Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  It wasn’t grief which loosed his next sob. He was filled with reproach that he could find no words of outrage over the murder or find a single serious thought to dignify the life Rings’n’Things had left. Instead his mind was monopolized by a single banality: You really are what you eat.

  Zooming down the corridor Rings was shur this was It, as in Big Time. Struggle as she might, the combined forces of momentum and rushing air fastened her to the gurney. Faster and faster the hypnotic blur of blades rushed up; it was like being dropped into a giant Mixmaster. A home video of her loony life fastforwarded between her ears, its highlights freezeframed: reaching her first orgasm with an electric toothbrush, winning the disco rollerskate competition in the mall parking lot; watching Daddy lowered into the ground to the derision of the Dead Kennedys through the Walkman clamping her ears.

  Over the scream of blades she didn’t hear the wheels screeching down the intersecting corridor, she saw only a peripheral flash of steel before the gurney broadsided the chow wagon suddenly interposed between it and the ventilator.

  Rings did a front somersault, knocking a twentygallon steam tray of sloppy joe mix into the fan. Ground chuck and tomato sauce sprayed the corridor. Gag City, was all she could think lying on the floor, her skull numbed by the collision. Then hands lifted her by the armpits and she heard a familiar voice: “Hurry.”

  Rings gazed up in the jowly face of her Tuesday lunch special, Change Clothes Collins. “My hero,” she gasped.

  “Hurry,” he huffed again, hoisting Rings around the chow wagon and stuffing her into an empty lower compartment where normally a garbage can was stored. He slid shut the compartment door. From her cramped and clammy sanctuary Rings heard the fan motor die. As her senses returned, her heart began pounding and her stomach went on spin cycle.

  The heavy wagon rumbled down the corridor. Through the kitchen doors it barged. Greasy swirling steam seeped into the compartment, clutching Rings’s throat. She heard the rubber wheels swishing through shallow water. Her head struck the top of the compartment with a stunning bump, making her howl. “Say what, cap?” she heard a culinary trusty ask. “Just my belly aching out loud,” C.C. answered. “You got enough onions and chili powder in that slop to wake the dead … What’s with the flood?”

  “The grease traps in scullery are backed up, sir.”

  “I want them cleaned. Now!”

  “But we got two hundred chickens to clean for dinner …”

  “No use preparing food under unsanitary conditions. I want every available man on those grease traps. Jump!”

  Once the kitchen was cleared, C.C. opened the compartment. Out Rings tumbled, gasping for air. She brushed aside his apologies for the wagon’s poor ergonomics, peppering him instead with questions.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. “They probably believe they killed you, the Sick Bay corridor was empty when I got there. We have to get you out of the building before you’re seen alive.”

  “My radical hero!” Rings jumped up and down.

  C.C. blushed and scuffed his shoe.

  “How can I repay yu-?”

  ZZzzzppp! Frilly lace panties effloresced through his fly, strumming a tumid pink pistil.

  The debt retired, Rings climbed off her knees.

  “You could suck the dark out of the night,” said the undies sheriff.

  “Like, major thanks. You can put that on my tombstone if we cant figger a way to get me out of this dump.”

  “Kitchen elevator. Opens out on the loading docks. No one will notice you.”

  “Naked? I’m shur! … Hey! Why cant you get my own clothes?”

  That would attract attention, C.C. was certain. He had a better idea. He told Rings to wait behind some garbage cans and rushed off.

  With her hysteria subsiding, Rings’s ability to reason returned, one thought fitting into a second, setting a third in motion: That freak who tried to kill me had to have been sent by the Pimp Blimp—who, if he can get at me in the jailhouse, can reach me anywhere in this burg. I cant count on them believing they mulched my bahakas. If C.C. busts me outta here, I gotta fur shur book a long vacation.

  C.C. loped back with khakis over his arm. Rings blanched. “Dress like a deputy?”

  “A female deputy,” C.C. grinned.

  “Kasj! Good ole Change Clothes.”

  “I’ll miss crossdressing with you,” he mumbled and blushed again, as brightly as if a bulb blinked in his mouth. Then he whipped a large brassiere out of his hip pocket. “I’ve only worn it twice. It’s a Playtex Cross Your Heart …”

  “I’m glad you think I still got one to cross,” smirked Rings, scooping a tit tattooed like a bullseye into a cup.

  Downstairs on the loading docks C.C. asked what she was going to do.

  “Beat cheeks down the blacktop,” was what.

  Down the loading dock steps she skipped, and across the parking lot. Reaching Harrison Street, she flung out her thumb. Several cars slowed without stopping, leery of a hitchhiking cop. Prancing out into traffic, she shot her hip, plucked a kiss from her lips and planted it on her fanny. She ignored the braking Toyota rearended by the pickup, running instead to the open door of a maroon Oldsmobile with outofstate plates.

  She never heard the shot or saw C.C. do his halfgainer off the loading dock.

  After Lights, Joe heard the whrr-zzzz of Spencer’s wheelchair maneuvering close to his bed.

  “Joe,” he whispered, “dont be mad at the others. They already know what you’ll learn when you get to the pen. It pays to be selectively deaf and blind. That was no orderly. That was a contractor sent after that girl to keep her from turning state’s evidence against Baby Jewels Moses.”

  “Moses? You sure?” Between Joe’s cranial precincts flashed neuronic SOS’s, warning in manic Morse that coincidences compounded become causalities. Christ! Could the moon on the whore’s last breath be the same as the one guarded by the sharks?

  “Aint no secrets in a jailhouse, homeboy.”

  “Christ,” Joe prayed to the phantasmal dark.

  VENUS DE MILWAUKEE

  “I came to this town in a hot Studebaker with a stolen hot gas card,” Baby Jewels wheezed expansively. “I slept in the Studie three months before I opened my first club, the Blackhawk. My father Izzy said I’d never amount to anything. He spent his whole life slaving in the garment district, keeled over of a heart attack shlepping a dress rod up Seventh Avenue, and he said I’d never amount to anything.” Again he wheezed, a ventosity vast as a hippo blowing Limpopo mist.

  “If he could see you now,” Quick Cicero said, sipping customground Peruvian coffee. They were breakfasting on the terrace encircling the Fat Man’s Pacific Heights penthouse. Lesser buildings below spilled down to the sparkling bay. The city sighed softly on the breeze ruffling the white linen table cloth.

  A black butler in livery ghosted to the table with silver tray heaped with sliced salmon.

  “I hope that’s Nova Scotia lox, Wesley,” clucked Baby Jewels, “not that Alaskan junk.”

  “Nossir. Aint no Eskimo fish.”

  Baby Jewels heaped the lox on a halved bagel slathered with cream cheese, wistfully wheezing, “Yes, if he could see me now.” Mirth burbled from his baby mouth. “Though he’d probably be ashamed, say I was a cheap goniff. But he’d be wrong, wouldnt he? We’re living the primetime American Dream. Horatio Alger doesnt hold a candle to Jules Moses.”

  “Fuckin A,” corroborated Quick, though his voice wavered uncertainly, thinking of a highyaller jazz musician named Horatio who blacksocked parttime for Climax Produxions, and imagining with distaste that his boss was comparing himself to him.

  “Hey, Tubby!” called a sharp voice through the sliding glass doors. Lieutenant Rick Tarzon stepped out onto the terrace. One hand held Fabulous Frank by the scuff of the neck, the other jammed a Walther P-38 down the front of his
pleated trousers. “I cant understand why you’d go through the expense of installing a private security elevator, then post a drunk to guard it.”

  “You got a warrant,” hissed the Fat Man.

  “Doan need no steenkin warrant,” Tarzon grinned.

  “Dont piss him off, boss,” Frank quailed. “He’ll blow my nuts off sure.”

  “He’d be doing you a favor,” was the Fat Man’s verdict.

  A dozen lifesize terracotta nudes composed in various wanton attitudes populated the terrace. Yanking the Walther from Frank’s pants, Tarzon cuffed his wrists around one statue so tasteless that it was timeless in its own right, a bustout reproduction of the Venus de Milo, arms and head regrafted to her torso. The arms were arranged in the manner of a gameshow hostess gesturing toward a prize La-Z-Boy recliner. The sculptor must have used a photograph of Jayne Mansfield as a model for the baubly head. The blond hair was reproduced in rampant goldleafed swoops.

  “Yer stogie’s ruinin my appetite,” Quick groused.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll put it out.”

  Stepping to the table, Tarzon ground the Hav-A-Tampa Jewel into Quick’s halved cantaloupe. The expug leaped to his feet, toppling his wroughtiron chair. Tarzon smacked him backhanded with the Walther, cracking his jaw. Quick hula’d drunkenly, then fell.

  Tarzon emptied the pitcher of orange juice on Quick’s face, partially reviving him, then hoisted him to his feet and cuffed him hugging the nude from the side opposite Frank. He stood back with an appreciative cluck. “I guess you’d call that a Venus sandwich in your trade, huh, you tub of slime.”

  “What do you want?” the Fat Man spluttered.

  “Who was the guy with the limp, Fats?”

  “Who you talking about?”

  “The one who pureed Rosemary Hooten.”

  “I dont know any Rosemary Hooten.”

  Tarzon righted and sat in Quick’s chair. “You didnt know she watched you zero Gloria Monday.” He took careless aim with the Walther and blasted the head off one of the nudes. “Just like that.”

  “The city’s going to pay for that.”

  “No, the city’s going to pay for your murder trial. I didnt have time to get a sworn statement from the girl before you had her killed, but she told me she watched you ice Gloria Monday and take a diamond belonging to her sugardaddy. Smells like blackmail, Fats. I’m going to identify this sugardaddy and expose it. Then I’m going to bill you for Gloria Monday’s murder. You’ve committed dozens, but I only need to prove one to gas your fat ass.”

  “You shouldnt listen to jail gossip, Lieutenant.”

  “Did I mention jail?” Tarzon smiled pleasantly.

  Baby Jewels mottled. “The papers said a black killed her.”

  “A black assaulted her. He used a television cord to tie her wrists. When the TV was reconnected, its LED clock read 5:48 P.M. Two hours before the time of death fixed by the M.E. Twenty minutes before she died, Miss Monday called your limo. You forgot that time and charges for mobile calls are logged just like long distance ones.” Tarzon blasted another head in a cloud of glazed clay. “That diamond’s going to prove your bad luck piece, Fats. It’s gonna drop the pill on you.” Tarzon laid down the Walther. Boxing his thumbs and forefingers, he measured the elephantine rump squeezed in Baby Jewels’s chair. “They’re gonna have to build you a custom seat for the chamber, lardass.”

  “Fuck you,” lisped the ancient baby voice.

  “I’ve got a daughter about the same age as these girls you enjoy killing. If anything happened to her …” Tarzon trained the Walther between the eyes glinting in the Fat Man’s head like tenpenny nails. Suddenly, without removing his stare from Moses, Tarzon swung the automatic and squeezed three times. Steeljacketed parabellums splashed through Venus de Milwaukee’s neck and each shoulder, simultaneously recreating Jayne Mansfield’s decapitation and restoring the statue to classical verisimilitude. Frank screeched and wet his pants.

  “Just cant get good help these days, huh, Fats?”

  Tarzon stood, holstering the Walther P-38 beneath his arm. He stared thoughtfully at the table. “I heard you talking about your father, a Jewish garment worker. My father was a Mexican magician. He never graduated from the border dives. They used to squeeze his act between the live sex shows in Tijuana. I’m afraid he wasnt very good, but he taught me a couple of routines. Here, I’ll show you the old tablecloth trick.”

  Sternly Tarzon composed his blueshadowed features and deliberately shot his cuffs. Stepping to the head of the table, he took careful hold of the edge of the linen tablecloth. “Guess I dont get a drum roll,” he joked selfeffacingly before violently jerking the tablecloth, launching Waterford crystal, bone china, and silver flatware high into the bright morning, crashing to the terrace flagstones.

  “Sorry, Fats. I wonder if my ole man would be as ashamed of me as yours would be of you …” He turned to leave and stopped. Facing Baby Jewels one last time, he said: “When they dog down the door on you inside the green room across the bay,” pointing to where the jumbled cellblocks of San Quentin across the bay were emerging from the morning mist, “look for me in the front row of witnesses. I’ll be the one jacking off … motherfucker.”

  WHISPER MORAN

  Spring ushers new hope into the real world; in the jailhouse it only births fresh despair. The same sun brewing life into the earth grills discontent into the concrete tanks. The same breezes nodding flowers in the park and lifting cotton skirts converts the rusted ventilators atop the Hall of Justice into furnace flues.

  If warm weather made F Tank’s recycled air unbreathable, the crowding of extra lungs effected by stricter sentencing laws and the Sheriff’s practice of inflating population for the upcoming fiscal census turned it suffocating. Thirtytwo men were now crammed in F Tank, and the count rose daily, new arrivals lugging in mattresses to spread wherever room remained on the floor.

  It was called a prison boom—more Californians doing more time in the largest prison system in the free world, a felony population greater by twenty thousand than the U.S. Bureau of Prisons even; and growing by one hundred and fifty felons a week, fodder for a correctional Chicken Little feeding uncorrectably on itself, bloating beyond control.

  Last night Reverend Bones and another hammer dueled over a carton of milk. A storm of oaths; a sudden black blur of fists; then Bones’s foe was jackknifed over the front table. The Reverend’s coveralls were down, his deadly weapon of a dick out, swelling thick as a radiator hose when the deputies stormed and gassed the tank. A rain of billy clubs beat Bones insensate; they dragged him from the tank by the heels, crashing his skull against the gate in a spray of blood, smearing a bright red wake down the corridor.

  All night the Mace eddied through the tank, clinging to coveralls and bedding, threading noxious tendrils through nightmares. Now the sun rose over the East Bay, baking the jailhouse walls anew, reactivating the Mace and inducing a fresh round of streaming eyes and retching.

  Naked, the prisoners lined up ten deep for the two showerheads. When Joe’s turn came, he stood mouth open in the boiling steam, bellowing his lungs, flushing out the gas eddying miasmically deep in his chest. He turned, letting the hailstorm of spray pelt his back. Languorously, he lathered chest, underarms, belly, and balls. He wore the motelsized soap bar to a sliver, raising a foam everywhere. On the streets, he took no showers: junkies, like cats, hate the touch of water. Joe’d forgotten how good one felt; forgotten how good many simple things felt.

  Beneath the other showerhead, Smoothbore was vigorously scrubbing the crack of his withered ass. He looked so droll and vulnerable in the nude: little cannonball tummy, matchstick arms and legs, saggy little tits with gray nipples.

  “While you wuz on Sick Bay I got bitched,” Smoothbore cried over the crashing water. “Life Without for being a habitchual offender.” He grinned, dismissing his last years lost with the easy fatal
ism of a pennyante gambler watching the dealer’s cards scoop his last chips off the table.

  “All day long …” Joe shook his head. A ghostly light suffused the steam enshrouding the drifter.

  “You comin outta there any time this week?” came a hoarse whisper at Joe’s back. He turned, swiping water from his eyes to look into the subzero stare of a tall, dark man reticulated with tattoos.

  “No Hollywood showers in the jailhouse!” crowed Smoothbore. The drifter jumped from beneath his showerhead and grabbed two towels from the steel table. Brows raised meaningfully, he shook one in warning at Joe.

  “Dude’s got more than whore splash comin,” Joe growled, still locked on that impenetrable stare. It took all his heart to pretend he was ready to fight for an extra minute in the pelting spray. Casually he stepped dripping from the stall and took the towel. “All yours, podner,” he drawled as if the villain shouldering past him needed the telling.

  “Life dont get much better,” Smoothbore brightly signified to break the tension.

  “I guess it dont,” Joe mumbled, dogeyeing his successor beneath the showerhead. At least he didn’t come off weak, he consoled himself. Losing face was more frightening than fighting.

  Smoothbore jigged from foot to foot drying chalkwhite calves filigreed with broken blue veins like old bone china; trying to whistle without his state teeth, making flubbery sounds like a pony stamping for its oats. “Now we jailin!” he laughed aloud.

  Jailin’ was an art form and lifestyle both. The style was walkin’ slow, drinkin’ plenty of water, and doin’ your own time; the art was lightin’ cigarets from wall sockets, playin’ the dozens, cuttin’ up dream jackpots, and slowin’ your metabolism to a crawl, sleepin’ twenty hours a day. Forget the streets you won’t see for years. Lettin’ your heart beat the bricks with your body behind bars was hard time. Acceptin’ the jailhouse as the only reality was easy time. Jailin’.

  “I guess we are,” Joe agreed ambivalently, still gunning with a gritty eye and tuck of lip between his teeth the frescoed freebooter in the cone of steam. He had the look of a night manager of a sleazy motel, but was indelibly marked as a hardrock career convict by more tattoos than Joe had ever seen on one man. And not the variety shavetails and sailors select from tattoo parlor walls to look dangerous to their sweethearts. These were prison tattoos, their primitivism alone attested to that; and they spoke a violent legend of the California mainlines.