No Andes here above New York, but make no mistake, our supposed messenger driving an old Indian trail had to pay attention to his driving at that sly twilight the Motor Vehicle authorities threaten us with, between night and day, each margin your last along the tree-lined roads and into the steep, rock-bound curves Slippery When Wet (you see I remember). I remember the road signs, Jim, the shapes alone, as the authorities like you to know them. Signs of the Outside. Signs that, when they’re put to you, are just shapes you could enter right into, never hear from you again ‘less you’re a messenger getting to prison on time.
Your time, Jim. So taken for granted that it’s unknown to you who have it. Think of the problem it is spending yours, whereas our solution is to spend by doing. Good time, they call it. Time done. But take time to come, Jim.
Time well known by seventeen hundred wall calendars here and known so to the day and hour of future rain and shine that it decays into what I call a suspension where anything could fall out, looking for an opening, even past time, well how you gon’ teach Chemistry without a lab?
So let’s say the messenger’s got a purpose if he didn’t always see it. He had something his host wanted. But some of the criminal types waiting for him wanted not a message but to be him.
They waited up against the walls at first in the long, one-hundred-odd-yard-long green concrete corridor with your white-line two-layer corridor long as the city block between the jugular training school I attended in my extreme youth and the brown-brick fire-escape tenement where I practically lived because my girl Miriam lived there with her family and she was my girl and practically my sister from seventh grade until I left school, and later so did she, if I’m going to tell about her.
You came into Room Four of what we call the South Forty in this our temporary home-retirement institute where you won’t need your rented, purchased, stolen on time, or second car, looked from face to face, you formerly of (let me introduce you) the Associated Press (was all I knew) and now on a once-a-week basis voluntarily deputized to a posse of criminal types unless you’re CIA—you walking into the room and the guys getting off jokes and kidding (like the kids that this place condemns them to stay) while they acted like they’re not paying attention to you—this pro in a suit, red tie, cordovan shoes, who’d come once before—how I got wind, who might best profit from the experience, the only new man at this second meeting of the group in this pocket of human waste imploded into a toxic mountain—and while the guys are kidding around and not (you might think) paying too much attention or when you stopped by the desk and took out your cigarettes and put them down on the desk I know I heard you say, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here," so quiet you maybe hadn’t decided to be heard. Right?
Which we did hear. Even the guys laughing it up heard you through their own shit. And what you said pulled us together, Jim. It’s not the thing you hear from the lifers’ legal liaison, who’s dedicated in a way you’re not; and it’s not what the death padre (temporarily out of work!) says in the cadre therapy sessions religiously attended in order to put off lock-up for a couple of hours, when he tells us though he means well how we must not abuse ourselves; and not what you hear from the two Bible-class oldtimers who come in in boots and Stetsons sporting Bible Belt accents and huge guts—well, only the one with the white Stetson—but they mean well, but all these others are at least a little different from you; but you, you’re saying, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here." So Efrain (of whom much more later; right, Jim?) said, "Then you come to the right place because we don’t know either. You going to fit right in." Which got a laugh, but Smitty with the eyes closed said to Efrain, "You’re here because you’re a bunch of murderers and rapists, right?" which got another laugh, and from you, too, Jim, you wouldn’t keep it in.
"So you got something in common with us," says Efrain, who then was getting out very soon, and you answered so quick ("Oh yes") you can’t hear you almost, so nobody picks up on it.
The news comes in about the Outside, and we are not there.
So then I said, if you recall (and maybe only if) that some of the guys were really into journalism, which quieted things down, and I said once upon a time (though I don’t mean the clippings on my case) I was into it too— until they locked me up, and then I diversified inward. Newspaper work, you opined, has many facets.
But Jim while I have sweated out the politics of why I’m here, I know what you meant when you said (be brief, you said, be brief) that you wondered what you were doing here (though you were kind enough not to wonder if there was any future in it—for what is there to journalize about inside?). So the circumstances under which I was implicated in the decease of a person known to me would have come to mind even if you had not pinpointed said circumstances by telling us that as of fiscal ‘76 fourteen thousand dollars (and counting) was what each of us more or less cost the state per year, subject to inflationary update, when we all know the inmate doesn’t get that fourteen grand unless he is very special. It goes into a waste flume except that those whose overweight ill health and expanding families this fund floats cannot get off on the insanity of this fund or, come to think of it, the beauty of (in many domestic establishments) a wife who does work worth $250 a week by 1970 par, roughly $13 grand per annum, my mother for example a crimeless victim, or Miriam, such a girl, Jim, that around her I could never say enough. Meanwhile you do not ask, What’s your story?
Now you said you were used to getting a substitute instead of what you were looking for, and that that was the story of your life as a newsman. Carlos takes the New York Times and asked if you had information you refused to reveal and if you knew any journalists who blackmailed their sources to get more info and if you often knew the answers before you went after the facts. But I am communicating now to ask you this: a government contractor, say, gave you what they wanted you to get, like their own press release, ‘stead of you always finding out what was truly going on, so for instance you said they say countermeasures equipment that keeps the peace protecting B-52 bombers by denying threat radars information as to our bombers’ range and azimuth position, but I am asking you this because it was hard to get your attention with a dozen criminal types monopolizing you . . . now when you go down to, say, Venezuela or the Argentine (you said)—or, cell-bunk itinerant I, let’s say Vermont (you said), doing an in-depth on the ‘‘insurance cover" corporation you did not name, well what else are you going to go looking for except the truth? I mean, did you surprise yourself and get into insurance and forget what it’s covering?
You answered as I asked and so I understood: but wave-length, forget it, though alternating current comes closer: what it is, Jim, which I put together that I never could have Outside is the Colloidal Unconscious where contact works through the Schism. And I am not guilty of discovering this unconscious, much less that it found me through a lab-less chemistry unseen as deepest bonds. Not that we’re of one mind in here with seventeen hundred guys longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic and black, Irish and black Irish, but only one slot-machine massage Chair in the chapel confronting four rows of pews for player-piano historians with clout and the need to study a captive example, if not to throw up the menu in reverse, but you said you were acquainted with at least one man in your business who was capable of the blackmail Carlos brought up—and you sometimes thought the truth about the Mysterycorp in the points of its operation you had checked into might have been all the time in you. Or did I only guess that?
If the guys didn’t know what you were talking about, I did. Arizona where sacred mesas are not above shedding refuse; northwest New Mexico, where a rocky ship shrugs off a moving desert; oh Jim, hit Houston racing-dog farms, El Paso boot supermart where every pair fits someone who will die, Vermont cemetery-sculpture quarries, New York music; you went into the history of that ghost state Uruguay as sanctuary in the McCarthy period which is like before my time. You traveled some in South America, which half these guys are mapping runs to in their waking d
reams. And you sent word back or flew back to your desk with the information you had developed—how does that work?—and had the stuff in the old attache case bringing it back thousands of miles to your office, well maybe (you said) dry run or wet, going and coming you carried the real facts on you at all times, do you recall saying that?
Why do I ask? Conspicuous leisure and lifetime bent.
Remember when you asked, Got any animals here?—which got a laugh because you meant real cats, real dogs, tiger in this think tank, camel with loose hump in the yard walking between the basketball game and the iron pumpers.
But on the heels of that laugh you asked what I read. Someone said, George never learned; someone else, He got his own rules.
Right then, Jim, I hear Miriam on the phone and see the clear, large color of her eyes. What’s your act, Foley? you asked with wordless eyes. And once gently asked on the way out, Don’t you want to kill or get killed in here? but I had felt the shadow of such words cast long since, and the answer was colloid not pacif-ass. And we’re onto something new but then it seems not much good to have you aboard.
Yet some of us who share interface reach other in a mind compounded chemically but far truer than the sums of its particles—call it Colloidal Unconscious for lack of more up-to-date name: and some whose interfaces lie a billion millimeters off do reach each other and know they are amid particles suspended and dispersed but—I said "colloid"—so much smaller than fat droplets in homogenized and pasteurized (carcinoma-emulsified) juice not from concentrate and so much smaller than the clay in what you call at a glance muddy waters that you (because as I came to see when I had to make up my own lab, we are colloid solutions) experience and maybe use them (only you don’t see them) and if the Colloidal Unconscious is unconscious of itself this is the same as ants in their towers in Africa, they’re all working together, Jim, cooperation life, competition death—and already I can’t help hearing Miriam on the phone at the tax-return office—and you talking to me, the noise, you’re blunt and brief, you leave stuff out. And when you asked me what I was interested in, well you can write back and tell me what you think of that Norwegian immigrant non-farmer who grew ideas you know his name—wore a fur cap that hid his long-headed predictions—didn’t do much more farming than I would give my labor away for twenty-five cents an hour the going rate here, the staying rate!—to be your own peasant outside the walls on the correctional farm correcting potatoes to be someday mashed in milk. And I have read all the philosophers—read them in the programs, Jim—and have found many as blind and slippery as the economists on my way to test myself at Toxic Mountain (rumored by a lone foul or fair-weather genius correspondent of mine) via the Colloidal Unconscious which goes down through monetary theory like laxative or in your planet like dry ice through cloud potential.
You said, Don’t call collect (like the hip social worker whose phone got cut off), but Write, and you’d write too but you didn’t save letters. I don’t want you should get a substitute for the real thing you wanted, you’re a man who met the great Goulart in Brazil on his way out so there’s a chance for me, and you’re after something more than helping a clutch of cons be journalists (my mother went to school twice a week on the sly at age fifty-one) (my substitute teacher aforementioned Ruth M. Heard always made me feel I was in for something special in my life and must watch patiently)—by the way please fill out the correspondence form, Jim—you see as I told my mother who comes up here all alone sometimes real independent with a pack of cards and who is brave but has her own way of understanding what I mean, what I’m in for has proved to be something else, Jim, a purpose: thus I found myself, and here not there, like you in New Mexico, if I got your meaning.
What I’m in for—the appeal hangs fire. So when you said you don’t save letters, were you letting us down gently? A package deal of friendly help but when you get it open—well ... the letters you said all get boiled down in your mind, you probably had them all, so that, never fear, while you would remember us—our stupid fish faces boiled down to veined pulp—you had to save on head space (there being not the unused capacity some claimed, and I was grinning because you knew I knew what you were talking about and not to think our letters were lost when they got thrown away, but you don’t have to be so honest all the time, did you know that, Jim?).
You saw I knew you meant who had written the letter didn’t matter, the name could detach from the words though the person was still there and the letter’s message turned into you and you had it in a new vein so I was glad to grin and also at the two former missionaries I get mixed up, you never see them together, they wear sweaters. I was sweeping, and one quick-steps by and with a shake of his head he says to my uncomprehending automatic pushbroom, Such a waste, such a waste; and I to my broom which suddenly goes off Automatic and weighs like a live thing on my hands, In my keeper’s multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.
This I thought, thinking of you, Jim: He’s been all over. I been here. Years going on lots more. But what’s he know? Said he skimmed stuff more than before; needed the information, distrusted eyewitness.
Then I thought, He wouldn’t be here for the hell of it.
Neither would I.
The guys wanted to ask you about yourself. I can speak for them, because I know they did. Your family, if any; your history: brother in haberdashery in Jersey, the brown-and-orange tie (the next time you came) came from his place. Much of it better forgotten, you said, if you recall.
You were shown the prison newspaper. Front-page shots, Puerto Ri-quenos, Indian hair and headbands, don’t know what you thought. You don’t see our whole picture. What is intrinsic here?
What the messenger’s hosts wanted, waiting for him in a mile-long corridor, then a weather-proof room (look, no windows!), was not a message at all (unless an emergency greeting from the state parole board); what they wanted was to be not the messenger himself but the message. Or so they think. But while some did, not I.
What could they know of you?
The lines you gave them straight—the news article simple and clear at the outset, separate from everything else under the sun except its subject. Subject in hand, get in get out, that’s your rule, and "How is the Rican mafia taking over the prison newspaper?" "They like to get their boys into all the photos looking like Indians," Charley said; and Efrain, "Hey man, I got to get out of here," like an inmate here who escaped a month before his release date.
But between the lines a message the guys would not find: I saw Juan write it down and put a box around it. "Don’t get too curious around here," Efrain said, didn’t he? He knows because he had a long elevator ride one morning, and the building he’s in only got two floors.
Curious about the law—you got a laugh; we got a law library here where some guys go to dream. You said dreams passed you by.
Curious about people: what questions do you ask an interview? You got a laugh, some questions you don’t ask, man! What makes people tick, what sets them off, look at a man, an ordinary man at a run-of-the-mill international conference, and you report what he said, not what’s going round in his mind, but I think you know that also, Jim, and pile it up as you encounter this prominent character again months later: "it’s like chemistry," you said—you looked my way—you never knew much chem ("Makes two of us," Juan said)—’ ‘Like between a man and a woman," said Efrain, and the guys laughed ("Oh darling," called Jackie, and I hear Miriam saying on the phone, "To whom am I speaking?")—but molecules, you said, if they are in the body, who says they are not in the mind? The guys sensed we were loose in inner space and they were ready for some personal history all around, but I knew where we had gotten to, and was glad I had broached the molecule problem.
Miriam I heard between us.
And most of them did not wait first in the room that our strange messenger had aimed at as he drove billowing parkways into twilight headlights coming on and oncoming. They waited in the mile-like corridor.
They waited in order to see the e
vening’s arrivals lest these be in part female. To whom am I speaking? For whom am I waiting. They’re good guys; there is some beautiful understanding going down here, don’t doubt it. Here comes the lifers’ legal liaison (young mother of three), keeps them up on the law (popular in her own right).
And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?
Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend—a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it—and any other females, the more the merrier, why not?, the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour—the program people—and you among them but not of them, Jim.
Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs—no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper)—start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read—and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you want to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk—but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise—about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son—taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?
Women and Men Page 111
