And finally Tooley, our friend with the teeth Tooley, the hack Tooley, caught him with a shoe-tip. He caught the old man in the gut, and the old man rolled over gasping like a beached fish. The guards picked him up, and I heard the Captain say something about violent ward and Bellevue. And then the old man was gone.
All he’d wanted was his juice.
I never felt like crying so hard for someone I’d never known. But he was gone, and I was still here, and Pooch was withdrawing into himself, and I wanted to tell him who I was, really, and what I was doing here, and what I’d been doing in the Barons. But it wouldn’t have worked.
Communication is a strange thing.
When you need it most, it fails.
“Awright, you prisoners,” a hack yelled, coming up to the still open door of the bullpen, “we got cake’n coffee an’ a few sanniches here for ya, so file out one atta time an’ take one helping is all.” A trusty in gray wheeled up a huge stainless steel serving cart.
I didn’t feel like eating. My stomach was numb.
All around me the noises of the bullpen, strange and in their own way jungle-like, merged together to make one great clamor. The men dashing for the food outside the cell, the coughs, the mumbled dirty words, the hissing sound of men with unruly systems breaking wind, the snoring of a lush sleeping it off before they roused him, the tinny whine of cowards’ voices and the brassy boom of braggarts back for their fiftieth journey. It was all the same, as Pooch came back and sat down, a brown-bread sandwich of butter (oleo?) and a tin cup of watery black coffee in his hands.
“Whyncha go and get something?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not hungry,”
“Good coffee,” he mumbled, sipping at the steaming thin stuff.
I figured the coffee might help. I walked out and drew a cup with the ladle. One of the prisoners standing just inside the door hissed at me, then urged, “Take a sandwich.”
“No, thanks,” I said, dumbly.
“Take a sandwich; you sonofabitch, take a sandwich!”
I walked back into the cell, and he stepped in front of me. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, you dumb bastard? Take a sandwich!”
“Say, what the hell is your problem?” I jammed him. He was a big, nasty-looking cat, with two sandwiches and two cups of coffee, one in his hand, the other propped against the wall on top of the metal partition shielding the toilet. “I’m not hungry, I don’t want a sandwich,” I concluded. I tried to elbow past, but he stopped me roughly, and shoved me back with his hip.
“For me, you little c—”
I didn’t need to have him outline it in Anglo-Saxon. I went back and drew him another sandwich. I hoped he’d choke.
We sat there, Pooch and me, and I had nothing to say. I was feeling miserable. Lonesome and sad and just plain gritty. Then a hack came up to the cell and yelled, “Throw your extra food in a disposal can there, and line up out here.” The vags who hadn’t eaten since hitting the slammer the night before weren’t about to waste the food so they stuffed it in their mouths and fell into line. Aside from the two queers, most of the men were Negroes, hauled in for a number of charges from wife-beating and knife-fighting to policy and numbers raps, possession of narcotics (or “holding” as we cons called it), non-support, exposing their privates in public, drunk & disorderly, assault, disturbing the peace, authentic auto theft and simulated rape.
They were, however, the cleanest-looking of the prisoners, and carried themselves with more dignity than their ofay brothers, who were here for aggravated assault, pushing junk, prostitution, gambling, auto theft (in this case known as “boosting”), confidence robbery, grand larceny, failure to pay traffic fines, authentic rape and simulated murder.
My hammer-killer was nowhere to be seen.
But he had been replaced by the Sandwich-Gobbler, who looked like something out of Long John Silver’s nightmares. He was as swarthy and beefy and nasty looking a cat as I’ve ever seen, and while I suspected him of the foulest deeds known to Western Man, I’m sure he was in for something innocuous, like poisoning pigeons in Washington Square.
“Beat it,” I heard Pooch say, with a snarl, and turned around to look at him behind me.
One of the fags, the younger one, the Princess, had propositioned him. Great fun for a Monday outing.
The line moved out, turned left, and we passed in front of the wooden counter.
I figured now was my time to make my play.
“Hey, I want to call my lawyer,” I said.
“No phone calls,” I was told.
“But—”
“No phone calls. You can write a message on this form,” the hack said, passing me a 5 x 8 ½ sheet on which I could list my name, offense, and message. I stepped aside, borrowed a pencil (which bugged the ass off the hack) and wrote a note to my agent, Theron. It said, simply:
PLEASE GET THE BAIL MONEY AND GET ME OUT
OF HERE PLEASE! IF YOU DON’T GET IT SOON AND
COME FOR ME, THERE WON’T BE ANY NEED TO
BOTHER. PLEASE!
I gave the note to the hack, he read it, laughed, and shoved it into a little box. Lord only knew how long I’d wait before that note got to the proper party.
I got back in line, behind the younger fag, watching my rear at all times, for the older one, the junkie, still clutching himself, was behind me.
“Take everything out of your pockets,” I was listening to the hack behind the ledger talking to the young fag. The young queen lisped (so help me!) something quaint and stripped his pockets clean. I thought it was lovely that he had carried two bottles of his favorite scent with him, as well as a bottle of new, clear Stopette roll-on deodorant.
Then it was my turn. They took everything, including my money and my glasses, tossed them all into a manila envelope, and passed me down the line into a disrobing room where everyone was undressing, putting their clothes into a wire basket provided by a hack.
I heard one of the young guys who had been in line ahead of me squeal as the fag struck again. I cursed inwardly, and felt myself reeling just a bit. What a mad house!
The hack in attendance went through everybody’s clothes in the baskets, slapping the shoes hard to make sure there were no files, knives, packets of heroin or razor blades in the heels or soles. He turned all the jackets and shirts inside out. When he’d done with mine, I offered him my tie to search for a Thompson sub-machine gun, but he didn’t think that was funny.
I went into the shower, leaving my basket on the bench in front of the long line of steaming nozzles. It was an education, watching the teen-agers duck and blanch as the fags tried to goose them, studying the scummy bodies of the old men, with their filthy, rotting feet; it was a scene out of Hogarth’s Bedlam, with the junkies and their scabrous, gray-fleshed arms full of needle tracks, the winos puking on the floor, the lice-ridden derelicts and the masturbators who didn’t care who watched them as they took their momentary pleasures under the stinging spray of the showers.
I could feel myself slipping again.
One cat got led away to be de-loused. He needed it. He left a vapor trail as he passed. Then I was washed, and stepped forward, to hear a hack yell, “Okay, step over here before you get dressed, over here, over here, c’mon!”
I stepped forward, continuing the dehumanizing but sanitizing assembly line routine, with the Tombs physician waiting to ask how I felt. I might tell him, too.
SIXTEEN
He asked me how I felt, and I said, “Glorious. A delightful little resort you have down here.” A hand came out of the right hand portion of nowhere and Tooley slapped me across the side of the head. I told the Doctor I felt fine. He made me spread my toes to show him if I had Athlete’s Foot. I said, “Dermatophytosis,” and he looked up, shocked that one of his charges would be literate. If he’d known I’d memorized the word off a bottle of foot powder, he wouldn’t have been so impressed.
He nudged me ahead with a nod of his head, I went back and got my basket, r
e-dressed, and walked out of the shower room into another tiny waiting area where they had a fingerprinting set-up ready. They printed me again, and again offered no means of washing the black, condemning stains off my fingers. It was a perfect illustration to me of how they systematically reduce you to an animal. Instead of having the inking ready at the other end of the shower, enabling a man to wash himself clean in the hot water, they wait till he is clean and again bears some vestige of personality, humanity, dignity, and then they rub his nose in his own shit again.
As I stood there waiting to be told what to do next, an old saucehound staggered out of the shower, perspiring terribly from either a disease Herr Doktor Quack-Quack had decided was unimportant, or from the heat of the shower room. He vomited on my shoes, though I leaped back quickly.
The smell remained on my shoes for three days no matter how hard I was to scrub them, I finally threw them away. The memories were bad enough, without olfactory additions.
I stared at my black fingertips with morbid curiosity. A physical reminder that I was a criminal. It seemed, at that point, that I had been locked away for months. Time has a peculiar and hideous manner in jail. It does not move. It stops completely, and since they have taken away all watches, since there are no clocks in sight, since the hacks will not tell you what time it is, the mind boggles, and you lose sight of the time-flow, and consequently, a little more of reality is stolen away from you, while you feel your mind decaying underground.
The men were being printed and harangued into a cell midway down the line, directly opposite the big bullpen in which the old man had gone berserk. It was a waiting cell, the last one before they transferred you to a home in the main cell blocks.
I knew if they got me in there I’d snap completely. I had to make a move now, or go with the rest of them, get locked away in the Tombs and they’d lose my card and when the bail money came they wouldn’t know where I was and I’d become just another person in a cell and they’d tell my mother and my agent and my friends that I must be somewhere else because I wasn’t listed here as being in a cell and they would go away and the bail money would lie waiting and I’d be in the Tombs forever and forever and forev—
I caught myself.
That was how it happened, I guessed.
You never know you’re a coward until it happens. No. You never know your character is weak until it snaps. You never know how thin the tensile cord of your sanity can be until it breaks. I would have cried, right then, sat down on the floor and wept, I was so seared and lost and lonely and desperate to get OUT!
Out!
OUT! I didn’t care how, just get me OUT OF HERE!
Pooch was coming out of the shower room as I made my move. All the other men were being put into the temporary cell, till they could be taken away to their regular residences, when I stalked past the hack who was locking them up. I walked past him, and he turned around to say something to me, and I just gave him a peremptory wave with my hand and mumbled something about having the Captain’s permission and blah blah blah. He stared at me for a second, but since he knew I couldn’t get out of that processing room, and since I was striding toward the front desk and the Captain bent over his papers—as though I actually knew where I was going and what I was doing—he assumed I had been ordered to the desk, and he let me go.
I had perhaps forty feet to cross before I could get to the Captain (and even then I had no idea what I would say to the man), when I saw Tooley coming after me. He knew I wasn’t supposed to be out of that line.
“Hey! Hey, you, c’mon back here!”
I stopped dead in my tracks. He came up behind me and I’ll never forget the feeling of that meathook on my collar as big Tooley literally grabbed me off the floor. He swung me around as though I was a sack of meal, and propelled me before him, back to the cell, midway in the line. He snapped his fingers and the hack opened the cell door, and Tooley cuffed me alongside the head as he booted me forward with his foot. “Now getcha ass in there, and don’t try nothin’ again or I’ll give you a real kickina ass!”
Tooley, wherever you are today, know this:
I wanted to injure you. I wanted to hurt you. Every boot in the ass I’d ever gotten, since I was a kid, every cuff in the ear I’d ever taken, since I was old enough to recognize pain, every hurt and every confinement and every inability to strike back was caught up in my fist then, Tooley. You are a fat, sadistic sonofabitch, Officer Tooley. You are the reason so many guys try to break out of jail. You are the reason in this culture for violence and striking back and murder. You are everything lousy and egotistical and crummy, Tooley. And when you gave me that kick in the slats I felt every anti-Semitic bastard who’d kicked me when I was in grade school, and I felt every warped Sergeant in the Army who got his jollies booting troopers around, and I felt every snotty cop who uses his badge to vent his spleen…and right then, Tooley, you were close to having me on you. You’d have gone to your grave with my teeth embedded in your throat, Tooley, you rotten sonofabitch!
But…
I went flailing across the cell, impelled by Tooley’s foot, and brought up short against the opposite wall. I hit it and went sliding, landing in a heap, my raincoat wrapped around my legs. One of the winos helped me up. Tooley had walked away already. The cell was locked. I was trapped again. It was a hopeless cycle. There was no way out.
I was still filled with thoughts of violence, toward big Tooley, fat Tooley, sonofabitch Tooley. I tried to be rational about it, tried to tell myself Hell, take it easy, he’s just doing his job. Don’t take out all the bitterness you’ve ever known on him. Was I speaking for myself, or was I projecting Tooley’s kick in the ass as the hob-nailed boot of authority on the neck of every poor slob in the world?
And I knew at once that I was speaking only for myself, but that there was truth in what I’d thought. It was men like Tooley who corrupted, men like Tooley hidden behind a badge or a diploma or a white collar whose personalities came before the responsibilities of their position. Aw, hell, I said to myself, you’re just bitter. Everybody gets booted around in a lifetime.
Which was true, of course. But it didn’t make me feel any better. I still wanted to kill that mother—!
Rationality is the first thing to go.
I slumped down on the bench, beside the big can full of crap and wet stuff, and my head fell into my hands. It had been a hard day, and there didn’t seem to be any end to it. I felt a hand on my arm. I looked sidewise and it was Pooch. “Hey, man,” he was speaking very softly, a tone I’d never heard him use, one of real compassion, “what’s shakin’?”
I grinned up at him. He made it easier.
“Nothin’ shakin’ but the leaves on the trees,” I replied.
I could see them marching in a new batch of men, across the room, into the cell we’d first occupied, when the old man had flipped and streaked away. They were a bunch very similar to our group (I’d already established rapport with my confined compatriots; it was “our” group).
It was more of the grimy group I’d shared the big cell upstairs with, waiting to go to court. I saw my pal the hammer-killer in the ranks, trotting alongside a kid who couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen; every once in a while the kid would look up from under guarded eyes at his traveling companion. That kid was out of his nut with fright. That was the crime of the Tombs, right there, all neatly packaged for anyone who wanted to look at it.
The hack unlocked the door, left it standing ajar, and walked back toward the printing bench, instructing a group of men which cell to enter when they’d been blacked on the hands. I said to Pooch, “I’ll see you, man, stay cool,” and before he could ask me where I was going, I was off the bench, out of the cell and crossing that fifty feet from the cell, past the spot where Tooley had caught me, and right up to the Captain behind the counter.
I started talking, and I talked faster than I ever had before, in a life singularly noted for fast talking and rapidly-employed angles. I’m not sur
e what I said, but it was something like:
“Captain my name’s Harlan Ellison, Ellison, I’m expecting my agent and my mother and some friends to get my bail money and get it down here fast in a very few minutes just a little while and honestogod I can’t stand being in that cell I’ve got claustrophobia and if I stay in that damned cell another minute I’ll flip and the money’ll be here in a few minutes in fact you may have the papers for my release now and if you’ll let me sit out here on this bench I swear to God I won’t be any trouble and you won’t have to worry about looking for me when they come with the papers so why don’t you blah and blah and blah…”
Either my innocent, ingenuous expression won him, or my babble wore him down, or he knew I was going to be released soon, because he raised both hands to his ears and shook them gently, as if to say all right, all right, you can sit on the bench, just shut up and let me get back to work.
He pointed to the end of the bench and said, “Go ahead.” I made for that bench as though it were a raft in a stormy sea. I sat right on the edge of it, and at the very end of it, so no one could confuse me with a prisoner about to go into a cell.
Tooley came past, right about then, and took one look at my white, terrified kisser, and made a move toward me. I stopped him fast by gibbering: “The Captain said I could sit here the Captain the Captain! Ask the Captain!”
He walked up to the Captain and spoke to him in a low tone for a moment. The Captain said something short and brusque, and Tooley noodled it out and said something else and the Captain dismissed him peremptorily. Tooley walked away, giving me a hateful stare.
I was home free, for a while, anyhow.
Time does not move in jail. That is one of the most overwhelming truths I realized. It does not crawl, it does not slither, it does not budge. There are no watches, no clocks, no ways to tell the passage of the minutes, and no guard will tell you if you ask him. So you have no way of knowing whether it is high noon, three and tea time, five just before dinner, or eight o’clock with darkness on its way. The time-sense becomes atrophied quickly, under the ground, in the Tombs. You find yourself dozing, only to awaken a moment later with the impression three or four hours have passed. After the first few hours, in which the novelty of being shunted about here and there has worn off, I began to feel that I had been down in the cells for a week, not just a few hours. Subjectively, I spent much longer than twenty-four hours in jail…it was more like twenty-four months.