Dirty Harry Comes for Thanksgiving Dinner

Story Number 16: Servitude Sagas Number 3

(Written 11/21/22 - 11/30/2022)

Today I was thinking about my upcoming dinner with my new, wonderful friend Madeline. We are planning a thankful-for-friendsgiving pot luck for our friends and I was reviewing what I will be contributing, when all of a sudden an image of Dirty Harry popped into my mind. “Oh yeah,” I thought excitedly, “It’s that time of year for me to watch my Dirty Harry movies!”

Now I know that when people think of Thanksgiving and the rest of the holidays, Dirty Harry is probably not the immediate go to for most people. I am sure Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer most often come to mind. Or for the more irreverent among us, the newer classics such as Christmas Vacation, Elf, and Bad Santa. No, admittedly, Dirty Harry movies are not considered a series of feel-good, heart-warming, cheerful holiday classics.

But me being me, this tradition, about eight years old, makes sense. When I was working for Snafu County Child Protective Services, I would feel much relief (well, some relief) when fall set in and November hit. This was a time of cooler weather and increased days off. I loathe the sun and the heat (being one of the rarer weirdos who has summer seasonal affective disorder). Being in the direct sun drains me and, as strange as this sounds, makes me feel oppressed and gives me migraines and nausea. Having to do investigations while standing in the blazing sun, with sweat dripping down the inside of my shirt, needing to be hyper-focused on all the details and be mindful of safety was very taxing. Even just going out in “the field” to do home visits in the heat and sun was draining. During the eight months from March through October there were only three, three-day weekends, unlike November through February, where we were blessed with many three- or even four-day weekends, and for me, the lovelier, cooler weather and rain (I LOVE rain). I often took vacation time during the fall, so this was a time of rest, though sadly usually not recuperation, but at least I was not at a job that was a cause of so much grief for me. If you are uninitiated to my woes, my job resulted in PTSD. So while I was not in the financial position to be able to quit my job (and I accepted that The Universe wanted me to work at CPS despite my plans to NEVER to that), having larger or more frequent amounts of time off was really a blessing; so hurray for the holiday season!!

Let me first tell you about how Dirty Harry has been a part of my life. Growing up, my parents would take me to see all kinds of movies. I had a liberal, rather unconventional upbringing and my parents didn’t really limit my exposure to much. There are times in my life when I wish they would have had more discretion and used better judgment, but my fallback is always to the place that the experiences I went through are ultimately what makes me, me. Being thrust into the adult world at a very early age has made me the tough, resilient, self-sufficient, independent, brave, take-no-shit, observant and wise person that I am. When the chips are down, I know I can always count on myself to get through things. Not unlike Harry Callahan, just a non-gun toting, female version of him. I saw the Dirty Harry movies in the theater when I was quite young, Dirty Harry at age 5, Magnum Force at age 7, and The Enforcer at age 10. I saw Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool with my friends as a teen. Then when VCRs came out, I rewatched all the movies and throughout my life I would occasionally watch the movies when I had a chance.

I was, and am, a fan for many reasons. I like the character, Harry Callahan. He is straight-forward, not flashy, tough as nails, calm, completely unexcitable and in charge of his reactions and responses; what you see is what you get. He is succinct and right-on in offering his opinion of a situation, which, I believe, involves the appropriate swear words, lightly growled out of his clenched teeth. He has restraint when necessary, but he is also going to let people, usually bureaucrats, know exactly what he is thinking. He fundamentally cares about his job and doing the right thing, and equally doesn’t give two shits about the sluggish, choking, irrational, kowtow- and ass-kiss-requiring bureaucracy and their stilted, stultifying rules that could be disconnected from the reality of the actual work. I also felt at home in Harry Callahan’s work place, San Francisco, as my father was raised there and we visited the area frequently and I lived in South San Francisco briefly. I never felt like a tourist; it was my place and the sweeping views of The City in the movies was enthralling and I knew every place that Harry travelled while he protected The City. And wow, do I love a good car chase scene! The soundtrack is also very good; the right combination of funky and dark; perfect to set the mood for the scenes.

Now where I appear to be digressing here is essential background in my deeper connection with Dirty Harry, so just bear with me. My cubicle at Snafu County was decorated in a way that made me comfortable, much to the consternation of the administration, who made snide, indirect comments about cubicles that looked like “shrines” and us lowly cubicle-inhabitants who deigned to break The Rule of having no more than six “personal items” in each cubicle. My thinking was that my job, which was rated as one of the most stressful of all jobs (up there with air-traffic control) needed some softening. I spent more of my waking time in my cubicle than I was at home and I deserved to feel comfortable in my cubicle while taking reports or preparing to investigate reports of people not feeding, not caring for, doing drug with, or beating, selling, or fucking their kids. How odd of me to think I would want to have comforting things around me while doing the most heart-rending, wretched, stressful work; but I do embrace that I am a bit of an oddball.

My coworkers loved my cubicle, with its lamps that had warm, full-spectrum lights (to help dull the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent lights above our desks), my salt lamp, emitting its negative ions for a positive atmosphere, plants, my tiny fountain, and all my visual accoutrements of happiness that included tiny statues, figurines, funny, colorful post cards, sea glass, seashells, meaningful doodads, and magnets with funny sayings or spiritual figures. I had St. Francis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Buddha, images of children from all cultures looking down upon me as I did my very difficult, sacred, important, soul-sucking work. I had picture of my cats. And yes, I did have more than six paltry “personal items” in my cubicle. We were behind locked doors and the public did not enter our work space. I had nothing offensive, unless Gandhi in his loincloth offends you.

If one cared to look closer they would have seen the tin shark with the partially-eaten surfer jutting from his mouth with the tiny, typed message I made that said, “CPS is eating my soul,” or the picture of the Great White Shark with the wide-eyed, tiny, vulnerable fish under it, with labels I made to indicate that CPS was the shark and I was the tiny fish. IF anyone cared to look. This all sounds like a lot, but my desk was among the top most organized, always uncluttered desks in the division. So all my necessary, comforting items did not get in the way of my work, but trust me, they enhanced fighting off the grimness of what I waded in every day just to do my job. In my cubicle, a bit off to the side, was a postcard that showed Dirty Harry with his .44 magnum. I couldn’t not have that in my cubicle, though I know that particular postcard could have been something that I was asked to remove. Ultimately, I was ethical and calm as I moved through my daily work, but as I often told my coworkers, my inner-Gandhi was in conflict with my inner-Dirty Harry, most especially as it came to dealing with the bureaucracy. I was even anointed by one of my mentees (love you Martin!!!) with the moniker “The Fuzzy Hammer,” and I am very proud of that label. I was kind and caring, but also firm and steadfast in my work with my clients. I was also not about bullshit, kowtowing, ass-kissing, cutting corners, lying or afraid to move around, as necessary, the inane, choking policy and procedure that was far removed from the daily reality of the actual work.

This is the postcard I had in my cubicle. Okay, admittedly, this was pushing the limits of “acceptable,” but I couldn’t NOT have it. St. Callahan, I pray to you for the courage to Do The Right Thing.
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I do have to say a bit about my penchant for magnets. No one in a supervisory or higher position ever came to me directly to talk to me about my more than six personal items, but in division or agency-wide meetings “we” were reminded that our cubicles “should not look like shrines,” which I know, based on my saints and spiritual items, was directed at me. However, I acted like the adult here and waited to see if someone would approach me, as should be done, to speak directly to me about any “concerns” regarding my cubicle. If that were to happen, I was already prepared to shove a ton of research in their face about the benefits of worker-decorated cubicles and how it reduces stress and increases productivity and, need be, my next stop would have been the union. No one did ever come to me and the comments stopped after an internal investigation was conducted by a hired outside agency into the circumstances surrounding a baby that died while involved in a voluntary case open with CPS. Us social workers, who blamed a supervisor for blocking us from taking the baby’s case to court to see if the baby should be placed into protective custody, held nothing back about our displeasure with how things were “managed” at CPS, talking about things beyond the dead baby case. During my interview I used the magic word of how “offended” I was that my cubicle was always referred in a roundabout way in group meetings as “a shrine.” The administration stopped talking about our cubicles after that and I never again heard the word “shrine.” A coup for me. Too bad a baby died, so a sad coup. And my cubicle was a shrine, to be sure. A shrine dedicated to the efforts of cutting through and shoveling away all the suffering of my clients, my coworkers and me. But when the administration said “shrine,” they meant it in a derogatory way, looking down their noses at us peons.

But I know our cubicles continued to be a source of irritation to our director, who considered our newly built building her legacy, and her hyper-focus on how things looked, the paint, the carpets, the furniture, her literally entering some people’s cubicles to remove push pins holding important papers from the noise-dampening interior walls of the cubicles, because we were instructed to not put push pins there—that is what drew her attention. Appearances were everything to the director, not the focus on what mattered, which, in my opinion, was the welfare of my clients and me and my coworkers. Because I know it was driving the director mad that I had so many “personal items" in my cubicle, it became my tradition every time I took a trip somewhere to get another magnet for my cubicle, just to piss off the director. And I will fully admit here, that while I needed all my funky, funny, cute, soul-supporting items in my cubicle to help me feel a bit less grim about the work I did, equally I stuffed my cubicle with these things precisely because I knew I was breaking The Rule and irritating the administration, especially The Director. This was one of my subtle ways of being subversive. It was more fun than stealing office supplies and a satisfying and classier, more controlled way of saying “fuck you” to the administration, and way better than going postal (though I fully understand how people can get to that point, I really do).

I am only digressing here to give a tiny piece of background on the biggest part of my CPS PTSD, what I call the bureaucratic trauma. The uncaring, beat you down, overload you, treat you as less than and as an expendable cog in the machine, non-sensical policy and procedure choking bureaucracy that is charged by various laws to ensure we are caring for the safety and well-being of innocent, vulnerable children. The bureaucracy who rarely, truly supported us in carrying out this work, who rarely acknowledged our own trauma or even the trauma of the children, and did not always abide by research and best practices, who tripped over their own inept, cold, over-inflated egos as they congratulated themselves on how great they were. My hat does go off, my arms do go around, and I bow deeply with tears of gratitude to a few of the supervisors and administrators who were very good at what they did and for how much they cared about the clients and us workers, and for the exceptional people they were. But to the rest of you supervisory and administrative assholes who made my life go beyond the brink of unbearable, fuck you.

What started in my childhood as being drawn to Harry Callahan as a solid, steady, bad-ass guy (hhhmm, what does THAT say about my childhood?) and exciting car chase scenes, became, as I endured a longer and longer CPS career, an almost saint-like reverence for Harry. Saint Mahatma Gandhi may have been keeping my mouth in check with my inner thoughts about the bureaucracy, but Saint Harry Callahan was captaining my mind, my resolve, and my shear determination to not be crushed by the bureaucracy and to move forward every day with integrity and perseverance for the most difficult of careers.

The best estimate I can give was that watching the Dirty Harry movies during the holidays became a yearly tradition for me around 2014. It was in February 2014 that the creep of PTSD really started to pick up its pace with some crushing, chronic anxiety, though I was not diagnosed until 2018. CPS works hard to normalize what to outsiders would be obvious crushing, debilitating, dangerous, scary situations and mental health symptoms. It was as if the administration was shrouding my PTSD in some form of cloaking device and serving it to me in small, but steady tidbits, all washed down with grape koolaid; and always saying “here, have some more.”

So in 2014 I was home, on vacation, during the holiday time and all the Dirty Harry movies were being shown on one of the cable networks, and sure, why not partake, I hadn’t seen them in a while and it would be nice to catch up with Harry Callahan. The perverse pleasure I got from watching the movies during this time of my life was unexpected. Every time Harry made a snide, cutting, but extremely accurate remark to a bureaucrat, I laughed and cackled loudly with glee, often rewatching scenes over and over as they brought me so much delight and relief. I also felt I could really relate to Harry doggedly pursuing the law-breakers and killers even though his safety and life was very much on the line; nothing deterred him in his drive to Do The Right Thing. I cheered and clapped my hands and reveled in the euphoria I felt as Harry verbally cut down a bureaucrat, or shot or rammed his car into a villain. I know this twisted level of exaltation I felt was an indication of all not being well with my mind and soul, but I needed to feel this relief, this relatedness, this oneness with this fictional folk character who wants to fix the world even though he is crushed on one side by his own employer and on his other side by the bad guys. Some women watch romantic movies and swoon over love fantasies. Some women watch heart-felt dramas about creating and building a family. This woman’s needs for redemption and control and triumphing over the crushing bureaucracy and evil, sick people is satiated by reveling in the deeds, actions, and swear-word spewing of Dirty Harry. And every year, during the holidays, I continued to need my fix of Inspector Callahan. And though now a retired CPS social worker, my forever-scarred soul needs the salve of St. Callahan to strangely feel normal in a crazy world.

I do have to laugh as I reflect while writing this that my master’s degree is not in Social Work, but in Criminal Justice. A large part of this is due to what I witnessed while working at the Santa Crazy County Children’s Shelter, being horrified by the statements and actions of the “professionals” and those working on or having their degrees in Social Work. I wanted no part of that, and what I witnessed was definitely the embryonic stirrings of my bureaucratic trauma. But I do wonder, if subconsciously, my exposure as a child to Dirty Harry isn’t a bit responsible for me obtaining my master’s in Criminal Justice.

This year as I have so far enjoyed The Dead Pool and Dirty Harry, I was keenly aware of laughing loudly at scenes that other people would probably be horrified about, especially when Harry runs over or shoots bad guys and clearly tells the bureaucrats what he thinks of them. If these movies were ever to be rereleased into theaters, I don’t think it would be wise to see them in the company of other people, “normal” people, because it would become quickly obvious that something is not quite right with me. I can see me, in the dark theater, enjoying my extra-buttered popcorn and soda, munching away, as I laugh often and boisterously at all the “wrong” places and probably utter swear words when the ego-driven, idiot bureaucrats appear on scene and demonstrate their ineptness with complete unawareness. I would be thoroughly enjoying my movie experience. The other patrons would not be enjoying the experience for fear of me; I can’t do that to others. I can see other theater patrons, getting up from their seats and moving away from this clearly disturbed woman and having thoughts of informing the management. I know I risk a lot by admitting to my dark, scarred side. But I know I am not the only one who has seen things and has heard uttered by tiny lips horrendous, unthinkable acts done to them, and in that context, I know my reactions are “normal.” Trauma reactions are, after all, normal (however disturbing) reactions to abnormal events.

I do give myself credit for having an enormous amount of restraint (thank you Saint Gandhi!) and not losing my shit when the vice that was both the bureaucracy and the horror of child abuse and neglect relentlessly squeezed me for nearly 17 years. I wonder if my PTSD would be less severe if I had had regular eruptions instead of keeping things mostly internalized. But eruptions are not my nature, so that is perhaps why I take such perverse pleasure in watching Dirty Harry take a more aggressive approach to his work.

If only I would have had the chance for this scene to play out:

**Perfect picture from Wonder. If Dirty Harry was a social worker.**

Bunny has just returned from an investigation where she single-handedly placed children into protective custody, being deputized to do that. She has to find the children foster homes and immediately do mounds of paperwork required for each child. Time is ticking on the 48-hour clock for her to appear in court with a petition and a detention report in hand and with all her investigative notes in order. Lunch is a wistful thought; she needs to pee. She is ignoring all the other pending court reports and home visits that also need her attention; the message light on her phone is flashing. She is trying not to think about all the 60 fully investigated and completed referrals that she still needs to enter into the computer system, some almost one year old. Bunny has a headache.

Enter the Administrator, who walks down the aisle towards Bunny’s cubicle, all prim in her Administrative tweedy skirt suit, sensible heels, her coiffed hair and her prefect, if a bit heavy, makeup —today is the day Bunny will be talked to about having more than six personal items in her cubicle.

The Administrator, with policy and procedure in hand. “No more than six personal items” is highlighted in harsh, asinine yellow. The Administrator, completely oblivious to what Bunny has just investigated and equally oblivious to the amount of pressure and the workload that Bunny faces, starts to talk about this Most Important Rule of cubicle contents.

For once, Saint Gandhi, takes a step back as he feels the rising volcanic pressure inside Bunny, and he bows deeply to Saint Callahan and with a sweeping motion of his arm, he indicates for Saint Callahan to come front and center. Harry Callahan is no longer just the engine that drives Bunny, he will now, for once, be her mouth piece. The Administrator, with that disdainful “you are merely the help” look on her face, opens her mouth to speak. Bunny raises her hand, palm out, directly in the face of the Administrator, indicating that she . . . should . . . not . . . speak.

Out of clinched teeth Bunny says to the Administrator, calmly but with hot ire under the surface, "I know what you’re thinking punk. You’re thinking ‘Does she have six items in her cubicle, or more than that?’ Now, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, and pressure, and nearly complete lack of support, I’ve forgotten myself exactly how many items I have in my cubicle. But being that I am one of the most dedicated, honest, ethical, hardworking, stressed-the-fuck-out social workers, who could, if pushed to unreasonable limits over the stupidest, most menial and least important policy in the world, potentially go postal on you, you've got to ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' . . . . Well, do ya, punk?"

If only.

Dirty Harry Comes for Thanksgiving Dinner

Seasonal Affective Disorder Sucks!

A preview and a mixed drink recipe: Get your suicidal social worker here!