“Ain’t Talkin’ To No Law”

The drunk was staggering around the parking lot of the old Frontier Club, yelling, cussing, waving a knife.  His outfit was dapper enough.  Saturday night “going to town” clothes.  Clean, almost new Levis, white shirt, open collar, clean shaven, hair pomaded and combed although right then it was sticking out on one side. The man was what we used to call “whiskey drunk.”  

A crowd had gathered on the side of the road, prudently keeping well back from the flashing knife.   I was watching from the Nickel’s Pay Less parking lot across the road.  I had started working at the store at age 11, sweeping the parking lot in the hours before sunup. By this time, I was a teenager, working inside the store, bagging groceries, and carrying them out to customer’s cars.  After placing some bags in the back seat of Mrs. Wilson’s ’53 Ford, I paused on the way back into the store and stood there in my apron taking in the show.

The sight of a man mean-drunk on cheap whiskey spoiling for a fight, was not exactly foreign to many of us. 

I won’t confirm or deny the drunk was a relative.  Let’s just say I was familiar with him and wasn’t surprised by what he was doing.

It wasn’t long before a siren sounded in the distance and in a couple of minutes a police car arrived and as the onlookers parted, the car pulled right up in the middle of the parking lot in front of the drunk.  

One of Farmersville’s new policemen got out of his car, leaving the door open and the lights on.  He was big man.  Not large in the sense of a yard wide chest and bulging biceps developed in a gym, enhanced by supplements.  He was just big and brawny, from spending his youth, like many others in our town, working in the fields and tossing hay bales.   Big shoulders, large belly, shirt too small at the neck to be buttoned.

The big cop never pulled his gun.  He spent no time attempting to “de-escalate.” He moved quickly and purposely right up to the drunk who had raised the knife as if he intended to stab or slash anyone who dared to come near.  The officer grabbed the hand with the knife in a vice grip and with his other fist smashed the drunk directly in the face.  I could, from across the street, see his face collapse inward with the blow. 

The drunk was out cold. The knife had dropped from his hand.  The cop still holding him by the arm dragged him over to back of the patrol car, opened the back door and slung him inside.  He slammed the door.  He got back in the driver’s seat, reengaged the siren and sped off to the county jail.

We all went about our business.  I will say, I had it on good authority from a deputy sheriff assigned to the jail, (who also may or may not have also been a relative), that upon asking the drunk what he did to get himself beat up and thrown in jail, the drunk sheepishly described what his acts and agreed he got what he deserved that day.  The man accepted the consequences, served his 30 days without complaint, and for the hundredth time swore off drinking so much whiskey on a Saturday night.

Farmersville is one of the oldest towns in Tulare County, having been in existence since 1866. However, it was only incorporated in late 1960.  There were many reasons it took so long. Some had to do with small town politics, other reasons flowed from a prideful orneriness of the residents.  A significant factor in favor of moving forward was that incorporation brings to a new city the power to form a police department. 

Farmersville in those years had a well-deserved reputation for being a tough place. If getting in a fight was what one craved, one could find one there.  It wasn’t unheard of for groups from other towns to meet for that specific purpose in Farmersville.  They loaded up and drove over from Visalia or Porterville to battle it out in the parking lot of one of the many bars or on one of its backstreets.   It some respects, at least as to fighting, Farmersville was an outpost of lawlessness. 

Those who didn’t want the town to become a city, didn’t give up easily.  The new city struggled throughout the sixties to get its footing and barely survived a move to disincorporate late in the decade.   But the movement was turned back, and Farmersville’s first Police Department was organized.

Because I knew most of the new police officers and their families, I can say that during those early years there was not a great deal of difference between the types of men who put on the badge and those who they were called on to police.  The cops were tough men. They had to be.  

The new officers could handle themselves in a fight. Long before they took the oath, they had plenty of experience in fighting other men. Some with weapons, some with fists and boots and teeth.  They knew not only how to defend themselves, but how to beat their opponent, how to put them on the ground in a such a fashion they had little appetite for getting up to continue the fight.  And for that reason, the new officers didn’t buckle under the stress of physical conflict; they weren’t paralyzed by fear when it became apparent that force was going to be needed to subdue some mean stubborn man, hopped up on whiskey or anything else. 

Legislators, holding press conferences self-righteously announcing new restrictions on police officer’s use of force, have never had to wrestle an adult male who is determined to fight. It is difficult and frightful and cops like soldiers feel fear like everyone else.  But their experience equips them to handle the situation. In the sixties and seventies, many soldiers coming home from combat zones overseas chose careers in law enforcement.  They knew how to handle themselves.  Because they did, it was striking how seldom they resorted to the use of guns during the years they worked the streets. The suspect may have ended up with a broken nose, or a sore noggin.  But they survived.

It took tough guys to enforce the law.  But it was enforced. And because it was, there was order in the community.  Even in that environment, with no advantages of any kind, with no tax base, no special programs, kids could grow up and excel, old people could walk the streets unmolested, families could live their lives in relative safety.  There might be fights, but bullies and thugs didn’t hold sway.

Not that there weren’t those who, just like now, didn’t like cops and resented their authority.  There was an undercurrent of intense dislike for what this element referred to as “The Law.”  Depending on where people came from, they retained certain biases born in the back woods and hills of Arkansas, Kentucky, or Tennessee.  They resented “The Law” and saw them as an implacable enemy.  They respected them, feared them, but there was an animosity born of family experiences back in the hills of Appalachia, some of it, I’m sure, the result of still remembered raids on illegal liquor operations.

I once came out of the Store after my shift to see the side of the my ‘55 chevy (my pride and joy) caved in. Some folks lolling lazily in some beat up chairs out front of run down one-room “apartments” across a side street hollered at me.  It had been long rumored although I vehemently denied it then, and now, that they too were relatives of mine. They shouted, “Hey Cline, we seen who done it.”  Without bothering to get up from their chairs, they lounged there, lazy and smug, and said they saw what happened and who did it. They even called out the name.  

By then in my mid-teens, I figured I knew the proper thing was to do in that situation.  I said I would call the police so they could report what they observed to the authorities. The group, two men and a woman, shook their heads from side to side.  One of them, the woman, spit out the side of her mouth an emphatic declaration, “We ain’t talkin” to no Law.” 

Nothing I could say to them would change their mind.  

When I told my dad what was said (and who it was who said it) he just chuckled, got out his Prince Albert can and his papers, rolled a cigarette, licking the brown paper to hold it together and, as he struck a wooden match, told me, “Son, you got a job; you got your own money, best you get that car down to the body shop and get your fender fixed.”  

I did.  I paid my own money to get my fender replaced.  Lesson learned.

But the way they said they wouldn’t talk with “No Law” stuck with me for many years.  It is said, Fate has a consistent sense of irony. Within a couple of decades my career developed to the point where I became in their words “The Law.” 

I never forgot that as hard as one tries to establish trust in the people you are sworn to serve, there were always going to be those who weren’t going to want anything to do with “No Law.”

Farmersville Tales is published Sundays.  For more writings by Phil Cline, visit philcline. com