Let me continue.. I don't know how old I was when they put me in the orphanage.. not very.. and the first time I heard the word “orphan” I thought it was some guy's name. Billy Orphan. Then I found out I was an orphan too, and then I figured me and Billy were related. Then I found out that we were all orphans... and I figured... Hell... Somebody must be lying... We can't all be relatives.
Let me finish. So we were all orphans but I still didn't know what the word meant except that we talked about everything in terms of that one word... The outside world was a non-orphanage... Those that got placed were de-orphanated... Those that came back were re-orphanated. For a long time I thought only boys were orphans... So when I grew up I wanted to be a girl. Then I found out there were female orphans too... We called them orphenes. But I still didn't know what the word meant. So I asked one of the guards one day... What's an orphan? He said it was somebody that nobody liked. But these other orphans liked me... Billy liked me... So I asked him if that made me a non-orphan. He said no... He said being liked by another orphan didn't count.
So I started thinking that nothing that happened in the orphanage counted. The only things that mattered happened on the outside. For the whole time that I was there some police athletic league kept promising to take us to a ball game. We went to bed every night hoping that tomorrow was the big day when we'd go to a ball game. Hell, we didn't know what a ball game was... Properly speaking... But it was on the outside so we assumed that it was something incredible... Something unheard of... And finally the big day came and this man took us all to a ball game.
The Yankees won. That was it. The Yankees won... And all of us orphans sat there scratching our ass thinking... You mean this is it... This is the real thing... That's why I still go to ball games... I figure on of these days I'm going to see it the way I thought it would be... You know... The ball game of a century... the ball game of all time...
And you know what? ...When I go there I see all of those orphans I once knew... Billy's there every time... They're all grown up and everything but still looking orphany as hell... Still waiting for the ball game... You see don't you... You see how we were tricked in to thinking that the outside world was so exciting and full of wonders... Not that we thought it was all good... But we did think it was full of extremes... That's it... Extremes... The most beautiful and ugliest things were on the outside... Nothing in between... The orphanage was in between... And that's why I became a cop..
I thought that by being a cop I'd be able to find those extremes.. And sometimes, I think I'm close.