I was peddling my bike up the tallest hill in Central Park when all of a sudden a beautiful African-American female cop drove up alongside me in one of those patrol carts. And when I say beautiful, I mean movie star beautiful.
She said, "Go ahead. You can make it," referring to the long upgrade. Our eyes met as she drove slowly besides me and we both smiled. She then said, "You really look good." I nearly fell off my bike and all I could come up with was, "I'm sorry--I'm at a loss for words. Young and beautiful women intimidate me." With that she said thanks and drove on.
What I concealed from her was my Marxist concept of the role of the cops in the bourgeois society. When I was studying Trotskyist politics in the late '60s, one of the things that was drummed into our heads was that cops were not part of the working class even if they were in trade unions, worked for a wage and occasionally struck.
So my question is whether I would have been crossing class lines if I asked for her phone number?
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)