The odds on Claymore were a little more sentimental; after all, he was an expert in a sense, and so the betting was a flat even-money proposition.
The night they heard about it Billy was excited and nervous in the cell. “Man,” he said to Jack, “me and that Claymore are connected. I can feel it.”
“What do you mean? Because he’s a Negro?”
Billy rubbed his mouth. He did not look either happy or unhappy, but disturbed. “I don’t know. When he first come in here and headed up that pipe I could feel it, you know. Connected. That’s all.”
From Billy’s mood, Jack decided not to ask any more questions, and spent the time until lights-out reading in his history book. Afterward, in the semidarkness, he heard Billy say from above, “That man’s got to stay free.”
Now, this was something Jack could not understand. He knew, of course, that free meant outside the prison, and that he himself wanted that, especially when he awakened in the mornings to the cell, or stood by the door while the guard at the end of the long walkway pulled down the heavy bar that locked the cells; at such moments there was a heavy tension in him to just run, run down the gallery past a thousand cells or throw himself off the side and into the court; a pain starting at the edges of his eyes as he sat still for the count or put on his shoes—that he could understand, but not Billy’s passionate need for Claymore to stay free. Personal freedom, yes, of course; but why freedom for somebody else? It did not make sense.
“If you want to escape,” he said to Billy, “why don’t you try?”
Billy laughed. He did not even bother to answer. When they heard Claymore was caught and on Alcatraz, Billy brooded for days.
Fourteen
Eventually, with so much time ahead of him, Jack got used to San Quentin. The yellow walls, the tall barred windows, the girders in the dining hall, became as familiar as home to him; even the smokestacks, through one of which the cyanide gas and a man’s life had too often risen, wrinkling the sky for a few minutes above the north block at around ten in the morning. He even learned how to play dominoes, out at the picnic tables in the big yard. He had to—the enemy here was even more intangible than in reform school or the orphanage, and his fear that he would become accustomed to the life and even learn to like it was outweighed by the need to survive each day. For this it was necessary for him to become a con, to join the club; at least on the surface. He learned the language and he learned the ropes: that a man who never got into trouble with the screws was almost as bad as somebody who was always in trouble; that when you were asked to pass contraband you did it, not as a minor piece of defiance but because without some kind of connecting force of law among the inmates the prison would become an anarchy and the prisoners less than men. It was necessary for their self-esteem that they consider, no matter how comically, that they were in charge of their own destiny, and to break the rules a little demonstrated this. It also got stuff passed, which was probably even more important. The perfect convict, the man who lived entirely by the rules set down for him, was not a man but a vegetable. And the constant troublemaker, no matter how sick he was inside, was actually doing just what the State expected of him, therefore justifying the existence of the prison. So it was a matter of delicate balance between defiance and obedience.
But naturally, he learned, there was no unanimity. Not all the prisoners gambled, not all of them did any particular thing; they didn’t even all agree that prison was wrong—many not only thought it was right but admitted that they belonged in there. On this matter, Jack was not certain himself. Deep inside there was a tickle of guilt, an admission, perhaps, of the justice of prison existence. With Billy Lancing it was just the opposite. Penology was something Billy could get passionate about.
“Prison stinks, man. It really stinks. Think of all them mother-fuckers on the outside who don’t know what it’s like and think we belong here. Man, think about them cats. Aint a one of them don’t break the law every time it gets in their way; man, I read a book once that said most of the money lost in crime in this country was stuff like stolen paper clips, shit like that, bank presidents runnin off to Mexico; and think a minute about the guys in jail because they ran gambling games! Can you believe it? Gambling? Every fuckin lawyer and judge in the fuckin country plays poker at his fatass club, an then goes down to court and gives some poor asshole two years for playin the same goddam game! What the fuck is this shit? And cheat you? What fuckin businessman wouldn’t cheat you if he got the chance? Shit!”
Jack laughed at him. “You’re sure pissed off. Somebody cheat you?”
Billy looked at him incredulously. “Cheat me? What the fuck do you think my fuckin sentence is? Fair play? I bop one check in my entire fuckin life and get one-to-five! What the fuck would you call that? And here some chickenshit accountant draws thirty thousand dollars out of the till an they give him six months! Look around you, man, all you’ll see in here is the fuggin chicken thieves; all the big boys, the pros, the white-collar cats, are on the outside, or down in Chino out in the sun. Sure, fuck yes, you got to do somethin with the criminals, but you got to do it to all the criminals, or the whole thing is horse -shit.”
Jack said, “Well, what did you expect?”
Billy snorted. “Now I’m locked up, I don’t expect nothin. But they better not let me out of here.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No. Fuck no. Let me out and I’ll kiss every ass from here to the Supreme Court to keep from comin back.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “So there’s a lot of injustice. So what? What’s that got to do with you?”
“Nothin. Only, I do hate it. Man, justice is based on the idea that we all got a right to live our lives any way we fuckin please, so long as we don’t fuck up anybody else. Okay, I did wrong. I’ll pay, I’ll do my time. But I hope you don’t think I’m doin this time cause I bopped that one little check. I hope you know I’d be home free or at worst out on probation if I had the money to buy a good lawyer.” He had his hands in his pockets and his skinny shoulders hunched up, grinning down at Jack on the bunk. “I hope you dig that lawyer scene. Did you have a lawyer?”
Jack explained to him, for the first time, what had happened in Balboa County. Billy listened, smiling, nodding his head as if the story confirmed his thesis.
“Yeah. They sucked you in royally, tellin you that if you cooperate, everthin gets better an better. Man, don’t you know the machine don’t need your help? The only thing you can do to the machine is fuck it up. You can’t help it. But you can slow it down. Now, like my case, man. I forged a check, dig? I won’t give you the whole scam, but like it was a payroll check, some cats got this check protector and print up a bunch, and hand em out to cats like me to cash, for a quarter of the money. So I’m broke an I cash the fucker, an three days later a couple dicks come in to the Palace an haul my ass to jail. On an information ; like, somebody turned me up, dig?
“So me an this dumb kid lawyer goes to court, see, and this bartender gets up an says he seen me endorse the check an he recognizes it, an then some cop gets up there an says they got about fifty checks just like it an endorsed the same way, an my lawyer just sits there. The gas is, I didn’t endorse any of the checks at all! So they got me for a whole goddam crime wave!”
“Well, you got screwed, that’s all,” Jack said.
“Yeah, but my point is, a good lawyer could of got me off. I studied up on this, man. Like, the bartender says he saw me, an he says he saw me write. Well, man, a good lawyer’s gonna hire a expert to come and prove that endorsement aint in my writing, dig, so that makes everything the fuggin bartender says bullshit. An he was their only witness, cause the cat that turned me up sure hell aint gonna show up in court. Hell, whoever it was only turned me up to take the heat off himself.”
Jack thought about that for a while. “Well, why don’t you make an appeal, or something? Like Chessman?”
Billy sneered at him. “Are you out of your skull? Who’s gonna pay for the fugg
in transcript? The Urban League? Fuck it. I’ll do my time. But what grinds my ass is all the goddam people takin away my rights, stealin my money, makin it tough on my kids, an gettin away with it. I’m talkin about crime, not law. They don’t even have laws for some of the shit they pull.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin about,” Jack said.
“You wouldn’t. You’re white.”
“Oh. That. Well, I’m here, too. You ain’t in here because you’re part Negro; you’re in here because you forged a check.”
“Sho, man, I aint talkin about that. You’re in here because you’re too fuckin dumb to keep out. So am I. But I was talkin in general, not you and me.”
“Why bother?”
“I give up. You are the dumbest cat I ever met.”
“I just don’t see it,” Jack said. “They put us in here because it was easier than leaving us outside on the street. They had the power and they used it. I’m no victim of injustice. I’m not a victim of anything.”
“Sho,” Billy laughed. “You’re in here cause you love me.”
Lately it had been coming up like that, accidentally, in joke, or a casual touch, or a reference to somebody else; but it was getting to the point where their evening dialogues were tinged with it and making them both nervous. Once, when they were half-undressed for the night, Billy was trying to get past Jack to go to the toilet and he brushed against him in such a way that Jack could feel Billy’s fingers against his thigh. There was a quick shove, an exchange of profanity, and both went to bed infuriated, their friendship dissolved. Jack lay there angry and offended, tense beyond reason, and Billy lay above him mortified and angry, equally tense.
“I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole!” Billy hissed down angrily through the darkness. After a few moments of electric silence, Jack heard him chuckle and add, “Even if I had a ten-foot pole.” But it was several days before Jack built up his nerve enough to apologize.
Sex in prison is a matter of three choices: abstinence, masturbation, and homosexuality. Jack was familiar with all three, in varying degrees. At the orphanage the boys had been watched very carefully to see that they did not indulge in any “obscene practices,” but naturally the boys managed, as they always do, furtively, quickly, and in darkness. The few homosexual episodes Jack remembered from the orphanage were all of the brutal sort, in which a small or weak and generally unpopular boy was forced by a ring of grim youths to submit himself to rape. The emotional climate of the orphanage did not seem to encourage crushes or pairings of any sort; only gang activity. Any boy caught masturbating, Jack remembered, was subjected to incessant and cruel joking from the other boys, and public humiliation from the administration. But it was clearly understood among the boys that all this was merely “something to do” and that Sex meant Women. In a way, Women meant growing-up-and-getting-out-of-here, and one of the first things Jack did after running away was to visit a whorehouse. Although he had taken part, often as a leader, in the rapes and circle-jerks, he dropped all that sort of thing on the outside, and like most boys of high-school age, resorted to masturbation only when he had to, and even then felt angry and shabby about it afterward.
At the reform school there had been precious few effeminate boys, and again sex life in the cottages was a group affair, the strong taking from the weak; but Jack didn’t join in much because he spent most of his time in the hole. There, of course, he could masturbate all he wanted, but he didn’t. It just made things worse.
Of the three alternatives, abstinence was the one he knew best, and he hoped that in San Quentin he would be able to forget about sex. He did not see how, with two men to a cell, you could get away with masturbating. These were all grown men. Masturbating was a kid trick, he thought, and only a childish man would resort to it. He learned very quickly that men in prison were treated like children and expected to act like children, even in, one might say especially in, the matter of sex. But he still did not see how he could get away with it.
But one ceaseless night he got to thinking about Mona, and from her his thoughts went without volition to vague erotic images of other women he had known, their flesh glowing before his eyes. He tried to think of other things, but it didn’t work. A breast, a nipple, a smooth flank would interrupt the flow of thought and he could feel his penis thickening and hardening, beyond his control. It should have been no problem at all, just jack off and forget about it. It had to happen once in a while. Either that or cut it off. It was infuriating to think that one organ could be in charge like that, turn his mind, make his whole body tremble; it was disgusting. But not two feet above his head Billy Lancing was asleep, or perhaps even not asleep, and he might hear Jack’s movements and lean his head over and ask him what he was doing. Or he might even know, understand, and say nothing. In the morning he would look amused. Jack had never heard Billy making any such noises, and often Jack did not get to sleep until long after midnight. Therefore, Billy did not masturbate. He had conquered his sexual desires. If Jack gave in, he would be the only one in the cell to give in. Furiously he threw himself over on his stomach and waited for the erection to subside. He thought about how funny it all was. He thought bitterly how funny it would seem to somebody not going through it. Like a bad hangover; a subject of much snickering. He wanted to ask Billy about it, but he did not dare. It was too personal.
What made it worse was that most of the men talked about sex incessantly, or so it seemed. To hear them tell it, the most virile men in America were here gathered, temporarily cutting womanhood off from their prowess. Yet you could not be in prison long without hearing about the love affairs that were going on right there, between the men themselves. Now that Jack seemed to have sex on the brain, he seemed to hear about nothing else. It was a commonplace to hear a man bragging about all the women he had slept with, and then without apparent transition begin discussing the cute little Mexican who worked in the bakery. It was all very embarrassing. One day while Jack was walking past the salad table with a stack of hot clipper racks, he happened to glance over in time to see one man slip a plastic ring on the finger of another man. Both were ordinary-looking men, one a burglar and the other a thief, but the expressions on their faces were ones Jack could never remember having seen on a man: one of them shy and coy, an outrageous burlesque of maiden modesty; the other simpering with equally feminine aggressiveness.
Another con, one of the cooks, saw the look of disgust on Jack’s face and gave him a steamy wink. Jack was actually embarrassed and could feel his already hot face reddening.
After that the prison seemed alive with affairs. It was unbelievable. These were grown men, and not queers, either. You could expect this from the few homosexuals, but to see a hardened old thief kissing a stubby Negro when he thought nobody was looking was beyond belief.
Finally Jack was approached. He was standing at the salad table, slicing carrots with a butcher knife, and one of the cooks came up behind him, made a remark about something inconsequential, and pushed his body up against Jack, his fingers touching him briefly on the hips. After the momentary shock of the contact passed, Jack said out of the corner of his mouth, “Take it on the heel and toe, or I’ll have your balls for a watch fob,” and the man backed away, offended, and said, “You don’t have to get bitchy about it.” Jack turned and gave him an evil grin, holding the butcher knife low and twirling its tip. “Split,” he said.
Yet even having refused the man had a bitchy quality about it, as if he were queer, and was available, but just not to this particular cook. And besides, there was no denying that the pressure of the man against him had roused him. It had been pleasant, damn it.
Another time, a con said to him, “Oh, we know you’re playing hard to get.” There did not seem to be any answer. It had been on the tip of Jack’s tongue to say, “Oh no I’m not,” but that hardly would have cleared the matter up.
But it was not just a question of courtship and seduction, which after all, he reasoned, probably helped
a lot of the men forget themselves for a while. There were also the prison wolves, homosexual rapists, who would get it into their heads that they wanted a particular man, and then go after him with single-willed determination until they caught him in a corner somewhere. These wolves sometimes worked in pairs or threes, and it was very difficult to avoid them once they had their eyes on you. Things had been quiet for a while, because just before Jack arrived a man had been killed in the shower by one of these wolves, and there was a big crackdown. All the known wolves had been moved around and were being watched carefully. The one who had done the knifing hadn’t been caught, but the population was certain that it was a factory worker named Clifford, a gigantic Negro armed robber who had his fingers into almost every racket in the prison; an organizer, a dominant personality, a natural leader. Even the guards were afraid of him. He was serving life as a habitual criminal, and so had settled down to making the prison his own private territory. Even the tightly knit, secretive Muslim group was afraid of him, though they claimed to admire him.
Jack was not afraid of Clifford or the other wolves, but Billy was. He had been caught twice, he admitted, and both times he thought he was going to be killed. “So I just laid there and took it, man,” he said. “What the fuck, I ain’t going to die for a virgin asshole.”
The really bad times for Jack, now, were the hours spent locked up in his cell with another man, with live flesh, a warm human body that grew more attractive each night, until Jack’s fantasies no longer were about women but about Billy; how they could grapple together in secret as so many dozens of others were doing probably right at that instant, all up and down the tiers of cells, in secret and private, enjoying the flavor of each other’s hot thrusts; while he, Jack, lay in murderous frustration and agony. After a while it was even funny. He knew that the only tangible thing that stood in his way was fear of refusal; that, and a strong reluctance to make the overtures. He didn’t even know what to say to Billy. He was not going to get up in the middle of some dark night and tap Billy on the shoulder and say, “How about it?” or, “Say, let’s you and me screw,” or anything of the sort. Nor would he invite Billy into his bunk, winking and grinning and pointing. What if Billy laughed at him? What if Billy groaned with passion and tried to kiss him? It was impossible.