Submitted by Karquena Healez
Metaphorically speaking and just so they can say that it is understandable, you make mistakes when you are young, admit it, confession is good for the soul? The truth is not important for police. They will create evidence and conditions to satisfy their inferior morals. Commonsense to them is something that apparently only comes when you’re old. Pity. Grown men and women constricted by law and a hideous uniform–especially khaki on black men–eww when the man is really dark and ugly thinking that commonsense is equivalent to experience.
This dilemma confronted me for the past three years. I went about my business for the six years I was in the force before attachment to the admin division. I was cordial and polite to all, no matter what deformity of morals, character or attitude the officer possessed, no matter what rank. But I perceived attitudes of malice, deceit and that akin to a cat taunting a mouse before the kill. The first persons to intimate what was afoot were two female officers; one who was involved in a long term relationship with an older policeman who was much more experienced than her and the other who boasted of brief encounters with male officers–more than one?!, being involved with a man old enough to be her father and someone else’s husband–all different relationships.
I was told rather brashly by the latter woman to admit what I did, that she had had a fifty year old man already, and left it at that. I was kerfuffled. My bewildered ‘what?’ was echoed by the former mentioned police woman in a manner I later came to understand. I got no enlightenment, but hindsight revealed that I was supposed to be hiding the fact that I had sex with an old policeman. These women were practiced at deceit, and I didn’t guess that my response was anticipated and only indicted my participation in an act that could happen only if the old officer molested my corpse in the morgue. I guess they ‘knew’ that I knew what I what I did, they knew and deduced that I wasn’t ‘open’ about it. That state of confusion was to be my reality for a long time. And I still went to work–no sick leave. Man the capacity of my endurance.
I did try to get some idea of what or rather who I was supposed to have done–only a five year old would be left clueless by Ms Brash. So I said to Ms Police Squared that I hoped people didn’t think that I skated in on my back under the then station sergeant in charge. With that manner I mentioned earlier, I got a reply of no, that wasn’t the case.
Back to the drawing board for me. Things happened to ensure that what I was beginning to imagine was paranoia was in fact me being intuitive. For instance, two old men shanghaied me into what started out as an innocuous discourse on meat. Of course, the two police officers, both old enough to be my father degraded womanhood to malleable objects requiring pervasive sexual perversion. I was ill equipped to offer any substantial input and got out. I don’t recognise old people–sad I know, they suffered so we could enjoy better lives, right? But the old person who is the same place I am in life or who has to purchase tolerance from a young woman or man is pathetic and a waste.
Anyhow, one other male officer, short, square and old enough to be my uncle said outright that he could lift me and even offered to buy my shoes–how thoughtful: I’d never met the man till then and had never formed any sort of relationship with him. Only a dunce wouldn’t realise by then that she was targeted. Still, no one came right out and said it or who. That is the culture. So called tests are devised without your knowledge so you are never equipped with fairness to rebut veiled accusations.
To make matters worse, a different female officer actually said to me to leave out my man and that uncle prospect and I would be good…nuff said. Not only was I not in possession of taste, apparently I was blind, deaf, dumb, unemployed, desperate and on the lowest rung of humanity.
The short man was forcibly pushed down my throat like cerasee bush. The only reflex is to puke. And to avoid contact. The urge to go to the bathroom became an inbuilt reaction to people’s presence in an office I was visiting but for a time and where demeaning and belittling behaviour was not cautioned as long as it was me to whom it was targeted.
By far the most obnoxious and worse was by one of the ugliest men in Barbados and the force. This terminally ill police man made my presence in the office when he visited a nightmare. His conversations were always about people–especially women in the Force–being sexually immoral. I was too tall and slow of course to figure out he meant me so one day he came with another oldster and had a conversation about sex when only I was there. I left, thinking they’d be done flirting with each other when I came back but lo, no, they were still there. On approaching the room, they were talking about something else but the moment I got back in, Officer Sick shared a sexual joke from Trinidad. It was so special, the way he was coming on to the other old man. Closeted Gay Senior Citizens are so cute…I’m gagging.
Pardon me, I am dense. If I was white, I’d probably be blonde. Anyhoo, the visits to spectate on the newest edition to the xxy concentrated dept started to dwindle. There really was nothing to see. So it was fabricated. Again, I perceived rather than heard the shift with the lies. After subtly denying the subversive allegation for so long, the talk was now that I was an Inspector’s pimp and that I’d confessed to sex with a relic.
So after two years of shadow boxing opponents who dealt in the supernatural and black arts of gossip and diminution of other persons through creatively engineered trials without my knowing participation, I started to wise up. I mean, after all, being told to shut up, open up and having the senior officer’s name, coy assessments of endowment proportion and his apparent ability to rack up the numbers of partners and children’s mothers over four decades of adulthood screeched like fingernails down a blackboard, was enough to enlighten me that I had–wait, I can’t even think, write or imagine it without feeling to vomit–been done over by dark, archaic and on the way out relic.
I did ask Police officer squared and she said that years ago, the speculation was tossed around in the South, with the impression that I was sent to a specific area because I was the old man’s whore. What a dumb imbecile I must be. Having sex to get to somewhere I only need to write to HR to get. Pity for all those women who thought they had to have sex with old men to do policing.
The things I noted through this ordeal were that people want to feel superior to you and will do it through money, image, perceived preference in social and even work settings, the impression that they have achieved more, through family connections, nepotism, cronyism and when it comes down to it, the person determined to be lesser, must show open appreciation and need to join in or tag along. The really amazing thing is that no one seems inclined to actually live good, clean, faithful, honourable, ethical lives.The divergent personality will be targeted and destroyed. The person doing it will feel justified–that they are merely showing the truth of the situation.
Anything you obtain must have been through begging, pimping, slutting or prostituting. Amazing really. Just don’t apply that to oneself–everyone not deemed friend or self.
To this time, I can’t imagine a time the old man was young, or sexy in my adult lifetime. I don’t know the reason for the lie so I don’t know if the old man not only molested me as a child but his daughters too, who must be my age. I don’t know when in my policing career, I got dead and suffered the assault. What I know is that the lies have spread widely in and beyond the Force. Instead of trying to ascertain the truth, I have been sullied by the lies, police low standards, sexual malfeasance and the sexual immorality of the old man.
Someone even said I was a beautiful woman as though that justifies the rumours. Yes I am beautiful. I know it. I knew it before I joined the Force. I also know my worth. It doesn’t have a dollar value attached to it, nor is it a stupid beauty that is diminished by the attention of an ugly, old black, promiscuous policeman.
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