CHAPTER 16

 

We were talking about two days later, Manny and me, while we were playing double sol, about the joint and shit that went down and we were discussing prison movies and books and crap like that.

And most of ‘em are crap. Like Manny said to start off the conversation, “How come nobody calls the hacks screws here?”

And I said, “‘Cause, that’s only in movies. I never in my life heard a hack called anything but a hack. Or maybe “The Man.” To their face, you called them “Officers,” but always when inmates talked it was “hacks” or “The Man” or maybe “guards,” but never screws. That’s Hollywood bullshit.”

Or maybe not. Maybe in some joints they said screws. Maybe joints were like colleges. I bet they use different lingo at Harvard than they do at Iowa State. Probably joints is the same. But I bet there aren’t any where the inmates call the hacks screws unless it was about eighty years ago maybe.

Movies about prison just gripe my ass. They’ve got about five standard types they always show that I’ve never met. It’s like movies about the service. I was in the Navy before I got sent up and I’ve never seen guys there that look the least like the ones they’ve got up there storming Iwo Jima or wherever. Those guys (in the flicks) are all drop-dead hunks and they all seem to be about in their late twenties. Well, color me orange, but when I was sailing the ocean blue, all my mates seemed to be skinny and we all looked like we were sixteen and it was hard to make out our features through all our pimples. I guess Hollywood doesn’t think kids look like soldiers. In movies anyway—in real life that’s what you get—punk-ass kids who get drunk on three beers and throw up on you and want to fight every five minutes only they ain’t much good at it.

It’s like when Manny and I were up in quarantine before we got released to the population. We’re hanging out on the walk one day just before they locked us down after supper and I spot this clown who came in the day I did.

“Punk,” I thought, and I must have said it out loud ‘cause Manny says, “Huh?”

“That guy,” I said, pointing him out. He was in a cell aways down from mine, standing around jiving with some black dude.

“Whaddya mean? You know him?”

“Naw,” I said. “I just know his type. White bread motherfucker. His daddy sells insurance and his mommy’s president of the PTA. He’s about to get his asshole reamed. Saturday morning when we go to the movie he’s gonna be roaming the aisles for his daddy, giving BJs for packs of tailor-mades. I can read him like a D.C. Comic upside down.”

“Yeah,” said Manny after a minute. “He ain’t right, is he?”

Even Manny could make the guy and it’s Manny’s first time doing hard time. Reason Manny could was he was an outlaw, same as most of the rest of us, even if he hadn’t done joint time before.

Just the way this guy stood, the way he acted, you could tell he was a goner. The sissies would swoop on him like they was pigeons and he was a bread crust just hit the sidewalk.

“I had a guy like him was my first cellmate first time here,” I told Manny. “This guy could be his twin.”

This guy, name of Rudy or some such silly handle, had done crimes, sure, else he wouldn’ta been there but he wasn’t like any of the rest of us. I had him scoped out in ten minutes and it turned out later I was right. About three days later it came down. It’s hard to bullshit a bullshitter, to sell wolf tickets to Sonny Liston, as we say. This kid was basically a lonely kid, born not to bucks maybe, but to your standard-issue middle class family and it was as if he looked around one day and figured out what was “cool” to him and then tried to fake it, to fit in with a group he thought was hip. And, even though he “walked the walk” and “talked the talk” it was all a front. See, he was an actor and could take his observations and use them, play a role, but you knew it wasn’t real inside—he just plain didn’t feel it deep down and naturally, the way the rest of us did. He had an bad end coming I could have made money betting on—a black mother “befriended” him—I warned him, but you could see he had it in his mind he’d really hit the mother lode by being “accepted” by one of the baddest badasses, as if that would rub off on his puny ass and make him the same—only he ended up being the guy’s kid in about as long a time as it takes to get the lid off the KY Jelly tube. After that, the guy turned him out, used to take him out nights in the TV room and send him around jacking guys off and giving out blow jobs for Camels and then when he got tired of his shit threw him off the third tier and squashed his monkey ass like a rotten coconut. The reason he got tired of him was the kid “fell in love” and every other minute was crying he loved this guy and turn around five minutes later and say he was going to kill himself. The black guy got tired of his soap opera—it gave him a headache—and so he erased him.

This guy in quarantine reminded me of that other guy exactly. Where’s this guy in your prison movies? Oh, yeah—sometimes they get somebody like Sal Mineo to play somebody kind of like that but then there’s always somebody else like Tony Curtis bails his weak ass out. Yeah, sure. Like anybody else gives a shit. Like somebody in the joint looked like Tony Curtis could bail anybody’s ass out. Guy looked like that would be the cleanest guy in the joint on account of all the group showers he was gonna have to be taking.

Or—better yet—they have Sidney Poitier saving this clown. First time I see a black guy sticking up for a white guy in here they better put both of ‘em in the hold for safekeeping.

I see this shit in movies when I’m on the bricks and all around me people are going ooooh and aaaah because they think this shit is real and what I want to do—what I got a real itch to do when that happens—is pick up my piece and hold up the place, let them see what a real badass looks like, catch the look on their kissers when I pop a couple of ‘em. I don’t think I look like any Tony Curtis neither.

You can always tell they never asked anybody in a joint about this stuff.

They never get cops right in movies either. Here’s a typical cop deal. I was busted for some burglaries once and they kept asking me to ‘fess up. “Fuck you,” is all I’d say, and finally, this big ass wipe, name of Billy Paddister, he takes me out of my cell and outside, in the street between the jail and the courthouse. This was on a Sunday morning, not a person in sight, only a car passing by once in a while.

Billy takes the cuffs off me and shines me a grin. “Mayes,” he says, “I’m going to give you a chance to escape. You take off running and I’ll count to ten. Then, I’m going to take my gun out and shoot you if I can. Go ahead, run.”

I looked at him with my best hard-guy look. “You think I’m crazy? I don’t think you can count all the way to ten. Nosir, I’m sticking to you like stink on shit.”

Then he unsnapped his holster and snaked out his hog and for a second there I thought it was all over, but all he did was raise up and smack me alongside the cheek with his piece. Didn’t knock me out but I got blood running all over the place and I was choking on a back tooth that got knocked out and went down the wrong pipe. He just stood there laughing.

“He tried to escape,” he told the officer at the desk when we went back in. “Put him in the hole and I’ll write up a report.”

***

I didn’t know what I was going to do about Frick. His real name was Freddy Boles, I found out, from the prison newspaper. They had this jerk ran it, one of those born-again assholes. Most of those religious cunts are putting on a con, hoping the parole board thinks God’s straightened their phony ass out, and cuts them loose, but mostly what I seen of guys like that is that they’re cum-drunk from all the dicks they’ve sucked and it’s a way their mind lets them maintain.

This guy, James Ferril, writes this totally insane article about Boles’ being stabbed and says that there is a religious significance in that he was stabbed thirty-three times. This is how old Christ was when he died on the cross, it says in the article, and Ferril wants the warden to investigate whether there’s a satanic cult at loose within the walls. Ferril also says the stabs were done in the form of a cross which proves his point.

Man!

There are some loony tunes loose around here but this guy takes the blue ribbon.

“I think Jesus was thirty-six, not thirty-three,” Manny said. I believe Manny before I believe this other jerk. Manny’s a devout Catholic, knows his shit.

My problem’s the same whatever kind of crap Ferril is babbling about in the paper. Boles is still alive.

Who knows if he’s a snitch or not? Creep like that probably is. He tells the Man who put holes in him, I’m going to end up in Michigan City and for a long time.

They got him over in Indianapolis, at Methodist Hospital, got him handcuffed to a bed in the security ward and so far he hasn’t come to it says in the paper. I’ve got two chances to skate here. One, he doesn’t make it, croaks before he comes to, and two, if he doesn’t become room temperature, that he doesn’t snitch me out.

You’d think I’d want him dead just on general principles but that wasn’t the case. My mad was gone, completely erased. That was weird. Guy does what he done to me you’d think I’d want him in a box and sure, that’s what I wanted originally only now I didn’t really care. The only thing I didn’t want was to end up doing more time.

I’m still trying to work out what I was going to do about Boles if and when he came back to Pendleton when we got some good/bad news.

Bud was on his way back!