Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  One of the two officers gently tapped me on the bicep and I moved between them, one in front, one behind, up the stairs to the squad room.

  The squad room was perhaps sixty or seventy feet long by thirty feet wide, with a high ceiling, drab and colorless walls, a floor whose color was so gray, it must have been non-existent, and heavy light fixtures (the ones with the milk-glass globes, you know the kind) hanging down from the ceiling on thick chains.

  Desks were scattered in a neat disorder, all across the room. Bulletin boards contained directives, circulars, wanted posters, departmental information and “cop cartoons” from various magazines. At the far left end of the room was a floor-to-ceiling barred enclosure, the “tank,” where felons were summarily heaved until disposition could be made.

  Two men were working at desks across from one another. One of the detectives was called by name, and the man looked up with the most everlastingly weary eyes I have ever seen.

  “Hey,” he said. It was a greeting, and a recognition, and not much else. The weary cop went back to his paperwork. A burst of static and some garbled code-numbers erupted from the squawk-box on the wall, but no one paid any attention. My two companions indicated a chair beside a desk, and I sat down. The two detectives who had been working at the desks looked up, almost at the same time, as though their heads had been worked by strings.

  One of them said to my enforcers, “Listen, you want to hold down the fort till the Old Man gets in? We haven’t had any dinner yet.”

  One of my cops nodded assent and the two detectives collated and tapped their papers into neat stacks, filed them away in drawers, and left the squad room. I lit a cigarette.

  It wasn’t bad, this waiting. There was almost a flavor of excitement about it. But I was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t all going to be as simple as leaving my books with the officers and having them call me later when the matter came up. I had a suspicion I might have to spend the night in the can—but I put that thought out of my head at once…it was ridiculous. After all, I hadn’t done anything.

  The taller of my two friends, now free of his raincoat and carrying the paper bag with the weapons and my books, sat down behind the desk. I sat in a chair to the side of it. He looked at me for a moment, gave me a reassuring grin and reached into the desk for the forms. He wanted a statement.

  I tried to think what day it was, and how old I was, and what I was doing here, and without any difficulty the answers came: September 11th, 1960…twenty-six…I’ve been nabbed on the Sullivan Act, illegal possession of firearms in the City of New York, state of New York, Borough of Manhattan. That was right; I knew it was right. I was ready to give him his statement.

  He took it all down, including the name of Ken Bales, the fact that I had done lecture tours and been on TV with the weapons, and the additional information that I had let them search my apartment without hindrance. The detectives clued me that though this was a serious charge, he didn’t think I was in much trouble.

  We waited for the Old Man, the Captain.

  The other two cops who had been in the squad room when we’d arrived did not come back. I assumed they’d gone off duty. While we waited, Linda Solomon arrived at the station house, and was sent up to the squad room. She had brought me a toothbrush, a tube of Gleem, some money, my reading glasses, a bar of soap, and three books:

  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad

  THE WIZARD OF OZ by L. Frank Baum

  EICHMANN: THE MAN AND HIS CRIMES

  I sometimes wonder about my friends.

  I took the paper bag of goodies, noting the titles of the three paperbacks and grimacing strangely at her rather morbid sense of humor. She grinned back like the large Cheshire she resembles, and shrugged eloquently. She wanted to hang around and “soak up the atmosphere” of prison, but my temper had frayed by that time and I suggested not too politely—despite her kindness of trudging over in the rain with my belongings—that she get the hell out of there before they began examining her butt for needle marks.

  She gave me a sisterly kiss on the forehead and advised me to keep a stiff upper. Or something in that category. Jeezus, I wanted to get out of there.

  Perhaps forty-five minutes later, the Captain arrived. A tall and muscular fellow with kind features, he ushered me into his office, and proceeded to read my statement, checking points for clarification from time to time. He called in the senior of the two detectives who had arrested me, and asked him a number of questions about my personal behavior. The detective gave him a faithful, concise account of what had happened. Then he showed the Captain my books. Thus far I seemed to be doing okay.

  I got the impression that the Captain would rather not have been troubled with me, as it was fairly obvious by that time that I was not an ax murderer, a narcotics pusher or an exposer of privates in playgrounds. But the complaint had been filed, and he was duty-bound to follow it up.

  The report read, the Captain looked at me and asked me if I had any idea how the police had been put onto this matter. I told him about Ken Bales. He didn’t say anything. It was obvious: the call had been anonymous, and there was no way of proving if it had been Bales or someone else. I had never thought of that…someone else.

  The names raced through my mind. All the petty enemies a guy can make in a lifetime, the stupid ones, mostly, who would take such a punk, cowardly way to get even with someone. And then I considered a name I had not offered up before. My ex-wife, Charlotte, now living in New York, in the Bronx. Could it have been her? I didn’t want to think about it too hard. I didn’t want to think anyone I’d known so intimately could hate me so completely. I tried to think of other things.

  After several hours of sitting, waiting, in the squad room (and I must offer truth where it comes; the Captain did not put me into the barred tank, where he could by all rights have stashed me), the Captain told me I’d have to be booked, printed, and put in a cell for the night. I was panic-stricken. They had taken the revolver, to check it out, to see if it matched up with any unsolved cases of shootings they had had in the recent past, but I thought, right up to that moment, that I would be allowed to go home, to be called up whenever the case came to court.

  But the silent, deadly machinery of the law had begun to grind, and caught in its yearning wheels and cogs, I was trapped till the cycle had run its course.

  I had vivid images of my two years in the Army, and the almost pathological terror I had of being regimented, being ordered and confined, not allowed to act or speak or function as I wanted. But this was a thousand times worse. I was being locked up.

  They printed me, then, and the black stains on the fingers were a visible pronouncement of my guilt, even before I’d been tried. There was one more indignity. They had no soap to wash off the black ink from the pad. A coarse paper towel merely smudged and deadened, ingrained the ink. I took to staring at my fingers, all through that night, and it was a feeling I cannot readily express.

  A feeling of having been imprinted by my Times, by people who did not know me, who couldn’t care less about me, who only knew that ten fingers deserved ten blots on them. “Can I have some soap?” I asked them, and they stared at me as though I was a trifle insane. “It’ll wash off soon enough,” they said, without comprehension.

  I had been turned into a criminal by the simple act of blackening my fingers. I could see it beginning: the studied process that can take a teen-age gang kid with too much rebellion in him, and make him into something else…a loser, a thief, a kid with inked fingers.

  There wasn’t any use trying to explain to them—they would have commiserated, but never understood. No one really can understand how an individual feels about something so personal. To maybe only one out of a million people would the sight of ink on the fingers be comprehensible as stigmata. But my heart sank.

  It was to sink even lower during the next hours.

  They took me downstairs and booked me. Complaint 1897, Police Ledger for Charles Street Station. Booked on the Sullivan. I w
as now officially and forever listed in the records of the New York Police Department.

  (I was to find out only months later that though the complaint may be dismissed eventually, and the prints and mug shots requested from the Police Department, though they may in effect say the records have been struck from the files, they never are. Once printed, once catalogued, you are there till the day you die. You have a record. This is one of the unsung attributes of the often-over-zealous New York Police Department. Many innocent men have their faces in mug books in the five boroughs.)

  Then I was taken back upstairs, and turned over to a guard for placement in a cell. They took me through the huge gray fire door, and down the row of tiny gun-metal gray cells, and stopped before one. Another guard down the line released the master control of the bank of cages, and the man beside me opened the individual cell with his key. I took a step forward, and stopped. I turned to the detective who had arrested me and I suppose the look on my face was mournful as I said, “Uh, hey, uh, how about if I don’t uh have to go into here tonight, uh, maybe I could sit up in the uh the room back there, huh?” The detective tried to be gentle, but firm. He shook his head.

  The guard was not quite so pleasant. “C’mon, kid, c’mon, get your ass in there, I haven’t got all night!”

  It was night by that time.

  And getting darker every minute.

  I stepped inside the cell. The guard said, “Gimme your belt and tie and that bag of stuff.”

  I asked to keep the books and my cigarettes and lighter, and he was about to refuse when the detective intervened. “Let him have them,” he said. The guard gave him a piercing, altogether unfriendly look, the sort of look a lackey gives an official, and let me keep everything but my lighter. I had to light one cigarette and keep smoking all night if I wanted nicotine. Chain smoking. All night.

  The guard slid the door shut and I heard the master bar slam home. The detective said something reassuring, something about coming for me early the next morning and I should try to get some sleep. I grinned mawkishly and said, “Helluva hotel you’ve got here.” He grinned back, and went away.

  The guard stayed and stared at me for a few more seconds, trying to figure out what my pull was, that I had the plainclothes bulls going for me. Then he put my bag of goodies (which I now recall had some fruit and chicken in it, that my mother had sent with Linda) on the window ledge outside the cell, across the thin corridor…and he walked back the way he had come.

  The light in the corridor stayed on, the fire door slammed with a J. Arthur Rank clang, and I was all alone in the tier.

  It was night by that time.

  And getting darker every minute.

  I smoked.

  ELEVEN

  The cell overnight. A cell, whose dimensions, with handles attached, would have made a fine coffin. Gun-metal gray, faceless gray, cadaverous gray, emptily gray, without even the humanity of a chipped place on the wall. Solid, unbroken gray, with privy obscenities inscribed. (How? No pencils in perdition.) Durance vile with a lidless toilet that cannot be flushed. Coventry with a flat hardwood bedslab and a light that never goes out.

  That light. All night in my eyes. Was this a modern American jail or a stopover on the Brainwash Express? I expected the Cominform representatives at any moment, with subtle thumbscrew tortures unless I revealed the plans for the Yankee spaceship. Jeezus, that goddam bulb…no wonder they encased it in a hard-glass shield, and a wire mesh, so no one could break it. They may have been afraid of some pistolero smashing it to obtain a sharp shard of glass to aid an escape, but in my case all I wanted to do was get some sleep, and that sonofabitch was burning out my eye-sockets.

  I spent the night for the most part awake; there was no sleeping with the light in my eyes. That isn’t entirely correct. A lesson well-learned in the Army was: When they yell fall out, shuck out of your pack, use it for a pillow and drop where you are.

  I could sleep in a rock field, within a matter of seconds be completely out of it. But I couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t the bulb, entirely. It was where I was sleeping.

  Part of the time I read. Enchanted as generations of tots and elders have been by Frank Baum’s Dorothy and Tin Woodman and Scarecrow and Wizard, none of them could have blessed the kindly old characters as much as I did that night. They took me out of myself, and I recognized for the first time the full value of fantasy. But eventually I had to think about it. I had to put one of the smoking cigarettes on the edge of the toilet bowl in my mouth, close the book, and sit on the edge of that hardwood slab, and think about it:

  Was I guilty? I didn’t for a moment consider myself guilty in the accepted cultural sense of the word. I had committed no crime, and had in fact come by the weapons as a result of trying to do good, of trying to mirror a true state of our times. But in the deeper, moral sense, was I responsible for my actions, was I in prison rightfully? I had to know. I had to reason it out as a human being; I had to analyze my own ethics and morality, and decide if being behind bars was proper in this instance.

  And so I considered it, silently, for a long time. I had, indeed, run with a gang, for purposes which I chose to consider altruistic and lofty. But had my own personal needs for recognition and stature dictated my course? Was I really a dilettante, who took his chances when he thought he could get away without being punished…or was I completely honest about my motives? I discounted the word “completely.” No one is ever completely anything.

  Finally, I decided that it was neither all black nor all white. I was partially guilty, of selling out my responsibility to the kids I had seen in the streets, by writing cheap blood-and-guts yarns about them, rather than going the longer, harder haul and doing it sociologically. But though I was guilty of moral turpitude in varying degrees, I was not guilty of selling out my society. I had prostituted my talent to make money—for many reasons; most of which (wife, home, three squares a day, a few primary pleasures, a little class) would not be considered improper by the majority—but the crime was in my soul, not in my dossier.

  Guilty? Yes, of selling out, of obfuscating, of cheapening my message, of dawdling and playing the poseur.

  But guilty of owning a lethal weapon with intent to perform a crime…of indulging in illegal activity…of corruption in the greater sense…no, never.

  I went back to the Land of Oz with a pastel heart, with an ease and peace. I hadn’t turned to obsidian as yet. Soon, perhaps, here in hell, but not just at the moment. At the moment I was a flawed human being, a man with imperfections, a little guy who wanted desperately to be a big guy. But I wasn’t a criminal. Not yet. Not just yet.

  Still, I didn’t read about Eichmann that night.

  Sometime after three-thirty I fell asleep. I might have liked to report that it was a night filled with dark phantasmagoric shapes, threatening, but nonesuch was the case. The Army had taught me well. I slept like a baby. When I came back from wherever it was I had gone, the morning had come through the window across the corridor, the light had gone out, and I was stiff as a bitch. My right shoulder felt as though someone had gone at it with a piton. Several vertebrae were ratcheted sidewise, and I had that next-day feeling of mugginess, with my nose and eyes and ears filled with moist, unpleasant, viscous matter. I could not wash, not just then, and I felt like hell. Eyes grainy and chin stubbly, suit wrinkled from having used the jacket as a pillow and the pants as sheets, hair mussed and lank from the high temperature, I looked the part of a seedy street-bum, brought to bay.

  I heard noises and the fire door opened down the line. The guard came in, followed by one of the detectives who had arrested me the late afternoon before. They came up to the cage and we went through the unlocking procedure. The guard told me I’d have time to wash up later, but right now I should get my can in gear.

  I followed the detective downstairs, and as we walked, he said, “Look, I’m supposed to put the cuffs on you, but I don’t think they’re necessary, so when we get downstairs, I’ll be going in my ca
r, following you.”

  “What am I going in?” I asked.

  “The wagon,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He jerked a thumb downtown. “One hundred Centre Street,” he replied. I believe I must have said something, because he took me under the elbow and steered me down the stairs, saying, “Listen, take it easy. The judge’ll be very easy on you. The Old Man didn’t let us down, and he agreed on not mentioning this junk charge. So you won’t have any real problems.”

  I hoped not. I had asked Linda to get in touch with my agent, Theron Raines of the Ann Elmo Literary Agency, in order to prepare bail if it was needed, though the general consensus had been that all I’d need was remanding into my own custody. The books I’d written had apparently given me some small stature as a reputable member of the community.

  Charles Street station had been quiet the night before. I was the only passenger in the meat wagon. They hustled me into the back, and locked the grilled door. I sat there, finger-combing my hair and clutching my little bag of goodies to me. As the wagon started, I fished out a chicken leg and began chewing on it.

  We went careening through downtown New York, with the city going away from me in a grilled panorama, the people staring in when the wagon stopped for lights, seeing what I’m sure they considered The True Face of Evil.

  I tried to look young and innocent.