by Les Edgerton
Jail time just murders you. Give me six months in the joint where I don’t have to be reminded of what’s out there to one day in jail where all you see is assholes walking around, taking for granted what you’d give your left nut for. I’ll take six months in a real joint over six days in the classiest city lockup there is.
I tried to stay away from that window in the officer’s shop, but couldn’t help myself. It just kept pulling me over. Every five minutes I’d get up off where I was sitting on the floor and wander over and look out.
After a while, Dusty said, “You’re fucking up you know, dontcha?”
I knew, I knew. Still, it was like some kind of forbidden fruit you know is bad for you but which you can’t help eating. Must be how a junkie feels, why they keep sticking that needle in their arm even though they aren’t stupid—they know they’re killing themselves, but man! how sweet the poison!
We spent the night on the floor, about fifteen of us, and the officers brought in pillows and blankets. They even brought us in Big Macs from the town’s McDonald’s. They were cold time we got them, but who cares? They were delicious. Freedom food.
Along about daybreak it got quiet. All night we could hear the murmur of officers outside the barber shop and then it got deadly still just before the sun came up. That meant one thing. They’d gone in to take back over the institution.
“We’ll be back in our bunks before noon,” Dusty predicted.
Actually, it was almost three in the afternoon before they came and took us back down to K. It seems they found a guy up on the roof of the laundry with a bunch of holes in him and once they got everybody rounded up and locked down they brought in the state police crime lab boys to check it out. They kept us up front until the state boys were done.
Going back inside, we passed a group of guards and I overheard one of the hacks say to another, “Can you believe this shit? Guy’s got thirty-three stab wounds and he’s still alive!”
Fuck me.
CHAPTER 16
We were talking about two days later, Manny and me, while we were playing double sol, about the joint and shit that went down and we were discussing prison movies and books and crap like that.
And most of ‘em are crap. Like Manny said to start off the conversation, “How come nobody calls the hacks screws here?”
And I said, “‘Cause, that’s only in movies. I never in my life heard a hack called anything but a hack. Or maybe “The Man.” To their face, you called them “Officers,” but always when inmates talked it was “hacks” or “The Man” or maybe “guards,” but never screws. That’s Hollywood bullshit.”
Or maybe not. Maybe in some joints they said screws. Maybe joints were like colleges. I bet they use different lingo at Harvard than they do at Iowa State. Probably joints is the same. But I bet there aren’t any where the inmates call the hacks screws unless it was about eighty years ago maybe.
Movies about prison just gripe my ass. They’ve got about five standard types they always show that I’ve never met. It’s like movies about the service. I was in the Navy before I got sent up and I’ve never seen guys there that look the least like the ones they’ve got up there storming Iwo Jima or wherever. Those guys (in the flicks) are all drop-dead hunks and they all seem to be about in their late twenties. Well, color me orange, but when I was sailing the ocean blue, all my mates seemed to be skinny and we all looked like we were sixteen and it was hard to make out our features through all our pimples. I guess Hollywood doesn’t think kids look like soldiers. In movies anyway—in real life that’s what you get—punk-ass kids who get drunk on three beers and throw up on you and want to fight every five minutes only they ain’t much good at it.
It’s like when Manny and I were up in quarantine before we got released to the population. We’re hanging out on the walk one day just before they locked us down after supper and I spot this clown who came in the day I did.
“Punk,” I thought, and I must have said it out loud ‘cause Manny says, “Huh?”
“That guy,” I said, pointing him out. He was in a cell aways down from mine, standing around jiving with some black dude.
“Whaddya mean? You know him?”
“Naw,” I said. “I just know his type. White bread motherfucker. His daddy sells insurance and his mommy’s president of the PTA. He’s about to get his asshole reamed. Saturday morning when we go to the movie he’s gonna be roaming the aisles for his daddy, giving BJs for packs of tailor-mades. I can read him like a D.C. Comic upside down.”
“Yeah,” said Manny after a minute. “He ain’t right, is he?”
Even Manny could make the guy and it’s Manny’s first time doing hard time. Reason Manny could was he was an outlaw, same as most of the rest of us, even if he hadn’t done joint time before.
Just the way this guy stood, the way he acted, you could tell he was a goner. The sissies would swoop on him like they was pigeons and he was a bread crust just hit the sidewalk.
“I had a guy like him was my first cellmate first time here,” I told Manny. “This guy could be his twin.”
This guy, name of Rudy or some such silly handle, had done crimes, sure, else he wouldn’ta been there but he wasn’t like any of the rest of us. I had him scoped out in ten minutes and it turned out later I was right. About three days later it came down. It’s hard to bullshit a bullshitter, to sell wolf tickets to Sonny Liston, as we say. This kid was basically a lonely kid, born not to bucks maybe, but to your standard-issue middle class family and it was as if he looked around one day and figured out what was “cool” to him and then tried to fake it, to fit in with a group he thought was hip. And, even though he “walked the walk” and “talked the talk” it was all a front. See, he was an actor and could take his observations and use them, play a role, but you knew it wasn’t real inside—he just plain didn’t feel it deep down and naturally, the way the rest of us did. He had an bad end coming I could have made money betting on—a black mother “befriended” him—I warned him, but you could see he had it in his mind he’d really hit the mother lode by being “accepted” by one of the baddest badasses, as if that would rub off on his puny ass and make him the same—only he ended up being the guy’s kid in about as long a time as it takes to get the lid off the KY Jelly tube. After that, the guy turned him out, used to take him out nights in the TV room and send him around jacking guys off and giving out blow jobs for Camels and then when he got tired of his shit threw him off the third tier and squashed his monkey ass like a rotten coconut. The reason he got tired of him was the kid “fell in love” and every other minute was crying he loved this guy and turn around five minutes later and say he was going to kill himself. The black guy got tired of his soap opera—it gave him a headache—and so he erased him.
This guy in quarantine reminded me of that other guy exactly. Where’s this guy in your prison movies? Oh, yeah—sometimes they get somebody like Sal Mineo to play somebody kind of like that but then there’s always somebody else like Tony Curtis bails his weak ass out. Yeah, sure. Like anybody else gives a shit. Like somebody in the joint looked like Tony Curtis could bail anybody’s ass out. Guy looked like that would be the cleanest guy in the joint on account of all the group showers he was gonna have to be taking.
Or—better yet—they have Sidney Poitier saving this clown. First time I see a black guy sticking up for a white guy in here they better put both of ‘em in the hold for safekeeping.
I see this shit in movies when I’m on the bricks and all around me people are going ooooh and aaaah because they think this shit is real and what I want to do—what I got a real itch to do when that happens—is pick up my piece and hold up the place, let them see what a real badass looks like, catch the look on their kissers when I pop a couple of ‘em. I don’t think I look like any Tony Curtis neither.
You can always tell they never asked anybody in a joint about this stuff.
They never get cops right in movies either. Here’s a typical cop deal. I was busted for som
e burglaries once and they kept asking me to ‘fess up. “Fuck you,” is all I’d say, and finally, this big ass wipe, name of Billy Paddister, he takes me out of my cell and outside, in the street between the jail and the courthouse. This was on a Sunday morning, not a person in sight, only a car passing by once in a while.
Billy takes the cuffs off me and shines me a grin. “Mayes,” he says, “I’m going to give you a chance to escape. You take off running and I’ll count to ten. Then, I’m going to take my gun out and shoot you if I can. Go ahead, run.”
I looked at him with my best hard-guy look. “You think I’m crazy? I don’t think you can count all the way to ten. Nosir, I’m sticking to you like stink on shit.”
Then he unsnapped his holster and snaked out his hog and for a second there I thought it was all over, but all he did was raise up and smack me alongside the cheek with his piece. Didn’t knock me out but I got blood running all over the place and I was choking on a back tooth that got knocked out and went down the wrong pipe. He just stood there laughing.
“He tried to escape,” he told the officer at the desk when we went back in. “Put him in the hole and I’ll write up a report.”
***
I didn’t know what I was going to do about Frick. His real name was Freddy Boles, I found out, from the prison newspaper. They had this jerk ran it, one of those born-again assholes. Most of those religious cunts are putting on a con, hoping the parole board thinks God’s straightened their phony ass out, and cuts them loose, but mostly what I seen of guys like that is that they’re cum-drunk from all the dicks they’ve sucked and it’s a way their mind lets them maintain.
This guy, James Ferril, writes this totally insane article about Boles’ being stabbed and says that there is a religious significance in that he was stabbed thirty-three times. This is how old Christ was when he died on the cross, it says in the article, and Ferril wants the warden to investigate whether there’s a satanic cult at loose within the walls. Ferril also says the stabs were done in the form of a cross which proves his point.
Man!
There are some loony tunes loose around here but this guy takes the blue ribbon.
“I think Jesus was thirty-six, not thirty-three,” Manny said. I believe Manny before I believe this other jerk. Manny’s a devout Catholic, knows his shit.
My problem’s the same whatever kind of crap Ferril is babbling about in the paper. Boles is still alive.
Who knows if he’s a snitch or not? Creep like that probably is. He tells the Man who put holes in him, I’m going to end up in Michigan City and for a long time.
They got him over in Indianapolis, at Methodist Hospital, got him handcuffed to a bed in the security ward and so far he hasn’t come to it says in the paper. I’ve got two chances to skate here. One, he doesn’t make it, croaks before he comes to, and two, if he doesn’t become room temperature, that he doesn’t snitch me out.
You’d think I’d want him dead just on general principles but that wasn’t the case. My mad was gone, completely erased. That was weird. Guy does what he done to me you’d think I’d want him in a box and sure, that’s what I wanted originally only now I didn’t really care. The only thing I didn’t want was to end up doing more time.
I’m still trying to work out what I was going to do about Boles if and when he came back to Pendleton when we got some good/bad news.
Bud was on his way back!
CHAPTER 17
“Mayes! You got a visitor.”
It was the hack Franklin. I was lying on my bunk trying to read Moby Dick on Sunday afternoon and had just got past all the whale shit and about to get to the good stuff when Franklin called out my name. I’d read this book three, four times already; it was one of the few decent things they had in the library. Mostly what they had was Westerns and kids’ books. Hardly any covers on any of them. Guys would rip off the covers so they had something to look at in their cells.
It was my brother.
“Hey, Ray,” I said and shook his hand. This was a surprise. I think it was only the second or third time any of my family had ever come down to see me. Not that I could blame them. It was about a three or four-hour drive from South Bend.
“I put some money on your account,” he said. “Fifty bucks. I figured you could use it.” That was a double surprise. That last time Raymond gave me anything, pigs still had the ability to fly.
“I sold one of your coats for a hundred,” he said. “I figured half was yours.”
I thanked him and we just sat there looking at each other for a minute or two.
Normally, I hated getting visitors. All a visit from someone on the outside did was remind you where you were and where you weren’t. It fucked you up when they left, knowing they were going to get in a car and drive away, free as the wind and you were going to go back and sit in your fucking cell and give names to your toes. The worst kind of visit is the ones from your lady. All you can think of is that when she leaves she’s gonna be hitting the sheets with some motherfucker. That kind of shit can really fuck you up.
This visit didn’t feel like that, though. In fact, it felt pretty good. Ray was all right, a pretty good dude, matter of fact. He’d even gone on a job or two with us, a penny-ante burglary or two, but then he got scared of what could happen and quit. That was all right. Some are just not cut out for the outlaw life and Ray was one of them. Not enough of the right kind of guts. Oh—regular things, like fighting, there was no one had more balls than Ray—I seen him take on two guys at once lots of times and there’s no one else I’d rather have beside me in a bar brawl—but breaking into a bar at three in the morning—that took a different kind of cojones, the kind Raymond didn’t have.
There was this one time when we were kids when we were living down in Texas and I was maybe thirteen and Ray had just turned eleven and we got the bright idea to break into the Lack’s Sporting Goods store on Broadway. Ray was scared to death, wouldn’t go in with me. “I’ll stand watch,” he said. He always wanted to stand watch. So I climbed up this chinaberry tree in the back, dropped onto the roof and broke into the skylight. I had just grabbed a revolver, a .45 and a box of shells and was looking around for something else to grab. It never dawned on me at that stage of my crime career to look for cash. The whole reason I broke in was to get a gun. Just then, Ray started banging on the back door and yelling at me to hurry up. Thinking the cops were coming around the corner, I flew out the back door. There wasn’t anybody around except Ray.
“I heard something,” he said. He was sweating and wide-eyed.
“What?”
“I don’t know. A car or something.”
I just gave him my best disgusted look. For a minute, I thought about going back inside and seeing if there was anything else I could snatch but decided not to. We ended up walking over to the Brazos River, along the levee. There was an old barge, all busted up and laying stove-in along the shore, half-sunk and rusted all to hell. We walked down to it, thinking we might find some rats to shoot. We’d figured out how to load the gun on our way there. We no sooner climbed up on the deck when four Mexican kids, all of them a lot older than either of us, came walking around what must have been the pilot house.
“Hey, gringo,” one of them said. “We going to kick your little white asses, gringos.”
“Fuck you are.” It was my brother. I just stared at him. He was holding the gun and pointing it right at the Mexicans.
The one guy, the one who’d said he was going to whip our butts, just started laughing. “What you got there, chinga? A cap gun? You going to shoot us with real caps?” He turned to enjoy his buddies’ laughter.
Boom! Ray fired that cocksucker! He really shot it! The Mexicans didn’t even try to jump across to shore. They just hit the Brazos on the other side, kind of a synchronized diving team.
“Man!” I said to Ray. “You nuts or something? You mighta hit one of those guys.”
He just looked at me, serious-like, and said, “I was trying to. The t
hing just didn’t shoot where I pointed it is all.”
Ray had guts I guess, just a different kind.
Our visitor’s area wasn’t like anything you see in the movies, with glass partitions and headphones where you talked to your visitor. It was just a large room, up toward the front of the institution and it was laid out with two rows of chairs facing each other. At the back of the room there was a high podium and a hack stood back there, looking down on all of us while another guard walked around to make sure you weren’t doing anything funny. You could touch your visitor, hug and kiss them, stuff like that. I looked down the row and saw guys trying to do more with their girlfriends and wives. Cop a feel, stuff like that. The hack walking around would let them get away with some stuff, to a point. You could feel your girl’s boob, if you were quick and not too obvious, but then again, that depended on who the hack was who was walking around. Some were decent about that kind of thing but others would crack on you right now.
I saw Mitch Stiles with his twin brother Matt and sure enough they both had their shoes off. That’s how Mitch got drugs in. His brother wore the same kind of institution shoes we wore when he visited and both their shoes had false heels. During the visit they’d slip off their kicks when they thought the guards weren’t looking and exchange them. They’d been doing it forever and lots of us knew the scam but they’d never been caught. I made a point to look up Mitch when we went out for recreation that night. His brother always brought in pure-ass smack and Mitch and I were tight. I got to him quick enough, before he’d stepped on it very much and I’d have me a nice time tonight.
“Mom’s dead.”
I hadn’t been paying attention and I had to ask Ray what he said again.
“Mom. She died. Day before yesterday.”
I couldn’t get what he was saying.
“I was going to write you and then thought that would be a lousy way to break the news to you so I came on down.”
