The Graybar Hotel

by Curtis Dawkins

“Hey, Wiggins,” Micky said to one of the deputies. “What kind of voltage you think is running through that fence?”

  “Why don’t you grab it and find out?” Wiggins said.

  “All right,” Micky said, and pulled Sideshow toward the fence. Sideshow just smiled, apparently not realizing the current would pass through the handcuffs into him too.

  Wiggins turned around, smiling until he saw Micky reaching. The smile dropped and his eyes went black—he must have seen his twenty years of service washed away in lawyers and television crews, microphones and a face-to-face with the mayor of Kalamazoo.

  Micky’s hand got a couple of inches away before he pulled it back. Wiggins had taken two steps in his direction. His partner went after him and was ready to step between, but they were eye to eye when Wiggins whispered something under his breath and walked away.

  “What do you think he said?” Ray asked me as we neared the entrance to the processing center.

  Micky piped up. “He wished me long life, good health, and sweet dreams at night.” He and Sideshow entered the building. The electric door shushed closed behind them.

  Ray was legally deaf without his hearing aids, which he hadn’t seen since the night he was arrested for shooting his estranged wife dead. “What did he say?” he asked.

  “He wished him a good life and sweet dreams.”

  “Really? That’s pretty nice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The electric door slid open, we walked in, and Ray began to whistle softly. I didn’t have the heart to quiet him.

  * * *

  We were taken to a room with sheets of white paper covering half the floor in random squares. We were uncuffed and told to strip. The deputies collected the County jumpsuits, flip-flops, and handcuffs and left without a word. There was one guard there, small and bald. One of the guys asked if we were to strip completely.

  “If your old lady asked you to strip would you stand around asking if she meant completely?”

  We took off our socks and underwear too. We put on faded blue, ill-fitting prison jumpsuits and filled out the medical forms that lay scattered on the floor of the room. Pictures were taken and tattoos were listed for our ID cards. Fingerprints were scanned into a computer. In a small, private room I told a lady the names of my next of kin before she injected me with a TB test and hepatitis vaccination.

  We showered and went to the gymnasium for our clothes. Fellow inmates stood at tables stenciling on our numbers using rollers and white paint. Months ago, after our convictions or plea deals, we had each been given our six digits, but this was the first time we had seen them on our clothes: three button-up blue shirts; three pairs of pants; five pairs of tube socks; three T-shirts; two thermal shirts; two thermal underpants; five pair of briefs; a canvas belt; a bright orange sock hat; a blue baseball cap; a blue and orange winter coat; black dress shoes; white tennis shoes; and two pairs of pajamas. A small paper bag held five metered envelopes, a flexible pen, and fifty pages of writing paper. We took turns changing clothes in the wide-open restroom, dropping our jumpsuits on an ever-rising pile. We each had a heavy, dark green bag to carry it all, and with the orange stripe running down the length of our legs and across our backs, we looked like a bowling team in brand-new outfits as we walked out of the gym. Micky and I stopped near each other. “Shoes,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and we looked at our feet as if we had a couple of fish there. Neither of us had worn shoes in a very long time. They felt like an old, favorite song.

  A guard told us simply, “Library.” Micky and I hesitated because we didn’t know the way, and he called us a couple of dumb motherfuckers. I knew that he too would seem like a prop if I described his big, fat, miserable face and his stellar vocabulary, but there you go.

  In the library, we sat at long tables with other new and returning prisoners. We were handed plastic bags with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, juice, and potato chips. A middle-aged man sporting a mustache and calling himself Z gave us information on AIDS and explained how tattoos in prison were the most common way to contract HIV. “But sex is a big spreader too,” he said, and laughed.

  “What do you do if someone wants to give you a pack of cigarettes for free?” Z asked.

  A small black man in the front row answered: “You don’t take it.”

  “And why not?” Z reached into his front pocket, slipped out a Pall Mall, and tossed it to the man.

  “Because he’ll want to get paid.”

  Z asked a few more questions, rewarding the men who answered with cigarettes. He told us we could trade our metered envelopes for four cigarettes to the other prisoners who were in quarantine awhile, but some would try to give us three. He said that our objective was to make it through the next five or six weeks and “be on the next bus rolling” to our destination prison. Z seemed nice enough, which is what made the whole experience more frightening—one person of authority would be a decent example of humanity and the next would be a raging numbskull. It was like living with manic, dysfunctional parents—warm and accepting one minute, cold and abusive the next.

  Z wished our group luck. We shouldered our duffel bags and walked out into the large recreation yard behind the prison walls. The rain had softened to a light, foggy drizzle. Guys were huddled in groups of five or six smoking the new cigarettes. The smoke surrounded them in a soft blue haze that lifted slowly into the air. I hadn’t smoked in nearly eleven months and that sweet, earthy smell of burning tobacco caused me to think of home and all the pain I’d caused. I thought of my children and freedom, everything I’d taken and lost. Tommy, the guy with the kiestered Seroquel, was sharing a cigarette with Micky. He saw me watching and motioned me over. He offered me the cigarette and saw my hand shake as I reached for it. “I know, I’m shaking too,” he said. He noticed the water in my eyes and looked across the yard. It’s a phenomenon between prisoners in the presence of another’s emotions—they look away and become quiet. It’s one boundary we all respect.

  I took a slow drag off Tommy’s hand-rolled and instantly became light-headed. I had imagined that moment for a long time, and though I always assumed I would cough, I didn’t. Micky took a drag and asked Tommy where he got it. “One of the guys where we got our clothes traded some for an envelope,” he said. “Is this the first time down for both of you?” Micky and I nodded.

  “Just be careful who you hang around with, don’t mess with anyone’s sissy, don’t gamble, and you’ll be fine. Prison ain’t like it used to be. What about him?” he said, nodding toward Ray, who was still whistling as he stared out into the yard at nothing in particular. “It’s gonna be rough for him.”

  Tommy didn’t give a reason but he didn’t have to. We knew.

  There were four guards outside with us waiting for lists telling where we were to be housed. Tommy lit another cigarette and blew a smoke ring that just skimmed the top of Micky’s shaved head. “I dreamed about all this years ago,” Micky said. He was looking toward the continuous line of brick buildings across the yard. “Is that where we’re going?”

  “I’m not sure how they do things now,” said Tommy, handing the cigarette to me. “You may start out in the South Buildings, or you may start out in Seven Block. I heard now if you’re a violent, they start you in Seven. What’d you do?”

  Micky looked at the ground. “Robbed a bank,” he said. I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, and I thought Tommy would respect that, but he didn’t. He wanted to find out if Micky was lying, if he was a molester trying to cover it up. “How’d you get caught?”

  “My mom,” he said.

  “How’d she know?”

  “She found my disguise.”

  “What was it?”

  “A clown.”

  “No shit,” said Tommy. “That was you?”

  Micky looked up and smiled like a C-list celebrity happy to be recognized. “I had the hair, the nose, the clothes—I had everything but the big shoes. I could never find a pair of big shoes.” Micky had a pron
ounced forehead that overshadowed his eyes. He had jutting cheekbones, acne around his temples, and scraggly hair on his chin. There was a half-finished homemade tattoo heart on his forearm, probably made in County with a diabetic lancet.

  “You were probably better off without those shoes,” Tommy said, tossing the cigarette butt to the sidewalk. “No way you could have run in them.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” said Micky. “They would have been lucky. I could fly with the shoes in my dream. I think that means I would have never gotten caught. But hey, so, is bank robbery a violent crime?”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said.

  “I kind of figured.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to not rob a bank in a getup like that? That just because you dreamed it—”

  “No,” Micky said. “It was perfect. I don’t regret a thing except the shoes.”

  “Well fucking A, then. So were you a happy clown, or a sad clown?”

  “Oh, sad, definitely—it was serious business.”

  I watched Tommy as he took in this last answer. I had known a guy in County who knew exactly what I was thinking in times like these. I always figured he could read it on my face, and as I looked at Tommy smiling, I knew he wasn’t imagining at all what I was: I could think only of this poor kid’s tennis shoes—dirty, worn-out, sadder than any makeup he could ever paint on his face.

  Tommy summed things up: “In here there are far worse things you could be than a fucked-up clown. Yup, there are worse things.”

  The guards got their prisoner lists and split us into two groups. The six of us from Kalamazoo were split in half with Micky, Ray, and me on one side. We thanked Tommy for the smoke and he wished us well, “Godspeed,” I think he said. Maybe “God bless.” God was in there, whatever it was.

  * * *

  We passed through the new hospital annex and entered a different part of the prison property. The large buildings we had seen were now to our backs, and joined another long row that was only a vague shape within the mist in the distance. We walked along the razor-wire fence encircling the prison’s yard. At our side was a quarter mile of open field, but it was misty enough that I couldn’t see the end of that either. As if on cue, we began to hear voices off to our right, catcalls for the new arrivals. Micky and I and some of the others laughed, but Ray and a few more veered away from the fence.

  Micky spit, then yelled. “I’ll climb that fence and fuck you up, bitch!”

  The fifty or so men who had by now crossed the running track let out a collective “Oooh,” and laughed. There was a regulation-size football field marked off with bright orange pylons and a game in progress. Past the football field was one, maybe two baseball fields, and everything beyond that the mist hid from sight.

  Ray walked up beside me. “I thought prison wasn’t like that anymore. I didn’t think people got raped anymore,” he said.

  “Those guys were just messing around.”

  “Well, it’s not funny.”

  “Yeah, well, you may as well laugh.”

  He spoke slowly then, trying to share what I imagine was something like disappointment: “I thought things would make more sense once we got here, at least more than County, but nothing seems to. Do you know what I mean?”

  “You’ll be fine, Ray,” I said.

  We had moved out of range from the catcalling. The full duffel bag was getting heavier in my hand. Some men had the bags across their shoulders. We walked through what could have been an abandoned industrial complex—empty warehouses and uninhabited cellblocks. There were bars on all the windows and small video cameras mounted high in the corners of the buildings. A water tower overshadowed an empty basketball court, and a chapel with a tall bell stood unused. We passed several empty greenhouses and then began to see signs of life—the grass was manicured and trash cans were freshly painted. There was an apple tree, pigeons pecking at fallen fruit. Through a window in a two-story building I saw a very bright light. I stopped to look and to shift the duffel bag to my shoulder.

  I could see shelving with new plants under bright growing lights. Some of them were bushy and long, their leafy vines cascading to the shelf below. It looked like a jungle awash in Amazon sunlight and I imagined working around all those lights, snipping leaves and caring for the plants in the soft, black, jungle dirt. We kept walking but I kept looking back, trying to capture another flash of that light, before it was lost to the mist.

  We came to the wide, steel doors and a sign above neatly painted in red script: 7 BLOCK. 7 Block was like all the other cellblocks we had passed, except it was inhabited. Upon reaching our destination I realized neither the guards, the razor wire, nor the walls held us in place. It was the confusion. By the time we reached 7 Block, I had no idea which way was out.

  We entered the building and heard the steady hum of five hundred men talking. We walked down the center of five stories of single-man cells. Prisoners on the ground level tried to trade us cigarettes for envelopes, but with a guard in front and one at our backs, none of us stopped. We sat at tables near the end of the cellblock and a woman with a bullhorn called us up to the third-floor officer’s station one at a time to get our cell assignments and two nylon netted laundry bags. The tags on mine read: 35-3-7, for Cell 35, third level, 7 Block. Micky was Cell 34 on the second level, and Ray was cell 12 on my level.

  I waited in front of my cell for the door to open. I was met by a young black man who introduced himself as Popcorn and asked if I wanted to trade some envelopes for cigarettes.

  “Yeah,” I said, and dug three out of my duffel bag. He handed me twelve neatly rolled smokes and a pack of matches. His hands had been badly burned and the tendons stuck out in relief from under the scar tissue. I wondered if the burn had something to do with his nickname, but I didn’t ask.

  My cell door opened and I went in. There were bars at the back as well with a walkway behind them. I could hear Micky talking to his new neighbors in his cell below mine. I put a sheet on the sickly green mattress, sat on the end, and looked across the space to the cells on the other side. Men were living their lives—reading paperback novels and Bibles, writing letters, napping, combing their hair, brushing teeth, exercising, a Muslim faced east on the floor. I wondered how he knew which way east was.

  “How can you tell when it’s safe to smoke?” I asked Popcorn.

  “You can’t tell from the back—you get caught, you get caught. From the front, though, get someone’s attention on the other side and they’ll look out.”

  So I whistled shyly and got no one’s attention. “You got to do it like this,” Popcorn said, and whistled loudly. A guy in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms on the second level looked up. I waved my cigarette at him; he looked left, then right, and gave me the thumbs-up.

  I lit the cigarette. The match hissed out in the stainless-steel toilet and I blew smoke toward the back of the cell while watching the man on the second level. I smoked half, knocked the ember off into the toilet bowl, and flushed. The flush sounded like a jet at takeoff, and I could feel air sucking down with the water. I lay down on the bed, went to sleep, and dreamed that someone kept stealing the batteries from the radio I once owned as a kid.

  * * *

  The next morning, Micky, Ray, and I were called out early to have our TB tests read. On the way back I looked up at that brightly lit indoor jungle without mentioning it to Ray or Micky. Another fence rolled back and we walked up to a guard who checked our yellow call-out sheets against our IDs. Micky talked about his dream last night the whole way. “I was driving a Ferrari, right? But it wasn’t on a road, it was through a shopping mall filled with Halloween costumes.”

  We were passing the open yard where the catcalls had been hurled the day before. Razor wire ran over the top of the fence and along the ground in front. Men jogged around the track, and nearer to the five-story cellblocks, they lifted weights. It could have been a college campus. There was probably half a mile of distance between us and the hospital building. That much spac
e gave me the feeling I always got while looking at oceans, or across some huge square in Moscow or Venice, though I’d never been to either. The sight caused me to long vaguely for those places—a false nostalgia made from space and mist.

  “But the shifter is all backwards,” said Micky, “so I can’t figure out how to make the car go fast at all. And this hot bitch is in the front seat with me—turns out, it’s the mom from that show, The Sopranos, but we start fighting because her husband is chasing us. Finally we end up doing it in a New Jersey hardware store. So, what do you think?” We were approaching the hospital annex.

  “I think you’ve got mother issues,” I said.

  “What? It wasn’t my mom. It’s the hot chick from TV.”

  “Still,” I said. “Did you and your mom get along?”

  “Hell no. She turned me in, the bitch.”

  “I know, but before that.”

  “I gave her crack when she wanted it,” he said. “Fuck it, man, never mind.” We walked into the hospital and stood in a long line to have a nurse check if the injection site was swollen. We were all clean.

  We took our time walking back, smoking and looking around. The mist had lifted somewhat and we could see the end of the field opposite the large prison yard. There were the two guard towers perched atop a long gray wall. The windows of the towers were darkly tinted. Why, I wondered, did they not want us to see in?

  “They’re having a huge hurricane down in Louisiana,” Ray said. “The guy in line behind me gets the paper. He said it’ll be raining up here by Sunday.” He looked up at the sky, which was as gray as it was on the ground. Micky and I kept walking, but Ray stopped and began to cry. His shoulders shook and saliva flew out of his mouth when he coughed. He took off his glasses and buried his face in his hands. “I can’t fucking take this,” he said. “I can’t take any of this. All my life I just walked in the woods, just walked in the woods . . .” His words trailed off into more sobs. I put my hand on his shoulder and Micky stood apart, watching. We had heard the “walked in the woods” speech before—it was when he was happy, alone and happy, before he met his estranged wife. What more could we say to cheer him up that we hadn’t already tried to say in County: that people make mistakes; you can’t look back; there is a reason for everything; life’s a bitch sometimes. Ray straightened up and began to walk again, slowly, like a man who’d had the wind kicked from him. The truth was, I envied his ability to break down and let the pain loose. “Whew,” he said. “Sorry.”