through it all, there was that fucking elephant, now forest green, now lime green, swinging its trunk and flapping its ears . . .

  “Now isn’t that something? I bet you never once in your life thought of a green elephant, and now you can’t think of anything else.”

  I got the point, and it evidently stayed with me. But did I get the ten dollars? I recall the incident vividly, but I somehow remember it with two irreconcilably different endings. In one: “You know what? You gave it your best shot, and nobody could have done any better. Here you go.” In the other: “You know what? This here is going right back in my wallet, but the lesson you just learned about the way the mind works, that’s going to be worth lots more than ten dollars.”

  I remember it both ways, and I’m not sure either of them ever happened. Maybe there was no ending. Maybe he just patted me on the shoulder and went around the corner to get himself a beer, and maybe my mind dreamed up both endings and gave them equal time, but together they add up to another lesson, right up there with the green elephant—a lesson about memory, and just how reliable it is.

  I always knew that about eyewitness testimony, had it drummed into me at the Academy, confirmed it on the job. But it’s something you figure only really applies to other people.