The crude description was funny in a way, yet Willy’s difficulties were vivid. There’d be no communication between someone like Willy and the personality he described.
“He should be happy you’re not hooked and stealing,” I said.
“He wants everyone to be like him. People are different. I know that, and I’m just an illiterate dope fiend. I’ll show you what an asshole he is. If he knew I was driving a car he’d throw me in jail and write a report to the parole board. He’d feel bad, but to him it would be his responsibility. Can’t he understand that being without a car in L.A. is like being in Death Valley without water? It’d take me four hours to ride a bus to work.”
Willy went on to recount how he’d already lost two jobs because the parole officer had told the employers that Willy was a felonaddict on parole. The regulations required an employer knowing, but not many parole officers pushed it. A man running a business wasn’t interested in ex-convict problems; he was more worried about something being stolen. So Willy was fired after a couple weeks, the employer giving some lame excuse and the parole officer never realizing the truth of what had happened.
“How’re you getting along with Selma?”
“It was pretty shaky when I got out. I didn’t go with her right away. You saw the new baby, huh?”
“Hers—but not yours?”
“Right. I was down two years. I didn’t expect her to watch television. Shit, I didn’t even leave the television. I sold it and shot up the bread the month before I got busted. But a baby! It’s so stupid. Nobody has unplanned babies anymore, not with pills and shit. Even an abortion. And she didn’t even tell me until I was ready to get out. The baby was four months old. Right then I didn’t want to see her anymore, and when I got out I stayed at Mary’s for a week until I got a paycheck. Joe was already busted. Anyway, Selma came over, one thing led to another, and we made up. Who am I to throw rocks at anybody? And the broad’s treated me pretty good considering everything. She’s a pain in the ass sometimes, but I’m used to her. We’re all right, I guess.”
Willy stopped talking. He made me smile—so phlegmatic, unruffled by poverty and frustration. His dream was the permanent euphoria of narcotics and to be left alone. He would stumble along, accept the parole officer’s indignities, incarceration being worse, live with his shrewish wife in patience, and he might finish five years parole.
“Let’s stop and see Mary,” he said. “She’ll groove on seeing you.”
“It’s 3:30 in the morning.”
“She won’t give a fuck if we wake her up. She’s used to it.”
Mary Gambesi lived two miles from her sister and brother-in-law. Willy turned down an alley in the lower middle-class suburb and switched off the headlights. “She lives in the back.”
Willy cut the motor and glided to a halt. Tiptoeing, our shoes nonetheless scrunching on gravel, we moved through extreme darkness to a darker bungalow. Willy knew his way. He rapped his knuckles against a window. A dog yipped nearby, aroused by the sound. A dozen canine voices instantly joined in chorus.
“Now some fool will call the police about a prowler. Sonofabitch.” Willy rapped harder.
The windowshade fluttered; a pale, featureless face appeared. “Is that you, Willy?”
“Yeah, it’s me … your old faithful brother-in-law.”
“Is that Max with you?”
“That’s him.” Willy turned to me. “Selma must’ve called.”
We trampled through a flower bed and around the corner of the building. Willy muttered curses at the yelping dogs. Mary waited until the door was closed before turning on the lights. She held a flannel housecoat tight around her throat with one hand. She put the other to her mouth at sight of me. The gesture was so dramatic that it had to be spontaneous. “Selma called and told me, but I can’t believe it.”
“Lazarus risen,” I said. “Everybody gets out some day, parole or pine box.” I could see that time had been gentle with her. Even barefoot, hair in curlers, she looked no more than eighteen. She waited for my appraisal, smiling softly. We shared a bond of affection.
“You haven’t aged a day,” I said.
She made a deprecatory gesture; she was unaccustomed to compliments. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She wanted to put on slippers and close the doors to the children’s room. She asked us to be quiet.
“You two got somethin’ goin’,” Willy said. “Why don’t you pull her? She’s a thoroughbred and she’s free. Joe and her are all over.”
“She’s still Joe’s old lady as far as I’m concerned. And I dig her in a different way, anyway.”
“If you really want to straighten up, she’s perfect for you. I know you dig them stallion blondes, but you’ve gotta be on top for that. For someone to stick with you, ain’t none better’n Mary. She’s almost too fuckin’ sweet to be real.”
“Maybe she’s too sweet for me.”
Mary returned at that moment, hair brushed out. The vast black mane tumbled over her shoulders. Again I was struck with how young she looked. “Don’t you ever age?” I asked.
“I pluck out the gray hair,” She laughed, coloring.
“If I did that I’d be bald.”
“I noticed … but you look distinguished.”
“You still know how to make a fella feel good.”
She blurted suddenly: “Oh, Max, I’m so glad you’re free. I just hope you can stay out and enjoy life for a change.” The gust of emotion made her blush. She turned to Willy. “Do you have any cigarettes? I know Max doesn’t smoke.”
“Just cigars,” I said.
“Smelly cigars if I remember right.” She asked if we were hungry, but the amphetamine in our systems left no appetite. Coffee was another matter. She began heating water and getting cups. I tilted the chair back against a wall and relaxed, tranquility spreading through me. I bathed in the warmth of friendship in the room. Watching Mary, I wondered what would happen to her now that Joe was gone. Would she find some working stiff? Yet she was so accustomed to criminals. I could remember her in the background when addicts came to buy from Joe. They’d fix in the bathroom and lie in stupors around the living room, dropping lighted cigarettes onto the furniture.
I wondered, too, about their children. Lisa was six and Joey Junior three when I went away. How had they turned out? What effect was the bizarre world of their parents and in-laws having on them? I asked Mary about them. Lisa, it seemed, was boy crazy and presently worried because her breasts weren’t filling out as quickly as her friends’. Joe was a devil—but a delightful devil.
Mary mentioned that Selma was worried about Willy being with me, that I’d lead him into trouble. Willy shook his head in disgust, finished his coffee, and went into the living room to nap a while.
I didn’t tell Mary, but Selma’s fears were unfounded. If I was going back into crime, Willy would never be a participant. Beyond getting equipment and menial chores I’d never be able to trust him. I’d gone on one score with him—rather I’d taken him with me—and it would be the last time. The score was easy (as scores go): a bookmaker who carried at least two thousand dollars on him. The bookie weighed about two hundred and thirty pounds. The plan was to break into his apartment and wait for him. Willy would wait outside and follow him in and help me tie him up.
I made entry by cutting a screen in a bathroom, and waited in a Halloween mask. The bookie arrived twenty minutes later. I faced him, got the money, and sat him down on the sofa. He wanted to jump me. I could see it in his eyes. Willy never came. It was impossible to tie him up with one hand while holding a pistol with the other—and getting that close to him would be dangerous. I waited half an hour, finally backed out of the apartment. I knew the victim was leaping for a telephone the moment I closed the door behind me. I’d planned to have time to get away by tying him up. That was gone.
So was Willy. There was only a vacant space at the curb where Willy had parked. I sprinted through back yards and alleys to get away.
<
br /> Willy was waiting at my apartment. He was trembling. He claimed that a prowl car had cruised by and doubled back, the policemen eyeing him. That’s why he’d fled. I disbelieved him—but accepted the story without argument. Friendship was more important. But it was the last time I considered Willy for a caper. He lacked the necessary courage.
“Do you hear from Joe?” I asked Mary.
She sipped coffee and kept her eyes down. “Once in a while he writes, claims it’s going to be different next time. But it’s over, Max, all over. I’ve waited years for him to change. He won’t. I don’t think any of you will. I’d stay if it was just me, but I’ve got the children to think of.”
“You should wait until he’s on the streets, not quit when he’s down. You know how that looks.”
“I don’t care how it looks. I’ve waited half a dozen times. I never even go on dates. When he’s behind bars he always promises that things are going to be different. Maybe he believes it … I don’t. All of you have some kind of sickness. This time he moved out before they got him. He’d come here and start fights and”—tears shone in her eyes—“he was living with a whore and selling heroin again. When he came to see the kids he brought her along.”
“Was he giving you any money?”
“He wasn’t supporting us if that’s what you mean. He’d buy things for Joey and Lisa and they thought he was wonderful, but he wasn’t putting beans in the pot. We get more from welfare now that he’s back in prison. It’s strange to realize it’s easier to raise my children—and feed them—if my husband’s in prison.”
She poured fresh coffee and we talked until she was stifling yawns. I chased her back to bed, promising to drop by in a few days to see the children. Dawn was only an hour away. Willy and I could stop for coffee and pastry. He could then drop me downtown and go to work. I’d look for a job until it was time to report to Rosenthal’s office.
My first night of freedom was over. It had not been accompanied by rockets, brass bands, and flying banners.
4
THE classified section of the Los Angeles Times had pages of job listings. A tiny fraction might suit me, and of these only half a dozen were downtown where I could answer them before seeing Rosenthal.
I answered four that morning. One was filled. Another was a giant firm that required employees to be bonded and I walked out without making an application. Two others needed salesmen—but needed a man with an automobile, and neither of them had a guarantee or advances while the salesman learned. I had neither car nor money to tide me over.
I’d walked three miles from office to office. My feet, after so many years of prison brogans, were unaccustomed to low-cut shoes. Blisters the size of half dollars, puffed with fluid, had formed on each Achilles tendon. When I reached the branch parole office on West Olympic Boulevard I was limping severely. Adding to my discomfort was ferocious heat beginning to press its fist on the Los Angeles basin.
The building housing the parole office was inconspicuous. Only the lettering on the tinted glass door—Department of Corrections, Community Services Division—set it off from being a small medical building. The waiting room had bare, hard benches, and was empty. A receptionist announced me and pressed a button. The door to the office area buzzed as the electrically operated door was freed. The sound made me wince inwardly. Beyond the door I would be in custody.
Rosenthal stood in a short corridor beyond, framed in a doorway with a pool of sunlight spilling around his legs. He was coatless and his short-sleeved shirt exposed a carpet of coarse black hair on his forearms. “Come on in,” he said. “I was worried you’d run. You were pretty nervous last night.”
“If I’d known about your electric doors I might’ve skipped. Something like that is frightening. I feel like I’m in a police station.”
“Oh, those … not my idea. Have a seat.”
“I can use that gate money.”
Rosenthal shuffled through papers on his desk. “Here we are,” he said, handing over the check.
I held it up. “Thirty dollars for eight years. Not much per annum.”
“Society doesn’t even owe you that.”
“It isn’t much to start a new life with.”
“Try feeling more penitent and less the martyr.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t feel anything but a little bitter … and I’m trying to suppress that.”
“So, what’d you do last night?”
I had a lie waiting in ambush for the question. “Visited friends, saw a girl.”
“You stay with her?”
“No, in a hotel.”
“That’s pretty expensive for someone in your position.”
“Not this hotel.”
Rosenthal tilted his chair and propped his feet on the desk. He laced stubby fingers into a web behind his neck and watched me with candid intensity. He chomped gum placidly. Tension grew with the silence.
“I’m less than satisfied with your attitude,” he said, “and about how you’re starting out. First you don’t want the halfway house, next you run around all night. It isn’t a good start, not at all. It’s your attitude, your outlook.”
I flushed, wanting to protest, but snipped off the hot words. Confrontation with authority was a game I’d played often, and I knew its unfairness. If I argued, Rosenthal could put me in jail (unless I knocked him down and escaped), write a report saying whatever he wanted, and I’d be riding a bus with barred windows back to prison. There would be no hearing, no appeal, and I wouldn’t even see what he wrote. So I checked myself, and decided that a plea for reason might get through.
“I’m sorry, if you think that,” I said. “I’m trying to be forthright and sincere. Tell me what I’ve done wrong.”
“It’s your attitude. I keep telling you that. You act like you’re free, can do what you damn well please. You’re not free. You’re still in custodia legis, a legal prisoner being allowed to serve part of your term outside on parole. Besides that, you’ve got a long, long record of mismanaging your life. And you should feel some remorse for what you’ve done.”
“Eight years for bad checks should clean the slate.” I saw the flippancy in the words after they were out. Rosenthal’s face soured. He was obviously a moralist and outraged by my file. He knew more about me than anyone should know about another. Yet the words in the file were less than the whole of me. Nothing there showed that I was human.
“Look, I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve got more gray hair than you. I hope I’m old enough to make some decisions, at least where to sleep. If I didn’t learn that much in prison it was a waste.”
“It protected society. That’s my job, too, my first job.”
“They let me out. I want to stay out. You don’t have to be on my back. You’re doing a better job if you help me, aren’t you? I want to be a decent human being. I might not understand what it means exactly the way most people do.”
I paused, struggling to channel the tumult into words, sweat on my forehead and under my arms. “You’ve got to realize I’m not like you. I’m too warped and tangled by too many yesterdays to be like you. This doesn’t mean I’m fated to be a menace to society. If I believed my future had to be like my past, I’d kill myself. I’m tired. I can bend enough to stay within the law, but I’m never going to be the guy who goes home to San Fernando Valley to a wife and kids. I wish I was that guy, but I’m not. And your threats aren’t going to hold me. Threats instill fury, not fear.”
“Nobody is threatening you,” Rosenthal said. “I’m just telling you the realities of the situation, what you must adjust to.”
“It sounds like threats.”
“I’m here to help you with your problems.”
“By giving me ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’.”
“I don’t make the parole conditions. I just enforce them. I can’t give you a license to break the rules even if I wanted to. I wouldn’t have a job very long if I did.”
“Bend a little and I’ll bend a little. J
ust ask that I don’t commit any crimes, not that I live by your moral standards. If society demands that, society shouldn’t have put me in foster homes and reform schools and twisted me. And these last eight years. Shit, after that, nobody would be normal. Just understand my predicament. I don’t know anyone but ex-convicts, hustlers, and prostitutes. I don’t even feel comfortable around squarejohns. I like call girls instead of nice girls. I don’t need a Freudian explanation, which wouldn’t change the fact anyway. But because I prefer going to bed with a prostitute doesn’t mean I’m going to use an acetylene torch on a safe.”
“It means you want permission to be a pimp.”
“No! No! I just want you to understand that you can’t reduce persons to formulas.” I stopped to gather breath and select intelligible words from the bewildering thoughts rotating through my mind. “In essence, I’m asking you not to make this parole a leash that chokes me.”
“In essence, you want to do what you want to do, right?”
My stomach sank. Rosenthal was unmoved. I’d tried. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my torso. An awful thought geysered up. What if Rosenthal was right? What if blindly following the rules was the path to happiness and inner peace? Could a person alone, even if certain, be right? Maybe Rosenthal had sight of me while I was blinding myself with words. To think thus was placing a foot over the abyss. I drew back to the firm ground of hidden indignation. I’d tried to be honest and the motherfucker wasn’t to be trusted. Now I’d use deceit.
Rosenthal watched me, a Giaconda smile on his fat lips, eyes gleaming, jaws working the gum. “Let’s quit the bullshit and get down to cases,” he said. “I’m going to tell you what I expect of you.”
No Beast So Fierce Page 5
