If you asked eight-year-old me to draw a police officer (with the caveat it not be my dad), the end product would’ve looked a lot like Stan Van Gundy: body and limbs a sea of seamless blue, face replete with all the angular nuance of my bedroom table-globe, pocket-comb mustache Crayola’d with Outer Space on account of Black being nub-worn by ninja battles. There’d be gun in hand, of course, as one never knows when the bad guys might come to kidnap your girlfriend, Topanga.
I would’ve known how to do this, to doodle a cop, because I grew up very much in their midst.