After the working companies came back the guards had dinner. Then, after that, all of us left the cell block. The working convicts went back to work and the rest of us to the idle house.
The idle house was a big box of a room on the third floor of an old crumbling mill building. It was filled with hard wooden benches, spaced a foot apart, facing from the ends toward a wide center aisle. There was a guard-stand by the door and one in each corner and two on each side. At the far end of the center aisle was the latrine. As all the latrines in prison, it was unenclosed. And it stank.
Grimy windows let in the light of gray March days. Now put a rickety wooden outside staircase, very steep and wobbly, ascending from the brick walk below, and fill the place to overflowing with cold, stale, smelly convicts jammed side-by-side on the benches and not allowed to read, or talk, or smoke; and only to go to the latrine with a guard’s permission.
No convict but a fool would sit there on those hard benches all day and go crazy doing nothing. They read papers, books, magazines; played cards, checkers, and other games, on the benches out of sight of the guards; shot dice on the floor, using a felt-lined cigar box in which to shake the dice; smoked cigarettes, fanning the smoke out of sight to the floor; and mush-faked. Mush-faking was the major industry within the prison. It was the manufacture of gadgets such as cigarette holders and lighters and jewel boxes and rings and pins and similar items from old bones, toothbrush handles, copper coins and gold crowns.
Our company sat on three benches at the north end. There was a small room partitioned off behind us where the prison band practiced. The colored convicts from all of the companies sat together at the other end of the idle house. All day long the band played. It was a very loud and brassy band. It played marches and marches and more marches until you could close your eyes and see the gray convicts marching through the gray days. When the band guard had to leave, for some reason or other, the convicts immediately stopped playing and began a crap game. The convicts from the idle house would crawl down between the benches and slip into the band room to join them.
As soon as we were settled the fellows began getting acquainted with me. “Weren’t you the fellow old man Warren caught writing that note?”
“He didn’t get it off of me. He got it off of Hunky.”
“I saw old Hunky right after that. He said the note fell into his inside coat pocket and he couldn’t find it. Old Fuss Face found it even before he knew where it was himself.
“Yeah? He didn’t tell me.”
“They sapped up on Book-me, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. I hated to see that.”
“Say, was that your mother I saw visiting you the other day?” someone called from the end of the bench.
“Yeah.” I had to answer them. They didn’t have anything else to do.
“Too bad about Big John.”
“Damn right,” I said. “Put him in the hole over a dried slice of bread.”
“I mean about him dying.”
“Dying?” I gave a start. “When did he die?”
“He died in the hole. Didn’t you hear about it? Caught pneumonia. He told Kish and the guard he was sick but they wouldn’t take him to the hospital.”
“Damn!” I said. “Damn!”
They asked me about my charge and my sentence and whether I had graduated from college, sure enough, and how old I was and did I expect to get a pardon?
“Hell, you have to be a big shot to get a pardon,” somebody said.
“Maybe he’s a big shot,” another convict answered.
Blackie asked me if I wanted to read his paper. He had moved over to sit next to me. I told him I got a paper.
“You know, it seems to me I’ve seen you in Toledo.”
That was the old approach. I’d gotten used to it by then. “You might have,” I said. I’d never been to Toledo but he was a likable-looking little fellow. He was about five feet, three inches tall and weighed about a hundred and twenty. He had long, curly black hair and features that were chiseled so finely they looked fragile. His skin was dead white. When his hair became mussed he looked very girlish.
“When we go in, stop by my cell, I’ve got something I want to show you,” he said. “It’s cell No. 13.”
“Okay.” I didn’t stop by his cell. I knew that the best way to keep out of trouble was to keep in your place. But I let him down lightly. I stopped and whispered through the bars as I passed, ‘The hack’s watching me.”
That night I asked Starlight about him. “What the hell did a kid like him do to get in here?”
“Who, Blackie? Man, he’s every bit of thirty-five years old. He was a machine gunner for the Lucky Lou mob.
Doing double life for machine-gunning two guys in Black-stone Park.”
The guard shift changed at six. After supper, when they had locked the men in their cells and taken the count, they relaxed and prepared to leave. For the most part they congregated in the stair well, down at the end of the cell blocks known as the hall, and shot the bull. During that time the convicts did all their extra-cell business. They shouted from cell to cell, from range to range, passed notes, passed objects down the range, someone in each cell moving it along. It was a time of great activity. The range boys who celled in the first cells of each range were still out. They were busy as cats covering up crap, hustling their change—doing whatever anyone wanted done for a price. The convicts passed objects from one range to another by tying them to strings, throwing them over the range and lowering away. When the object reached the desired range another convict would reach out of his cell and draw in the object with a wire hook. Then the sender would shout down directions, and it would be passed on to the next cell to be passed on down to its destination. Every convict had some sort of mirror, if only a broken fragment, and whenever a convict started a note or a package down the range he’d angle his mirror in the bars so he could watch its progress. We could also watch the guards in this way. Although it was against the rules to have such implements, and if caught with them it meant time in the hole, every cell had a hook, a string, a mirror, and many of the convicts had knives, clubs, sections of pipe, homemade blackjacks, and other instruments of aggression and defense.
The cell lights were turned on after supper, to remain on until bedtime. I began to read my morning paper which had been stuck into my cell by the paper boy in my absence. But Starlight wanted to talk. He told me about the time he was a member of The Syndicate, and about the automobiles he had owned and the thousands of dollars he had won in dice games in the army. Every convict had owned at least two Cadillacs and had at least fifty thousand dollars in civilian life.
He was a short, fat, redheaded guy who thought he looked like a prize fighter. Actually he looked like a chubby, good-natured little runt. He was. He told me that they called him the Boston Red Squirrel and that he was in for driving the getaway car during a bank robbery. He said he drew eighty dollars a month disability pension and that he had been General MacArthur’s orderly.
The routine of the soup company was: Get up at six, wash, breakfast, idle house, cells and wash, dinner, cells, idle house, cells and wash, supper, cells, bedtime. Saturday afternoons we remained in the cells. Sunday mornings we went to church. We took our buckets to the dining room Sundays at dinnertime and brought back a half-bucket of soup and two slices of bread for our supper. Those of us who had money bought sandwiches and slices of pie from fellows on the other ranges.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we went to the barbershop and on Fridays to bathe. The bathhouse was across from the idle house. There was a waiting room inside where we stood in line until our numbers were called. Then we stepped to the counter and received our change of clothing from the commissary clerk. Afterward we marched into the showers. In the center, benches surrounded a platform. We sat on the benches, undressed, piled our clothes on the platform. When we were all undressed we stood beneath the showers, often three and four men to each shower. The guard signaled the attendant who turned o
n the water. Always the water was too cold or too hot. It stayed on for three minutes. We dried and dressed and filed out the doorway, dropping our soiled socks into a basket, under the watchful eyes of the guard. We had to hold up our shirts and underwear, extended so that the guard could see that they had not been cut or torn. This was to keep us from tearing our clothes to get new ones, or holding out so we could get extras. We turned in our towels and got clean ones. That was our weekly bath.
Each morning we were required to sweep our cells. We were not furnished with brooms. We used old newspapers. Afterward the range boy came along and swept the range. If the guard wasn’t watching he’d just sweep it off below, where it blew back into the cells and on the ranges beneath. Once a week he would bring around a pail of water and a mop. The water was strong with lysol. Each of us mopped our own cells. He never changed the water. We mopped the twenty-seven cells with the same bucket of water.
“Jim, you ought to give the range boy something,” Starlight told me once. “He can do you favors.”
“Give him what?”
“Oh, a couple of twists a week will do. Just let him keep your state-issue tobacco. You never use it, anyway, and they’re the pettiest chiselers in the joint.”
“What the hell do I want to give him my tobacco for?”
“Oh, he can do you a lot of favors. He can carry messages and pass papers and packages. He can connect with the yard runners and get stuff from all over the joint.”
“That’s right, too,” I agreed. I’d been using the paper boys but I had to give them something each time.
“You have to give everybody a handout,” Starlight said. “Everybody in here’s got a racket. You have to pay the waiters in order to get something to eat. You have to pay the nurses and the doctors in order to get into the hospital. You have to pay the bucket boy before he’ll clean out your bucket.”
“Damn right, you have to pay to get your clothes washed if you own any of your own, like handkerchiefs and pajamas and underwear and stuff. If you put them in the laundry you’ll never get them back.”
“But if you give the commissary clerk a handout he’ll furnish you with tailor-made shirts. You pay for everything,” he said. “Maybe you don’t know it but they charge you for your clothes, your food and all the medicine you get from the hospital. That’s why nobody ever has any earnings when they turn ‘em loose. You know we’re supposed to be getting eighteen cents a day for working in here but some of these poor bastards work for twenty years in here and when they go home all they get is the lousy ten-dollar bill the state gives them.”
“Hell, you can get that if you don’t do a lick of work,” I said.
“Sure. You get more for not working than you do for working. That’s why I don’t do any work. You don’t get nothing but a pain in the ass from working.”
“You get the t.b. if you work in the mills,” I said. I’d heard that.
“Work in those mills and get the t.b. and die and then they won’t even give you nothing but a plain wood box to be buried in.” We were just shooting the bull to pass off the time; neither of us really gave a damn about it.
“The only thing you get in here worth a damn for your earnings is some teeth,” he said. “They’ll give you some gold teeth.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”
“Sure, they’ll give you gold teeth. But they ain’t worth a damn. They’re about ninety-per cent brass and canker in your mouth. They turn green in a week and give you cancer of the stomach. A son of a bitch’s got the toothache, so he figures he’ll get some gold teeth. Next goddamn thing he’s got the cancer and is dead as hell. It don’t pay. If you ever have any dentist work done you better pay for it out your pocket.”
“Can you do that?”
“Sure. You can buy anything in this joint you want. Whisky, dope. You can pay these guards to take letters out for you. They’ll bring in stuff for you, too. I got a buddy in the construction company who it costs a hundred dollars a month, at the very least, just to live in here. Hell, I used to buy three meals a day myself. I used to have a big radio set but it cost me so much to keep it up I had to sell it.”
I was getting tired of his crap by then. “Damn right,” I said, ending it. “Everything in here’s a racket.”
“That’s the setup,” he said. “The only thing you can get plenty of in here, without paying for it in some way or another, is hell.”
“And that’s free,” I said. And that wasn’t a lie, I found out. That was the solid truth.
9
THERE WERE MANY things that happened during that time but all of them that I remember happening, happened to me. They happened to me in sight and in feeling and in smelling and in hearing; emotionally and spiritually. The seasons happened to me. Spring was as heady as a drink of rare old wine, and white clouds in a high blue summer sky happened to me like a choking up of tears. The routine happened to me and the discipline; and being locked up with Starlight to smell his unique stink which he said came from being poisoned by Jap wine in the war; and the sight of the convicts happened to me. Nights happened to me and made me want to see the sky and the stars and smell it out at night.
But nothing lingered, neither the shocks, nor the scares, nor the laughs, nor the hurts. Nothing had a past or a future and when the feeling or the emotion happened, stirring up its definite sensation, that was all. I could not bring it back to conjure up that laugh again, nor could it come back of its own accord to bring those tears.
Each moment was absolute, like a still-life photograph; each happening lived its span and died, unrelated to the ones that came before and afterward. A day was not the seventh part of a week, but in itself infinity.
I thought through seeing and smelling and feeling, and many times I was deeply touched, angered, sickened, amused, frustrated, shocked, but none of these outlived the sensation which spawned them—the simple sound, the simple smell. Everything was an odor, a sound, a picture; hot or cold, blunt or sharp, amusing or irritating.
That was present tense. It was timeless, governed neither by the seasons nor the years, neither by the past nor the future, but in itself complete. It was not automatic because there was thought in it; nor was it meditative because that almost always is retrospective and it was not retrospective. What it was, in fact, as any old-timer could have told me, I was simply doing time.
But although there was thought in it, it was not necessary to think in order to survive. Everything necessary to survival was in a pattern, an old and musty pattern that some poor convict had used before you got there, and which some poor convict would use after you were gone, and which, like the gray stone walls, was eternal. There was no need for retrospection, nor introspection, nor even experience. If you had never lived before, anywhere at all, you still would have no need to know how it was done, as it was all down in the pattern.
The things that happened in the pattern are not the things which stand out most clearly in recollection, but are the things which are completely gone. Only the pattern is remembered, such as dinner, which is not remembered as the midday meal on a Tuesday, February 21st, but as two thousand six hundred and forty-five midday meals strung out like an endless chain of plates of beans and potatoes and cabbage. The things which stand out clearly are those which were done in contradiction or discord with the pattern. So it was with the things that happened to me during my time in the soup company.
The first day of spring happened, but it happened only on the calendar. The day itself was cold and dreary with the bleakness that comes alone to prison—gray, gray top, gray bottom, gray men, gray walls, dull-toned and unrelieved, with the sky so low you could feel the weight of it on your shoulders. At first there was slush underfoot, soggy and soot-blackened, and then the rains came. I learned then what they meant by it never rains in prison. We marched through the rain with our caps pulled low and our collars turned high.
“Take those hands out your pocket! You had ‘em out all winter, now you don’t want to get the
m wet.”
It was not raining. Fog was the only thing that kept us in our cells.
The warden had us new men over to talk to us. He was the remnants of a large man gone to seed, dressed in an expensive suit made for that man and much too large in the shoulders for the remnant of the man, and too small in the waistline for where he had all gone to. His head was practically bald and his face, seamed and sagging, looked as if it had melted through the years and had run down into his jowls which, in turn, had dripped like flaccid tallow onto his belly. His shoulders had sagged down onto his belly too, so that now his whole skinny frame seemed built to keep his belly off the ground. He had sickly white, vein-laced hands which made one nauseated to look at them. He wore a huge diamond on his second finger.
What he said, boiled down, was simply that he was tough. That any man so completely decayed could wield the power to make himself tough to four thousand human beings so much stronger was a sickening realization.
That night Nig and the night guard had it. Nig was yelling up to some convict on 3-10 and the guard, walking down the second range, heard him. The guard stopped, took the cigar from his mouth, spat on the range, and called below, “Pipe down, down there! What the hell you think this is, a levee camp?” He was standing in front of our cell.
“Come down and make me,” Nig called up.
The guard reddened. He was a young, medium-built, dark-haired man with a bluish growth of whiskers. Instead of the regulation uniform he wore a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit. He kept his coat unbuttoned so we could see the bright butt of the thirty-eight special he wore in the shoulder holster, and after seeing the gun we could smell narcissus perfume, whisky and cheap cigars. That always made me think of whores—the lousy kind. “I’ll come down and break your skull, you black nigger bastard!” he snarled.
“Come on.”
Someone laughed. He rushed down the range, tugging at his gun. I was excited.
“Come on down, punk,” Nig said.
“What’ll he do to him?” I asked Starlight.
Cast the First Stone Page 10