HORSES
HORSES
I left the apartment to mail some letters. My two most recent apartments have both been located within 300 yards of a post office. They always have the best lines and angriest people at the post office. This has nothing to do with the story. I stepped out from the front door, a giant metal security gate that protects us, the nearly homeless, from them, the truly homeless and watched the park across the street. The park, even closer than the post office, is not a sunny spot where romance is born, or children eat picnic lunches on checkered blankets, but a shaded lot of wet grass where men with bushy beards and exposed bellies sleep, curse, and share needles. I go there sometimes to fold zines and listen to vagabonds argue with themselves. If I’m there alone, the police often stop to ask if I am in need of assistance.
The park is also where the Mexican fellows from all the surrounding apartments gather to play soccer. Intense soccer, with high kicks, shaved heads and speaking in tongues. Soccer played on a fifty foot stretch between two large stones and an oak tree, not a lawn chair or overly supportive mother in sight. These games are in fact so intense that the Park’s Commission has posted signs depicting a foot and a soccer ball with a red circle and slash through them reading “no soccer” in several different languages. The signs weren’t there yesterday.
How often does a sign like that get used? Is the national Mexican makeshift soccer craze sweeping the nation so fast that the production of signs to curb its growth is rapidly approaching that of “no skateboarding” or were committees formed, spending hours, weeks, and years researching facts and figures to determine the positions of the “soccer playin’-ist” neighborhoods in Los Angeles and post a limited number of specially pressed signs at the entrance ways to selected parks and large green expanses? I wonder.
I also wonder if the posting of such a sign is a direct reaction to the goings in of a particular location or if it’s the other way around. If there were signs to prevent me and my friends from hosting a middleweight boxing match in the parking lot of an open air shopping center, one with a Ross dress for less and a TCBY, would it make us want to box there that much more, or would we have to first start a weekly title bout to eventually incur the wrath of the waving finger telling us “no sir, no middleweight championship boxing, not in this parking lot.” The modern urban outdoor chicken or the egg. Regardless, the signs are clear, soccer should be played in the street drugs should be sold in the park.
In front of the park on the sidewalk and in the street were two police officers directly parallel riding horses. Enforcing the soccer embargo perhaps? No, just riding horses in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city. The city of Los Angeles. Now far be it from me to nitpick about such insignificant political matters as the allocution of the city’s law enforcement budget. With the war and the terrorism, and all the awards shows to deal with this might not even be a political matter but I was in front of my apartment, and it just popped into my head so I’m running with it; is the horse-mounted street patrol really the most cost effective means of crime prevention? I don’t know the exact figures on the upkeep for a full-grown horse, but I’m assuming there’s a reason only rich people get to have them. When a middle-class little girl asks Santa for a pony, she wakes up early Christmas morning to discover a stocking full of false promises. Horses, like videophones, are a luxury item.
In addition to the hefty sticker price, a horse is a logistical nightmare. It’s not as if a horse is the most stealth like animal on the planet. You can’t exactly sneak up on a drug deal clop-clop-clopping around on a mighty stallion. Even if you were somehow able to hide your horse behind some tall shrubs or a Winnebago, and in the best-case scenario were able to spring out at the exact moment some masked bandit was snatching the purse from a helpless elderly woman, wouldn’t you have to get off the horse to make the collar? Or would the arresting officer simply chase the suspect, hunt him down like a fox in the woods, dodging and weaving about the neighborhoods and corner stores until finally galloping up alongside the crook and running him through with a lance, smiting him with a broadsword, or wrangling him with a well thrown lasso? And then what? Is the offender hog tied and slung over the back of the horse like a sack of grain? Do they ride the horses back to the station house and hitch them up out front next to a water trough? Where do the horses live? Are the horse cops better or worse than bike cops? What do they feed the horses? Do they feed them seized property? Have they found a way to train the horses to eat criminals? Why are their two of them? Did the horses have horse names like officer JINGLEBELLS and officer HERE COMES TROUBLE ? Why, without a riot, or a carnival or a D.A.R.E. convention, why in gods name are there two full grown adult male city employees wandering around mere blocks from Sunset Boulevard on the backs of wild animals?
I was confused. Gazing at the officers, this might have shone outwardly as admiration. They smiled down at me from high atop their crime preventing beasts with matching “serve and protect” grins. As I walked around the corner the questions were heavy on my mind. But I decided a majority of the horse mounted patrol officer’s day was already devoted to defending his manhood. They were probably just dying to arrest someone, anyone, for anything they could think of. I didn’t feel like getting taken downtown for violation of penal code X3189F “thinking to much about things you shouldn’t.” I continued on to the post office bought some stamps and mailed a letter.
It’s a short walk, between the house and the mailboxes. I know I said that before, but the more you walk back and forth the more you notice details and focus on differences, like the soccer sign. “The same kids aren’t sitting on the porch, I wonder if the went to get a soda?” “That car is parked in a different spot than before” “Oh hey, there’s two giant horse sized piles of shit in the road, those are new.”
Seeing a police officer run through a red light with his sirens blaring, then shut them off as he passes the intersection, or watching a cop make an illegal U turn generate almost the same feeling as having a horse cop take a shit on the street. It’s a strange tense frustration. It’s bewildering. You don’t really care that they ran the light, hell, you’d run the light too if you had a siren, it’s just the idea that you saw them do it. That you know police take advantage of their authority so often, and so flagrantly, that something like this doesn’t even deserve a second look. If I were a stern but loving father, and the horse-mounted police officers were my rambunctious teenage sons out for a joyride, this wouldn’t be about the act itself but about “the principle” of the matter. I really wanted to say something. If I knew my day was clear and spending a night in jail wouldn’t have bothered me physically, monetarily, or psychologically, I’d have sat the boys down for one of our father son chats. “…a horse is a privilege, not a right.”
Honestly, do you know the kind of abuse you take these days for not curbing a dog? No? Well, I don’t either really, I don’t have a dog, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t clean up its shit with a bag, but I see people doing it all the time, and I respect them for it. I hear it’s important for the ground water, so if you’re doing it, keep it up. Either way that’s just dog shit, dogs are small and mostly cute. Sure, the ones with the eyes that go in different directions are hard to take some times but that’s a tough obstacle to overcome, and they’re working with what they were given, like Forrest Whitaker. Dogs are efficient too, I’ve seen dogs eat other dogs shit, they’ve got it down to science. Horse shit on the other hand, horse shit is bigger than human shit, it’s green and full of hay. It falls out while they walk and lands in giant clumps. You can smell horse shit all the way from the corner. No other horse is going to come along and eat this. What would another horse be doing in this residential neighborhood in the first place? That’s absurd. It’s just going to sit there and stink. They should be cleaning this up. They should be leading by example. Kids would probably want to play with this. You know how kids are. Some older kid with a scruffy mustache is going to rub a stick in this and throw the stick at a chubby nerd just to make himself feel better about his turbulent home life. This is how complexes are born.
If only I were sixteen and full of passion and hatred for all things authoritarian. I’d give those cops something to think about. I’d start a heated debate. “Hey you! Hey you cops! What the hell is the meaning of this!?!” “Get over here and clean this up!” I’d call them fascists. I’d call their horses fascists. They would threaten to arrest me, and I would love it if they did. “I know my rights! What are you arresting me for!” “My parents pay your salaries!” I’d ask them for their badge numbers and tell them they had better clean up that mess or I’d have them reported. Then I’d walk back home and tell all my friends about it and we’d listen to records with photocopied inserts. How dare they? On my street, my home is on this street! Fucking pigs. Pigs and horses. And a whole big mess. I’d probably even start a band. That’s a perfect reason to start a band. We’d have a song called “horseshit.” (It would be about the LAPD). The chorus would go “HORSESHIT!” and everyone would point and jump on each other to reach the stage. Yeah that’s it. I’d give them what for. If only I were sixteen and angry.
Well at least I’m still thinking about it. The cops rode away, sort of into the sunset. That’s got to make them feel empowered. The shit was still in the street. Maybe the soccer department will put up a sign. “I bet this is why people vote,” I thought as I went back to my apartment and ate a salad. It was delicious.