“The Wagon and Other Tales From the City”
By Martin Preib
University of Chicago Press, $20, 176 pages
The darkness pervading the title essay of Martin Preib’s new collection of stories, “The Wagon and Other Tales From the City,” is rooted in an exploration of death and loneliness seen through the eyes of a writer who is also a Chicago police officer assigned to haul dead bodies to the morgue.
The essay, which first gained Preib literary attention when it was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review a few years ago, lends a lyrical voice to the grimmest angles of Chicago, the harsher world that police officers see every day.
While the police officer in the title essay is a rookie learning the ropes, years later, Preib’s experiences on the street produced “Essential Services,” another powerful but dark piece rooted in the hostility and alienation felt by officers who suspect the public does not revere, or even respect, the work they do. The essay articulates this anger among the rank and file, intertwined with Preib’s own story.
Sitting at a coffee shop in Lakeview recently, 46-year-old Preib, who joined the department just eight years ago, painted a picture in which the public is more suspicious of the police than of the criminals they pursue. In this view, the media is often quick to turn the tables on who is the villain and who is the victim. Preib takes the issue very personally. In fact, when the conversation lingered on whether the police are fairly portrayed in the media, Preib ended the interview abruptly.
The essay details affronts and outrages, for example, the oppression police feel when the city decides put cameras in squad cars to record officers’ every action and word. To Preib, the cameras are a symptom of the disrespect and condemnation with which the city views the police.
In a series of compelling anecdotes about training a new partner Preib describes a fracturing of his city, with police officers on one side and nearly everyone else across the divide.
“Essential Services” traces the twists and turns of Preib’s path in life. “All I wanted to do was read literature,” Preib reflected on his life in the interview. “I’m not a big believer in formal education.”
Born in Evanston but raised in an affluent Detroit suburb, Preib spent a good deal of his adult life feeling conflicted and lost, frustrated in his attempts to express himself on the page. He was obsessed with literature, though he attended five colleges before earning a bachelor’s degree. He dealt with the disapproval of his father, chafing at the rules of his middle-class upbringing. After college, Preib worked a decade as a hotel doorman — with all of the indignities and insights that came with that job ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿ ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿ ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿ briefly venturing into the politics of the hotel workers union.
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“Being a doorman was a formative experience. Very illuminating,” he said. “It was a wonderful way to connect to the city. I loved talking to people. Talking to cops.”
A sense of shame about the job, and health care concerns eventually prompted him to look for a job with benefits in his late 30s. A police acquaintance he met said he ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿ ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿ ‘ ” ‘ ‘ ¿d make a good cop. In the police department he found a sense of community, as well as the writing voice and subject matter that had eluded him for years.
But the competing strains of his life feed a sense of alienation. As a writer of growing esteem as well as a police officer still working the streets, Preib straddles two very different worlds, often uncomfortably. In “Essential Services” the act of putting cameras in police cars is a metaphor for all of the pressure and unfairness officers feel. He takes the metaphor further by ascribing the affront to a faceless group of decision makers he calls “the camera people”:
“I am met with hostility at dinner parties and barbecues with friends allying themselves with the camera people, and I often make excuses to leave early, sensing my increasing desire to recede from the gatherings of my professional friends.”
Later in the same passage, he defines this divide in part as the ignorance of the “uninitiated” who have no idea of the level of everyday mayhem in Chicago’s poorest and crime-ridden neighborhoods.