Sashay Chantay

 

The first day at police academy is always rough. The initial jockeying to establish a pecking order makes every interaction a power struggle. No one is exempt, and even the tone or inflection of a hello can determine where one shakes out. Who makes eye contact or breaks it first can signal one's role as an alpha or beta. He (or she) who can dish out the cruelest barbs is usually determined to be the the leader.

I'd been there exactly ten minutes when I got first ribbing. Of course, I'd also arrived late, so I had to run the gauntlet of cadets who were already in their places.

"That's a lovely color of lipstick, cadet," one sophomore cadet teased.

Wondering what the comment was about, I went into the washroom and was shocked to find that my lips were indeed a very bright shade of hot pink. Rather appealingly full and pouty lips, I thought to myself, however incongruous they might have been, placed on the rugged terrain of my stern and manly face. I rubbed them with a paper towel, and some of the pigment came off on the tissue. 

I wondered how it had gotten there. I seemed to remember someone pulling me aside and giving me one of those shocking Bugs Bunny style kisses the night before. It had been at a pre-academy bash, a last hurrah before training day, and one of the more flagrantly gay cadets had singled me out for the drive by smooching. I hadn't minded. All in good fun, I supposed.

The lipstick pigment remained, however, no matter how much I tried to wash it off. I realized that I was just going to be stuck with a mouth that looked like I'd been necking with a hooker, so I tried to play it off like it was intentional. Leaving the restroom, I walked past the cadet who was working reception, the one who had teased me earlier, and did a little sashay, affecting a swishy gait for the occasion. 

I found my seat in the training hall. It was a big white room with cheap molded plastic chairs and a blackboard at the front of the room. I'd been there less than a minute when I was approached by one of the staff. 

"You're going to have to come with me, cadet," the burly uniformed officer said. "There's been a complaint about you filed with HR."

"If it's about the lipstick, I can explain," I said.

"No," he said, "this is a much more serious matter."

He led me to an office where another cadet was seated in one of those cheap plastic chairs. She was a rather attractive black girl of about 25 or so, with short, lightly tinted orange hair. She was wearing a sundress, and she was smiling and joking with a couple of other cadets in the office. When she saw me, her demeanor changed.

"That's him!" she cried. "He was the one who tried to choke me." She put her hands up to her neck in a Strangelovian, self-choking gesture.

"I certainly did not!" I exclaimed. "I would never!"

It didn't matter. The incident was going to be reported, and it would be in my file forever. Assaulting a fellow cadet, a black female no less, racist and sexist allegations would most likely ensue and dog me for my entire career. I couldn't let this stand, but I couldn't fight it, either. I waited around in the office for a while, but no one ever came to interview me, so I left to return to the training hall.

I wasn't able to find the training hall, however. I wound up stuck in a long hallway that had a conveyor belt walkway system. It wasn't the traditional type, where one stands on a rubber belt. It was more like a ski-lift, the kind where one is dragged along by holding onto nylon ropes. Instead of snow skiing up a hill, one was propelled down the hallway by skidding across the smooth polished linoleum floors. At least that's how I thought it was supposed to work.

The belts were a nylon mesh, about 4 inches wide. The top belt was moving in one direction, and one would hold onto it to travel in that direction. The bottom belt was on the floor and seemed to be moving at twice the speed of the top, in the opposite direction. I accidentally stepped on the floor belt and was hurtled back to the beginning of the line and unceremoniously flung against the wall. 

I decided I'd had enough for the time being and left the academy to go to K-Mart. I didn't really have any shopping to do. I was supposed to be at the academy, but I couldn't bring myself to get back in that line on the conveyor belt, or return to the HR office to face the charges against me. 

I looked at my watch and it had gotten very late. K-Mart would be closing soon. I realized that my window of opportunity at the academy was closing, if it hadn't indeed already closed. It was 6:30 PM, and I was all out of options. 

Luckily for me, I woke up, and that was that. I hit the eject button, and joined the land of the living, or semi-living, at any rate. My lady friend is fast asleep, and even the cats aren't moving from their warm beds. Why I am here, retelling this uneventful dream drama, is beyond me.