Following the superintendent’s departure, the cottage’s volcanic atmosphere returned to some semblance of normality. Those of us who had participated in the fight received the necessary medical treatment, and after returning from the hospital, we went downstairs to take our showers.
As I started to undress, still apprehensive and uncertain about what I should expect from the young hellions around me, I kept my eye glued to Chink and the rest of his boys. One eye was all I had. From its corner, I spied the dastardly brogan I had seen earlier, a split second before it had crashed into and mangled my other eye. The shoes were distinguishable because they were black, as opposed to the state-issued brown ones the rest of us wore.
Immediately, my heart began to race with a renewed vengeance, and I knew I would have to fight again or pass out from acute frustration. Almost blinded by my emotions, I stumbled over to Little A and whispered this information in his ear.
“That’s Sconion-Eyed Jones!” he whispered back. “A treacherous sonofabitch! What do you want to do about it?”
“I know what I’m going to do!” I told him bitterly. “I’m going to kick his goddamn eye out, that’s what I’m going to do!” Then I went back to my locker and put on my shoes.
Sconion-Eyed Jones stood six feet tall and dwarfed the rest of us by at least six inches. A rangy, light-skinned fellow, he had sharply slanted eyes that always seemed to be watering—which was the reason for his name.
Once I had laced up my boots and gotten myself together, I went out and stood in the middle of the floor, hotter than a bushel of motherfuckers. “You, there—monkey!” I glared at Sconion-Eyed Jones, and pointed my finger at him. “Yo-yo-you’re the nigger who stomped me!” I accused. “Now, come on out here on the floor, you dirty moth-mo-moth-motherfucker! Come on out here, and let’s me and you start from the giddy-up!”
I was stuttering so badly that before I could suitably challenge the towering Jones, Chink had interfered.
“Now just a cotton-picking minute!” he grumbled, letting me know that he was still boss. “How do you know that he was the one who stomped you? How do you know it wasn’t me, or one of the others?”
Smoke jumped straight from my head, and I blew my cool. “Why you stinking, low-life motherfucker!” I sneered venomously, not stuttering anymore. “Man, if I just thought you were the one! If I just thought you were the one I would be hopping around on one leg right now,” I told him, “because the other one would be planted so far up in your stinking ass that the hospital would have had to cut it clean off to get it out!”
Chink knew I meant it too, so he didn’t push it any further. Instead, he turned to his boy and started coaching him. “Awright, Sconion, baby,” he said, urging him on, “he’s all yours now! But take your time and watch yourself, because the little nigger hits harder than a Mississippi mule kicking downhill, backwards!”
“Ohhhh, that’s awright with me!” Sconion boasted, strutting forward and moving out to the center of the floor. “Fuck the little nigger! He’s going to wish that I kicked both of his goddamn eyes out!” he stated emphatically. “’Cause I’ve got something for all you hard-hitting motherfuckers!” With a burst of speed, his right hand dipped and flashed into his pocket and whipped out a long, razor-sharp shiv.
Chink gasped in astonishment, and unconsciously moved towards him. “What da hell!” he mumbled, still moving, but he stopped dead in his tracks when Sconion wheeled around and thrust the knife in his direction.
“Back up, Chink!” he warned. “I told you I had something for all of you hard-hitting motherfuckers. And now I’m going to cut this nigger too short to shit! When I get through with his hard-hitting ass, he’ll have to reach up to tie his own goddamn shoes!”
I stared at him in disbelief, almost paralyzed with fear. A sickening wave of terror chilled my blood and froze me in my place. I became frightfully aware of my wretched condition: with only one eye working properly, and it half closed, the probable outcome of this fight became obvious. But, as it turned out, I didn’t have too much time to think about it. Sconion-Eyed leaped right in and started raking at me with his blade.
His watery eyes, now pinpoints of hatred, scared me all over again, but I instinctively backpedaled out of range. Moving quickly and carefully, making sure I stayed away from the dangerous corners, I circled the room looking for a weapon. I tried to work my way around to the utility closet, to get to my baseball bat again, but Sconion was having none of that. He kept me well away from the closet, and continued to stalk me slowly, cautiously, his glazed eyes fixed. upon my face. The only thing I could lay my hands on was an old ragged coat, and I grabbed that up and held it bunched in one hand:
With each step Sconion-Eyes took, he switched his, knife from hand to hand. Then suddenly, without a hint of warning, he lunged in again. Hooking, jabbing, slashing at my stomach. There seemed to be a kind of effervescence about him, as if he had eaten fire. His eyes were slits of amalgamated hatred, but his movements were slow—much slower than before. His actions now, it seemed to me, were somehow exaggerated and relaxed, more lazy than harmful.
He smiled, and backed away. Then, he started in again. But now I was ready for him. I timed his motion and grabbed his arm, then groaned in excruciating pain as a deep piercing tongue of flame ripped through my side and let me know I’d been had, tricked into grabbing the wrong arm. Before he could stab me again, I latched on to the right arm, and with all the strength that I had, forced it up toward my face and sank my teeth in to the bone.
“Oh, my God!” he screamed, like a scared bitch. Blood gushed from his wound, and the knife slipped away from his limp fingers. But his God couldn’t help him now. My fist shot out in a short swinging arc, colliding with his jawbone with a crunching impact, and down he fell—unconscious before his back hit the floor.
I reached down and picked up the knife, and a wheel of fire scorched my ribs. I moved toward Sconion with the clear intention of slitting his throat. I wanted him to wake up in hell. But just before I could reach his sprawled-out body, the roof fell in. Little A and the rest. of the boys wrestled me to the floor and tried to take the knife.
I fought them savagely, hammering away at anything I touched. I though that everybody had turned against me, and I was trying to break that knife off in somebody’s head. But the struggling mass was too much for me. I felt the knife being wrenched. from my hand, and at any second I expected it to be plunged into my chest. The pain I’d felt earlier fled and a mixed media of emotions sliced through my heart.
“Hold him down, man! Hold him, goddammit!” Little A hissed, his voice penetrating my mind and adding fury to my struggle. “Take it easy, Rube!” he said soothingly. “We’re not trying to hurt you. We’re only trying to help you.”
I lay there on the cold floor and gasped for breath. The concrete slowly cooled the heat of combat that raged within me, but as it subsided, something else died, too. I mean, some feeling, some sort of sensibility—call it benevolence for my fellowman—was gone now. Wiped out in the face of this persistent violence, hatred and fear, it was replaced by a seething distrust of everything and everybody, except Rubin Carter.
When finally I pulled myself up off the floor, I realized that I wasn’t hurt as badly as I’d thought—although my side continued to burn like Lucifer’s candle. The coat I had grabbed while Sconion was stalking me around the room might have been what had saved my life. His knife had hit me only after slicing through its thickness, thus minimizing his thrusting power. For the second time that night, I went to the hospital. When I returned, everybody was fast asleep, and I quickly followed suit.
One hour ... two hours ... maybe three hours had passed when I was jerked awake. Fully alert, I sat upright in my bed. My heart was fluttering in a fearful serenade of perturbation, trying to understand what had gotten me so scared. I looked around. Something was tugging at my bedcovers. There, lying on the floor and grinning like a Cheshire cat, his pearly teeth gleaming in the darkness, was Little A. Before I could ask what he was doing there, he motioned for me to be quiet and follow him. I hesitated at first, then eased out of bed and to the floor. Together we belly-slid from bed to bed, moving toward the far corner of the dormitory.
When my eyes became accustomed to the darker darkness beneath the beds, I saw that there were other people squatting down at the opposite end of the room. As we closed in, the fragrant odor of cigarette smoke invaded my nostrils. Smoking was prohibited at Jamesburg.
“Were you sleeping, little fighting man?” Chink questioned with a smile, giving me and Little A a cigarette. His battered face was covered with bruises. Sconion-Eyed Jones was there too, along with a boy called Salty Dog, and another, Boston Beans.
“No, I wasn’t asleep,” I lied easily, handing him back the weed. “And I don’t smoke, either,” I said.
This was a strange and unusual group to be clustered in amity beneath this little bed. I mean, there were lumps, bumps, and bruises in evidence everywhere. We were all fucked up. But, be that as it may, there was something about these fellows that stood out and puzzled me no end—their composure. While it was true we were all very young, their posturing reeked of a maturity well beyond their years.
Take Sconion-Eyed Jones, for example. Here was a fourteen-year-old who knew more about handling a knife than Jim Bowie. This boy had been locked up for killing his father—who had killed his mother—and was now a permanent ward of the state until he reached twenty-one. Sconion-Eyed was what we called “a state baby,” and his notorious reputation with a knife became a legend in the years to come—until one day he died, burned to a crisp in the electric chair.
As for the rest of the group, while their crimes were not as heinous as that of Sconion-Eyed Jones, they were all mentally abused products of a morally abusing environment, shamelessly vicious, corrupt, and depraved. To make matters worse, these were contagious qualities.
“C‘mon, Chink!” Salty Dog complained impatiently after finishing his cigarette. “Shit, man, we’ve got to go to work this morning, so let’s do what we’re gonna do if we’re gonna do it! It’s getting later all the time, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Chink agreed thoughtfully, knocking the fire off his cigarette. “Okay,” he said, “let’s make it then.” He started creeping back under the beds on his belly, the rest of us following close behind. We had crawled all the way to the other side of the room before Chink reached up and shook someone lying in the bed above.
“Huh!” a startled voice cried out, the bed springs squeaking from his movements.
“Shhhhhhh, be quiet, motherfucker!” Chink cautioned the noisemaker, putting a hand over his mouth. “Ease out of bed and get down here on the floor,” he snarled, “and you better not make anymore goddamn noise, either! You hear?” The bed springs squeaked softly one more time, then a small body slipped soundlessly to the floor.
“I’m sorry, Chink,” whispered a tiny petrified voice. “I didn’t mean to make any noise.” It was pathetic. We turned around and crawled back to the smoking corner.
Now I might have been a little more naive than was considered healthy for a Jamesburg youngster at that time, but I’ll be goddamned if I was downright stupid! Jamesburg had taught me something since I’d been incarcerated there: now I knew what a faggot was when I saw one, and this was what we had in tow—a goddamned faggot, a fuck boy.
Wait a minute. I’ll have to retract that statement; it’s not entirely the truth. The boy was not a committed homosexual, but he did submit, nonetheless, to what, I think, were the degrading desires of stronger inmates in return for cigarettes, food, and favor. At Jamesburg, it made no difference if one had or didn’t have the inclination to become somebody’s “wife.” If one couldn’t protect himself in a sure-fire, devastating manner in a fight, before very long he would find himself switching and “married” to a tougher inmate. So this boy was less a pedigreed faggot than a simple jailhouse punk, which in my estimation is the difference between sugar and shit.
When our group had arrived back at the smoking corner, the cigarettes were lit again and passed around to everybody except the newest member. He was instead ordered to remove his pajamas and lay down on his stomach. Then, one by one, each of my associates mounted the boy-girl’s back, grunted for a minute, groaned for another, then shuddered and relaxed.
This was the first time that I had ever witnessed a homosexual act, and, to be truthful, it was neither fascinating nor overly repulsive to me. But it did stink. I looked upon the deed with an attitude of dishonorable indifference: indifference, in that it had no physical effect upon my person; dishonorable in that, if this punk had offered only a molecule, a mere speck—a tiny smithereen—of resistance, verbally or otherwise, I would have forced myself to become his ally and be ready to go to war again, if necessary.
But undeclared offers are worthless. When my turn came to take a ride in his saddle, I declined as gracefully as possible. The only person who seemed to be offended was the punk himself, and if he had said anything, I would have broken my foot off in his nasty ass. Nobody else pressed the issue. Then we all went back to bed. Thus ended my first day in Cottage Eight.