“I did,” Oliver said, eyeing the six grapefruits on Champ's desk.
“Looks like you just had a sparring session with someone.”
Oliver had momentarily forgotten about the mouse under his left eye and the fresh scab over it. “Just a little misunderstanding, that's all.”
“Everything all right?”
“It is now.”
“That's good. I want to ask you a serious question, Priddy. You feel safe in this joint?”
Before Oliver could answer, someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Are you coming or going? Let me get by, please.”
Oliver stepped out of the way to let the prisoner enter Champ's cell. He was carrying a jug of steaming hot coffee wrapped in a yellow dishtowel. He wore blood-red Japanese slippers with gold thread and a white terry cloth bathrobe. His long black hair hung loose halfway down his back and over his shoulders, black curtains billowed around a strikingly feminine face. He had black almond-shaped eyes, flawless skin and thick lips, a delicate frame, but his hands were strong and marked by work.
“This is my boy, Little,” Champ said. “Little, this is Oliver.”
“How's it going?” said Oliver.
“Nice to meet you,” the boy said. “Excuse me again.”
After he was gone Champ said, “You want some coffee?”
“No thanks.” Oliver stood at the threshold of the cell eyeing the posters on Champ's wall. Mohammad Ali, Dr. J, and the Honorable Elijah Mohammad. He looked around the room and two things impressed him: the racks of clothes hanging from several hooks on the walls-sweat suits, silk robes, jeans, shirts, jackets, and sweaters; and two waist-high stacks of books inside the door. The room had a strange smell to it, though. Oliver wasn't sure, but he thought it was a combination of dried sweat and cocoa butter.
“Well, do you, Priddy?”
“What?”
“Feel safe in here.”
“Anybody would be a fool to feel safe in a penitentiary, Champ. I watch my back everywhere I go, but I'm not afraid. Just smart. I'll tell you one thing, though.”
“What?”
“I feel a lot better now that I'm over here in the big St. Regis.”
“Why's that?”
“Well, let's just say I was real close to fucking a dude up over there and now I don't have to.”
“Lemme guess. Was it a niggah named Fat Daddy?”
“Yeah. That's the dude.”
Champ smiled and dropped a pile of clothes into a cardboard box. “How do you think I knew that?”
“I don't know, man.”
“Cuz I know everything that goes on in this joint. You think you're safer over here?”
“All I know is I'm glad to be away from that guy. He was stalking me everywhere I went. I didn't have any peace of mind except when I was at work or locked in my cell at night. It was nerve racking.”
“Well, this is why I wanted to talk to you, Priddy. See this block's no different, man. There's guys over here tougher and crazier than Fat Daddy and they're everywhere. In the stairwells, the showers, around every corner, ducking behind the trash cans. All they're looking to do is pounce on something young, white and fresh. No disrespect intended, but you're a good looking dude, Priddy, and you're gonna have trouble over here too.”
“Yeah, but there's something those guys don't know about me, Champ. I had to kill a guy already for that shit, and I'll do it again it if I have to.” Suddenly, Oliver was feeling queasy, his adrenalin was pumping fast and the butterflies were fluttering in his stomach. He was relieved when he heard the work-line bell ring. “I've got to be getting to work now, Champ.”
“Hold up, Jack. You still got ten minutes. I called you up here to ask you a question. How'd you like to be my partner?”
Oliver couldn't hide his disappointment or his fear. His jaw dropped and his eyes were wide. A red scald rose up his neck and into his cheeks. “What kind of question is that, Champ? I thought you and I were cool, man. I ain't no punk.”
Champ grinned and shook his head. “Calm down, Priddy. We cool. I like you. You're all right for a white guy. Look. You get visits, right?”
“Yeah, every week.”
“All right. Get your girl to start bringing you reefer. You smoke?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Keep a little for yourself each time and give me the rest. Let's say a couple ounces a month. I'll sell enough to pay your girl back for the stuff and keep the rest for myself. We can be business partners. You won't ever have to worry about another niggah in this joint even looking funny at you.”
Oliver sighed slowly, relieved to learn that Champ wasn't interested in trying to demoralize him. He knew what his answer would be. He admired Champ and enjoyed hanging out with his squad in the Young Guns Boxing Gym. They had never ridiculed or teased him after he quit the team to go to school and when he came in to work out on the heavy bag and jump rope once or twice a week, they welcomed him with open arms, treating him like a brother. Big Jake. Brother Melvin. Disco Bob. Blue Light. Cheese. Soul Train. And Champ. These North Philly boys, notorious not just for their gang-warring prowess, superior boxing skills and unflinching courage, also had a gift for talking jive and ribbing one another. Oliver loved hearing them play the dozens. He felt a real kinship when he was around these fellows. There was no reason why he couldn't help Champ make a few dollars for himself while at the same time gain the one thing in the world he needed to prosper. Albert was going home in a few months and he had already arranged for Oliver to continue receiving packages once he got home. Oliver's part of the deal would be a cinch.
“Yeah. We can do that, Champ. But what happens if my girl leaves me? What do we do then?”
“As slick as you are, I know you'll find another chick sooner or later.”
“Okay. It's a deal,” Oliver said.
“Wait. There's one more thing, Priddy. I've come a long way in math and I appreciate all the help you've been giving me up in that school. I'm going to try one more time to pass that GED exam but if I fail it again, you're going to have to find a way to take the math test for me the next time. I've got to get my diploma, man. That's all there is to it.”
“You'll pass it, Champ.”
“Yeah, but if I don't, you've got to find a way to take the exam into the bathroom or somewhere and complete it for me.”
“Okay. If it comes down to that, I will.”
“Solid. So it's a deal?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. Let's shake on it.”
AFTER MAKING HIS quid pro quo deal, Oliver immediately stopped reading and sleeping with one eye peeled to the door. No longer did he squeeze his anus tighter than a vise or walk around checking over his shoulder every time he turned a corner. Now he threw himself into his studies. Now he could concentrate with the precision of a microscope. During his childhood it had been easy for him to become enthusiastic about a new hobby or adventure only to grow bored and lose interest when the novelty wore off. Baseball cards had lost their importance the minute the bubble gum lost its flavor. Winning every cat's eye and steely in the circle wasn't as much fun as giving the whole sack of marbles away in the end. Bringing home pockets full of Mary Janes from Woolworth's was a strong second to the excitement he experienced when he had first shoplifted them. But that didn't happen when it came to pursuing his education. His hunger for knowledge was relentless.
Every night after the dead bolt dropped on his door, he withdrew like a hermit crab into his inner world. For the next four years he studied subjects ranging from religions of the world to personality disorders, multicultural poetry, criminal justice, calculus, satire, public speaking and many others. Though he was more interested in literature and philosophy than he was in mathematics and history, he still earned straight As in calculus and the history of Western civilization. So in awe of the academic world and so concerned about his status within that world was he that he was compelled to master every subject he took up. His greatest passion of all was li
terature, though, for it was through the vicarious experience of reading that he had come to recognize a truth and internalize it. The Count of Monte Cristo may have been a condemned man, but hope still ran through his prison. If the protagonist in The Red Badge of Courage was a coward, Oliver wanted to be one too. After reading the novels of a Russian writer named Dostoyevsky, he found a book of letters the author had written while he had been in a Siberian prison. One particular letter Dostoyevsky sent to his brother gave Oliver permanent assurance that it didn't matter whether he was in prison or out in society because, as Dostoevsky had so eloquently put it, “... life is life everywhere. Life is in ourselves, not in the world that surrounds us.” Oliver read these words and the epiphany moved him to tears.
Discovering life inside himself eventually led Oliver to grapple with his Catholic upbringing and reject original sin as the source of his suffering. It was original ignorance, he believed, that was the root of all suffering. He rejected, too, the father, son and holy ghost, and the rest of the supernatural kingdom. Pascal's wager was fascinating, but it went against the grain of his own thinking. If we live our lives as believers and find in the end that there is no God, we have lost nothing, Pascal proposed. But if we live as non-believers and find ourselves face to face with a supernatural God at the end, then our proverbial goose is cooked for all of eternity. Cela vous fera croire et vous abetira. (“This will make you believe and you will be stupefied.”) Oliver disagreed that there was nothing to lose by believing blindly, for to do so, as the Church demanded, was to stop searching for the truth.
With every book he opened he found a reason to turn the page. When he studied Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, became his heroine and led him to other books where he learned advanced mnemonic tricks for remembering formulas, dates and important names and geographic regions. In philosophy, Husserl's idea of intentionality became his grail: “If our 'gaze' toward a thought or idea is a stone thrown toward its object, then meaning depends on how hard we throw the stone.” Eureka!
During these years his increasing sense of inner freedom led him to write in his journal about the aesthetic side of his daily life:
October 9, 1982. Today while I was sitting in the bleachers reading Emerson's “Self Reliance,” I saw a blind man standing near the wall. He was a gaunt and gristly looking man with blotches of pink and brown skin covering his face and hands. For a while I watched him standing there tapping his red-stick-of-a-cane to the rhythm of the blue handball the prisoners were hitting against the wall. What disease, I wondered, had caused his black skin to turn pink like that and his hair to fall out in patches, leaving the bald spots a hue of sickly pinkish-brown? I thought to myself this man would curse God's ass up one side and down the other if he knew how horrible and pathetic he looked. Dostoyevsky said that denial of self-expression is death to the soul, so when I came in from the yard this evening I wrote this poem about discovering a blind man among us:
STUDY OF A BLIND PRISONER
The Blind Man who stands
near the cracked asylum wall
and tap tap taps his red
stick-of-a-cane is as lonely
and lame as the old guard
who stands above the wall,
chained, hour after hour,
to his gray and gloomy gun tower.
It was a little over a year later when the blind prisoner tapped his way up the steps of the education building and into the classroom where Oliver was explaining the Pythagorean theorem to a group of GED students:
February 21, 1984. Today I finally met the blind prisoner face to face. His name is Milo and he's from right here on the North Side of the city. He came up to the school this morning to inquire about a system of learning mathematics by finger counting. I asked if he knew how to read Braille and if he had enough books to read. He hesitated for a few seconds and then he said, “I have a disease in my nervous system that causes my fingertips to be numb, so I can't feel the Braille.” I can't even begin to describe how sorry I felt for him when he told me this. Wasn't it bad enough that the man was blind? Did he have to suffer even more? I told him I would ask my boss if there was anything he could do to help him with his needs. He seemed like an easygoing fellow. After we got to talking, I found out he's an avid jazz fan. I told him I'd look for him on the yard over the weekend so we could talk more and listen to some of his jazz tapes on that giant boom box he lugs around.
After that day Milo turned Oliver on to the Jazz Crusaders and Oliver gave Milo his Jackie Wilson's Greatest Hits tape to listen to. One day Oliver's boss, Mr. Lionel Sommers, brought a woman from the Pennsylvania Society for the Blind to meet and teach Milo how to calculate math on his fingers. A week later the woman brought him stories and magazines on audio tapes and Milo thanked her over and over. Then he thanked Mr. Sommers who later thanked Oliver. “You're a real asset to this school, Oliver,” his boss told him one morning as the sun glinted through the half-open Venetian blinds. “You've become a fine teacher, too, and I think it's time you had your own classroom. Why don't you move into the learning skills center? You can set the room up for your high school classes and you can clean out that storage closet in the back of the room and use it for an office. How's that sound?”
“Man, you don't know how much I appreciate that, Mr. Sommers,” Oliver exclaimed.
“Well, you've earned it, Oliver, and let me tell you something else. A professor named Dr. B.J. Dallet is coming to our graduation this spring. She's a good friend of mine. I've told her all about your academic achievements and the great progress you've made getting through to some of our most difficult GED students. She's interested in talking with you about attending graduate school. Now if you can get admitted into her program and earn your Master's, I think you'll be in an excellent position to go home one day. I'm not going to be working in this godforsaken prison forever. A few more years and I'm out of here. You should be finished earning your graduate degree by then. As long as I'm not working for the DOC, I can attend your pardons hearing and speak on your behalf if you'd like me to.”
Oliver was dumbfounded. “Are you serious? I'd be grateful as hell, Mr. Sommers. That's how Garfield Gilly got out. A retired police commissioner from his home town vouched for him. I can't wait to tell my family.”
“Just make sure you keep doing the right thing. Don't let me down.”
“I won't. Thanks, Mr. Sommers.” Oliver took Mr. Sommers' hand and shook it jubilantly. “Hey, before I go, there's a rumor going around that we're getting a new warden. Any truth to it?”
“It's true. He's a troubleshooter from central office. The deputy warden told us at yesterday's staff meeting that a lot of changes are coming down the pike and they're sending this guy down here to initiate them.”
“Changes? Like what?”
“For one thing, and you didn't hear this from me, Oliver, they're talking about putting two men in a cell to help relieve the overcrowding.”
“Two men living in one of these little ass cages? They're out of their minds. These men aren't going to go for that, Mr. Sommers.”
“What do you think they'll do?”
“I don't know.”
Mr. Sommers shook his head in frustration. “In your opinion, Oliver, is Champ Burnett capable of keeping the lifers under control?”
“Not all of them, he's not. He might be the most respected guy in this prison, but that doesn't mean everyone will listen to him. He wouldn't expect them to either. Not about something like this.”
“At some point, they're probably going to be calling Champ in to see if he'll help them keep the guys calm when these new changes start taking place.”
“You mean there's more? What else are they talking about?”
“Well, they're going to restrict varsity sports teams from traveling every week, and they're talking about doing away with the Christian family masses and cutting back on the number of hours you men get for your organizations' annual picnics. There's some other things too, bu
t they're not finalized yet.”
“Like what, Mr. Sommers?”
“The DOC is asking the legislators for money to build three new prisons. With this new governor backing them, they'll no doubt get it too, I'm afraid. It's really a shame. They've slashed my educational budget to hell.”
As Oliver twisted his face in disgust, thunder shook the roof and was followed by the first spatters of rain. The raindrops sounded hard, like someone flinging handfuls of pebbles into a washtub. Prison could seem like a boring place, about as dangerous as a maternity ward when everything was going well. The days and weeks and months could pass without cause for alarm, and then something like a memo could appear announcing the slightest change and someone would go down with the speed of a kamikaze pilot. The slightest change and someone reminded everyone else just how dangerous prison really was.
But what worried Oliver more than the threat of these new changes was how they appeared to be in sync with the new wave of politicians who were getting elected all over the state by running on a campaign that promised to get tough on crime and criminals. Every night on the six o'clock news these politicians were resounding the same theme: “It's time to lock 'em up and throw away the key.”
WHEN IGNATIUS MELROSE WHITE showed up in the winter of 1983 with a briefcase full of new policies, the lifers' newsletter box swelled with complaints about the man and the changes he was putting down. Formerly the warden at White Hill Penitentiary, Ignatius Melrose White was now the new “Superintendent” at Riverview. The title “warden” had outlived its purpose and a new euphemism was now in place. The new warden's stationery read, simply, Superintendent I.M. White. That was the first change.
Eureka Man: A Novel Page 10
