Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  Against one wall a tall man in an Italian silk suit leaned toward his companion, a swarthy type with too much hair, badly cut, and falling down into his face as though he had scuffled with someone and had not had time to comb it. They talked in subdued tones and though I couldn’t make out what their subject was, I knew the sharp dresser was bugged at the olive-skinned one about a slip-up somewhere in the recent past. Their conversation reached such a pitch of intensity—while maintaining the same level of quiet—that the sharp dresser gave the smaller felon a slap across the forehead with his palm. I looked away and passed on to a huge, muscular Negro with a cast in his right eye, sitting at the end of the bench, his T-shirt ripped halfway across the chest, revealing heavy musculature, beaded with sweat. He caught me looking at him, and there was such a return glare of hatred, that I turned away.

  Lying on the floor, tossed up on himself like a fetus, I saw a man wrapped in his overcoat, clutching his knees to his chest, and snoring fitfully. Next to him, also lying on the floor, was a young man of indeterminate age—but not much over twenty-eight—covered with blood and home-made bandages. His head was swathed in them, covering the left ear and swinging down over the left eye. His cheek had a ragged cut on it, and his hands looked as though he had tried to grab a knife away from someone. His hands were ribboned with slices, hastily-bandaged with handkerchiefs, soaked through darkly. Or perhaps someone had been trying to get the knife from him.

  A drunken derelict lay huddled against the bars, one arm hanging out into the corridor, vomit all around him and his fellows as far away as they could get.

  A terribly thin man with no jacket, and suspenders criss-crossing over the top of his long-johns, was wrapped in on himself, sitting on the bench, other men pressed in on him tightly, and he shivered. He shook like a bridge guy wire in a heavy gale, and his eyes kept rolling up in his head, showing blue-veined eyeballs. I may have been wrong (though the bird-tracks up his bare arms told me I was right), but he looked like a junkie going into withdrawal.

  There were more, but suddenly I stopped looking at all of them, and settled on just one. A boy, no more than twenty, with a look of defiance and contempt mixed with helplessness and utter fear. I knew I knew that boy. No, not that boy, but another boy, someone younger perhaps? Or, someone like this boy, or…then I recognized him. It didn’t seem possible…and yet, how great could the odds be? It was Pooch. The Prez of the Barons, here in the Tombs with me, his Boswell. Here we were, how many years later? Seven? It seemed a lifetime. I’d had two years in the Army, the slow torture of a marriage gone bad, a year in Chicago, moral and emotional decay, a comeback and flight back to my New York, months of poverty and the inability to write, a new spate of sales, this arrest, and now, full circle. I was back with the gang. I was still a j.d. and no matter what I had considered myself, we—Pooch and me—had wound up at the same place at the same time.

  What were the odds?

  No more than a million to one, which is about par for Dumb Fate. There had been many kids in the gang, and the odds of one of them being arrested in the Borough of Manhattan (rather than home turf, Brooklyn) the same day I had been arrested, was not that strange. I looked at him, and the years had done their work.

  He was still Pooch, with the thin white face and the dark hollows in his cheeks, and the oily curly hair and the bits of anthracite for eyes. But now there were character lines around his eyes, and down his face alongside his mouth. Bitter lines that were not from laughing, and not from scowling. They were from squinting, measuring the angles. His hands were blockier, and his body seemed more tensed, but he was still the same kid. I had two cigarettes left, and asked the guy in the turtle-neck sweater next to me by the sink for a light. He gave me a match, and I lit both butts. I walked over to Pooch where he sat on the bench, lost in his own brooding, and stuck one of the cigarettes down under his nose. He looked up sharply, frantically, and for a minute there was no recognition. He stared at the cigarette as though I was trying to pick a fight.

  “What’s the matter, Pooch,” I said, quietly, “isn’t it your brand?” He stared from the cigarette to me and back again, and I could see his mind working, trying to make who I was. Where had he seen this little guy? Where? Whoever it was, he hadn’t seen him dressed like this…who?

  “Remember Candle, and Fish, and Flo, and Filene, and…”

  “Cheech!”

  I grinned at him and offered the butt again. “The same.” He took the cigarette slowly, and tried to get a handle on whether the last time we’d seen each other he’d been for or against me. I could see him casting back through time with difficulty. The days were too much alike, the years too conformed for much differentiation, but he knew me. He knew I’d gone away, and who I had been when I’d been in his gang.

  “I’ll be goddammed,” he said, rising from the bench. Before he had moved three steps away, an old man had slid into Pooch’s seat. I drew the boy away from the others, to the angle corner of bars and sink. We leaned toward each other and puffed on our cigarettes. We didn’t say anything for a while, just gauging each other, noting the changes, seeing what was to be seen.

  Finally, Pooch said, “What’s shakin’, man?”

  I shrugged, a peculiarly bizarre gesture in my suit and trenchcoat, geared as it was to leather jacket and T-shirt circumstances. “Nothin’s shakin’ but the leaves on the trees,” I answered. He gave me a quirk of a smile.

  “Helluva place to find you, man.” He meant it, too. “You seemed sharper than that.” I shrugged again; who can explain how a guy winds up in the can?

  “How long’s it been?” he asked.

  “It’s about seven now,” I ventured.

  He nodded agreement, then shrugged and made a weary gesture. “The slammer, man. Wow.” I nodded agreement with his agreement. The eloquence, the beautiful eloquence of that nod, that shrug, that weary gesture! How complete. He had told me, in one shrug and a half-formed gesture, that all the years between had been wasted years, had brought him unerringly to this end-residence, as it had been ordained.

  He was truly hung-up.

  I started to ask him what had happened to the kids—in particular Fish and Filene—when the beefy, bored guard came into sight around the corner.

  “Awright, you crumbs, on yet feet, let’s move out in snappy style here!”

  He unlocked the barred entrance, and some of the more drunken inhabitants tried to elbow past him. He straight-armed them back into the bullpen, and bellowed, “Awright, you buncha shits, wait a minnit!” Then he began reading from a clipboard that had been tucked under his arm:

  “Alberts, Charles; Arthur, John; Asten, Clyde; Becker, Wilhelm; Brookes, John; Brown, Tom; Brown, Virgil; Brown, Wallace; Brown, Whitney; Czelowitz, August; Dempsey—”

  He went on reading the names, and my name came up and I moved away from Pooch, murmuring, “See you later.” Those whose names had been called began to file out of the cell, and made a ragged line around the corner toward the elevator. I didn’t see my plainclothesman, but I knew he’d be along any time now. I was both relieved and flattered when he came out of a side door in the narrow corridor; he had obviously taken a liking to me, and wasn’t ready to let me sink into the System completely. Either that, or they thought I would bolt. They may have been right.

  I was getting panicky, now that we were apparently getting ready to move down for arraignment. I was certain I’d be turned loose at once, at least with a minimum bail. But there was the niggling worry of that remark about my name having gone out over the radio. If it was such a phony and trumped-up charge against me, then why the publicity? I wasn’t that well-known a literary figure, God knows. So why? And the thought hit me that it might not be such a shoo-in. That my pretty baby face with its day growth of stubble might not be enough to get me out of this jam.

  So my buddy’s presence might well have been attributed not to my inherent good looks and ingenuous nature, but to a sensible realization on his part that I was just unstable enough
to break and run if I thought this situation was worse than I’d first thought. My reassurance vanished.

  I joined the line of prisoners, and as I saw the cuffs being attached to the others, I whispered to my buddy in plainclothes, “Can I go without?” He gave me a benign smile and shrugged. Then he cuffed me. But he held the other ring himself, rather than attaching me to another felon.

  Another felon?

  Yes, I had begun to think of myself as one. The innocence till judged guilty did not hold. It was a lovely theory, but wretched practice. No one who goes through the System can consider himself innocent, while being herded and locked up and treated like a foregone conclusion.

  I was a felon, right then.

  Yet my thoughts were not free to dwell on semantics. The line was moving out. Not to the elevator, but through the side door from which my plainclothesman had emerged. Down a side-corridor, and up to a larger, sturdier freight elevator. We waited, and finally the door slammed back. A decrepit old man in gray uniform was operating the machine, and he looked at us as though he had seen a million of us for a million years past. We were fodder for the legal machinery. He was a thoroughly dead old man. I wondered if he was a trusty.

  We were loaded into the elevator, and I saw Pooch come on, cuffed to a grizzled veteran of the penal system, busily picking his nose and scratching at his denim shirt.

  We went downstairs? Upstairs? I don’t even know.

  Then began a dizzying series of shunting-abouts, in and out of corridors, pens, cages, enclosures, all of which smelled faintly of vomit, urine and carbolic acid. The smell of a jail is a thing you never forget. There are bitter, acrid and sometimes gagging smell-memories of Lysol, carbolic acid and paraldehyde, a chemical used to quiet drunks, one drop, one-millionth of a drop of which, leaves a scent in the nostrils that never really departs.

  And there is the stench of human bodies, of the sweat of guilt and tension. The odor of cosmolene from the guard’s guns, and the smell of all-purpose oil used on the locks. The smell of rain-wet coats, and the smell of bad breath. The smell of old leather from cracked shoes, and the smell of absolute desperation.

  It is a stink that must offend God, for Man cannot take it for too long, and its persistence in reality should offend God. (But after a few hours in the System, one begins to suspect there is no God. If it be true there are no atheists in a foxhole, then it is equally true that there are no true believers in a prison.)

  We came out of the labyrinth, through a door, a heavy fire-door with triple locks, passed a little entrance that showed us the outside, still gray and pelted with slimy rain, and we all yearned to go through that entrance…

  But we had been put into the System, and like the Army, once in formation, you were trapped for the duration: Of the day, of the term, of the lifetime…

  All of us—perhaps a third of the number who had been in the larger pen upstairs (downstairs?)—were hustled into a very tiny waiting cell with two benches. The heavy wooden door to the left of the cell opened, and we saw through into the courtroom.

  We were there, ready to be arraigned. Ready to find out if we would be free men or temporarily placed in durance vile.

  My plainclothesman came up to me at the bars and said, “Do you have a lawyer?” It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. “No,” I answered, “I’ll plead my own case.” It seemed that simple. I was innocent, what did I need a lawyer for…wasn’t a man an innocent till adjudged guilty in this court, as in any court?

  He looked worried. “You’d better get a public defender,” he advised. “It may be tougher in there than you think.”

  “You really think so?” I asked.

  Naïve? Jeezus, Pollyanna move over, here comes Ellison.

  “I think you’d better.”

  He was damned serious, and the cold feeling crept up through my guts to my neck and my face, and I had a sensation of falling. “Would you get him for me?” I asked. He nodded and went out through the wooden door to the courtroom.

  In a little while he came back, with me still hanging on the bars like a mounted animal, and he said, “The man’s name is Strangways; be here in a minute.” I thanked him, and the cop added, “Your mother and Miss Solomon and your agent and some other people are out there. They asked me how you were.”

  “Tell them I’m fighting mad,” I said, sounding anything but.

  He grinned, tapped my hand in reassurance, and disappeared again. I turned around to see what was happening in my cell, and that was when all hell broke loose.

  THIRTEEN

  It was as though someone had said “Roll ’em” and the Marx Brothers had gone into their act. From doors on all sides of the cell, little men with pads of notepaper erupted. Doors slammed. Guards appeared out of nowhere. The prisoners flung themselves against the bars to talk to the little men. The noise level went up a millionfold. It was sheer bedlam. I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and literally hurled away from the bars, as a brawny derelict moved forward to talk to an approaching note taker. These, apparently, were the public defenders, hauled away from their practices in the awful early morning hours, to try and defend the scum of New York’s streets, without fee, without honor, and usually, I was to discover, without success.

  Some of them were registered lawyers who devoted a portion of their time—at the Court’s “request”—to the defense of those unable to afford counsel. Some of them worked full-time for the Legal Aid Society. Some of them were philanthropists. Most of them were woefully overworked and frighteningly incompetent.

  They bounced back and forth from the barred waiting cell to the courtroom, back and forth, here and gone, back and gone, again, like the ping-pong balls in the air-vent machines used on TV to show how an air conditioner operates. Most of them were balding, and the image of them ricocheting between “clients” and courtroom would have been ludicrous, had not so many men’s very existences depended on their ritualistic gyrations.

  I sat down on one of the benches, and tried to read, not really knowing what was happening, nor if one of these budding Clarence Darrows was for me. The noise was deafening, and the phrase most heard, over the din, always tinged with a red frenetic tone, was, “You gotta get me outta this!”

  I tried to blot out the noise, but it was impossible. They were like animals, fighting for a piece of meat. They reached through and grabbed at the coats and collars of the lawyers, and those worthies shook them off with slaps and harsh phrases, with wrinkled-up noses and utter contempt. Are these the men who will speak for us before the bench? I thought.

  They no more wanted to be here, wasting their time on unfortunate bastards with a cent in their pockets, than they wanted to be on our side of the bars. How doomed we are, was all I could think, and though it may sound melodramatic, just consider for a moment: the way the System is run today, with all our metropolitan courts so terribly glutted with cases that lawsuits wait a year and two years before they can be heard, with felonies and minor infractions of the law heaped one upon another onto the calendar, with judges overworked and harassed, with a surfeit of poverty and a scarcity of counsels who put the Law before the Dollar…what man has a chance without hired representation?

  Consider: you are before a judge who has handled over fifty cases in the past three hours, who is sweltering in his robes, and distressed at the whining voices coming from in front of him; you are unfamiliar with the rules of the game, or you are not glib and fast on your feet; you don’t know what to say and even if you did he doesn’t want to hear it. If you’ve been picked up, you must have done what you’re accused of having done.

  So they send you a public defender, who is totally incapable of helping you, but in whom you put your momentary trust. And he has sixty, seventy, eighty different cases to trot before the magistrate in a matter of minutes. He doesn’t know you, has no idea whether you are guilty or innocent, and doesn’t really care. It is an obligation; he has been told to do the best he can for you, and so be pumps up to the bars, t
akes the sketchiest information, and runs back into the court to plead on the arraignment for the poor devil that went before you. Then he rushes back to you, having lost the train of your explanation, makes you start over again, stops you midway with, “Okay, okay, you told me all that…what I want to know is what your excuse was.” He cannot remember what you’ve said previously, he doesn’t give a damn about what you’re saying now, all he wants is a few choice words to throw together in some semi-logical order to make a feeble showing before the judge…a grandstand attempt…a sham effort…

  “Ellison?”

  I sat there, considering the plight of all those poor dumb bastards who wouldn’t have a feather’s chance in the courtroom, who were going out there to get arraigned and slapped into the Tombs till they met bail or were transferred for trial. I wanted to scream at these phony creeps with their yellow note paper pads, “You’re louses, all of you! Nothing but goddam students of the law and you don’t care what happens to any of these men! You shouldn’t be allowed to practice! These men need help, not play-actors like you!”

  “Ellison? Is Ellison in here?”

  How terrible it was, to know you were going up against the System, the Machine, the Beast, with nothing standing between you but a paper lance. How terrible to know that the massed indifference and cynicism and boredom of the men of the law were ready to crush you, mold you and force you into a false position, with no help from these bland, dewy-eyed lads who came down to practice on you; like apprentice barbers in a tonsorial school. If you got sliced by their straight razors, or had a chunk taken out of your ear, well, it didn’t really matter: Who were you? Just another face. Just another guy with a stubble from having slept overnight in the Charles Street station. So what did it matter.

  “Hey! Ellison! Ellison Harlan, Harlan Ellison! Is there someone here named Ellison or Harlan or something like that?”

  I suddenly realized that a tall, good-looking man in a Brooks Brothers sport jacket and dark slacks was standing on the other side of the bars, with the animals trying to grab his lapels and his attention, calling for me.