Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  I sat down on a hard bench and looked around. The pen was much larger than the one upstairs, but it was the same gun-metal gray color, with a floor that was covered with bits of paper, empty candy wrappers, pools of moisture that might have been urine and might have been anything, with a barred window at the back of the cell (but outside the cell itself) in a little narrow space between the wall of the building and the pen itself. The window was open and the wind was blowing in, and it was damned cold, with the rain slanting through, making it impossible to stand in the rear of the cell without getting wet.

  I looked around at my compatriots, and the men therein assembled were as miserable a bunch as I’d ever seen. Not miserable in the social sense of the word, but miserable in the strictest literal sense. They were unhappy men. Tormented men, perhaps. They ranged from the oldest, dirtiest vag with his rose-nose and bloodshot eyes to the youngest Ivy cat all wide-eyed and terrified at being tossed in here with all these cri-min-als.

  A hack came up to the door and said, “Okay, a couple of you guys clean up them loose papers there.” Two of the eager young tots, anxious to seem cooperative, hustled about and cleaned up the floor of scraps. Now the bullpen around me was clean and bare, except for the puddles I now recognized as water that had come in through the open window.

  Clean and bare, like my spirit at the moment. Fresh out of platitudes and pithy observations. Pooch sat down next to me. “Crumby buncha shits, ain’t they?” he asked.

  I shrugged. They were no better or worse than the ones on the outside. The only difference was location.

  There wasn’t anything else to do, the waiting now having begun, so I talked to Pooch. “So tell me, what’s happened to the bunch?”

  He gave me a peculiar expression, as though I should have known, and if I didn’t where had I been, and come to think of it where had I disappeared to, after the big rumble?

  “You been away, huh?” he asked, suspiciously.

  “Yeah, uh, I moved out of the neighborhood,” I parried.

  “Y’know,” he observed, a bit sluggishly, I thought, “you don’t look the same’s I saw you last time. You look, I dunno, older or somethin’.”

  “Well, it’s been seven years,” I covered.

  He nodded acknowledgment, trying to conceive of seven years as time. “Whatcha been doin’ with yourself?”

  “Oh, you know,” I stalled, “the usual. A couple years in the Army, and I got married, and kicking around here and there. You know.” That seemed to satisfy him, and he settled back. If he had only known. I was surprised that he hadn’t asked me why I’d disappeared after the big fight, but it was a mark of personal integrity in Pooch’s set not to ask a man why he had chickened out…if that was what he suspected.

  “So where’s the gang we used to hang around with?” I asked.

  He blew air between his pursed lips, puffing his cheeks like a hamster, and said, “Oh, man, whatta drag. I’m just about the onny one left. They all either split or got split.”

  I urged him to tell me what fate had befallen the tots I’d ran with in the Barons, and at first it was as though he was reluctant to talk because they were gone—almost like speaking ill of the dead. But then he started talking, and he told me each kid’s story. This is what I learned:

  Candle had fallen in love. The boy who had despised Puerto Ricans had fallen in love with a dark-eyed, thin-ankled muchacha, and had not known it. Her name was something very Anglicized, and Candle had met her at a dance. They had started going together, and after three months the girl was pregnant. Her family pounded Candle’s name out of her, and one night a three-car caravan had come down from her neighborhood and caught the boy. They had offered him the chance to marry her, but as he stared into their faces, seeing their flat peon look, reflecting his own accursed features, he had spat at them and called them garbage. They had taken him into an alley and beaten him. They did not stop with the bike chains or the boards with nails in them. They went on with a broken bottle, and changed Candle’s appearance so completely he would never again have to worry about being mistaken for a Puerto Rican. In fact, he would have difficulty being mistaken for a human being. They cut his right eye so severely that he was blinded, and the muscles of his face went completely limp. They left him for dead and took the girl to a Puerto Rican abortionist who specialized in the love-children of attractive young Latin misses. The girl died on the table. Candle was taken to Bellevue and for what it was worth, they saved his life. He was now living in another neighborhood, somewhere uptown, working as a clerk in a grocery store, and paying periodic visits to an institution to help the handicapped, and a grave in a Harlem cemetery.

  Filene had been broken in properly. She had discovered sex as it should be discovered, and had found it was not as frightening as she had believed. After Cheech had disappeared (and she had spent Saturday nights cruising 42nd Street, hoping to get a glimpse of him in the Pizza joints and flea-bag movies) she took up with Tarzan, who, once he was informed how she liked to be handled, treated her gently and with utmost art a teen-ager bent on education can employ. She had allowed Tarzan to burn his initials in her breast, and so when Tarzan contracted a serious case of breaking and entering, she moved on to a new boy in the neighborhood, a blonde boy named Speed, who had come from Pittsburgh and knew all sorts of new ways to dance, and have fun in the bushes. She was arrested for indecent exposure in Central Park with Speed, and though she was not booked, her mother and father beat her severely, and she left home. She took thirty-five dollars from her mother’s purse and got as far as she could on a bus. When her money ran out, she worked for a time as a waitress in a roadside diner, until she had enough money to get to an Aunt’s home in Boise, Idaho. The Aunt tried to send her back, but Filene would not go, and when the family said they did not want her back, the Aunt let Filene live with her. Six months later Filene met a young man who sold health insurance, and they were married the following June. Her picture in bridal veil was run in the social section of The Idaho Statesman. She clipped the picture and sent it to her parents, with the words DROP DEAD scrawled across the face in red marking crayon.

  Fish had taken to shooting pool for a living. He got very good at it, and was considered by the sharks in that particular sea a very good man with a “bridge” or “ladies’ aid” as they sometimes called it. He ran one hundred and eighteen balls during a certain high-stake game of rotation, and was declared the absolute champ of the neighborhood. When he hit eighteen he enlisted in the United States Army and served eight months at Fort Dix, New Jersey before he was arrested by the C.I.D. for pilfering foot lockers. He was court-martialed, sentenced to six months at hard labor and a dishonorable discharge, which was invoked at the end of his term in the stockade. He returned to Brooklyn, found most of the gang gone their ways, and cut out cross-country for Las Vegas. He was struck down and killed by a Thunderbird in Salt Lake City, Utah, while fleeing the owner of a Chrysler Imperial who had discovered him trying to jimmy open the door with a coat hanger. He was returned to Brooklyn for burial, an expense his father had to go to HFC carry off.

  Fat Barky became a bartender in the bar where his father got down on all fours and barked for his booze. He very often gave his father free drinks and paid for them out of his own pocket. Shit managed to get a scholarship to CCNY and became interested in geology. He majored in the subject and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, to find he could not obtain a position with the government Interior Department. He went to work as a floorwalker in a department store. He was still there. Goofball had moved away with her family when they became aware of her alliances with the Barons. No one knew where they had gone. No one cared. Flo became pregnant, no one knew by whom, and managed to extract seventy dollars from nine beaus, each of whom suspected it might be him. She used the money to go to a “rest farm” where the baby was born and sold to a family that could not get a child through normal adoption channels. She drifted back to New York, this time Manhattan, and began a very unspectacular
career of getting picked up in bars and selling her body. She was around, as far as anyone knew. Or perhaps they meant she was “round.”

  Pooch had been unable to grow up. He had been Prez of the Barons for too long. It was his glory, his only status, and he needed it as badly as a lush needed his juice. When the contemporaries began drifting away, and the junior gang members began growing up into his place, Pooch was forced out by democratic vote, and took to hanging around the streets. He managed to get picked up for attacking a garage owner with a switch-blade, and served six months in Bellevue Detention Home. When he was released he tried to enlist in the Marines, but they would not take him because of his record as a delinquent. He tried the other services and was treated the same. Belligerent, he started robbing candy stores, toy stores, pharmacies, garages, private homes, getting what he could, whether it was worth fencing or not. He was arrested for breaking and entering, petty larceny and resisting arrest, and served one year on Rikers Island. When he got out he tried to get a job, found himself hanging around the streets with the same kids he had known as junior Baron recruits, and when pushed by his parole officer to get straight or go back to the Island to finish his sentence, attacked the man with a fireplace poker. He was arrested for ADW and found himself back in the Tombs, sitting beside a guy he had not seen in seven years.

  I listened to all the stories of the kids I had known, and the view was a terrible one. They had gone the way they had started. The seeds of rot had been planted so early, and they had ripened to produce diseased fruit. Every one of them…every one in some way inadequate or hostile or scared or corrupt. And I wondered, then, how much I could have done for them. I wondered if I’d failed them as much as I thought I had. Could I have done anything to save them, to turn them away from the dead ends?

  I didn’t know, and my heart ached in me as I thought of all of them; the ones I’d liked and the ones I’d hated, and the ones I’d even loved in a way. And it seemed that I was more guilty than any society that had done this to them. I was more guilty than the teachers who had not taught them, and the clergymen who had not given them faith, and the parents who had ignored and corrupted them. I was more guilty than all of them, because I knew and I had run away to write about it.

  To keep my hands clean.

  To play the dilettante.

  I had refused to pay my dues.

  And now I sat here beside Pooch, seven years later, and I was a big-deal pillar of the community, and he was a gutter urchin, and neither of us was better than the other.

  We were both in Hell.

  FIFTEEN

  The bullpen around me was clean and bare, and filled with the naked faces of men who were guilty, except for the innocence in their hands…

  Here it was, all laid out for me, full circle and with whatever meanings I felt like charging to my scene. I knew there would be men who had spent longer in jail than I had, who would scoff at what I was thinking, saying, “What the hell are you making such a big thing for? You haven’t been in long. You ought to try it for ten years or so. Then you can play the martyr.” I knew there would be people who would say I was making a big social megillah, a federal case, a mountain out of a molehill, from my one lousy day in the slammer. Guys who would call me a bleeding heart, and a fanatic, and a kook, because I saw what I’d seen and interpreted it the way I had. People who would say, “Hell, I’ve been in the can, too, and I just laughed it off. You’re making a big case out of a little problem.” And they might be right. Perhaps I should have taken it easy and settled back and waited for the bail to come through—as I knew it had to, eventually. Perhaps I shouldn’t have beaten my chest and pissed and moaned about the Inglorious Evils Of A Corrupt System. Perhaps I should have played the clown, as would these others, with ribald little tales of my goofy, happy-go-lucky sojourn in the pokey.

  But that wasn’t the way it was for me.

  It wasn’t a game or a lark or something to laugh at.

  It was a place where men are sent to pay for their sins…that’s the strictest literal purpose of a prison, you know…where you can smell the stink of desperation, and the odor of men’s souls slowly rotting. I saw it in those terms, and to write about it any other way would be selling out.

  It is possible to be petty and literarily inventive and caustic and bored by this sort of scene, and I presume that is what is considered sophisticated and very hip. But don’t talk of sophistication or hipness to a rag full of rotten, sour liquor and crab lice. Don’t talk about the chic of being a jailbird to a seventeen-year-old kid locked in a cell with case-hardened homosexuals, junkies in the first stages of withdrawal, acknowledged rapists and heist artists, deadbeats and homicidal types. Don’t tell me about how I could take it with a twinkle and a chuckle and away we go, because that’s a pile of pseudo-sophisticated horse manure! It all comes down one way, and that way is pure and simple and don’t give me any of your sophistic guff about being too serious when a smile will help.

  I know it stinks in the Tombs.

  I know I saw young cats being warped and altered and twisted right in front of me.

  So get away from me with that crap. This is the way it is, not the Pollyanna pink lace and rose-colored glasses tomfoolery we use in this country to delude ourselves about everything from True Love to Disarmament. We are going straight to hell, gentle reader, and if you need proof of it just get yourself pinched in New York, or go out in the streets and dig those kids.

  And somehow, without meaning to do it, I’ve made the point of this book…even before I’ve finished writing it. I’ve made what desperate little point I have to make, and all the rest is anti-climax. We’re in trouble. We’re in serious trouble. It’s like Jim Baldwin says, the only way we’ll solve—for instance—“The Negro Problem” is if we solve The American Problem. So don’t look for hidden meanings and morals, friend, I’m not subtle enough to give them to you candy-coated. The word is simply that for all our national pride and all our jingoism and all our heavy-duty platitudes, this country is losing a lot of battles, and we are sitting around with our fingers up our noses deluding ourselves that we’re doing just fine, thanks, just fine.

  It all ties in. It’s all part of the scene. It’s Purgatory, with singing commercials. Hell with an 8-cylinder fish-finned Detroitmobile. It’s Perdition with indoor plumbing

  And it’s a teen-aged kid named Pooch locked away in a cell with forty other damned souls, waiting to find out if he’s going to spend some years of his life behind walls too high to climb, or be turned back into the streets, to do the best he can until his luck runs short.

  That’s why I wrote this book.

  That’s why I knew I’d write it, in that bullpen.

  And when this book is done, I’ll shut my mouth.

  It was something out of Kafka or Dinesen, almost sure realistic, the narrow gray world of the bars; dark and many-faceted, and constantly terrifying. I saw two Negro homosexuals sitting close together at one end of a bench, almost hugging each other. They were a fine pair of spokesmen for their people. They were junkies.

  I asked myself, who did this to them? Did they do it to themselves, with weak characters? Or did the ofay, the White Man, do it to them, with his “culture”? And I didn’t have an answer. But it seemed to me that they were more offensive a millionfold than White fags would have been. Because here was a race that was on the move, on the march, as Baldwin—again—put it, “The Magic People.” It was true, and these two men, correction: individuals, were no part of it.

  They huddled together like a pair of small, thin girls, their Continental slacks so tight they fit like leotards, and so short I could see the bad taste of their striped socks. One was in bad shape. He needed a fix and he was going to need it even worse, very shortly. He was bone-sick then, and he sat with his right leg crossed over his left so completely that his right foot wound around back of his left calf and hooked around the shin. He had his arms folded across his stomach as though someone had slit him up the middle and he w
as afraid his cold guts would drop out unless he held them in. That one was the old queer, a cruising queen who had turned too many other young cats on to be left in circulation. His partner was a pretty, very hairy swinger whose clothes reeked with inbred filth, but who smelled lovely from the perfume daubed behind his ears. And I thought of these lovers: You, stink, Group. You really stink. No one condemns you for your morals, or your odor, or your habit, or your skin color. They condemn you because you show how rotten a good thing can get when there’s no personal integrity, when there’s no character.

  They weren’t even niggers. They certainly weren’t Negro, despite the color of their skins. They were something almost sub-human, on the way out, and hanging on, doing harm, by creating an image.

  Their sin was their existence.

  Next to them was an old man, his clothes of fairly good grade and his weathered, pocked face clean-shaved, still red and puffy from scraping too close with a straight razor. He was shaking. Terribly. Convulsively. As though his clockwork mechanism was beginning to shudder to a stop.

  Even as Pooch and I watched him, he leaped up and threw himself staggeringly against the barred front of the cell, and the door sprang open…

  I had thought it had been locked, but apparently they were planning to move us down the induction line, and had left it unlocked.

  He went bursting through, arms flailing like a great blue serge seagull, his collar points upthrust and white, his hair like blowing snow showers, his eyes quite mad, and his mouth agape. He flung himself into the compound, and the hacks were on him in a moment, trying to pin him, trying to silence his screams, trying to avoid the other men’s going berserk. But the old man, the poor old man who wanted his taste of rot gut and was quite out of his head, would not be silenced. He flung himself about, over the benches, across the floor, banging his feathery head against the steel barred doors.