An excellent essay by Chicago Police Officer Martin Preib in Chicago’s Newcity.
The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago: We find them in basements, laundry rooms, on floors next to couches, sticking out of two parked cars or shrubs next to the sidewalk. It is more than gravity that pulls them down, for in every dead body there is something more willfully downward: the lowest possible place, the head sunken into the chest and turned toward the floor.
I have smelled the smell of death. It is bad. And there was one call I never had in my brief time on the streets: a really stinky dripping leaking ripe DOA. It’s a call I’m happy to have missed.
The essay is from the just published The Wagon and Other Stories from the City by the University of Chicago Press. I’m happy to see more academic presses, U of C in particular, to be publishing more cop related books. I just ordered it from Amazon.
[Thanks to Mayor Irish Pirate for the link]
That is one hell of a good piece of writing. I look forward to reading the book.
As for my Mayoral candidacy based on certain events involving cheerleaders in my past I probably should reconsider.
We just had the Democratic nominee for Lt Governor forced out because he allegedly enjoyed spending quality time with hookers, drug abuse, and physical violence
I just can't top that so why run?
Now if I were a family values, drug war, Republican I might run. Then I would likely have some really twisted stuff in my past.
Good piece of writing, but I can tell this guy is a cop and not a paramedic.
If it were the other way around it would start: "The dead, especially the morbidly obese, seek the highest and most inconvenient places to die: We find them in their third floor half bath, wedged between the toilet and the closed door…"