The drill the visitors knew was above all that of waiting, in total deference. Complaint had been worn out of them some time ago. We waited in one secured zone after another, as we progressed by degrees inside the Watertown facility. First, approved by some unseen hand, we were taken from the trailer, along concrete paths marked with fluorescent orange-and-yellow paint. I found it impossible not to fear being rifle-shot from a high tower for crossing the painted stripes, for we were now under the gaze of the concrete towers, having put the trailer and parking lot, the whole of Watertown out of sight behind us. Then we passed through what was called an “A/B door”—a metal cage, wired so door A and door B couldn’t be unlocked at the same time. After we were inspected from within a windowed office there came a joltingly loud buzz to switch the circuit. Bolts slammed through the door behind us, and the door ahead opened to permit us to pass from the box.
With that we were inside, sort of. The prison wasn’t, as I’d pictured, a single edifice, a stone Gormenghast or iron Deathstar, but a sprawled compound of structures and fences and gates, a bleak ranch for human livestock. Between everything, safe zones, moats of speckless concrete, protected by razor wire. And, through doors unlocked for us by gray-clad, dronelike officers, the interiors were dully institutional, like 1960s-era school buildings or hospital emergency rooms, full of mint-green tile and wooden paneling worn to matte. Each place we encountered in this visitor’s gauntlet felt provisional, refitted for this temporary use, though they’d likely been used this way for years.
I later understood each prisoner had to be located, cleared, brought to the visiting room hidden deep inside the walls—there was no motive for the guards to finish processing us until the prisoner had been escorted to wait for us in that room. This was a place of canceled time: it had no value. We weren’t customers, to be pleased or reassured. Yet for all the waiting, I was always guiltily startled when my name was finally called, was always gazing in the wrong direction, distracted by the stuff pinned to the walls, yellowed notices, ten-year-old memos requiring block sergeants to remain at posts until the arrival of replacement block sergeants or forbidding visitors skirts higher than 2 inches above the knees or “bear midriff,” advertisements for shuttle services and child care, twelve-step and pregnancy clinic solicitations, and a long, hypnotic list, photocopied into a runic blur, of commissary items: toothpaste $1.39, comb 19¢, ketchup packet 19¢, jar chicken $1.79, jar lima beans 89¢, jar instant coffee $1.59, peanut butter $1.39, conditioner $1.29, hairnet 29¢, bun 25¢, chocolate bun 30¢, and on and on from there—the list was schemeless, incantatory, horrible.
“Ebdus.”
“Yes.”
“Belt and shoes off, contents of pockets in the wooden box.”
I waddled up, the only one who needed to be told.
“All in the box.”
I scooped out my pockets, offered them my shoes and belt.
“No pens.”
I shrugged helplessly.
“You can throw it out here.”
“Sure.” I put my ballpoint in the green steel garbage pail. Other visitors streamed through the metal detector while I fidgeted with my crap.
“What’s this ring?”
“Wedding ring.”
“Why ain’t you wearing it?”
“Uh, it’s my mother’s wedding ring. I just carry it around, it doesn’t fit.” Don’t make me put it on, I prayed. The officer squinted, frowned, let it pass. Something else was more interesting.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
She pointed to a single pale-orange conical earplug which had sprung to the top of the change and rental-car keys I’d heaped into the wooden tray along with the ring. The plug had unsquished, breathed open as foam shapes will do.
“Earplug,” I said.
“What for?”
I considered the appearance of the earplug, the vaguely sexual fitted form, through the officer’s eyes. “For the airplane,” I said.
She looked at it closely. Now I wondered if it more resembled drug paraphernalia.
“That’s for an airplane ?”
“For blocking out the sound of the engines. So I can sleep.”
“Just one?”
“I guess I lost the other one.”
“Huh.”
I’d never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. The officer scowled, but placed my tray full of stuff on the far side of the barrier. “Give me your right hand, sir.” From a stamp pad she marked my knuckles with some invisible stuff. “Take your box, sir.”
Once through, I began slipping into my shoes, repocketing my stuff.
“Sir, not here.”
“What?”
“You can’t stay in this area. Take your box to the bench in there.”
Five of us were called, to have our hands examined with a black-light wand that exposed a purplish emblem. The keys on the fistlike ring at the escort officer’s belt varied in size and shape, some as modern as my rental car’s ignition key, others as medieval as those wielded by the Wizard of Id ’s bailiff. As our group strode the corridor I learned another subtle art, of slowing so that the officer, who’d lingered to relock the door behind us, had time to overtake us and open the door ahead.
I tried to absorb the others’ expert docility, as a balm. We were being transformed into inmates, I began to understand, as our reward for asking to go inside. We’d crossed seven or eight levels of lock-in before I was led to meet Mingus Rude in the visitor’s room, a bleach-redolent chamber of pale blue tile. There, we were sealed from one another by a Plexiglas window covered with minute scratchiti, and allowed to converse on telephones.
He had to speak for both of us, at first. I couldn’t find a word.
“D-Man. I can’t believe it’s you, shit.”
I nodded.
“Check you out. Boy done growed up. Hah!”
I’d journeyed back, from that distance at which Mingus had sometimes seemed an implausibility, a myth. Now he was before me, in the all-too-human flesh. His skin was skull-tight, the whites of his eyes sickly yellow, he wore his father’s ridiculous Fu Manchu mustache and a filthy red sweatshirt, his wide grin revealed a chipped incisor, his raised eyebrows a thin scar seaming his eyelid. Still, I persuaded myself he didn’t look bad, or so different from the man I remembered. In Junior’s photograph on the Bothered Blue cover I’d seen a resemblance to Mingus, but now, despite the mustache, I didn’t see Mingus in terms of his father. Mingus was only Mingus, the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover. Seated across from him, I knew he’d already grown into a man at some point before the last time I’d seen him, the day of the shooting. I hated to recall the boy I’d encountered in the mirror when I first arrived at my Camden dorm—the frightened boy, desperate to impress with his fresh punk haircut, who’d go on spend his life pretending not to have seen and known so much.
“I can’t believe it. Where you been, son?”
He spoke as though resuming where we’d left it, my year before graduation from Stuyvesant. As though I’d been at high school in Manhattan these decades, and now we only hadn’t run into one another, to exchange a quick handclasp on Dean Street, for a few long months.
So where had I been? I answered, “California.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard from your pops you was out that way. Someday I got to get out there myself— the Golden State, damn.” Like Marilla, Mingus merely hadn’t gotten around to it. “Dillinger’s gone way out west, checkin’ out the Golden State. Yet despite how the boy’s livin’ large, he don’t diminishize his roots, he comes back to represent.”
Mingus was authoring a romance, wrapping my awkwardness in his old raconteur’s warmth. It was nonsense and a gift I took gladly. No mention of the special nature of the setting for our reunion, though his jive happened to be piped over an intercom. The setting didn’t bear mentioning. His smile’s warmth, the way he beamed himself across that thickness of Plexiglas, suggested a capacity for a binoc
ular vision which excluded surroundings. Recalling how the city had reeled from us as we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway gazing at spray-painted stone, I thought now that that had always been one of Mingus’s talents.
“Arthur couldn’t come,” I said, as if Arthur were the unfaithful one. “He sent up some money for the commissary, though.”
“Arthur’s always lookin’ out for a brother,” said Mingus. He didn’t mean to sting me, only to bathe Arthur, too, in beatific gratitude. “I know I let Arturo down a bunch of times, but my man always picks up the phone.”
“I count on him for news of you,” I lied. I hadn’t been any more in touch with Arthur than I had with Mingus. And I hadn’t heard news of Mingus until Abraham and Francesca raised the subject in Anaheim, at dinner with Zelmo Swift.
“Little brother’s doing fine for himself, too,” said Mingus, freeing me from this line of talk. “Done got fat and happy.”
“Well, fat.”
Mingus wheezed, too much laughter for the joke. “Ho snap,” he said, putting on a show. “I heard that. I been tellin’ the boy he got to shed some poundage he wants to snag himself a wife.”
The word was peculiarly silencing: heading to forty, we’d fallen laps behind life’s course. We had no wives. Mingus, at least, had an excuse for why he hadn’t been dating lately. About Abby there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound self-pitying or fatuous. I felt the distance between Dean Street and my Berkeley life as an unbridgeable gulf.
At the lapse I tuned in the murmur around us: one-sided talk into the visitors’ telephones, the unself-conscious yakking of two corrections officers at the door, and, from one of the booths, a voice gummy with weeping.
“I saw Junior,” I said.
“At the house?”
“Yesterday. With Arthur.”
“My old man,” said Mingus. He spoke simply now, his gaze shy. “He’s hanging in there.”
“It was good to see him,” I said.
“He must have been glad to see you.”
I couldn’t fathom a reply, so we fell to silence a second time. Mingus had abandoned his patois, and the trumped-up garrulity that had gone with it. I was ashamed to want it back.
Mingus smoothed his long contrails of mustache, stroked his chin. There were flecks of spittle on his side of the glass between us, evidence of his actor’s enthusiasm, now gone. I met his rheumy eyes and saw a stranger. I could no more ask Mingus who he’d become—whether incarceration had broken him the first time, at eighteen, or what had led him back inside after his first release, or what his life had meant to him in the time between his two sentences—than I could imagine how to confess myself to him. I was helpless to say who I’d become in California, or to let him know I remembered everything between us despite it all.
“Arthur says Robert’s inside too,” I said, despising myself for the false casualness, for my use of inside. My heart was thudding now.
“Plenty of brothers you’d recall from the old days inside now,” said Mingus. There might have been rebuke in his words, I wasn’t certain. “Donald, Herbert, whole bunch of them.”
I didn’t remember Donald or Herbert. Perhaps Mingus knew this.
“You and Robert see a whole lot of each other?” Dopey questions poured from me, helplessly.
“I put myself out for Robert until I couldn’t afford to no more.” Now there came a steely note of institutional savvy in Mingus’s voice, and his gaze blinked from mine. “Our boy Robert put himself in the way of some trouble. They had to shift him into protective custody.”
“Oh.”
“I told him but the poor-ass snake can’t listen.”
To divert the anger that seemed to be unstoppering, I said, “Actually, Arthur sent cash for both of you.”
“Put mine to Robert’s name. Boy could use it.”
“Really?”
“It’s not too late for him to pay his debt down. Anyway, I’m in a protest with these motherfuckers, they took my stamps.”
“Stamps?”
“For letters. Postage stamps, man.”
“What happened?”
“I had thirty dollars of stamps in my bunk down at Auburn. When they moved me up here they were supposed to be transferred—” Here Mingus launched into a torturous account of a paperwork error. The Watertown facility prohibited stamps because they resembled paper money, could be used as scrip. The postage had been meant to be dissolved into Mingus’s commissary account, had been placed instead with belongings to be returned to him after release. Mingus filed protest forms, but the seized stamps were stranded in a limbo between the two prisons, the two sets of rules. Mingus retailed this story with a joy-in-persecution that could only be called Kafkaesque. In a world of deprivations, I suppose the smallest might become a fetish. It made my head hurt. I wanted to scream Forget the stamps, for God’s sake I’ll buy you thirty dollars’ worth of stamps if you want! But the stamps were Mingus’s cause, and so he railed on. What was thirty dollars compared to a cause? Too, in this place a talker’s gifts were only encouraged in one direction, to stanch the wound which bled hours, days, years. I tried not to lose patience with the monologue.
“I brought you something else,” I said, when Mingus paused for breath.
He scowled confusion.
I dug in my pocket as discreetly as I could. “I’ve been keeping it for you,” I said, and pushed the ring to the edge of the Plexiglas, like a checker I wanted Mingus to king.
“Put that away,” he said. He waved, a low flat gesture which seemed to say Keep it under the table. “They’ll confiscate it.”
I covered the ring with my palm. Still, I couldn’t keep from avowing my mission of rescue. “This is why I came—I mean, I wanted to see you. But the ring belongs to you.”
“It never did.”
“It does now, then.”
“Shit.”
Mingus had grown cold and wary, as though I’d asked him to recall things he couldn’t afford to.
“How can I get it in to you?” I said, thinking moronically, If I’d known about the hermetic seal, I’d have baked a cake.
“Put it away.”
“You could use it to break out of this place,” I said quietly.
His laugh now was bitter, and authentic.
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t even use that thing to break into this place.”
The rest, until my time was up, was small talk. Mingus wanted news of my father, so I described the honor he’d received in Anaheim. I mentioned Abby, omitted her color. We even talked over the stamps again. Mingus asked questions and didn’t listen to my answers. A wall had fallen between us. Afterward, I was led out, my knuckles inspected again for the phosphorescent stamp of a free man. On my way out I deposited two hundred dollars into Robert Woolfolk’s commissary account, keeping my promise.
chapter 12
Invisible in twilight, my eyes picked out stuff I’d missed the first time crossing the yard.
On concrete clean of the slightest scrap of litter or leaf, a single latex glove, flipped inside out in the haste of its removal.
Pinned to the fence, a hand-pained sign: DON ’ T FEED THE CATS!
Past the fence, shadow-blobbed trees. Sensuous unreachable hills. The moon a pale disk snuck into sky before sunset.
It wasn’t either day or night when I crept back inside the gates of Watertown Correctional, but something in between: daynight, the hour of the changing of the guards.
I’d only had to lay on my motel bedspread flipping cable channels for half an hour—Mets game; Emeril ; Sunburn, with Farrah Fawcett and Charles Grodin; and Teddy Pendergrass: Behind the Music —before Mingus’s words penetrated my brain in their full profundity: You couldn’t even break into this place. I’d heard them as merely scoffing, when in fact they spoke of my whole life’s flinching from what mattered most—not California, dummy, but Brooklyn. Not Camden College, but Intermediate School 293. Not Talking Heads, but Al Green. “No way out but i
n” (cf. Timothy Leary, 1967). “The old way out is now the new way in” (cf. Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair, 1984). Behind the Music, sure. But I needed to go behind the walls. My first pass at the prison had been too cursory, a tourist’s, as ever. I had to earn Mingus’s escape with my own willingness to go inside, to show it could be done. I’d known Aeroman had one last mission: now I saw it couldn’t be conducted by surrogate. I’d wear the ring myself, once more.
This certainty came like a fever. The motel room seemed to pitch, the walls to crawl, like Ray Milland’s in The Lost Weekend. I broke a sweat, felt my bowels loosen dangerously. Lying still, apart from the twitching of my thumb on the remote, I sought a channel to distract me from my intent, uselessly. So I sprang from the bed, rinsed the clammy perspiration from my throat, and spent five minutes or so under the motel sink’s fluorescent, trying to stare myself out of what I was about to do. Then I repacked my small bag and checked out.
The Fortress of Solitude Page 49
