I usually love a man in uniform. I’m a democratic regalia ogler: chefs, firefighters, zookeepers, bikie gangs and Captain Kirk. Throw in those smoking hot priests from the 2014 Vatican Calendar. I hanker for scrubs, white coats, chaps and strips, busbies, bellbottoms and blokes dressed up as singing chipmunks. There’s a wing of hot doormen in ridiculous hats at Naga. And don’t get me started on pilots. Changi Airport is my crack.
So you’d think in law-abiding CharmingVille, where there are so many more cop-like enforcers than there are actual laws, I’d be happy as a pig in shit. But I like my blokes burly. And at least able to run for a bus, if we had them. And sober. Those Asahi police boxes were a poor, though hilarious, PR choice.
Plus I’m not a lover of big guns, unless they’re perched atop the arms of Channing Tatum and he’s handcuffing me in a holding cell while I struggle bravely. Weaponry and ordnance are a little bit sexy intellectually, but mainly not in real life. Even liquored up, paintball hurts. And I’ve seen those tuk tuk ads for the shooting range. I just ain’t got the cojones to stand next to a bunch of rheum-eyed Balkan sexpats on a yabba lark waving loaded AK47s. Plus you have to wear those ridiculous earmuffs pre-moistened with someone else’s hangover sweat.
Laser tag at Kid’s City is fun after a few quick bevs down the Golden Mile. But with the traffic how it is since Freedom Park became a blockbusting soap-box suburb and the fact that these days you might actually get shot by an overzealous 12-year-old Glock-wielding ‘crowd controller’, I reckon it’s just safer – and sexier – to lock yourself in, load up on the snake snacks and ride along to One Police Plaza for some virtual GBH with – dun dun DUNNNN – the body cocking, head-tilting, suit-sweating, crime-busting bear-man that is Detective Robert Goren of Law & Order’s NYPD.
Bobby. Oh, Bobby. My afternoon detective. My grizzled, wounded shambler. I crave your pigeon-toed ponderings, your ever-so-slight buckyness, your off-the-rack shab. No beKevlared GRK stirs me the way you do when you’re protecting and serving. Fearful witnesses respond to your assured older manliness and sensitive winkling. Persons of interest are becalmed by your meandering bumble as you circle your prey, closer and closer…
And then BANG! That nose-to-perp booyah moment: the brooding incandescence that flares and explodes, complete with a little bit of Stanislavski spit, once every three or four episodes. “How do you like them apples, motherfucker?!!” I shout inside my head, snake snacks awry, as the smug ne’er-do-well unravels before Bobby’s super-shaggy physical magnetism and mad dot-joining skillz. I know it’s gonna end this way. It always does. But it’s hotter than my top-hot Banderas/Pitt dungeon scene three-quarters of the way through Interview With A Vampire, and that’s super hot. But I digress…
Turn on the TV any weekday morning and you can see the local ‘news’:- his ‘n’ hers hosts, flanked by feminine wash and muscle wine product placement, giggling over a parade of terrified sex workers being hauled off to some hellhole by grinning plain-clothed coplets and bespangled brass. Meanwhile, in CharmingVille’s war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are rarely pursued by the detectives of the major case squad (some would say they’re one and the same). In uniform or undercover, where’s Bobby Goren when you need him?