Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  Finally Rings woke up one morning feeling like, Hey, enough’s enough, it’s all about Boink City. She scarfed a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and beat cheeks straight down to Frederick’s of Hollywood, where she ran Marty’s Visa up to like its total limit. When he got home from work, she was sprawled on the sofa in sixinch spikes, rubber garter belt, crotchless panties, and a pushup bra with nipple ports—the whole beatme, boneme tostada.

  The sight of his gaslight Galatea greened Marty’s gills. “I’m g-goin out for p-pizza,” he stammered.

  “Oh gag on yer pizza! Willya do me a favor and fuck my fillings out?”

  Marty started bawling then, and Rings had to beg him just tell her what turned him on. Having her make weewee was what tripped his trigger—put on her Jordache jeans, lean over the dresser and wet them. If that’s what it took to get his respect, she sighed. Rings prided herself on her tolerance, her flexibility. She watched him in the dresser mirror getting hard, offering up silent thanks that at least he didn’t want it in the mouth like most weewee worshipers.

  Lickitysplit she ran into the bathroom, peeled off the icky jeans, jumped in and out of the shower, and dashed back in the bedroom to climb aboard … But Marty was crying again and his little pecker was all shrunk and it was back to square one, where Rings just couldn’t bear to be.

  Nothing to do but cry her eyes out and call her service right in front of Marty. She had to make sure someone out there needed her for more than just a ditz to teach the difference between a booger and an escargot.

  Her first trick asked so many questions, at first she feared he was another like Marty who wanted to pick her brains instead of fucking them out. When they finally got down the gitdown, she was afraid she’d have to use Rustoleum it had been so long, but good ole K-Y was grease enough. Still, he had such a fat one and pumped so hard, Rings got some kind of gas. With like an attitude. Started farting like a tuba. When he got off he asked if the jet assist was extra and Rings said, no, organic power boosts were on the house, so to speak. Next thing she knew she was staring through her tears at a gold shield. So that’s why all the questions.

  But her troubles had only started. The lady judge bumped her up to the felony docket on account of all her priors, and whipped deuces wild on her, consecutive two year sentences. Rings’s public defender argued till he was blue in the face, and the judge relented just a little, running the deuces bowlegged instead, as in concurrent. Still, it was state time just for renting a piece of gut.

  “The old bitch in her black rayon muumuu!” sobbed Rings. “And now Marty wont even accept my collect calls. So much for love.”

  “I love you, girlfriend,” Darcie said.

  “Fur shur?” Rings turned to Darcie dabbing donewrong drops from her cheeks. “But what good’s that? We’re going opposite ways through the gate.” An intimation of like atomic love was mushrooming in her heart. “Will you wait for me?”

  “I’ll stitch my pussy shut meanwhile.” Darcie crossed her heart.

  TANK COURT

  No seasons in a jailhouse, only time. No sun to rise and set, just Lights On, Lights Off. At five ayem the central circuit was thrown with a WHUMP that hummed the bars and flooded Felony Tank F with electric pissyellow from fortywatters recessed behind steel mesh.

  “Christ!” Joe jerked the blanket reeking of creosote over his face. Dismally he registered the sounds: prisoners growling up from sleep; cursing, farting, rasping bare feet across concrete, and loudly pissing; roaring toilets, the rumble and bang of distant steel, sleepthick voices. He moaned, “Why’m I always wakin up in jail?”

  “Maybe cuz you got a habit of fallin to sleep in em,” suggested a drifter of indeterminate years brushing his dentures at the steel sink beneath Joe’s upper bunk. Unbidden, he introduced himself: “Smoothbore’s the name,” flashing smooth pink gums, “crime’s my game. I’m a rambler, a gambler, my gun’s by request. From Sparks to Key West, I’m known as the best …”

  “Best gum beater, peter eater,” sneered a white voice from beneath his wooly shroud stenciled CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO.

  If only Joe could still laugh, the way he could when cops and robbers was still a game and jail just like old home week. But now Rooski lay ten floors below in the basement morgue, racked on a cold steel slab with a sinkhole between his feet dripping gore into a bucket; his bloody clothes stuffed in a paper sack between his knobby knees, his guts coiled atop his sawn chest, an ID tag wired to his big toe.

  “COUNT TIME!” boomed from the front bars. “Drop yer cocks n pull up yer socks!”

  Joe tumbled off his bunk and stood with the others gripping the bars where the paint was worn to naked steel by generations of wringing hands. The deputy ticked the wristbands off with a mechanical hand counter, click click click. He stopped where a barechested black with a shaved head shiny as an eightball stood.

  The deputy drawled, “We put a boy in last night needs some of your religion, Reverend Bones.”

  “Which one?” Bones had tonsils like bronze bell clappers.

  “You’ll see,” winked the deputy.

  Ardor glowed the green eyes sunk beneath Bones’s beetled brow; anticipation shivered his thick plates of chest muscles. Retiring from the bars at the completion of count, there was no mistaking the menace in his rolling simian carriage.

  Safely out of earshot, a peachfuzzed punk named Clovis wondered who this Reverend could be that the other prisoners tolerated his parlaying with the deputies. Smoothbore hitched a foot on a bunkframe, struck a match off the tightened pantleg to a cigaret, and reported as surely as if he’d booked the badass himself:

  “Reverend Ismael Bones is his name, n rapin up pretty young black boys is his game. Run himself a Tenderloin storefront church, looted them boys in there with free coffee and instant salvation.”

  “But I thought rapists got no respect in jail,” piped Clovis, a nice enough kid—though a few years behind bars would fix that. “Especially homo rapists.”

  “Shh, boy …” Smoothbore lifted a stained finger to his lips. “Yuh dont want the Rev hearin sech talk … Forgit everythin you ever heard bout these jailhouses n lemme put you wise. It took the whole SWAT team to bring Bones in—n the Rev werent even armed! When you that bad, you gonna get respeck. I dont care if you raped yo mama. You gonna get shit on yer dick or blood on yer blade …”

  The yellow hours dragged their chains toward noon. Joe joined the flow of prisoners strolling the circuit of the tank. Counterclockwise, according to jailhouse protocol. By traveling in the same direction at roughly the same speed, collisions were avoided with serial killers preparing to enter pleas and gunsels fresh out of Y.A., their secret shivs thirsting for the blood to build an Adult rep. The shuffling feet made a long sad sigh.

  A dopefiend named Harold was hanging at the front bars. Spotting Joe, he dropped into the flow. “Save me shorts, Homes.” Joe passed over his Camel stub as they fell in walkin’ and talkin’. Harold and Joe had capered together on the streets, though petty boosting only; Joe hadn’t the nerve for the vet’s favored metier, armed to the teeth robbery—“commercial firefights,” Harold called them.

  Harold picked up his habit in Vietnam and had run with it ever since. A Special Forces paratrooper, he also nurtured an adrenaline jones. Stateside, Harold couldn’t satisfy this yen for danger punching a time clock. The capering Life was the closest match to the exhilaration of night drops across the Cambodian border. So he turned in his M16 for a chopped twelvegauge, exchanged his field ampules for twentydollar balloons, and resumed fire.

  “I’m just doin what you trained me to,” Harold explained his depredations with a shrug and straight face to authorities who wondered how a decorated Marine had ended up a jailhouse veteran—authorities who hadn’t noticed that the nation’s penal institutions had become bivouacs for middleaged boys home from the war that wasn’t.

  Joe felt the sickness trembli
ng in Harold, smelled it seeping miasmically from his pores, heard it sizzling his ganglia. Like a spark between live wires, withdrawal leaps from one host junkie to another whose narcotic insulation is wearing thin. Joe felt it welling in his bowels, frosting his extremities. Harold had awakened the demons and they were rattling their cage; sometime tonight they’d be loosed in full cry.

  An airbrake gasped and a deputy unlocked F Tank with a large brass key like ones used in morality plays or fairytales as symbols. Consulting his clipboard he wearily cried: “Pierce, Harold … Roll em up!”

  “I dont believe it!” Harold exclaimed, springing for his bunk to collect his blanket roll. “The bitch made my bail!”

  Joe hurriedly borrowed a pencil stub from a card player at one of the long steel tables in the aisle between the bunks. He used his booking receipt flimsy to scribble: They blew away Rooski and got me for GTA. Please bring money for my books. Well this looks like it. He chewed his lip seeing the blue effulgence in the shark tank and wanted to scrawl, I got something big to cash in and make us the life we got coming, but decided otherwise. No telling if Harold wouldnt be picked up again before he saw Kitty. He wrote simply, Wait for me. I love you, Joe.

  He caught Harold at the tank gate. “Here. Fly this kite to Kitty. She’s still strippin at the Blue Note. Dont let a homey down now …”

  Harold nodded from the other side of the bars. “Walk slow and drink plenty of water, Homes.”

  Over the locking wheeze of the airbrake Clovis asked what that meant. Smoothbore explained: “You walk slow so no one mistakes you for makin a fast move. You drink plenny water to keep from gettin hemorrhoids settin on concrete all day.”

  “Any time you get rhoids, kid, I’ll pack em for you,” offered another prisoner, grabbing a handful of crotch to dramatize his drift.

  Evenings, a half hour after the chow wagons rolled, a TV was positioned in the hallway so as to be visible from the front bars. Which meant invisible to any who weren’t black. The hambone majority controlled the front bars where the action was. There to beg phone calls from passing deputies, greet incoming crimeys and vilify enemies trudging down the line with their blanket rolls; hoot and whistle at the transisters swishing to and from the Queen Tank, haggle with trusties for food and cigarets—and control the image connected to the metallic babble ricocheting around angled concrete. Some action.

  The cholos crouched murmuring and smoking against the rear wall, beneath a graffitied gallery of names and numbers burned with matches or scored with sharpened toothbrush shivs into the concrete. The whiteboys read on their bunks or played cards on blankets spread on the steel tables. Joe played dominoes with Smoothbore and Clovis. The thwacking of the bones punctuated desultory conversation.

  The TV was tuned to the local news. The newscaster’s voice echoed in F Tank like a man shouting into a toilet. Something about a sixyearold black girl’s raped and mutilated body being discovered in a dump behind Candlestick Park. A suspect had been arrested. And here! This tape just in of the suspect being led into the Hall of Justice …

  “Whoa!” A young blood named Toot Sweet swung out of his hammock fashioned from a blanket tied between bars. “I seen that motherfucker in here …”

  “You smoked too much rock on them streets, be seein things,” his crimey Top Dog was sure. “That boy’s gotta be in Protective Custody …”

  “Nooo, Doggie boy.” Toot Sweet shook his head emphatically while casting wildly around the tank. “He’s the nigger the deputy told the Rev needs religion. He’s right here in F Tank.”

  Joe sensed the horror to transpire; a surf began booming in his ears and his neck swelled like a bullfrog’s. Jumping to his feet, he propped a foot on a stool and snatched up his bones in both fists, convictstyle. He whacked out the double six to open a fresh domino set, growling: “Big six to the board. Come big or stay home …”

  Top Dog cried: “Why you think they put that nigger in here, then show us his face on the news …” Yet before he’d finished asking, the awful answer unraveled on his face; though it took a third blood to articulate it: “They wants Bones to do their justice. Save taxpayer ducats, hold court right here in the tank …”

  Suddenly Reverend Bones stood among them, rubbing sleep from his emerald eyes, tolling the bronze bell deep in his breast: “Where?”

  “Here the nigger be!” sang out Toot Sweet. He’d located the wretch cowering in one of the concrete toilet stalls in the rear of the tank.

  Down the line of double bunks rolled the avenging angel. He paused at the box stall’s open front, grinning like a cathouse piano. “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,” he chuckled, the smooth warm sound of whiskey from a bottle’s neck. “Now mine eye seeth thee.”

  Toot Sweet and Top Dog blocked the opening when Bones entered the stall. It began then, the dull thump of the fists into flesh, the grunts of exertion interspersing biblical denunciations. Joe heard a bone crack and the child rapist scream, a decrescendo wail dying in wet bubbles.

  “Rev,” cried Top Dog, eyes big as cue balls. “He’s out cold.”

  “He’s warm,” answered Bones’s congested voice. “I gots to have him.” The mellifluous pulpit baritone dropped a half octave: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

  The sudden clatter of Clovis’s dropped dominoes rang like pistol shots on the steel table.

  “Pick em up,” urged Joe’s hoarse whisper.

  “Aaarrgghh …” It was Bones.

  The spectators who had collected at the stall’s opening collapsed backward, eyes pinned wide, exclaiming in low disbelief. First one, then another turned and bolted. Toot Sweet rushed to another toilet stall, hand over his mouth.

  Joe couldn’t stop himself. Softly he set down his dominoes and walked back to the cubicle. Before reaching it, he heard the rhythmic wet plangency in the stall, a sound like a horse trotting through deep mud. His first glimpse of the activity within turned him to stone; his head filled with a sustained silent shriek.

  The child rapist was crumpled on his knees at the toilet, orange coveralls bunched around one ankle. Reverend Bones was naked, crouched behind him on the balls of his feet like a baseball catcher. One great hand held his victim’s head inside the bowl; the other gathered lifeless loins to his own. His gleaming head flung back, straining noisily through clenched teeth, Bones was exacting the punishment to exactly fit the crime. Blood bubbled, splattering the gray concrete.

  Over the synaptic storm in his skull Joe heard Clovis pray, “I sure hope I dont have to do no time.”

  “The time does itself,” schooled Smoothbore. “You jist got to live with it.”

  SPACE

  Rings and Darcie waited after Lights until they heard the other whores snoring before bumping bellies again, quiet as they could beneath the blankets, switching tops and bottoms. They shared a Kool afterward.

  “I wish you could raise up with me,” Darcie said wistfully.

  “Yeah. That would be fur shur maximum kasj.”

  “We could open a tattoo parlor, maybe a bodyfender shop.”

  “Whoa, Silver!” Rings snapped the Kool through the bars.

  “What’s with you, girlfriend?”

  “Maybe I can raise up with you. I just remembered I got info I could fur shur parlay into probation, maybe dismissal.”

  “You dont mean turn state?”

  “Shhh …” Touching a finger to her lips, Rings peered through the interstitial darkness, searching the surrounding bunks. She saw only motionless humps, heard only the sounds of women meeting children and lovers in dreams. She paid no special heed to one particularly large, wooly shape, a lump with neither lovers nor children awaiting its sleep. In her excitement Rings forgot the bulldagger whose hair she’d knotted through the bars, adding injury to the insult of spurning her advances. But Big Lurleen hadn’t forgotten. Lying perfectly still, the diese
ldyke held her breath to better hear, swearing vengeance.

  Turning back to Darcie, eyes dancing in the dark, Rings related in a whisper the details of Gloria Monday’s murder. “I’m callin Homicide in the ayem,” she concluded excitedly. “This Humpty Dumpty’s got a fall comin.”

  “Then we can get the bodyfender shop,” Darcie cried softly, her aversion to snitching squelched once she knew its subject. “But aint you a little afraid of him?”

  “Of the Pimp Blimp? Like, totally. But I’m more in love with you.” Purring deep in her throat, Darcie pushed Rings back on the bunk. Unsnapping her jumpsuit and plucking it off, she hitched one of Rings’s feet on a crossbar and planted the other on the floor. “You soppin wet, slut,” she panted, slurping a thumb in Rings’s milky snatch. Next she slid her forefinger up Rings’s glomming anus to massage against her thumb the secret membrane separating the channels. Gently gripping the two digits, she lifted Rings closer.

  “Whaddaya think I am,” Rings chuffed, “a sixpack?” Sixpack my sweet ass, simmered Big Lurleen’s brainpan. Landfill’s what you’ll be once the Fat Man hears you fixin to run your bitch mouth.

  MAN DOWN

  Someone in the murmurous dark called for Toot Sweet to pop some corn, and he obliged the ironbarred gallery with the Homeric ballad of that badass Dolomite:

  Now Dolomite hailed from San Antone

  Baddest nigger the world has known

  Why same day he dropped from his mammy’s ass

  Dolomite rear up slap his pappy’s face

  Top Dog took up the toast:

  Now one day Dolomite took a stroll

  Run up on Mabel, Queen of the hos

  Dolomite, he say, Bee-itch!

  Had me job in Africa fuckin steers

  Fucked a she elephant till she broke down in tears

  A falsetto broke in:

  Mabel jus say, Dont give a damn where you been

  Say, I’m layin to wrap this juicy hot pussy