by Lee Taylor
One of the inmates speaks up. The one I thought might be Speck. He’s a short white man, about twenty-five, wearing round glasses and a crew cut. Doesn’t look anything like Speck. I wonder if I’d recognize him if I did see him? It’s been more than twenty years.
“It true we get to meet Schwarzenegger?”
“Well, it all depends on the time factor and the work. The talent pretty much keeps to themselves, but Arnold’s different. He’s real outgoing. So who knows? Maybe.”
The four men seem pleased with my answer. I start asking some questions while Mike takes the head shots with our Polaroid. I don’t get their names, just their numbers—that’s the only way we can identify them—and they don’t get our full names, just in case they want to identify us.
Crew Cut and the black kid standing next to him bring their hands up around their heads, like they’re about to fix their hair, but then don’t.
“Arms down. Stand straight,” Captain Bob orders. The black kid doesn’t listen and Mike snaps the picture. “You’ll have to take it again,” the Captain demands while holding out his hand, waiting for Mike to rip off the picture and hand it to him. He does. The room gets quiet. The guard tears it into four pieces, and tosses them on the table.
The kid looks down at the floor, puts his hands at his sides and brings his head back up for another picture. The only sound is the click from the camera.
I break the silence. “We need some men to be skinheads. Any of you in the mood for a close shave? The pay goes up twenty bucks each day, plus you get to stand around with the talent.”
Three of them nod and mutter, “Sure.”
The black kid, who is maybe nineteen, answers, “I got me a problem with that. My head ain’t so nice no more. Took a bullet. That gonna mean I can’t be in no movie?”
“Would you shave your head?”
He shakes his head no and runs his fingers over the obvious groove in his skull. “No ma’am. I can’t.”
I look into his eyes and for an instant I see a vulnerable young man. Wonder what the hell got him locked up in this place. Whatever that was, had to be bad.
“Let’s go,” Captain Bob says. The men start to move away from the wall toward the other door. The two guards exchange inmates like game pieces and so the process begins. I do my job, Mike does his and the guards do theirs. The day passes without incident.
• • •
The last of the inmates walks through around four o’clock. I’m exhausted. Vivian’s just getting started.
“I wasn’t here for the last movie,” she says, “and I understand that it was quite the nightmare. I don’t see how anything could go wrong this time. I met Mr. Hill, the director, and he seems like a man in control. I don’t think he’d ever let any of his people have sex with the inmates like the last director did.”
“The directors can’t control what the talent does off camera.”
“I guess not, but Mr. Hill seems like such a strong leader. Are most Hollywood directors like him?”
“I don’t really know. Haven’t given it much thought,” I tell her while I stack all my blue papers so that Mike can collect them. She’s starting to annoy me.
“Oh, this is all so wonderful for morale. Couldn’t you see the excitement in their eyes?”
I stop to look at her.
“Is that what that was?”
“Do you think you met any future stars among these men?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Vivian gets a concerned look on her face.
“Yes,” Mike says, interrupting my next thought. “All of them have potential. You can never tell about a person. And what about you, Vivian. You ever think about being in the movies? You could be the next Meryl Streep.”
Vivian blushes and plays right into Mike’s hands.
“Me? Oh, no. I could never be a movie star. I’d have to live in L.A. and you know what they say about L.A. I’d be too scared.”
Again I have to stop to look at her. Who is this woman? Doesn’t she hear herself? She sounds nutty, like some kind of spinhead. I open my mouth to spit out the perfect wisecrack, like “oh, and you feel safe here at Stateville?” but Warden Evans walks in. A man of reality. I let my wisecrack die.
“All set then?” he asks.
Mike answers, “Yeah, all set.”
“Good. I’ll escort you out.”
Mike shoves the stat sheets, with the pictures attached, into his black bag and we all turn to go out the way we came in. Somehow we end up in single file, Mike right in front of me and Vivian in front of him. It’s as if we’re back in grade school. Or maybe it’s the effect of the guards—Warden Evans leads and Captain Bob brings up the rear.
“Single file now. No slouching,” I whisper into Mike’s ear.
He turns toward me a little and smiles.
When we hit the open courtyard, I can feel my body letting go of some of the day’s tension. The sky is an intense blue and there’s a slight cooling breeze making a low rumbling sound as it comes off the fences and surrounding towers. The taunting from the inmates has diminished substantially, and we walk in silence. I try to remain calm. Not allowing myself to think about where I am. Where Speck might be. Glad that I got through the day.
Still in single file, we walk down a cement path towards the tunnel we came through this morning. A group of people, probably from the movie, three men and a tall blonde woman, walk across the courtyard on the other side with a guard. They’re talking and laughing about something. The blonde is carrying a personal video camera. Why would anybody want to take home movies of this place? They spot us and nod our way, as if they know us.
Mike and I nod and smile in return. The thing about working a movie on location is that you meet a lot of people, both from the crew and from the world around you. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep up with all the new faces.
“You know anybody?” Mike asks as he gawks at the blonde.
“No, I’ve never seen her before.”
“I said, ‘do you know anybody?’ Not ‘do you know the blonde?’”
“Like you’re looking at anybody else.”
“I might be,” Mike says wearing a sly looking grin.
“Yeah, right.”
“That’s the trouble with you, Carly. You assume all men think about is sex. There are other things we’re concerned with, you know.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“I can’t answer that right now. The blonde just winked at me.”
“It won’t work, you know.”
“What?”
“You trying to make me jealous like this. Look, I have my own winking guy,” I tell him as one of the men, dressed in white, pushing some kind of cart breaks off from the group and heads toward us. He winks again and then rubs his eyes.
“That’s not a wink. He just has something in his eye. The blonde actually winked. You’re the one who’s jealous. Not me.”
“You wish.”
“A little jealousy is good for the soul.”
“Aren’t you more the brunette type? And speaking of brunettes, too bad Mr. Denthead wouldn’t shave. He was perfect,” I say.
“Poor bastard. He seemed so shy. What could’ve he have done? Maybe he just got caught in the crossfire or something.”
Captain Bob interrupts, saying, “He’s a member of the Gangster Disciples. He was trying to give gang signals on that picture. That’s why I had to rip it up. Man’s in for rape and attempted murder. Don’t let that ‘yes, ma’am’ talk fool ya. He’s trouble.”
I gaze over at Mike. I can tell he’s in shock. Like he never would have guessed in a million years what the kid did. Funny. I thought his crimes might have been worse. Much worse.
We enter the tunnel through the open doorway and head for the three gates. The only sound is the clack clack of our feet on the cement. Almost there. Almost free.
Just then, an alarm of some sort goes off. It seems to be coming from all the towers and from inside the buildings. Loud.
Almost ear shattering.
“Now what?” Mike asks Captain Bob.
“It’s a lockdown. Just relax and stay where you are. We can usually get through these things in a short time. Nobody goes anywhere until all the inmates are accounted for.”
For some reason, I notice that Captain Bob has one of those thick Chicah-go accents. Perfect casting.
“Just remain calm. It shouldn’t take too long,” Warden Evans offers with an apologetic grin.
I crack a smile and groan my defeated acceptance. The alarm stops. Other guards rush around us. Their feet pounding the cement floor like thoroughbreds on a racetrack.
There’s a screeching sound coming from the guy with the cart behind us. One of the wheels probably needs oil or something. I turn to get a better look. Familiar. Seems as though I know him, but I can’t place him—maybe a crew member from that River Phoenix movie we did a few months back. A carpenter. The guy kept following me around. Wanted to be an extra. What was his name? Annoying guy with a short name…what was it?
Jim, that was it. Carpenter Jim.
While I’m sort of smiling at the warden and proud that I remembered the guy’s name, I turn to ask Carpenter Jim a question. Maybe he can tell me something about this lockdown thing. Maybe he’s already been through it while he was building the set.
I turn, smiling. As soon as I do, he spots me. A slow, crooked smile cuts across his face.
I recognize the smile, that particular smile.
The screeching wheel on the cart intensifies with each rotation. It becomes louder than the alarm was, bouncing off the walls and piercing through my brain. I have to cover my ears to protect myself.
Bells. The warning bells on a drawbridge.
The wind—a ship’s horn.
I tell myself to just breathe. Pull the air in. Out.
I move up to the front of the line where Warden Evans says something to the guard on the other side of the gate.
“I have to get out of here,” I say, but the words don’t come out right. I’m shaking too much.
“Try to remain calm. There’s nothing to get nervous about,” the warden answers while he turns to look at the man behind us.
“There’s Richard now,” he says as casually as that. Like a friend has just arrived. The warden turns back to the guard and adds, “You know Speck’s number, right?”
I take a millisecond to try to convince myself I’d heard wrong. This can’t be Speck. Not now. Not this close.
But I heard right.
Richard Franklin Speck stops the cart about two feet away from me. He wears his hair in a weird, early Beatles’ haircut, and I swear there are breasts bouncing under his paint-stained overalls as he bends over to straighten something on his cart. He’s a big man, thick in the middle from years of neglect. The veins in his hands prominent. A splash of gray paint sticks in the folds of his somewhat swollen fingers. His nails, dirty. Those hands. His murderous hands only inches from my throat.
A thin film of sweat binds my clothing to my skin. My stomach churns. Nausea overwhelms me.
I turn away from the group, run past Speck and down to the doorway we just entered. Once out in the courtyard, I lean over and vomit on the manicured lawn.
My name is Valentine Passion, Tina to my friends.
We begin to learn English in the Philippines when we first go to school; therefore it is natural that most of us want to go to America as soon as we get old enough to be on our own. A person can make a lot of money in America. I wanted to be that person. I wanted to help my family with that money, for we were very poor.
I graduated from Manila Central University School of Nursing in 1965. Almost immediately I tried to come to the United States with the nurses exchange program, but twice there were problems with my passport. Finally, in April of 1966 everything cleared up. I arrived in Chicago the following month. The drive from O’Hare airport, through the city, to the Southeast Side was, perhaps, the happiest moment of my life.
Even though I missed everyone and would sometimes cry myself to sleep, I wrote home to tell my sister Aida, that I wished I could stay forever. I knew she would understand because she had wanted to come to the United States as much as I did.
There were two men who wanted to marry me. I wrote to each one as much as I could. Sometimes, I liked them both the same, and other times I liked the dentist more than the doctor. He liked Jerry Vale. So did I, but marrying either one of them would force me to return to the Philippines. Unless, of course, one of them, perhaps the dentist, would come to Chicago. We would have bought a small house, not too far from South Chicago Community Hospital. I wanted to go on working there and raise a family. With both our incomes, we would have sent a lot of money home and eventually brought some of my sisters and brothers to Chicago. That way, I wouldn’t have been so lonely.
By July, I had managed to send my parents more than three hundred dollars, almost half of my salary. I wanted them to use the money to fix up the house, but they never had the opportunity.
My father received a phone call from the State Department on July 15 telling him that his twenty-three-year-old daughter had been a victim of a mass murder.
While my hands and feet were still bound, Richard Speck dragged me across the wooden bedroom floor to the back bedroom. Once there, he knelt down behind me. Terrified, I tried to yell out. He slit my throat and pushed me face down onto the floor, careful not to get any of my blood on his clothes. Then, when it was over, he slowly and systematically washed his face and hands in the bathroom sink.
The three hundred dollars I had sent home arrived just in time to pay for my burial expenses.
Six
I’m reclining on a small sofa in Vivian’s crowded office, struggling to get control of my spastic stomach while Mike rests a cool, wet towel on my forehead and tries to convince me to drink some tea. “It’ll settle your stomach.”
“I don’t want any, thank you,” I tell him.
Vivian peers over me. “But sweetie, it will make you feel better,” she coos.
“No, thanks. I just need to get out of here for awhile,” I tell her, forcing out a smile. I mumble to Mike, “Like for the rest of my life.”
“I’m afraid you can’t do that just yet. Relax. Try sitting up. Sometimes that helps,” Vivian says.
Mike agrees. “Maybe she’s right.”
I feel like I’m trapped with Bert and Ernie, each going along with the other for the sake of agreeing.
I sit up, if for nothing else but to get them to be quiet.
“There. Isn’t that better?” Vivian asks.
Immediately the room starts to spin. I grab my purse and run off to the bathroom.
“Poor dear,” Vivian says while I make my way out of her office and down the hall. “Some women just have a terrible time—” Her voice fades into a weird sort of sing-song thing, like the bells on a drawbridge and I’m back in South Chicago.
• • •
Just as we arrived on the corner of 100th and Commercial Avenue, the bells started ringing on the bridge signaling a passing ship. We ran the rest of the way, yelling and laughing. Lisa lagged behind, struggling to keep up. Sharon and I turned back every now and then just to make sure Lisa didn’t pass out or anything. It was a pretty hot day.
“Come on, you slow poke, you’re going to miss it,” Sharon yelled back to Lisa as she ran up the block.
“Oh, go on,” Lisa shouted, waving her hand. “There’ll be another one.”
Sharon and I ran off without her. There were times when one of us had to be sacrificed for the common good of the group. This was one of those times. The ship could be from England.
We crossed the first street weaving in between the waiting traffic, then the next, all the while screaming fantasies to each other using our best English accents.
“I’ll have to bring Ringo here, you know. Just to remind ‘im of ‘ome,” I chanted, almost out of breath. Sharon laughed as she reached our special vantage point next to the brown gateh
ouse. “Then I’ll be bringing Paul as well. The lads might get a kick out of it.”
From around the bend we could see the ship heading straight for us. A small tugboat pulled it along the river. The drawbridge was completely lifted, its street and sidewalks pointing to the sky. I loved to stand right next to the sidewalk and pretend I was lying down on it, arms outstretched, head tilted up. It felt strange to see the sky at the end of the sidewalk, almost as though if I stood up I could walk straight up to heaven. That way I could simply ask God to let me marry Ringo. It seemed much easier than going to Mass every morning and hoping that He heard my prayers.
“Can you see where it’s from?” Sharon asked as she strained to make out the ship’s flag. “Is it British? Oh please let it be from England.”
I left my heaven sidewalk and joined her on the side of the bridge. “I can’t see a flag anywhere.” I climbed up on the small ledge to get a better look.
The ship slowly made its way toward us, blasting its horn every now and then. Next to a Beatles song, there wasn’t a more pleasurable sound than the combination of the bells from the bridge mixed with a ship’s bellow.
“It’s from Germany,” Lisa said while standing behind us. “There’s the flag.” We all looked at each other and screamed.
“That proves it then,” Sharon proclaimed. “It’s a sign from God. We have a real German sailor staying right next door to me. He probably got off that very ship.”
We all screamed again.
The ship was right beside us by then. So close we could see the faces of the men who stood on her deck. Four sailors screamed something to us in German, each vying for our attention, waving, jumping up and down, and whistling. Sharon and I leaned over the railing as far as we could and yelled, “Have you met the Beatles? Do you know the Beatles?”
The men recognized the word Beatles and started rattling off lyrics, “I want to hold your hand, yeah, yeah, yeah, please, please me, just seventeen, you know what I mean…Help, I need somebody!” All the while they yelled they mimed several heart-throb poses, such as going down on one knee or clasping their hands over their heart. We waved back and when they were right beside us Sharon sang out, “I want to hold your ha-a-a-nd. Baby slow down, ooh baby you move too fast,” to which one guy almost fell overboard trying to get to us.