Chapter 4: Jailhouse rock
Matt’s already in the hearing room as Jared’s brought in. Neither has seen or communicated with the other over the past four days. Jared’s desperate to talk but the bailiffs keep them at a no-talking distance. Their lawyer feels confident that Burston's articles, the large outpouring of supportive letters to the editor—matched by a venomous batch of “Ship them to Russia!” and “Hang the bastards!”—in addition to the large support rally that materialized, unbeknownst to Jared and the others, the morning after they were captured, will bolster his case for bail reduction.
Matt looks okay. No apparent bruises or harm. The draft board welt is gone. Once again, he’s all white on pure white.
Matt’s been closely watching Jared from the moment the door opened. He's on hold, waiting to catch his attention. Without sound he mouths but one word to Jared, Karma. Intones it to himself then ends chuckling a half-faced smile. Jared is taken aback. Karma?! Humor in the midst of everything’s fucked-up!
The bailiffs pull them even farther apart. The session begins then ends almost in the split second it takes the judge to rap the gavel. For all the lawyer’s exploitation of the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” newspaper clips, nothing changes. The judge summarily denies all their attorney's motions.
As Jared is escorted back to his cell, he’s absorbed, intently trying to form the question, a question whose probable answer rattles his core of commitment to nonviolence. Did Matt submit? Passively!
Once again, as Jared becomes aware as to which cell block they’ve taken him, he bolts backwards, trying to avoid entering. Once again they’ve played their own humorous version of musical chairs. Once again it’s a different wing and cell. This time, though, shoved and stumbling, he enters to the sound of a blaring TV. What the fuck, now?
Jared’s new cell mate is black. An older guy, early forties, maybe late thirties. Hard to tell. Tall, not too heavy. Fairly well muscled. He propped up by a pillow, half-reclined in his bunk, wearing glasses, ones he takes off as he checks Jared out.
This guy at least looks friendly.
“I'm Dikbar.” A head nod, not a handshake. He puts his glasses back on.
“Name's Jared.” Nothing more. Then Jared lies down on the unmade bunk.
Dikbar resumes reading the paper.
“Psst!” The trustee, Victor, is at the bars. “Here, quickly!” He waves a wad of yellow paper. Jared gets up to take it but before he can ask about the report he had sent, Victor vanishes. Dikbar doesn’t stir. Never leaves his newsprint.
Jared plops back down and sits on the edge of the bed. He furtively unfolds the wad. It's from Aaren! “Bejesus, almighty!” Uttered with a bit more fear than he’d admit, but Dikbar hears him clearly. Jared doesn't pause to question how she connected with Victor, he just jumps into the letter like a lost puppy into its mistress's lap. No salutation; not noticed.
“We are proud of your selfless sacrifice on behalf of the Heroic Anti-Imperialist People of Minnesota. You have valiantly advanced the contradictions of this militaristic, racist and corrupt capitalistic society. You have shown the People the true predatory character of the Imperialist Lackeys! You have struck a victorious blow for the suffering masses around the world. Those who suffer from Amerika's imperialistic wars salute you! The valiant Vietnamese salute you! The valiant Cambodians salute you! The valiant Laotians salute you! Stand fast brothers for the cobra has not yet found its nest!”
It’s signed, In the blood of true revolutionaries! Aaren
Upon first reading a rush of warm, comforting feelings swirl through Jared. Even the hard-line leftist doggerel fails to derail him. All he can think about is her. She has written! Risked herself. A hot fantasy of them in bed races through his mind. As he falls back and stretches out, he reads it again. This time, a shiver rattles him.
He mutters, “Damn, if they've intercepted this and then passed it through, she's in danger!” He’s momentarily blanketed with powerlessness. “Trapped in here and she's at risk out there!” he voices out loud.
As he gets up and sits back on the bed's edge, “A letter from home?” laughs Dikbar.
Jared had pushed him out of his mind.
“No, no, not that,” he answers as if he’s received the note at Mail Call.
“You gotta watch ole Victor, he's an Oreo.”
“What?”
“Har, smart boy like you don't know Oreos?”
“You mean the cookies?”
“Yes sir.”
“I still don't get it.”
Dikbar’s enjoying the farce. “Oreos. Black on the outside and white on the inside!” Finally, the light flickers on. “This might not be from who I think it is?”
“You're getting smarter just sitting there.” Dikbar rustles and flaps his newspaper, indicating that the conversation is at end. He slips back to reading.
Dikbar's remarks move Jared to re-read the letter, to search between the lines.
Maybe he's right. Why would she sign this? And this line, “Stand fast brothers for the cobra has not yet found its nest!” That's an oblique reference to herself. She once called
herself The Cobra. But how would they know all of this? It has to be from her.
Then the message within the message speaks to him. Dikbar hears, “Shit, she's planning to break me out! That's what this cobra thing's about! Jesus, is she that crazy?”
As he mutters “crazy,” Jared realizes he'll have to risk trusting Dikbar.
With a feigned air of friendliness, as if Dikbar hasn’t witnessed anything, “Say Dikbar, why do you think we're housed together?”
Dikbar doesn’t immediately respond. He takes his time, finishing and folding his paper. He returns it to its original fold, and then rolls it into a paper baton. As he begins to speak he takes off his glasses, then says matter-of-factly, “It wasn't at my request.”
Jared misses Dikbar’s point and blurts, “What are you in here for?”
Dikbar snaps back, “None of your business, white boy!”
“White boy? I told you my name’s Jared.”
“You're all white boy to me, sonny.” Dikbar focuses on Jared without staring.
“This is going down the wrong street,” Jared sighs. More than that he’s totally missed the subtle emotional reversal that is creeping stealthily about and commanding Dikbar.
“Look, man, just do me one favor. Give me a bead on Victor. Does he have any political sympathies? I mean, you know, if he’s supported the Civil Rights movement or anything?”
“What are you looking for, boy?”
“Just that I'm in here for political reasons, did ya know that?”
Dikbar unchains a hoot, whacks the side of his bunk with his paper baton.
“I'se con read! I'se con read!”
Flustered, Jared flicks out an “Oh fuck that shit!” This rankles Dikbar. He’s seen too many guys like this white boy whose words release poison into the air. An air already heavily masked by the guy’s self-absorbed sense of importance.
“Help me out, man! Maybe ol’ Victor's sympathetic to me and this is really from who I think it's from?”
“Sympathetic?” Dikbar practically chews the word, tearing it into tidbits of disbelief. “How can you expect a black convict to be sympathetic with you, white boy?” He sways his head in a rhythm of disbelief. “You're either dumber or a greater fool than these stories make you out to be.” He taps his paper baton against his right temple. “You're supposed to be some derring-do Savior of All the Oppressed Peoples of the World—the Good Guys who are real bad asses—and you really think Victor’s sympathetic to you?”
Dikbar sits up and shifts to the edge of his bed. He stares at Jared, closing the physical distance between them, drawing him emotionally face to face. “This is black skin, see it?” He stretches a grip of facial flesh towards Jared. “Can you be in sympathy with me when you have white skin? Sympathy is a feeling of the heart, a piece of soul. Can you be white a
nd have a black soul or a black heart?”
Without even a nod of hesitation Jared says, “Yeah. Sure, man.” His easy, flip answer maddens Dikbar who jolts off the bed and whips towards Jared.
“You arrogant son-of-a-bitch! You mad dog white boy!” Dikbar seethes, clenches his left fist and waves it threateningly at Jared, just a micrometer from the tip of his nose.
“You're a true descendant of the slave master! You bastard! They took our bodies and our souls. They thought they could possess our feelings and our hearts. They took our women and raped their seeds into our hearts. Do you know,” Dikbar’s face begins to pulsate with spasms of misery, pain and rage, “do you know why I hate this black skin?” He rolls back a sleeve holds up a bare right arm.
Jared is dumbstruck.
“Because it has the worm of white sperm in it!”
As the convict who hears the judge deliver the death sentence, Dikbar turns slowly, shoulders slumping. Overcome by the weight of despair and resignation, he steps back and lies down on his bunk, face to the wall away from Jared.
Dikbar has unintentionally bewitched Jared. His manner of talking, his “I'm teetering at the edge of life and death” passion excites Jared just as Jared has excited others when taken by a like fervor. He watches Dikbar's anger and passion recede as his pulls a pillow over his eyes.
Jared bursts into vigorous applause as if the final curtain has just rung down on a thrilling one-act play. Dikbar, lost within himself, doesn’t respond. Grants no encore.
“God, man, you really have soul!” Jared booms, unaware of the cruelty of his words. “You really are in touch with the heart of Resistance!” He stands and draws a pace closer to Dikbar. Reaches down to touch him, saying, “I do, I do understand . . . I do feel what you feel.”
Jared's words awaken the other aspect of Dikbar's personality—a dark apocalyptic soul . His eyes snap open, he rolls over and off the bunk, stands fully erect, then quickly steps forward and embraces Jared. He picks him up with a huge hugging motion, shaking and rattling him up and down. As he releases him Dikbar looks at Jared with saucer-like eyes of wonder. “Maybe you are The One! You’ll help me escape? Find a place for me on the Outside?”
Dikbar rolls his eyes up towards heaven and utters with burning sincerity as if a revelation has been entrusted to him, “Yes! Yes! The Time has come!”
Then he thrusts his right arm towards Jared, fingers jerkily dancing, “Let me read the letter! Let me read . . . !”
Jared hesitantly hands it to him. Dikbar sits down and pores over it, reading and re-reading with prophet's eyes ferreting out secret messages. Suddenly, in a breath, another mood abruptly transfixes Dikbar. He drops the letter, arms go limp, says to Jared while staring at the floor, “It's all foolishness.”
Jared’s so intent on finding an answer to his own question that he misses the flip-flop in Dikbar's voice. “But do you think the Feds would write something like that to trap me?”
Dikbar rises slowly, takes a few plodding steps to the bars. Dangles his arms out into the free air of the corridor. Near whisper: “Can't you tell by the writing? Don't you know how the writer writes?”
Jared stoops and retrieves the letter. “Well, I mean, man, I never got a letter from her before.”
“I can't help you,” Dikbar exhales as if regretfully addressing a supplicant from the void outside the cell. In a mental Click! he regains the composure he held prior to their conversation. “Just take this. Victor doesn't want to leave this place. So he's not at risk. What he does, he does for money and influence. Answer your question?”
Smacking the letter against the back of his left hand, Jared is pleased. “Thanks. Thanks.”
Then he goes back and half-reclines on his bunk. Dikbar has disappeared from his world.
This has got to be from her. Who else could write this fucked-up Maoist crap? Jared’s arguing within. But then, why did she sign it if she mentioned Cobra? She'd use that as her signature.
Jared muses back and forth on the points, pro and con. Hours pass, as they do in County, to the beat of daydreaming, and Jared daydreams most of this day away.
It’s just after lights-out when Jared hears the blast. Kaaaroom! The ancient stone building shivers slightly. A second blast causes a detectable jolt. It trips all the cell block security systems, cell locks clunk open and the air shrills with several sirens, caterwauling one after the other. Within a Fucking shit, man! it’s all chaos and cacophony. Then another duet of a jailhouse shuddering blast and more wailing sirens turn the chaos up a notch. More, this last explosion takes out a glass panel in the upper window of their cell. Like snowflakes, glass shards pop, float, and tinkle onto the floor. Protectively, Jared and Dikbar raise their arms, duck down under their pillows as if warding off a guard’s attack.
Jared’s ears ring and he strains to hear clearly. Like gunshot echoes, glass continues to explode up and down the cell block. Pop! Pop! Light-bulbs and window panes shatter. The cell block dims, fogs with an eerie, failing light casts by a few unbroken overhead banks of flourescents. As if harmonizing in a chorus, a deafening hum of chaos rises and soulfully vibrates throughout all corridors and cell blocks. Only the massive granite blocks that frame and secure this aging fortress jailhouse prevent the whole building from collapsing.
Jared yells at the top of his lungs, “Bejesus! The Cobra's looking for her nest.” Totally freaked, he rolls out of his bed, hits the ground and rolls under Dikbar’s bunk.
He’s paralyzed, not knowing what to expect next. Will he see helicopters and Aaren swinging down like Wonder Woman?!
But Jared is Jared and in no time curiosity trumps his fear and he cautiously belly-crawls over to the bars, presses his face between two of them, peers, strains to see down the corridor to spy what the guards might be doing. He squinches his face harder against the iron as if by doing so his eyes and ears would actually function better. But he really can’t make out a thing.
“Come back here and go to bed,” Dikbar says, paternalistically. “They blew the south wing.”
“Jesus, man, tell me what wing this is!”
“It's north, boy, north.”
The humor of it all! Dikbar's punch line, “It's north, boy, north,” delivered in monotone. Jared can’t but laugh. Could it have been funnier if mimed? He reruns the scene. Dikbar in whiteface prancing around the cell, miming The Mining of the Jail. Nestling the explosives in place, watching all with parental fondness, patting the bombs with kitchee-coo strokes, blowing goodnight kisses . . . only to watch it all blow up in his own face. Shit-faced! With Revolutionary embarrassment, Marxist poo-poo, Maoist caca.
Jared crosses himself and chuckles out loud, “Jesus save us one and all!”
As both the noise and the reverie subside, Jared pitches back onto his own bunk. Dikbar’s never left his. Jared’s throttled by mirthless glee. All these revolutionary shenanigans have made him tired, dog-tired. Eyes closed, he crashes, slipping again, readily and eagerly, into the embrace of the night.
Jared’s been in deep sleep for several hours when Dikbar's screams wake him.
“Help me! Help me!”
Jared bolts and half-jumps out of bed, not aware of where he’s going, when he’s elbow-rapped in the mouth. Blood seeps between his front teeth. Two large guards, Lone Ranger masks on their faces, are beating the shit out of Dikbar. The one who slammed Jared halts momentarily, tapping his baton against his own thigh, gauging Jared's reaction.
“What the fuck's going on, man?” Jared shouts, angrily.
“What are you gonna do, hippie asshole?” taunts the guard who whacked him. The other one has knocked Dikbar unconscious, yet continues to pummel him with a blackjack.
“C'mon, hippie asshole, show me what kinda man you are!” He beckons, calling Jared like one does a dog. “C'mon, badass hippie!”
Something inside tells Jared to fly up and deck the guy, like John Wayne in the movies—but Jared’s never been in a real fight, so he freezes
.
The taste of blood on his lips and the stings shooting through his jaw are wounds that waken all the demons of fright who ever visited him during a draft raid. Once again he’s stone-cold paralyzed. Later he’ll be further mortified by the pee stains down his left trouser leg.
Several times during the past few days, he’s begun to reproach himself for his cowardice. Cowardice in terms of nonviolence. Shit-kicking Bruiser was an act of cowardice too! And now in fright he stomps all over such thoughts, drives them deeper within. Undeterred, as they retreat, they indict, lash out, Coward! Coward! Although he himself is a trainer in nonviolent resistance techniques—and therefore doubly able to protect Dikbar—he does not thrust his body forward in nonviolent offense. No, shamefully, he’s stuck, deadened, comatose in violent fantasy.
In his moral defense arises a voice, a voice weak as if hoarse from repeated pleadings. This voice speaks about his bravery at the front line of many nonviolent protests. It proffers as evidence his suffering of bruises at the end of blunt clubs and from being jammed into the sides of paddy wagons. Yet the voice falls ever so slowly into a shaky stillness as it is demonstrated by the prosecutor that such protests are well publicized and have a protocol that restrains the police. No questions about it, Dikbar’s threat is different. It occurs not on the streets but in a cage, inside a jail with two berserk guards.
Coward! Coward!
Dikbar's groans have stopped pleading for help, though his silent screams reach Jared's panicky ears. This is worse than his worst nightmare.
“You're just a fucking fag! I knew it,” sneers Jared's attacker as he turns to his partner who shares his dark power. “He's a lily-assed cock-sucking fag. Just for that I should kick his ass for good.”
Dikbar's punisher quits his task, roughly grabs his cohort, restrains him.
“No. Don't touch him. Let him be.” Their purpose must not be sullied by personal indulgence. Jared's body was not the target tonight. Stepping back, they stand like dancers waiting for the music to resume, beside the heap of Dikbar's body, and glare at Jared with scorn.
“My oh my, you don't want to die for this uppity nigger? Maybe you're more of a white man than we thought!”
This purchases a riff of self-amused laughter. The one who challenged Jared makes a feint as if to come at him. Jared cowers on his bunk, curls up even tighter, covering his face with his hands, body rigid, fearfully bracing for more pain. But all that touches him is a cold wave of humiliation.
“God damn, peacenik, you're a fucking pile of puke. You don't even have the balls to fight!”
Fighting the humiliation, Jared uncurls and sits ramrod straight at his bed’s edge. All he can muster is a forced stare and a theatrical half-sneer at the guards. As they leave each hack spits on Jared. One glob lands smack dab in the center of his forehead. It starts to drip down the side of his left eyebrow oozing over the center of his nose. But Jared is too stupefied, too embalmed to even wipe the spittle off. He just squats there like a skid row drunk with bird shit on his face. Just a statue splotched with white medals of a forgotten revolution. Sitting there during the time that Victor comes into the cell with another trustee and carries Dikbar away.
The morning's light finds Jared on his knees again. Not since the days of the Franciscan novitiate has he spent so many hours on his knees. Back then, like the other novices, he developed thick calluses from making the Stations of the Cross, crawling all the way around the chapel on submissive knees. It was self-inflicted pain, self-conscious pain, pain satisfied in its purpose. Now his knees burn and unforgiving pain repeatedly stab his calves.
Although this pain was not his choice, Jared knows how to use it. He invokes a stoical discipline, welcomes the anguish and hurt. Savors it as he knows it is real. Is all of this real? keeps ricocheting through his mind. Is all of this real?
Jared must make it real! So he does what he has been trained to do. Teach and preach. He does what so many prisoners in so many countries at so many times have done—He starts scratching on paper. With fierce effort, as fierce as his actions to protect Dikbar should have been, Jared starts clawing his brain and heart for words. Words with which to speak to himself.
Like a deaf and dumb mute, Jared is desperate for the miracle of words, the music of his tongue, to bless him, save him from the jail cell of himself. He scrawls the first words of his “Manifesto” on a pad he filches from Dikbar's cache. For unmeasured hours he labors and labors, till birth trades him the sound of life for the groans of his dying.
To the People of America:
“We live in a country built upon violence. Violence pervades and gives meaning to every facet of our lives. We’re a market economy rapidly deteriorating into a military-driven economy. Over half of our businesses now focus on military projects, directly or indirectly. Education is a military incentive and reward. Politicians fashion America as the Savior of the World, turning Jesus into the Commander-in-Chief. Between ourselves, in the intimacy of our homes, this greater violence is ritualized. Men define their maleness in terms of threats of violence. Their authority is grounded in their ability to punish, beat their wives and children into submission. Women are continually offered up as acceptable sacrifices to wanton rape. Look at the newspapers—women half-clad, sold at a discount! Our media is pornography. Our sit-coms feed off interpersonal violence as their fodder. Each “Movie of the Week” is another offering to the insatiable god of violence. Who will save us from this cult of violence?
I ask this question because I desire to be saved. I come before you as both a symbol and the reality of your violence. There are few as violent as I. I dream violence. I speak violence. I watch violence. My nonviolence is even its own peculiar violence. For I have become a violent observer. I have watched a black man being beaten, and I only feared for myself. I have become what I most feared. I am a German who stands by and watches the Nazis tear Jews from their homes. I am the pacifist Quaker frontiersman who in 1758 watched the militia from the New Jersey Colony drive the Delaware Indians onto the first Reservation . . . then took up the plough. I am the exemplary, fervent, daily Catholic communicant who ignores the poor clamoring for crumbs on the steps of a bejeweled cathedral. Where is there a violence I have not committed? Where is there a woman I have not raped in my mind's eye, in my imagination? Where is there a child I have not willingly consigned to die in battle on my behalf—in my stead? There is no greater violence than I.
Where do I ask you to start this chain of anti-violence? Start with yourself, as I do with myself. Do not let the oppressive realization of the breadth and depth of violence in America kill you. Do not commit suicide! Do not escape into drugs or booze or therapy. No. Look at yourself and love yourself. Jesus said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. He knew how wrenchingly difficult this is. Start with yourself. Forgive yourself for past violences. Do not deny or regret them. They are you. Accept your violences. Then, start in your home and at your work. Struggle where you can succeed. Make those little in-roads which are the small chips and cracks that will one day swell into an earthquake that will topple this culture of violence.
Remember, we are seeking nothing short of a New Creation, a true personal revolution. And the revolution begins with you! It comes from the barrel of your heart!”
Completed, totally exhausted, he carefully folds and creases the pages into the smallest square possible. He slips it inside his sock, under his right heel. Jail searches are more like pat downs, but he can’t risk getting caught. How to get it to Burston? Should Victor be trusted?
As Victor rolls the lunch wagon up to his cell, a hack is with him.
“Roll up. Be ready after lunch.”
“Shit, moving me again? Aw, fuck!”
No answer. He waits, doesn’t eat.
When commanded, he rises and follows the guard. Through two gates, one cursory body search, then he’s told to drop his roll.
What room is this? he wonders. Also wonders why he is unguarded, al
one. Strange. He hears a corridor gate creak open and thud shut. Then a key at his door. It’s the same guard, but this time with Matt.
Neither is chained, both are left alone. Stranger. Both move to take advantage of the moment. Jared embraces Matt and bounces him around in a half-bear-hug.
“How are you, man?”
“Okay. Okay.”
Before either can say more, the key clicks and the door opens. Both are surprised as Sean's dad bounds in. His exuberance—hands clapping, broad smile, moving to slap them both on the back—only intensifies their bewilderment.
“Great news! I got the bail lowered to ten grand. That's only one thousand for deposit!”
Jared and Matt are two blanks.
“Hey, wake up, you two!” Sean’s dad waves his hands in their faces. “Hey, you're free! Free!”
With “Free!” something breaks loose and both fall upon Sean's dad, wordless but pounding him on the back, shaking his hand. Without asking who bailed them out or voicing any comments, Matt and Jared hurriedly pick up their rolls and fall in behind Mr. Schneider as if following orders from the guard. For himself, Sean’s dad can't understand why they aren't kicking their heels for joy. “Strange brew these anti-war guys, strange brew,” he mutters, a sound lost amidst the clatter of jail cell grates and caged voices as he leads them to the discharge desk where Sean and Corey have already been processed.
Kill the dove! Page 4