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The Choirboys

 

            
            
             The Choirboys is a very raunchy, tell-it-like-it-is book concerning ten fellow officers who belong to the Wilshire Police Station and have after-hour rendezvous in MacArthur Park. These sessions were called choir practices. It was merely an off-duty meeting, usually in a secluded hideaway, for policemen who, have just finished their tour of duty, were too tense or stimulated to go to a silent sleeping house and lie down like ordinary people while nerve ends sparked. Each of the ten officers had different reasons for being at the choir practice, such as, not having enough money to go to the policeman's bar, needing to uncoil and have a drink with others who had been on the streets that night, and also to reassure one's self. These choir practices were by invitation only and were only open to a certain caliber of police officers in this particular police station. The choir practices consisted of drunkenness, illicit sex, illicit drug use and fighting among themselves. These choirboys, as they were known by their fellow officers and to each other, carried this tradition on for many years until one fateful night, after one of their own, Baxter Slate, had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, one of the officers, Sam Niles, lost control and in his temporary insanity accidentally shot an innocent passerby who had come to look and listen in on these choir practices. When this accident happened, all of the officers involved as "choirboys" were dealt with by Internal Affairs. Sam Niles was quietly released from the force and admitted to the state mental institution as he never recovered from his insanity; Harold Bloomguard, who called the most choir practices, resigned from the police force; Herbert Whalen, who had at the time nineteen and one-half years on the police force, was given only a thirty day suspension and then was allowed to stay on another six months and retire; Spencer Van Moot, who solicited the area's most prominent businesses to clothe and feed him in a very elaborate style for "protection" and the choirboys" chaplain, Father Willie Wright, who was named this because of his squeaky sermons, were fired.


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