I am called and march dutifully to the visiting room ready to risk it all for the treasured touch of a woman. Nora is dressed in a traditional Indian gown, a gossamer violet-hued sari, and with a scarf wrapped over her head. With her eyes painted and a round vermilion mark in the middle of her forehead, she looks exotic, a vision from another world, which indeed she is, and nothing like the hip young New Yorker who was my teacher at MCC and showed up in jeans and demure blouses.
“I’m so sorry I got you in trouble,” she says after I give her a brief squeeze and kiss on the mouth—the only contact allowed as per the rules and regulations of the institution.
We sit and I say, “That kind of trouble is no trouble at all.”
She gives me a sly smile. “How is it here?”
The visiting room is crowded: lots of kids, whole families up from the city to visit dad or son. We sit side-by-side in molded plastic chairs. There is a hack at the front desk where convicts and visitors sign in, and two other cops are up and circulating around the room to keep an eye on things. There is also a mirrored globe hanging from the middle of the ceiling that I know contains video cameras to record events in the room.
“It’s okay,” I say. “At least I get to go outside.”
“I can tell,” she says. “You look fantastic. Much healthier than when you were at MCC.”
“Thanks. You look pretty good yourself,” I say. “I love the outfit.”
“I’m not wearing any underwear.”
My cock perks up. “You had to tell me that.”
“My pussy is getting wet just looking at you.” Nora smiles and stands. “Would you like something … from the vending machines?”
“Yes, sure. How about a bag of popcorn? I’ve been craving popcorn.”
We go over to the bank of food vending machines, she buys the bag of popcorn, and I pop it in the microwave. Back in our seats, with the bag of popcorn resting strategically in my lap, I say, “Put your hand in my pocket.”
She does and quickly understands there is no pocket but rather easy access to my unfettered dong. Her small, moist hand slithers in and takes me tentatively at first, probing deftly, as though gauging my measure.
“Unnnnnhhhhh,” Nora moans. “You feel so heavy.”
Back when I was her student at the MCC, Nora at first gave no hint of her wanton side. She seemed studious, interested in me because I was not what she expected. She was intrigued to know how and why an educated middle-class white boy had chosen a life of crime. I may never have articulated it to her, but I think we bonded in our mutual attraction to danger. I’m certain part of why she volunteered to teach classes at MCC was because she thought to come in contact with the other—big, bad men, so accustomed is she to small, docile men. She told me in one of her letters that as a girl growing up in Bombay, she and her family lived in a large block of flats. From the window of her room she could look into the bedroom of a couple living in the building beside hers. The man of the apartment would often stand or sit while his wife knelt before him and took him in her mouth. This impressed Nora. The image stayed with her as she could see how the man and the woman seemed to enjoy the ritual bonding. As an adult, Nora too was attracted to fellatio as a means of giving and receiving pleasure.
People come and go around us. Couples embrace, hold hands. Kids eat junk food from the vending machines, and they run about chasing each other. Nora’s hand slides up and down beneath my jumpsuit. There is enough activity in the room so that no one seems to take any notice of us. She squirms in her seat and commences humping my hand.
“The cameras,” I groan. “They’ve got cameras in here.”
This seems to excite her all the more. “Put your hand under my dress,” she implores me. “Stick your fingers in my pussy…. I’m so wet.”
One of the cops circulating through the room makes a beeline in our direction.
“Whoa, hold it,” I say. “Here comes the cop.”
She’s oblivious. “You get to play with it all the time,” she says and keeps stroking me.
Thankfully, the roving cop veers off and continues down the line of seats and away from us.
I announce, “I’m going to come.”
“Good. Come. Let me make you come.”
The bag of popcorn in my lap moves up and down. I keep eating faster and faster. Then the room goes out of focus. The earth continues to turn on its axis. Life goes on. There is no stopping us now. The undertone of babbling voices dies away. I leave my body, leave the room, but not in my mind, for my mind is blank. My whole being is caught up in a dimension of pure sensation. This may be the apocalyptic orgasm from which there is no return. I might just expire here in the visiting room at FCI Otisville. Cause of death: acute orgasmic ecstasy. Nora’s hand on my cock is holding me by the very root of my carnal existence and taking me outside of my body, outside of this prison, outside of my confined life to …
The floodgates are open. There will be no holding back the flow. I quiver, my whole body goes into spasms, my member throbs and ejaculates, and then my muscles go slack. I float in and out of the here-and-now in post-orgasmic bliss and only gradually come back to the reality of where I am. In my lap, clearly an unauthorized event has taken place.
“Nora,” I pant, resting my head on her shoulder, “that was like a religious experience.”
She smiles and looks at me wet-eyed. We kiss and her mouth feels sticky. Only then do I notice she has her hand out and is licking the semen from her fingers like a bear licking honey from its paw. “Mmmmmm, you taste so good,” she coos.
In my lap, all over the top of my thigh, a big stain has formed where my seed soaked through the jumpsuit. My face is flushed. I’m still breathing heavily, sweating.
“Put your hand up my dress,” Nora urges me.
Fuck these people, I’m thinking, and I reach for her snatch. One good turn deserves another. The cop on the desk receives a phone call. I glance over at him and our eyes meet. He replaces the receiver and gets up, strides toward us. I’ve still got my hand up under Nora’s sari and she is slithering her wet cunt back and forth on my fingers.
Nora gets off. She moans, shakes, cries out—but it could be an exclamation of joy or surprise. I remove my hand even as the desk cop arrives in front of us. Now I’m the one licking my fingers.
“You,” the cop demands, “come with me.”
“Where are we going? My visit’s not over.”
“Yes, it is. Up, let’s go.” And to Nora. “You. Out!”
“Hey, don’t talk to her like that,” I chastise him. “Get some manners.”
He’s taken aback. “Me? After what you just did!”
“What? What did I do?”
It’s the only way to handle these people—play stupid. Deny everything. Act like you don’t know what they are talking about.
“Come with me,” he says and puts one hand on his body alarm, set to hit the panic button.
“Relax,” I tell him. “I’m coming.” I should say: I came. It is done. You’re too late.
I stand. The stain on the front of my jumpsuit looks like a pattern in a Rorschach test.
“Good-bye,” I say to Nora and go to kiss her. The cop steps between us.
“OUT! Now!” he barks. “This visit is terminated!”
“Get a life,” I tell him. And to Nora, “Thank you,” I say and give her hand a squeeze. “That was a really nice visit.”
“I enjoyed it, too,” she says and smiles. “Good-bye.”
The cop escorts me into the shakedown room. I stand facing the wall.
“Turn around,” he orders me. He’s tall, Germanic-looking, probably in his early thirties, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and the Bureau of Punishment baseball cap. The tag pinned to his shirt says his name is Swick.
“We had the camera on you all the time,” he declares menacingly. “You had your zipper down and were exposing yourself.”
“Bullshit, Officer Swick,” I say, defiant. “I never had my zipper down. This j
umpsuit doesn’t even have a zipper.”
“What’s that stain on the front of your jumpsuit?” he demands.
Another guard enters, a young, pimply kid. They are both excited, carrying on as though this were the bust of the day. He nods, says to Swick. “We got it. It’s all on tape.”
I look down at the gooey stain. “This? Oh, I spilled a soda in my lap.”
“No, no!” the younger cop practically shouts. “We got it all on film. You had your penis out!”
As usual, they got it wrong. They knew an unauthorized event had taken place, but because they couldn’t catch me right, they invent an offense—indecent exposure—that never happened. A phone mounted on the wall rings. The desk cop answers it and says, “Yes, we’ve got him right here.”
“Strip,” the young hack tells me.
I take off the jumpsuit and my shorts—also wet with semen—and drop them on the floor.
“Bend over and spread ’em.”
I assume the position. The young hack picks up my jumpsuit, touches the guilty stain. He rubs his fingertips and thumb together and pronounces, “That’s not soda! That’s cum.”
“Mountain Dew,” I say. “Or was it Seven Up?”
It’s all I can do to keep from laughing in this guy’s face. Except I’m standing there bare-ass and feeling vulnerable. The cop looks up my ass, inspects up under my scrotum. My cock is so content it’s indolent, doesn’t even care.
“He denies everything,” the desk hack says into the phone. “Okay.” And he hangs up. “Get dressed,” he instructs me. “Go back to your unit. The lieutenant is going to review the tape and decide what to do with you.”
Whatever they do to me, it was worth it. Like I give a shit. That was one of the most amazing orgasms I’ve ever had—incredible the difference a woman’s gentle touch can make. But with my resentencing and impending release, if these fools can ever figure out how much time I’ve got left to serve, I really don’t want an incident report and the loss of good-time. Oh, well … I ask myself, Stratton, will you ever learn to behave? Will you ever fully submit to their rules and regulations? Or will you always be this recalcitrant outlaw in search of punishment?”
BACK IN MY cell, I rummage through my belongings, find the printout of the rules and regulations of the institution, and I look up the sanctions under which this alleged misconduct might fall. There are actually several possible violations I could be guilty of. They are, in order of severity: Code 205: Engaging in sexual acts; Code 300: Indecent exposure; Code 327: Unauthorized contact with the public; Code 407: Conduct with a visitor in violation of Bureau regulations; and Code 409: Unauthorized physical contact (e.g. kissing, embracing). All of these offenses are punishable with Hole time, possible forfeiture of earned good-time, and other punishment such as loss of visiting privileges for a specified period.
Love! These federal fuckers have outlawed love. Just who the fuck do they think they are? Of course I will dispute all their charges; that is my standard MO. Yes, I slipped up when I agreed to submit to the underpants check—a momentary lapse. My attitude at this point is fuck it. The orgasm has emboldened me. No more will I admit to their indignities. Let them prove it. I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court. And then, even if I am convicted, I’ll tell them to blow it out their asses! No Bureau of Punishment bureaucrat is going to tell me I can’t be loved.
There comes the call over the PA: “Inmate Stratton report to the lieutenant’s office.”
Off I go.
“STRATTON,” SAYS THE investigating lieutenant, “you got a jack job out there in the visiting room.”
His name is Metzger. They all have names like that—bunch of fucking Nazis. But Metzger and I half-ass get along. I ran into him at the penitentiary in Lewisburg, and again here. He loves to pull me up for political discussions, calls me a lily-livered liberal, which I’m certainly not, more like a flaming radical freethinking American. He’s a Vietnam vet, and though I applaud his service, I tell him I believe the reason for the war was a horrendous lie and that I refused to serve. I complain the war on drugs is an even bigger and ultimately costlier farce or fraud, the American people are the victims, and he should find himself a real job. He laughs and tells me I’m the one wearing the jumpsuit. True that.
Curious terminology—jack job. I prefer to think of it not as a job at all, more as a calling. The woman was called to make me feel human, even if only for a fleeting moment. And I was able to reciprocate.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I respond.
Metzger sneers. “You can’t deny it. We’ve got the whole show on video. I saw it myself…. And then she licked her hand!” he exclaims in disgust. “Jesus, I couldn’t believe it when I saw that.”
“C’mon, you’re just jealous,” I tell him. “You probably never had an old lady who swallowed.”
Now Metzger takes offence. “I should lock you up.”
“Go ahead,” I say and offer my wrists. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“That’s your problem, Stratton. You’re a sick bastard,” he says, shaking his head. But I see that now he is smiling, enjoying this unique contretemps.
“Me? I’m sick? What about you guys? Bunch of voyeurs sitting around watching people trying to act like humans.”
He grins. “You know what? I don’t think you’re being rehabilitated, Stratton. I think you’re getting worse.”
“Wrong again, Lieutenant. What happened out there this afternoon—and I’m not saying anything did happen—but if it did, that was what I call rehabilitation. I haven’t felt this alive in years.”
METZGER THROWS ME out of his office. He knows, as I know, there will be no sanctions. A bag of popcorn moving up and down in a prisoner’s lap. His head turns red, he seems to go into convulsions—maybe he’s having some kind of seizure. A petit mal and not la petite mort. Who can say? The evidence is inconclusive. The telltale stain on the jumpsuit—the hordes of offspring I will never father—of course, they know what happened. I know what happened. But the alleged guilty member never appeared on camera.
There was no flesh. They cannot outlaw the spirit of love. The essence of the orgasm is, after all, invisible.
Chapter Twelve
THE OLD DON
FCI Petersburg, Virginia
BACK IN THE penitentiary at last! How pathetic that I have reached the point where I rejoice at being returned to a real prison. But those transit facilities—MCC, Otisville, K Dorm at Lewisburg; and the county jails along the way; and the intermittent doses of diesel therapy—they make it impossible for a convict to settle into a healthy routine. It becomes a stunted and buffeted version of the cloistered life. There is no access to my beloved volumes in the law library. No mail. No phone calls. No bed of one’s own upon which to rest one’s weary bones. It’s like living in a series of bus depots—traveling, traveling on, but never arriving at a destination.
The only advantage to diesel therapy is that one gets to see the outside World as it blurs by, glimpsed through the barred and meshed Bureau of Punishment bus windows. The trip up from Manhattan to Otisville was not unlike taking a freeworld weekend trip from the City to Westchester and beyond, Orange County, to enjoy nature in the rolling hills and verdant vales of the country in springtime. Life is out there, so close: trees, fields, streams, and rivers, all God’s miraculous creation. Separated from the World, I have come to appreciate it so much more. Seeing the World through the bus windows, I am flush with excitement at the thought that I will one day in the not-so-distant future be free to walk again unfettered by chains and shackles, and to get down on my hands and knees and thank God for life, for this opportunity to experience freedom.
And journeying on from Upstate New York to Virginia, with multiple stops along the way, one gets to meet fellow travelers, convicts from all over the vast American prison system, and to hear good and bad news from joints far and near: Who got out. Who got jammed up with a new case and may never get out. Who got out and got rearres
ted and is looking at a whole shitload of time. Who got shanked and bled to death just months prior to his release. What new prisons have been added to the ever-expanding federal gulag. News. Some news one would rather not hear. Here’s the rub: the closer one gets to realizing freedom, the harder the concept of freedom is to grasp and hold on to—like the World streaming too quickly past my eyes through the bus window—for the fear mounts that something, anything, could go wrong. The bus might crash. A riot might jump off in one of the institutions along the way. One could be forced into an untenable situation, be forced to defend oneself, or simply fuck up, and the free world would remain out there, fleeting, forever beyond reach.
UPON MY RETURN to Petersburg, I find that I have become a minor celebrity, hailed as the jailhouse lawyer du jour. How many prisoners litigating pro se win an appeal in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals? Precious few. And to have one’s sentence vacated and then reduced for refusing to rat? Unheard of. In fact, there are those know-it-alls who doubt me and would hint that I must have rolled over and cooperated, until I make available the published appellate court decision.
I could be making big bucks fleecing these unschooled and desperate cons on a promise of reprieve, but I work for commissary—ice cream, cigarettes to be used as currency, sneakers, or a tennis racket for a big case—and I won’t take a case unless I believe it has merit.
Joe Stassi, the octogenarian mafioso who dwells in the cell beside mine, beckons me into his presence. He too has recently returned from a road trip. They shipped him to the federal prison hospital facility in Springfield, Missouri, a kind of retirement home for geriatric gangsters. He says he is fully recovered after a hernia operation and has had some melanoma spots removed from his pendulous, Buddha-like ears, his cheeks, and his forehead. At the time, due to his age and longevity in the system, Joe is one of twenty or thirty prisoners at Petersburg still living in a single cell; I am another, largely due to the status I have achieved as a writ writer. After the Shindola incident, the cops don’t fuck with my typewriter; some have even come to me asking for legal advice.
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