Naomi Hirahara

I press the buzzer by the door of a small brick building.

The door immediately opens, as if Father Kwame is expecting us. He greets my dog first. “Hello, Shippo,” he says, and Shippo wags his tail in response.

The priest ushers us into his corner office and excuses himself to make some tea.

Shippo makes himself at home on a throw rug while I sit underneath a floor lamp. There are books on the shelves lining the walls. They are not only in English, because Father Kwame is fluent in about six languages, and they are not only religious ...

I’ve only said I love you to two men—well, other than my dad and he doesn’t really count. One of them was my college boyfriend, Benjamin Choi, and the other one is Cortez Williams. Cortez is currently on an operating room table while I’m sitting like a fool on a plastic chair in a waiting room in USC General Hospital. Also in this windowless room is a family who seems spellbound by a daytime talk show broadcast on the television mounted on the wall. I want to shout at them, “Who are these women around the ...

You can get the wrong idea from TV police shows. Officers discharge their weapons multiple times in every episode, when the truth is, most of us never fire our guns in the line of duty, even in a big city like Los Angeles. And for homicide detectives like my boyfriend, Cortez Williams, and especially bicycle cops like me, our guns will only get action at the firing range.

So to hear that an officer is down, only a few blocks from where we are in Pershing Square, is a big deal. My partner, Johnny Mayhew, is a champion BMX rider ...

It’s past midnight and someone’s turning the key to my double-lock on my front door. I know who it is and even Shippo doesn’t bother to get out of his doggy bed.

Some women wouldn’t like it if their boyfriends smelled better than them. I’ve never worn perfume and sometimes even the scented pages of fashion magazines cause me to dissolve into a spasm of sneezes. Cortez Williams lays it on thick with ample splashes of cologne on his freshly shaven jaw. By midnight, his afternoon shadow is back and the cologne lingers, but it ...

My cheeks are still a bit flushed from the beer from the Far Bar, but I make sure that I’m fully sober before getting on my bicycle. I’m Hapa and have inherited the Asian flush from my mother’s side. California Vehicle Code Section 21200.5 pretty much says that you can get a citation for riding a bike under the influence. And since a bike is essentially my work wheels, I have to make sure that I don’t end up like my arch enemy Officer Mac Lambert, who had one too many drinks in a Frogtown ...