Eventually, the craftier of the two jaspers wore the doll down and turned her out. They had to keep the secret of their romance from the other jasper because she was tough and built like a football player. She was doing money favors for the doll hoping to get into her pants. The doll and her jockey were in cahoots playing the sucker jasper hard for the scratch.
One night the doll and her jockey were tied into a pretzel doing the sixty-nine and drunk as Hell on my merchandise, when their passionate outcries reached the ears of the muscular jasper.
The bloody fight and spicy details were topics for state-wide gossip.
In the heat of the investigation my agent fell apart. She put the finger on me and within a week I was on the train going back to the streets for good. I didn’t turn over on my roommate. I obeyed the code.
Mama changed jobs a week after I got back, to nurse and cook for a wealthy, white recluse. Now I really stuck my nose in the devil’s ass.
Mama had to stay on the place. I saw her once a week, on Sunday, when she would come in for a day. That was the only time I stayed at the hotel.
I had found a fascinating second home, a gambling joint run by a broken down ex-pimp and murderer called Diamond Tooth Jimmy. The two-carat stone, wedged between the upper front rotting teeth, was the last vulgar memento of his infamy as the top ass-kicker of the nineteen-twenties.
He boasted endlessly that he was the only Nigger pimp on Earth who had ever pimped in Paris on French girls. I was to discover later, when I would meet and be trained by the Master, that Jimmy was a mere buffoon, an amateur not fit to hold the Master’s coat.
After the suckers were trimmed and all the shills had been paid, Jimmy would lock the door and then like a ritual, light up a thin brown reefer. As he talked, he would pass it to me, cursing me affably for not inhaling deeply and holding the smoke, as he put it, “deep in my belly.”
When dawn broke he would go out through the joint door home to the nineteen-year-old jasper on whom he lavished furs and jewels. He was a real sucker.
I would go to bed in the tiny cubicle in the rear of the joint and dream fantastic dreams. Always beautiful whores would get down on their knees and tearfully beg me to take their money.
For several months I had been screwing the luscious daughter of a popular band leader. She was fifteen. Her name was June and she had a wild yen for me. She had a habit of waiting down the street from the gambling joint until Jimmy left, then she would come up and get on the army cot with me. She would stay until seven o’clock at night. She knew I had to clean the joint for action around nine.
One day, around noon, I asked her, “Do you love me enough to do anything for me?”
She said, “Yes.”
So, I said, “Even turn a trick?”
She said, “Anything.”
I put my clothes on and went to the street and saw an old gambler whom I knew was a trick and told him what was upstairs. Sure enough he gave me a five-dollar bill, the asking price, and I took him upstairs and let him in on her. She turned him in less than five minutes.
My seventeen-year-old brain reeled. This was still the depression. I could get rich with this girl and drive a big white Packard.
My next prospect was all wrong. He was an acquaintance of the band leader, June’s father. He went up the stairs, saw her and called the father in Pittsburgh.
The father called the local police department and my pimping career died aborning. When the detective came, I was still out there looking for tricks for the down payment on that big white Packard.
Diamond Tooth’s bullshit had screwed me for certain. My mother, of course, was shocked. She was sure it was a frame up. That June, that evil girl, had led her sweet little Bobby astray.
At the County Jail two days before my trial, I left my cell on an Attorney Consultation pass. A short, gopher-faced Negro sat in the cage at an old oak desk grinning at me.
My blood ran cold, my palms got slippery wet as I took a seat across from him. The gleaming yellow gold teeth filling his mouth had been a flash of doom. Christ! I thought, a deep South Nigger lip. Didn’t Mama know that most of them turned to jelly when defending a criminal case?
The rodent wiped his blue-black brow with a soggy handkerchief and said, “Well Bobby, it seems that you are in a little trouble, huh? I am attorney Williams, an old friend of your family. I knew your mother as a girl.”
My eyes sent special delivery murder across the table to that ugly bastard.
I said, “It isn’t a little trouble. Under the Max I could get a fin’.”
He fingered his dollar necktie and hoisted his starved shoulders inside the jacket of his cheap vine and said, “Oh! Now let’s not be fatalistic. You are a first offender and I am positive it will mitigate the charge. Rest assured I will press the court for leniency. Now tell me the whole truth about your trouble.”
Anger, everything drained out of me. I was lost, stricken. The phony would lead me to the slaughter. I knew I was already tried and convicted and sentenced to the joint. The only loose end was for how long? Without hearing it myself, I ran down the details to him and stumbled blindly back to my cell.
On my trial day in the courtroom, the shaky bastard was so nervous before the bench when he pleaded me guilty, that the same cheap vine that he had worn at our first meeting was soaked by his sweat.
He was so shook up by the stern face and voice of the white hawk-faced judge that he forgot to ask for leniency. That awful fear the white folks had put into him down South was still painfully alive in him. He just stood there paralyzed, waiting for the judge to sentence me.
So, I looked up into the frosty blue eyes and said, “Your Honor, I am sorry for what I did. I have never been in trouble before. If Your Honor will just give me a break this time, I swear before the Lord I won’t ever come back down here. Please, Your Honor, don’t send me to the pen.”
The frost deepened in his eyes as he looked down at me and intoned, “You are a vicious young man. Your crime against that innocent young girl, against the laws of this state, is inexcusable. The very nature of your crime precludes the possibility of probation. For your own good and for that of society’s I sentence you to the State Reformatory to a term for not less than one year, and for not more than eighteen months. I hope it teaches you a lesson.”
I shrugged off the wet hand of the lip from my shoulder, avoided the tear-reddened eyes of Mama sobbing quietly in the rear of the courtroom, and stuck my hands out to the bailiff for the icy-cold handcuffs.
June’s old man was a big wheel with lots of muscle in the courts. He had gone behind the scenes and pulled strings and put the cinch on the joint for me. My sentence was for carnal knowledge and abuse, reduced from pandering, because you can’t pander from anything except a whore, and June’s old man wasn’t about to go for that.
Yes, I was sure working at that first patch of gray in my mother’s hair. Steve would have been proud of me, don’t you think?
My sentence to the Wisconsin Green Bay reformatory almost cracked Mama up.
There were several repeaters from the reformatory on my tier at County Jail, who tried to bug the first offenders with terrible stories about the hard time up at the reformatory, while we were waiting for the van to take upstate to the reformatory. I was too dumb to feel anything, A fool I was to think the dummy was a fairy tale!
In the two weeks that I waited, Mama wrote me a letter every day and visited twice. Mama’s guilt and heartbreak were weighing heavily on her.
Back in Rockford she had been a dutiful church goer, leading a christian life until Steve came on the scene. But now when I read her long rambling letters crammed with threats of fire and brimstone for me if I didn’t get Jesus in my heart and respect the Holy Ghost and the fire, I realized that poor Mama was becoming a religious fanatic to save her sanity. The pressures of Henry’s death and now my plight must have been awful.
The van came to get us on a stormy, thunderous morning. As we stepped into the van handcuffe
d together I saw Mama standing in the icy, driving rain waving good-bye. I could feel a hot throbbing lump at the base of my throat to see her standing there looking so sad and lonesome, cowering beneath the battering rain. I could feel the tears aching to flow, but I couldn’t cry.
Mama never told me how she found out the time the van would come. I still wonder how she found out and what her thoughts were out there in the storm as she watched me start my journey.
The state called it a reformatory, but believe me it was a prison for real.
My belly fluttered when the van pulled into the prison road leading to the joint. The van had been vibrating with horse play and profane ribbing among the twenty-odd prisoners. Only one of them had sat tensely and silently during the entire trip. The fat fellow next to me.
But when those high slate grey walls loomed grimly before us it was as if a giant fist had slugged the breath from us all. Even the repeaters who had served time behind those walls were silent, tight faced. I started to believe those stories they had told back in County Jail.
The van went through three gates manned by rock-faced backs carrying scoped, high-powered rifles. Three casket-gray cell houses stood like mute mourners beneath the bleak sunless sky. For the first time in my life I felt raw, grinding fear.
The fat Negro sitting next to me was a former schoolmate of mine in high school. He had been a dedicated member of the Holiness Church then.
I had never gotten friendly with him because his only interest at that time seemed to be his church and Bible. He didn’t smoke, swear, chase broads or gamble. He had been a rock-ribbed square.
His name was Oscar. Apparently he was still square because now his eyes were closed and I could hear bits of prayer as he whispered softly.
Oscar’s prayer was abruptly cut off by the screech of the van’s brakes as it stopped in front of the prison check-in station and bath house. We clambered out and stood in line to have our handcuffs removed. Two screws started at each end of the line unlocking the cuffs.
As they moved toward the middle of the line they stifled the thin whispers of the men. They said to each man, “Button it up! Silence! No talking!”
Oscar was shaking and trembling in front of me as we filed into a brightly-lit high-ceilinged room. A rough pine counter stretched for twenty yards down a green-and-gray flagstone floor that looked clean enough to eat from. This was part of the shiny, clean skin of the apple. The inside was rotting and foul.
Cons with starch-white faces stood behind the long counter guessing our sizes as we passed them and passing out faded pieces of our uniform from caps to brogans.
We passed with our bundles into a large room. A tall silent screw, dazzling with brass buttons and gold braid on his navy-blue uniform, slashed his lead-loaded cane through the air like a vocal sword directing us to put our bundles on a long bench and to undress for short arm inspection, and a brief exam by the prison croaker seated at a battered steel desk in the back of the room.
Finally we all had been checked by the croaker and showered. The gold-spangled screw raised his talkative cane. It told us to go out the door and turn left, then straight ahead. Two screws marched alongside as we made it toward a squat sandstone building two-hundred yards away. Was that talking cane the dummys?
I heard it before I saw it. A loud scraping, thunder laced with a hollow roar. Never before had I heard anything like it. Then mysteriously, in the dimness, countless young grim faces seemed to be bobbing in a sea of gray. A hundred feet ahead I saw the mystery. Hundreds of gray-clad cons were lock stepping from the mess halls into the three cell houses. They were an eerie sight in the twilight, marching mutely in cadence like tragic robot soldiers. The roaring thunder was the scrape and thump of their heavy prison brogans.
We reached the squat building. We were to stay in its quarantine cells for the next ten days. All fish, new cons, were housed here to be given a thorough medical check out and classification before being assigned to work details out in population.
I got a putrid taste of the inside of that apple when cons in white uniforms and peaked caps gave us our supper through a slot in our cell doors. It was barley soup with a hunk of brown bread. It would have made great shrapnel in a grenade.
I was new and learning, so instead of just gulping it down, I took a long close look at the odd little things black-dotted at one end. I puked until my belly cramped. The barley in the soup was lousy with worms.
The lights went out at nine. Every hour or so a screw came by the row of cells. He would poke the bright eye of his flashlight into a cell and then squint his eyes as he looked into each cell. I wondered if it were a capital crime in this joint to get caught having an affair with “lady five fingers.”
I flapped my ears when I heard one of the white repeaters running down the joint in a whisper to a fish. Oscar was listening too because he had stopped praying in his cell next to mine.
The white fish was saying, “Look Rocky, what the Hell gives with that hack in the bath house? Why don’t the jack-off never rap? What’s with that cane bit?”
The repeater said, “The son-of-a-bitch is stir crazy. His voice-box screwed up on him a dime ago. He’s been the brass nuts here for a double dime, and guess how the bastard lost his rapper?”
That screw and his light was making the rounds again, so the repeater got on the dummy.
When the screw had passed he continued, “The creep was called Fog Horn by the cons before his trouble made him a dummy. They say the bastard’s bellows could be heard from one side of the joint to the other. He’s the meanest captain of screws this joint ever had. In the last double dime he has croaked two white cons and four spades with his cane. He hates Niggers.”
Oscar was praying like mad now. He had heard what the repeater said about those four Negroes. The fish wanted a loose end tied for him.
He said, “Yeh Rocky, just to glim him and you know he’s rough, but what in the Hell cut his box off?”
The repeater said, “Oh! The vine has it he treated his wife and Crumb crusher worse than he did the cons. She got her fill of his screwing and drilled herself and the kid through the head. The little broad was only two years old. The note his broad left said, ‘I can’t stand your hollering any longer. Good-bye.’ A head-shrinker here at the time said when the broad croaked herself it shut off Brass Nuts box.”
I lay there thinking about what the con had said. I thought about Oscar and wondered if he could pull his bit or if he would go back to his parents in a pine box, or worse, to the crazy farm.
Oscar had been sentenced to a year by the same-judge that had socked it into me. Oscar, poor chump had started going with a crippled Irish girl of seventeen.
In the dark balcony of a downtown theatre they were seen smooching by the son of a close friend of the girl’s family. He reported post haste to his parents who wired up the girl’s parents. They were Irish, with temper and prejudice.
They third-degreed the girl and she confessed that old black Oscar had indeed trespassed the forbidden valley. The charge of statutory rape naturally stood up and here was old Oscar next door to me.
I slapped the itching sting on my thigh. I pulled the sheet back. Lord, have mercy! How I hated them. It was a bed bug I had smashed, but he was only a scout. When that flashlight jarred me awake an hour later, a division of them was parading the walls.
I lay wide-eyed until morning. The inside of that shiny apple was really something else.
After all our tests we fish were taken out of the quarantine tank on the tenth day to the Warden’s office. My turn came to go in. I got up from the long bench in the hall outside his office and walked in. My knees were having a boxing match as I stood before him.
He was a silver-maned, profane, huge, white bull with two tiny chunks of black fire rammed deep into his eye sockets.
He said, “Well Sambo, you sure got your black-Nigger ass in a sling, didn’t you? Well understand me, we didn’t send for you, but you came. We are here to punish you smart-alec
k bastards, so if you fuck around, two things can happen to you, both of them horrible. We got a hole here that we bury tough punks in. It’s a stripped cell without light, twenty feet below ground. Down there, two slices of bread and a pint of water twice a day. You can go out that North gate in a box for your second choice. So take this rulebook and study it. Now get your rusty black ass out of my face.”
The only thing I said before I eased out of there was, “Yes Sir, Boss Man,” and I was grinning like a Mississippi rape suspect turned loose by the mob.
It was a wise thing I had uncled on him. One of those arrogant repeaters went to the hole for having a sassy look in his eyes. The charge was “visual insubordination.”
Oscar and I were assigned to work and live in cell block “B.” It was all black. Of the three, it was the only one without toilets. We had buckets in cells that we took out each morning and dumped into running water in a trough behind the cell block.
The only stench in my life I have ever smelled that was worse than that cell block on a warm night was a sick hype.
It was rough all right and a terrible battle of wits. The battle mainly centered around staying out of sight and trouble with the dummy. He walked on the balls of his feet and he could read a con’s mind. It was terrifying to have maybe a slice of contraband bread in your bosom, and then from nowhere have the dummy pop up.
He didn’t pass out an instruction leaflet running down the lingo of that cane. If you misunderstood what it said, the dummy would crack the leaded shaft of it against your skull.
After I had put in six months on my bit, a young Negro con came in on transfer from the big joint and brought me a wire from Party.
He sent word that we were still tight and I was his horse if I never won a race.
It felt good to know he had forgiven me for turning chicken back there in the alley with the balloon.
The dummy hated everybody. He felt something much more frightful for Oscar.
I don’t know whether it was that the dummy had a hate for God too, and he knew how religious Oscar was, and had focused all his hate on a living target.