Free The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

"Oh well."
    "A man gets drunk and careless and screws himself into another ten years on the job. It ain't fair."
    "Oh well," said Father Willie.
    "Everything happens to me!" Spencer said.
    Spencer Van Moot was interrupted for a moment by catching a glimpse of a seventy year old pensioner who lived in a Seventh Street fleabag called the Restful Arms Motel. He pushed his wheelchair down the sidewalk backward with his foot as he held his useless arthritic hands in his lap. The pensioner was trying to get to the mom-and-pop market one block west where he could buy two cans of nutritious dog food for his dinner.
    "Things could always be worse, Spencer."
    "Oh sure, I'm gonna be unloading shitty diapers at forty years old and."
    "You've got a new camper. You can get away with your wife sometimes and go fishing."
    "Oh sure. I got a new camper. I'm so thrilled, so happy! I'm in debt again. I was getting insecure not owing money."
    "It'll work out."
    "Yeah, it will. I'll be dead soon. No one in my family lives very long. I got an uncle that died of old age at forty-five. That's what the doctor said. Every organ in the man's body was old, dissipated. I won't last long. At least then I'll be rid of my old lady. I tell you, Padre, she's got a tongue so sharp it's a wonder she don't cut her mouth to pieces and bleed to death."
    "You want to come to church with Geneva and me?" Father Willie offered. "Some of the best Witnesses I know came to God later in life. And what with the early deaths in your family."
    "Goddamnit, I ain't dead yet!" Spencer cried, suddenly frightened. "Padre, gimme a chance! I ain't lived yet!"
    "Well, I only meant with poor health and all."
    "Poor health? Poor health? I'm too young to be thinking about dying. Jesus, partner, you're getting morbid!"
    It was almost an hour before Spencer fully recovered from the suggestion of his imminent demise. He had the worst sick record on the nightwatch. He was tall and strong, in the prime of life, and had seen vats of spilled blood and acres of mutilated flesh in his sixteen years of police work, but he became faint when he'd scratch his finger. He could bear any pain but his own.
    Just before dark they passed the Mary Sinclair Adams Home for Girls, a funded institution where young women who were pregnant and indigent could be cared for. It was a converted two Story home two blocks east of Hancock Park and had once been a palatial residence of an eighty year old virgin who died envying young girls the fun they had growing round bellies.
    There was a teenage girl with an eight month stomach standing in front of the house: cigarette dangling, eyebrows plucked to nothing, eyes shadowed to three inch black orbs, talking to three young men on chopper motorcycles.
    "The Stork Club," Spencer remarked, shaking his head disgustedly. "They go in there, drop a frog and cut out."
    "I hear the county's okayed the installation of interuterine devices in some of these girls they place in foster homes," Father Willie said.
    "Someone shoulda plugged my old lady's birdbath and I wouldn't be in this fix," Spencer answered, blowing a cloud of smoke out the window: "Old dried up sponge, I don't know how she ever got knocked up. I'll just have to cut down on expenses, live like a goddamn Trappist monk. I won't be able to eat like a human being anymore, that's all."
    "It'll work out all right," Father Willie said. Then, "Spencer; we'll still be able to eat roast duckling with orange sauce, won't we?"
    "Oh sure."
    "With glazed carrots and shallots?"
    "Oh, we'll still eat at our restaurants for free just like we always have," said Spencer, allaying Father Willie's fears. "I meant at home I'll have to starve. My wife and kids'll have to go without and maybe wear old clothes with patches."
    Father Willie felt like suggesting Spencer could make patches with some of the fourteen Italian suits which hung in his closet, when he sported a Lincoln blow the red light on Wilshire and Western. The Lincoln pulled