“Ready for the people, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said.
“Defendant is ready, Your Honor,” Horvath said, glancing at Ron and winking, though it had no significance.
The judge moved some unseen papers, slipped on glasses for a few seconds to read something, took them off and looked down. Everyone stood quietly waiting for him.
“Do you have any remarks, Mr. Horvath?”
“Yes, Your Honor, though in substance it is what you’ll find in the preparation report and the evaluation of Dr.”—Horvath glanced at notes—“Muller.”
“I’m familiar with both reports … but proceed.”
“This young man is a classic example of the tragedy of our era. He comes from a good family, attended college, and there’s no history of any criminal activity until two years ago when he was arrested with a half-pound of marijuana. Both the probation officer and the psychiatrist report that he started smoking marijuana in college and, as a favor to friends, began getting some extra to sell. In the youth culture, this isn’t criminal. But things have a momentum of their own, and someone wanted cocaine, and he could get that from the same place he got the marijuana. In other words, he drifted into it without realizing what he was doing. He was also using cocaine quite heavily, which clouded his perspective, and although there’s no physical addiction to cocaine, there can be a psychological dependence.
“According to Dr. Muller, Mr. Decker isn’t violent or dangerous. On the contrary, the psychological tests show an intelligent, well-balanced personality, providing he is weaned from the drug dependence …”
Horvath went on for five minutes, and Ron was fascinated. It was weird to listen while he was being discussed. He was impressed by Horvath’s plea for leniency.
The prosecutor was next. “I concur with much that counsel says. This young man is intelligent. He is from a good family. But that gives him even less excuse, because he had every opportunity. The facts don’t indicate that this was a hobby, which counsel seems to imply. Mr. Decker was living in a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment and owned two automobiles, one of them a twelve-thousand-dollar sports car. The amount of drugs that he was caught with are worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If he needs treatment for his own drug problem—and cocaine is not addictive—the Department of Corrections has programs. Above and beyond that, this is a serious offense, and if someone with this degree of involvement, someone who has every advantage and opportunity our society provides, doesn’t go to prison, it would be unfair to send those who haven’t had such opportunity.”
When the prosecutor finished, the judge looked to Ron. “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Is there any legal reason why judgment should not be passed?”
“No, Your Honor,” Horvath said. “I’ll submit the matter.”
“The People submit,” said the prosecutor.
“Frankly,” the judge said after a judicious pause, “this is a difficult case. What counsel says—both counsel—has merit. There is a lot of good in this young man, and yet the People have a right to demand severe punishment because this offense is so serious. I’m going to send him to prison, for the term prescribed by law, but I think that the statutory term of ten years to life may be too severe. Many years there could ruin him and not serve society’s best interests … so I’m going to retain jurisdiction under the provisions of Section Eleven sixty-eight, and I’ll ask for reports in, say, two years. If they’re satisfactory, I’ll modify the sentence.” He looked directly at Ron. “Do you understand? If you show signs of rehabilitation, I’ll change this sentence in two years.” Then to Horvath. “Now this matter is off calendar, and it’s your responsibility to make a motion.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Ron felt the deputy’s hand tweak his elbow. Sentence had been passed and he was going where he had expected to go.
Ronald Decker began the ten-day wait for the prison bus. Since his arrest five months earlier he’d told everyone that he was going, but part of him had belived that he would avoid it somehow. The imminent reality created both anxiety and curiosity. He asked questions, listened to stories. Prison was more than a walled-in place; it was an alien world of distorted values, ruled by a code of violence. Some tales contradicted others; the viewpoint depended on the experiences of the speaker. A middle-aged forger who had served eighteen months as a clerk in the administration building while living in an honor cellhouse saw prison differently from a barrio Chicano who had gone in at age twenty and spent five years walking the yard and bouncing between segregation and the cotton textile mill. The clerk said, “Sure those lowriders stab each other, but if you mind your own business, nobody bothers you, except when a race war is happening. Then you stay in your cell.” The Chicano said, “A vato can get killed quick. Every day somebody gets hit. You need to get in a gang. They run things.” The clerk explained that there were four powerful gangs, two Mexican, one white, one black, and that they existed in varying strengths in every one of the prisons. The clerk didn’t know much about them, and the Chicano wouldn’t talk. However, a few days later the Los Angeles Times had an article about the fifty-seven murders and three hundred stabbings that had happened in three prisons—Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin—the previous year. Nearly all the violence was attributable to the gangs, which, according to the article, had started up for protection during the early racial violence but were now running rackets when they weren’t killing each other. The two Mexican gangs were at war, as were the whites and blacks. “Fifty-seven killings!” Ron said. “What kind of place am I going to?”
“You might miss Q and Folsom,” a potbellied old con said. “But you might have trouble wherever you go. Some people can go there and fade into the crowd, but sure as shit you can’t. Know what I mean?”
Ron threw the paper on the bunk and nodded. He knew.
“You’ll look like Gina Lollobrigida to some of those animals who’ve been down for eight or nine years. Even to some who aren’t animals but just hardrock convicts. The jockers will have one idea and the fairies will want to gobble you up. Shit! Give ’em a chance and all they’ll find of you is shoelaces and a belt buckle.” The man laughed as Ron blushed. Prison culture, he knew, distinguished between masculine and feminine roles, but he was repelled by all of it. He didn’t condemn it, but it wasn’t for him. He was especially touchy about it because he’d seemed to attract homosexual propositions since puberty.
“So how do I handle it?”
“Start out by not being friendly and don’t accept favors. The game is to get you obligated. Don’t shave too much and wear ragged clothes. Talk out of the corner of your mouth with a lot of motherfuckers thrown in … and give off vibes that you’ll ice the first bastard who fucks with you. It’ll make ’em think about it. Nobody wants to get killed. And some people do get through with murder-mouth and nothing behind it. But they don’t look like you. ’Course you could put a shiv in one and that’d keep ’em off you … leastways them that ain’t serious. But if he’s got friends … and it’d keep you from getting out.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Ron said. He thought of asking what the prison authorities would do if he asked for help. Certainly others were in the same situation and the men who ran the prison had responsibility. Asking for protection was distasteful, but getting buggered or killing someone was beyond distaste. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself after submitting to that, and killing, even without penalties, would be hard. He couldn’t imagine himself taking someone’s life. He didn’t ask, sensing that appealing to the authorities for help was taboo. Maybe he could hire bodyguards. He asked if that was possible.
“Maybe, but what’d probably happen is that they’ll take your money, extort more, and then turn on you. Then again, you might find someone. Shit, I’ve seen twenty cartons of cigarettes buy a stabbing … right in the fuckin’ lung.”
The questions had been partly rhetorical, but later Ron lay on his
bunk and thought about the price of twenty cartons of cigarettes for a stabbing. It was cheap enough—if he could afford it. One week before the bust he’d had fifty-three thousand dollars in cold cash, another twenty-five thousand dollars or more in pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexican ruins (stolen and smuggled by the same persons in Culiacán who sold him narcotics), a Porsche, a Cammaro, and a partnership in a downtown parking lot. Thirty grand was lost when the narcotics were seized. The police had seized twelve grand, and turned eight over to Internal Revenue, which claimed he still owed sixty thousand. Some policemen had kept the missing four thousand. Five thousand in the bank had gone to the bail bondsman to get Pamela out. But before she made bail, some jackal among their acquaintances had broken into the apartment, stolen the artifacts, the stereo, the color television, and his clothes. The Porsche had been sold to pay Horvath, who also got the pittance from the forced sale of the parking lot. Pamela had the Cammaro, all that remained of his empire. It had been stripped like autumn leaves in a gale.
Maybe I can’t afford twenty cartons, he thought, and grunted in disgust.
Ron knew that this would be the last visit. Tomorrow or the next day he would ride a sheriff’s bus to prison. When his name was called at 10:00 a.m., eight men were in the four-man cell. Every night the jail filled with drunks and traffic violators who hadn’t paid their tickets. The floor was always littered with bodies, many without mattresses but too full of booze to care. In the late afternoon they were moved to the county farm to make room for a new batch. All but one were awake. The old con was reading the newspaper by light coming through the bars. The recessed cell light had been burned out when Ron arrived and never replaced. Three middle-aged blacks and a rotund Indian were playing nickel-and-dime tonk on a bunk, while two others watched. The sleeper was on the floor in front of the toilet, which Ron had to use. The wino was snoring lustily, spittle drooling from his toothless mouth. In jail vernacular he was a “grape.” After a momentary hesitation, Ron stood as close as possible and pissed over the sleeper’s head. Most of the stream went into the toilet, but as it expired and he shook himself, some fell on the man’s face without breaking the rhythm of his snores. Ron rinsed his hands and turned around. The gate would open any moment and he had to be ready. If he hesitated, the gate would close and he’d miss the visit.
The old con had lowered the newspaper and his expression was of a privately enjoyed joke.
“What’s on your mind?” Ron asked.
“See … it’s already got you.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Time in the cage, how it corrupts. Six months ago you wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that—” he glanced toward the wino on the floor—“pissing on somebody, you couldn’t have done it.”
“He’s just an old grape.”
“Ah, that’s what you think now. It wasn’t what you thought then.”
Before Ron could comment, the door slid open and the deputy at the control panel called his name. He stepped out, tucking in the wrinkled denim shirt as he walked by the faces of the cells to the front and picked up the visiting-room pass.
The corridor with waxed concrete floors and prisoners moving along right-hand walls, watched by deputies, was so quiet that soft music from recessed speakers could be heard plainly. But as he neared the visiting-room door, Ron was washed by a tide of sound, an accretion of two hundred separate conversations. A trusty took his pass, said, “E five,” and put the pass in a pneumatic tube. Row E, window five, Ron thought, going to where he’d been directed. “E” Row visitors would come in a bunch when the prisoner windows were full. All phones would go on simultaneously, and go off automatically in twenty minutes. Ron sat on the stool and stared through the dirty Plexiglas, freedom inches away, wondering what kind of acid would simply melt the barrier and let him walk away. The thought was academic. Desperate moves were not his style. Next, he looked at the visitors at the windows across from him. Most were women visiting sons, lovers, and husbands, bearing the historical female burden to endure. The single impression of the throng was poverty. Prisoners came from the poor. Even the hallowed right to bail favored the wealthy. As always, he looked for pretty women. Mere sight had now become a semiprecious experience. A Mexican girl, perhaps still in her teens, with lustrous black hair to her waist, velvet skin, and fawn-like eyes, was visiting a man with the dark granite features of an Indian. Ron watched the girl’s ass and thighs pressing against her jeans as she shifted around.
A fresh cluster of visitors filled the air, their faces flashing into his as they looked for the right prisoner. Pamela came quickly, plopping down with a smile. Since he’d gone, she’d returned to jeans and bra-less T-shirts, blond hair hanging straight down. She was the complete hippie chick, and without makeup she looked young. The “skinny blond with big knockers,” she called herself.
Ron immediately saw the pinpointed pupils; he’d seen them several times lately, but now he didn’t want to argue so he would ignore them. She carried a pencil and tablet, ready in case something needed to be written down. Each held a dead phone at the ready, smiling and feeling stupid.
Somewhere the switch was thrown on and twenty conversations commenced along the row.
“Hi, honey, why so glum?” Pamela asked, turning her mouth down to mock the mask of tragedy.
“Not glum. I’m probably going tomorrow. Two buses are scheduled.”
“You’ll be glad to get out of here, won’t you? This is shitty—except I can visit twice a week.”
“Horvath says the judge won’t let us get married. I don’t really know if he asked him. Fuckin’ mouthpieces are lyin’ bastards. They take your money and fuck you over quick.”
“What about just putting down that you’re married?”
“I’ll try it.” He needed married status to get conjugal visits. “You know you need to get fucked good to keep you in line.”
She winked in exaggerated lewdness.
“Get I.D. in my name,” he said. “You won’t have an arrest record under that name so there’ll be no trouble. They can’t very well take your fingerprints. At least I’ll be able to touch you when you visit there.”
“I won’t be able to come as often.”
“I know.”
“I’ll call tomorrow to see if you’re still here.”
“I’ll be glad to get it started. All these months in jail don’t count.”
“What?”
“The time doesn’t start counting until I get there.”
The information triggered sudden tears, which momentarily startled Ron, for although she was volatile, given to all kinds of emotional outbreaks, these tears were out of proportion.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“Things are just … so shitty.” She managed a smile. “I’m going to start hustling again.”
“Don’t tell me about it.”
“That’s where you found me,” she snapped, anger replacing anguish. “I mean, what the hell …”
“Do what you have to do, but you don’t have to tell me. I’ve got enough trouble as it is.”
“I’m sorry. I’m uptight. I never thought I’d miss a man so much.”
After a pause, he changed the subject. “Oh yeah, I talked to the bondsman. He’s giving back some money. Send me enough to buy canteen and keep the rest for yourself.”
It was information he’d given before. Nearly everything had been said before, and there was nothing really new to say. The glass was more than a barrier to freedom; it was a line between lives. Two persons together, the condition of an entity, atrophied when they were divided. Yet he felt more longing than he ever had outside. Then she had been merely a convenience, a portion of his interests. Now she was the focus of his hope and dreams because everything else was gone. He wanted to tell her, though he’d done so in letters already, but before he could speak the phone went dead. Time was up. Men began to stand up along the row, making final, pantomined communication before a deputy began ordering them to mov
e out. Pamela quickly wrote on the tablet and held it up to the glass. “I love you,” it said, with a sketched sunflower behind it. She held up three one-dollar bills, the amount a prisoner could receive. Not needing it, he shook his head.
As Ron was heading back to the tank, face twisted with his thoughts, Pamela was crossing the parking lot to the Cammaro where a slender, light-skinned black in bell-bottom jeans and multiple strings of beads was waiting behind the wheel.
Long before daylight Ron and thirty others were stripped naked, skin-searched, given white jumpsuits, and then put in waist chains, handcuffs, and leg irons. They hobbled through the cold darkness to the bus while men with shotguns and mackinaws stood on the sidelines, mist coming from their noses and mouths. The prisoners shivered in their seats until the bus had been under way for ten minutes, its headlights finally probing the ramp to the freeway. Ron was one of the few who had a seat to himself, and he felt lucky. Pleasure comes from trivial things in jail.
For the first hour they sliced through the city on the nearly empty freeway. Ron gazed out at the dark silhouettes of the Hollywood skyline, remembering other days, wondering how long it would be until he saw freedom again. He sat near the rear, a shotgun guard in a cage behind him. Beside the guard was the open toilet, and Ron would regret having taken a seat close to it long before the day was over.
As the sun came up, the bus catapulted through the mountains. The driver turned on a radio. A speaker was nearby and Ron’s mind drifted with the music and shifted from gnawing anxiety to longing. He was going to face a long, bitter experience before he “danced beneath a diamond sky … silhouetted by the sea …”
The bus ran along the coast highway, stopping at San Luis Obispo to unload some prisoners and gather others. Ron’s name wasn’t called and the queasiness in his stomach increased.
By late afternoon the bus had made another stop at Soledad amid central California farms, and again Ron wasn’t called.
The Animal Factory Page 2