Street Blues: Friends on the force are the hardest to leave behind

I’m with Portland Copwatch.  Why are you harassing this man?”

I looked up in disbelief from Mr. Jarmer, an elderly, homeless regular of SE Hawthorne whom I’d gotten to know during my summer patrolling the area on a bicycle.  A former college teacher, malt liquor was guiding his life now.  He usually sported a lucid, good-humored buzz, but today my partner and I discovered him lying on the sidewalk, highly inebriated and unable to walk because of some sort of leg injury.  I was trying to decipher his slurred account of his leg problem when the twenty-something man interrupted me with his demanding tone.