Imagine this: you’re walking to your car after a horrifyingly long day of class. The air has nearly reached Absolute Zero, you haven’t eaten lunch yet and it’s already 2:57, you have hours of homework and you are just trying to get back to your apartment to collapse in on yourself like a dying star. But when you hop in your 2011 Corolla (the poor thing is still hanging on after all these years), it won’t start. Who do you attempt to call with frozen fingers when your car won’t start?
Your friends are busy. Your roommate has the flu, and there is no way in heck you’re going to call her because your car is the only place void of germs. As your thumb scrolls through your phone at a snail’s pace because it is so cold, you see the campus safety and security number. You call it. Moments later, like a beacon of light, an angel swooping down to rescue you from the clutches of Satan himself, you see a safety and security officer pulling up next to you in a brand new Dodge and ask you if you need any help. That’s when you realize: these are safety men. These are men with answers. These are men with jumper cables. These are God’s men.
One of these men is John Lawrence, a safety and security officer at Union. I knew Lawrence and I would really get along when the first thing he asked me was, “Do you want me to turn on the lights for you?” when I hopped in the passenger seat of Union’s brand new security car. I wondered how he resisted the temptation to put the pedal down and fly through campus, blaring his horn and shining his lights every time he had to go somewhere non-urgently. Lawrence was a professional truck driver alongside his father for 28 years before coming to Union.
“From coast to coast and border to border, all over the United States,” he said. Over his career, he has accumulated 3.3 million miles of accident-free driving.
I asked him about the daily routine of security guards, since, in all honesty, I really wasn’t sure what a normal day looked like for them.
“We just go when we are called or when we were needed,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes it’s just things like unlocking doors for people or setting up traffic cones before library board meetings, other times it’s bigger things. Each day is something different.” (Like, perhaps a spam email chain that blows up the Internet, but that’s another article.)
We continued to ride around campus while I tried not to touch all the buttons.
“There’s no seat back there because this used to be the canine unit vehicle,” he told me.
“Do you ever get to load up a huge drug dog and do random spot checks on people?” I asked.
“No.”
But later Lawrence admitted, quietly, “I’d like to get Buster in here and sit him in the front seat, though.”
I asked how we got the new security car.
“Vanderbilt had two of these new cop cars and sold both of them. This one had been sitting at Milan until someone got word of it and they [the faculty] looked at it and said, ‘We want this.’ The other one wasn’t a canine unit, just this one but–,” Lawrence stopped and honked the siren twice at students setting up a project behind White Hall. When they turned around, startled, he just waved. They all waved back, and I realized I’ll actually be a little sad to leave Union.
“…Drive up behind someone walking on the street and do that,” he mumbled. We laughed.
Most schools hate the security. There is a wedge between students and the rule-keepers. But that vibe isn’t here.
“I feel like we are closer to people,” Lawrence told me. “We need to be close to the students, faculty and staff. They need us to be seen. That’s why we do vehicle patrol, bicycle patrol, foot patrol. They want everyone on campus to know they are safe and secure while we are here. We need to interact with people and make them feel comfortable.”
But there is a fine line between being personal and doing a job. It’s a line that is difficult to walk. However, Union’s safety and security team seems to manage it, which is something that may also have to do with the students as well.
“I think if we were anywhere else, we would have a lot bigger issues to deal with that we don’t have here at Union. When you start talking about private institutions or public institutions, there is a big difference. A really big difference. Union’s a good campus,” Lawrence said when I asked him about what his job would look like if he were at a massive university like Mizzou or Ole Miss. “I have actually had people, young ladies and young men, walk by me and then turn around and come back and shake my hand and say, ‘Thank you for doing what you do,’ on this campus. That means a lot. They could just keep walking and go on about their business, but they turn around and say something like that to me…that says a lot.”
“Does that make it all worth it?”
“Oh yes. That’s what makes the job good. Things like that right there.”
Before I left, I asked for his full name and title for the article. He thought for a long time.
“John Lawrence,” he said. “In the directory it’s John Roberts, but John Lawrence is fine.”
I thanked him and got out of the car. It didn’t occur to me until I was leaving that he hesitated when I asked, and that he gave me two different names. It made me think that maybe, just maybe, John Lawrence/Roberts wasn’t his real name at all, and maybe he wasn’t really a truck driver before this. Maybe he did used to haul drug dogs out of cars and maybe there was a secret reason for why he hesitated when someone asked his name — perhaps he is a former FBI agent who went into the Witness Protection Program and in order to keep working and doing the thing he loved, he was hired as a security guard for a Christian school in rural Tennessee. I realize there is probably a small, logical, real reason for why John Lawrence paused when I asked for his name, but the theory I concocted on my drive home is way more fun.
