North of Unreal
Captive Audience/ Celebrity Cops
It all started on the dawn flight out of Prince George, when a prisoner in handcuffs and leg irons shuffled up with his two sheriffs to pre-board alongside the babies and the toddlers. We knew it wasn’t a Prince George version of Extraordinary Rendition, or a northern version of Con-Air. But it felt like a dream or a movie, and we wanted to know where the convict was going and how the story would end. The man wore a red checked hoser jacket over his red jail jumpsuit. He was young and rough and didn’t have time to shave. His sheriffs were broad-shouldered and armed and they joked with him about whether he would get a return flight or more Air Miles. Some passengers prayed they’d be seated by the toddler instead of by the prisoner. I looked out the window and watched water freeze along the wing as my striped suitcase slid into the plane.
The newspaper stuffed in the seat pocket in front of me was splashed with the face of Canada’s RCMP Commissioner, a uniformed man who was expected to resign, or was about to resign, or had been forced to resign. There were questions about a Canadian sent to Syria on a secret plane to be tortured. Our flight attendants passed out pretzels and head sets. The plane pitched and stirred in the storm.
We connected through Vancouver, where I crashed headlong into a really bad cop. When I came home to Prince George and told this tale, someone told me: “I hate to tell you this, but he’s not really a bad cop. He’s an actor who plays a bad cop. On television.” Someone else smirked and told me, “If he’s really a bad cop, he wouldn’t be living in Hollywood, would he? All the bad cops get sent to Kamloops!”
So I confess: The bad cop I encountered is an actor, from the late, great Da Vinci’s Inquest, a Canadian television masterpiece which launched me, one night, along with cheese popcorn, into labour and then delivery. For years, I’d watched Brian-the-Dirty-Cop bully witnesses, plant evidence, kill informants, and do lots of blow. He was burly and undercover. He had long wild hair and a manic manner. And since the Da Vinci TV show had been killed suddenly and buried quickly, without an autopsy or a coroner’s report, I rushed up to this man in the airport and demanded: “Are you the bad cop?” And he was, and we embraced like old friends. The actor was much tinier than the rogue on TV, and he lacked the Bad Cop’s wild hair and evil demeanor. But he told me he’d killed someone in a stairwell on the last episode, and that he’d be back for a Da Vinci Movie of the Week, and that in real life border guards often searched him for drugs. He signed his autograph with a “Betsy! Ah! My cover’s BLOWN!!” as we stood together by the baggage carousel.
If Vancouver is your final destination, you’ll find it’s foul with TV cops. Not two days later, on a city street, I stumbled up to a tough, burly dude smoking a cigarette and asked him if he was indeed Brian-the-Dirty-Cop’s boss. And indeed, he was Detective Joe Finn—or perhaps just Patrick Gallagher, the actor who once played the detective on Da Vinci. In any case, the good detective told me the man who played Brian-the-Dirty-Cop is “a libertarian and a great actor.” He, too, mentioned plans for the Da Vinci Movie of the Week. And then, he wondered aloud, “Did Brian really do all these terrible things? We don’t know. Is he gonna go down? We don’t know. I once asked them if I was evil, but they never wanted to tell us if we were good or bad.”
This story began with a shackled prisoner shuffling onto a plane. It ends with an actor puzzling over good and evil and stamping out his cigarette on the ground.
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