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Chapter 24: Adjusting to a new agency

In one way my job change from liquor control to highway patrol was the simplest of my life. Same employer, the state. Same city, the capital. At the first traffic light off the freeway, turn left instead of right. That’s it. Other things were not so simple. My assigned parking was a quarter-mile away, not right outside the door. I didn’t have an office, I had a cubicle. I wasn’t a division head, I worked for one.

Bill Burkett
7 min readDec 25, 2024

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Headquarters was riddled with tension. In January the new governor would take office. The sitting chief would be history. Among his most unpopular moves he had appointed women and blacks to command positions with no uniform above them, like the black retired Army colonel I reported to. The traditional hierarchy had been rigid as the Navy’s. As with the Navy, civilians were second-class citizens. So his move enraged the badged brotherhood. The crime lab’s boss, a nationally recognized forensics expert, wryly told me he soon would be reporting to some random captain appointed by whoever the new governor made chief.

Even worse than civilians in command slots, the lame-duck chief, a former cop somewhere else, hired other outside cops. His top deputy was former LAPD, polishing his resume waiting for the ax to fall. We got along fine; he liked it I had worked in LA and even knew where Parker Center was. He said too bad I got here too late to save the day, I might as well relax until the new governor made his pick.

Speculation was rife about who the governor would choose: constant closed-door conversations and mutterings. I was on the outside looking in — the fireman called too late, sifting through the burned-out husk of a failed administration. My ex-Army boss, trying to function as if change weren’t coming, arranged for me to lecture on public relations at the academy.

The afternoon before I left, I faced a background grilling from internal affairs that stopped short of the polygraph required for uniforms, but asked invasive questions anyway. Crimes committed? Knowledge of crimes committed? Had I ever partaken of illegal substances? They had marijuana on the brain. I admitted smoking unbranded substances resembling tobacco in my pipe in California. Was it illegal weed? I shrugged: I’m neither a lawyer nor a chemist, couldn’t tell you. Got a laugh from the detective. Unlike the liquor board, he didn’t probe about drinking or extracurricular sex. He implied highway cops considered these sacred rights. Or maybe rites. As long as you didn’t publicly embarrass the agency.

The sexual waiver struck me as ironic since part of my new positive-thinking regimen was to try to quit rambling.

An irony reinforced when I stopped at a hotel on the way to the academy. I was drinking in the bar when a tall shapely brunette in a pretty sweater and tailored slacks came over and said Please dance with me, this is too embarrassing. She had been dancing with her girlfriends because no man asked. It looked like I still was the kind of man women picked up in bars.

Dancing wasn’t all she had in mind. But her friends razzed her to stay till closing. I guess women can call each other slut if they smile when they say it. Like the famous line in The Virginian where the hero tells Trampas: “When you call me that (Son of a bitch), smile.” The bar closed. She came to my room quivering with nervous energy. I wasn’t doing a very good job quitting. She pushed me onto my back on the bed, fully clothed. Straddled me. Muttering Damn, damn, damn. Deep kiss…damn. Rubbed her clothed breasts on my chest…damn. I finally said What?

“Those bitches! They made me wait too long! I’ve been up since before dawn. I have the biggest business meeting of my life at lunch!” Nuzzling kisses under my beard. “And…I don’t wanna…stop!”

“You’ve been up twenty hours?” I slid my hands under her sweater, massaged her drum-tight back. Her muscles relaxed.

“Mmhmm.” She rocked under my hands, eyes closed. “I just can’t stay awake twenty-four hours, get my brains fucked out, and be ready by noon. I’m over forty for God’s sake!”

One part of my brain was laughing. Fate was helping me quit. She took my face in both hands, peered into my eyes. “Why are you being so nice?” She nibbled my lower lip sexily. My cock twitched against the furnace of her crotch. A lower-precinct vote to postpone quitting. She groaned. Uh oh, I knew that sound. “You’re not making this any easier,” she said. “But this sale is so important…”

It was on her mind, so I asked about it to cool things down. She had created a specialty newsletter on her kitchen table, and sold enough subscriptions to attract a publisher’s buy-out offer. Lunch was to negotiate price and hopefully ensure enough economic freedom to escape a boring marriage. All this while bending in for kisses, groaning softly as I rubbed her back. Then she sat up, stripped her sweater, released quite-nice breasts from her bra, the nipples pebble-hard. “This proves I wasn’t leading you on…God! I wasn’t! This is thank you for being nice…” Rubbing her breasts in my face.

Her gesture was sweet but juvenile. She had nothing to prove about intent. Her groans said it all. But I really did mean to quit. I moved my hands to her face, kissed her. “Our timing is off, that’s all.”

“You won’t be here tomorrow.” Not a question. She slowly replaced her bra and sweater, then dismounted. “My girlfriends are going to give me so much shit! And we didn’t even…”

I stood and put my fingers to her lips. “Shh-h-h. Story of my life.” Well, until my forties it had been. She reached up, squeezed my hand. Held it lingeringly as she stepped through the door, fingertips sliding away slowly until contact was broken. “Damn!” And she was gone.

Friday at the academy, some of the lieutenants I lectured on fundamental PR said implementing my media advice would have resulted in punitive discipline from the outgoing chief. They were twitchy about clout the trooper’s union would wield in matters of trooper discipline, having elected the new governor. I had nothing to offer about that. The entire agency was on hold, waiting.

I took the LAPD guy’s advice to relax. Saturday at zero-dark-thirty my son and I departed for a lake near the Canadian border for his first licensed duck hunt. He slept in the camper after we were sure my new 14-foot kayak — shipped all the way from South Carolina to Chloe’s vocal dismay — was secure on the roof. Our new Labrador behaved perfectly in the tippy craft, which glided easily over shallows that had defeated my outboard skiff.

My son’s education began: a mallard flared above the decoys while he yanked the trigger with the safety on. He glanced down — a flock swooped by before he could react. Three more decoyed — a blind seventy yards away opened up and flared them. Nothing fazed him, not the goofs, not the recoil of heavy duck loads. His blazing grin at being out there actually shooting was a joy. As before he was old enough to shoot, he tirelessly helped with decoys and boat-handling.

Back at work refreshed, a Seattle reporter wanted an interview about switching from liquor to traffic enforcement. She said the lame-duck chief — who had never granted me an audience, though I didn’t tell her that — always stonewalled the media. Given my liquor-board reputation, was hiring me evidence change was in the wind? Same thing the lieutenants wondered.

My division head was nervous about reporters, given his untenable situation. His boss, the LAPD guy, said they’re all vipers — you gotta be careful. Siege mentality of an agency under fire. I asked the legislative-liaison major who liked my drunk-driving speech.“Use your judgment — that’s why you’re here.”

I met the reporter in the snack bar across the hall from my cubicle, outside earshot of other cubicle-dwellers. She was a hard-nose — most newswomen are tougher than their male colleagues — but liked me. I winged it, and she did a nice write-up. The female sergeant one cubicle over was annoyed the story called me the new agency spokesman when a classmate of hers still held the official title. No other negative feedback.

The two-month wait till inauguration was very strange. The strangest thing is something I was never able to explain. I was on the phone when I looked up and saw the legislative-liaison major. He pointed to himself, then at the ceiling — his office was on the floor above. I got off the phone and went up. Majors had glass-walled offices like editors in a newsroom, staff at desks outside. A sergeant announced me. “What can I do for you?” the major said.

“I was going to ask you that. You said come see me.”

“I did? When?” I told him. He looked confused. “Wasn’t me, Ish. I haven’t been downstairs today.”

To say I felt silly would be understatement. “Well, somebody in uniform did. Is there anybody else up here that looks like you?”

He leaned back and laughed. “You mean bald as me? Not in this office. I liked that piece in The Times. You settling in?” I said I was — other than the odd hallucination. He got a kick out of that.

In January, one of the new governor’s first acts was to name that major as new chief. Then he did show up at my cubicle. Told me to pack up, I was moving upstairs across from the chief’s — now his — office.“You’re my spokesman now.”

The matriarch always said coming events cast their shadows before. I have no way to explain what I saw. But I did see it. And the coming event turned out to be working for the best boss I ever had.

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Bill Burkett
Bill Burkett

Written by Bill Burkett

Professional writer, Pacific Northwest. 20 Books: “Sleeping Planet” 1964 to “Venus Mons Iliad” 2018–19. Most on Amazon for sale. Il faut d’abord durer.

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