Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  “I’m Ellison, hey, I’m Ellison,” I yelled, jumping up.

  “C’mere. C’mon, c’mere already, will you. I’ve got other cases waiting in there, you shouldn’t slow me up that wa—”

  He never got a chance to finish telling me what a ghastly inconvenience I was to him. A guard poked his head in through the wooden door from the courtroom. “Strangways?” he yelled, and my Defender whirled, belting back, “Yeah, what’s happening?” The guard jerked a thumb toward the courtroom, and my Defender, the Right Honorable Upholder Of Speed and Facility, Attorney Strangways, urged me to, “Stay right there. I’ve got a case up, I’ll be right back…”

  And he was gone.

  So help me God, be said: “Stay right there.” It sounds like a bad W. C. Fields gag. It sounded that way then. But he said it. He really did.

  I couldn’t laugh. It was too uncomplicatedly frightening to laugh about.

  I went back to sit down and read, and wait for Mr. Strangways to work me into his crowded poor-man schedule.

  Pooch was sitting there, staring at his hands.

  I sat down beside him. I had to lean in close to make myself heard over the noise of the animal herd.

  “What’re you in for?” I asked.

  “ADW,” he replied. He wasn’t too hip on talking. I really couldn’t blame him. ADW. Assault with a Deadly Weapon. A serious offense. Particularly if he’d been nabbed before and had any kind of a record.

  I started to say something, I don’t know what, when my man Strangways burst through the door again and motioned me to the bars. I patted Pooch lightly on the arm to let him know I’d be back, and went to my counsel. “Now,” he began, as though we had accomplished something on his last trip through, “let me have that again.”

  “Have what again?” I asked.

  This was incredible.

  He gave me a cold look, as though I was wasting his time. “What happened, what happened, boy! Tell me what your story is.”

  “My story, Counselor, is that I’m innocent. I didn’t do anything. I was just—”

  “Yes, yes,” he broke in. “I know. I know you didn’t do anything, but what are you in here for?”

  I decided I’d better cease my lofty tactics and tell this clown everything I could, in hopes he might retain a bit of it, either in his gray cells or his yellow note pad. “I’m a writer,” I began, talking rapidly. “I’ve done two books on juvenile delinquency. I ran with a kid gang for ten weeks, about five years ago, to gather background data. When I came out of the gang I had a bunch of weapons I used for lectures before PTA groups, youth groups, that sort of thing. A guy I haven’t seen in a few years, who wanted to hang me up, called the police and told them I had an arsenal. They picked me up on the Sullivan, and I have a perfectly legitimate use for the weapons—I never thought of the gun as a weapon, only as a visual aid, or I would have had the pin pulled and had it registered. Anyway, I’ve been out of the state for the last few years and I haven’t done any—”

  He broke in rudely, “Ever used it for an illegal purpose?”

  “What’re you, kidding or something?” I was outraged.

  “I just told you, I’m a legitimate writer, and I used it when lecturing to youth groups, YMCA classes, that kind of jazz. Don’t you believe me?”

  “Sure, sure,” he indicated no belief whatsoever, putting a palm up to placate me. “I believe you. I’ll see what I can do. Wait here.” And the Lone Ranger was gone again.

  I had a feeling with this bush league Perry Mason on my team I might wind up on the guillotine, rather than in the slammer.

  And all the while, the other inmates were clamoring and jostling and going a little mad trying to get heard.

  Strangways came rushing through, with a set of briefs under his arm, and I thought he was coming to talk to me, but he called out another name and a seedy old man leaped up from where he’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, and they huddled (much as I had) for about thirty seconds. Then Strangways bolted again, as a guard held the door for him. (It looked like a torero making a pass at the bull, and as Strangways went spinning through the door in his own personal veronica, I felt like hollering Olé!)

  Then I went cold all over, because I was yelling to the vanishing Strangways, and I realized I’d been yelling for almost a full minute, and I heard my voice above the other desperate animals in that pen.

  I was yelling, “You gotta get me outta this!”

  Then, much later, while my head was spinning so completely from the noise, they let me out of the pen, and it was my turn to go before the arraigning judge. I gave Pooch a feeble look, hoping I’d never see him again in that cell, and watched him mouth the words, “See you soon, man.”

  The only impression I now have of that few seconds before the bar was a room very heavy with wood paneling, a great many people, the scent of rain-wet clothes, a great deal of bustle and confusion, and half a dozen public defenders, bailiffs, cops, guards, hangers-on and crying women, all clustered around the bench.

  I had no idea how the judge could see me, examine me, hear my plea. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about it. He never bothered.

  Pay attention, then. This is the face of preliminary justice in the morning courts of New York City:

  The clerk read off the charge in a monotone, the Judge scratched his white hair, examining himself for signs of dandruff, my Knight In White Button-Down Armor, the sharp and pithy Mr. Strangways, came bursting on the scene and said (so help me God this is word-for-word):

  “Your Honor, this man is a writer. He obtained these weapons in the pursuit of a story and he has a legitimate right to own them, becau—”

  WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE HAD A RIGHT TO OWN OF THEM? came the voice of someone’s God. SINCE WHEN DOES BEING A WRITER GIVE HIM ANY RIGHT TO OWN A WEAPON? ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS BAIL.

  I nearly fainted.

  “Your Honor,” whined Strangways, “five hundred!”

  ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS BAIL.

  And that was that.

  Strangways didn’t say another word. He turned on his heel, picked up a new set of briefs on another poor soul, and disappeared into the room with the cage. I stood there, waiting for a chance to say something, but that chance never came. I had had it. Completely.

  God, the absolute futility I felt! The helplessness! The need to say or do something! And not being able to move an inch, being so confused by what had happened and its rapidity that I was still lost in a fog!

  I turned slowly around as a bailiff grabbed me, and I saw my mother and Linda and my friend Ted White, the jazz critic with his wife Sylvia, and they were absolutely stark white with disbelief and terror. I caught sight of my agent, Theron Raines, and I felt compassion for him, for gentle Theron was practically faint with helplessness at what had happened to me, his friend and his client.

  “You got the bail money?” the bailiff asked me.

  I don’t even know if I answered him.

  He dragged me back into the room with the cage, and they tossed me back into the pen with the other losers.

  I was down the toilet now. Completely. I had been booked, mugged, printed, and at last, arraigned. It was the end of the game-playing. The Author was now a felon.

  Pooch grinned. “Welcome home, man,” be said.

  All I could think of was that my mother was out there, who knew in what condition. This kind of thing might very well kill her. I can’t think of any mother who enjoys seeing her pride and joy being hauled away to the pokey.

  I didn’t have too much time to think about it, though, for Strangways came trotting back in. “Have you got the bail money?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “No, I haven’t got that kind of money, but my agent’s out there, Mr. Raines—”

  “Yes, I met him,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you.”

  I wasn’t feeling too salutary at that point. “Thanks anyway,” I replied, “If you’d done any more I might have gotten the chair.” He looked at
me as though I was some kind of a whack, and didn’t I appreciate all he’d done for me, taking off from his valuable, money-grubbing, ambulance-chasing practice to come down here to help me and I was probably guilty anyhow.

  All I could think of was how be had whined, actually whined in front of the Judge. “Your Honor, five hundred!” Jeezus God in Heaven! What a schmuck! Pity the guy who had no mother, agent or friends in the circus audience.

  He went on to his next customer, and another sterling success jousting with the Beast of the Law.

  “How’d’ja do?”

  I turned to see Pooch waiting for me. He had been talking to his own Legal Aid man. “About as good as you’re going to do,” I snapped back. I wasn’t feeling charitable, either.

  Then his man came for him, and he went out to face the Judge and the Judge’s justice. I slumped down on the bench and started to crack up.

  Unless you have seen the conveyor-belt justice of an overcrowded New York court, until you have felt the helpless inevitability of not being heard, you don’t know what it means to be hung up. The Judge was no better or worse a man than any other; if polled, he would consider himself a fine example of what a magistrate should be. But then, Eichmann probably didn’t think of himself as a perverted killer, either. Hitler probably never thought of himself as a maniac. This is the nature of the sickness: not to recognize it. Not to know when you are subverting morality and ethics and common humanity in the name of expediency.

  This is the sickness of our times, and the men we put in positions of power, to rule us wisely and with an iron hand. The Judge, harassed, tired, overworked, filled with a deadly cynicism and callousness from years of seeing pleading faces before him, impatient and uncomfortable, perhaps even subconsciously guilty about the shabby job he had been forced to pass off as competent, had found it unnecessary to hear any of the facts in the case, and had intoned, “One thousand dollars bail,” without really knowing what he was doing. I felt more pity for him, then, and the anger came later; not too much later, but later nonetheless.

  He, too, was trapped.

  FOURTEEN

  Then began the horrors, as I went through the police detention routine, while awaiting the arrival (from Lord only knew where!) of my thousand dollar bail money.

  The Tombs are very clean, brightly lit, and because of this more frightening than the typical romantic conception of Torquemada’s inquisition chambers.

  The closed-in feeling, the almost claustrophobic terror of being chivvied, harried, moved wherever they want to move you, in a line with dozens of other men, faceless and without freedom—the entire weight of the building, the city, the law, life—everything weighing down on you…this is the most terrifying single reality of existence in a jail.

  Don’t believe it: a grown man can cry. Frighten him long enough and hard enough, it’ll happen.

  Pooch came back as they were unlocking the cell. He had done no better, than me, and since his bail was set at two thousand dollars—this was the second arrest for ADW—he was considerably worse off. At least I had people on the outside presumably trying to bail me out.

  (I was not to learn until much later that day just how hard they did try, and the heartbreaks and personal sacrifice involved, nor how my friends truly came through for me.)

  I don’t know how conditions run in the other, more permanent, prisons of the New York area—Hart or Rikers Island to name just two—but in the Tombs, the goal is to turn you from a human being into a number, a piece of flesh that will obey, a body that will be where they want it, when they want it. The total de-humanization of a man. And for some of the unfortunates I saw in the Tombs, this was a short step.

  The first batch of us who had been remanded to custody were moved out of the waiting pen, and the men tried to hold back, to stay near the little door to the outside world, so gray and cadaverous with rain. The guards shoved them forward roughly, though not with any real brutality, despite the fact that one old man screamed like a chicken, “Keep your f—kin’ hands offen me, hack!”

  That was my first occasion to hear the prison slang word for guard used. From that moment on, I thought of them as “hacks” also. After all, wasn’t I one of the boys?

  We were led out through the fire door and down the twists and cross-corridors of the rabbit-warren that is the Tombs maze. We got in an elevator (perhaps the same one we had been on before) and went down…way down. It was like being taken beneath the Earth forever.

  When we settled, and were led out of the elevator, we crossed a large open area to another heavy barred door, with a metal fire door arrangement bolted to it, and a thick pane of chicken-wired glass set in the middle. The hack who was leading the caravan banged with his fist on the door, and then rang a bell. After a second another face appeared in the glass, noted who was waiting, yelled something we could not hear through the glass, over his shoulder, and unlocked the door.

  We marched into the reception area of the Tombs, where I was to spend the next five or six hours, the worst five or six hours of my life. It was a huge marshalling area, with pens along both walls, and, to our left as we came in, a high-countered desk behind which uniformed hacks were busy arranging records and dossiers, preparing files, typing reports, slamming the drawers of filing cabinets, arguing about undecipherable subjects, and in general making a helluva racket. Down the spine of the room ran two long wooden benches—back-to-back—like the kind they have in railroad waiting rooms or in the principal’s office of the high school. At the end of the left-hand bench, at the far end of the room, was a gray-slate-colored counter, behind which two men were busily working. One of them was stuffing possessions into a manila envelope, and the other was getting men to sign something in a huge ledger.

  Our line stood there for two or three minutes, and Pooch moved up through the ranks to stand beside me. “I think I know a couple’a these hacks,” he confided, with a tinge of youthful pride in his voice.

  “Awright, let’s go,” said the hack who had been leading the procession. He had asked some instructions of the Captain, a chunky man wearing a regulation police cap with badge attached, a black tie (a shade too wide for the current fashion, and a shade too slim for the 40’s style), and a white shirt. The Captain had apparently advised him where to put us till he was ready to process us.

  The hack shoved one of the men forward, and the man stumbled a step, turned and swung heavily, awkwardly at the guard. “Sonofabitch, you better treat me better’n that!” he snarled, as the blow went wide of the mark.

  The hack stepped in, ponderous operator though he seemed, with amazing agility, and chopped the prisoner across the top of his chest. The man staggered with the blow, so accurately and heavily was it dealt, and fell back. The hack moved in, his fist balled for a direct clubbing. He drew back, ready to belt the prisoner, but the Captain’s voice came from the other side of the line of men, from the counter right near us: “All right, Tooley, that’s it. Let him alone. He’s drunk.”

  Tooley back-pedaled and snapped a curt, “Yessir, Cap’n,” at his superior. He proceeded to get us into a waiting bullpen. Tooley was an exception among the hacks I saw while in the Tombs. While none of them was charming or debonair, most were just bored and cynical enough so that if you jumped when they said jump, you had no trouble. There was no actual physical brutality, in the strictest sense of the word, though on several occasions I saw hacks defend themselves from out-of-their-nut winos or psycho cases who wanted out. In those instances, they leveled the quickest club or fist and settled the offender’s hash without comment. On several occasions I saw men struck by the hacks in a glancing sense, that is, they didn’t move fast enough, or they lipped the guard, or were just generally surly. But since none of the guards carried guns, they tried to keep their hands to themselves as much as possible.

  A hack with busy fists could get himself very squashed in a matter of seconds if a crowd of outraged pen-residents decided to gang him. So they only nudge when necessary.

 
; Yet their attitude is the damning condition. They don’t see their charges as men. These are so much meat, to be processed in a certain manner, at a certain rate of speed, and when you speak to them, it’s almost as though they have to readjust their thinking to comprehend that you are a human being, and not some lower form of life.

  I would ascertain that most of the hacks were nice guys in private life; family men who loved baseball games and dogs and old ladies, and who would never think of being anything but gentle outside of this gray room that was a Universe in itself. But in the processing room they were something else. They were far from sadistic (though Tooley, to my mind, was a cat who could do with a little pounding), but they were not quite human either.

  It was as though having worked around chained prisoners for so long had rubbed off on them. They were not of us, but they were not entirely free of the imprisoned taint, either. It is a peculiar feeling, a strange aura they possess, and I can’t explain it any more fully than to say that though they were ostensibly on one side of the Law, and we were on the other, we were very much brothers…chained together by what they did to us and what we were forced to let them do to us. It is a strong bond, based in hatred, but identifiable with the authority of a father or brother.

  There were exceptions, of course.

  Tooley, who seemed to be a thoroughgoing bastard who delighted in the kicks he could get by humiliating his prisoners, on the one end of the chain…and the Captain, who had given indication of moderation, intelligence and humanity, on the other.

  But at that moment we were prey to Tooley, not the Captain, and as we were hustled into the bullpen, I had a feeling that if Tooley could get away with thumbing our eyes behind the Captain’s back, he’d do it.

  The beefy hack slammed the barred door and locked it. Now began the waiting, till they had processed the bunch of prisoners in the next pen down the line.