Joseph Wambaugh - The Onion Field

JOSEPH WAMBAUGH worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for fourteen years before turning to writing full-time. He is the author of seventeen books, and he lives in southern California.

T he night in the onion field was a Saturday night. Saturday meant impossible traffic in Hollywood so felony car officers did a good deal of their best work on side streets off Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. On those side streets, revelers cars were clouted or stolen. F-cars also cruised the more remote commercial areas, away from intersections where traffic snarled, and the streets undulated with out-of-towners, roaming groups of juveniles, fruit hustlers, desperate homosexuals, con men, sailors, marines.

Nothing the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said could camouflage the very obvious dangers to tourists on those teeming streets. Most of the famous clubs had closed, the others were closing, and Hollywood was being left to the street people. The swells of the forties and early fifties had all but abandoned downtown Hollywood and were gradually surrendering the entire Sunset Strip, at least at night.

In spite of it all, Hollywood Division was a good place for police work. It was busy and exciting in the way that is unique to police experiencethe unpredictable lurked. Ian Campbell believed that what most policemen shared was an abhorrence of the predictable, a distaste for the foreseeable experiences of working life. It wasn't what the misinformed often wrote, that they were danger lovers. Race drivers were danger lovers. That's why, after Ian and his old friend Wayne Ferber had crashed a sports car several years before, he had given up racing, though he would never give up police work.

He felt that the job was not particularly hazardous physically but was incredibly hazardous emotionally and too often led to divorce, alcoholism, and suicide. No, policemen were not danger lovers, they were seekers of the awesome, the incredible, even the unspeakable in human experience. Never mind whether they could interpret, never mind if it was potentially hazardous to the soul. To be there was the thing.

Karl Hettinger was newly assigned to felony cars and Ian was breaking him in. The partnership had jelled almost at once.

You were in the marine corps too? Ian asked, during the monotonous first night of plainclothes felony car patrol.

Communications. Karl nodded.

Really? So was I, Ian said, flickering his headlights at a truck coming onto Santa Monica from the freeway.

The voice with a smile, Karl said, and they both grinned and made the first step toward a compatible partnership.

Each man learned after two nights together that the other was unobtrusive and quiet, Ian the more quiet, Karl the more unobtrusive, but a dry wit. It would take two men like these longer to learn the habits and tastes of the other, but once learned, the partnership could result in satisfying working rapport. There is nothing more important to a patrol officer than the partner with whom he will share more waking hours than with a wife, upon whom he is to depend more than a man should, with whom he will share the ugliness and tedium, the humor and the wonder.

You dropped out of college in your final semester? asked Ian during their third night. So did I. What were you majoring in?

'Agriculture, beer, and poker, not in that order, said Karl, who was driving tonight, a slow and cautious driver who now wore glasses at night, finding he had some trouble reading license plates.

I was in zoology and pre-med. Looks like we're both out of our elements.

I'm taking police science courses now, said Karl.

So am I, said Ian. You must know something about trees, don't you?

Probably not as much as I should, said Karl. An ag major has to know a little bit about tree and plant identification.

I'm really involved in trees now, Ian said, becoming unusually garrulous as he always did when something interested him. I'm landscaping my house, or trying to. You know anything about fruitless mulberry?

Not much.

Well, it grows big and wide and fast. Instant shade. I like that. I get impatient waiting for things.

You have to be patient to make things grow.

Sometimes I think that's why I'm a policeman, said Ian. Not patient enough. Antsy my wife calls me. I guess I just have to be free and moving around.

I don't know why I'm a policeman, said Karl. It just happened. But I like it. I couldn't have a job where I was closed up inside four walls and a roof. That's the latent farmer in me.

The best thing is that no matter how boring things get, like tonight for instance, something might be right around the corner. A little action I mean, said Ian.

Karl touched his cotton shirt, open at the throat, and the threadbare sport coat. I'm glad not to go back to uniform.

One thing to remember is that all those working hours you spent in patrol refereeing family beefs and writing tickets and taking reportswe'll use all that time in felony cars for one thing: to find serious crime on the street. You're bound to run up against a hot one once in a while. You just have to be a little more careful working this detail.

Don't worry I will. Karl nodded. By the way, you ever cruise around behind the bar up here on McCadden? In the parking lot?

Parking lot? Don't think I know it.

You just go north on McCadden from Sunset till you smell it, then go east till you step in it. It's like a zombies convention back there. When I worked vice I used to see a lot of activity at night. Probably hypes more than anything.

Let's check it out tonight, said Ian, pleased to see that his new partner was energetic. Good police work made time race.

Hey look at that, said Ian on their fifth night, slowing as they passed a wooded acre in front of a white Spanish colonial home on Laurel Canyon. It was a balmy evening because the warm Santa Ana winds were blowing, and the canyon was a respite from the Hollywood traffic.

Whadda you see? Karl asked, twisting abruptly in his seat, tensing for a moment, as he peered through the smoky darkness in the woodsy residential valley.

Liquid amber, Ian said, admiring the foliage almost hidden by tall shaggy eucalyptus. You should see them in the fall. They change colors like flames. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Karl shook his head and grinned.

Ian Campbell never noticed the grin. He watched the trees. The eucalyptus reminded him of a park in the heart of the city where the smell of tar filled the air and had once ignited a boy's imagination.

Ian had been a bookish romantic youngster a dreamer his mother called himand even as a high school senior, loved to dawdle for hours by the pits and stare into the tar until he vividly imagined great Pleistocene creatures there.