The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Styrofoam,” said Sherman.

  “Styrofoam,” said Tanooch, nodding his head, but in an uncomprehending fashion. He left the room.

  Then the big man stood Sherman in front of a metal stand and took two pictures of him, one from the front and one from the side. It dawned on Sherman that this was what was known as a mug shot. This great huge bear had just taken his mug shot, while Sherman stood there holding up his pants. He led him over to a counter and took Sherman’s fingers one by one and pressed them into an ink pad and then rolled them onto a printed form. It was a surprisingly rough operation. He gripped each of Sherman’s fingers as if he were picking up a knife or a hammer and plunged it into the ink pad. Then he apologized.

  “You have to do all the work yourself,” he said to Sherman. “You can’t expect nobody comes in here to lift a goddamned finger for you.”

  From across the corridor came the furious sound of someone retching. Three of the Latins were at the bars of the pen.

  “Ayyyyyy!” yelled one of them. “The man puking! He puking plenty!”

  Tanooch was the first policeman there.

  “Oh, f’r Chrissake. Oh, beautiful. Hey, Angel! This guy’s a one-man garbage barge. Whaddaya wanna do?”

  “He the same one?” said the Angel.

  Then the smell of vomit began to spread.

  “Ayyyyyyyy, whaddaya whaddaya,” said the Angel. “Hose it down and leave ’im in there.”

  They opened the bars, and two policemen stood by outside while a third went inside with the hose. The prisoners hopped this way and that, to keep from getting wet.

  “Hey, Sarge,” said the policeman. “Guy puked all over his pants.”

  “The fatigues?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck it. Hose ’em down. This ain’t a laundry.”

  Sherman could see the tall man sitting on the ledge with his head down. His knees were covered in vomit, and his elbows were on his knees.

  The big man was watching all this through the window of the fingerprint room. He was shaking his head. Sherman went up to him.

  “Look, Officer, isn’t there some other place I can wait? I can’t go in there. I’m—I just can’t do it.”

  The big man stuck his head out of the fingerprint room and yelled, “Hey, Angel, whaddaya wanna do with my man here, McCoy?”

  The Angel looked over from his desk and stared at Sherman and rubbed his hand over his bald head.

  “Welllll…” Then he motioned with his hand toward the cell. “That’s it.”

  Tanooch came in and took Sherman by the arm again. Someone opened up the bars. Tanooch steered Sherman inside, and he went shuffling onto the tile floor, holding up his pants. The bars shut behind him. Sherman stared at the Latins, who were sitting on the ledge. They stared back, all but the tall one, who still had his head down, rolling his elbows in the vomit on his knees.

  The entire floor slanted in toward the drain in the middle. It was still wet. Sherman could feel the slant now that he was standing on it. A few driblets of water were still rolling down the drain. That was it. It was a drainpipe, where mankind sought its own level, and the meat spigot was on.

  He heard the bars slide shut behind him, and he stood there in the cell holding his pants up with his right hand. He cradled his jacket with his left arm. He didn’t know what to do or even where to look, and so he picked out an empty space on the wall and tried to take a look at…them…with peripheral vision. Their clothes were a blur of gray and black and brown, except for their sneakers, which created a pattern of stripes and swashes along the floor. He knew they were watching him. He glanced toward the bars. Not a single policeman! Would they even move a muscle if anything…

  The Latinos had taken every seat on the ledge. He chose a spot about four feet from the end of the ledge and leaned his back up against the wall. The wall hurt his spine. He lifted his right foot, and his shoe fell off. He slipped his foot back into it as casually as he could. Looking down at his foot on the bright tile made him feel as if he was going to keel over with vertigo. The Styrofoam peanuts! They were still all over his pants legs.

  He was seized with the terrible fear that they would take him to be a lunatic, the sort of hopeless case they could slaughter at their leisure. He was aware of the smell of vomit…vomit and cigarette smoke…He lowered his head, as if he were dozing, and cut his eyes toward them. They were staring at him! They were staring at him and smoking their cigarettes. The tall one, the one who had kept saying, “¡Mira! ¡Mira!” still sat on the ledge with his head down and his elbows on his knees, which were covered in vomit.

  One of the Latinos was rising up from the ledge and walking toward him! He could see him out of the corner of his eye. Now it was starting! They weren’t even waiting!

  The man was settling up against the wall, right next to him, leaning back the same way Sherman was. He had thin curly hair, a mustache that curved down around his lips, a slightly yellowish complexion, narrow shoulders, a little potbelly, and a crazy look in his eyes. He must have been about thirty-five. He smiled, and that made him look crazier still.

  “Hey, man, I see you outside.”

  See me outside!

  “With the TV, man. Why you here?”

  “Reckless endangerment,” said Sherman. He felt as if he were croaking out his last words on this earth.

  “Reckless endangerment?”

  “That’s…hitting somebody with your car.”

  “With you car? You hit somebody with you car, and the TV come here?”

  Sherman shrugged. He didn’t want to say anything more, but his fear of appearing aloof got the better of him.

  “What are you here for?”

  “Oh, man, 220, 265, 225.” The fellow threw his hand out, as if to take in the entire world. “Drugs, handguns, gambling paraphernalia—ayyyyyy, every piece a bullshit, you know?”

  The man seemed to take a certain pride in this calamity.

  “You hit somebody with you car?” he asked once more. He apparently found this trivial and unmanly. Sherman raised his eyebrows and nodded wearily.

  The man returned to the seating ledge, and Sherman could see him talking to three or four of his comrades, who looked at Sherman once more and then looked away, as if bored by the news. Sherman had the feeling that he had let them down. Very odd! And yet that was what he felt.

  Sherman’s fear was rapidly supplanted by tedium. The minutes crawled by. His left hip joint began to hurt. He shifted his weight to the right, and his back hurt. Then his right hip joint hurt. The floor was tile. The walls were tile. He rolled up his jacket to create a cushion. He put it on the floor, next to the wall, and sat down and leaned back. The jacket was damp, and so were his pants. His bladder was beginning to fill, and he could feel little knives of gas in his bowels.

  The little man who had come over to talk to him, the little man who knew the numbers, walked to the bars. He had a cigarette in his mouth. He took the cigarette out, and he yelled, “Ayyyyyy! I need a light!” No response from the policeman beyond. “Ayyyyyy, I need a light!”

  Finally, the one called Tanooch came up. “What’s your problem?”

  “Ayyy, I need a light.” He held up his cigarette.

  Tanooch dug a book of matches out of his pocket and lit one and held it about four feet away from the bars. The little man waited, then put the cigarette between his lips and pressed his face against the bars so that the cigarette protruded outside. Tanooch was motionless, holding the burning match. The match went out.

  “Ayyyyyy!” said the little man.

  Tanooch shrugged and let the match fall to the floor.

  “Ayyyyyy!” The little man turned around toward his comrades and held the cigarette up in the air. (See what he did?) One of the men sitting on the ledge laughed. The little man made a face at this betrayal of sympathies. Then he looked at Sherman. Sherman didn’t know whether to commiserate or look the other way. He ended up just staring. The man walked over and squatted down beside hi
m. The unlit cigarette was hanging out of his mouth.

  “Dja see that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Sherman.

  “You wanna light, they suppose a give you a light. Son a mabitch. Ayyy…you got cigarettes?”

  “No, they took everything away from me. Even my shoestrings.”

  “No shit?” He looked at Sherman’s shoes. He himself still had on shoelaces, Sherman noticed.

  Sherman could hear a woman’s voice. She was angry about something. She appeared in the little corridor outside the cell. Tanooch was leading her. She was a tall thin woman with curly brown hair and dark tan skin, wearing black pants and an odd-looking jacket with very big shoulders. Tanooch was escorting her toward the fingerprint room. All at once she wheeled about and said to someone Sherman couldn’t see, “You big bag a…” She didn’t complete the phrase. “Least I don’t sit in ’is sewer here all day long, way you do! Think about it, fat boy!”

  Much derisive laughter from the policemen in the background.

  “Watch it or he’ll flush you down, Mabel.”

  Tanooch prodded her on. “C’mon, Mabel.”

  She turned on Tanooch. “You talk to me, you call me by my right name! You don’t call me Mabel!”

  Tanooch said, “I’ll call you worse’n that in a minute,” and he kept pushing her on toward the fingerprint room.

  “Two-twenty-thirty-one,” said the little man. “Selling drugs.”

  “How do you know?” asked Sherman.

  The little man just opened his eyes wide and put a knowing look on his face. (Some things go without saying.) Then he shook his head and said, “Focking bus come in.”

  “Bus?”

  It seemed that ordinarily, when people were arrested, they were taken first to a precinct station house and locked up. Periodically a police van made the rounds of the precincts and transported the prisoners to Central Booking for fingerprinting and arraignment. So now a new lot had arrived. They would all end up in this pen, except for the women, who were taken to another pen, down the corridor and around a bend. And nothing was moving, because “Albany was down.”

  Three more women went by. They were younger than the first one.

  “Two-thirty,” said the little man. “Prostitutes.”

  The little man who knew the numbers was right. The bus had come in. The procession began, from the Angel’s desk to the fingerprinting room to the cell. Sherman’s pang of fear began to heat up all over again. One by one, three tall black youths with shaved heads, windbreakers, and big white sneakers came into the cell. All of the new arrivals were black or Latin. Most were young. Several appeared to be drunk. The little man who knew the numbers got up and went back to join his comrades and secure his place on the ledge. Sherman was determined not to move. He wanted to be invisible. Somehow…so long as he didn’t move a muscle…they wouldn’t see him.

  Sherman stared at the floor and tried not to think about his aching bowels and bladder. One of the black lines between the tiles on the floor began to move. A cockroach! Then he saw another…and a third. Fascinating!—and horrible. Sherman glanced about to see if anyone else noticed. No one seemed to—but he caught the eye of one of the three black youths. All three were staring at him! Such thin hard malevolent faces! His heart immediately kicked into tachycardia. He could see his foot jerk with the force of his heartbeat pulse. He stared at the cockroaches to try to cool himself down. A cockroach had made its way over to the drunken Latino, who had slumped to the floor. The cockroach began ascending the heel of his shoe. It began walking up his leg. It disappeared up his pant leg. Then it reappeared. It climbed the cuff of his pants. It began climbing toward his knee. When it reached the knee, it settled in amid the cakes of vomit.

  Sherman looked up. One of the black youths was heading toward him. He had a little smile on his face. He seemed tremendously tall. His eyes were set close together. He wore black pants with stovepipe legs and big white sneakers that closed in front with Velcro straps rather than shoelaces. He stooped down in front of Sherman. His face had no expression at all. All the more terrifying! He looked right into Sherman’s face.

  “Hey, man, you got a cigarette?”

  Sherman said, “No.” But he didn’t want him to think he was acting tough or even uncommunicative, and so he added, “Sorry. They took everything away from me.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake. It was an apology, a signal that he was weak.

  “That’s okay, man.” The youth sounded halfway friendly. “What you in for?”

  Sherman hesitated. “Manslaughter,” he said. “Reckless endangerment” just wasn’t enough.

  “Yeah. That’s bad,” said the youth in an approximation of a concerned voice. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Sherman. “I don’t know what they’re talking about. What are you here for?”

  “A 160–15,” said the youth. Then he added, “Armed robbery.”

  The youth screwed up his lips. Sherman couldn’t tell whether that was supposed to say, “Armed robbery is nothing special,” or, “It’s a bullshit charge.”

  The youth smiled at Sherman, still looking directly into his face. “Okay, Mr. Manslaughter,” he said, and he stood up and turned about and walked back to the other side of the cell.

  Mr. Manslaughter! Immediately he knew he could treat me cavalierly! What could they do? Surely they couldn’t…There had been an incident—where?—in which some of the prisoners in a cell blocked the view through the bars with their bodies while the others…But would any of the others in here do such a thing for these three—would the Latinos?

  Sherman’s mouth was dry, absolutely parched. The urge to urinate was acute. His heart beat nervously, although not as rapidly as before. At that moment, the bars slid open. More policemen. One of them carried two cardboard trays, the sort delicatessens use. He set them down on the floor of the cell. On one was a mound of sandwiches; on the other, rows of plastic cups.

  He stood up and said, “Okay, chow time. Share and share alike, and I don’t wanna hear any bullshit.”

  There was no rush toward the food. All the same, Sherman was glad he was not too far away from the two trays. He tucked his filthy jacket under his left arm and shuffled over and picked up a sandwich wrapped in Saran Wrap and a plastic cup containing a clear pinkish liquid. Then he sat down on his coat again and tried the drink. It had a weak sugary taste. He put the plastic cup on the floor beside him and pulled the wrap off the sandwich. He pulled the two pieces of bread apart and peeked inside. There was a slice of lunch meat. It was a sickly yellowish color. In the fluorescent light of the cell it looked almost chartreuse. It had a smooth clammy surface. He raised the sandwich toward his face and sniffed. A dead chemical smell came from the meat. He separated the two pieces of bread and pulled out the piece of meat and wrapped it up in the Saran Wrap and put the crumpled mess on the floor. He would eat the bread by itself. But the bread gave off such an unpleasant smell from the meat he couldn’t stand it. Laboriously, he unfolded the Saran Wrap and rolled up the bread into balls and wrapped up the whole mess, the meat and the bread. He was aware of someone standing in front of him. White sneakers with Velcro straps.

  He looked up. The black youth was looking down at him with a curious little smile. He sank down on his haunches, until his head was only slightly above Sherman’s.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “I’m kinda thirsty. Gimme your drink.”

  Gimme your drink! Sherman nodded toward the cardboard trays.

  “Ain’t none left, man. Gimme yours.”

  Sherman ransacked his mind for something to say. He shook his head.

  “You heard the man. Share and share alike. Thought me and you’s buddies.”

  Such a contemptuous tone of mock disappointment! Sherman knew it was time to draw a line, stop this…this…Quicker than Sherman’s eye could follow it, the youth’s arm shot out and seized the plastic cup on the floor beside Sherman. He stood up and threw back his head and osten
tatiously drained the drink and held the cup over Sherman and said:

  “I asked you politely…You understand?…In here, you gotta use your head and make friends.”

  Then he opened his hand, let the cup fall down onto Sherman’s lap, and walked away. Sherman was aware the entire room was watching. I should—I should—but he was paralyzed with fear and confusion. Across the way, a Latino was pulling the meat out of his sandwich and throwing it on the floor. There were slices of meat everywhere. Here and there were balled-up wads of Saran Wrap and entire sandwiches, unwrapped and thrown on the floor. The Latino had begun to eat the bread by itself—and his eyes were on Sherman. They were looking at him…in this human pen…yellow lunch meat, bread, Saran Wrap, plastic cups…cockroaches! Here…over there…He looked toward the drunken Latino. He was still collapsed on the floor. There were three cockroaches rooting about in the folds of his left pant leg at the knee. All at once Sherman saw something moving at the mouth of the man’s pant pocket. Another roach—no, much too big…gray…a mouse!…a mouse crawling out of the man’s pocket…The mouse clung to the cloth for a moment, then scampered down to the tile floor and stopped again. Then it darted forward and reached a piece of yellow lunch meat. It stopped again, as if sizing up this bonanza…

  “¡Mira!” One of the Latinos had seen the mouse.

  A foot came flying out from the ledge. The mouse went skidding across the tile floor like a hockey puck. Another leg flew out. The mouse went flying back toward the ledge…A laugh, a cackle…“¡Mira!”…another foot…The mouse went skidding on its back, over a wad of lunch meat, which spun it upright again…Laughter, shouts…“¡Mira! ¡Mira!”…another kick…The mouse came spinning toward Sherman, on its back. It was just lying there, two or three inches from his foot, dazed, its legs jerking. Then it struggled to its feet, barely moving. The little rodent was out of it, finished. Not even fear was enough to get it moving. It lurched forward a couple of steps…More laughter…Should I kick it as a sign of my solidarity with my cellmates?…That was what he wondered…Without thinking, he stood up. He reached down and picked up the mouse. He held it in his right hand and walked toward the bars. The cell grew silent. The mouse twitched feebly in his palm. He had almost reached the bars…Sonofabitch!…A tremendous pain in his index finger…The mouse had bitten him!…Sherman jumped and jerked his hand up. The mouse held on to his finger with its jaws. Sherman flailed his finger up and down as if he were shaking down a thermometer. The little beast wouldn’t let go!…“¡Mira! ¡Mira!”…cackles, laughter…It was a terrific show! They were enjoying it immensely! Sherman banged the meaty side of his hand down on one of the crosspieces of the bars. The mouse went flying off…right in front of Tanooch, who had a sheaf of papers in his hand and was approaching the cell. Tanooch jumped back.