Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  LOVE and HATE were lettered on his left and righthand knuckles; chains encircled raw, red wrists. A snarling panther clawed blood down one forearm; on the other, a dagger with the words JUST DESSERTS on its blade skewered a rat with X’s for eyes; on the insides of his forearms, a forest of criminal commitment numbers, the most faded preceded by the initials Y.A. for Youth Authority; littering his upper body the leitmotifs of the perennial pariah: DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, LIVE SUFFER DIE, DUST IS MY DESTINY—among swastikas, hangman’s nooses, several aspects of the Grim Reaper, dice showing snake eyes, and on his left pectoral a black cat inside an eight ball. Ornately scrolled rocker arms, like the identifying patches on biker jackets, adorned his belly. The bottom arm, or lower banner arch, describing a smiling semicircle beneath his navel, heralded his home county: SAN BERDOO. The upper rocker arm followed the curve of his rib cage and announced the problem: JACK MORAN.

  Out of the shower stepped Jack Moran, slinging water from his black mane. Eyes reflecting the jaundiced jailhouse light caught Joe staring at the wrong part of his body. The thick lower lip barely moved making a sound like grinding bones: “You got a problem?”

  Joe tore his eyes off the penis with flames inked down its length as if its glans were an engine cowling. Christ! Would the Bearded Clam That Ate San Pedro have met its match in a Panavision version of that nookie nuker!

  “I aint got no problem … unless you do,” Joe parried, rolling his shoulders, praying the hardrocker wouldn’t call his bluff.

  Moran’s eyes blinked once, becoming gun slits. Then Smoothbore had Joe by the arm, hustling him to the front of the tank to exchange his soiled coveralls for one of the fresh pairs being distributed through the bars by a trusty from a rolling hamper.

  “You dont know who you woofin at,” bumped Smoothbore’s naked gums. “That’s Jack Moran. They call him Whisper on accounta the police bullet what blew out his voice box. Whisper’s back on another murder. He paroled just last week from Folsom, got off the bus here in Frisco and stabbed a dude to death in the station. Jist fer bumpin into him! Whisper told the police he walked the mainline eighteen years and was never once bumped. So he bladed the citizen for not showin respeck. Carved his initials on his heart … He’s General of the Aryan Brotherhood, too. Check the lightnin bolts and butterfly on his neck, the iron cross on his throat … Dont even look crosseyed at that man, Joe. Blood makes him laugh. He likes killin … the way you like chokin yer chicken.”

  Joe returned to his bunk with his fresh issue: ripped orange coveralls, a yellowed towel, and threadbare sheet. He made up the bunk and donned the coveralls, which billowed like a parachute, and scouted for a domino game. None were in progress, the rest of the felons being busy showering and dressing. He lit a Camel, casting idly around the bustling tank. And his eye was drawn once more to the man called Whisper.

  He stood naked at a rear sink, grooming his hair. With alternating comb flicks and delicate hand sculptings, the General of the dreaded white supremacist prison gang was building a stratospheric pachook pomp that fairly begged for half a tube of Brylcreem. The style was strictly early Roy Orbison, unseen outside Tupelo, Mississippi, for twentyfive years. Joe might have laughed had he not known this man had killed another only yesterday for the imagined slight of jostling him in a crowded public place. And something else too—something ineffably sad suggested by his grave demeanor as he conducted the archaic tonsorial ritual. Career convicts like Whisper Moran were marooned in time, Joe realized, watching this aging ghost of an early sixties punk gone bad.

  Not that this detracted from the glory of his dermagraffiti. From the sink Whisper Moran afforded Joe a rear view of his body pictography. More of the conventional loser icons across the shoulders, skulls and scorpions and such. Down his backarm triceps, in vertical Gothic print above spiderwebbed elbows, WEISSE and MACHT, German for “White Power.” Similarly, on the back of one calf, BLUT, and the other, UND FEUER, “Blood and Fire,” the motto engraved on Nazi SS daggers. A vision of penitentiary apocalypse covered the ganglord’s back; a nightmarish prisonscape of medieval crenellated walls and stone guntowers engulfed by smoke and flames out of which a firebreathing dragon reared its fearsome head, eyes rendered glaucous by metallic ink. Scrolled beneath was the legend, “Which way I fly am hell. Myself am hell.” The anonymous Mainline Michelangelo signed his work SATAN.

  Satisfied with his hairdo, Whisper Moran turned from the sink. On his neck just beneath the SS runes and butterfly Joe spotted the jagged surgical scar marking the wound that left him voiceless.

  The A.B. General didnt have to stand in the linen line with the others. A neatly folded pair of orange coveralls awaited him on the edge of the table. He slipped into them; they fitted as if tailormade. Idly Joe wondered if he might join the A.B. and tack on the bolts and butterfly himself. If only to steal their symbolic courage, cheat for himself the respect these badges commanded behind every locked gate in the state. If only to protect himself inside from the powers pursuing the Moon.

  Then Whisper Moran fitted an oldtime baseball cap on his head. On its faded crown was stitched a P.T. Barnum letter “B.” Once more he caught Joe gawking. The deadly calabash within the tattooed throat rattled, “I think maybe you do have a problem.”

  “No, no.” Joe crisscrossed his palms before him, signaling surrender. “I was just admiring your old Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Never be another team like em.”

  Something that might have been amusement flashed in the shadow of the cap’s bill, and Joe first noticed falling from one eye a single tattooed tear.

  BON APPETIT

  Sammy Chin appreciated his job as pot cook at Woh Sun’s Chinese Restaurant on Washington, next to the cable car barn. Sammy was a chemistry major at San Francisco State, and pot cooking for Woh Sun paid his basic tuition and board. For pin money Sammy did an altogether different sort of cooking. In basement Chinatown labs he produced Methedrine, LSD, PCP, and crack for the Joe Sing gang. And pretty pin money it was, for it kept up the payments on his Datsun 300X and covered his gambling losses.

  But when the rivalry between the Joe Sing gang and the Wah Ching erupted into open war, the gang’s streetcorner retailers became troops and the labs closed down. War had broken out five times in the two years since Sammy joined the Joe Sing gang, and each new time a shaky truce was forged it was harder for Sammy to rationalize continuing as the gang’s chemist. Each time he was so many units closer to the degree, that much closer to the realization of his dream of a career in industrial chemistry. One bust would ruin forever all he’d worked for.

  Two days before the Golden Boar massacre, Sammy had interviewed with a campus recruiter for Dow. When the recruiter asked his views on toxic waste management, Sammy answered with the cooking analogy: “You cant make an omelette without breaking eggs.” The recruiter found this response practical, realistic. Little could he know just how practical and realistic Sammy truly was when it came to chemical toxins. The recruiter was so optimistic about his chances with Dow that Sammy concluded he’d retire from the Joe Sing gang.

  That morning he turned the fancy Datsun back to the dealership; and that afternoon before he went to work called Ah Toy, Woh Sun’s eldest daughter, and proposed marriage. Woh Sun was a powerful and wealthy man, Snow Leopard of the Circle of Six, Chinatown’s oldest and most powerful tong. Ping Chin, Sammy’s father, had also been a Leopard of the Circle until his death. Sammy was confident that Woh Sun would assent to Sammy’s union with Ah Toy—and grant a substantial dowry with which the chemistry student might satisfy his outstanding gambling debts. As a bonus, Ah Toy was a stunner of the stripe that Chinese poets liken to celestial phenomena and Western manufacturers award bluejean contracts.

  To his proposal over the phone Ah Toy responded with a tintinnabulation closer to birdsong than giggle, a purely ceremonial pretense of chastity. After all, Ah Toy once worked at one of Johnny Formosa’s doll shops. Unbeknownst to Woh Sun, of course. She woul
d be as relieved to escape her father’s tyranny through marriage as Sammy would be to sever his ties with the Joe Sing gang.

  A shipment of arcane spices ordered by Sammy had finally arrived this afternoon, and he was working alone in the closed restaurant, preparing the chicken stock by which a Chinese eatery is judged just as an Italian one is distinguished by its tomato sauces. Sammy didn’t know that Ah Toy had slipped out of her home to meet him at the restaurant and demonstrate her personal delight at his proposal in one of the rear banquet booths.

  She slipped through the restaurant’s front door. If she made a sound it was lost in the shuttlebang of cable cars in the adjacent barn, the whine of turbines turning the fiftyfoot iron wheels that pulleyed the miles of pleated iron cable beneath the city streets.

  Stealing through the darkened restaurant she heard Sammy whistling cheerfully from where he stood on a milk crate stirring with a giant ladle his simmering concoction in a vat atop the great stove. “You shouldnt have crossed the road,” he scolded the bobbing chicken heads. Sammy’s heart was light as the briny breezes wafting through the open rear doors, his prospects bright as the sunlight glancing off the stainless steel pots hanging from overhead racks.

  Ah Toy paused at the kitchen’s bamboo curtain to think up just the right seductive remark to inveigle Sammy to the lovers bower she’d chosen. She started suddenly at unfamiliar voices. Men had entered the kitchen through the rear doors. She bent close enough to the bamboo to see, yet not so close her shadow could be detected through its interstices.

  “Sammy, we’re callin in all our markers,” said a gangly character wearing a loud sports jacket and too much greasy kids stuff in his droopy grey hair.

  “Frank,” Sammy said, “aint I always squared with you guys?”

  A second man carrying a Belgian FN-LAR automatic rifle sauntered to the stove. Ah Toy watched him roll his shoulders and twitch his neck as if his jacket and collar were too tight. He said, “Look, you fuckin slope. Square is payin yer debts without us havin to come ask. You got three and a half large in yer jeans there?”

  “No,” Sammy said. He started to climb down from the milk crate.

  The second man slapped the back of Sammy’s knees with the assault rifle. “Stay up there on your playstool, wimp … Now we know you aint cookin dope up there. How you expect to pay us?”

  Ah Toy was about to turn away from the curtain to phone the police when she was shocked to hear Sammy blurt: “Lissen. I’m getting married to the daughter of this dive’s owner. I’m doing it for the dowry. Soon as I’m hitched, I can pay you off. With juice.”

  “What’s a dowry?” asked the one who looked like washedup pimp.

  “Alimony up front,” the twitchy one said; then to Sammy: “That takes too long. We got to cover these markers now … But there is a way you can square up without cash. We need some information which is worth more than what you owe us.”

  “What? Anything.” Sammy was shaking so violently the ladle clinked inside the vat of stock.

  “The masks and guns the Sing brothers used for the Golden Boar massacre. They loaned them to a coupla whiteboys who used them to rob us. Tell us who these characters are and you can put these markers inside fortune cookies.”

  Sammy’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, shit. You gotta understand. When Joe and Archie go militant, they go alone. They keep the rest of us in the dark … honest,” he spluttered, staring crosseyed at the assault rifle touching the bridge of his nose, “I’m just the chemist. They … they dont tell me nothing about the killings and all.”

  “One last chance, zipperhead,” he said. “Either of the brothers mention a diamond in your little gang powwows? Put us on to the diamond those whiteboys robbed from us and you get more than your markers back. I’ll give you your life. Otherwise …”

  “You said you wouldnt …” quavered the greasy one.

  “Shut up, juicehead … Well, Sammy boy?” Now the rifle was poking at Sammy’s genitals, making him squirm.

  “Please. I never heard of any diamond. But I will pay my markers. As soon as Ah Toy and I are married, I’ll pay you first. I’ll …”

  Like a snake striking, the twitchy one swept the rifle behind Sammy’s knees, overturning him into the bubbling vat. He mounted the stool and held Sammy’s Reeboks until his kicking legs went limp.

  The gangly one giggled. Hopping from loafer to tassled loafer, he trilled just like Julia Child, “Bon appetit!”

  The other hopped off the milk crate and stared disgustedly at him.

  “Are you finished, asshole?”

  “Yeah. Just got a little carried away.” He hung his greasy head.

  “This is the last time I take you anywhere.” Motioning with the rifle, the twitchy one ordered the other out the back door and started to follow. But at the threshold he paused, teased by an impulse. “I’m gettin bad as you,” he laughed to the other. He whirled and fired a burst on full automatic, ringing showers of sparks off the hanging pots and pans so that Woh Sun’s kitchen cymbaled and gonged like a Chinese concert hall.

  Lieutenant Tarzon was among the first police on the scene. While the rest took pictures of Sammy in the vat and suggested ways of getting him out of it, Tarzon led Ah Toy back to the very booth she’d chosen for her tryst with Sammy to question her. Briefly she described the two men. They were trying to discover the identity of other white men, ones the Sing brothers had loaned guns and masks. The last thing they asked before drowning Sammy was about a diamond they said was stolen from them.

  Would Ah Toy be willing to come down to headquarters to look through some mugshot books? It wouldn’t take long. The dark little lieutenant seemed to know already who killed Sammy Chin.

  “Ah Toy know nothing, go nowhere,” boomed a voice through the police hubbub. It was Woh Sun himself with his glinting goldframed glasses and seablue silk suit.

  The Snow Leopard of the Circle of Six swooped up his daughter and was gone before Tarzon could protest. Not that it would have done any good. Distrust of foreign authority among the Chinese dated back to their enslavement by feudal Manchurian warlords; the bloody persecutions visited on coolies by nineteenthcentury Americans only confirmed their xenophobia. They made Sicilians seem like a race of gossips. If he tried holding her as a material witness, Woh Sun would post her bail and spirit her out of the country.

  Besides, Tarzon already knew all he needed. The diamond had been stolen, it was loose on the streets. He had only to recover it before the Fat Man did to identify the sugardaddy and lock Moses behind the green door. He screwed a Hav-A-Tampa Jewel into a lupine smile. Stolen by whiteboys with the same guns and masks used at the Golden Boar. Lieutenant Tarzon had a strong hunch just which punks those were.

  DEAD TIME

  Joe wasn’t the only prisoner who didn’t sleep that night in F Tank. Most felons with weeks, sometimes months between court appearances, reset their body clocks to remain awake nights. Then, in the steelstitched jailhouse shadows, when its stone bowels ceased from grinding, their fantasies were unfettered and their deepest longings released in masturbation and minstrelsy. By day they slept like the dead, rising just for meals; by night they came alive and were free … Jailin’.

  Toot Sweet sprawled in his blanket hammock at the front bars. A newcomer named Champagne sat crosslegged nearby. Toot was running down the further pedigree of that mythic badass Dolomite:

  Say, Bee-itch! I fucked the cow jumped over the moon

  Joe stared at the sagging bunk springs over his head, mired in a lovelost funk. Why hadn’t Kitty visited or written him? She hadn’t even left money on his books, as he’d asked in the kite sent with Harold, for cigarets and candy. Maybe she no longer shook a tailfeather over the candycolored lights. Maybe another dude had taken Joe’s place. He tried comforting himself that he hadn’t told her of the Moon. If she knew and remained true, he would never have known whether it was to him or the promise
of wealth.

  Champagne was privy to certain details of Dolomite’s sex life:

  Dat ho bee-itch Mabel farted

  N dat’s when de FUCKIN started

  Her pussy do the mojo, turkey, popcorn n grind

  Lef ole Dolomite six strokes behind

  Nex mawnin dey founded Mabel daid

  Wid her fonky drawers wrapped round her nappy haid

  On a top bunk near the front of the G Tank, across the corridor from F, a puttyskinned youth with glasses thick as Coke bottles was ripping and chewing his blanket. Joe smirked. Ruffage was a desirable supplement to the jailhouse diet, but fireretardant wool? Marinated in creosote, sweat, and jizz? Joe decided the dude was going Eleven Ninetyeight, the administrative section number for snapping under the stress of incarceration. Well, he hoped vaguely, if they catch him eating county property, maybe they’ll get him the help he needs.

  At the front bars Top Dog had switched the toast to the saga of that Ole Signifyin’ Monkey always gettin’ over on the bigger, stronger jungle beasts like a streetcorner pimp runnin’ the Murphy on a gang of Shriners:

  Now Monkey wore them uptown stitches

  Drove a Cadillac fulla dem monkey bitches

  Joe swung off his bunk and stepped to the front bars, lighting a cigaret. Tomorrow he would go to court, where he would plead not guilty but be ready to cop out if their case was airtight. Let ’em give him the book. The max for GTA was three years. Two, with work and good time off. Short time, homey! he jollied himself. Do it standing on yer head stackin’ BB’s. But the time wouldn’t start running till he hit the penitentiary gates. County jail was dead time.