CHAPTER 22

 

That night, a weird thing happened.

I was laying on my bunk, thinking about all kinds of junk. Mom, Donna, life as a general bitch. All around me, the usual stuff was going on. The constant din that never ceases. Guys yelling, screaming, laughing, telling jokes, playing cards, selling semi-serious wolf tickets. The click of the guard’s heels as he came up the stairs to the dorms on his rounds. You could always tell it was the hack walking. They had leather shoes, hard leather soles that you could hear clear downstairs. Inmates all wore rubber-soled state shoes.

Somebody was playing a guitar that needed tuning. Somebody else in the back, was sobbing aloud and in between the sobs, calling for his mother. About every twenty seconds someone else would yell at him to shut up. After about ten minutes of that shit, somebody went over and kicked his bunk and started screaming he was gonna kill him if he didn’t stop. The guard in the hallway outside heard and got on his walkie-talkie. I could hear about half of what he was saying over the crackle. A couple of minutes later, two other hacks came up and opened the front door. They dragged the guy out. He was all slumped over so they had to practically carry him. He just lost it, went over the edge. They’d stick him in the hospital, load him up with downers, and he’d be back in a week. If he hadn’t found a way to kill himself by then.

Toilets flushed, guys argued, bitched about a hundred things...all this stuff was going on, but it was like I wasn’t there. I was in my head. Shit was going on around me, and I could hear it, but it was like it was underwater.

I didn’t even realize the guy was pulling on my shirt at first. Who knows how long he’d been standing there, trying to get my attention.

“Jake,” he whispered, the whites of his eyes huge as he glanced to see if anyone was noticing him talking to me. I tried to remember the guy’s name. Bob, something. I’d talked to him a couple of times, but we weren’t friends. At least, I didn’t think so. I hardly knew the dude. His bunk was clear in the back of the dorm.

“I’m busy, man,” I said and turned over on my side away from him. All I wanted was to be left alone in my misery.

“Look,” he said, and dropped something on my pillow, in front of my face. I sat up and picked up the thing he’d dropped. It was a twenty-dollar bill, all folded up into a tiny square.

“I don’t do that shit,” I said. “You want Angel Heart.” Angel Heart was a punk had his bunk in the back and would suck a dick for a toke on a tightroll. I figured the guy was after sex and had me mixed up with Angel. We looked somewhat alike.

“It’s not that,” he said. Bob Barnes. That was his name, I remembered. A weasely kind of mutt, light blond hair and light brown eyes, pale skin. Almost an albino. I remembered talking to him one day, weeks before. He’d seen me sitting by myself at one of the picnic tables in the TV area, reading, and must have thought I was some kind of deep thinker, being as the magazine I was looking at didn’t have any pictures. It was some kind of journal a college put out, full of poetry and short stories. Some pretty good stuff in it. Some do-gooder had donated it to the prison library and I’d glommed onto it. Almost the only book there that wasn’t written by Zane Grey, which was why I’d checked it out. I couldn’t stand Westerns.

I remembered Barnes was from some little podunk town down in southern Indiana. Seymour, I think is what he said. We’d talked for about an hour. Well, mostly he talked and I listened, trying to sneak reading a few paragraphs of the story I was on in while he jabbered on. Something about what a neat town Seymour was and how everybody hung out at some place called the Walton Hotel. A regular hot spot, he made it out to be. The local babes’ hangout. It didn’t sound like a regular hotel. I never heard of anybody our age hanging out at a hotel. Sounded mostly like the guy was homesick and wanted me to know what a great place he’d come from. He was also the only guy I’d ever known inside who claimed he was innocent.

That’s another thing about movies and books about the joint that makes me sick. Just one more myth straights have about us. That we’re all claiming to be innocent. Fuck! If you did happen to be innocent of the charge that got you here, you’d never admit it to anyone. That’d be the kiss of death. Guys would figure you were a pussy and that’d be it. If anything, even if you were innocent, you’d pretend you were the biggest outlaw on the planet. But, all the time, in movies and such, they pictured the cons as always walking around protesting their bumraps.

It’s easy to see how this kind of stuff happens. Ex-cons don’t write books or movies. Books and movies are written by people who visit prisons, not by people who are actually in them. And any con, anywhere, is always shucking straights. For lots of reasons. The main one is that we’re always hoping someone in a position to help us will believe we’re really innocent and somehow will set us free because of that belief. So, whenever any of us talk to a reporter or writer or anyone who’s not a fellow inmate—we fill them full of crap about our innocence. It’d be suicide not to, at least that’s the way most of us think. Not protesting your innocence could well be the end of all hope that someone—the governor, perhaps—might set us free, believing we’re telling the truth and were wrongfully imprisoned. That this never happens doesn’t occur to most of us. There’s not much hope when you’re locked up to begin with and insisting on innocence to everyone except our fellow cons keeps a tiny ray of hope alive. But, it just isn’t true. No con goes around to other cons protesting his innocence. Even when you tell an outsider you didn’t do the crime, you hope another con doesn’t find out what you’ve said.

Another myth that always bothers me is the one that convicted felons hate child-molesters and can’t wait to see them sent up so they can kill them. Bullshit. Nobody gives a damn what you did and in most cases, they don’t even know unless you tell them. When I worked in I.D. during my first stretch, I saw everybody’s rap sheet and there were several dozen guys in here for molesting or even killing little kids. Nobody gave a fuck at all. Another Hollywood myth. The thing I’ve read is that cons have kids themselves and since they can’t protect their kids on the outside, they kill these creeps inside. Biggest piece of malarkey I’ve ever heard. Nobody thinks that way. Half the guys in here have molested or abused their own kids and will again as soon as they get out.

Same thing with cops that get busted and sent up. In the movies, they’d have you believe that’s a death sentence for the poor cop. Pure bull. Every stretch I did, there were always half a dozen cops doing time with me and usually they were the most popular guys in the place. Even guys they put away were friends with them.

There’s so much total bullshit propaganda about things in the joint. I really love those movies where all the inmates look like weight-lifting bad-asses with blow-dried haircuts. Central casting. If you took all the inmates out of the joint and set them down in the town square of any town, you’d think they were just the regular citizens gathered for an Elks convention. Same number of skinny dudes, same number of wimps, same number of sissies, same number who looked like accountants or bank clerks. There just isn’t any criminal “look.” If that was the case, straights wouldn’t need cops. Just round up all those guys that looked like the cast of “The Shawshank Redemption”. ‘Course, you might nail the local bank president, the owner of the carwash chain and the guy who presses your clothes down at the One-Day Martinize.

Or the one that all snitches get killed. Ha! I can walk out anywhere in the yard, throw a stone and hit maybe 5-10 snitches. All alive. Nobody likes them much, but nobody does much about them, either.

Anyway, Barnes was the exception to the “I’m innocent” myth. He was always crying about how he’d been bumrapped. And now, he was bothering me, throwing $20 bills at me.

“I don’t want no sex,” he said. “I want somebody to talk to.”

Huh?

“Fuck off,” I said. What kind of weird shit was that?

“No, no,” he said, coming around so he was facing me. He got down on his knees to be level with my face. I debated just punching the fruit out, but didn’t.

“I just took twenty sleeping pills,” he said. “Ten minutes ago.”

“So go to sleep,” I said. “Why you bothering me?”

“Because,” he said, in this whiney voice. I honestly thought he was going to start crying, way his little chin puckered up.

He went away, bawling, and everybody’s looking at me. Fucking loser.

Next day I hear he’s in the infirmary. Got sick, this guy said, barfed half the pills out and the rest they siphoned out over in the hospital. The hack on duty hears him throwing up and goes up and sees blood all over the floor and his bed and figures he cut himself and when he finds out later the blood came from an ulcer and the guy was going to be all right, he’s so pissed he takes two days off and goes on a bender.

When the guy gets his bearings, he tells the doctor it was me who sold him the pills. His way of getting even, I guess, since I wouldn’t hold his punk-ass hand.

For that, I get three days in the hole.

For that, he gets himself transferred to Michigan City as soon as he can sit up and eat solid food. I guess he heard I put out a price on him. Five cartons of Camels if anybody brought me his dick.