Chapter 22: Betty and Filbert
It was a simple matter. All the fellow did was walk over, tell me he likes my cock and ask me to visit his bunk after Lights Out. How many times have I asked myself the question? Questioning the question. Asking whether my time will come. Whether it’s just my fears or my personal distaste? Is it something out of the long forgotten past of my cerebral cells? Is it a cultural inhibition? Something carried around in my mental chest, my emotive Pandora’s Box? What indeed is it? What accounts for it?
All I remember is my spurting hostility. Except for the guy’s cool manner I expected to see my fist in his teeth. There he was in the stall. Penis hanging, ivory white thighs relaxed and enticing . . . Aw, shit, I’d often felt strange inklings when in jock rooms. How many times did I feel the heat—the bitch’s heat—of a basketball locker room after a game?
After you’ve spent the evening hustling and working and straining with other bodies to achieve a goal, how many times then do you feel the lure of their exhausted thighs? Flit on images of embracing them? Or even hold their pride in your hand, stroking it?
Back then it all seemed so impossible. No—strangely, it seemed even more possible. After all, you had disciplined yourself to be One Body. To function as one hand, one eye, one reflex for so many months that the victory rightly drew forth the embraces of triumph. How we all kibitzed about screwing some of the cheerleaders or some other lucky filly. Fucking-A, how many of us knew the stalking terror of desire for each other? Sure, it was more possible back then. But here?
Okay, sure prison makes you horny. I mean, there are no females around. But it also lacks the lust of teamship. Isn’t that obvious? I mean, man, in prison each con pulls his own time, no matter what he thinks. When you get up each day, you desire to be free. Certainly you don’t desire that others be free first. Dig it! You might say that or hear someone say it but everyone knows that’s a crock of shit. In prison it’s clear and simple—Each guy wants out first.
There’s no shame attached to that. After all, when they hang you by the balls you certainly can’t free anyone else till you’re free yourself. Damn right! I certainly want to get out. I’m glad when others get out, but I always want myself to be next in line.
Hear me! Doing time all alone leaves me ice cold, sexually. I mean, when I beat off at night it’s an event full of personal longings. Longings to be back with the women I knew. Masturbation doesn’t lend itself to teamwork. Although we do play a lot of basketball in prison. Yeah, man, but it’s a different thing. Listen up! When this dude walks up to me and tells me in no uncertain terms that he wants to cop my dick, “I’ll give you better head than any broad,” Fucking-A! somehow it all repulses me. “Man,” I say, “I don’t have any time for that shit. Get your ass outta here.” The dude, named Clovis, called Betty, walks away nonplussed. He just saunters out of the shower stall as if I hadn’t spoken to him at all. As if I hadn’t turned him down cold. As if he believes I’ve said no but meant yes!
I finish showering and go back to my cube. On my pillow I find a dandelion. Christ! Does that get a rise out of me. That hustling motherfucker. I certainly want to kick his ass. Who the hell does he think he’s playing around with? Angered, I check the activity in the dorm and find Clovis to be nowhere. So I dress and get ready for supper.
Jared walks into the dinner line. “Eh, Strauss, how’s thing’s going, ya little muddafuckar?”
“Not bad, man. Say, I’ve got this book on Minoan art that isn’t due back for another two weeks. Do you want it?”
“Sure, man, cool, just drop it on my bunk.”
Slowly inching through the chow line, Jared’s mind starts to wander. It jumps aimlessly from trivia to trivia. Did I get my letter to Char off last night? How many clean shorts do I have left? On to things like whether he should get his hair cut or moustache trimmed or what kind of stupid work he has left at his clerk’s job. Near the third circling of trivia mountain, Matt steps up right behind.
“Evening,” he says, “I’ve been trying to find you all day. Where’ve you been?”
“Me? Christ, I’ve been around in the open. At my job, reading. On the Circle. Where were you looking?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just want to talk about this new guy, Filbert.”
“Filbert?”
“Just a kid who’s come in on a six. Out of Larson’s court.”
“Six months. Another one of those, hmm? Run it down, what’s the beef?”
Matt moves in step with Jared, talking all the way through beef and spaghetti into veggie delights and en route to their table.
“This kid Filbert’s really flipped out on Jesus. Since he’s gotten in, he’s been rapping about how he’s going to die in prison. How it is that Jesus died in the clutches of the political powers like Pilate, and how he knows, really knows, he’s meant to die in here. Gee-zus, what a guy! He got a guard really rattled since he ran this number down on him. How he’s prepared to die. The guard didn’t know how to take him. Whether he’s psycho or something. I hear they’re going to put him in Seg.”
Matt pauses. “You should talk to him.”
“Aw, fucking shit, you know I’m trying to get away from all that Jesus crap. The kid’s probably a Jesus freak. All mind-boggled with half-assed quotations from the Bible. I doubt if I could get through to someone like that.”
Both of them remain quiet as they inhale their skimpy meal. Finished and looking far away Jared probes, “Is it Jesus or something else?”
“Glad you asked. I can tell—I knew you’d go see him—man, I think he’s afraid of being raped.”
Jared curses himself inwardly, picks up his plate, taps Matt on the top of his head and leaves.
Matt knew that Jared couldn’t not see the kid.
Back in the dorm Jared readies his mind for visiting Filbert.
Christ, oh sweet Christ, you motherfucker, why’d’ya allow yourself to get so fucked up in people’s minds? Isn’t it bad enough a few of us go out and hang our asses like you want us to? Why the fuck don’t you keep yourself away from the Devil’s magic?
What type of kid am I going to find? Someone who believes he has a personal relationship with you? Someone who feels he has met you—met you in some freaked out abyss of his shallow mind?
Jared thrusts a fist skyward, then gives Jesus the Finger. “You crummy bastard, I wish you were a person. I wish you did actually exist in the flesh, right now. Fucking-A, dig it! I’d punch you in the mouth!”
Jared’s pissed. How often has it happened this way? That I have to confront my own limits with a rush of mad words? When will I have peace?
Since coming to prison Jared’s put himself to the final test. He spent his first months as if in graduate research. He read the Bible thoroughly, plowed through the standard theological texts, devoured Gilkey’s Naming the Whirlwind, spent tedious hours in the nooks and crannies of process philosophy and language analysis. After three months, after being driven to a state of haggardness and exhaustion, he concluded that he had to trash his theological armor.
All his life he’s jousted encased in it. Flung its daggers of doctrinal and dogmatic insight. Even soulfully wounded his opponents. But what was it now, in here, but the language of mad monks? Those soulfully starved aesthetes. Hollowed-eyed flagellants flailing at the warmth from their loins? Christ, what a bout that was.
Often Jared likens himself to Job. Job wrestling with God. Job afflicted with sores and diseases, with all types of calamities befouling and befalling him. Job, the steadfast believer in his own powers of understanding. “Curse God and die!” How often those taunts of Job’s wife seep from his pillow! Curse God and die! Why don’t you curse God?
“I don’t curse Him,” he answers himself, “because He isn’t there! As simple as that. The great Jehovah isn’t there. When I utter my curse, it’s just a breath on my own face.”
Now he has to go and face a kid who’s using God for all the camouflage He offers.
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br /> A few hours later, like a badly bruised survivor of a car wreck, Jared returns to his bunk. Having seen the Fear, now he knows that he has it, not Filbert. Once again the negative force transferred itself from a lesser body to his own. Once again his night will be the battle wherein the eagle claws his liver.
The dandelion mounts itself upward, reaching with its golden feathers towards the endless shine of the sun. Its magnificence sheds a glistening shroud of gold. Towards Betty, Jared moves. Towards Betty, the ever-faithful. Aside the emerald stem she stands, right hand on its round firmness, she pauses and smiles at him. Not smiles—no, she radiates her intense pleasure. Jared is impassioned at her sight. Never has he seen a body so beautiful. Naked with but her hair combed forward touching her eyebrows, she is a cameo of the exquisite.
Closer he moves, but the distance between them doesn’t lessen perceptibly as he walks. Energetically, he moves his feet, going from a walk to a stretching stride. But he still doesn’t gain ground. A terrible shame rifles through Jared’s body. A bolt of unworthiness smites him. Eyeing her still standing there, still radiant, still exquisite, he bends forward and thrusts his body into a run, moving himself faster and faster, straining as his arms fling themselves backwards and then forward. No matter how he strains, no matter how much he wills it, his pace seems not to move him any farther. A shrill anxiety overcomes him. He stumbles to the ground, face on the dew-wet grass, and a drilling pain strikes his nape. Rising to his knees he cups his mouth and yells, “Betty! Betty!”
Betty remains there, exquisite cameo.
Jared racks his lungs. “Betty! Betty! Don’t leave me! Betty, come to me! Betty, oh, Betty!” He bursts into a bellowing sob, “Betty, I love you.”
Betty smiles from afar. Painfully, it seems a smile he can almost reach out and caress. Then—gasp!—she turns her back.
Jared is forlorn. His begins to slide backward, backward, downward to somewhere he doesn’t know.
Kicking the covers off Jared lurches from the bed. “Christ!” he mutters lowly. “Fucking shit! What’s going on in my head?!” Sitting at the bed’s edge he fishes among images of light and darkness, casting with an almost panicked hand, happy to snare something, anything, even bottom grass, something to tug himself back up to surface reality.
As he emerges into a fuller wakefulness, he feels the dampness of his body, a total spray of sweat spotting face, hand, arms, tingling his soles, and so reaches for a towel. Then, as if the Novice Master has just jingled his bell intoning, “Benedicamus Domino”—response, “Deo gratia”—Jared stands up and with a faithful and practiced hand remakes the bed, hospital corners and all. It’s his way of working to banish the dream. Completed, he slips on his shorts and walks out to the TV room.
Luckily, the TV room is only partly filled with late-night movie watchers. Jared looks around for someone to pass a bit of time with. Sitting in the back at a table writing a letter is Matt. Jared sits down across from him. Matt nods and continues writing. With a signature flourish he finishes the letter. Then, as per censor regulations, Matt puts his name and number at the bottom.
“I talked to Filbert tonight.”
“Good thing, how’d it go?”
“Man, much like anticipated. The kid’s hanging on to some thin threads. He sort of picked up on Jesus when he found out he was drafted. He’s quite freaked. Man, he didn’t say it that way but I put it together that he was.
Matt puts his letter into an open envelope.
“See, he found this group of socially minded Jesus freaks and began to go to Bible sessions. What he’s picked up is the usual amalgam of Christian tidbits wrapped in a mad emphasis on the Second Coming. Filbert, sweet Jesus! The kid actually believes Jesus will be coming back in—let’s see, I think he said, 1981. Can you believe that? Dig it, one stone crazy motherfucker! Yeah, somewhere ’round there. He has this rap about how the war and corruption in government and all fits into biblical prophecy and that The End is near.”
Matt doesn’t respond. Finishes his task. Addresses the envelope but doesn’t seal it, per the censor. He places this one next to two others.
Jared goes on, “The twist Filbert brings is really peculiar. His group believes they’ll all die before Jesus comes again. Far out for sure. It gets better! Most believe they’ll die at the hands of the government. Filbert believes he was sent to die, here. But the kid’s so terrified about everything—about dying, about prison—that all he can do is talk about it and pray.”
Matt leans forward, places his right hand on Jared’s shoulder. “Do you think he’s worried about getting raped?”
“Fucking-A, you bet! Don’t know though. It’s six of one, half a dozen of another. He’s small and fair-haired and all that. All the stereotyped stuff. But he feels whether it’s rape or being beat to death—man, he’s really zoned! He’ll get it one way or another.
But I think he’s so weird, no gay in here will touch him. The kid’s so tight, I don’t think an electric drill could bore up his ass!”
Matt lightly laughs then switches the topic. “Are you going to get a visit this weekend?”
“Can’t seem to stop her. Char might come up. At least she’s going to if she can hitch a ride with Sean’s family.”
“Good. Despite what you think, it’ll make you less crazy—at least for the weekend!”
Done, Matt releases Jared, rises, snatches his letters and with a nod bids him a good night.
Jared hangs around the TV room until the last network goes off. He listens to the “Star Spangled Banner,” even lends a tiring ear to some rabbi’s “Thought for the Day.” Finally feeling weary enough to try sleep once again, he walks back into the dorm, stopping momentarily to hit the head.
Absorbed within himself he moves robotically but within an unguarded instance a slight twist of his head captures a glimpse of Betty!
She’s sitting on the can, all involved in a boisterous conversation with a black dude crapping in the stall next to her.
“You’re lying, just lying!”
Their laughter unnerves him and his stream runs dry.
“No I’m not. It’s true. They all love me!” This brings more laughter and purchases a loving tittering. It’s just two dudes banging on the crapper walls as if stoned drunk and not knowing where they are.
“Oh, God do they ever love me!”
After the last urinal drop, Jared hurtles back to bed and rapidly binds himself with pillow and covers. To all accounts he looks like a mummy among so many in this jailhouse morgue.He falls into a deep sleep, head resting at the foot of the dandelion.
Betty!
Kill the dove! Page 22