by Les Edgerton
“You still fucked up over this crazy bitch after the shit she done?” I didn’t realize Manny’s eyes could get that wide. The way he looked and the way he said it made me think maybe it was me that was crazy. “How can you even want to be on the same planet with her?”
“Because I’m stupid?”
I wasn’t a hundred percent joking. I stared at the end of the cigarette I had going.
“Yeah. It’s somethin’, huh? Go figure. You want me to lie about it?”
“Naw, man. It’s just...well, I don’t figure you to be pussywhipped, that’s all.”
“You wait, Manny. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. I knew she was just about wacko enough to pull some stunt like that—drive by and shoot me—it wouldn’t be hard—I’m working in front of this big plate glass window two feet from the street—and then I get this phone call from her.”
“What’d she say?” He was all ears.
“She said, ‘I just want to tell you why I came over that night.’
“That’s right. You said she said she wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Yeah. What it was, what she said was that she was pregnant and that she murdered it. That’s the words she used.”
“You mean—”
“Abortion. She had an abortion. Man, I’m death on abortions! She knows that, the cunt!” Thinking about it all over again brought on some of the same feelings I’d had then.
“I started thinking about this baby boy—I’m sure it was a boy—and, man, I lost it. I started drinking then, went out and bought a bottle of Jack and hit it hard. I’m thinking all kinds of things. You know, ‘what coulda been’ kinds of things. Me and her. Me and her and our baby boy. I just kinda went out of my skull. It probably didn’t help I laid up in this motel room for three days doing nothing but slugging down Jack and going crazy in the head. That’s when I did it.”
I told him about the Norelco razor cord and it breaking and all that stuff like I’d told Bud, only I hadn’t told Bud exactly why I’d been in that motel room in the first place. I don’t know why I was telling Manny all this. Maybe to get it all out, make me feel better. Only it didn’t. Make me feel better, that is. I felt worse. I felt just like I had during those three days only I didn’t have any whiskey to help take the edge off. I know one thing—if I’d been on the bricks right that minute I wouldn’t be qualifying for any of those white poker chips they give out at A.A.
Time I went to bed that night I’d got it back under control somewhat. Only thing is I kept seeing Donna’s fucking face and I hated the way I felt. Like I still wanted us to be together.
Ain’t that some shit?
CHAPTER 21
Wouldn’t you know it? I start thinking about Donna again and what happens! What happens is that Mr. Bliss, one of the guards who worked the visiting room, sent a runner to the barber shop with a pass for me. I had a visitor.
Donna.
For a minute, I thought about refusing the visit. A stronger man would’ve. That wasn’t me.
On the way up to the front, all kinds of weird things were going through my mind.
None of which...as it turned out...were even remotely close to reality.
“Jake,” she said, once I sat in the chair across from her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t even want to blink for fear that this was all an apparition, that I’d wake up in my bunk holding my johnson with sweat pouring into my eyes.
She looked so fine. Women always look fine when you’ve been inside for a while. Even the dogs look like...cute dogs. All you see is a pussy and all pussies look beautiful. I swear, if the ugliest woman in the world sat across from me when I’d been locked up for a while, the only thing that would be on my mind would be how to cop a peek up her dress.
But Donna was gorgeous no matter where you saw her. I remember the first time I saw her without any makeup on and without thinking, I said, “You don’t have any eyes!” She didn’t. Well, at least not the eyes I was used to. Without mascara and the other goop she looked...Swedish. That’s what I told her, after the shock of seeing her eyes naked had passed. “You look Swedish,” I said, the master of originality. “Like Ingmar Bergman or something.”
She had on her eye makeup today. Her hair was wild in that new way girls were doing it—”scrunched,” I think they called it—and she had on a lemon-yellow dress that was working as hard as it could to keep her boobs from falling out of it. She was getting dirty looks from all the other women on her side of the chairs. Looks from the guys on my side too, and they were dirty looks too, only a different kind of dirty. All of a sudden, I wanted to fight every swinging dick in the room while at the same time feeling so damned juiced with pride because of the drop-dead movie star that came to see me, I couldn’t see straight. I knew every man jack in that visiting room was going to be stroking the bald man that night in their cell...and I knew who every damn one of them was going to be picturing.
She looked like she’d gained a little weight, too, which was a good thing. Donna was always on some stupid diet or the other, always eating ex-lax chunks like they were Almond Joys, or sticking her finger down her throat. She could throw up and never make a sound. Just a little fillip! and it was gone. I watched her do it dozens of times and I swear her stomach never even moved.
I was always on her to gain some weight. Crack on her every chance I got. She subscribed to Weight Watchers Magazine and when it came in the mail, I’d bring it in from the mailbox and announce, “You got your Hog Digest. You make the centerfold this month?” She’d naturally get mad and I’d ask what the hell did she get stuff like that for.
“You look fantastic, babe. I always said you were too skinny.”
She looked at me and got this funny look on her face.
“Well...that’s why I came to see you, Jake.”
About her weight? Shit, it looked good!
“I’m going have a baby, Jake.”
I just sat there, a goofy grin spreading all over my entire face. I couldn’t stop it. The worse I felt inside, as what she was saying sank in, the wider my grin got.
“You’re pregnant?”
Yes, she was. Twins. She’d already had one of those ultrasounds. Two boys. You could see their penises, she said. “You wanna see?” She reached for the envelope they’d let her bring in with her.
“That’s all right,” I said, waving my hand to stop her. That was the last thing I wanted to see. Ever.
“So,” I said finally, after a long silence. “Why didn’t you just write me a letter?”
“Oh, Jake!” She reached over, put her hand on my knee. I pushed it away. I wanted to just get up, leave, but I didn’t.
“I’m getting married. Next Tuesday. I just...” She stopped, dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex she must’ve had ready in her hand. “I just thought I should tell you in person. I owe you that much. We—”
I stood up, put up my hand like a traffic cop.
“There is no we, Donna.” It was like that time at Alexander’s. I knew I should say something memorable, something that would just reach up and bite her ass every time she thought about it, but I just couldn’t think of a damn thing. I stood there and looked down at her and I saw the hack up at the podium start to come over like he thought there was going to be trouble.
“Bye, Donna,” I said. I turned and walked toward the turnkey who let inmates in and out for their visits.
CHAPTER 22
That night, a weird thing happened.
I was laying on my bunk, thinking about all kinds of junk. Mom, Donna, life as a general bitch. All around me, the usual stuff was going on. The constant din that never ceases. Guys yelling, screaming, laughing, telling jokes, playing cards, selling semi-serious wolf tickets. The click of the guard’s heels as he came up the stairs to the dorms on his rounds. You could always tell it was the hack walking. They had leather shoes, hard leather soles that you could hear clear downstairs. Inmates all wore rubber-soled state shoes.
Somebody was p
laying a guitar that needed tuning. Somebody else in the back, was sobbing aloud and in between the sobs, calling for his mother. About every twenty seconds someone else would yell at him to shut up. After about ten minutes of that shit, somebody went over and kicked his bunk and started screaming he was gonna kill him if he didn’t stop. The guard in the hallway outside heard and got on his walkie-talkie. I could hear about half of what he was saying over the crackle. A couple of minutes later, two other hacks came up and opened the front door. They dragged the guy out. He was all slumped over so they had to practically carry him. He just lost it, went over the edge. They’d stick him in the hospital, load him up with downers, and he’d be back in a week. If he hadn’t found a way to kill himself by then.
Toilets flushed, guys argued, bitched about a hundred things...all this stuff was going on, but it was like I wasn’t there. I was in my head. Shit was going on around me, and I could hear it, but it was like it was underwater.
I didn’t even realize the guy was pulling on my shirt at first. Who knows how long he’d been standing there, trying to get my attention.
“Jake,” he whispered, the whites of his eyes huge as he glanced to see if anyone was noticing him talking to me. I tried to remember the guy’s name. Bob, something. I’d talked to him a couple of times, but we weren’t friends. At least, I didn’t think so. I hardly knew the dude. His bunk was clear in the back of the dorm.
“I’m busy, man,” I said and turned over on my side away from him. All I wanted was to be left alone in my misery.
“Look,” he said, and dropped something on my pillow, in front of my face. I sat up and picked up the thing he’d dropped. It was a twenty-dollar bill, all folded up into a tiny square.
“I don’t do that shit,” I said. “You want Angel Heart.” Angel Heart was a punk had his bunk in the back and would suck a dick for a toke on a tightroll. I figured the guy was after sex and had me mixed up with Angel. We looked somewhat alike.
“It’s not that,” he said. Bob Barnes. That was his name, I remembered. A weasely kind of mutt, light blond hair and light brown eyes, pale skin. Almost an albino. I remembered talking to him one day, weeks before. He’d seen me sitting by myself at one of the picnic tables in the TV area, reading, and must have thought I was some kind of deep thinker, being as the magazine I was looking at didn’t have any pictures. It was some kind of journal a college put out, full of poetry and short stories. Some pretty good stuff in it. Some do-gooder had donated it to the prison library and I’d glommed onto it. Almost the only book there that wasn’t written by Zane Grey, which was why I’d checked it out. I couldn’t stand Westerns.
I remembered Barnes was from some little podunk town down in southern Indiana. Seymour, I think is what he said. We’d talked for about an hour. Well, mostly he talked and I listened, trying to sneak reading a few paragraphs of the story I was on in while he jabbered on. Something about what a neat town Seymour was and how everybody hung out at some place called the Walton Hotel. A regular hot spot, he made it out to be. The local babes’ hangout. It didn’t sound like a regular hotel. I never heard of anybody our age hanging out at a hotel. Sounded mostly like the guy was homesick and wanted me to know what a great place he’d come from. He was also the only guy I’d ever known inside who claimed he was innocent.
That’s another thing about movies and books about the joint that makes me sick. Just one more myth straights have about us. That we’re all claiming to be innocent. Fuck! If you did happen to be innocent of the charge that got you here, you’d never admit it to anyone. That’d be the kiss of death. Guys would figure you were a pussy and that’d be it. If anything, even if you were innocent, you’d pretend you were the biggest outlaw on the planet. But, all the time, in movies and such, they pictured the cons as always walking around protesting their bumraps.
It’s easy to see how this kind of stuff happens. Ex-cons don’t write books or movies. Books and movies are written by people who visit prisons, not by people who are actually in them. And any con, anywhere, is always shucking straights. For lots of reasons. The main one is that we’re always hoping someone in a position to help us will believe we’re really innocent and somehow will set us free because of that belief. So, whenever any of us talk to a reporter or writer or anyone who’s not a fellow inmate—we fill them full of crap about our innocence. It’d be suicide not to, at least that’s the way most of us think. Not protesting your innocence could well be the end of all hope that someone—the governor, perhaps—might set us free, believing we’re telling the truth and were wrongfully imprisoned. That this never happens doesn’t occur to most of us. There’s not much hope when you’re locked up to begin with and insisting on innocence to everyone except our fellow cons keeps a tiny ray of hope alive. But, it just isn’t true. No con goes around to other cons protesting his innocence. Even when you tell an outsider you didn’t do the crime, you hope another con doesn’t find out what you’ve said.
Another myth that always bothers me is the one that convicted felons hate child-molesters and can’t wait to see them sent up so they can kill them. Bullshit. Nobody gives a damn what you did and in most cases, they don’t even know unless you tell them. When I worked in I.D. during my first stretch, I saw everybody’s rap sheet and there were several dozen guys in here for molesting or even killing little kids. Nobody gave a fuck at all. Another Hollywood myth. The thing I’ve read is that cons have kids themselves and since they can’t protect their kids on the outside, they kill these creeps inside. Biggest piece of malarkey I’ve ever heard. Nobody thinks that way. Half the guys in here have molested or abused their own kids and will again as soon as they get out.
Same thing with cops that get busted and sent up. In the movies, they’d have you believe that’s a death sentence for the poor cop. Pure bull. Every stretch I did, there were always half a dozen cops doing time with me and usually they were the most popular guys in the place. Even guys they put away were friends with them.
There’s so much total bullshit propaganda about things in the joint. I really love those movies where all the inmates look like weight-lifting bad-asses with blow-dried haircuts. Central casting. If you took all the inmates out of the joint and set them down in the town square of any town, you’d think they were just the regular citizens gathered for an Elks convention. Same number of skinny dudes, same number of wimps, same number of sissies, same number who looked like accountants or bank clerks. There just isn’t any criminal “look.” If that was the case, straights wouldn’t need cops. Just round up all those guys that looked like the cast of “The Shawshank Redemption”. ‘Course, you might nail the local bank president, the owner of the carwash chain and the guy who presses your clothes down at the One-Day Martinize.
Or the one that all snitches get killed. Ha! I can walk out anywhere in the yard, throw a stone and hit maybe 5-10 snitches. All alive. Nobody likes them much, but nobody does much about them, either.
Anyway, Barnes was the exception to the “I’m innocent” myth. He was always crying about how he’d been bumrapped. And now, he was bothering me, throwing $20 bills at me.
“I don’t want no sex,” he said. “I want somebody to talk to.”
Huh?
“Fuck off,” I said. What kind of weird shit was that?
“No, no,” he said, coming around so he was facing me. He got down on his knees to be level with my face. I debated just punching the fruit out, but didn’t.
“I just took twenty sleeping pills,” he said. “Ten minutes ago.”
“So go to sleep,” I said. “Why you bothering me?”
“Because,” he said, in this whiney voice. I honestly thought he was going to start crying, way his little chin puckered up.
He went away, bawling, and everybody’s looking at me. Fucking loser.
Next day I hear he’s in the infirmary. Got sick, this guy said, barfed half the pills out and the rest they siphoned out over in the hospital. The hack on duty hears him throwing up and goes up and s
ees blood all over the floor and his bed and figures he cut himself and when he finds out later the blood came from an ulcer and the guy was going to be all right, he’s so pissed he takes two days off and goes on a bender.
When the guy gets his bearings, he tells the doctor it was me who sold him the pills. His way of getting even, I guess, since I wouldn’t hold his punk-ass hand.
For that, I get three days in the hole.
For that, he gets himself transferred to Michigan City as soon as he can sit up and eat solid food. I guess he heard I put out a price on him. Five cartons of Camels if anybody brought me his dick.
CHAPTER 23
Boles was back.
I was cutting a guy’s hair when Manny came over and told me. He’d been up front, talking to the guard on duty that day. They put him in the infirmary. The guard thought he’d be there at least a week before they put him back out in the population and gave him limited duty. Probably put him in the library for a while the guard told Manny. That made sense. Put an illiterate in charge of Pendleton’s priceless Zane Grey paperback collection.
There was no question I had to get to him. It was obvious he hadn’t snitched on me yet but I knew it was only a matter of time.
It’s hard to move around in prison. In movies, it seems like guys come and go pretty much as they want. All they have to do is bribe a guard or some trusty. That might be the case in Tinseltown, but at Pendleton it was a different story. You couldn’t take a crap without a pass. And what’re you supposed to be bribing guards with? Packs of cigarettes? True, I had some green, over three hundred bucks, which made me practically a millionaire in here but three thousand wouldn’t be enough to bribe a guard into a situation where he might end up in here doing time with the guys he’s been abusing. Cops who get busted are no big deal, but hacks? Ha! Hacks are a different story.
