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rats the size of small dogs prowled. No longer did I see women in ritual wigs, men in beards and long dark coats, boys with curls of hair dangling alongside their ears.
    Brownsville faces were now black and brown and angry. It seemed new, but it was really the same old class struggle, only with different music. I was doing my best to understand the anger on the basis of hopelessly limited information.
    During this rookie time, I was still living at home and the breakfast discussions with my father were becoming more and more heated.
    “The yoms, Pop, they’re crazy. They live like animals and throw shit at us from the rooftops. I mean bottles and bricks. You know what a bottle or a brick would do to you thrown from six stories up?”
    “Yom is a dumb word spoken by stupid people,” said Pop. “Don’t ever use that word in this house again.”
    “Those people are crazy,” I told him.
    “They’re not crazy. They’re poor and oppressed, and they’re angry. They take their anger into the streets. And let me tell you something, Mister Policeman, it’s going to get worse.”
    My father was kin to all the demoralized and poor and out-of-work peoples of the world; his instinctive belief in the class struggle, back then, drove me up the wall.
    “The bosses and landlords screw these people over in ways you could never understand,” Pop said.
    “You have to see how they live,” I replied.
    “I know how they live. You think we lived any differently?”
    “Sure you did.”
    He smiled.
    “Drugs, Pop. The drugs are everywhere—on the rooftops, in the basements, in the hallways. And where do they get the money for those drugs? They rob, they steal, they burglarize. Their women are prostitutes. It’s a hellhole.”
    “Mister Policeman, who do you think brought all those drugs into that neighborhood? I wish you’d stayed in school.”
    In those days, I was assigned to the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Force. The unit had been formed in 1959, the creation of Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy. At first, there were thoughts to simply name it Special Services. Except, having SS on the collars of New York City cop uniforms would have been less than wise.
    TPF’s nickname was Kennedy’s Commandos. It was a specialized uniformed unit—most of the members were young and had been Marines or paratroopers. We patrolled across the city in high-crime areas.
    Our special training focused on dealing with all sorts of civil disorder. Patrol in TPF was mobile and proactive and very aggressive. We all shined up our brass with silver polish. Our uniforms were always creased and unsoiled. It was there, in that unit, where I would draw my gun for the first time and shoot someone—in a place where I almost got shot myself, and the place where my first partner was killed.
    In TPF, you carried yourself with poise, a kind of dignity and macho zeal. What I remember most about those years are the alleyways and backyards of the tenements, scary stuff, the sounds and smells and always the music—the sweet sound of salsa wafting up to the rooftops, how it made the scary stuff somehow go away.
    Things happen quickly in the street, and as a cop you really don’t know what you’re doing most of the time. You’re just doing. Afterward, you can tell yourself any kind of bullshit you want. Say that you handled it well, it didn’t bother you one single bit, that you loved doing this or that, that you behaved heroically and you’re proud of yourself. “You would not believe this shit,” is what you tell people.
    I had two partners, Dave Jackel and Pete Schmidt. Dave was six-foot-five and Pete was just about six-three. I was five-foot-nine, the smallest man in the unit; in my memory, we made a unique-looking trio walking our posts.
    The TPF attitude was, action comes on so fast it’s not smart or safe to involve yourself in tentative assumptions or too much scrutiny. Speed counts.
    * * *
    “Fuckin’ muggers, I hate ’em.” This was Officer Pete