Free Fugitive Nights by Joseph Wambaugh

tennis whites, lounging by a pool that reflected a sparkle of sunbeams, framed by a backdrop of mocha desert hillside laced with purple verbeña. Enchantment.
    He’d decided he had to learn to play tennis for Claudia, so he’d signed up for five lessons a week. Those flat-bellied young pros used to run him down like process servers. He’d go out to the playground as soon as he got off duty and smack balls against a concrete wall until his elbow got so sore he couldn’t lift his arm higher than his shoulder. He’d later admitted to his pals that Claudia had him busting more balls than the Gabors, who also lived in Palm Springs, where they got a fleet discount on face-lifts.
    Lynn and Claudia had decided against having kids in that her paycheck was urgently needed if they were to live like deposed Iranians. In those days a relative of the shah had visited Palm Springs with her pet peacock and lost it. Lynn was one of the cops assigned to the peacock posse and he’d tracked the bird by listening to its Roseanne Barr screams. Peacock wrangling, that summarized Palm Springs for you, Lynn always said.
    But one day Claudia had returned from a flight and informed Lynn that she’d met somebody in Denver who’d “opened up new vistas” for her.
    He asked, “Is it okay for you to ball someone out of state? I mean, if it’s a different time zone is it still considered cheating? I’m just wondering.”
    Claudia answered by saying, “I hope you’ll be man enough to deal with this maturely.”
    Lynn said, “I’ll try to pinch off my tear ducts. Goodbye, Claudia.”
    He’d gone out and gotten hammered that night, relieved that he’d never again have to feed her Doberman, which she called her “DNA dog.” The little charmer had trained it to eat anyone with a nonwhite genetic code.
    His second ex-wife, Teddi: Now there was a woman nobody could figure out. She was about as understandable as acupuncture. On some days, her idea of a profound decision in life was whether or not to have her lug nuts chromed, but a day later, she’d drag him to a poetry reading at the University of California, Riverside, where some hairball who could make a rap group throw up would scream “poems” at them. As far as Lynn could discern, they were all about excrement, necrophilia, incest, rape, mayhem and vomit.
    Teddi had gotten positively moist at their last reading, when they were allowed to shake hands with a poet and buy an inscribed copy of his work, published by some vanity press in San Francisco. As the poet took Lynn’s bucks for the book, he asked whether Lynn had enjoyed the reading.
    Lynn said to him in front of thirty people, “Oh yeah, very tasteful. I never once heard you mention pus or vaginal discharge.”
    On the drive home to Palm Springs that night, Teddi told Lynn that she thought they lived in two different worlds, and that his was without “texture, subtlety or nuance.”
    â€œYou’re not ready to change for me,” she informed him that night.
    â€œI got cut for you,” he reminded her. “Your Siamese tomcat now has the only fully operating pair a balls in the house.”
    â€œYou only see things in black and white,” Teddi told him.
    â€œYou want Technicolor, you better hook up with Ted Turner,” he responded, long before the mogul’s merger with Jane Fonda.
    A highway patrol officer-cum-lawyer had handled that divorce, giving him a police discount. The lawyer told Lynn that he knew a doctor who would reverse the vasectomy if Lynn ever got married again.
    But Lynn had informed the lawyer that women were about as impenetrable as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that as a single man he was happy as a rutting rabbit, intending to stay that way forever.
    His “dates” in recent years usually began at The Furnace Room, but all relationships withered after a few weeks or months. Wilfred