The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  Once you're in that cell, they have you, and the only you have is the rights they feel like giving you.

  Never let 'em see you sweat. Cruz was still lucid; he still had all his parts. Most people lost it when confronted with arrest and detainment. TV had not prepared them. Only on cop shows did the knightly minions of law and order swap rough-and-tumble mots with their justly bested foes.

  When your survival imperative was no longer wired to your mouth you ended up in the shoes - socks, rather - of the dude just booked, who had probably said something stupid like I know my rights or You can't do this or, worst of all, I pay your salary.

  MR HAPPY. Jonathan had the number. Would he do anything with it?

  He remembered Jonathan's eyes, uploading. Green eyes, but not like Jamaica 's. An unfathomable slibphylum of green, more yellow near the pupil, with sharp bits of brown that came and went, a murky blend like agitated pea soup. Cloudy. Dense. Jonathan struck Cruz as too upscale for the likes of Kenilworth Arms. All that paper stuff, to move in. This guy was a thinker, a planner, the sort of person who devised stratagems and wrote down lists before making focused, surgical moves. He aimed before he fired. Probably destined for some high rise, an office with Danish furniture, a health plan and a savings account. He would spend years amassing the perks that Emilio or Bauhaus could summon right now with a fingersnap… only to waste. Jonathan was real people; he fit into the bourgeois world of people who drove Nipponese compacts and paid taxes. Cruz was a fringe dweller, a maverick virus; he slipped through the cracks and hung at the edge of proper civilization. Like a predator, he fed off the norm. Columnists wrote inept articles on what they called 'the drug subculture.' People like Jonathan read them in Sunday supplements, having one of two reactions: How can people LIVE like that? Or Jesus; must be goddamn nice. When you boiled it down to business structure it was all the same. Profits, losses, hostile takeovers, power raiders. The veepees eventually slid into their boss's vacancies. Corporate America; just say no. Cruz took pride in his outsider status, whose risks included the cell in which he had landed. Average people craved vicarious and riskless excitement. Maybe Jonathan's presence on the opposite side of the fence of social respectability would serve to balance out the fact that Cruz lived and breathed.

  Maybe Cruz could do Jonathan a favor someday.

  From what he overheard, Oakwood cops called their collars 'alleged individuals' when in the presence of Sergeant Barnett. Otherwise, arrestees were known as hemorrhoids. Or bugs. The benediction of the Oakwood station, as you were thrown into a cell, was:

  'Welcome to Club Paradise, bug.'

  It was what the duty officer had told him as he opened the bullpen door. Enter by yourself, hemorrhoid - or do it my way. Cruz heard it coming hollowly from down the cinderblock corridor, followed by the sound of the new prisoner being cuffed to a Murphy bunk. Then the slide-slam of the cell door, not barred, but a solid core job thick with industrial gray paint like the bulkhead of a battleship. The new guy had been isolated in one of the solitaries. One tiny square window, no glass. One food slot. Silence.

  One of the bullpen's bugs was hunched on the steel toilet, liberating a blatting, diarrhetic shit. Cruz tried to ignore the acidic aroma that enriched the big cell. When the duty officer came back, he saw flecks of the new bug dotting the starched uniform blouse. Good. Cruz wiped a palm down his own face and stuck his hands back through the bars. Your clothes got stale quickly in jail, and he could smell himself. Awhile back he'd unzipped to piss, and the updraft from his pants was like the den of a randy puma. Jamaica 's juices still scaled his thighs and starched his pubic beard. His penis, tender now to the point of pain, did not wish to see the outside world and shriveled, withdrawing toward the sanctuary of his torso as soon as he had relieved himself.

  Some of Jamaica was still with him. He was happy for that.

  The head of his dick had been cold between his frozen fingers, and his toes were dead in socks too thin. In the bullpen it was probably lower than fifty degrees; cops knew that the temperature could help keep prisoners quiet, bundled into themselves instead of overheating and pounding each other. Each incoming hemorrhoid was issued a 4x4 square of Army roughweave that left fiberballs on any clothing it touched and was inadequate for real warmth. Cruz could almost see his breath condensing. The air around him was fetid. Nobody ever washed their feet, foreseeing incarceration.

  They would want him to talk about Bauhaus. He might have to stay here a spell. Due process would never be expedited on behalf of someone like Cruz. He knew this and prepared to mentally cocoon until Bauhaus could spring him. The concrete bullpen floor was as cold as the metal grid of a soft drink cooler. The bunks were all taken. The King Kongs of the cell had already relieved the lesser bugs of their blankets and were mummified on the topmost shelves of steel. Other bugs were wasted enough to pass out on the floor in fetal wino's curls, oblivious to time, temperature, pain and life. Cruz hung on to the square of floor he had staked out, and did not stray except to rub cold water into his face from the push-tap sink mounted above the cell's single toilet. If he had to drop his pants and sit, eleven pairs of eyes would be aware of his vulnerability.

  He sat lotus, tucking his frigid feet behind his knees to try and thaw his toes, which felt like particles of ice from Saturn's rings. The chilly floor instantly buzzed his butt numb. A toot would have kept his metabolism more attentive. Another rockin' Friday night.

  His very familiarity with police procedure had irritated Stallis and Reinholtz, the arresting officers. They had heard the secret word - drugs - and wanted an excuse to cripple him. He kept his face shut and did not respond to taunts or threats: 'You got some kinda problem with this?' Best to say nothing beyond no, officer, sir.

  Jamaica knew the limits to which she could badmouth her lawful abductors. The social dynamic was charged, primitive, and its innate sexism was both a boon and a drawback. It was part of the game of insult played by all cops with all prostitutes, including males. Including female cops. The downside was running afoul of a cop not fond of games… in which event you sometimes got raped with a nightstick, or worse, for mouthing off.

  His spine was beginning to ache. He sat, legs folded, arms wrapped tight, head down and jaw clenched. His teeth wanted to chatter. The afterburn of the coke had blown away, leaving bleary insomnia. His joints were packed with iron filings, muscles striated from his mattress Olympics, brain pulsating and trying to crack his eggshell skull and push through like expanding bread dough. A ground glass feeling in the creases of his eyes. A sewage deadness thickly veneering his tongue. Neck tendons like the wire of a spiral binder yanked into uselessness. He nodded heavily but could not sleep, his sinuses packed, his head topheavy, a bowling ball tottering atop a drinking straw.

  He could not remember whether he had actually kissed Jamaica, once, during the whole night. Just kissed her.

  Officer Stallis had checked him into the holding tank, a box with two payphones and a bench as cold as the floor. The bench was splintery and etched with graffiti. Two big fractureproof windows overlooked the corridor leading to the cellblock. To one side Cruz could see a window of wired glass and beyond it, the police day room. A fat cop with a flattop sat watching a portable Sony TV and checking the security monitors, trading lewd jokes and tall tales of arrest and valor. No female field cops in Oakwood. Cruz had seen a uniformed woman working the switchboard. The property sheet he had signed had been filed by a woman.

  In the holding tank he lifted one of the payphone receivers and listened to the dial tone. A sonic barrier he could penetrate with his voice, thereby putting a tiny part of himself back in the world. He had no change. Who could he call? Dialing Bauhaus direct or collect would be verboten, not to mention unfulfilling. Why help the cops get for free data they were hoping to frost out of him?

  Call Rosie long distance. Sure.

  The phones were right in front of him, and useless.

  Maybe Jonathan would drop dime on behalf of a total stranger. Maybe
Jonathan would think that by helping Cruz he might get another look at Jamaica. Whatever works.

  'Rack that fucking phone, shithead, nobody gave you permission to call nobody.'

  It had been Stallis, hungry for fingerprints and a Polaroid or two. Cruz had signed the arrest form, which was passed through a slot akin to the drawers at a pump-and-pay gas -station. Reinholtz had trouble with the camera. Cruz's mugs came out greenish, like Jamaica 's ID photo. They did several complete print workups on him, including palms, which meant one set was tagged for the FBI. Great. Cruz had to wash his hands in acrid blue gunk the texture of lard. The stench clung to his hands for hours.

  His indoctrination done, he was escorted to the bullpen. Welcome to Club Paradise, hemorrhoid. As the new guy he became the object of disinterest until dethroned by the night's next candidate.

  Huddled, shivering, half-in and half-out, snot caked like crushed ice in his nose, cranium hammering in 4/4, Cruz was jolted back to reality at the sound of a voice.

  'That cocksucker Barnett say you a drug pusher, boy.'

  He saw frayed gym socks and smelled bromidrosis. Old chinos. Gut. Lumberjack shirt, thermal undershirt, both grimy with jail time.

  Over in one corner of the cell a bug with wild, matted hair and eyes as vacant as clear marbles was furiously jacking off, cock poking up like the heating element of a soldering pencil.

  Cruz sighed. 'No. Barnett's full of shit.' The cell shrank in to crowd them. Here comes the inevitable. Get ready for it.

  One of the feet nudged him roughly. A tap to crack the hard freeze of his joints. 'Then what the fuck are you in here for?'

  If anyone had really needed to know, Cruz would have answered such an inquiry when he had first come in. Not now. Now was different. Now defined the asshole before him as a habitual arrestee, a chronic misdemeanor bug whose confiscated shoes would be workboots and whose personal effects baggie would contain a cowboy belt with a brass buckle the size of the grille on a '54 Chevy, and a fat, battered wallet with a two-year-old condom welded to one pocket. Now was time for the first detainees of the evening to stir up some shit, having slept off their binges and needing exertion to get warm and perhaps seed an appetite for the Oakwood jail's continental morning cuisine.

  Cruz pretended to be out of it. Two more seconds, to torque up.

  The man had abandoned his nest of hijacked bedding, one of the blankets hanging from his shoulders to make a shawl with a bunched cowl. He was fleshy, heavy, but in the meaty, slow-sinewed way a grizzly bear is. Thick neck like the hatchway on a tank, bulging veins laboring under the stress to flush the nose and face red. Visage eroded, sunburnt, deep-wrinkled. Irish spud nose traced with burst capillaries, eyes a brainless blue, hating the world, cataracted against logic with the base rage of the inbred and stupid.

  This guy spent a lot of time beating up people.

  'Talkin' to you, shitface.'

  A hemorrhoid elsewhere in the cell - crony, or a former victim - laughed. Cruz did not divert his attention from the dangerous beast right in front of him. He kept looking up until they locked gazes. In those eyes he found no slack, no reprieve, nothing.

  'So why the fuck you in here with a buncha men?'

  He was ready now. 'I cut the balls off a loudmouthed redneck faggot like you.'

  As the bigger man bent to wrest this skinny snotball off the floor, to wrench him erect and make him swallow a fist, Cruz reached back overhand, grabbed the vertical bars, and arched one nearly senseless foot into the crotch hovering dead ahead. He rolled. His opponent woofed air and folded, banging his simian brow ridge against the bars with a drainpipe clank.

  Cruz hit his feet, wobbling but rebounding in time to smash two solid punches into the man's exposed kidneys. They were packed in fat, well padded, but the guy grunted and crashed to his knees, hanging on to the bars for support now. Street politics had taught Cruz to get his hits in fast and make them count. Lacking his opponent's size and strength, all he had as a backstop was speed and meanness.

  Pummeling this monster's Peterbilt body wouldn't even count as exercise. Cruz had to put his lights out, and now, or he was going to get mangled as soon as Moby Dickhead caught his wind.

  The cell woke up fast. Cruz snapped around to kick the big man in the face while he was still down and wheezing, one hand cupping his flattened testicles. Hemorrhoids rooted for their chosen contestants. In ten more seconds the guards would tip and charge in, truncheons raised.

  Cruz hoped they wouldn't show up just to place bets. Breath rushed in and out of him as he cocked his foot. Payback time, for this day's harassment.

  The wild man in the corner whooped and ejaculated, making pig noises.

  Cruz fell on his ass before he even realized what had happened. Like water into a pan of hot oil, ssss, he could no longer feel either of his legs until the cramps hit.

  He tried to roll but felt his vital seconds piss away. He grabbed the toilet and managed to get one leg under him.

  Momentum tore him askew as his enemy helped him up. Cruz was yanked backward by the shirt and the next thing he saw was an oncoming fist the size of an anvil with knuckles like rivets.

  The haymaker plowed full-blast into Cruz's midsection, tearing loose a hawk of pain and imploding his chest around the fist. He thought he could feel his intestines springing across the cell.

  Cruz went down, then up, and saw the cannibal grin of his attacker. 'I want you to remember this, you little fucker.'

  Cruz tried to lash in with a side kick but it was like trying to dance by remote control. Moby had his wrist in a trash compacter grip.

  He snapped it sidewise and out. He kicked Cruz sharply in the exposed armpit.

  The pain was astonishing.

  He felt his shoulder unsocket and his vision whited out. Crack like fractured kindling.

  The prisoners were cheering and cursing as the duty guard and four other officers piled into the cellblock. Everyone was awake now.

  Cruz was airborne.

  He saw the concrete floor hurrying to kiss his face. Another gentlemanly contest forfeit in deference to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. If only he'd've had some nasal steroids, he would have won.

  The cell flip-flopped. At least he was warmer.

  FOURTEEN

  Jonathan's pump was thudding, stressing his ribcage, irising his throat shut. He felt excited, elated.

  Hanging up the payphone had been a rush.

  The cold air did not seem oppressively arctic, but crisp. Despite the move-in, the cops, and the late hour, all his weariness had drained as though lanced. Relief; he felt good for perhaps the first time since he had stepped out into Chicago - city of bootleggers and Neapolitan knee-breakers and Sinclair's meat packers, the land of fascist mayors and Dillinger and Speck and Gacy. And the snow, the ceaseless, engulfing, choking, blinding, freezing wet devil shavings of alabaster cold, coiling down from the night sky to suck the color from the world and shroud it in the deceptive numbness of a lethal injection, to pack and suffocate the city in a season of death until even the calcimine downfall itself assimilated the city's blackness and stink.

  Somehow, Jonathan now found himself able to look across the sweeping dunes of white seamlessly interring cars and phone poles and avenues alike, and feel good. There were times when everything could change that simply.

  He felt good on his own terms. No chemical assists; no overdose of Quietly, nor the slingshot rush of Bash's Terminal Turbos. So much easier it would have been tonight, to grumble while shooting the cheesy locks on his two doors, to hit the cot and submerge the late-night roust of Kenilworth Arms in a self-indulgent drunk of sleep. By dawn it would have been someone else's problem.

  Instead, he had acted. Now he felt good. Simple.

  His internal bias was for talk, not action. He always talked a great game, as Amanda used to say. Sharp insights, the firm glue of potent words, aimed and bowshot with killing skill. Since most other people were all talk, too, Jonathan could therefore verbalise his way o
ut of almost any responsibility. Amanda had accused him of trying to disenfranchise from the grownup world of hurt. If you never stuck out your neck, you never feared the razor.

  He ignored television and disdained common pursuits. Most people were unattractive or vapid; if neither, then a time wasting bore, beyond their utility to him. Before Amanda it had been simple enough for him to magnetize transient partners. By the third meal taken in public most turned repetitive, dreary oh yeah David Lee Roth has the most GORGEOUS bod or bottomed out in their own shallowness: You know what I like more than anything in the world? Chicken McNuggets.

  In bed, most were overly passive or conventional. Jonathan's sexual notions impressed them much too quickly. They were strangers to pleasure. And he never got a feeling of hooking up with another personality. Until…

  No.

  As a former hash-house waitress, Amanda had educated Jonathan on the necessity of proper tipping. Today, if service was rotten, he would withhold. Sometimes he overtipped, not only if a waitress was receptive to him, but if she knew her job and was good at it. The act of tipping itself was a tenuous link back in Amanda's direction.

  Of voting, Jonathan's line had always been that he refused to vote for politicians. 'It only encourages them.' Amanda would sigh, tell him not to bitch because he had not taken a say, and peruse local ballot initiatives alone. He talked about drops of water in an ocean, of corruption so deeply rooted as to be immune to a universe of good intentions. Amanda voted anyway, telling him he had closed off too many avenues. Soon he would be perfectly impregnable, walled up inside his own head.

  She would tell him it was pretty goddamned hard to lose anything when you had nothing.

  Before Amanda, it had been much easier to evaporate problems by averting his attention. You really could ignore it and it would go away. It was not a very honorable way of life, but it was safe - a core survival lesson learned long ago by hyenas. Just another verse of that venerable old standard blues, Don't Get Yo Ass Involved.