A man in full, p.45
A Man in Full, page 45
Five-O stopped, froze, with his hands poised above Mutt’s chest, and turned toward Conrad and glowered with the look that says, “What do you think you’re looking at?” Then he growled, “Boddah you? I owe you money, or wot?”
Mutt turned toward him, too, lowered his eyebrows, squinted accusingly, then turned back and said under his breath, “Shit. Motherfucker.”
Conrad shrugged and looked away and closed his eyes again. Despite all their jailhouse bluster, he didn’t fear these two men. Mutt, from all he could gather, was a far-gone petty criminal who had been in jails more than he had been out of them and was currently awaiting trial on a charge of dealing in a drug called crank, a form of methedrine. He claimed to be a member of the Nordic Bund, and perhaps he really was, since he was one of the few white inmates able to penetrate the blacks’ control of the two telephones in the pod room. But his tough-guy pose had failed to cover up the fact that he was a nervous wreck, plagued by twitches and tics and given to stretches of gloomy silence interrupted by bursts of anger. Five-O was in jail on a charge of forgery, involving credit cards, and not for the first time, apparently. Having a sound instinct for self-preservation, he, like most knowledgeable Asian inmates who could manage it, had hooked up with a Latino gang known as Nuestra Familia.
All such matters of jailhouse manners, mores, and vocabulary Conrad had come to know through Mutt and Five-O’s interminable conversations. Cooped up in the cell for hours at a time, they sometimes read books from the bookmobile cart that came around to the pod every two weeks. Mutt was reading a novel called Berkut, about the last days of the Third Reich and Hitler’s escape and capture by Stalin, which he devoutly believed to be based on fact. Five-O was reading a novel called Dr. Snow, about pimps and “their bitches,” by a writer named Donald Goines. He kept slapping it down on his bunk and saying, “Wow, bummahs. Wot a junk book.” Then he would pick up a tablet of writing paper and a ballpoint pen from the commissary and start drawing stupendously muscular men and women, after the fashion of comic-book superheroes. They were grotesque in their extreme muscularity, and yet the big Hawaiian knew his human anatomy. The gods and goddesses kept pouring out of his fingertips, often in attitudes of violent action, involving complex foreshortening. Mutt would pester him for pornographic creations, and occasionally Five-O would oblige, sending Mutt off into wild cackles of pleasure. And now Five-O was tattooing an AK-47 for him, on his chest, while the two of them continued their verbal chronicle of jailhouse days.
Five-O struck Conrad as a moke, which, he had deduced, was Pidgin for an ordinary Low Rent knockabout fellow. He had gotten in trouble here on the mainland and was scuffling to survive in a bad fix known as Santa Rita.
At the moment, as Conrad sat on the floor with his eyes closed, Five-O and Mutt were discussing jailhouse bodybuilding and the problems it was causing currently in the pod room. The only bathing facility in the pod—Five-O said bafe-ing—was a lineup of showers on one side of the pod room separated from the rest of the room by a waist-high concrete wall with a narrow opening midway. There was no weight lifting equipment at Santa Rita, and so “buffed-up cons” had taken to standing in the opening and placing one hand on each section of the wall and doing dips, an exercise that pumped up the shoulders, the chest, and the triceps muscles of the arms. The black inmates in the pool outnumbered the white inmates by better than three to one; and their shot caller, a brute named Vastly, who wore his hair in cornrows with tiny yellow ribbons like a jailhouse crown, was even bigger than Rotto. When “the popolos”—black people—were busy doing dips, Five-O observed, no one else could take a shower.
“You try go eenside,” he said, “you ass-out.”
Ass-out was not Pidgin; it was the universal Santa Rita term for out of luck. Conrad was curious as to what Mutt’s reaction to this declaration of the jailhouse facts of life would be, and so he parted his eyelids slightly, just enough to see without his cellmates realizing he was looking at them.
“Shit,” said Mutt, “any motherfucker tries to keep me out the mother-fuckin’ shower, I’ll show you who’s ass-out.”
“Yeah, den I hope you get plenny lakas, bruddah.” Get meant have; lakas meant balls. “You know dat buggah, Riffraff? Dat buggah wen fo’ try cockaroach”—slip—“on by one dem beeg popolos fo’ go eenside, and chee!—Vastly-dem broke his face fo’im! Dey bus’up dat buggah!” He made a gesture with one hand over the biceps of his other arm to indicate how big the muscles of Vastly’n’them were.
“Fuck doing dips ’n’all’at shit,” Mutt said, with infinite disgust. “You wanna know what’ll pop all ’ose motherfuckin’ inflated muscles real fast?”
“Wot?”
“A length a metal, Five-O. Gimme a shank, and I’ll go up against any pumped-up ugga-bugga in this whole motherfuckin’ jail.” He closed his fingers and gave his hand a sudden twisting thrust, as if shoving a knife into someone’s solar plexus.
Just then there was a clack at the door, the sound of a deputy sliding open the slat that covered the food slot.
“Hensley!”
Conrad looked up. He could see part of the deputy’s face peering in. “You got a package.” Conrad got up and with a single step was at the door. Through the slot he could see the deputy, a pale, stout Okie with big arms bulging out of his short-sleeved gray uniform blouse. The man was pulling open the zip-strip on a padded manila envelope. He withdrew a book. Conrad barely had time to make out the word Stoics on the jacket before the deputy removed the jacket and tucked it under his arm, along with the padded envelope. Then he seized the book’s hard front cover with his right hand and, without another word, began shaking it for all he was worth. The pages and the back cover flapped about violently.
Conrad was appalled. The binding would be torn to bits!
The deputy suddenly stopped flailing the thing and looked at Conrad through the slot. “You can have the book, but you can’t have this.” He nodded toward the hard cover, which he still gripped, holding it up at eye level.
So saying, he seized the pages of the book with his other hand and hunched over and, with a furious grunt, ripped the front cover off and then the spine and then the back cover. When it was all over, his face was red, and he was breathing hard. He held up the remains, a pathetic stack of folios that were coming apart, with clots of glue sprouting all over the place.
“Okay, this is yours.” He passed the stricken clump through the slot, and Conrad took it. “Next time, whoever sent you this, you tell ’em you want paperbacks.” Then he walked away.
Conrad stood there for a moment, holding what was left of this grossly violated object. He was shocked. Somehow he had been terribly degraded and humiliated. Such a gratuitous, utterly pointless exercise of power! My book!
Still holding the sheaf of paper chest-high, he turned and looked at his two cellmates, halfway expecting some expression of sympathy, despite their obvious resentment of his very existence. Both were watching him from the lower bunk.
“Motherfucker!” said Mutt, but not to Conrad. He was now looking at Five-O. “I’d like to get my hands on ’at motherfuckin’ book cover. Talk about shanks, man … It don’t have to be metal, long’s it’ll go in. I learned that the first day I ever spent in jail. I was—” He stopped. He looked off, as if he were gazing into the distance instead of at a filthy beige wall two feet away. Then he glanced at Conrad. Conrad averted his eyes and stepped back toward the wall and sat down on the floor again and looked at the remains of the book, as if he was about to start reading it. Holding the folios together with his left hand, he turned the first page with his right. It was the blank sheet that began the book. Next came a page with the title; only that, the title: THE STOICS … How strange … It didn’t say THE STOICS’ GAME, and STOICS didn’t have an apostrophe—
Mutt resumed. “I was just a kid,” he told Five-O. “I was seventeen, but I musta looked twelve. I don’t reckon I weighted a hunnert’n ten pounds, and they th’ew me in a cell with three a these big buffed-up motherfuckers.” He made the same motion over his biceps that Five-O had made in describing Vastly and his retinue.
“T’ree popolos?”
“Naw, they was three white motherfuckers. First thin I know, they jump me, and two a those buffed-up motherfuckers, they hold me down, and the third one—he tries to rape me.” He stopped again. Another long pause. “Shit … he did rape me, Five-O, he did rape me. The other two uv’em, they had my arms and legs pinned down, and there wasn’t one goddamned thing I could do about it. I was seventeen years old. And then they took a nap, all three uv’em, just like they’d all had ’emselves a nice big meal. Well, one a those motherfuckers had a book just like’at motherfucking book he got, with the stiff cover, and the front uv’it was prackly tore off the rest uv’it. So I tore it off the rest a the way, quiet as you please, and I started bending that cardboard while they was sleeping, like this here.” He pantomimed bending the cardboard back and forth with his hands. “I worked me loose a piece of it about like this here.” He made a wedge shape with his forefingers. “Then I started bending ’at piece a cardboard the long way until I had me a double-thick piece like this here.” With his fingers he described a long, narrow triangle, the shape of a dagger. “Then I took it around the big end like this here”—he clenched his fingers in the air, as if holding a knife—“and I leaned over that big motherfucker, the one ’at’d had me—and I—so help me, Christ, Five-O—I DROVE ’AT CARDBOARD SHANK RIGHT IN HIS MOTHERFUCKIN’ EYE!”
With that he brought his clenched hand down with such ferocity that Five-O drew back on the bunk. Mutt’s outcry was so loud, it was no doubt heard in every cell in the pod.
“Chee!” said Five-O. “Wot happen den, bruddah?”
Mutt was now leaning forward on the bunk, his arms and his bare torso rigid. His eyes were blazing with the recollection of that incident long ago. “That motherfucker, he wakes up screamin’, and there’s blood spoutin’ th’oo his fuckin’ fingers where he puts ’em over his eye, and he looks up at me with the other eye, and I was glad he could look up and see it was me who done it, because that was the last thing that motherfucker ever got to use his eyes for except to cry his fuckin’ guts out, because, FIVE-O—THEN I DROVE’AT CARDBOARD SHANK TH’OO ’AT MOTHERFUCKER’S OTHER EYE!”
He brought his hand down again, and Five-O flinched again, and a chorus started up from the cells all around:
“Who’s ’at talkin’ all ’at eyeball shit?”
“Where’s at cardboard J-cat at?”
“Yo! Motherfucker! Shut up or I’m gon’ shove ’at cardboard a yo’s up Mr. Brown!”
These messages “over the wire,” as it was known, riled Mutt up still further, until he was leaning toward Five-O like an animal about to pounce.
“It wasn’t nothing but a piece a cardboard off a book, Five-O, but it was the sweetest shank I ever had! Ain’t no metalworker in the world ever made a sweeter one! It was sweeter than if I’d killed the motherfucker! That motherfucker, if he’s still livin’, then all he is is one miserable goddamned shufflin’ gimpalong gork with poached eggs for eyes—AND FUCK HIM! AIN’T NO MOTHERFUCKER IN NO MOTHERFUCKIN’ JAIL EVER TRIED TO FUCK WITH ME AGAIN!”
The chorus swelled up anew:
“Yo! Superman! Kiss my sweet ass!”
“Who’s ’at J-cat? Cat got cardboard fo’ brains!”
“’At cat’s got a reservation in the Rubber Room, ’at’s what he’s got!”
Heh-heh-hegggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!
The mere memory of the rape had already roused Mutt to a manic intensity. The mockery and laughter of the chorus of black voices now pushed him to the edge. You had only to look at him to see that. He jumped off the bunk and looked up through the screen, his lips parted and his teeth showing, breathing rapidly. You could tell he was about to deliver a message to the world. Which he now did:
“SO DON’T TRY TO TELL ME SOME BUNCHA BUFFED-UP NIGGAS GON’ KEEP ME OUT THE SHOWER!”
That did it.
“Hey! Who used the N-word?”
“Who’s the motherfucker said that?”
“’At J-cat motherfucker just used the N-word!”
“Yo! Deputy! Better pack ’at motherfucker off to Wackyville or he’s dead meat!”
The cries rose from cells all over the pod. A regular ruckus it was. Conrad no longer pretended to look at the book. He sat upright in a state of alarm. The N-word was the most taboo word at Santa Rita, if you were white.
“Where’s ’at J-cat at? What’s his motherfuckin’ cell number?”
J-cat was the jailhouse lingo for a crazy person. Many Santa Rita inmates were first sent to the state prison facility at Vacaville, up in the Napa Valley, for psychiatric evaluation. The Vacaville designation for psychotics was category “J”; homosexuals were category “B”; and inmates referred to Vacaville as Wackyville and Faggotville. Well—maybe Mutt was a candidate for Wackyville. Conrad, sitting tensely on the floor, chanced a look at Five-O. Five-O was sitting on the edge of the bunk, not so close to Mutt any longer. He had put the piece of guitar string down. He looked at Conrad—for the first time with something other than the aloofness of the jailhouse veteran lording it over the new fish. What did Conrad now see?—perhaps even a glimmer of the comradeship of two poor devils thrown together, for they were both thinking the same thing: this wound-up little Okie with half an AK-47 freshly tattooed on his chest had just snapped.
Sure enough, Mutt began raging at his detractors. He threw his head back and screamed up through the screen: “WHO THE FUCK YOU TALKIN’ TO, YOU BUNCH A MOTHERFUCKIN’ UGGAH-BUGGAHS!” Then he started hopping about like a monkey and scratching his ribs with his fingers and screaming, “UGGAH-BUGGAH! UGGAH-BUGGAH! UGGAH-BUGGAH! UGGAH-BUGGAH!”
The roar of the pod was now deafening.
“Hey! Knock it off down ’eh!” It was one of the deputies leaning over the railing of the catwalk.
From somewhere one inmate’s voice rose above all the others: “Tell ’at racist J-cat motherfucker knock it off or he gon’ get his cap peeled!”
“Gon’ peel yo’ cap, motherfucker!”
“Peel yo’ cap!”
“Peel yo’ cap!”
“Peel yo’ cap!”
Kenny! It all came back! On the night Conrad had gotten laid off at Croker Global Foods, Kenny had come barreling into the parking lot with his brand-new red boom-box car thundering out some Country Metal song called “Brain Dead,” in which a group called the Pus Casserole kept bawling, “Peel yo’ cap, I said—peel yo’ cap, I said—peel yo’ cap, I said,” and Kenny, from his eminence as a man of the world talking to a poor square kid named Conrad Hensley, had informed him this was jailhouse talk. How ironic! How little Kenny actually knew! If Kenny had thought and thought for a thousand years, he couldn’t have imagined being penned up like a lizard at Santa Rita, where people threatened to peel each other’s caps—with the utmost sincerity!
Mutt stood beside the bunk, looking up through the screen, his teeth clenched, his arms out to the side as if he were ready for a movie cowboy gunfight. He was bare from the waist up. His slim torso was all gristle, nodes, and veins. His eyebrows were flexing up and down at a furious rate. The phantom motorcyclist and the death’s-head Nazi on his shoulders took on a crazed reality. The AK-47 emblazoned on his chest looked as demented as he did. Half of it was still in the dull black of Five-O’s ballpoint rendering. The other half, the half Five-O had already incised into his skin, stood out in an inflamed red relief. Sweat poured down his face. His half-naked body glistened. He began screaming again:
“SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
“Easy, brah!” said Five-O. “Cool head main t’ing!” But it was no use.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” screamed Mutt. “OR I’M GON’ PUTCHOO BACK ON THE SIDE A THE MINUTE RICE BOX, YOU BUNCHA UNCLE BENS!”
The ruckus increased. Someone yelled out, “Motherfucker’s dead meat! Dead meat!”
Then it became a chant: “DEAD MEAT! DEAD MEAT! DEAD MEAT! DEAD MEAT!”
Splaaatttt—
—something hit the floor of the cell just inches from where Conrad was sitting. Right there—a runny yellowish gooey mess. The smell of urine rose up, that and a high sweet smell besides. He jumped up before the pool could spread. Above him a long viscous string of goo hung from the screen, gradually lengthening, thanks to its own weight. Bombardment! From an adjoining cell! The pizzooka! The pizzooka was part of the perverse weaponry of Santa Rita. Inmates urinated into plastic shampoo tubes from the commissary, poured in syrup saved up from the morning servings of pancakes, shook it all up, screwed the tops back on, got on the top bunks, and squeezed the tubes to propel the noxious mixture up over the cell walls.
Mutt stared at the mess on the floor for a moment, then leaped past Conrad. When he reached the door, he gave it a terrific kick, like a karate kick, with the heel and the sole of his foot. This was a way inmates commonly expressed dissatisfaction. He stopped, stared at the lower part of the door, then began kicking it repeatedly: BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
“Yo! Simms! Was a matter wit chew?” It was one of the Okie deputies, yelling down from the catwalk. “What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Without looking up, still facing the door, Mutt said, “I want some crank!”
The deputy said, “You want some crank?”
“Gimme some crank, goddamn it!”
“Guess what, Simms—you’re ass-out!”
A chorus of catcalls and laughter from the other cells. Mutt’s face became contorted with rage.
