Just Like That

by Les Edgerton

  And back in the cells you had music. Not the greatest. Pendleton had one station, run by an old rummy con whose taste ran to what I called “Double-Wide Trailer Park Jams,” liked to play the same six songs over and over. There was a wall jack and you got earphones at the commissary to plug into it. I kinda missed that. At night, midnight exactly, a train always ran just outside the walls and tooted its whistle the whole time it was going by. The disc jockey, name of Jake, same as mine, always played the same song when it was going by. Porter Wagoner’s “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” That, or Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City.” Like to make you go berserk listening to that lonesome whistle outside the walls, listening to that sad, sad song. That was when guys made a bedsheet necktie, jumped off the stool in their cells and danced the Last Tango. About once every two, three months all the lights would dim, go out and then kick back on when the emergency generators cut in. Somebody’d taken their illegal hotplate and dropped it in the sink while they were holding on. It always happened in the middle or the end of that song, seemed like.

  It’s weird but I liked that. The song and the train. It was the saddest I’ve ever felt but it felt good in a twisted kind of way. It was such a deep fucking sad, reached down into your bones, I guess what it was it made you feel alive, more than at any other time. It’s like you were on the edge of taking the pipe yourself. Only way I can describe it is you just tried to hold onto the feeling long as possible, milk it for all it was worth just like you try and hold your nut till you’re ready to explode when you’re having sex. It hurt but it hurt good.

  Over in K Dorm you could hear that same train although there were times everybody was still making so much racket it was hard to make out so it wasn’t the same. Once in a while you just need a major league sad to get you straight, let you know you were still a human being, had the same kinds of things going through you regular people, straights, did.

  That time before when I had the toothache from the beans, I remember I’d hear one of those songs and it didn’t mean a thing. I didn’t feel it. That’s when Larry—I mean Wherry—started signifying on me. He might have been right. When you can listen to “The Green, Green Grass of Home” in here and not get punky inside you’re a con can do easy time.

  I remember hearing that song once in a while on the bricks, and I’d pull over if I could, and just put the car in park and close my eyes and try to get that feeling back. It wasn’t the same and I missed it. I don’t know if there’s a better feeling you can experience than listening to “The Green, Green Grass of Home” and hearing that train whistle while laying in a bunk at Pendleton at midnight, the back of your mind thinking about all the things that were going on back home that you were missing out on and would for a long, long time, maybe forever.

  Except for that, K Dorm was the best place to be in Pendleton. Manny and I were lucky to get assigned to it coming out of quarantine. Usually, you had to go to J or one of the other cellhouses and then earn K the old-fashioned way, as they say in that ad. Pay somebody off. They’d tell you it was awarded for good behavior but that was horseshit. Twenty bucks to the hack who was in charge was what got you K. I figured Dusty had something to do with us getting put there and I was right.

  “Fuck, man,” he said. We’re all firing up Camel regulars, sitting on his bunk. “I couldn’t let my rappy go into J, could I? You’da done the same for me.”

  “Man, this tastes good,” Manny said, sucking on his cigarette. “How do guys smoke that Hoosier shit?”

  We both laughed, Dusty and me. We’d smoked enough of the crap the state gave out free. Hoosier. It wasn’t tobacco, no matter what they told us. Wheat chaff is what we called it. Loose bits of brown shit in a white gauze bag with a drawstring. They gave you papers too, crap that came apart if you used too much spit. You ate about as much “tobacco” as you smoked. They claimed it was Indiana tobacco, grown down in the southern part of the state, but I never heard of no tobacco grown in Indiana. That was all done over in Virginia, places like that. Whatever it was, it was nasty stuff, but if you didn’t have any green on the books that’s what you smoked if you wanted a cigarette.

  That was one of the ways the blacks found new meat. They see a guy smoking Hoosier they knew he was poor. Slip the guy a deck of real butts and he was theirs if he took it. Same way they’d watch to see which of the new guys showed up at the chow hall on payday. Guys who had money skipped evening chow that day, filled up on Oreos and other sweet stuff they bought from the commissary. You didn’t have any money, you went to chow. It wasn’t hard to figure out who might need a daddy, be in the right frame of mind.

  I got another break besides getting assigned to K Dorm coming out of quarantine. I got back in the barber school. Manny too.

  Barber school was by far the best lick in the entire joint. It was one of maybe only two or three jobs where you actually learned a marketable skill. There wasn’t much call for making license plates on the outside and most of the other gigs weren’t much better. Places like the laundry, the metal shop, the chow hall—all they did was prepare you for a low paying, dead-end job when you got cut loose. Be a fry cook in a greasy diner, work for minimum wage in a dry cleaners. They talked all the time about how good the training was in the metalworking shop but guys who’d been out and come back said they couldn’t get a job in a real shop because all the Pendleton equipment was too old and never used anymore in real life.

  Barber school was different. Barber shop owners on the outside were waiting in line to get you to work for them. The reason was we were a thousand times better trained than the guys who went to school on the outside.

  In “straight” schools students got maybe two or three heads to cut each day. At the Thomas R. White School (the name of Pendleton’s barber college) we averaged fifteen heads a day, more than the guys on the outside did in a week. Plus, guys outside only went to school for nine months before they graduated and took their state exam. The least anyone in here was in school was two years and in most cases at least double that. We were the best haircutters in the state and everybody in the business knew it. At the state exam we blew everybody away. Hardly anybody from Pendleton or Michigan City scored less than ninety-five percent on the test and our practical exams where you did a haircut and a shave were works of art.

  It was a hoot to watch barber students from the outside shave. They’d shake. Their hands would be twitching like they had a disease. I wondered what their models thought when they looked up and saw that razor bearing down on their throats with the guy’s hand shimmying like his wheels were out of balance. We gave maybe three, four shaves a day, every day, and most of the guys on the outside were lucky to get in a shave a month. One of our tests in the school was the instructor would lather up a balloon and we’d have to shave it without popping it. Try that!

  When I took my test in Indianapolis to get my license the first time in Pendleton, I didn’t have a model for the practical part of the test. That was a common problem for inmates, being as we didn’t know anybody on the outside we could get. Most guys’ families had given up on them, gone their own ways. Disowned their sons, husbands, whatever. So what we did was the instructor would head down to Skid Row in Naptown and try and line up a bunch of bums needed haircuts and shaves and get ‘em over to the place where we all got tested, usually one of the barber schools in Indianapolis. You talk about a smelly bunch! You’d have to shampoo them six times to get half the crud out of their hair.

  The guy I ended up getting was in the middle of a severe case of DTs, kept jumping up out of the chair as giant cockroaches or something scary bore down on his alkie ass. I got through the haircut somehow, but when it came time to shave him, that was a different story. He was so far gone with his habit his cheeks were wall-to-wall capillaries. You could touch his skin with the lightest pressure and it’d turn beet red, the skin was so paper thin. No way one of those guys from one of the outside schools could have shaved him without starting a major hemorrhage. They’d have to have t
he ambulance standing by. I remember whispering to Dusty who was taking his test at the chair next to me that I’d probably get my license and get arrested at the same time for killing my model. Especially the way he was twitching.

  Didn’t even nick him the least little bit, which was good seeing as how he would’ve never quit bleeding. The state barber board guy came by and shook his head as I was starting, and when I finished and he came up to inspect, he took me aside and said, “Son, that is as fine a piece of shaving as I’ve ever seen. I couldn’tve done half as well myself and I’ve been at this thirty years.” I scored a perfect score on the written test, as well, and there wasn’t a single hair out of place on my haircut. Not bragging, almost all of us from Pendleton done just as well.

  The thing was, getting into the barber school was a big source of pride to inmates. It was very competitive. You had to have absolute “good time” on your record and had to score high on this personality test they gave you as well. Plus, you had to get recommended by two guards and your counselor and then do good on the interview the barber instructor made you go through. I bet it’s easier to get into Harvard than it was for us cons to get into barber school, especially seeing as we’re all minorities and can’t use that dodge. They took about one in every two hundred and fifty-three applicants, something like that.

  There was another benefit to being in barber school. It was a money-maker. If an inmate wanted a good haircut he had to cross your palm with something, at least a couple packs of butts or some green, usually a buck. Otherwise, you fucked him up. The last thing somebody with an upcoming visit from his lady wanted was a chopped up haircut.

  So, I’m back in K Dorm and I’m back in barber school and I’m with my old pard Dusty. Things couldn’t be better if it wasn’t for Frick. Sooner or later, we’d have to get it on. There was no way around it for either of us. One of us would have to die.

  I told Dusty about my problem with Frick. I didn’t tell him what had happened back in city jail that started it all off but I think he guessed. It didn’t matter—Dusty knew I wasn’t any punk and there’s no shame in being overpowered...long as you do something about it when you can but I still wasn’t about to tell him the whole story.

  “How you want to do it?” was all he asked.

  “I don’t know yet. When the time comes I might ask for a little help.”

  What I had in mind was, I would need an alibi in case I was questioned. Long as I had another inmate say I was with him or whatever when Frick bought it, I was in the clear. The warden wouldn’t believe me but as long as I had somebody saying I was someplace else at the time Frick got killed he wouldn’t care much, either. It would come down to our word against whoever might snitch me out and being as it would be just some inmate killed another there wouldn’t be much fuss over it. Shit like that happened all the time.

  That was all that was said about my situation at the time but I felt better. When the time came I would be all set. The thing that scared me was getting my good time fucked up, maybe even catching another sentence. It wasn’t that I minded doing extra time—I just hated the thought of doing time for that scumbag.

  “I want to talk to you about something else,” Dusty said and he included Manny when he said that. “I got a sweet deal going on.” The deal was loan sharking. Basic stuff. I loan you five packs of cigarettes for a week and you pay me back a carton. Stuff like that. Dusty wanted Manny and me for muscle. Take care of slowwalkers, deadbeats. Guy slowwalked you, didn’t pay up on time, you had to do something. Break his arm, something like that. Deadbeats, they got whacked. Last thing you can have, you’re in the loan business, is have somebody not pay up. Guy deadbeats you and the others find out, you’re out of business in five minutes. It’s a sign of weakness and you can’t ever afford to look weak. Look weak for five seconds and you’ll be sucking somebody’s dick, that’s for sure. On the bricks, owing six thousand smackers don’t get you squat, but in here, owe somebody a single deck of butts and you can end up rendered room temperature.

  I didn’t mind breaking an arm or leg or two but I didn’t know about whacking guys. Manny said about the same thing.

  “Think it over,” was all Dusty said. “It’s not as hard as you think and it’s not like you have to do it every week. Maybe never. I only had to do it once myself and I been in this business over a year now.”

  We talked it over, Manny and I, and the more we thought about it, the more we thought we’d do it. Neither of us had anyone who was going to send us money and the thought of smoking Hoosier for the next couple of years was depressing.

  “Count us in,” we told Dusty the next day. “Whadda we gotta do?”

  Nothing, at least for a while, he said. Deliver some shit to people, cookies, cigarettes, stuff like that, to guys who wanted to borrow from him. Green. That was the hinky part. No big deal if a hack caught you with a carton of cigarettes, six bags of cookies. You got caught with green in your possession—that was bad news. Green—real money, greenbacks, were strictly outlawed in the joint. That was because of escapees. Lots of guys escaped—trustees who could go outside the walls—only they mostly got caught quick on account of they didn’t have any money to get anywhere. If they had green—real money—they could maybe get on a bus or something before anybody knew they were gone. The state police had a conniption fit then, since they had to actually go out and do their job.

  That was something else that was covered up all the time. Escapes. There wasn’t hardly a week went by didn’t somebody escape. Trustees who got to work outside the walls were always walking off. That’s not counting all the guys who walked off from the honor camps they had all around the state. When I worked in I.D. I was always pulling inmates’ sheets to give to the troopers from the post just outside the prison.

  That was the drill. A guy escaped, the state mounties came to Pendleton and got their mug shot and record. The law in the inmate’s home town was then notified that he was on the loose. Something would be sent to the rest of the state law enforcement agencies. That was it. Nobody did much. There wasn’t ever any great manhunts and the press was never notified. Would’ve looked bad. Citizens would have been in shock if they knew how many escapees were walking around free all the time.

  What happened was that the cops knew that ninety-five percent of the escapees didn’t have anywhere to go or anybody to help them and so they just headed home. Most of the dudes that walked only wanted to get laid or drunk. Maybe beat up the guy who was currently screwing their wife. Once they had that out of their system, they didn’t have much of a game plan left. The Man knew all this, so what they did was send a local cop to the guy’s parents’ or wife’s or girlfriend’s house and wait on him. More times than not, he’d show up and they’d cuff him and send him back. He’d get charged with escape and add a few more years to his sentence. About the only other way he’d ever get caught, would be to get busted for something else like a D&D, which accounted for about all of the five percent who didn’t run right home and get nailed, and as soon as they printed the guy, he’d show up as an escapee. The more I learn about “police methods,” the more I’m sure law enforcement wouldn’t suffer much if it was run by chimpanzees.

  Of course, most criminals aren’t much brighter. All most escapees had to do was stay out of trouble and not go by Mom’s and they’d probably stay free forever.

  Anyway, that was why it was such a big deal if you got busted with green inside. If you had green when you escaped, it meant you probably didn’t have to commit a burglary or strong-arm robbery or something to get money to survive on. Which meant you probably wouldn’t be caught, at least not by the razor-sharp crime detection moves they normally used.

  If you got sent money by relatives or maybe had money when you came in, it went on a sheet they kept up front. Every two weeks we got to go to commissary and buy stuff and they took what you spent off your account. You didn’t have money on your account, you couldn’t go to commissary. The state gave you a paycheck but what y
ou got paid wasn’t even close to minimum wage. The highest priced job you could get in the joint only paid six cents an hour and no matter how many hours you worked you only got paid for forty hours a week, max. Four-eighty every two weeks didn’t go a long way. You also had to buy your own soap, shaving cream, razor blades, toothpaste, all that kind of stuff as well. The state didn’t give you diddly. And green was worth more because it was so scarce. A dollar could buy two bucks’ worth of stuff, sometimes more. Dope. Dope dealers only dealt for green. You couldn’t buy fucking catnip for cigarettes.

  “When we go into the barber shop tomorrow,” Dusty said, “take these with you.” He tossed each of us two cartons of Camels. “You’ll have two guys come in want these.”

  How were we supposed to know who they were, we asked.

  “They’ll know you,” he said. “They’ll be on your book for haircuts.”

  Dusty could fix who sat in whose chair. He explained it to us. For a carton a week, the kid who worked as our “receptionist” and was in charge of assigning inmates getting haircuts to a barber would put Dusty’s customers in the right chair. Randy, that was the kid—was something else. He was the youngest guy in the joint, just turned fifteen. Sweet-looking thing, he was way past handsome. He was just plain pretty. Long, curly eyelashes, big brown eyes, wavy black hair. Every daddy in the place wanted him, had wet dreams over him. Except nobody except new guys didn’t know any better fucked with him even as young and as pretty as he was.