Chapter 23: Wake-up—Davitt’s offer
It isn’t the flashlights or the cautious noise—both of these he’s become accustomed to after Lights Out. Every night, for the first hour right after the switch is flipped off, flashlights peek through the darkness. Soon, whispered calls, muffled solicitations, and secret code names filter through the air. The blankets go up. “Ah, the flag is waving!” Jared mocks. For blankets with “US“ emblems are hoisted to form a modest barricade for the bazaar of immodest acts. Although he has never “bought a ticket,” he knows how to if he wants. Supply Line is Millston’s walking Ticketron outlet. “Ven-ella or Chalk-late?” is all he says. Then, at a time that just seems to happen, guys start queuing for their gay appointments.
Sex has always amused Jared with its musical variations. Some broads are like banging a grand piano—a humping cacophony. Others screech like suffering violins. My favorite is the saxophone, those lovelies you can run riffs on, from titters to deep base bellowing. Damn, playing a woman like the sax, that’s my thing!
In contrast, here, the “broads” are more like a drum section, lots of thumping, banging and cymbals clashing. Jared really doesn’t want to know how they do it exactly, but he has witnessed, with more than a bit of uncomfortable fascination, the billowing of sails, the shadowy lines of waiting customers, and heard the squeals of the bedspring section harmonize its screeches, giggles, grunts. As such, he has come to accept the staccato of satisfaction, “Oh, yes . . .Yes! . . .Yes!”
What Jared knows is that the gay thing, like basketball, is something different Inside than Out. But then maybe not? His own experience with Insider B-ball makes him question whether his involvement—addiction?—with basketball means something more than he’s ever considered. Shit, Fucking-A Freud might have something on me! As with just about everything, he’s even reconsidering the function and meaning of gayness.
During the several months between capture and sentencing, a “Men’s Movement” sprouted within the Anti-War Movement. All of a sudden his “Men’s Consciousness Raising Group” began focusing more on “sexual politics” than the war. Those who pushed this agenda made a big deal about the continuity between “anti-racism, anti-war, anti-violence,” and now “anti-sexism.” Distracted by the pressing details of his trial, Jared was mostly an observer and listener. One day, however, he picked up a copy of the Twin Cities’ underground press, Hundred Flowers and read the lead article by a guy he knows, Brian Coyle. Brian was active in SDS since its beginning, and also a flirt with all the deviations and permutations of leftist romance.
“Unless you suck cock, you can’t be a true revolutionary,” is the opening line.
“Whoa!” shouts Jared’s Novice Master. “You’re not going to step over that line, are you?”
This thought need hardly be answered because Jared’s had more than enough struggles with the looseness Free Love cast upon his desire for Char to even consider this.
“He’s got to be kidding!” Then he crushed the paper and trashed it. Although he’s always been attracted to “strong women,” there’s utterly no place in his spirit for same-sex sex. He has a repugnance for the word homosexuality.
Here in Millston, seeing the unfettered movement and social visibility allotted to gays, he’s taken it as just another quirk in a weird place. But it’s definitely making him reconsider gayness.
“Nothing is what it seems!” is one of his key insights into prison life. This forces him to wonder, what exactly goes on behind those flags? Is it just sex? Orgasmic release? Or . . . what?
Even Char’s I am not your body! What the fuck does that really mean?
Tonight he’s off the agenda—the flashlights search for other loves.
“Get up. Now! Shut up. Just dress. Don’t take anything!”
These are different whispers of urgent commands. Jared starts to get out of bed. “Don’t move,” snarls a beam of light that blinds his eyes.
Jared passes his left forearm across his eyes, attempting to shield the probe while catching a glimpse of what’s going on.
Hacks! It’s clearly the hacks. Just moving guys out. They often do this type of thing in the early morning hours. Jared watches three go. Jesus! Sean. Sweet Jesus! Filbert —but he can’t make out the third. Are they coming for me? He waits apprehensively. Within minutes, the clearing out is over. Jared is left behind.
Right after they leave, Jared throws off his covers and scouts bed to bed. Others meet him with questions and fears. “Fucking motherfuckers, are they’re throwing those guys in Seg?”
“Man, when it’s this time of night it’s the Midnight Express!”
Meaning that Sean and the rest—how many?—are being shipped out. Sent to other federal pens. A whole bunch of COs have been taken! Fright overcomes him, a dark vision, and he rushes to the beds he knows, counts—Jesus!curses and prays. On Harley’s still-empty bunk he sits down, tallying the numbers and announces only to himself, “I’m the only fucking CO left!”
Why? The question goads him, keeps him awake all night. When the first Count comes, Jared is still perplexed, and absolutely terrified.
At breakfast Jared is stunned to find that he’s the only CO left in all of Millston! He rushed out on his way to chow and searched Matt’s dorm, found his bunk empty. Jesus, now more a prayer for intercession than an expletive. What to do? Play dead?
He sits down quietly and mechanically consumes his breakfast. No one comes by and sits with him.
During work’s coffee chatter he listens to the Inside grapevine. “Hey, blood, they took your white sweetie away!” leads to the knowledge that only whites were transferred. One guy, a loner and a long-timer who works in his area and with whom he has spoken maybe once or twice since he arrived, warns, “You better be careful. Sometimes it’s worse to be left behind.”
He says no more. What’s more to say?
“Thanks,” is what Jared doesn’t say. He begins to feel freaky, exposed, vulnerable.
All day long escape! is the only topic on his internal TV talk show. Escape. It’s the only thing on his mind, in his heart, present to his soul. It’s as if he won’t be able to breathe until he’s out. Although out doesn’t have any specific geographical identity—it’s just out, somewhere, anywhere.
But how?
Jared’s mind races around the prison’s perimeter. He has jogged the Yard track and knows every spot in the chain-link fence: a ten-foot-high, barbed-wire barricade topped with razor threads. “The best, Warden, just the best! They’ll be sliced to the bone before blood even begins to flow!”
It could be cut.
But how do I get from the dorm to the Yard’s fence at night?
He has never really thought about it. Without a doubt, dreams of escape are just that, dreams. More of those James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart type affairs where everything just seems to fall together. A crooked hack, solid Inside connections . . . but he doesn’t have any of those. His only hope: Supply Line.
Jared approaches Supply Line with the same hapless naivety that propelled him into draft raids. He hardly pauses to consider the risks. Here, his “Do it!” virtue is truly a vice. He’s heard that there have been breakouts but few where the cons weren’t back within the month. At least there is a way. I’ve just got to find it. He’s quite confident that he won’t be as foolish as the regular cons, once he’s on the Outside.
What Jared doesn’t know, has never had a reason to ask is, “Who backs Supply Line?” Is he screwed in with some high-ranking hack? Or is he a third-party distributor for an inside “Mr. Big” convict?
“Look,” Jared just rushes into the issue, “I need things and I need to know what you can get me.”
Supply Line checks him out with his mental “short-timer” meter but he isn’t short “Sey, y’er nut do outta ’ere fer five lung ones?”
“Fuck it, yeah man, I know, but look, they’re going to get me. I mean it, man, I can feel it. They left me here to barbecue and be cut up for
the Thanksgiving feast!”
Jared’s urgency and recklessness are not uncommon convict emotions. It’s his sincerity, his clarity of conviction that causes Supply Line to hesitate. It’s a hesitation during which he sizes Jared up. A fool? Er jest crezzy?
Supply Line knows that the Black Muslims hate this guy but that they won’t risk harming him. That would just boomerang. No, the word was out to “isolate him.” He’s a bit baffled. Who’s spookin’ um, dis terrable? Mist be da time! Kant ’andle da time!
Jared’s getting more agitated as he waits. Supply Line judges him to be both a fool and crazy. Bit biznes es biznes!
Supply Line assures him that he can provide the fence cutters, perfect copies of the necessary keys, a length of strong rope, a flashlight—everything on his list. “’Cept da drivar.”
Supply Line’s aging into senior citizen status while Inside for the past twenty years has dried up some of his Outside sources. But he knows who could arrange it. “Meestar Davit. Ha’ll do et fer yar.”
“Davitt! Shit, man, I don’t want to deal with him. Can’t you just do it for me?”
Davitt is a middle-level Mafioso guy from back East. Humorously, at least a bit of dark humor, Jared laughs when he finds out that Davitt’s from my hometown—Bayonne! Jesus, I might have served this guy Communion. He’s freaking Irish and probably went to St. Vinnies!
Davitt is doing time for an assortment of other bigwigs for whom he’s taken a fall. Given that status, he has unlimited Outside contacts. His time in prison is, in his own word, “recreational.” As anticipated, he’s set himself up as a jailhouse kingpin. Like the gays, Davitt gets special treatment from the guards. To be sure he’s one mean, nasty son of a bitch, this Jared knows. His skin crawls thinking about having to bargain with this guy.
Bit ya gotta do wat’s ya gotta do! Jared keeps repeating to himself, mimicking Supply Line, boosting his sense of rightness, masking his sense of desperation as he prepares for an audience with “King Davitt.”
“You really are a crazy motherfucker!” Davitt says more than once, almost giggling, but stomping it out by chomping on a lewd, obese cigar. Maduro Maduro, 52 Ring, Private Stock, 12 inches! Jared flashes on his dad’s fetish: mail-order cigars from Wally Frank.
The cigar that Davitt waves round and round as he talks glints the air along with spars from his chubby diamonded fingers. He obviously watched more Edward G. Robinson movies than I did! A fleeting moment catches them laughing at each other’s Bayonne jokes. Jared’s certain, this asshole is from Saint Vincent’s!
“How much did Supply Line get?”
“I gave him one and a note for four.”
Holy Mother, kid, you must be desperate, Davitt silently concludes, that ole nigger usually gets only two spots.
Through this bantering exchange, Jared unwittingly reveals his vulnerability. All the respect he tries to build through his appearance, use of educated language, calmness of tone—all that practiced charm which he believes must work on Davitt—goes straight down the tubes. Davitt’s grossest street instincts begin to surface.
Davitt comes from Jared’s hometown but flunked out of Bayonne High. He secured a good paying job being a mug for his cousin, “Wild Irish Matty,” who ran whores and loan-sharked in Jersey City.
Davitt’s early specialty was beating up lazy prostitutes, dope fiends and loan shark welshers. His rapid rise began when he raised kiddie porn from a perversion to an investment with returns greater than any from Wall Street. ”ROI! The bottom line! Cash is king! It ain’t criminal to make money, now is it, sonny?”
Fatefully, Davitt lacked the brainpower to reach the top. Even within the Mob, the Peter Principle works. As expected, when he took this fall for the bosses, he was rewarded with a higher rank than he would ever have achieved on his own. Inside, he outranked other mobsters and within his first few weeks he had a built a little empire.
“You’re out of your fucking head, man!” Jared responds to Davitt’s offer. This would normally have been a strong rebuke, revealing a respectable macho strut behind his polished appearance. It blares out, “Hey, no matter what, I’m not doing that! I’m a man!” But in this situation it only underscores his desperateness. And the passion behind it—a mingling of fear and self-respect, of innocence—whets Davitt’s appetite. He’s beginning to enjoy the spectacle. He, the high judge in a place where he’s both judge and jury, both sheriff and executioner. He can see Jared bending over. Relishes his cowering in homage to his overwhelming power. Inside, with no exaggeration, Davitt wields power over life and death. Ironically, it’s a power that Jared unwittingly gave him the moment Davitt realized how desperate Jared was to escape. Just his coming to him required that he yield, submit, bend down for Davitt’s boot upon his neck. Davitt knows this. Jared doesn’t.
“No way, man,” Jared repeats, fooling himself that such repetition will convince Davitt. “I’m not into that!”
Davitt is pleased, knowing that it’s just a matter of time. “Think it over. If you find a better deal, take it.” With that, he winks at Jared. A wink that telegraphs, “I know you know the game—strut and make yourself feel good—I’ll be here!
“Fucking cock-sucking son-of-a-bitch, motherfucking ass-banging F-A-G!” is what Jared wants to shout, but he just bears the lash of the wink and slinks away.
Back at his bunk, Jared checks his hidden supplies. Good! No one has come. Sometimes the hacks just mess around with a guy’s things for the hell of it.
“Do you enjoy your work?” Jared once asked a newly hired Correctional Officer, a sallow ninety-pound weakling who probably couldn’t handle farming. “I mean, man, do you enjoy looking up assholes and watching fifty guys strip buck naked after each visit? Do you enjoy holding the keys?” How Jared drilled the punk! “Do you talk about your work with your girl?”
He asked this to a cat’s-whiskered country bumpkin who, in due time, will become a brick no con can break. “It’s just a job,” is all he says. Only the gods of cruelty know that this is the secret code he shares with his kin at Treblinka.
Fairly soon, Jared has to make a decision.
Am I really a deviant? Spoken, thought, but not asked to anyone else. The acceptable academic word was a thin veil over the boiling cauldron called “Jared’s soul.” Having been raised Catholic, homosexuality has always been emblazoned as the “perversion of the perverse.”
Maybe . . . maybe I should read Uncle Sam’s letters? This, yet another desperate thought, a death-row scrambling for scraps of absolution. Jared has consigned Uncle Sam’s monthly missives to an unread stash of rubber-banded letters, sealed in the box protected by the hibakusha.
Over the years, Jared and Uncle Sam repeatedly clashed when discussing (debating, haranguing, screaming) about the degree of acceptance of sexual perversity in the religious life and thought of the Church. Jared was ever the innocent-abroad who was shocked, jolted, mortified, angered, and ended up erupting into a frenzy of absolute confusion mixed with a heartfelt call for Revolution! His “Throw the bastards out!” included the Pope, cardinals and every bishop and priest in the world.
Long before Char and Aaren had stumbled onto the insufficiency of the image, Jared had discerned its logical weakness. “Even the Godhead, the Holy Trinity is all and only male! Can’t you see? Can’t you see how gay this is? How fey?”
Back then, Jared only wanted to tweak the noses of those clerical stuffed shirts. He didn’t really intend to call for the rejection of the Male Religion, but he’s had to revisit even that interpretation and consider the position of Char, Aaren and the Sisters. Now, as push comes to shove, deep within, he questions whether he would trade places, go back, even don the black hood of the axe man and attack Bruiser? Burn and kill those faggots!?
Matt’s handling of his jail rape is an issue Jared now fervently wishes they had discussed. “Damn, Matt, help me out!” he utters, a fervent prayer. Jared needs help, an intercession whether angelic or demonic, to face and answer Da
vitt’s proposal: “I can guarantee safe pickup and passage to Canada. I’ll even get you a job. Pay off Supply Line. And have some cash waiting for you.” But the deal! Oh sweet Jesus! He hears Davitt but he simply can’t believe him.
“All’s you have to do is satisfy Sally.”
It’s that simple. And if it had been a chick, damn, Char would understand. Aaren certainly. Christ, I could make my mother understand . . . but Sally?
“Simon of Cyrene, pick up this cross!”
Jared has never really come to know the sexual terrain occupied by perverts and deviants. What he thinks he knows is but the simplicities given by novels and films. Even the two triple-X’s never conveyed what the actors were really like. Now he’s being called to not just watch but to do it! This is an act he’s stone-cold ready to back away from.
Not surprisingly, Jared has a terrible night. There’s one dream sequence so fearsome that he awakes gagging. The few spectral survivors who he glimpses are all decked out with frilly dresses. It’s a headache vision, erupting with cranium-cracking throbs. For a flash he sees bodies jumbled, skirts flared, “girls” being humped and sucked . . . jerking and squirting—and he’s one of them! He trembles and feels sure that this cements the deal. I am not going to do that. Better to die here in Millston than become a catcher!
Fatefully, the seed was planted in early caged dreams: “I am not your body!” I am not your body. Rejected thoughts—that the body is worthless, just a shell, not of value—register again, claiming recognition. He wonders now if he understands how and why concentration camp inmates just waited to be cremated. They recognized that this life is not about the body.
Yet this can’t be. No! No! I will never accept that lie again! He knows that he’s being prepared for degradation. But he won’t yield. He proclaims over and over, I won’t do it! I won’t do it!
Though Jared’s moral resolve is set in reinforced concrete, it’s a block teetering on a precipice—a most fragile balance.
After chow, Jared’s world shifts another astral degree.
“Roll it up, Jennings!”
At last! The words bring Jared some much-needed relief. They are coming for him. He’s finally getting on the train, like the others. This rosy hope, however, is quickly lost as the guard takes him over to Dorm 4-C, formally called “Malcolm X,” otherwise known as “Nigger Heaven.”
Jared can hardly move a muscle after the hack leaves. His bundle is locked frozen in his arms. He jitters and hardly breathes as he surveys the room, finding it all black—ebony, dark, nighttime, pitchblende—maybe some Hispanics, possibly some Indians, a pastiche of mulatto . . . but totally not white!
Still holding his bundle, Jared bolts out of the dorm and into the Yard. It’s finally May and the nights are getting longer, he can steal a few precious moments of security because final Lock-up and Count hasn’t been called.
What the fuck am I going to do? How is he going to make it through the night? He knows that he will not, cannot, must not sleep.
The one protection Jared did not anticipate but which he quickly surmises he has, is that of surprise. His new bunkmates are clearly as shocked to see him there as he is to be there. So, as Count ends he slips directly under his covers, though still fully dressed, even booted. He tries to tent and bury himself under several blankets. Yet, and he knows this, his is not a disguise to fool the greenest con or hack. Obviously, everyone knows he’s here. And he knows they know.
In the john, the Black Muslins call an impromptu meeting, bringing in guys from each ethnic and political group in the dorm. With Jared in their midst, it’s hard for them not to believe the Black Muslim’s analysis that it is a conspiracy. Pulling together the facts: (1) They had killed Harley because he was the one white leader the Blacks could easily control, (2) the mass exodus of all COs except Jared means that he’s a snitch, (3) the recent rumors out of Hennepin County about a crazy nigger named Dikbar telling everyone that Jared is a Messiah—a definite smoke screen, getting folks talking nonsense and not about how dangerous he is, and (4) the Moses thing. “Brothers, it’s the clear hand of Allah ripping the sheep’s fleece off the wolf’s body.”
But how to act? Some argue that Jared is “a fortuitous opportunity for revenge.” Others, “a trap from that sly fox,” the Warden. Injuring or killing Jared might be just what they want, be an excuse for a lock-down or worse, possibly some late-night “accidents”—executions. At the moment, the more seasoned leaders prevail. “Hasty decisions often play into the hands of our oppressors!” For an hour, all decisions are evaluated and reevaluated. Finally, it’s agreed that nothing will go down before dawn.
Jared can’t wait till dawn—or at least the person Jared has become, or rather the body compelled by the uncertain identity within. Whoever he is, he gets up a bit before midnight and tiptoes past the showers and john out into the TV room. His prey is there. Nameless and enjoying the serenity of a quiet late evening, the guy’s just another of life’s innocent victims, an unintentional participant in someone else’s world.
Jared grabs the guy from behind, jerks him up with a mighty grip of shirt. Spins him around, not catching the age in his eyes nor the fragility of his amble, and throws the aging con shuddering into the wall. Shocked, pained, and bewildered, none of his feelings or pleas register with Jared.
Jared picks up two metal-legged plastic chairs and shatters the Tube, bludgeons it. Then he swings and wields them wildly, attacking and cracking the full set of four large security-lighted windows—through which the hacks monitor Rec Room activity.
The monitoring hack hears the old man’s screams, pauses, and at the first sound of the TV glass shattering and tingling to the ground, is at full bore. He flashlight-signals (so as not to alarm the sleeping Population) to a cohort who hits a silent alarm inside Control and before Jared is aware that the dragon has escaped, a crowd of hands pull and tug, maul him.
It takes six guards to completely subdue Jared. He’s consumed by the ferocity of the role he’s playing out within this great dream of escape. So, despite being hit several times by clubs and fists that would have toppled the fiercest among them, Jared achieves an unsolicited 15 minutes of fame in jailhouse lore as he takes blow after blow, thud after thud, kick and smack and crack on his head that should have cold-cocked him right at the start. As happens, Jared’s performance soon becomes a rousing late-late-night TV special for the rest of the awakening dorm, who rate his performance as “one fucking crazy doper,” “that asshole CO,” “crazy, wild-ass white man,” “some ass-kicking dude, if I don’t say so!” By the wisest, he’s been written off as “Just a flipped out dude who couldn’t handle the hard time.”
Regardless, Jared accomplishes his objective. He is, literally, dragged all the way—a heels-scraping, butt-bruising, arm-twisting and shoulder-yanking haul and lug—and body-slammed into Seg. Thrust in with a fearsome thwack to the side of his head and a meaner, nastier bone-cracking kick to his butt.
When the Warden hears about Jared’s escapade, he’s furious. Not because Jared’s a white guy who has attacked a black, nor because of the potential bad press Jared’s notoriety might bring. No, because he knows, he sees it more clearly with this day’s event, that there is an FBI plant who’s executing orders from memos and directives that do not bear “CC: Warden.”
Kill the dove! Page 23