Before you rests a wooden door sporting only a single blemish upon its infinitely flat surface. At the eye’s level of the door was a slot through which familiar, however always incredulous eyes would cast their judgmental gaze. Blocking that simple breach was a metallic door probably fitted with a small knob on the other side to slide it. The noises of the young and the restless emanate in troughs and ridges from the illuminated rim of the door. Like the hardheaded kid you are, both these things beckon you. In the back of your mind nags a small thought of remorse and a tinge of fear. As a riposte to your parents pleads, you've approached a place where people have both lived fast and died slow. Regardless, you squash flat such qualms with an assuring delusion, a hail mary and a hope for the best. Nowadays, in this rat race where instinct doesn't guide you and each fight is life or death, what else will? Filled are your ears with is the timbre of damp champagne glasses meeting one another to carelessly spill more of their bubbly contents, the bellows of both men and women laughing raucously at the stories of their friends and the soothing, although sardonically placating melody of the Big Band. All of these things and more are what you can only imagine to be behind the door. This is your first time after all. Though you are alone, standing nervously in the back alley completely oblivious to the rain accumulating in the depression of your rounded fedora, you feel surrounded by others. Strange as you’ve not yet even entered. Welcome and hello.

A darkly lit smile as mischievous as your plans for the night you'll probably have no remembrance of graces your lips finely as you crack your knuckles in child-like anticipation. With the second knuckle of your middle finger, you tap the door once at its center. From one of your birds on the street, you heard that the bartender is very, very particular about how his entrants knocked and for good reason. After the sound melts silently into myriad of noise beyond the door, something happens and in mere moments, your smile fades into a knot of uncertainty. Instinctively, your hand reaches for the gun sheltered calmly in your chest holster. The sound of a hammer extending it's mid-ranged sight onto your back calms your reflexes and eases you. After all, you've come this far, right? It was life or death now as it always was. As it always has been. The metallic slot just at your eye's level shoot open and at first you're blinded by the light from within. As your eyes gradually opened, they are met with a golden cascading haze that radiated with silken softness. Above the shoulder of the blonde staring red-eyed through his sunglasses, your vision caught the way of a black haired man. He was washing dishes while bathing in the spectrum cast by the various alcohols behind him. Your antsy smile returns dragging your lips into an inappropriate smile...business was still at hand. You were well reminded of this when the bartender at his post looked at you with those ghostly, effervescent lavender eyes you were warned of. P's & Q's now.

A few words are exchanged between you and the man who's eyes burned like magma. Oddly though, your hand had long fallen from the holster of your gun. As is lulled by the voice of the blonde, you focus onto his words with no thought at all. He asks for a password to which you oblige him with haste. "..." A few of the heads poking into view turned from the door, perhaps your only safeguard, to the bar where the slicked back, black-haired male resided. His questioning gaze narrowed, then with a sly grin to entice feelings of unease within you, his gaze fell to a spot on his cup. It wasn't going to clean itself now was it? The metallic slot closes on you leaving you to your thoughts and the breathing of a man much larger than you. As you wished, the seconds past and the sounds of the door's locking mechanism sprung to life. The noisy participants of the evening no sooner resumed their songs of woe, work, women that did them wrong and alcohol. The door was finally opened to you and it was just as heavenly as your friends described it. Your first step in this establishment and you knew it would cast forward moments that would become what you hope to one day call 'the good old days' later in life. That is of course if you're lucky enough to make it there. Enjoy yourself, my friend.


~~~


With doleful eyes, you stare tiredly downwards at the small stack of papers before you. Their fine prints, which there were many, many of, were illuminated somewhat..tauntingly. With frustration, you bellow a disdainful grunt before turning your eyes to the lamp's off switch. Plainly, just a single black bump. Perhaps an aesthetic choice to cut out the middle man that was moving your finger across that pac-man shaped, two sided, - and o. You never knew the correct name for it. Add a google search to the seemingly infinite list of things you will use to procrastinate as the night grows old. As it shines it's light down on your proverbial death sentences, paragraphs and transcripts you think of simply cutting it off. Breaking it even comes to mind. Maybe you could pretend it was an accident like many of the criminals stacked before you. At the end of your often recurring psychological showdowns with the desk lamp, you always remember just what brought you here. Simply ignoring these stacks of paper would equate you to the subjects within it. As a detective, you say, "It just wouldn't be right, would it?" And like the choir boy scout you are deep down inside, you get back to work with the unwavering fervor you had when you signed up five or six years ago. The difference now is that you're not literally buzzing with excitement but rather now still and trained left only with your coffee, badge, pictures of your family and your mandatory desklamp to sustain your consciousness. You loved this dreamed and you always have. You loved this job and you always will.

With the lasting reverberation of a rock thrown into a tin pail, the words of your child rang in your mind. "I want to be just like you when I grow up," was the popular phrase in the house now alongside, "Stopping bad guys must be cool..." If it weren't, there was no doubt that you wouldn't be sitting in your chair toiling into the night on paperwork that never ended. Your shirt, white, colorless and unbuttoned at the top hung as tiredly on your shoulders as your eyes did on your face. Still, your smile didn't fade or crack. As you're reminded by the pictures of your family that you now live to serve and protect, you're reminded of the grim, uncut truth of it all by the bottle of pills next to you. Round and white, they have your name on it. They are yours and yours alone and you are not to share them with anyone...or that's what the bottle implied with language far more technical than you cared for. If it would put your job in peril to give out these millimeters of...miracles...then you wouldn't. At the end of the day, it was just another order handed to you by the higher ups. By this point in your career, you were next to programmed as each command went through you with no question or concern. Only your home that you rarely got to see thanks to the busy slums, calls from your family and the long, oft not remembered weekends with your co-workers protected your patience. As you've been told time and time again, there is a silver lining to every dark cloud. Shaking the cylinder of secrets, your forte, drug control and apprehension, now seemed like a joke. Your brow shifts in disbelief. It was this little orange bottle that made you exactly who you are and there wasn't much escaping that fact. The streets of the New York had evolved quite substantially over the years thanks to a few unprecedented advancements in medicine and science...things you knew enough about to answer a few questions on the seven o'clock quiz show. You were no master of the subject. Naturally however, the urchins whose lives were embedded in those streets evolved with it. It was to that extent that you gave a damn about the complications of these advancements set forth by the eggheads across the way. Rubbing your brow, you set your thoughtfully drifting gaze onto the dim light glimmering off the plastic of your pen. Your work is not yet over. Your daily report might take hours to complete and it only nine. Protecting your child from the bad guys might suffice for missing yet another bed-time story...