“Just say—”
“No.”
The neighborhood wasn’t a place where a man like him could ask for help if he got lost. So I gave him real specific directions. And a time.
If being in a place full of nonwhites bothered him, you’d never know it.
If eating a meal that could be his last upset him, it didn’t show on his face.
We were in my booth. In the back, against the wall that separates the main body of the joint from the kitchen. The bank of payphones was right behind where I sat, invisible but not always silent.
Max materialized next to me.
“This is—”
“Max the Silent,” the AB man finished for me, his tone that of a man who was actually getting to see something he’d heard about for years but had never been sure existed. Like Bigfoot or Nessie.
“Yeah. And, behind you, coming this way, is the Prof.”
He never turned around. His only reaction was to move to his left, making room.
“I need to speak with your boy,” I told him.
He didn’t bristle at the characterization, a man who didn’t have the time for that kind of thing.
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“You willing to ink up a little?”
“So I can pass for one of your guys?”
“Yeah.”
“Not for real. And I don’t want to risk a temp.”
“But I can tell him—?”
“Anything you want. So long as he understands that he has to talk to me. It’s not an option.”
“You going to hurt him?”
I gave him a quizzical look.
“To make him talk,” he explained.
“I thought you said he already did that.”
“Yeah. And you’re not buying?”
“Because I want to talk to him myself?”
“That’s right.”
“This isn’t about the truth of what he said. It’s about the truth of who he is.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Burke’s got powers,” the Prof assured him. “He can get inside a man’s mind as easy as me picking a lock.”
Max tapped the man’s forearm. Got his attention. Nodded. Nothing elaborate, but enough.
“So if he’s lying—?”
“It won’t matter,” I assured him. “Not to us doing the job, I mean. It’ll just change how we do it.”
“You believe those three—?”
“Did it? Yeah.”
“So what more do you need?”
“Why’d you come to me?”
“Silver said I could…Ah, all right, I get it.”
“Can you make it happen?”
“I think so. It is okay, I tell him you’re one of ours, right?”
“Right.”
“And I can go along? Not come inside, wherever you do what…whatever you’re going to do, but just come along with him?”
“He’s scared bad, huh?”
“Those are three big dogs.”
I gave him one of Wesley’s smiles.
Inside isn’t the same for everyone. If you got a little county-jail slap, you’ve got different options: they mix the pre-trial detainees with the ones doing misdemeanor bits, so you can work the guys who haven’t been tried yet for all kinds of nice stuff: phone relays, packages, maybe even get yourself introduced to their woman’s girlfriend on visiting day.
But there’s always people trying to work you, too. Pre-trial tanks draw more rats than Open House in a cheese factory, sniffing around for a little info they can sell to the DA for a cut-loose. If the crime’s headline-quality, and the proof isn’t too tight, a jailhouse snitch can buy himself a sweet life…provided he never comes back Inside.
When you’re short-time jugged, the “homeboy” stuff won’t do a thing for you unless you’re one of those youngbloods who’re still flying colors.
Anyway, if you’ve been down before, done real time, you stay far away from kids like that. Shank-happy fools act just like they do on the streets—stab someone over a bullshit diss, chest you to test you, act like they’re actually glad to be there…more status for when they go back to the corner.
Like the Prof said years ago, “You spend too much time working on your cred, you spend a lot longer being dead.”
If you’re like me, you look for the older guys, guys who know how things really work.
There’s rules: You never talk about your case. And you double-never ask about theirs. You find out if you know anyone in common, and you use the phones to start checking him out. You don’t front; you don’t profile; you don’t sell tickets; you don’t tell stories about how good you had it in the World.
You’re always ready to do every single minute by yourself, if that’s how it has to be. You stay polite, quiet, respectful. But you don’t step aside, you don’t ass-kiss, and you never talk to a uniform. You don’t play cards, you don’t throw dice, you don’t use dope—no kind of dope. You don’t run a hustle, you don’t open a book. You stay low and walk slow.
The penitentiary’s a different life. There, you have to connect. You can’t “do your own time,” like every con says he wants to do.
Used to be a saying: “There’s no Switzerland behind the walls.” But that was wrapping a truth around a lie. Yeah, sure, Switzerland was “neutral” in World War II. But all that meant was that they didn’t fight. And didn’t give a fuck who won, like the poker parlor taking a piece of every pot.
So they stored art treasures the Nazis looted from the Jews, then did the same for those American commanders who handled the mopping-up operation after the Ultimate Aryan Warrior pulled the maximum punk-out.
Switzerland might not have taken a side, but they sure played them all—storing no-trace cash for power-men from Germany, Russia, America, Italy, Japan…and anyone else who made it worth their while. The way they had it set up, the only sure winner was them.
Forget that kind of game Inside. Everything’s out in the open; no place to hide. So a jailhouse turnout takes a daddy because he thinks gang rape is his only other option…but he’s safe only if his daddy can hold his own ground.
Some can’t. And some of those who can, they rent out their property. Or sell it. Even if your daddy keeps you, and keeps you safe, you’re still a punk, forever. And, Inside, no punk is ever really safe.
In all my time, I only ran across a few guys who were actually able to pull it off and stand alone. They didn’t join, they didn’t roll over, and they’d kill you if you tried to make them do either one. If you wanted to be left alone, one of the best reps to have was being a for-real psycho. You can threaten him for a few minutes, but you can’t tell him what to do. Only the voices in his head can do that, and they’re on the job twenty-four/seven.
No matter what liberals tell you, it never matters what got you there. There was this freak, Lenny, I forget his last name. A citizen, until he was caught. Some said he had been a pharmacist. Some said nurse; some said chemist. But everyone knew what brought him Inside: the maggot poisoned his own three kids, for the insurance.
Lenny was Central Casting for “punk.” Pale, fair-haired, chubby young white boy with rabbit eyes and lips so naturally red you’d think he used lipstick.
But nobody bothered him.
Turned out Lenny’s fucking hobby was poisoning people. He loved to do it. And he knew a thousand ways to get it done.
One day, a guy named Uriah suddenly froze in the middle of chow, then started twitching like an epileptic on meth. When the guards got there, he was still doing his death-dance, but he was stiff before they rolled him onto the stretcher, already turning some color nobody’d ever seen on a human before.
Creeper got his name like you’d expect. And putting him behind bars didn’t change his game. Nobody cared, because he wasn’t a snitch—he just liked to watch. And he knew things.
A few days later, Creeper was telling his story. He’d been on the tier late the night before, and he passed by Lenny�
��s cell. Lenny was jerking off, and not being quiet about it—moaning like he was getting a blow job from a porn star, with three others lined up waiting their turn. Lenny had a piece of paper wrapped around his cock. But when he was done, instead of flushing it, he crumpled it up and tossed it out into the corridor.
Creeper took the paper back to his cell—the same thing inside him that got him his name made him do it. When he opened the paper ball, it turned out to be an autopsy report. On the guy who had spasmed to death.
So, the next time Lenny started babbling about all the different ways you could make poison out of damn near anything, everyone knew two things: He wasn’t lying. And he was the wrong guy to fuck with.
It turned out that this Uriah fool had given Lenny the usual “Shit on my dick or blood on my knife!” speech. Gave him twenty-four hours to make his decision—about as smart as telling a man you’re going to break into his house as soon as it gets dark out.
After that, anytime you saw Lenny coming down the corridor with an aerosol can of shaving cream in his hand, you moved out of his way—fast.
Making other people afraid gives some freaks a bigger appetite for more of the same. After a while, Lenny put on a lot of weight…and started throwing it around. Lenny knew chemicals, but he didn’t know cons. He scared one of them so much that the guy hired Wesley.
When I was Inside, they were just starting to have “programs.” They always had the Bible classes, the AA meetings, stuff that the Parole Board was supposed to believe made you ready for the street. Provided that street was the Bowery.
The new stuff was different: art classes, literacy programs, GED-prep courses. And therapy, that was the trump card. Especially group therapy. Always run by some smug little weasel who was born a chump and then went and got a degree in it. Big thing was, you had to “confront” all the time. Not just yourself, you had to jump on anyone who wasn’t “coming clean.” See, the goal was to get you to “express your feelings.” Criminals hadn’t learned how to do that. Once they did, well, they could be citizens.
Inmates sucked that stuff up. Convicts wouldn’t go near it. The Parole Board was appointed by the governor. Do the math.
The fancier stuff came along much later. Today, it’s all the rage. Some “tough” guy beats his woman bad enough to be locked up, they decide it’s all about too much testosterone. What a real man like that needs is some Anger Management. Get in touch with his sensitive side. Learn empathy. Learn to feel the pain of others.
Wesley was way ahead of his time—he could have been the poster boy for Anger Management. Nobody ever saw Wesley get mad. He’d step off for anyone, back down from any challenge. One guy—a crewed-up biker who must have ridden too long without a helmet—even slapped Wesley in the face once. Right on the yard.
Wesley took it. Just turned and walked away.
Action was heavy that night. Gambling action. I almost took the whole pool, betting ninety-six hours to the minute.
Fools went short, cons who’d been around awhile went long. Me, I figured two days to let the biker think he was the new bull on the block; another day to let him make some more enemies, so Wesley wouldn’t be the only suspect; and one day to let dopes wonder if the stories they’d heard about Wesley weren’t just jailhouse rumors, magnified over time.
But it wasn’t until the fifth day they found the biker in the weight room, when they opened it for business. He was on his back on the bench-press slab, a length of wire stiffer than he was embedded in his carotid artery. How it got there, nobody knows.
“Nobody knows.” That’s how you answer any question about Wesley. “You get this much time to do it,” he told me once, making a dry-click sound with his tongue, “but you might have to wait hours to do it. Even days, sometimes.”
You know what they call an impatient sniper?
Dead.
You can’t kill time. It doesn’t ever really die. Some of it keeps coming back, too. But you can make it pass.
If waiting was a martial art, I’d be a grand master.
The paper had a story about a coyote who’d been terrorizing Central Park, taking down dogs. “Beloved pets,” the sob sister who wrote the column called them. Letting your dogs run off-leash in that place after dark—yeah, that’s love.
The outraged city mounted a major effort, spent a ton of money, and finally bagged the coyote. They tranq’ed him out, put him in a cage—photo ops galore. More proof that one-bedroom walk-ups with no super and less service are worth a couple of grand a month just so you can live in the Big Apple.
The coyote died. Autopsy said it was from stress. Maybe it was too many flashbulbs in his face. Maybe it was the knowledge that he’d never run free again. Never find a mate. Never make another decision for himself.
All that time and energy, but nobody could find the gas money to drive him upstate, let him out in some forest, and leave him be, I guess. Always better to lock up the troublemakers.
I hate zoos. Lovingly supported by “nature-lovers,” they’re a crime against nature.
What’s the point of saving a species from extinction if the only way they can live is behind bars? And if kids “need” the opportunity to see a rhino or a panda or whatever, why can’t they just watch television?
Hell, why not have virtual zoos? Take the million miles of footage already stored, edit it down, and build long, dim corridors lined with giant, hyper-definition screens. Label each one, put a drop-down menu along the side, and let the kids get a better look at the animals doing what they really do than they could ever see in some zoo.
What’s better, watching a polar bear cross a glacier, or pace around in tiny circles? What’s more educational, a close-up of a tiger so tight you could count his whiskers, or smelling the foul rankness of his captivity?
Why pay extortion money to China to rent their goddamned pandas? Why pay big money for baby lions…especially when you know what had to have “happened” to their mothers for the “bring ’em back alive” heroes to harvest their crop? How do you put a great white shark in an aquarium and call it a “lesson” for children?
How many kids have the patience to watch a butterfly leave its cocoon? On tape, they can watch it whenever they want, just by pushing a button.
How the fuck do you call the “creation science” loons ignorant when you keep your own ancestors behind bars?
A hundred years ago, the New York Zoological Society—yeah, that’s right, they own the Bronx Zoo now—actually kept an African Pygmy in a cage, right next to the orangutans and chimps. Sure, slavery was outlawed by then, but that only applied to humans. An “explorer” had captured the Pygmy in the Congo, and turned him into an exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. When that show was over, the owner sold his property. It’s the American way.
You know who finally busted him out? The forebears of the same “true believers” who are trying to stop schools from teaching evolution today. How can there be a “missing link” if the whole world went from Nothing to Now in seven days? That’s downright ungodly. And America is a nation under God, isn’t it?
Yeah, speak of the Devil.
After they got him loose, they gave the Pygmy a name—Ota Benga, I think it was. They handed him a Bible and taught him to use tools. He finally got to go home, the same way a lot of locked-down, no-hope kids do: he took his own life, is what it says in the history books.
By me, he took his life back.
I understand he used a firearm to do the job. Somebody must have taught him how to shoot. Too bad they never taught him who to aim at.
I looked at my watch. I’d been gone for…almost three hours.
Yeah, I know how to wait.
There’s other ways. Michelle dragged me to this white-hot new club in the Village. Apparently, retro was in. The place reminded me of the club where I’d first seen Judy Henske—the goddess of torch-singing—live. I think she’d been on the card with Dave Van Ronk that night; I don’t know where he is, but I do know that Judy can still brin
g it.
The club even had a Joan Baez type…a tall, dark-haired girl with an acoustic guitar and the transported look of a solo violinist. She only did one number, but she drove it:
A long time ago when we weren’t at war
Even then we knew he was a political whore
His daddy tasted blood, so the son wanted more
And he’s still killing today
She carried that torch all the way to…
And now the little weasel stands alone
A single step from his Magic Phone
You know he’ll never call our soldiers home
Haliburton’s still got its bills to pay
…and closed to a standing O.
“We have to stop this one!” she shouted, as she walked off the stage. “Our mothers and fathers showed us how!”
No, they didn’t, I thought to myself. They showed us how to blow themselves up, or how to get their heads beat in by cops in Chicago, or to die at Kent State. Sure, some came in from the cold after a few years and told stories about how they had “renounced their white-skin privilege” while they’d been “underground.” The ones who couldn’t change their skin color, they were still in prison. Or “underground”…in a pine box.
But the dividing line was never as simple as color. Some of the whites had gone the distance, like Ray Luc Levasseur and Tom Manning. But it wasn’t only the Vietnam War that drove their car: they’d been working-class guys who’d done enough thinking to realize that thinking wasn’t going to get it done.
Levasseur is out now, after doing a ton, but Manning’s going to die behind the walls. Kathy Boudin’s free after twenty, but all the others in on that fatal armored-car heist are serving for the duration. David Gilbert’s never going home. Neither are all the BLA members they caught, even those who just helped out. Ask Marilyn Jean Buck.
The DA who prosecuted that “revolutionary” Brinks job later pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. He’d been ratted out by his mistress, whose details of her sugar daddy’s sexual preferences were enough to kill his reelection chances anyway. The DA got the “probation and community service” sentence they reserve for the nonviolent offender, especially one who could tell a few stories of his own if pushed too far.
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