Bob Goes to Jail

by Rob Sedgwick

  14

  Breakfast in jail.

  I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t normally eat breakfast, but when in Rome…

  In line, a guy with a forearm the size of my leg suddenly got in front of me. He blotted out the florescent light. He didn’t confront me directly, so I didn’t think it merited a fight to the death.

  Breakfast was surprisingly terrific: assorted muffins, cold cereals, coffee, juices, other bread products. Such selection! It was awfully nice of them. All this effort and presentation, and here we were in jail. Very thoughtful.

  I just had coffee.

  Then Jordan and I were summoned to pretrial and had to leave the general population and that special ambiance behind. Diego and his friend Hector came too. More affable than Diego, Hector seemed as bewildered and naive as I was. He spoke no English, but everything he did was soft and helpful to Diego. Acquiescent. I might as well have been looking at the shorter, Mexican version of myself. Later, after he flipped for the DEA, someone cut off part of his ear.

  Pretrial: my abusive, mean, lousy, browbeating, inappropriate, condescending, the reason-I-drank-enough-booze-to-fill-a-dainty-shallow-bath stepfather stepped up and got me a lawyer. A stand-in lawyer to start off with, but a lawyer nonetheless. Salvation.

  My lawyer cornered me immediately.

  Before she could say anything, Ralph Scott, the bad DEA agent, slammed me backward. “Not so fast.”

  Why he did this, I had no idea. I wasn’t doing anything “fast” and was in no position to “pull a fast one” on him. Or anyone. I suppose his cross to bear in life was that he could come up with nothing original and was hopelessly immersed in cliché:

  “I’ve got my eye on you.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “You’re gonna need that Vaseline in prison.”

  I’m certain his lack of originality must have pained him on some level, so he had to take it out on whomever he could, and the whomever in this case was me.

  When I finally spoke to my lawyer alone, she told me something that was way scarier than Ralph Scott: the DEA thought I was the main guy. She told me to keep my mouth shut from here on in. They thought I was strangely composed during the actual bust.

  You have GOT to be kidding me! Fear reverberated in every fiber of my being, my whiteness spilling out of every Park Avenue/York Avenue pore. I’d concentrated so pathetically hard on trying to deliberately complete each and every task that was given to me, like saying yes or no or walk this way, that I must have appeared calm.

  Jordan mumbled at me, trying to attach Hector, Diego, and himself to my legal coattails. But I was mad at Jordan now. He always said that in the event something like this happened, everything would be taken care of and that a lawyer would be waiting to whisk us away and make all bad things disappear. Clearly this was not happening. Loyalty avaunt. I acted like I was in kindergarten and didn’t understand him.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” the lawyer said, patting my chest adieu. Then off I went with Ralph Scott for more processing and another holding pen before bail was set.

  There were only two guests in our new holding tank: a short, round, affable guy, and a skinnier guy with one leg shorter than the other.

  “How are ju?” said the round guy. “What ju in for, maing?”

  “Pot.” I tried to be cryptic, in case this seemingly nice Latin man was a plant.

  “Marijuan?” he said dismissively.

  “Yes.”

  “Quanto?”

  “Five.”

  “Five pounds?” He smiled at me like a pumpkin. Silly me to be remotely concerned.

  “Five hundred.”

  I catapulted sky high in his estimation. He shook his head up and down vigorously; his face made the universally impressed sign. Suddenly, I was a badass.

  The skinnier guy had one leg that was significantly shorter than the other; it gave his step an exaggerated hitch. He prowled, loping around the cage like some angry cheetah. I tried not to notice.

  When told of my exploits, he turned to my friend and said, “I don’t give a fuck.”

  His was the chilling tone of nothingness. He wouldn’t care if someone walloped a building over his head. He was the scariest person I’d ever seen. This struck me as weird because he was small, skinny, and had nothing against me, so I should’ve been, “What, me worry?” like Alfred E. Neuman, but the guy scared the shit out of me. I guess because he was completely without fear and I was so full of it.

  The door flew open. We were off to see the bail judge.

  Too-da-loo to my cellmates!

  The first thing I saw was my mother, enveloped by my stepfather. She took the briefest of looks at me. Disgusted by what she saw, she buried her head in his mass.

  As Ralph Scott pushed me—mumbling a refreshingly original “That’s your lawyer, punk”—toward Warren Levi, one of the two men who were to be my actual legal counsel, my stepfather intercepted me to give me a quick hug.

  “There’s nothing you’ve done so bad that doesn’t deserve a kiss,” he said.

  It may not sound like much, but when you’re stepping out of the holding tank at the MCC, and things haven’t been too peachy for a while, and you don’t know what the fuck is going to happen to you, it’s a big deal to get some positive reinforcement.

  Then off to Warren Levi: my confessor.

  “Hey. I’m Warren. I’m going to be your lawyer. How was it in there?”

  “I’ve had better times.”

  “Good. What we’re going do now is post bail, and then we’ll get into the other stuff, okay? So just take it easy. There’s going to be no more incarceration for now. A lot of the bad stuff is over for now, so you can relax. You get into any fights or anything back there? You need a doctor?”

  “No, I’m fine, really, thanks so much.”

  Maybe we would go to the Harvard Club after this and get one of those nifty steaks.

  —

  The Harvard Club.

  My dad used to take us there when we were kids after he separated from my mom. It was one of those old, magnificent architectural structures in New York. Those horrible, wonderful portraits of ancient WASPS past—huge leather club chairs that shone Chinese lacquer red and enveloped my preadolescent body like a womb, an old-world New England security blanket.

  There was a men’s bathroom in the basement that was always empty and the cleanest, emptiest, whitest bathroom I’d ever seen. I always made sure to go there even if I didn’t need to, because even though it was a little chilly down there amidst all that sparkling white tile, I loved the aloneness, the privacy, and the sharp, fresh smell of ammonia. The old-fashioned sinks were as big as bathtubs. It felt impossibly safe in there, the silence holy as church.

  The main dining room was this enormous cathedral with vaulted ceilings, stone walls, echoes, maybe even flying buttresses, and the steaks tasted like what real life must taste like in Heaven. After Dad left Mom, he would take us to the Harvard Club with his young dates that were always nearer our age than his. I guess he took us to there to take our minds off the fact that he and Mom were separated. I kept praying in the back of my mind that they would get back together and this was just a phase.

  I was in the back of the Volkswagen, and we were driving up to somewhere after they had been separated for about six months, when I asked dad if he thought that he and Mom would ever be divorced. He took his time to answer and then, in a high-pitched voice, he said, “Yyyes.” I fell onto my side in the backseat. I knew it I knew it I knew it! I should never have asked that question. And because I asked that question, their divorce would be entirely my fault.

  —

  Warren guided me into bail court. I sat down. Finally, my own chair. Take a load off. The judge started the proceedings and garbled some stuff that sounded underwater to me. I was tired and shell shocked. I
couldn’t take anything in. I hadn’t slept in forty-two hours. Jordan sat to the right of me, with his mom about ten feet away.

  They, too, were terrified.

  The prosecutor, Brad Fine, strode over to Warren and whispered in his ear. Then Warren loudly stage-whispered to me, “What’s on West Eighteenth Street?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “The prosecution says there’s something on West Eighteenth Street, and that if you don’t tell him what it is, they’re not going to let us post bail.’’

  More diamonds from my sphincter. Was Nikko somehow in this too?

  “I don’t know what’s on West Eighteenth Street! The only thing I know about West Eighteenth Street is that my brother lives on West Eighteenth Street!”

  If Brad Fine didn’t buy what I was saying, I wasn’t leaving this courtroom.

  Warren nodded, satisfied I was telling the truth, and went over to Fine. They consulted in the way that lawyers do. With one solemn nod of his head, Fine bought whatever Warren was selling and bail was set at $500,000.

  I wanted to leave immediately so they wouldn’t change their minds.

  As I followed my parents and Warren out toward the get-out-of-jail door, I was clotheslined, yet again, by Ralph Scott. “Not so fast. You’re not done yet.”

  Yet another refreshingly original sentence.

  I wondered why he liked to hit me so much.

  My stepfather posted bond, which was 10 percent of the actual $500,000. He filled out the paperwork thoughtfully, clinically, his lips scrunched up a little. They looked full, sensuous, like he was about to taste a fine wine.

  I was free to leave.

  The last person I saw was my round friend with the jack-o’-lantern smile. He and his partner were also waiting to post bail. He raised his handcuffed hands, gave me the thumbs up sign, and said, “Good luck, maing.”

  His partner didn’t move a muscle. He just glared into space.

  His eyes reminded me of Roberto Durán, the fabulous lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight champion of the seventies and eighties. I’d once seen Durán at Victor’s Café, a well-known restaurant in the Theater district, about a month after he’d lost to Sugar Ray Leonard. He was half my size and slashed through the crowd at the restaurant like some renegade mongoose. Meryl Streep was there. Robert Duval was there. Other celebrities were. But I couldn’t have cared less. This was the Great Roberto Durán, who had just broken my heart and that of many others in the sadly remembered “No Mas” fight where he had no answer for the spectacular Sugar Ray Leonard and just quit. He gave up. He threw up a gloved hand, waved it to the referee, and said, “No mas.” A hero fell from grace, and his legend died that night. But at this restaurant, he still looked tremendous and frightening. Mythical. If his hands and feet were bound, it wouldn’t matter: he would still find a way to kill you. Such magnificent rage.

  Such was the rage of my friend’s partner. Epic. Like the Great Roberto Duran.

  I threw the big door open and inhaled freedom. It was great to get the fuck out. Whatever happens in life, I told myself, don’t ever forget this feeling. Free!

  For now.

  We got into the lawyer’s car and went uptown. I needed cigarettes. We stopped in Chinatown so I could buy a pack, and I sucked down five in a row. Mom peeled off, still hardly speaking to me. I felt terrible and couldn’t look her in the eye. I wanted to apologize to her, but the stuff in front of me was just too big to be able to think about anything else. Things are bad when you can’t look your mom in the eye.

  Ben, Warren, and I arrived at Warren’s office for the big powwow. Lots of lawyerly books, leather chairs, and fancy furniture in this office, much like the Harvard Club—except this stuff was newer, snappier. Probably bought with drug money. And this wasn’t the downy, womblike feel of the Harvard Club. This was all business. Before I went in to spill my beans, Ben said, “At the end of the day, I think this is going to end up being a cheap lesson.”

  Ben was at his best when life was at its most awful. I nodded a goofy teenager smile at him and then headed for the conference room, where Ron Montano, the man who would be my lead lawyer and the other half of the Montano and Primo law firm, beckoned.

  15

  “Why can’t we live in a normal apartment on West End Avenue?” I complain to my mom.

  After the sale of the Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles to the Australian government for two million dollars, Ben decides it’s time for us to move to the East Side.

  The townhouse at 127 East Seventhy-Fifth Street is so big, I get lost when we go to look at it. Five floors. Two bedrooms on each floor, entire living rooms on three of them, not to mention three kitchens, a basement, a wine cellar, a secretary’s office, an elegantly wood-paneled library and a vaulted ceiling renaissance living room that is the perfect showplace for Ben’s French furniture and creamy wood and velvet Louis the Something-or-Other chairs. The dining room could accommodate a legion of Vikings. The two front iron doors that led out to the street could probably go for fifty grand each, easy. It is gargantuan, twice the size of any normal townhouse, and it could easily accommodate at least thirty underprivileged families.

  “We don’t need so much space. This is ridiculous,” I tell my mother.

  In lieu of wallpaper, there is plush corduroy, so the walls are spongy like an insane asylum.

  The phones are modern for their time; they have about five working lines and an intercom system that is loud and easily heard. When I become friends with Milo Goldstein, the first couple of weeks he comes to visit the house, he never meets or runs into our parents; he just hears them calling to us on the intercom and is thus convinced that our parents are not actual people at all but intercoms.

  —

  The first time I meet Linus Jerome, in one of our several kitchens in the townhouse that is twice as big as any other, I am struck by how he looks as if he wandered out of some Fragonard painting on a whim to join us. With his tousled and crinkly blond hair, his unbuttoned, flowing white shirt, bare feet, clamming shorts, and his alabaster skin that make his red lips look bloody, there is something about him you can’t quite put your finger on.

  I’m seventeen. Mom says he’s to be our cook and that he’s crazy but brilliant. She loves him immediately “because he’s crazy. But brilliant.”

  “So you’re the pot smoker of the house?” he says.

  “Yeah.” I’m a little guarded. Maybe he’s a mole for the parents. Or maybe Mom told him because she tells everybody everything.

  “We should smoke sometime. Hey, your mother says you’re working downtown in some stockroom, some sweaty job or something.”

  “I’m working in my dad’s nuts and bolts shop downtown.”

  One of my dad’s many businesses. I take great pride in my job at Emmons Fasteners, Inc. It’s my first. Dad said, “You’re seventeen and you have to get a job this summer, and the fifth floor of the nuts and bolts warehouse downtown needs to cleaned up and organized. You’re hired.”

  The warehouse is located in what is now Tribeca, but back then was just Franklin Street. There is a diner on the corner that stands to this day, and the only other place you can get a sandwich is Blimpie. I always get the Blimpie Best, which has every luncheon meat under the sun on it—plus peppers, oil and vinegar, mustard and mayo, lettuce and tomato. Dumpy, industrial Franklin Street has a spice warehouse on the street, so your nose takes you to these faraway, elegantly exotic places. I’m being paid a whole hundred dollars and change a week, in cash. I’m a card-carrying member of the great unwashed. I hustle my ass off to show my black and Puerto Rican coworkers that I’m not some over-privileged white boy. I can hang with them.

  Tito, the son of one the managers, is checking me out for rich boy-itis. Late afternoon my first day, he says to me, “Why don’t you go home?”

  I know exact
ly what the question means. He’s checking me out to see if I can go home early. It’s a rabbit punch.

  “The day isn’t over,” I say.

  “No, it ain’t quittin’ time, but I thought you could leave any time you want because your dad’s the boss.”

  “Of course I can’t. I have to stay until the end of the day.”

  Dee, the foreman, one of those quiet, powerful men who won’t take shit from anyone, gives me the greatest compliment about my work by saying nothing. He sleeps on piled-up boxes at lunch and is raising four girls, one of whom is a sprinter. He won’t drink booze on Fridays like the others do.

  The bathroom is New York before gentrification. The floor is cement, the urine stench is permanent, the walls are green and haven’t been painted since the beginning of time, but you wouldn’t notice them anyway because covering basically every available surface in the bathroom is porn I didn’t even know was possible: women stuffed with ball gags, anal beads, multiple cocks, cocks down their throat; cum-drenched women looking directly at you like they love this treatment more than anything and this is their reason for living.

  If you actually had to use the bathroom, it was tough, because someone was always in there.

  “You’re working with coons, huh?” Linus says.

  This is so far out of left field that I lean into him, on the off chance I didn’t hear him properly. His body is shifting back and forth like he’s on a boat in heavy weather, with his left hand crammed into his pocket and right hand wrapped around his ribs, his fingers tucked just underneath the elbow. He seems as if he’s been drinking.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Okay, niggers, whatever. Why don’t you come down to my room later and we can smoke some pot, have a couple of drinks, and hang out?”

  The word “nigger” is jarring. My sensibilities are jostled. I don’t know how to react. I don’t say the word and I don’t know anyone who does. It’s not that I avoid the word or tiptoe around it, it just isn’t in my frame of reference, as it is absent from my vocabulary. Growing up in New York City in the sixties, I was certainly aware of crime, but I never heard that word and I didn’t know what racism was until well into my teens. And that was from books about slavery. Back in the sixties and seventies, New York was such an incomprehensible mix of everything and everybody that different colors, languages, points of view, heritages, and cultures were all part of the same multitudinous stew, and for the most part, we all just got along with each other.