My radio crackles. Dispatch calling units to a fender bender at an intersection. Two vehicles, no injuries, blocking the right lane. Unit 14 takes it. He’s welcome to it. Fenderbenders this weekend are their own special hell because at least one of the vehicles is a restored classic and the owner is going to react to a dented quarter panel like you just told him his mother died.
I check the clock.Six-thirty. I’m off at eight. Ninety minutes and then I’m out of this uniform and into Tex’s lot. There’ll be a plate of ribs, a cold beer and a stool at the bar where nobody needs anything from me. I can sit there and be a normal person for a while.
That’s all I want tonight.
I pull my phone out at a red light and text Tex.
Mickey:Save me a plate. Off at 8. If you let Sheila give away my ribs I’m running your plates for fun.
Tex:Your ribs are safe. Sheila says if you’re late she’s eating them herself.
Mickey:Sheila doesn’t eat. She survives on sweet tea and the fear of others.
Tex:I’ll tell her you said that.
Mickey:You will not.
Tex:Already walking towards her.
Mickey:TEX. Do not.
No response.
The light turns green. I roll forward another hundred yards and stop again behind a lifted F-250 with a set of truck nuts swinging from the trailer hitch. I’ve been a cop for nine years and I still haven’t figured out who these are for. Whois the target audience for rubber testicles on a truck? Who is driving behind this vehicle going, you know what, that’s a strong aesthetic choice, I respect the commitment to genital accessories. The answer is nobody. And yet they persist.
A ‘68 Mustang fastback rolls past me in the left lane. Highland Green. The driver is an older guy, maybe seventy, white hair, arm out the window, driving like he’s got nowhere to be and all night to get there. He catches my eye through the cruiser window and gives me a nod. I nod back.
That car is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all week. I include in that assessment the guy I met for coffee on Tuesday. He was nice enough until he found out I was a cop, at which point he spent the rest of the date trying to figure out if I was the one who’d arrested his cousin in 2019.
It’s hard to build a romantic spark when you’re being treated like a deposition. I didn’t even finish my latte before I excused myself to go back to a life that made sense.
It’s another night in the romantic paradise that is the Florida Panhandle for a gay cop who’s exhausted every option within a fifty-mile radius. The dating pool here isn’t a pool. It’s a puddle that dries up in the fall and refills with tourists in the spring. I stopped looking for anything real a couple years ago.
A Dodge Charger catches my eye. Black. Tinted windows. Alabama plates. It’s parked in the Mini-Golf lot and there are two guys standing around it drinking out of a cooler in the trunk. They’re not watching the cars. They’re watching the crowd. Loud, animated. They’re all wearing matching T-shirts.
I clock them and keep moving. Two guys drinking in a lot on a busy weekend isn’t a crime. Still, I note the plate automatically. Faces, plates, exits, who’s watching what instead of what they’re supposed to be watching. Most of the time it means nothing. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The crowds do this to me. The constant tension of being responsible for the safety of crowds of people who are actively making unsafe choices.
My best friend, Tex, doesn’t understand this. He thinks I worry too much. He’s probably right. Tex runs toward danger first and figures the rest out later. I’m usually the one trying to make sure it doesn’t get that far.
We’ve been balancing each other out since seventh grade when he punched a kid who was twice my size for calling me a name I’d already learned to expect. I talked the principal out of suspending him by presenting what I called “mitigating circumstances” and what was actually just me crying in the office until the secretary felt sorry for us both. We were twelve. He was already six feet tall and I was already figuring out how to work a system. Tex runs in hot and I clean up after.
The sun’s getting low through the windshield, dropping toward the Gulf, turning the sky the color of peach cobbler. Which makes me hungry for actual peach cobbler. I made one three days ago and ate the entire thing myself while watching a true crime documentary. Another exciting night at home for a gay cop.
I like my life though. I like this town. The Gulf and the humidity, Tex ten minutes away and my parents fifteen. It would just be nice to have someone to like it with.
The traffic thins slightly as the sun drops lower and the crowd starts migrating from the strip to the bars. The main rush will be the next two hours. Every beachfront bar from here to Pier Park will be standing room only.
Tex’s will be packed with the regular crowd plus overflow. It’ll be loud and full. Sheila will be running the bar like a general, Tex will be at the smoker and Stormy will be in the kitchen so locked into the work that you could detonate a bomb next to him and he’d plate the food first.
I love that bar. I’ve been going there since before it was Tex’s, when it was his dad’s place and I was seventeen. His dad let me sit at the bar and drink Cokes and pretend I was old enough to be there.
Seven forty-one. Nineteen minutes left on my shift. Christ, this has been a long day.
I take the last slow pass down Front Beach. The sun is almost gone now, just a sliver of orange sitting on the water. The lawn chair people are packing up. The cars are thinning out, heading for the bars. The road is opening back up.
I roll the window down. The air smells like exhaust and charcoal from a dozen grills running at once along the strip.
