A man in full, p.50
A Man in Full, page 50
Up on the top bunk, beneath the lizard screen, Conrad sighed and propped his back against the wall and tried once more to read his book, even though it had turned out to be a terrible disappointment. It was not The Stoics’ Game by the magnificently entertaining Lucius Tombs, after all. The title was simply The Stoics. On the title page it said, “The complete extant writings of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, C. Musonius Rufus, and Zeno. Edited and with an Introduction by A. Griswold Bemis, Associate Professor of Classics, Yale University.” He couldn’t believe it! The bookstore had sent the wrong book! How could fate turn this completely against him? As if to rub it in, the deputy had then raped the book’s physical integrity, leaving him with the tattered remains, these limp clumps of unbound pages—of the wrong book!—in his lap. Still, it was a book, and the only book he had. So he started browsing through the introduction by Professor Bemis … Scrack scrack scraaaccck went the ceiling fans … Thra-goooooom! Gluglugluglug went the toilets … Motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker went the inmates … It was pretty tedious going, this book, which was all about the Greeks and the Romans and “the origins of philosophy, the speculative spirit of inquiry into the mysteries of life and the universe” … These people, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, C. Musonius Rufus, and Zeno, were philosophers from nearly two thousand years ago in the days of Imperial Rome … Conrad was drifting on the swollen river of words when a detail, a mere detail, caught his attention. The author happened to mention that this Epictetus had spent time in prison as a young man. He had been tortured and crippled, but he had gone on to become one of the greatest Roman philosophers. Conrad began hurrying through the thick, leisurely prose. Very little was known about Epictetus, not even the dates of his birth and death, but it was known that his parents, who were Greeks, had sold him as a slave, when he was a boy, to an officer in the Emperor Nero’s Imperial Guard. He had begun his life stripped of everything, his family, his possessions, his freedom.
Now Conrad couldn’t read fast enough. He leafed through the pages to find this man Epictetus’ own words … Book I, Chapter 1: “On Things in Our Power and Things Not in Our Power” … and he came upon this passage: “To ye prisoners”—prisoners—“on the earth and in an earthly body and among earthly companions, what says Zeus? Zeus says, ‘If it were possible I would have made your body and your possessions (those trifles that you prize) free and untrammelled. But as things are—never forget this—this body is not yours, it is but a clever mixture of clay. I gave you a portion of our divinity, a spark from our own fire, the power to act and not to act, the will to get and the will to avoid. If you pay heed to this, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none.’”
And then Epictetus said: “We must die. But must we die groaning? We must be imprisoned”—We must be imprisoned! he said!—“but must we whine as well? What say you, fellow? Chain me? My leg you will chain—yes, but my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that. You say, ‘I will imprison you.’ I say, ‘My bit of a body, you mean.’ You say, ‘I will behead you.’ I say, ‘When did I ever tell you I was the only man in the world that could not be beheaded?’ It is circumstances which show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that Zeus, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. ‘For what purpose?’ you may say. ‘Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat—’”
“Yo! Conrad!” It was Five-O, who was sitting on the edge of the bunk below. “One noddah t’ing mo’, brah. Okay? Da new fish, dey t’ink so if—”
And Five-O was off on another lesson for the first-timer on the ways of jailhouse life. Conrad didn’t want another lesson just now. He had a sudden, overwhelming thirst for the words of this man he had never heard of before, this man whose name he couldn’t even begin to pronounce, Epictetus. At the same time, he didn’t want to risk losing the newly acquired goodwill of his cellie (as the prisoners called their cellmates), and so he figured he had better pay attention.
“Da new fish,” Five-O was saying, “dey t’ink so if dey stay real quiet kine, if dey no make ass, if dey ac’ like dey jes coasting kine, if dey boddah no mo’ nobody—den dey going stay eenveesible.” Invisible. “Cannot, brah! You edah dis t’ing or you one noddah t’ing. You no stay eenveesible. You edah one player or one punk, yeah? An’ dees buggahs”—he raised his hand high enough for Conrad to see it and made a circle in the air, as if to take in the entire pod—“if dey t’ink you one punk, den you real had-it. Bumbye dey going grind you.”
Conrad didn’t want to start a conversation. He wanted to get back to Epictetus. But the word grind got him. It frightened him. Hi, Conrad. How you doin’, bro? In Pidgin, as he knew by now, grind meant eat: bite, chew up, swallow, obliterate.
“But how do you get to be a … a player?” he asked Five-O. “What can you do?”
“No do no mo’ notting, brah. Use da mouth. No make beef wit’ da buggahs. Use da mouth.”
Conrad pondered this advice, but couldn’t imagine what it actually meant.
The white singers and the clarinets and the trombones were now bobbing along in some rickety old song about “jiggers of moonlight.” The pod was going scrack scrack scrack scraaacccckkkkkk thra-GOOM glug glug glug glug motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker … and then you could hear the aluminum clatter of the meal trolley beginning to roll though the pod … Yo! Trus-tee! … Trus-tee! … Inmates elevated to the status of trusty, thanks to good behavior—at Santa Rita the word was always pronounced trus-tee—dispensed the meals off the trolleys on thin paper plates with the cheapest plastic utensils imaginable. If you liked pancakes for breakfast and roast chicken for dinner, you wouldn’t starve at Santa Rita. The lunch, which was always a sandwich of processed meat shot through with what looked like blood vessels and tendons, was inedible, as were the powdered eggs at breakfast, which tasted oddly like prunes; but you could get by on the pancakes and the chicken … Yo! Trus-tee! … The meal trolley rattled closer.
Five-O picked up the ice cream cup with the sandwich wrap stretched across the top and went to the door, stuck the cup out the slot, then cocked his head and squinted out at the cup. Then he pulled the cup back in and turned to Conrad and said, “’Ey, try look.”
So Conrad walked over to the door and did as Five-O had done. He stuck the cup out through the slot and squinted at it. The cup’s top cap was the one Five-O had blackened with a ballpoint pen. The top, which he had forced down into the cup, plus the stretch wrap, which he had pulled tight over the opening, created a mirror, a rearview mirror, as it were. He could look down the line of cells. He could see the meal trolley, a tall aluminum cart full of shelves, two cells away. He could see the stacks of paper plates with roast chicken legs on them … Croker Global! Eighty pounds! Croker Global supplied Santa Rita. He had just finished humping a Santa Rita order the night he was laid off. The cartons of frozen chicken legs weighed eighty pounds apiece. For an instant he was back inside the icy cliffs of the Suicidal Freezer Unit, struggling with those frozen dun-colored cubes. Maybe Kenny or Light Bulb or Herbie had humped the very carton these chicken legs came from. And he was now on the receiving end in this unbelievable place … The trusty pushing the meal trolley was a tall but terribly thin and gawky Chinese wearing a pair of big round black-rimmed glasses. He was probably in his late twenties. He looked like an ancient Mandarin scholar in embryo.
Conrad pulled the cup and his arm back inside the cell, and Five-O, standing right beside him, lifted a forefinger straight up, at eye level, as if to say, “Hark!” and said, “Try listen, Conrad. Use da mouth.” He winked.
Soon there was a rap on the cell door, and you could see the big black-rimmed eyeglasses of the Chinese trusty at the slot. In a reedy voice he said, “Yo, mealtime.”
Five-O walked to the slot, squared his jaws, and stared at the trusty with a steady, deep, malevolent gaze. The trusty passed a paper plate with a chicken leg on it through the slot. Five-O took it, turned back toward Conrad, winked again, picked up the chicken leg, took a huge bite, and put the remains back on the plate. Almost half the meat was gone. Then he turned back to the trusty and pushed the plate and the chewed chicken leg back through the slot, and, his cheeks still crammed with food, managed to say, “’Ey, bummahs, man. Try look. Some buggah wen grind half da muddahfuggin’ cheecken. You going give me one noddah plate, man!”
He beamed such a malevolent look at the gawky Chinese that if looks could kill, the man would have died on the spot.
But he didn’t take the plate back. He just stared at Five-O and said, “Say what?”
“Spahk”—check out—“da muddahfuggin’ cheecken, bruddah! Some buggah wen grind half da muddahfuggah! You going give me one noddah one!”
“Aw, come on, man,” said the trusty wearily. “You ate half ’at leg a chicken yo’ownse’f.”
Conrad saw a glimmer of dismay in Five-O’s eyes. The trusty’s voice had deepened, and he didn’t sound like some weak, skinny Chinese. If anything, he sounded black. Five-O narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaws and tried a growl: “Haaaaaahh? Wot? Like beef?” Five-O’s face was so furious, you didn’t have to know Pidgin to know that he was saying: “You want to fight?”
The skinny Chinese with the big spectacles said, “Look, bruvva, I’m a number in here, and you a number in here … see … an’ I ain’t tryin’ a disrespectchoo. I’m jes’ tryin’a do my time … You unnastan’ what I’m sayin’ I ain’t tryin’ a sweatchoo, and I ain’t tryin’a play you. So whatchoo doggin’ me for? I ain’t rollin’is motherfuckin’ trolley th’oo here to come sweatchoo, play you, dog you, git over on you, run a game on you, or any other damn thing … see …”
By now Conrad was as perplexed as Five-O. Pouring out of the larynx of this slight, bespectacled, scholarly-looking Chinese was the voice of an East Oakland homeboy, a righteous one, with heart, a blood among bloods who knew how to get down and tend to business.
“So, bruvva, you kin have half a dis pod and half a Santa Rita and half a Alameda County and half a the whole damn East Bay, for all I care, but don’t be doggin’ me ’bout no half a damn leg a chicken, ’cause ain’t a damn thing in the world I kin do wid the other half of it ’cep’n git myse’f all fucked up wid my shot caller. My shot caller, he say, ‘You let yo’sef git dogged, bruvva, you gon’ git yo’sef double-dogged-by me’ … see … So whyn’tchoo kindly do the right thing, bruvva, and take ’is here paper plate and ’at half a damn leg a chicken and go with God, Shakem Alakem, and you’n’me’s fifty-fifty and everything’s cool.”
His jaw slack, his mouth half open, Five-O pulled the plate back through the slot without a word, in slow motion, all the while staring at this skinny Chinese with the bleary glasses and the baggy yellow felony pajamas. The light went out in Five-O’s eyes. He moved slowly away from the door, holding the plate at chest level, looking toward the bunk, as if in a trance. Conrad stepped up to the door and took the second plate, which the trusty now put through the slot. Five-O was sitting on the edge of his bunk, staring at the wall. You could hear the trolley rattling as the trusty pushed it to the next cell.
Conrad didn’t know whether to look at Five-O or not. The man had just been humiliated. After all his big talk, he was the one who had backed down. But Five-O himself solved that one for him.
“No laugh, you!” He stared at Conrad angrily, but then his expression changed from angry to doleful. “’Ey, bummahs, man, yeah? Hear dat buggah? Wow, dat buggah get connections! Dat buggah get connections wit’ da popolos from long time. No bulai”—No bullshit!—“brah. Maybe da Black Guerrilla Family, yeah? Maybe da Crips. No can affo’d’um, make beef wit’ dem buggahs.” He shook his head disconsolately.
What ran through Conrad’s mind was: Do I dare say the obvious? The tactful thing would be to say nothing and perhaps just nod to note the sagacity of this latest advice. But something told him this might in fact be a moment when he could forge a bond with his cellie. So he dared: “That trus-tee’s not a big guy like you, Five-O. He’s just a skinny, weak-looking guy with thick glasses.”
Irritably: “An’ den?”
“And then so maybe he took your advice.”
“Yeah? Ass what?”
“Remember what you just told me?” said Conrad. “You said, ‘Use the mouth.’ You said, ‘Don’t get into a beef. Use the mouth.’ Well, that trusty can really use the mouth. That bugger can talk, Five-O.”
Sitting there, holding his plate in his lap, Five-O narrowed his eyes and scowled. Then his face relaxed and he looked straight ahead at the wall, as if deep in thought. Then he turned back toward Conrad, and a smile stole over his face. He started nodding.
“Fo’ real, brah,” he said softly, “fo’ real.” He chortled ruefully. “Dat buggah wen use da mouth. Dat buggah—dat buggah’s mouth mo’ big dan mines! Dat Chinaboy, he stay one motormouth—to da max!” He started laughing. “No mo’ mind me, Conrad! Try listen dat China buggah!”
Every afternoon at one and every evening at six the deputies turned the inmates out of their cells and led them into the pod room for four hours of communal “pod time,” as it was known. Strictly speaking, you didn’t have to leave your cell. But if you didn’t, you were locked in, and that was that. You couldn’t go back and forth from the cell to the pod room. Conrad was so afraid of having to deal with Rotto, he was sorely tempted to stay inside. But on the other hand … staying inside that 5-by-9 lizard cage all day long, looking up through the screen at the catwalk, listening to the attic fans struggling, was a grim prospect … and sooner or later you had to come out, to take a shower … and he didn’t want his now-friendly cellie to think he was eccentric or, worse, frightened … and his body ached for the chance to move around, if only in that grim gray pod room … and something within him—his useless, deluded soul?—told him he must not surrender to fear. So he trooped on out with Five-O and the others.
The pod room was a large rectangle of concrete with two rows of metal tables and metal stools out in the middle. The tables and the stools, like every other piece of furniture in the pod, were bolted to the floor. Along one side of the room were the open showers with the concrete retaining wall in front of them; and along the opposite side, also separated from the rest of the space by a retaining wall, was a line of open toilets and basins. Down at one end were two public telephones that could be used for outgoing collect calls only. Not too far away was a television set up on a metal stanchion. To change the channels you had to be somebody tall standing on one of the metal tables. Overhead there was no wire screen and no catwalk. The main instrument of surveillance was a video camera high up in one corner that fed a screen the deputies monitored. From the position of the camera you could tell that … things … could go on in the shower area without the deputies ever knowing.
Of this, at the moment, Conrad was dreadfully aware. His job was to stay as far away from Rotto and his boys as possible without getting anywhere near Vastly and his boys. Every time he so much as glanced toward the telephones and the television set, he could pick out Vastly immediately. The yellow ribbons on his cornrows created a strange floating field of gold above his head. Right now he was seated, along with a half dozen of his followers, at the table that offered the best view of the television screen.
They had found a channel showing a concert, in some huge arena, featuring a black singer named Lorelei Washburn. Lorelei Washburn was a screamer. Given a choice between a high register and a low one, she always went high and screamed in order to reach the note … “tearing out the heart of meeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEeee!” … Her screams ricocheted off the gray concrete of the pod room. But Vastly and the boys had no interest in Lorelei Washburn, who was wearing a white dress that was sleek, silky, and tight-fitting, but also long and not particularly revealing. No, their entire attention seemed to be pinned on her backup singers, three tanskinned girls wearing pleated miniskirts that barely covered their bottoms. When they swiveled their hips or whirled—and they swiveled and whirled constantly—the pleated skirts rose up like pinwheels, revealing tiny glittery bikini panties. Little more than cache-sexes these panties were, and the sight of so much nearly bare booty drove Vastly’s gang wild.
“’At’s the real deal, baby!”
“Right on, bro! No mo’at homosexual-faggot-drag-queen-B-cat-turned-out-punk shit!”
“Yeah, ’at’s the real shit! It’s live, man! It ain’t Memorex!”
“I’m fulla jook, sugar!”
“Looka the booty on ’at mama!”
“Shake yo’ booty!”
“Jook yo’ booty!”
Conrad’s blood ran cold. Turned-out punk. The message he heard in these shouts had nothing to do with the three sexy young performers on the screen. These men—the rulers of the pod at Santa Rita—preferred women, but they regarded homosexuals as a perfectly acceptable substitute while you were in jail. And in jail, in addition to the drag queens and the B-cats, who might be found anywhere, there were also the “turned-out punks,” young and slightly built new fish, like the Mutt Simms of long ago, who were forced to commit or submit to homosexual acts.
Conrad now surveyed the pod room with a horrible clarity. It was a foul gray chamber inhabited by grim organisms in yellow felony pajamas who arranged themselves in primitive territorial packs. The prime territory was the end of the room where the two telephones and the television set were located, and the blacks had all of that to themselves. Most of the black inmates kept their heads shaved, or close to it, but some of them wore their hair long and wrapped do-rags around their heads. All the do-rags were green, because the only way they could get the material was to rip it off the green sheets the jail issued. It infuriated the deputies, all these insults to county property, but the practice never died. The most sinister-looking do-rag wearer, as Conrad saw it, was sitting next to Vastly at this moment, a tall, gaunt young man with sunken cheeks and a degenerate slouch, known as Rapmaster EmCee New York. He wrapped his do-rag down so low, it almost covered his eyes. He looked like a black pirate. A few, most notably Vastly, wore their hair in cornrows or dreadlocks. Bunched together the way they were, they looked supremely powerful; and in the pod room, in fact, they were. The possibility of some white or Latin inmate just ambling over and using a telephone or changing the television channel without Vastly’s permission was nil.
