NO EMERGENCY!


By Ed King


Every Friday evening in the summer of 1972 my buddy Munchy and I would work our way up the East Side of Manhattan from 42nd Street to 59th Street and Third Avenue. We were street peddlers and we carried with us our little folding tables and old-fashioned suitcases filled with our wares.

“Handmade Moroccan sheepskin wallets!” we would shout out when we stopped and set up on a corner that looked like it might produce some paying customers. We had to keep moving because the New York police were under strict orders to chase and harass and ticket any unlicensed peddlers they could catch (and there were a lot of us). There were licenses available, but they restricted the holder of the license to selling in areas where there were not any customers, like 12th Avenue near the West Side piers, where the only people you'd be likely to run into would be drug dealers and pimps.) Not like 42nd Street and Third, where the secretaries would pour out of the skyscrapers at lunchtime, and the tourists would stream from Grand Central Terminal on their way to the UN Building on First Avenue. Or 59th Street, our last stop of the day, where people coming off the subway from Brooklyn and Queens were lined up at the first-run movie theaters on Third Avenue.

Our Friday nights in front of the movie theaters were more like big parties than actual work. Everyone was in a good mood at the start of the weekend, and in a spending mood. Before we would set up our stands, we would sit outside at the Greek restaurant on the corner and have a gyro and a beer and get in the mood for a fun (and profitable) evening.

This one particular evening, the movie playing was 'A Clockwork Orange', the dystopian English film directed by Stanley Kubrick.
“Hey, get your handmade Moroccan sheepskin wallets!” we were shouting out in our mock British accents, adding to the festive mood of the evening. We were really hitting our stride and the crowds coming in and out of the theaters were enjoying the show. Then, out of nowhere, a New York City policeman pulled up quietly behind us – on a motor scooter.

“OK, let's see some ID,” he instructed us. We'd been stopped and ticketed many times since peddling season began in the spring, and were well-accustomed to the routine. We would supply an ID (something without an address on it like a draft card), the cop would ask if we had anything with an address on it and we would say 'no' and give him a fake address so we couldn't be tracked when they came looking for us for not paying the tickets. We usually got one or two tickets, 'Peddling Without A License' and 'Peddling in a Restricted Area' were the most popular ones. But this motor scooter cop must have been in a bad mood or maybe he thought we were just wise guys (which we sorta were), because he just kept writing those tickets until Munchy and I each had about half a dozen of them.

'Obstructing the Sidewalk', 'Loitering', 'Peddling within Twenty Feet of a Crosswalk', 'Failure to Collect Sales Tax'...the tickets just kept on coming. While the officer was writing tickets, more of a crowd was gathering around us. Some of them started heckling the cop.
“Leave them alone! They're not doing anything!” someone shouted.
“Stop hassling them!” someone else called out. Munchy and I, with our long hair and generally disheveled appearance, were the perfect victims of perceived police harassment. The whole scene was turning into street theater.
“Move on, move on!” the cop warned the growing crowd.
“Move on, move on!” a woman with a Brooklyn accent at the front of the crowd taunted him.

The cop, feeling increasingly overwhelmed, finished writing up our summonses and told us to clear out.
“I don't want to see you here again tonight or I'm taking you in,” he warned us. We took the tickets and started walking to the corner, as the crowd refocused on the Friday night movies. We started walking down 59th Street toward Second Avenue, bummed out that the cop had ruined our Friday night gig. But as we turned onto Second Avenue, we began to think that the scooter cop was probably already far enough away and unlikely to circle back and check up on us, and we decided to walk back up to Third Avenue and get back to our Friday night business as usual.

“Handmade Moroccan sheepskin wallets!” we cried out from the sidewalk's edge in our British-Queens accents. The party was back on, business was good, and everybody was having fun. It was a good way to finish the long day and start a promising weekend. Then, we heard a voice coming from behind us.
“I thought I told you guys I didn't want to see you again tonight,” said the cop as he pulled his scooter up to the curb. “Now, I'm taking you in!”
Going in to the precinct was no big deal. Not like we were going to be in some kind of real trouble or anything. More of just a hassle, really. And probably a few more tickets. Actually, they would be doing us a favor in a way since the police precinct was closer to our house and we wouldn't have to walk as far to get home. But business would be over for the night.
“C'mon give us a break,” we tried arguing with the cop. As we did, the crowd started growing again around us. They were louder and more boisterous than before and more in a Friday night party mode.
“Leave them alone!” they yelled at the cop. “Go arrest some REAL criminals!”
“Move on, move on!” he warned them.

The cop couldn't take us into the precinct on his scooter, of course, with our suitcases and folding tables and all. And so, as the crowd jeered him, he got on his walkie-talkie to request a squad car come and haul us and all our paraphernalia to the station. (There were no cell phones at the time, and communication was still pretty primitive.)
“Officer request assistance. Fifty-ninth and Third,” he shouted into the walkie-talkie over the noisy crowd. “NO emergency!”
It was only moments before we could hear police sirens racing toward us on 59th Street from Lexington Avenue. Then the flashing lights of another police car appeared from around the corner on 60th Street and came screaming against traffic down Third Avenue.
“NO EMERGENCY! NO EMERGENCY!!” the scooter cop was yelling into his walkie-talkie. But it was too late. New York City Mobile Units were rushing to the scene as fast and as loud as they could get there. They were coming from every direction, sirens blaring, lights flashing, tires screeching. The first ones to jump out of their vehicles, ready to draw their weapons, were a bit taken aback at the sight of the lone scooter cop, with the two ragged street peddlers, amidst the roaring, screaming, laughing crowd of would-be theater-goers.
“I said 'NO emergency',” the scooter cop tried to explain. But his primitive technology had let him down.

“Emergency! Emergency!” was the pleading call that was heard at the other end. The responding officers were trying hard to contain their anger. It was almost as if a trap had been set and they rode right into it in high gear.

Well, everybody soon sorted out that it wasn't the big emergency they had been led to believe. All the police cars resumed their regular patrols. One of them loaded me and Munchy and our gear into the back of his car and took us to the station, where the scooter cop tried to trick us (unsuccessfully) into giving him our real addresses. Then he wrote us up a few more tickets and kicked us out of the station house. It was a long night for everybody.

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