“DAMN HIPPY COPS!

        Rod Haney and I were a salt n’ pepper team working Willowbrook on EM’s, and both of us were Richard Pryor fans. We both had one of Pryor’s first comedy albums, on which he had a routine where two salt n’ pepper cops go into a local bar/pool hall, looking for a bad guy named “Cool Breeze.” Pryor played all the characters that the cops talk to in the place, and the white and black cops as well, and he was hilarious. One of the denizens of the bar was a hooker with a bubble butt, whose standard answer to any question by the po-lice was, “Kiss my _ _ _, M.F.   Yo’ don’t want to buy any    _ _ _ _ _!”

        Haney and I would try make each other laugh when we would go on a routine report call, or street contact, by standing behind the informant or witness, and silently mouth the above words that Pryor’s barroom hooker would say the cops, or one of us would say out loud, “Say, have you seen Cool Breeze?,” in an officious tone of voice. We each had a very hard time avoiding laughing on those occasions, and sometimes we lost the battle and some laughter would escape.

       On one such occasion, I was interviewing a very large lady at Ujima Village, with a huge bubble butt, weighing over 300 pounds, and Haney and I were thinking the same thing. Haney was standing behind her, and began to silently mouth the hooker’s words, making big eyes in the direction of her posterior, and I couldn’t contain myself and burst out laughing. This, of course made Haney break out in laughter, looking at me bent over double.

       The lady, understandably, became very angry and grabbed both of us and pushed us out the front door of her unit, shouting, “Get out of here, you damn hippy cops! You ain’t goin’ to laugh at me!” When she called us “hippy cops,” we laughed even harder, and were in tears, by the time we got back to the Black & White. It was hard to keep a straight face for the rest of the shift.

       About a week later, we were heading in at the end of EM shift, around 7:30 am, coming up Central Av., with Haney driving. We stopped for a red light, close to a bus bench. I look over and see a very attractive young woman sitting on the bench, obviously dressed for work, as she had a nice short-skirt business suit on. She looked very sweet and demure, and I told Haney to check her out. About the time Haney looks at her and smiles, she looks at me and mouths the words, “F_ _ _ _   y_ _, Honkie!”  In my best Richard Pryor imitation, I replied with the hooker’s statement, in a high-pitched voice, and the look on her face was priceless. Haney began to laugh so hard he drove part way up on the curb and I had to jerk the steering wheel back, to avoid a light pole.

As one of my trainees’ used to say when street people asked him how he liked being a cop, he would say, “It’s the only job for a human being.”

John Stacy