WITH POLICEMAN, BOY'S LOT IS A HAPPY ONE
By JUDY KLEMESRUD
Published: March 22, 1982
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Like many of his classmates, 17-year-old Michael Buchanan likes to wear a T-shirt and jeans when he goes to Curtis High School on Staten Island. There is one major difference: The T-shirt he prefers says ''Police Department - City of New York'' on the front.
''The kids always kid me when I wear it,'' the brown-eyed, brownhaired youth said the other day in his home on Staten Island. ''They say things like, 'Here comes the cop's son. Put out that joint. He'll snitch.' But I don't care because I like to wear it. I'm proud of it.''
Michael got the T-shirt from the man he considers his father, although he calls him ''Bill.'' The man is Police Officer William Fox, a 36-year-old bachelor, who last Sept. 1 persuaded Michael not to fling himself from a Bowery flophouse roof.
At the time, Michael was broke, jobless and homeless. ''Nobody cares,'' he told Officer Fox as people on the street below shouted ''Jump, jump!'' The officer said he cared, and during a long conversation with the distraught runaway youth, told him about his family and the spare room in his house on Staten Island. Finally the officer lunged and grabbed Michael.
Today Officer Fox is Michael's permanent legal guardian. He has set up a trust fund through the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association for the youth's education; it currently exceeds $3,000. And he kept his word about the extra room in his house: Michael now lives there, complete with Yankee pennants, an aquarium and a poster of Loni Anderson.
''I committed the ultimate sin for a policeman - I took my job home with me,'' said Officer Fox, who is assigned to the Police Emergency Squad, at 230 East 21st Street. He estimated he had talked to about 15 would-be ''jumpers'' in his nine years on the force.
What made him take a special interest in Michael? ''He was just not your normal jumper,'' he said. ''He was not spaced out or incoherent. He was a normal teen-ager who was telling me the story of his life. He wouldn't talk to any of the other cops at the scene, so I wondered, 'What makes me special, why's he talking to me?''
Officer Fox, a religious man who once considered entering the priesthood, said that ''the man upstairs'' took over while he was talking to Michael on the roof. ''So I started telling him about my house, my camper, my family. I told him I had a room in my house, he could go to high school, get his diploma and go to the senior prom. When I finally did grab him, he turned and looked at me, tears rolling down his face, and said, 'Did you really mean what you said?' ''
Michael, who was born in Texas and raised in Tennessee, was abandoned by his mother when he was 2 years old. His father, he said, was an abusive alcoholic whom he has not seen for eight years. ''I spent most of my life running away from foster homes and institutions,'' he said. ''Then the cops would catch me and take me back again.''
Today Michael leads the life of a typical American teen-ager. He has to be in bed by 10 P.M. on school nights, he is a member of Explorer Scout Post 185, he is on his school's bowling team and belongs to a school choral group that, he says proudly, ''is made up of the best 12 singers in the school.'' During his first semester at Curtis High, where he is a junior, he got mostly B's and C's, with one D.
He has also been seeing a psychiatrist about his past problems. ''But he's doing very well,'' Officer Fox said. ''His visits have been cut down to only one a month.''
When asked if he had had any discipline problems with Michael, the husky officer replied: ''The normal everyday garbage you have with teen-agers. The only time we've really yelled and screamed at each other was over the telephone. He ties it up for hours. Once I hung it up while he was talking, and he yelled, 'You insulted my friends!' But that's about the worst that has happened.''
Indeed, Officer Fox and Michael seem very close, more like brothers than father and son. They laugh a lot together and enjoy exchanging friendly insults. Sitting in front of the television set playing an Atari video game the other day, they shouted and gibed at each other as though they had been Missile Command opponents for years.
''Michael cheats!'' Officer Fox said with a smile. ''Whenever I start winning, he hits a button and resets the whole game.'' ''That was just an accident,'' Michael protested. ''Whenever that's happened, it's been an accident.'' One of their favorite activities together is the Explorer Post, for which Officer Fox is an adviser. The post specializes in teaching the principles of firefighting, and it has two antique fire trucks on which the scouts make weekend ''brush patrols.'' One recent Sunday, they put out a trash fire in Staten Island before the regular firemen got there.
Officer Fox said he also hopes to get permission to take Michael with him for runs on Truck No. 1 of the Police Emergency Squad. Michael will be eligible to ride on the truck next Monday, when he turns 18. He said he hopes to take photographs of the officers in action with the $400 Konica camera that Officer Fox gave him for Christmas.
Despite all his exposure to police work and firefighting, Michael said he wanted to study English or drama in college, with the hope of becoming an actor or a newscaster. ''To me, police work is just a boring job,'' he said. ''What Bill does is not boring, but you can't go from the Police Academy to the Emergency Service. If I became a cop I'd probably get stuck sitting at a desk somewhere.''
Officer Fox, who frequently works nights, said the main reason he was able to take Michael into his home was because his widowed mother, Lillian, 69, also lives there. ''I couldn't do it without my mom,'' he said. ''She's the overall ruler of the house.''
Other women, many of them strangers, have offered to help out, too. They have written letters to Officer Fox, proposing marriage. ''My old girlfriend keeps bugging me, too,'' he said with a smile. ''If the right person comes along, who knows what might happen?'' Accepted by the Family
He said that the rest of his family -two brothers who are police officers and a sister who is married to a policeman - had all accepted Michael as part of the family. ''At first my older brother, Jimmy, was against the idea,'' he said. ''He didn't think it would be possible for a streetwise kid who was neglected all his life to go into a family situation where people cared about him. But he's come around.''
Before the end of the year, many people will know the story of Officer Fox and Michael. A writer named Noel Hynd is writing a book about them, ''To Make a Difference,'' to be published in September, and a two-hour CBS television movie about the two will be shown in the fall. A percentage of the profits from both the book and movie will go to Michael's trust fund.
''We never expected all this publicity,'' Officer Fox said. ''But in a way it's good, because Michael is only one of about 60,000 kids who run away each year. If people hear about him, it might make them stop and think for a few seconds. The way I look at it, we're all our brothers' keepers.''