by Mary Leo
When I finally arrive at the prison, around noon, the lines are short for some reason so I get right in with hardly any wait. The guard, Henrietta, is there with wand in hand. I approach her and as soon as the wand comes close, the alarm goes off. She does her groping thing, only this time I smile at her, almost like I’m enjoying it. She and I need to be friends. There’s no telling what Captain Bob may try. I need one of these guards to be on my side.
“Next time you come in just come to the front of the line. You don’t have to wait,” she states once she’s satisfied that I’m not packing a .357.
I continue with my smile act, only she doesn’t smile back. “Thanks, the line can be pretty long sometimes. By the way, I like your hair today. Is that a new cut?”
She hesitates. Stares at me for a moment like she’s wondering what I just said. “No,” she says with a curt little voice and steps back, out of my way.
Breaking into her circle of friends could be a challenge.
I end up escorted to the red-brick building this time by Vivian and Captain Bob. We’re going to F-House where the main scene will take place. We walk through the guardhouse, across a small lawn area through an open doorway, up some cracked marble stairs to a landing with a staircase on either side and an arched walkway in the middle. The brown tile floor has been buffed to a glass shine. A guard stands in front of a green door-like gate just under the archway yelling something to a guard on the stairs. Their voices, mixed with the general noise from the many offices that surround us, is almost laughable. After the guard checks my badge, which he carefully studies as if I just dropped from the sky, he opens the gate. Then it’s down a short hallway, a flight of stairs and out an open back door.
F-house is the round four-story brick building to our left. There are a few trailers sitting outside in the courtyard and men and woman from the crew go about the business of setting things up for the scene.
I can feel the tension between the Captain and me. Probably more on my part. All he does is smile, like yesterday never happened. I’m thinking that I should be in New York City picking up bartender skills. This whole thing is stupid. Like I can do anything about what goes on inside Stateville. As if nobody on the outside knows about Speck’s hootch or the cookbook Mr. Mafioso is writing. The Captain has me pegged, all right. A first class fool.
For once, I should have listened to Mike.
I start up a conversation, “Vivian, how long has Henrietta been working here?”
“Henrietta? You mean the guard, Henrietta?”
“Is there another Henrietta?”
“Oh no, unless you know another Henrietta?” I stare at her for a moment. She gets the picture and goes on, “Let’s see, I guess she was here when I started. That would be three years this December. She’s a sweet woman once you get to know her. Loves silent movies and music. Plays the piano in the theater department at our local college and sometimes here, like at Christmas and such. She has real talent. Lives with her best friend, Maggie. It’s sweet. They’ve been best friends since they were teens. Never did get married, either one of them. I can’t understand it, what with all these good-looking guards around here. I keep trying to fix—”
I have to stop the woman before she spins out of control and realizes that Henrietta is a lesbian. I don’t know if she can handle that kind of truth. The more she talks the more I think of Gracie Allen, only with Gracie it was a routine. “Vivian, thanks. That’s more than I need to know, thanks.”
“Oh, you’re welcome.”
Captain Bob decides to talk. “That Jim Belushi sure is a nice fellow. Got to meet him this morning. You’d never know that he’s a big star.” The Captain is almost glowing with excitement. It seems that Mike has cast him in a scene where Jim Belushi and Arnold first walk into the prison. Captain Bob lets them through the gates. He can’t stop talking about meeting Belushi. “I think he’s better looking than his brother was and just as talented in a different way, a more serious actor. Don’t you think?”
I go along with his fantasy. “Oh, yeah, he’s another Marlon Brando—the rugged, Roman soldier type. Probably win an Oscar for this movie.” Personally, I don’t think Jim even comes close. That quick, quirky humor died with John, but I won’t mention that to the Captain. Need to ride out this distraction.
“I don’t know about that,” he reasons, “but he sure is a nice fellow.”
I’m wondering what game the Captain is playing. Toying with my emotions. I try to let it go and think about Jim Belushi.
The Belushi brothers seem to have one of those stage mothers who never gives up. The first time I met Jim he warned me about his mother and made me promise to keep her away from the set, said she made him edgy. Mike and I handled it with our good-cop bad-cop routine. Mrs. Belushi didn’t buy it and got on the set anyway. Jim had a fit when he saw her, but never let on to his mom that she was in the way. The good son, always treating her with respect. Since we’ve been at Stateville she hasn’t shown up. Don’t know why, but according to Mike, Jim does his best work without her.
To get into F-house, we walk through an open side door of the tunnel where a guard stands watching all the activity from the crew, both coming in and going out. Turning to the right this time, we continue walking through another open doorway into F-House. Instantly, the human noise factor revs up again. The entire crew has arrived and F-House is swarming with activity. They have virtually consumed the place with electronic equipment and cables. Captain Bob and yet another guard exchange nods as we walk to the center of the building.
Mike appears and joins us. “Wait till you see this place,” he says, excitement drumming up his voice.
Captain Bob says, “We stopped using this facility for awhile. Stirred up the inmates. Had one too many riots in here. Closed it down a few years back after the last one. But we need it again. Too crowded. Have it about half full right now. Those spots on the ceiling are from gun blasts to get the inmates under control. Lost a couple good men in that riot. Don’t want to repeat that action.” The ceiling is a mesh of steel girders and bars, spokes like a bicycle wheel jut out from the center with huge spot lights blasting their beams down on the polished cement floor below.
I stand at the entrance and look around at the half-empty cells lit up from the sun coming in through the windows that surround each floor. The silhouette of men standing in front of four stories of cells is a pretty frightening sight. Caged. One window. One toilet. Two bunks. Two shades of gray—light and dark. The noise is at the high end, both from the crew trying to work and the inmates yelling down at us. Like some nightmare you wake up from, still not sure if it’s real or just a dream.
The place has absolutely no privacy. There’s a gun tower smack in the middle with a paned glass room at the top, only the glass is cracked in a few of the panes. Not much protection for those three guards who watch our every move. The building must house several hundred inmates. Two in each cell, like some alien zoo.
“We’re painting some of the cells for a scene,” Captain Bob says and points to three painters across from me. I can tell right off that one of them is Speck. He’s joking around with a black guy while they paint the bars outside a cell. There’s a third painter inside, a white kid with glasses. He looks like Crew Cut, the guy who gave us all the trouble on the first day, but I can’t tell for sure.
“Isn’t that Speck?” I ask the Captain.
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s what’s considered a good inmate. A trustee. Sticks to himself most of the time. Don’t cause no trouble. He gets special privileges; one of them is painting. Gives him extra money to buy his junk food. The guy lives on that crap—chips, donuts, Fritos. Warden says he don’t take very good care of himself. Never exercises, just eats, drinks his homemade hooch and paints.”
“Is he pretty free to move around the prison as he pleases?”
“Depends on the work. Like I said, he’s a trustee. If they get their work done early, they can jerk off for the rest of the day.” He shrugs
.
Mike throws me a look and I can see the concern on his face. I smile up at him like everything’s cool and he takes off to talk to the second AD, an assistant director he’s worked with before.
I’m mesmerized by Speck and his buddies. At one point, Speck reaches over and grabs the black guy between the legs and leisurely strokes his groin. The guys smiles at Speck, says something and they laugh. Then Speck returns to his painting.
“Like what you see?” Captain Bob whispers in my ear. “Man loves this place. Wouldn’t leave if we handed him the key. Gets all the sex he wants, day or night. Glad to see you came back. We’ll talk later.” He gives me that we’ve-got-a-secret look before he drifts off and joins the other guard sitting outside the doorway. The whole thing gives me the creeps. Maybe I won’t stick around, after all. I could just walk away right now, but somehow my feet are glued to the floor. Can’t move. Can’t think. Just watching. Staring. Almost as if I’m inside a movie. This isn’t real. All these years I’ve played my own Speck movie. His misery. His loneliness. His mind wasting from lack of stimulation. Yet he seems happy. Jovial, even. ‘Wouldn’t leave if they gave him the key.’
It’s strange to be so close to Speck again, standing not more than a few yards away from him. Watching him talk, laugh, knowing that he’s virtually free to do anything he wants inside these walls. The model inmate. A trustee, no less. A man hooked on junk food. A man the warden frets over, like, for some reason he wants Speck to stay healthy. Healthy for what? So he can get paroled? Go out and live the life of an upstanding citizen because he’s been a good prisoner?
Suddenly Speck turns and notices me, as if he heard my thoughts. He examines me. I glare back at the bastard, fearless. He looks away when one of his buddies calls to him. A nauseating shiver passes through me as I remember something my dad must have told me a hundred times, “Carly, you’re safe anywhere you go as long as evil doesn’t notice you. Once it does, the secret to survival is the ability to recognize its face and take immediate action.”
“It’s time for action,” I say out loud, but my voice drowns in another wave of white noise.
I shift away from Speck and head straight for the Captain who stands joking with the guard out by the side door. Captain Bob looks over to watch my approach. We exchange a look. A nod.
He knows I’m finally ready to listen.
Chapter Fourteen
We’re alone, the Captain and me, in the prison library.
“My dad was a guard here, and his dad before him. I come from a long line.” Captain Bob and I stand in front of a wall of framed photos of Stateville. Most of them date back to its construction: buildings going up, men in hard hats mugging for the camera, stacks of bricks, trucks filled with lumber, and piles of steel girders.
The library’s not very big, a lot of dark polished wood and beige walls. He points to the pictures and tells me their story. “My grandfather helped build this place back in the twenties. We got sixty-four acres inside the wall and more than two-thousand outside. The wall’s thirty-three feet high. We opened in March of 1925. Was never supposed to handle more than 1,500 men, but I’ve seen it go almost double. F-house is panopticon, circular, designed by an Englishman. The only one of its kind in the U.S.
“When this place first opened, prisoners were brought in by horse and buggy. They actually wore those striped uniforms back then, and leg ligatures. Couldn’t do nothing and got beat or confined every time they did something wrong. Treated like the scum they were. Now they got rights. They got support groups. Can’t touch the pricks or your ass is on the line. They got their own world in here. A guard can’t get too tough or he’ll end up dead like the guard did over at the other facility yesterday. Had a problem over there in Menard. You hear about it?”
“No.”
“Happens every now and then. The inmates want to send out a message. One of us gets killed. Sometimes we’re lucky and can get a shot off and put one of them down before they get us, but then we hear about it from the Governor who catches heat from some prisoner civil-rights group. We’re as much a prisoner in here as the inmates. But we don’t have no groups out there fighting for our rights. We’re surrounded by guys who’ll stick a knife in our backs if they decide that we’re keeping out too much of their shit.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Drugs, cash, knives, whatever. You name it and they can get it in, and they’re all innocent. Like Speck. Never admitted to nothin’. Lives like the pig that he is and loves it. Wouldn’t want to be out. Those pathetic families of his victims drive in for his parole hearings like there’s a chance the man will try to get out. Never happen. He signs those papers weeks before the hearing. He don’t want to leave. If the place burned down he’d probably burn with it. Got his lovers, his hootch, his drugs and he knows how to play the warden for just about any privilege he wants. Like I said, a good inmate.”
“All this time I thought he was rotting. Thought his life was a terror. Hoped that each day was his nightmare. So you’re telling me that he actually likes it in here? Why should I believe you?”
“You can see it.”
“I saw a man painting a cell, that’s all.” I sit down at a table. Getting tired of standing.
“You know he’s got actual tits?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yeah. Took hormones for a while. Grew ‘em just like a woman. Got a pretty good set. Likes to show ‘em off whenever he can. He’s a real sweetheart.” The Captain takes a seat across from me.
“I don’t…what are you saying?”
“He never liked sex with women. Loves it with men, though. Got himself a few lovers. Thinks it’s all funny. They all think it’s funny. Can cop a feel whenever they want and pretend they got their own female whore locked up in the same room.”
“Why are you telling me this? Tell it to CBS. I don’t care about Speck’s sexual preferences.” I turn in my chair, thinking he’ll stop. Thinking I’ll bolt if I hear another word.
“Yeah you do. I can tell. I knew it from the first time you saw Speck. Most other people come in here and don’t give a shit what goes on. But you’re different. Your father was a cop, a cop who cared, that’s why he died. He couldn’t take what goes down on the streets. What happened in that townhouse. You’re the same way. You care, only you can’t do nothin’ about it and it drives you crazy. Makes you full of hate. I bet you were a sweet little girl, just like my girls at home, but Speck took that sweetness away from you and you’ll never get it back until you get even with the bastard for what he did.”
“The only way I can get even with that fuck is if somebody puts a bullet into his head and I provide the gun.” I stand up again, agitated.
“Then you’d be servin’ time. Wouldn’t get the sweetness back, but I have an idea. Got it when I saw all that camera equipment come in here.”
“What? You want Paramount to make a movie about Speck? I know… Speck, the Prison Years.”
“Something like that. Maybe a documentary on what these guys get away with inside this so-called maximum-security prison. Richard will be the star attraction. Everybody in Chicago knows who he is. He’ll get the attention I need.”
“And so? Who’s going to make this little show-and-tell?”
“You are.”
We stare at each other for a moment, sizing each other up. Checking for backbone, for grit. I can feel my heart beating, racking my body with each pulse. “I don’t know jack about shooting a documentary. Wrong job description. You need some up-and-coming director type who’s trying to make a name.”
“Don’t know nobody who cares about Speck like you do. Wouldn’t be the same.”
I’m churning with a thousand ideas, concerns. Thinking that I must be crazy to even listen to the man. “Suppose I did agree to this. It wouldn’t be professional looking. Just maybe a home movie type of thing.”
“Whatever you think is best. Just so it’s on film.”
“Just so what’s on fi
lm? Speck in action?”
“Something like that.”
“Where’s the camera coming from?”
“Don’t tell me you can’t get a hold of a camera. I’ve seen plenty come in here.”
“Wrong kind.”
“So bring in whatever you need.”
“I can’t get my bra past Henrietta. How’s that going to work?”
“You’ll figure it out. You’re smart.”
It’s all going too fast. I feel like I’m falling into something I can’t get out of. Something dangerous. Something that might kill me, but I keep going.
“And what about the warden? Is he okay with this?” He doesn’t answer. It’s all coming together now. The picture’s coming into focus. “So, this is just something you cooked up, right? You’re the whistle blower?”
“Something like that. Yeah,” he answers suddenly all secure in his idea.
“What happens when the warden gets wind of our little game?”
“He won’t find out. Not now. Not ever.”
For some reason, as I look into his eyes, I believe him. He continues. “I’ll provide you with a secure room. No one will find you. I guarantee it. I want you to ask Speck some questions for me. I wrote ‘em down. If I know Speck, he’ll brag about hisself and his life here. That’s what I want. That’s what you have to get out of him. How much he likes it here and why. You can add to the questions if you got any of your own. But the answers to mine are what can change things. Get rid of some of the gang activity, some of the drugs, the privileges. Go back to the way it was when my father was a guard. Those guards didn’t take no shit from nobody”
Memories of Cool Hand Luke flash up on my inner screen. “What we got here…is failure to commun’cate.”
He doesn’t respond. Instead, he disregards my pathetic attempt at humor and continues. “Maybe the prison will go back into the hands of the guards instead of the inmates. When you’re all done taping, you can get the video out easy and give it to some big shot reporter type. I can’t get it out. Guards check each other. Don’t know who to trust.”
