Chapter 25 - Wake-up: the escape
Everyone’s surprised when Jared is back in circulation within three days. The Blacks judge this a provocative act. They’re convinced that the Warden wants to use Jared to start a race riot. His return says, “Look stupid niggers, this is your target!” Could anything be more obvious?
What they can’t figure out is why Jared is cooperating—or is he? A few still believe that Fred Hampton’s trust had been for real and solidly based, that Jared isn’t a snitch. Others counter that nothing about his Millston acts fit their past experiences with COs. “From Jump Street, he’s been bad blood. Whether he’s in on it or just a dupe, it don’t make no difference!”
Jared returns to “Malcolm X” and is treated as if he never left. It’s decided: Ignore him. Make him invisible.
Jared’s quick release is a bewildering disappointment to him. He’s been gearing up for a week or two of rest and reading—having some space! Getting into his exercise regimen. Once back in the dorm he’s just roadkill. He doesn’t know what the Black Muslims are planning. He has no reason to trust anyone, white or black. Plus he’s anxious and wound up tight about not having moved an inch towards escape. He’s got to do something soon or they are going to fuck with him until they’re satisfied.
Matt’s voice, What happens to us is less important than what we do with what happens to us. Get it?
At day’s end, before the Lock-up and Count siren blares, Jared meets with Davitt.
“Okay.”
This is said simply, in monotone, flat voiced.
Davitt’s face creases only slightly, not betraying the eruption of pleasure soothing his whole being. He feels Jared crumble through his fingers. Just dirt, like the rest of them.
Later, in preparation, Jared secures the hibakusha in his toiletry box’s false bottom. Leaves a note: “Keep what’s in here but mail this box. Get it to my brother, Larry.” After jotting down Larry’s address, he rolls it up in two tens—depleting his cash position as Larry would say by one-third. Who’s to receive this? Who else but Supply Line?
Right after Lights Out, Davitt’s man pops into “X.” Davitt’s omnipotence is evidenced by the lack of attention given to this guy. He’s more than just a white boy. He’s alabaster with Celtic freckles fallen on milky skin, a shock of red hair with green-glinting eyes, and he just strolls—no, swaggers—into “X’s” heart of darkness. This guy’s not just visiting—no way!—he represents the landlord. So it’s no surprise that he motions to Jared and utters a command like the Corridor Captain, “Come on!”
Jared’s out in a shot.
With the tools Supply Line sold him bundled by two towels, Jared trails Davitt’s guy who seems to intimately know each Yard shadow. He guides Jared to a storage room in the Library area. Fingering the appropriate key from a hack’s round, he slips inside and as Jared follows he flicks on a light, pivots and leaves, quietly shutting the door. Jared is alone.
Set up? bolts from among the repressed memories of the raid, but the question doesn’t have time to settle as the doorknob turns and framed by back shadows is his blind date, Sally.
Sally is really someone baptized with his father’s name, Junior, but he looks every inch the woman. Jared can’t remember seeing this guy. Davitt has a harem?
Sally is slight of build, a Scandinavian blonde, almost hairless, fairly tall, and soft. She exudes softness. She enters, takes two swift steps towards Jared, pauses. Her voice floats like champagne fizz—“Yes?” The room crackles with tense anticipation and the magnetism of fear, of crime and sin, the trespassing of new boundaries. She poses, readies herself—steadying herself—for she fully expects Jared to make the first move. She’s accustomed to being lunged at and manhandled with an ardor only rape can describe.
Jared’s hesitancy, once she’s fully aware of it, loosens a tittering that she swiftly arrests with the back of her hand, sensitive to Jared’s embarrassment. It’s been a very, very long time since she’s been with a virgin.
Clearing his throat, Jared’s whispers, “Well . . . errr, let’s get it over with!”
Normally—how pleasant the reversal!—this is Sally’s unspoken line.
Jared squirms with the question he has to ask, “Pitch or catch?”
Sally flutters her eyes coyly and exhales like smoke, “Both.”
Oh my God! Holy Mother of God! Mary, Font of Wisdom! St. Jude, intercede for me! It’s a litany that doesn’t stop. He utters it as he is cast—casts himself—into the pit of darkness.
“Today, Friars, we shall discuss ‘non-orthogenital sexual acts,’ or in the layman’s lingua franca—perversions!”
Jared doesn’t think about her. Will not, cannot tolerate a moment of personal recognition. She will have to be but a vivid dream of masturbation, a nightmare of waywardness, corruption, depravity.
Fortunately, Sally is more than expert at her craft. Davitt paid a handsome amount to get her. She has Jared’s cock cranking off shots before he knows that his pants are down. Although he’s aware of the sensation, it arrives like the distant realization that the fire is warming your frostbitten hands. It’s a pleasure from beyond the blockade.
How Jared ever got himself into the catcher’s position, (shucks, just like kneeling at the altar!) he will never remember, never discuss; only relive in the most repressed of dreams. “Let’s play Catch the Catamite!”
What strengthens him during these moments is his invocation of Matt’s courage. If Matt could survive it, so can I! This is repeated round and round like fingering the decades of the Rosary. If Matt could survive it, so can I!
It. The act of submission is an it.
Jared is on another planet.
Mercifully, it’s over almost before it begins. Jared becomes haltingly aware that Sally is adjusting her dress and wiggling into her high heels. He’s also aware that his pants are carousing at his ankles and, embarrassed, he mechanically bends down and pulls them up—BVDs, trousers, then buckle. By habit, he reaches down and straightens out his socks. He hasn’t taken off his shoes or unbuttoned his shirt. Almost reflexively, he wants to say, “All done?” But he says nothing. She says nothing.
Sally leaves; evaporates.
Now what? Jared lies against the wall. He’s alone again. “It is not good that the man should be alone.” But he’s also self-abandoning—Sally never existed!
As if on cue, Davitt’s man comes back. He’s expressionless. “Let’s go,” he directs matter-of-factly. As before, he pilots Jared through the Yard, using his secret map of shadows, this time to the darkest recess of the fence. He leans against a dumpster and watches while Jared cuts a section and then ropes it up like a doggie door. Jared wonders why the guy is staying with him. Is he going with me? Actually, he’s staying to make sure that Jared cuts the fence correctly—just a bit of professional courtesy! Jared will never fully appreciate the service Davitt provides.
As Jared turns to say, “See ya!” the guy taps something against his forehead and says, “Thanks for the going-away present.”
Jared is at a loss.
“You did great. The Boss is gonna love you on film.”
Jared is on the other side of the fence when the full import of what the guy just said hits him like a spray of buckshot up close.
“Son of a bitch!” he snorts while thrusting a white-knuckled fist at the guy. “Son of a bitch, I’ll kill you and fucking Davitt if that’s true!”
The mix of macho posturing with the feebleness of the threat amuses the guy. He laughs and fuck-fingers Jared off. “Go on, you fucking hippie, you enjoyed it!”
The Mick doesn’t move. He’s enjoying the spectacle. He laughs and laughs the angrier Jared gets, then fades away as Jared starts duck-walking towards the tree line that serves as a windbreak for the farmer’s planting field that adjoins the prison.
Jared was told to make his way toward the farmer’s barn, about a quarter-mile diagonally across the field. It’s just mid-May and the farmer
should have been in the field but Jared sees no tractor tracks. He passes it off as a result of the past month’s quite peculiar weather, oscillating very hot or very cold. Fuck it! The field’s booby-trapped with muddy potholes. In a quick reverse, Jared judges this a blessing because if it was a month later Minnesota’s state bird, the “Paul Bunyan mosquito,” might be needling him to death. I’m truly blessed!
Then what happens is a story that he’ll retell often, however never expecting anyone to find it less perplexing or amusing, even ‘unbelievable!’ as he does.
“I break out from the tree line and waddle as fast as I can. Falling on my butt once and crawling now all caked with mud and hands beginning to thicken from the dampness seeping through. Finally, I get to the middle of the field. The moon’s fading in and out, being swiped by a rush of rain-darkening clouds, so Millston looks like an old movie strip where the frame goes by too slowly and the light bounces out at you. Everything’s slow-motion flickering and I just plop myself down. Then something really weird happens, man. I felt plopped like some Big Hand came down and said, ’Sit down here and think about it!’
“Squatting in the mud, I asked myself, How does it feel to be free? And the gallows humor of it all hit me. Free? The word cuts me this way and that. I realized I was certainly free of Millston as a place but was I dragging an umbilical cord with me? Even if I went to Canada, wouldn’t I always be connected to Millston? I had to face the possibility that if I did and then came back to the States they could reverse the process—cage me back up a second time. Thinking about it, I thought, Would it be worse the second time?”
Jared often stops at this point, ever caught up again in the dilemma he faced.
“What would I be going back to? I realized, Nothing. Nothing because I had not really escaped. Fucking-A! I was taking Millston with me like a turtle does. I mean, man, I was grafting Millston prison onto my flesh like a turtle’s shell. Me— Convict Turtle—no matter where I’d be, prison would be my shell.”
It forces him to be philosophical: “I guess it must’ve been like the other side of being born.” Jared struggles to find a way to explain, “like what the infant might feel if he looks back. Questions come up: Should I have left? Can I get back in? But the babe has no choice. His mother will never consider reversing the procedure! . . . But I did.
“That’s it! While squatting in the field, what comes to me is that if I don’t return then I’ll become—not might or could but inevitably will—become just like them. My own Warden, my own hack, my own executioner. I’ll never be able to be free. If I don’t return I’ll never be able to stand up and cast off my chains. “Fucking-A, man, I’ll always be doing time!”
Jared pauses, knows that it is something possibly only an ex-con could really understand. “Out in the field I look one way towards the barn and then the other way towards Millston. Thinking, If I go to Canada, I become a turtle. If I go back, what? Questions and thoughts rain like hail. I can’t move. What have they made me into? What does it mean to be a prisoner, an inmate, a convict?”
He knows that his hearers want a simple answer—shit! he wants a simple answer! None comes. “This was—is—the question, What happens to a man when he accepts being a prisoner? An answer came to me, one that I didn’t really like. One that you may not like. I just started hearing that black preacher guy back in the Afro meeting. ‘Cons are prisoners of the State, legally, slaves of the State.’ He made a connection between slavery and prison, but what is it? Well, I ask you, get stoned on this, man. What is the effect of slavery?
It’s to break the male spirit. Crack the masculine energy and twist out its power to use it in a perverted way. Perversion. It’s the right word, trust me. Prisoner perverts men, few ever become the same again.”
He stands tall when he says this, uses his full athletic masculinity to hammer home the point: “The reason, man, most cons can’t make it on the Outside, is they’re broken while Inside. Dig this! Think on it. They’re zapped and sapped of their masculinity like the slaves, but worse we’re turned into women. Yeah,” he thumps his chest, “they made me their bitch! No denying that.” He pauses, it always shocks them, always hurts him to confess it openly. “After you’ve lived as an expendable, disposable, No Deposit-No Return piece of social trash, you begin to become that. Man, it’s weird but you become your own lifelong imprisoner, you never stop doing time.” They want to know, he wants to know, someone always asks, “Are you still doing time?”
Jared is halfway back towards the fence before all of these thoughts reach full bloom. Once under and through the fence, back on the Inside, he glances over his left shoulder. It’s become clear to him, more clearly than at his departure from the seminary, more clearly than when raiding draft offices, more clearly than when watching Char sleep, more clearly than when he had been first born, “I belong here!”
In the morning, several angry black bloods gather at the foot of his bunk. Jared’s been deeply, deeply asleep and he’s snoring like Yahweh thundering revelations through his snout. Unseen, the hibakusha is buried in the press of his hands. Man, the bloods are really pissed and they kick-shake his bed! Lift it up and let it drop, bang and clang on the floor. No matter, Jared keeps on sleeping; undisturbed. They figure that he’s out on “horse” or some other dope.
Later, it takes two hacks about ten minutes to drag him out of bed, into the shower, and slap him awake.
“Hey, Jennings, whatsa matter? Been sniffing something?”
They rough him up a bit. Nothing too hard, not a beating—just trying to get their job done.
“Wake-up, asshole!” one keeps shouting, louder and louder, as if Jared is hard of hearing. The Blacks can’t figure this odd turn of events. They knew Jared was in flight. Supply Line gives out more than just supplies. One guy points out that Jared’s shoes are caked with mud. Anger and confusion mix. He was out, but now he’s back. Why?
What Jared never finds out, what only Davitt and the Warden know, is that his decision to return was more than metaphysically correct. He was damn lucky! Davitt’s waiting driver was an FBI agent. A passel of federal agents were also in hiding. They knew his route. They were poised to snatch him and set him onto one of life’s other “roads less travelled.” Unexpectedly and unhappily at the moment, they are the jilted lovers left waiting at the altar. Yet, not being guys easily deterred, that same day they hurriedly convene a meeting with the Warden and set in motion an alternate elopement strategy.
PART III: THE RIDE
Kill the dove! Page 25