by Seth Morgan
A picture on the Sally wall caught Rooski’s attention. To make it out he had to lean over an old fogy passed out on a metal chair, head tipped back, fat fuzzy tongue unhinging his jaw. It was a CERVEZA TECATE calendar featuring a sexpot Aztec warrior queen with little armored pasties tipping big copper jugs. One sandaled foot was planted on a fallen conquistador’s breastplate, braced to yank out the spear sunk deep in his chest. Behind her feathered headdress a volcano reared against a scowling sky, erupting suggestively. Kitty Litter could’ve posed for it, he concluded. The Barker’s TexMex squeeze was some kind of goddess in Rooski’s slim book.
That Y.A. evaluation wasn’t his first, nor would it be Rooski’s last brush with stateissue psychology. From some of the later encounters he even emerged something of a Pyrrhic victor. Case in point: during a short layover at the State Hospital at Atascadero, Rooski’s doctors as usual decided electroshock therapy was indicated. It was Brier Rabbit into the brier patch all over again: by now Rooski loved Edison medicine better than LSD. There he’d lie strapped to the stainless steel table, wired up like Frankenstein’s amphappy stepmonster, screaming “More! Crank it up! I’m runnin a juice jones!” He really was, he’d built up a tolerance, a habit. And with an addict’s typical ingenuity figured out how to surreptitiously ground himself to the radiator with a wire smuggled off the ward. Finally on his sixteenth treatment he snatched the saline sponge from the horrified technician, doused his testicles, and looped the wire around his penis. Like a lightning rod it sprang erect, buzzing blue and white, shooting sparks like sperm. “Bringin the rush home!” shrieked Rooski just before the hospital’s central circuits blew. To his awestruck fellow loons back on the ward he offered this modest yet manly explanation: “Just to show em I could take it.”
But excepting such occasions when correctional prescriptions jibed so cleanly with Rooski’s sense of fun, his life had been a pitiful, abusive progression of foster homes, youth detention facilities, county jails, and lastly state prison. His brief forays into society met invariably with disaster. There was no job so menial that he wouldn’t botch it and get fired, no social obligation so trivial it didn’t render him impotent with anxiety, no woman so chaste she didn’t carry a disease just for him to contract, no pastime so innocent he couldn’t convert it into instant criminality, no crime so petty he wouldn’t be immediately caught. He was alcoholic before he ever tasted beer and addicted before he swallowed his first aspirin.
It got so the inmates of the various institutions that periodically loosed him on an unsuspecting public started betting pools. Not as to the number of years, months, or even weeks Rooski might remain at large, but days. The lowballers always won.
This last stretch of freedom had set a record: nine months, one week, six days so far. Rooski marked free time the way most recorded sojourns in stir.
“It’s the Barker keeps me on the good foot,” he was quick to share the credit. “He knows how to stay in pocket and out of trouble. He’s got more learnin than just the paperbooks ridin his hip alla time. That Barker’s got street smarts.”
What Rooski shared with no one was his most compelling reason for staying on the bricks this time. There it hung hidden behind all the stateissue jackets, the one with the target on its back he’d have to wear through those penitentiary gates next time: SNITCH.
Rooski joined the mess line. From speakers hidden overhead rockabilly-guitar trailed notes sad as tinsel at an unattended party.
It was a dry snitch that came down at San Quentin. A number of the cons housed with Rooski in a North Block honor unit kept pet cats. For some time the guards winked at this technical rule infraction. Yet for some reason when Rooski acquired a kitten, it was confiscated. He lost his head and demanded why he was being singled out for persecution. The guards were forced to prove he wasn’t by staging a general feline roundup and using the critters for moving targets at the range. The North Block cats were more than pets, they were the only living things in a lifer’s stoneshrunk world from which he could expect the unconditional reciprocation of his affection. No matter that Rooski didn’t mean to front off the other cons. One can dry hump the local roundheels without fear of infection, dry fire a pistol and spend not one day in jail. But dry snitching in prison carries the same mortal penalty as the real thing. Rooski survived that jolt in Protective Custody. He’d be sprouting shanks like a human porcupine before he was processed through Receiving and Release the next time he was sent home.
A caged red bulb above the messhall doors flashed to the accompaniment of a raucous alarm. The doors whumped open. A chunky Sally matron with sooty fuzz on her lip, a bulldog scowl, and a nametag introducing SGT. ETHEL RAMIREZ took up station collecting meal tickets. Smartass Rooski saluted; she growled, “Shove it along, Stretch.”
On the steam line was standard Sally fare: rubberized cream chicken, mashed potatoes, sludgy boiled greens, lime Jell-O. Though his guts roiled like a tub of scalded rattlers, Rooski begged extra helpings out of instinct born from foster home famine.
He stood with his loaded tray squinting around for an empty place at the crowded tables. He saw the beckoning wave of a vaguely familiar fatdimpled arm sheathed in bright bracelets, but couldn’t remember to whom it was attached until he heard that tenor honed by cigarets and oiled with bourbon: Penny Bliss. Tray held high, he executed the difficult field maneuver through the sea of bobbing heads.
“You still skinny as an honest alibi,” crowed the Bliss miss. “Still tryin to keep up with the joneses … Take a load off your sex appeal.” Her plastic bracelets clacked, gesturing to the table’s last empty stool. Rooski sat and asked Miss Bliss how she was doing. “Better than a hand job,” was how. Beside her sat her twelveyearold daughter, Clarissa, who gunned Rooski a slow onceover, the corners of her mouth turned down in habitual faint revulsion. Her casehardened stare reminded him of Y.A. juveniles convicted of crimes they were not yet old enough to commit, yet purely dedicated to pulling once they were.
“Where your specs, Rooski?” asked Penny, watching him bent two inches over his tray, trolling for vagrant shreds of fowl in the suety paste already setting like concrete.
“Lost em,” he said. Remembering when and where galloped his heart.
“Not that you need them hangin out all day down in Cosimo’s gallery,” she said, adding quickly to quell his sudden alarm, “Dont getcher fuzzy red nuts in an uproar. The Bliss miss has ears like everyone else on the street.”
Pete the Packrat also sat at their table. The growlings through his polychromatic whiskers lamented the repair a bottle of vin fin could work on this excretal offering. Never mind that he hadn’t tasted corked wine since V-J Day. He kept up a running denunciation of the Sally kitchens for undercooking what he was certain was seagull. Suddenly dramatizing the point, he used his fork to flick a morsel over the heads at nearby tables with the exhortation: “Fly, gull! You aint hurt so bad.”
“They catch you throwin food, they’ll throw you out,” Rooski warned. Pete ignored him according to the chauvinistic code by which winos and junkies held each other in mutual contempt. Not that the Dean of the Dumpsters needed someone to look down on. His was the special gift of lying in the gutter staring down the whole world through a sewer grate. Just now he was staring at a cockroach embedded in his lime Jell-O like an emerald scarab.
“Listen, you tall drink of strawberry soda water,” said Miss Bliss, her clownish face turned serious. “In case you dont know it, you runnin a high temperature. The Man’s dragging the streets for your ass. Your mug’s on the top of every squadrol’s clipboard. And you know what’s waiting for you in the pen. If luck were money in the bank, you’re way overdrawn. It’s time to get out of Dodge.”
“The Barker’ll fix it …”
“The Barker? You crazy? You cant trust the Barker. A pick n pressure bar’s all you are to Joe Speaker. Operators like him throw people away like used rubbers …” Her eyes untracked. “L
ike someone threw away that girl on the news.”
“I knew that girl,” said Rooski, grateful for the chance to switch topics. “Usta work for Baby Jewels. Gloria Monday was her handle.”
“I knew her too. A nice girl, but she trusted everyone. Including her killer. No sign of forced entry, the papers said. Trust’ll earn you the same, Rooski—your own morgue drawer.”
A secretive smile bespoke Pete’s glee at stumbling across a piece of drift knowledge somehow left high and dry by the alcoholic ebb tide wiping his mind blank as wet sand. With a hand the color of wood layered with generations of varnish over dirt he crossed the air, intoning: “Sic transit Gloria Monday.”
“Shet up yer monkey gibberin,” commanded the Bliss miss, who of all things Latin liked only tortilla chips. She turned back to Rooski, tears milky with makeup tracking down her cheeks. “She’s just a number now. One hunnerd and twentyeight. I dont want you to be one hunnerd and twentynine …”
“Number’s already taken,” the fourth diner at the table broke his silence. “Last night they pulled the plug on a gook druggist who’d been brain dead since he was whacked during a burglary last week.”
Rooski yelped.
“What’s wrong?” cried Penny Bliss. “You shakin worse than a whore in church!”
“With a tendollar trick waitin outside,” sneered the baby pokerface fronting Clarissa.
“It’s this jones crushin my bones,” sobbed Rooski. I killed him, I never killed no one, but I busted his head like a rotten apple. Oh Barker, help me.
He leaped up tipping his tray to the floor and ran to the transient dorm where he lay staring blindly at the ceiling. I was jist skeered, dint mean to squash out his life like a bug.
Later in the stale dark, wrapped in the smells and sounds of a hundred transient dreams, his trembling subsided. Rooski knew the Barker would save him. Miss Bliss was wrong about Joe, she didn’t understand. With others he might be the way she said, but not with Rooski, his truliest homey. The Barker was magic almost. He could make down seem up and low look high; and bad so good you scoffed at anything better. If there was any swingin’ dick who could save Rooski this time, it was the Barker.
ROOSKI BUSINESS
“You dont have to talk to me,” jerked the Hav-A-Tampa Jewel like an artillery piece on a halftrack. “Twenty years ago an Arizona rapist named Miranda fixed that.”
How could Joe tell the homicide cop that he was too scared not to talk with him? They didn’t have Rooski, calling him out of the tank proved that. But what did they have? Imagining the worst was more terrifying by far than knowing it.
“Beats playin dominoes in the tank, Lieutenant Tarzan.”
“Tar-zone. Lieutenant Tarzon.”
Joe knew the correct pronunciation; he only hoped by low wit to negate the other’s advantage. “As in erogenous?”
“As in combat.”
“I’ll settle for twilight,” Joe said.
Watching Joe across the desk, Tarzon rolled the ash off his cheroot on the lip of a Firestone promotional ashtray, a miniature facsimile of a steelbelted radial. A gooseneck lamp, a wooden In-tray, and a heavy black telephone were the desk’s only other accessories. On the shadowed wall over the lieutenant’s shoulder hung a photograph in a stainless steel frame. The dark little girl behind the glass wore a frilly white dress like a Mexican tablecloth; a first communion portrait, Joe guessed.
Joe was about to crack that he’d visited mensrooms with more character when Tarzon’s frayed white cuff spun an eightbyten glossy across the desk with the casual contempt of a blackjack dealer busting out a desperate gambler. “Look familiar?”
Joe hunched forward, twisting sideways for a better look. It was a morgue shot of the Chinese druggist, pious wing read the placard. Blazing white bandages swathed his high head, sweeping gracefully up in the shape of a bishop’s miter. The sheet drawn to his chin clung to him as if wet, lending his peacefully clasped hands the look of polished marble. The eyes in his long ascetic face were halfopen, glazed with secret knowledge, possessing something as well of the luminous blank perfection of a cathedral carving.
“I asked you a question.”
“No,” Joe answered truthfully. The flashlighted yellow face that night was a blur. He disguised a shiver as a shrug and leaned back from the desk.
“Wing was the druggist you whacked.”
“You got the wrong dude,” Joe said watching a fly crawl onto the Smith & Wesson handcuff securing him to the chair. He wondered if the steel was as cold to those threadlike legs as it was to his sweating wrist. Dont get cold feet lil feller. “I’d no sooner hurt a fly.”
“If the fly was carrying less than a sawski …” Tarzon banged a fist to the desk, jumping the tire, jiggling the light. “Look at me!”
Joe lifted his head, cocking it slightly and lidding his eyes to screen their fright.
“I know your game, Speaker. Narcotics, bunko, burglary, pimping,” spat Tarzon. “But this is a redhot One Eightyseven. Doesnt matter which of you bashed his brains out the back of his skull, you’re both guilty under the felony murder rule.” He leaned back beyond the lamp’s small circle of light and puffed the cheroot, flashing dentalwork from the shadows. His voice dropped, coiling confidentially. “They just might drop the pill on you.”
Joe knew he meant the gas chamber but played it dumb. “Pill? I dont fuck with pills.” He was adept at whisking up courage with the wind of his own voice; courage as false as his words, yet courage just the same. “Maybe to taper off the stuff, that’s it.”
Tarzon lunged forward with a shriek of chair casters. His blueshadowed grimace aimed the Hav-A-Tampa between Joe’s eyes. “You know goddam well I’m talkin about the big plop plop fizz fizz.” Joe did his best to look as if he knew nothing of the sort. Slowly Tarzon leaned back out of the yellow puddle of light. “Word on the street’s you’re runnin a jones longer than your record,” all casual cop again, sveltely intimate, “a nuclear habit. You must be hurtin pretty bad by now.”
Of course, Joe realized. That’s why he waited two days to call me out of the tank. He counted on me being sick, in the throes of withdrawal, screaming to give Rooski up. How could he know that when I was arrested I swallowed six bags, then used a plastic fork in the tank to pick them out of my shit? I’ve held off the bonecrushers two days, rationing that stuff up my nose—horned the last just an hour ago.
“I threw in that junkie’s hand, Loot. Cleaned up my act …” He wished his legs weren’t chained so he could cross them to better join in Tarzon’s spirit of false intimacy. “Just got to where I had to run as fast as I could to stay in one place. To get anywhere, I had to run twice as fast. I think the Red Queen said that … No, no,” he added, seeing Tarzon reach for a pencil, “that’s a character from a kids’ book, not the streets.”
Tarzon tossed down the pencil and reached for the top file in the In-tray. Joe knew already it was his jacket, he’d seen his name stenciled on the tab. Once more from the top, he inwardly bemoaned. He’d suffered through these flapdoodle attempts at intimidation by official omniscience before. But nothing from his past could hurt him any longer, and his confidence swelled like a bully’s chest.
“I have your NCIC jacket here. There’s just one or two points I’d like to go over …” Tarzon invested his voice with the same putrid strain of spurious concern the others used. “Born 1958 to Beatrice Holly and ‘unknown’ father …” The lieutenant’s brows seesawed, surmising what sexual misdemeanor conceived Joe. “How’d you get the name Speaker?”
“Just the alias used by the stumblebum married my mom. Feds picked him up on a John Doe fugitive warrant just before my birth. Extradited him someplace on a murder charge. Hell, I hope.”
“Your mother never bothered to find out who he was?”
“Why? He was just a vicious drunk who socked her up every night for the paper she made slinging hash on
Highway 12. Far as she was concerned, the feds who gaffled him up were angels of mercy. Same as she never bothered divorcing a man who never existed, she didnt bother switching up my birth certificate. Just switched back to slinging pussy.”
“What about you?”
“Me, I never knew him. Far as I was concerned, he was just another of her supply of deadbeat daddyos. By the time I was five I had more ‘uncles’ than any little monkey.”
“Yeah, but later. When you were old enough to understand. To care … Werent you even curious?” Tarzon blued the cone of light with an indignant cloud of smoke. It pricked Joe’s olfactories like burning brush, and he sneezed twice rapidly, a sure harbinger of encroaching withdrawal. That and the cold sweat tracing rivulets down his back like the tips of icicles. The interview was spurring his adrenal gland, galloping his metabolism, wringing the heroin from his system.
“Later I already had enough people to hate.”
“With yourself at the top of the list.”
Joe just shook his head at the fatheadedness engendered by psychology extension courses.
Tarzon lowered his eyes again to the NCIC jacket. “So you lived with your mother and … ‘uncles’ until you were nine, when she copped one B case too many and the state took you away …”
“She might have been a whore, but that last bust was humbug. Sheriff had a thing for her and she had nothing for him. He got miffed and one day caught her in a bar and whipped a case on her when all she was soliciting was another beer.”
“Soon after, the sauce killed her. Well, not exactly. She passed out with a lit cigaret and incinerated herself in her trailer. Not even thirty. A tragic waste of a young life.”
Oh gimme a fivecent break, Joe wailed silently. “Why dont you light her a candle next time you’re in church?”
Tarzon vaulted to his feet, rocketsledding his chair against the wall. He sprang halfway around the desk, then gripped it with white knuckles, checking himself. “One more crack about your’s or anyone else’s mother and I’m taking you upstairs to a quiet cell and kicking your balls up between your ears.”