Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  At the head of the enclosure tilted a prefab construction with CHIEF OF PLANT stenciled on its door. The Work Order clerk’s office occupied its front, a single room reeking stalely of blueprint ink and packing grease. On one wall was impaled the motheaten head of a bull elk, binoculars hanging from the broken antler opposite the missing glass eye. Beneath its scraggly whiskers a bluefaced Belfast Water clock told the wrong time.

  Joe’s beatup desk faced out the first unbarred window he’d seen in nearly a year. The Typewriter Shop had “secured” him an electronic Olympia typewriter, and Moonpie Monroe a Mr. Coffee purloined from the kitchens. Everyone was eager to propitiate the Work Order clerk because his bribed blessing was required for all building and maintenance work.

  Joe picked up Work Requests from all sectors of the institution each morning from the Chief of Plant’s box in Custody. His job was to type these into Work Orders, obtain or forge the needed signatures, and route them to the appropriate Maintenance sectors. But Work Requests had a way of getting lost, never to become Work Orders. Displease Joe and that toilet might never get unclogged, refuse to kick down the ducats he demanded as juice and those shelves would never be built, thwart his contraband enterprise and forget having your cell lights fixed. No use trying to go over his head to his Supervisor, Chief of Plant Homer T. Chubb. Homer was drying out at a fidget farm on his state medical plan.

  Over his boneroo new coffee machine in Joe’s office hung a Playboy calendar X’ed off to the date of his predecessor’s parole, two months earlier. Joe didn’t believe in counting days to freedom, on the theory that a watched pot never boils. Neither was he partial to this month’s Miss November impersonating Pocahontas in buckskin lingerie. So in seeming defiance of the cold wind whistling down the Maintenance Yard and the peajackets and woolen watch caps issued to the outside convict workers (his cap fit nicely over Whisper’s legacy), he kept the calendar turned to his favorite of the twelve pinups, Miss July, reclining in her wraparound shades on a poolside chaise, shrugging humongous oiled udders to an L.A. sun.

  Except on days when he yearned for some strange. Then he spread the calendar on his desk to flip through and abuse whichever month he chose. Joe wasn’t serving time, he was fucking it.

  Yet this gritty gray ayem there was a better show than ole Hef’s boys could stage five yards outside Joe’s window in the lumber cage. Magdalena and Billy Skaggs had already started swapping passionate spit when the phone rang with Earl on the other end.

  “I got some news might give you a rise, amigo …” Joe was only halflistening, so rapt was he on Magdalena sinking to her knees, unzipping and digging out Billy’s thickening whammer to plop in her mouth, reaching behind for two fistfuls of denim to drive him. “That shemale friend of yours from the street’s drivin McGee crazy. She organizin weenie women for safe sex the way he recruitin guards for Teamsters …”

  Earl was talking about Oblivia, recently dubbed the Rubber Queen for her contraband heroics. She’d been holding AIDS prevention seminars in desperate secrecy, like conclaves of early Christians. McGee was wild to bust Oblivia, it had become an obsession with him, but she was too slick. To thwart his snitches, she held her sessions extemporaneously on the Yard, in individual cells, in empty dorms and classrooms. The transformation of the bustout Blue Note B-drinker into Coldwater’s very own Mother Teresa inspired Joe as profoundly as it infuriated McGee.

  “That’s one chick with a dick I’m proud of,” Joe said thickly. Billy had grabbed Magdalena by the hair and lifted her around and slammed her up against the cage’s wire mesh, which he clutched to facefuck her for all he was worth. The cage shook as though it held wild animals. Joe wondered if Magdalena’s imminent parole loaned the sex added piquancy.

  “Why you breathin funny, amigo? You spankin yer monkey?”

  “Sure, F Stop. Just keep talkin dirty …”

  And damned if the old coonass didn’t start pumping Joe’s ear full of pornographic minutiae concerning armadillo reproduction in captivity—“They shy, yeah. Only respond to that hands on approach.”

  Ballooning his cheeks, Joe interrupted with a plea to be allowed to return to work and hung up.

  He cursed rolling a Work Order into the machine backward. He wished Billy would wrap up the show; he couldn’t wrest his eyes from the lumber cage. Finally, the big con sagged, staggered backward and socked her in the mouth. Must have been good. Magdalena swished the cum oyster from one cheek to the other; her adamsapple bobbed like a toilet float swallowing it. She chanced to catch Joe’s eye and licked her bruised chops with a sexpot sneer just for him.

  To his horror and dismay, Joe was harder than a hanged man. That weenie woman doesn’t even characterize feminity, he tried castigating himself, she rebukes it. But his moronic member would not bend, much less cave in, to such abstractions; and Joe had to mount a commando assault on Miss September, nude bowling at the Playboy mansion. She stood at the line, eyes predatorily slitted, lips hungrily parted, cupping the shiny globe aloft between polished knockers of like mass and mold; becoming in Joe’s fisted rapture a tripletitted Tantric manifestation in Lucite by Mattel, at once terrible and tacky—Barbie, Destroyer of BMW’s, Devourer of Active Assets. At length selfsated and disgusted, he rolled in a fresh Work Order right side up.

  That evening Judge Harriet Innes-Brown held in camera proceedings in chambers to review new disclosures made in the Moses case and determine the advisability of declaring a mistrial. Present were Judge Innes-Brown, District Attorney Faria, defense counsel Dreaks, Homicide Lieutenant Ricardo Tarzon, state’s witness Karen Cowley, and a court reporter.

  Having stipulated for the record that Miss Cowley at her own request, and under the City and County Medical Examiner’s direction to forestall traumatic shock, had been administered tranquilizers; and having further stipulated that said tranquilizers impaired the witness’s mental acuity, Judge Innes-Brown inquired of both counsels if, in the interests of justice, they had any objection to the continuation of the proceedings; and both counsels acceded with the exception by both recorded that any testimony heard must be later reheard in open court under oath.

  JUDGE INNES-BROWN: Mr. Faria, would you care to open this inquiry?

  D. A. FARIA: Miss Cowley, why didnt you tell us earlier about these things, these … snuff movies, as you call them.

  KAREN COWLEY: You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. They snuffed my best friend, Peaches Supreme. All Peaches did was stuff a tip in her twat … vagina, I mean. Quick Cicero caught her. They made a snuffer of her. I saw the video. Mr. Moses played it for all the girls on his office VCR. Afterwards, they rented a motel room on Lombard Street and left the body there. I remember reading about it in the papers. The police called it murder-rape …

  D. A. FARIA: Just a minute, Miss Cowley. Lieutenant, do you—

  LT. TARZON: Real name Nancy Hoffstedder. Her body was discovered with its throat slashed and a bullet through its left ear in Room 234 of the Cablecar Inn in the first week of February last—

  D. A. FARIA: Please continue, Miss Cowley.

  KAREN COWLEY: Her folks came down from Oregon to get the body. Nice folks, Christmas tree farmers. They held a little memorial thing in Golden Gate Park. In the Japanese Tea Gardens. All us girls came dressed like I was in court today. See, they thought she was a PBX operator, so we made like secretaries and stuff. They were just country, didnt know the difference. Her mother showed us pictures of when she was a kid. On a bicycle. At the state fair with a stick of cotton candy bigger than she was. Her father read a stupid poem about death taking the brightest and best in the middle of life. At the end her mother couldnt quit crying. We tried to comfort her and all, but she wouldnt stop bawling. Then her father said she was crying for joy because her daughter had such a fine bunch of friends and knowing her life was so enriched made losing her a little easier. And here we were a bunch of cheap whores. It was sad. But it was sweet, too, with the s
hallow ponds full of fat goldfish and the cherry blossoms blowing everywhere—

  D. A. FARIA: Cherry blossoms? I thought we were talking about the first week in February?

  LT. TARZON: The cherry blossoms bloomed early last winter. I know in connection with another case.

  KAREN COWLEY: So now those nice folks are going to read about her in the paper and maybe even see the snuff flick. Just like I had to. Watch some twisted son of a bitch bust a nut up their baby’s cunt and a cap in her ear at the same time … Blew her brains all over the front of the camera. I didnt want Peaches’s folks to have to see that or even hear about it. That’s why I didnt say nothing about it. Not till I lost my head in court. And now I dont want to say any more about it. Only this. I hope you’re proud, Mr. Smartypants Lawyer.

  COUNSEL DREAKS: No, I’m not proud, I want the witness to know I regret this as much as she does.

  JUDGE INNES-BROWN: Mr. Dreaks, am I correct in assuming you are making a motion for mistrial at this juncture as the jury has been hopelessly subverted with inadmissible testimony.

  COUNSEL DREAKS: I have so advised my client. However, he insists I make no such motion. He understands his rights have been compromised, but wishes the matter to proceed with this same jury.

  JUDGE INNES-BROWN: That is highly irregular. I hope that it is an indication of nothing more than his faith in the system. The District Attorney is to take under advisement this Court’s recommendation that new charges be investigated and, should grounds be found, referred to the Grand Jury … In closing, I offer you all my thanks, you in particular, Miss Cowley, for your cooperation at this late hour after an extremely trying day. Good evening.

  NO PAIN, NO GAIN

  Three walls of the YMCA weight room were painted a soothing powderblue; the fourth was entirely mirrored. That way fitness devotees could see the immediate fruit of their labors on the sixteen gleaming exercise machines ranked like medieval torture engines across the rubbermatted floor.

  State Supreme Court Justice Lucius Bell was strapped in a Nautilus pectoral fly machine. Not to appease such vanity as drove the strutting Adonises and ardent Artemises in spandex activewear, empty heads clamped by Sony Walkmans, gushing holistic hocuspocus about highfiber diets and higher colonics and Highest Selves. Judge Bell was there for a reason. His doctor told him his ticker was clogging and he’d better lose some weight. What the doctor didn’t mention were the lesions on Bell’s heart, damage typical of cocaine abuse.

  Bell could have opted for swimming. But he hated getting wet and could do nothing more dignified in the water than a flailing doggie paddle. Then there was raquetball. The trouble with raquetball, he told his cronies at the Black Friars, was it was too white. Once he’d seen a film of colonial India where the Sikh officers played cricket. That’s how he felt playing raquetball, colonized. He said. Secretly he wanted to control every symbol of New Age ofay doodadism. He already had his own vineyard in Sonoma, a twelvemeter yacht, a son in school in Switzerland, and a seat on the Sierra Club Board. And it was hard imagining anything whiter than a white wife. The true trouble was, Bell’s archrival on the State Supreme Court, ultraright superwhite Chief Justice Kingsley Crowder III, was also senior state raquetball champion. It wouldn’t do to have their perennial judicial jousting decided symbolically with a hard rubber ball. He’d like to see Bill Cosby act so twofortennis cool if he knew his next time out on the court he was going to get thrashed like a house nigger by Jesse Helms.

  Bell breathed out at the top of the fly where his arms in the pulley levers were fully extended above his chest; inhaled deeply, spreading them wide into a rigid cross. Today he’d boosted the pin to the fortypound plate. No Pain, No Gain read the cute computer sign on the wall. His muscles burned … seven … spots danced in his eyes … eight … his arteries throbbed … nine … blood boomed in his ears … annnd TEN! He released the levers high; the weight plates crashed on the pulley rack behind the incline bench. His lungs exploded breath like a blown tire. He leaned back, eyes closed, tasting the sweat at the corners of his mouth. He thought of how he’d look in swimming trunks at the country club this summer. He opened his eyes, flared the lids to rinse away the spots; tested his vision looking into the mirror. Immediately his eyes bulged.

  Across the room a solitary figure in old gray sweats and black wool watchcap was working out on the heavy bag. He wore no gloves, only tape. A staccato flurry of jabs signed off with two lightning left hooks and an explosive right uppercut that could have launched the Space Shuttle; shuffle back, feint north and south; then into the bag again with a stuttering highspeed jab. He stopped and dropped his arms and rolled his neck and shoulders. He turned, chugging both fists low, skipping an invisible rope. He grinned from across the room into the mirror. None other than Quick Cicero.

  That psychotic slug has sent his hachet for a meet. They’re getting desperate, and desperation breeds stupidity.

  Lucius Bell unstrapped and hopped off the Nautilus bench and rushed from the mirrored room. On the way to the lockerroom, he passed the juice bar. Usually he stopped there for a Kharma Krush or Chakra Frappe.

  “Astral Smoothie’s today’s special,” the girl said in a purr that could just as easily have offered a half and half. Her name in this life was Bambi and she taught jazzercise and always wore a T-shirt imprinted with the YMCA logos. As usual her nipples protruded like thumbs. Once Bell had overheard one of the bodybuilders ask why they were perpetually erect. Those boneheads interpreted a mutual devotion to fitness as a license to pose with impunity any anatomical question. “My eyes”—she’d pointed to her baby blues—“are the windows of my soul. My nips”—she tweaked them—“its antennae. I keep them tuned to life’s potentialities. I used to be into rage, now I’m into growth … Like in bioenergetics, awareness through body movements. It’s all in this totally astral book of consciousness outtakes …” She held up a shiny paperback spread on top of the juicer. It was titled Just Bring Your Body, Your Mind Will Follow. On its cover a nude couple stood holding hands facing into a sunset so pyrotechnic it might have been an H-bomb explosion.

  But this morning Bell was too addled by Quick’s unexpected appearance to even ogle Bambi’s satellite dishes. Rushing into the lockerroom he nearly bowled over another member in his frantic search for his locker. It was always hard remembering which of the identical three hundred lockers, each fastened with an identical combination padlock, was his. This morning it was nearly impossible.

  What the hell was Cicero doing here, where Bell was known? All his other contacts with Baby Jewels had been by public phone. On a weekend Black Awareness Seminar in San Francisco, Bell had noted the numbers of a dozen pay telephones in open, crowded places. When his secretary received a message from a Mr. Moss from the California Association for Convalescent Action, or CACA, a fictitious lobby for resthome residents, Bell phoned the Tender Trap’s machine from a Sacramento pay phone and left a message instructing the Fat Man to be at a certain pay phone at a certain time to await his call. That way he was reasonably sure of not being recorded and witlessly adding further blackmail ammunition to the formidable smoking gun represented by the Blue Jager Moon. But now the stakes were climbing, the papers were full of the latest snuff movie revelations, and Baby Jewels was acting recklessly.

  Judge Bell was half out of his gym clothes before he found the locker. Skip the shower today, he decided in a flash—beat Cicero out of the Y. But when he was nude he had a better idea. Quickly he stuffed his shorts and tank top into the locker and spun the combination dial. He grabbed a towel off the stack and ducked into the steam room.

  The first lungful of wet heat reminded him of why he never used the facility. It was like being lowered down the stack of a steam ship. Come to think of it, he never saw any blacks use it. It was always the flabby old white men. He wondered if a taste for steam heat was acquired by genetics or environment.

  Never mind. Today he was just grateful no one wa
s using the steam room. He took a seat on the woodslat bench furthest from the door and forced himself to breathe deep and slow. He had to last in there long enough for Cicero to figure he’d flown the coop and leave himself. He’d just remembered his Aston Martin in the lot when he saw through the swirling steam the wiry figure with a towel around its waist.

  “How you, Yonner?” Smiling, Quick took a seat on the opposite bench; stretched out his legs and folded his hands over his corrugated belly.

  “This is insane! We could be easily spotted.”

  “You fergittin. You’s the only one hurt if we get tossed.”

  “Oh no, if we’re uncovered, I cant help you any longer.”

  Quick Cicero shrugged and rolled his shoulders. Then the little son of a bitch stepped over and turned up the thermostat. Returning to his seat he said, “Mr. Moses dont figger you’ve been such a big help anyhow.”

  “I was doing all I could …” Jesus, to have to grovel at the tail of this snake. “First I approached HYENA, the prostitutes’ union. They traditionally support independent working girls and take a dim view of kinds like Mr. Moses, whom they see as exploiters of women. I convinced their leadership, however, that Mr. Moses was quite the opposite, that he protected these girls from the perils of plying their trade unprotected in the streets. I had them convinced his motives corresponded with their own, the preservation of these young women’s welfare and dignity, and that now he was being singled out for persecution. I lobbied hard behind the scenes in this portraiture of Mr. Moses as the protector of the working girl. Once won over, HYENA used their influence to persuade the ACLU that issues of civil liberty were at stake here. The ACLU took up the cause largely on their faith in my record and integrity.”

  Quick rolled his eyes and began mining lint from his navel.