On the Up Beat : Despite a long partnership in L.A.’s deadliest police precinct, these guys are more like Mayberry’s Andy and Barney than they are Dirty Harry.

Officer Cliff Lloyd yanks the black-and-white patrol car to the curb at 48th and Hoover. Half a dozen people, some of them sipping beer, sit in a circle on folding chairs and plastic milk crates in the balmy, late afternoon shadow of the Caribbean Market.

They turn their heads and seem anxious until they recognize Lloyd and his partner, Officer Roger Gaylord, climbing out of the car. Azalea Usher, wearing a T-shirt that says “I Survived the 6.6 Tremor,” reaches out and hugs Lloyd. One guy knocks over his drink as he stands to shake hands.

On the streets, they are known as “OGs”--Old Gangsters. Their names--Gaylord and Lloyd--befit a Vegas magic act, and it’s true that they sometimes work from a bag of tricks, stuffed with bits and pieces of street-cop wisdom from the 77th Division, the deadliest precinct in Los Angeles.

They have learned that sometimes it is best not to play things strictly by the book, and sometimes police work is a crap shoot--like the time Gaylord, working alone, wandered into a park where Rolling 40s gang members were drinking and gambling.

“I wasn’t gonna arrest everybody, ‘cause I only got two handcuffs,” he recalls. He decided to deal with them on their own terms. “Tell you what,” he told the group. “I roll seven, you guys take it somewhere else. I don’t roll seven, I’ll leave.”

Gaylord rattled the dice and, sure enough, he shook out a seven. Everybody left smiling.

What makes Gaylord and Lloyd unique is that they have been partners for eight years in a division where officers constantly are shuffled to fill gaps. In most cases, partnerships are measured in months rather than years.

It is difficult for them to define their relationship: two heavily armed people who spend much of their lives distanced only by the width of a Chevy seat, who ride together through dark corners of Los Angeles. Who lay down the law in a quiet, human way that contrasts sharply with the shoot-’em-up image that dominates headlines and TV drama. Who love each other like brothers.

They work as a team, like two basketball players who know instinctively when the other will fake right, go left and cut for the hoop. They complement each other. When the only way into a building is through a window, it is the beefier Lloyd who will lift Gaylord on his shoulders to climb through and open the door.

When they were younger, they bulldozed through the hook ‘em and book ‘em years, but those days are long gone. They could have busted a couple of people at the Caribbean Market. But without mention, the alcohol seems to have disappeared, allowing Gaylord and Lloyd to get on with what they do best. Lloyd pulls up a milk crate while Gaylord engages in a separate conversation.

Lloyd is 49 and has worked in South L.A. for 21 years. Gaylord is 40 with 12 years experience in the 77th. That, too, separates them from their younger, less seasoned cohorts.

“You have to be young to work down here,” says Sgt. Phil Jackson. “The pace is very fast. It’s constantly boom, boom, boom. You have to be young to keep up with it.”

So, where does that leave Gaylord and Lloyd?

“They pace themselves because they’re no spring chickens,” Jackson says. “That’s one of the benefits of maturity and experience. You know how to pace yourself and get the job done as opposed to bam, bam, bam like a Ping-Pong ball and burning yourself out in a couple hours.”

On the boom-boom-boom, bam-bam-bam streets of the 77th, experience has taught Gaylord and Lloyd that there’s a time to boom, a time to bam, and a time to pull up a milk crate and shoot the breeze. It is amazing, they say, how many crimes can be solved by merely getting to know people and developing a sense of trust.

They once were stopped by a man who tipped them off about a burglary that was to take place that night at the Northridge Fashion Center. After the entire plan was laid out to them, Gaylord and Lloyd contacted the Devonshire Division. Suspects were arrested en route to the shopping center in stolen vehicles, and the heist was prevented.

In many ways, Gaylord and Lloyd are throwbacks to Mayberry, where officers sipped lemonade on front porches, hunted down lost cats and, on those rare occasions when trouble drifted into town, chased down and chastened criminals in unlikely and humane fashion.

But they are not Andy and Barney, and the 77th Division of South-Central Los Angeles is no Mayberry.

More homicides and other violent crimes are committed in these 12 square miles than anywhere else in the city. A history of distrust between police and residents has created ongoing tension. On the surface and in the headlines, South-Central is fused to such tensions: gang against gang, ethnic group against ethnic group.

Gaylord and Lloyd, however, know a different side of the city. They have watched children grow up here, taught them how to ride bicycles and catch baseballs with both hands, given them rides home when they were out too late at night, gone to their birthday parties . . . their funerals.

They have stood on street corners and in alleys, visiting with prostitutes, whom they refer to as “unlicensed physical therapists” but never as whores. They see their job as keeping the peace, and sometimes that means bending the rules. Oftentimes it means taking time to resolve confrontations with discussion rather than comeuppance.

“What it comes down to,” Lloyd says, “is having a sense of humanity.”

In 1992, shortly before the riots, they received permission to work foot patrol. If they had their way, they would still be walking the streets and alleys, but lack of personnel has forced them back into black-and-whites. It was while they were on foot that they came to know the people at the Caribbean Market.

Lloyd, with neatly trimmed graying hair and bushy mustache, is talking to Harrington Trapp, 45, a musician with two-foot dreadlocks. Trapp, like the others in front of the market, is a native of Belize. They take up a conversation about law enforcement.

“Cops are trained to be cops,” Trapp tells Lloyd. “But you can’t just be a cop, you have to be a humanitarian, deal with people regardless of what they look like.”

All agree: Gaylord and Lloyd are different.

“I’ve never seen cops like this in my life,” Trapp says. He pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “My mother knew I smoked but I never smoked around her, out of respect, and it’s the same with them.” He returns the crumpled cigarette to his pocket. “We respect them because they respect us.”

A compact car stops in front of the market and a young woman shouts, “Hey Lloyd.”

Lloyd looks ups, returns her greeting and waves.

“Where’s Gaylord?” the woman shouts through the window, waiting for the light to change. It’s the first question people ask when they see one without the other.

Lloyd shrugs, then points across the street. “I think he’s over there somewhere.”

It’s probably written in some book about how to be a cop that officers should always know where their partners are. But Gaylord and Lloyd did not learn how to be cops from a book.

And, as it turns out, Gaylord is indeed in the park across the street--on the monkey bars.

*

Once they pull out of the parking lot--Gaylord in a patched up 1974 Volkswagen Thing, and Lloyd on a bull-sized Suzuki motorcycle--they are through being cops.

In his personal life, Gaylord talks about the water, the times he has sailed freely in the wind and swum with dolphins. Lloyd, the quieter of the two, speaks of poetry.

“Were I learned and eloquent and had the minds of other men,

“Then I could put my thoughts to words; and my words I’d put to pen.”

So begins a poem he titled “If I Could Write.”

He and his wife, Miquie, live quiet lives where they can sit in the back yard at night and see the stars, hear the owls and the frogs, and an occasional barking dog.

Lloyd enjoys reading, especially Clive Cussler thrillers and Westerns. In both appearance and demeanor, he could a sheriff in a Louis L’Amour novel, the strong, silent, deep-thinking type. Even as he rides through town in the black-and-white, he greets people with a wave, sometimes with a pinch of tobacco in his mouth and a “Howdy.”

He admits that there is longing in his voice when he talks about the years he spent growing up in Alaska, about the wooden streets, homes without televisions, ponds where he and friends would gather to float on halibut crates in summer, to ice skate in winter.

“I could probably do real good retiring someplace like that,” he says. “I don’t need a city life.”

It was shortly after his first wife, Linda, died of a heart attack in 1985 that he teamed up with Gaylord, someone he found easy to talk to and lean on. From Day One, they say, there was a sense of trust and confidence between them.

Lloyd and Linda were married 19 years, had three children. Losing her was an uncertain, turbulent time, and what got him through it was the recognition that there are things in life over which a person has no control. Things happen that must merely be accepted or, at least, survived.

“You realize that life doesn’t just stop, and it does no good to be bitter or angry.”

The story of his wife’s death is one he shares often with people in tragic situations. It is his way of letting them know he understands.

Lloyd could have retired last year but chose to continue working. He says he still feels young, still enjoys the work and can still chase down bad guys when he has to. His decision to retire, he says, is likely to be made with the wind in his face some glorious day.

“One of these days,” he says, “I’m likely to head off for work on my motorcycle and tell myself, ‘I think I’ve had enough, and there’s this place Miquie and I haven’t been to for coffee in a long time.’ ”

So he will turn his bike around. And go home.

Gaylord also knows the feel of wind on his face. Much of his childhood was spent in a 10-foot-by-10-foot room at his great-grandfather’s home on Catalina Island, and much of his free time now is spent on his 31-foot sailboat.

“You separate me from the water,” he says, “and I might as well die.”

He arrived at police work following three years in the Army as a member of an anti-terrorist group. “Our job was to go in and just (mess) everything up. It didn’t matter what it was, just get in there and (mess) it up. . . . It was fun.”

He tries to remember the good times in the military, even though there were plenty of bad times: friends who were killed, people he killed. He is shielded from those memories by a thick crust, which also allows him to deal with the harsh side of police work.

His first marriage ended in divorce after 14 years and two children. He is engaged to a woman he met while working foot patrol. They plan an October wedding. It’s a new beginning, and there will be another new beginning when his partner retires.

“I would love to spend the rest of my career with Cliff. I couldn’t think of anything better, but I know eventually he is going to say enough is enough.”

*

Children come running out of the house on 47th Street. Within seconds, Shangrila Wright, 12, and her sister, Supreme, 8, have wrestled their way into handcuffs. Gaylord gives them the old line about not having a key.

When Gaylord and Lloyd were taken off foot patrol, Shangrila and Supreme took a petition around their block in protest. It wasn’t enough, however, to change the minds of police officials.

“I’d love to have them on foot patrol,” says Capt. Larry Goebel of the 77th Division. “They are ideal for that. They can sit down and talk to the most hard-core gang banger out there and break down barriers, or they can spend time with the little old lady who just wants to chat. They don’t come any better as far as beat cops are concerned.”

But with limited personnel, Goebel says, it’s more important to have them in a car so they can move quickly as needed. Even so, their black-and-white seems to be parked much of the time. They’re usually out in the street with children, on the sidewalk with parents, in the bars checking in with owners and employees.

Part of their job is to gather information; but equally important, they say, is answering questions about the police. On a call about missing Power Ranger figures, Gaylord and Lloyd are greeted by a woman and her young son, the victim.

They ask a few questions and are told that the youngster suspects his friend next door. They knock, and the suspect’s mother invites them in. They take a look around but come up empty.

“They’re not in there,” Gaylord says. They strike up a conversation on the sidewalk about expensive toys and kids, when a man from down the street approaches.

“Power Rangers? Don’t you guys have something more important to be doing?” asks Sadale Johnson, 27.

“It may not be important to you or me, but it’s pretty important to him,” says Lloyd, pointing to the young owner of the missing dolls. “Does it always have to be a shooting or something like that when the police come?”

“Usually is,” Johnson says. “We already have the perception of police that when y’all come that it’s gonna be trouble.”

“Yeah, that was the nice part about when we walked,” Lloyd says. “We could just talk to people about things. We didn’t need a reason to be somewhere. . . . There’s a helluva lot of good people here, and I enjoy being around them.”

“When you go home, does it take you about an hour, hour and a half?” Johnson asks. “A lot of the cops that come by here live in the San Fernando Valley, and sometimes I think, ‘How much can they care?’ ”

“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have been here 21 years,” Lloyd says. “And say I lived here. I’ve put a lot of people in jail over 21 years. Now, what would happen if I put myself and my family in this area? Retaliation. Plus, it’s just like any other job. When the day gets over, you want to get the hell away from here.”

“I respect that.”

*

The jingle of an ice cream truck is interrupted by gunfire just outside the 77th Street Division headquarters. Lloyd curses as he and Gaylord head out on foot. He raises his left arm and Gaylord reacts, crossing 77th as the two of them head toward Broadway.

Black-and-whites pour in from all directions. A helicopter circles. A suspect is arrested in a nearby apartment building within 15 minutes.

A cop’s job in South-Central can turn from pleasantry to tragedy in a snap. Says Lloyd: “You can turn a corner here and be in the deepest (trouble) of your life.” They have talked often about turning that corner.

“Roger knows that if we come out here and shooting ensues, I get hit, I go down, he’s not coming out and playing John Wayne,” Lloyd says. “It’s not gonna do any good to have two of us shot. I’ve been hurt enough times, I’ve run through 10 broken bones in my body, I’ve had 30 something stitches in my head from various things. I know what pain is, so I’m gonna take care of myself, as long as I’m conscious.”

The two of them have worked just about every kind of case there is to work in law enforcement, plumbing or mechanics. Their stories are sometimes gruesome, filled with bullets and bodies, but like most officers here, they have never fired their weapons on duty.

They describe how neighborhoods here have grown close and strong out of necessity, unlike many suburban areas, where neighbors isolate themselves. The bars that cover windows and doors may be viewed as scars of crime, but they also represent a determination to withstand, to protect precious peace.

In simplest terms, that is how Gaylord and Lloyd view their role as police officers, to help people live in peace. They are happy being who they are: a couple of coppers out on the street. They don’t have their sights set on a desk job, or anything that would require wearing a necktie. They aren’t out to prove how many people they can arrest, how many tickets they can issue. Both admit that the books of tickets they carry are outdated and rarely used.

“There are guys who go out there and hook and book and throw people in jail. Great. They’re doing their job and doing it right, but are you really solving the problem?” Gaylord says. “Cliff and I try to solve the problem.”

They soon will be separated as they begin training a couple of rookies right out of the academy. After them, there will be others. It could be years before they get back together, if they ever do. In the meantime, they will be paying particularly close attention to their radios.

“I will always consider Roger my partner,” Lloyd says. “Even if we’re not in the same car, if one of us gets in a hot situation, the other one will be there.”

That’s what being partners is all about.