Billy looked tired and gray, and Jack could not understand why he had been talking like that. Afterward, later, he knew that Billy had already decided, and he was taking this last chance to tell Jack who he was.
“Now, man,” Billy said, “I know how silly a lot of this sounds, dig, a philosophy of the poolhall; but shit, I looked around myself and I asked myself, what is my life, anyway, and the answer was quick and easy, my life is what I got, an if I don’t find anythin important in it, I’m dead. But, you know what it’s like when you get high sometimes and everything seems important? Well, it’s like that. If the way I feel about pool aint important, what the hell am I? So I sat down and tried to think up words for it, and the only one I could come up with was connect.”
He looked down at Jack’s hard, battered face. “You and me, now,” he said. “We’re connected. That’s good. And when the connection breaks, it’s over, that’s too bad, but it’s finished and a man would be a fool to try to make it go on when it’s all over. You dig? We got it, you don’t even have to admit it, but when we think of each other, we feel good, and that’s it. But when it busts, it’s busted, and that’s the end. Nothin happens twice.”
Now Jack understood him perfectly, and he lay silently on his bunk, his arms at his sides. He did not seem to be looking at anything, although his eyes were open. He felt powerless to move or to speak, but he wanted Billy to speak, he wanted Billy to say it all, and it would be said.
Very softly, Billy spoke: “Not the sex. That’s not the connection. You and me, we’re the connection. You live an I live, and we love each other. Do you know that? The sex, that’s—well, joy. I got to admit it. How many times we wrecked it because we was afraid to admit it was joy? How many times we had to play like we was just jackin off? How many times we have to pretend it wasn’t love. Now you know it’s love and I know it’s love, and I’m tellin you I love you. And I want you to tell me. To say it. In words.”
Billy waited. Jack could not speak. He did not want to speak. He was embarrassed. He had been afraid this would happen someday, that it would become romantic. It was awful, and because he did love Billy he wanted to tell him so, but he did not mean the word the way Billy obviously meant it, and so he could not speak.
Billy said, “Jack. I want you to kiss me. Once. That’s all. You can’t talk; at least, at most, kiss me. You got to. If you love me, kiss me.”
Jack closed his eyes. “No,” he said.
“All right,” Billy said. “All right.”
Jack got the story in bits and fragments, but what happened was this: Clifford, the wolf-pack leader and hardest nut in the place, made up his mind that he disliked Jack, probably as the result of some chance remark—they had never exchanged more than half a dozen words in a year—and Clifford let it be known that he would have Jack’s ass within a week, and was betting five to one Jack would stand still for it. Billy found out about it. He was terrified of Clifford, but the morning after he and Jack had their last long talk, he went up to Clifford’s group on the big yard, looking tiny among the huge Negroes, and said to Clifford, “If you don’t lay off Levitt, I’ll see to it you’re sorry.” They all laughed, and one of them moved his arm quickly and Billy stepped back, stumbled, and almost fell down. Jack saw this and asked Billy about it later, and all Billy said was that he was getting a bet down. But his face looked strange, grayish, drawn, and that night in the cell he didn’t talk at all. Clifford had gotten a message to Billy; he would get Jack the next afternoon.
In the morning break on the big yard, Jack saw most of it. The day was bright and warm and the men loafed and talked in small knots, or strolled by themselves back and forth. Jack was watching the domino games when he saw Billy leave one group of men and head across the yard toward Clifford’s group, just in the shade of the shed roof. Jack saw Clifford detach himself from the group with a grin and a wave; saw the two men approach each other. To a guard looking down, to anyone, it looked as if the two men were merely crossing the big yard and would pass within a few feet; a coincidence. The only reason Jack was watching was that Billy looked so stiff; he almost seemed to be marching, and his face was thin and frightened, his shoulders hunched up. He looked strange; usually he was loose and happy-looking. Clifford, as he approached Billy, loomed up over him, gigantic, black, but even his face was a little drawn; and they passed each other, very close, brushing together for a tenth of a second, but passed on, and for a moment Jack thought they were passing contraband. Clifford’s face was toward Jack now, and he looked astonished, his mouth loose, his eyes large. Billy, from the back, was ambling along slowly, and he seemed to have his arms folded over his chest. Then Jack saw Clifford fall to his knees. He still looked astonished. Then he fell forward, flat on his face, his legs twisting out and jerking slightly. Everyone, including Jack, turned away. No one saw Billy fall.
Clifford was dead in three hours, a sharpened spoon handle deep into his abdomen. Billy lasted almost five hours before dying. Clifford’s knife had a seven-inch blade, and all of it had been buried into Billy. A guard brought the word to Jack, who was celled on the shelf pending an investigation. The guard was a young man. He said, “Your buddy copped it.”
“When?” Jack said.
“Oh, about an hour, hour and a half ago. The shit’s gonna hit the fan around here again.” The guard passed on.
Jack wept that night, bitterly. He could find no thought to comfort himself. He could not even be enraged, only desolated, and more lonely than he had ever been in his life. There was nothing for him to do but weep, and he wept.
PART THREE
Meaningful Lives
1956–1960
Seventeen
Jack Levitt was 26 years old when he got out of San Quentin. He had finished high school and had even taken two courses by extension from the University of California; he had worked in both the kitchen and the bakery, and he had not gotten into one single fistfight. Custody felt he was a good risk, and Rehabilitation considered him to have taken great strides toward the goal of maturity. After the death of Billy Lancing, Jack broke down and cried only once more, when the news arrived that Claymore had escaped from Alcatraz.
According to the newspapers, Claymore had not escaped at all, but had been drowned in attempting escape. He must have drowned, the Federal authorities reasoned, because no one ever escaped. True, his body was never discovered, but, they reasoned, it had probably been washed out to sea. Jack did not believe this, and he didn’t think anybody else did, either. Claymore had escaped, and it made Jack cry in his cell, much to the amazement of his cellmate, an old safecracker. Billy had felt “connected” to Claymore, and this is what made Jack cry. He wished Billy were alive, to celebrate Claymore’s freedom. He wished there were a heaven, so Billy could look down and see it and rejoice.
Claymore’s escape plan had been very simple: He waited for a foggy day and for a moment when no one was looking at him, got outside, jumped into the bay, and started swimming. It is supposed to be beyond human endurance to swim from Alcatraz to shore without extensive training, thick grease on the body, etc., especially because of the strong currents; but if Claymore’s desire for freedom was strong enough, he could make it. Then, he would have to be able to wait, hidden, somewhere along the shore of San Francisco, for the early morning hours; and if he survived that, did not die of exposure or become so weak he could not move, he could begin to make his way through the police-watched streets toward the Fillmore District. If he could make it that far, he was probably safe. It would not be hard for him to find Negroes who would not turn him in. So it was not impossible, merely difficult—about as difficult as climbing Mount Everest. A few years later three more men escaped from The Rock, and after that the Federal authorities lost heart. The whole function of Alcatraz was its hopelessness, and if the convicts started leaving any time they felt like it, well.... So today it is closed, deserted, and remains a monument to man’s incredible stupidity on the one hand, and to his incredible courage and love
of freedom on the other.
Jack’s escape from that other blot on the pride of the human soul, San Quentin, was much less dramatic. He was paroled at the end of eighteen months, in spite of his bad record and in spite of his even worse appearance before the Parole Board. He felt like punching them all right in the face. For so long now he had not permitted himself to think about getting out, and now, with this invitation to appear before the Board, he could not help himself; he wanted out so badly he became terrified that they, the Board, a handful of men who really knew nothing about him, would refuse to let him out. So he stood there in front of them, his face red and tense, his fists clenched, answering their questions, trying to seem contrite and mature, wanting to smash them, and when he went back to his cell he knew he had botched it completely and he would have to wait at least another year.
But he was wrong; his record at Quentin was good and they considered him a good parole risk. So he left San Quentin absolutely determined not to go back, as much for their sake as his. Because that strange, awful place had actually tried to help him. They, it, had treated him as a man whenever Custody would let them, and tried to find a way to reach him through the layers of hardness, and where they failed they at least tried, and whether it was San Quentin or Billy Lancing that had reformed Jack was a moot point: he was reformed. He came out wanting to make something of his life.
There was a job waiting for him in a bakery on Union Street, near Fillmore. The building was set back from the street, and out in front on its own sidewalk were little marble-topped tables and wire chairs beneath a striped awning. Three trimmed acacia trees completed the decor, and there was a boy in a white jacket to wait on the tables and sell baked goods from the glass counter inside. The proprietor always sat on a high stool behind the cash register; he was a small man, usually dressed in a gray suit and vest, with a plump, pallid face, receding hair, an amused mouth, and blank, colorless eyes. His name was Saul Markowitz, and he opened the bakery each morning at six promptly by wearily pulling back the grating and unrolling the awning, and at that hour his best customers were the servants of the rich of Pacific Heights, who would come in for a quick cup of caffé Wien and a hot croissant; fresh, hot croissants were the specialty of the shop, and the servants would pick up a foil-lined box of them to take back to their people. Also at that hour there might be a few from all-night parties, drunk, sitting at the little tables eating their croissants and pouring brandy into their coffee, talking the brittle patter of people who don’t have anything to do with themselves. Saul Markowitz knew most of his customers by name, including the servants; he addressed them, joked with them, and kept his eyes remote. Many of his customers thought he was contemptuous of them, but they came back anyway.
Saul Markowitz often recruited his bakery help from San Quentin; they would come, work, be with him for a few weeks or months, and then move on. He would always get another. Jack could not understand at first what it was Mr. Markowitz wanted of him. He knew that Mr. Markowitz had a reputation for a special kind of wit: perhaps hiring ex-convicts was witty. Mr. Markowitz had been asked by Herb Caen why he had named his bakery “Rosenbloom’s” and had answered, according to the item in the column, “Who’d come to a place called `Markowitz’s?”’
But Jack was glad for the job and grateful to Saul Markowitz; he worked hard and made no trouble. There were two bakers, and Jack was the helper. He wore a white tee shirt, white duck trousers, and a white apron, and most of the time his face was smeared with a mixture of sweat and fine flour. He hauled sacks of flour around, greased pans and put them in the oven and pulled them out, stocked the display shelves, washed pots and trays, and stuffed himself with baked goods. It was a good job, hard hot work and fair pay, but after a while the smell of the place sickened him, especially when he would have to bend deep into the lard barrel and get the last handfuls of dead white lard from the bottom. The bakers were a pair of noncommittal types whose only conversation, aside from giving orders and cursing, was about union matters. They did not appear to have any life outside the bakery. They left Jack alone and he left them alone.
No one at all, in fact, paid any attention to him. He worked his shift, went home to his furnished room on Pine Street, read, went to movies, visited his parole officer, and that was about it. He did not violate his parole for two weeks—in his case, one of the conditions was no drinking—and when he did he carried it off as if it were a desperate caper, walking several blocks to buy the pint of whiskey, hiding the package under his jacket as he walked back up the hill, locking the door to the room—all with the heavy sense of dread and expectation of a teen-ager visiting his first prostitute. He sat on the edge of the bed and uncapped the bottle and took a quick swig, and almost immediately lost his temper. It was disgusting that he should have to sneak around like that, just to have a little drink.
Well, he would fling it in their teeth. He drank off about half the pint, jammed the bottle into his hip pocket, and took off for Market Street. When he left his room he was angry, and determined to make trouble, but by the time he got down to Market he felt just fine and sauntered along with the early evening crowd, savoring the pure freedom of it, the way people all dressed differently, the way the women looked and smelled, the way the streetcars sounded, the glitter of the lights, the strange, exciting music from the hot-dog joints, the corniness of it all, the cheapness, the vulgarity which is vulgar only if you haven’t been away for such a long time and in a place so dull as prison; there was a lot of stuff in the newspapers about “cleaning up” Market Street, and Jack wondered why they wanted to do it. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was? Didn’t they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing! But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog-turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool!” and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I’m doing, and they’re all so nice.
At the moment, glowing with whiskey, Jack loved everybody. He even loved that policeman, damn him, who made Jack hide his bottle for fear of being sent back to San Quentin for three years. But the policeman, damn him, went away and Jack took another nip. I aint going to get drunk and mug my fellowman. And go back to prison. Hell no, I’m gonna get drunk and go to a movie, some cheap Technicolor Western full of noise and easy choices, or maybe even pick up one of these beautiful sleazy-looking broads....
He was suddenly very dizzy. He was not used to liquor any more. But it wasn’t that. It was the idea of having a woman that made him dizzy, and he knew it. He leaned up against a building, watching the people surge past him, and took another drink without thinking. The bottle was empty. He made his way across the sidewalk to a trash receptacle and dropped the bottle in. A couple of sailors went past, and one of them looked at Jack, made a face, and stopped.
“Say, buddy,” the sailor said, “where can a man get a piece of tail in this town?”
“I look like I ought to know,” Jack said.
“Yeah, you look like you ought to know. Do you?”
“Nope. Less ask a cabbie.”
“Why didn’t you think of that, Normie?” the sailor said to his buddy. “You’re supposed to be so goddam hip.”
Three hours later they were all filthy drunk, and were asked very politely to leave a bar deep into the Spanish Mission District. The bar was full of Mexicans, and the two sailors and Jack put their heads together and in whispers and giggles admitted that it would be foolish to start a fight. They left and wandered down the street until they found a cab. When they were in back one of the sailors said, “Where to now? Less find that whorehouse.”
&n
bsp; “Nearest whorehouse is in Stockton,” the cabbie said over his shoulder.
“I got to go home,” Jack muttered doggedly. He told the driver his address, and they moved off.
“Go home,” one of the sailors said. “Why do you have to go home? We got to find a whorehouse an get fucked.”
“No fucking,” Jack said. “Too drunk to enjoy it. First one has to be good. I got to go to work tomorrow. Thass why.”
They couldn’t talk him out of it, and had to let him off on Pine Street, in front of his place.
“We goin to Stockton,” one of them said. He was sticking his head out the back window, and abruptly he vomited down the side of the cab, just as it moved off. Jack gave them a salute and went up the stairs, drunk and afraid. When he got in bed, the fear subsided a little. He was safe now. Nobody could pick him up and put him in jail. He was safe. But he could not go out and get drunk like that again. He could get in a fight or get braced, and go to jail, and back to San Quentin. They had him. He was free, but he couldn’t do anything. Those sailors. Talking about their 72 hours of freedom. What did they know? He fell asleep.
In the morning he had a vicious hangover, far out of proportion to the pleasures of the evening, and he went about his work dully. Out in front, while he was putting a tray of cherry tarts (which smelled disgusting) into the display case, a group of late partygoers were seating themselves around a couple of the little tables, and Jack saw beyond them a Rolls Royce parked in the yellow zone. What attracted Jack’s attention was a pair of men’s shoes sticking up out of the back window. Jack grinned painfully and hoped the man in the car felt worse than he did. He straightened up after placing the tray on the shelf, feeling the needles of pain back of his eyes, and found himself face-to-face with a woman, one of the party outside, pretty, disheveled, her eyes glassy. She looked rich and expensive, and young. Her lipstick was freshly applied and dark against her skin, but her mouth was puffy and reddish around the edges. She was staring at Jack from behind dark glasses. She pointed down into the case.
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