Coin Locker Babies (27 page)

While they were finishing the orientation program and a battery of tests and evaluations, new prisoners were kept in these one-man cells. Invariably the thick walls that deadened every contact with the outside world, blunting light, smells, and sound, brought on some degree of claustrophobia. From the warden’s point of view, this spell of solitude was useful in arousing a need for social contact in his prisoners, and for helping the staff assess their character. It was also effective as a preliminary course in prison discipline. Forbidden to speak, the inmates sat in their cells with only their own resources to relieve the tedium and nervous tension; the most popular remedies included exercise, deep breathing, Zen meditation, and jerking off. But they soon found themselves anxiously hoping for transfer to the group cells with their vocational training sessions and club activities. The majority were begging for an activity, any activity, before very long; and
the few who bore up under the solitude without seeming to mind it were noted on the Supervision Department’s list of people in need of special psychological evaluation.

Kiku, who actually seemed to like solitary confinement, was at the top of the list. He would sit in his cell, uncomplaining, for whole days at a time. At night, his screaming often brought the guard running, but, apart from these nightmares, his condition seemed unchanged since he’d arrived: he was a blank slate. He showed no interest in anything or anybody else; he followed orders well enough, but it was almost as if he didn’t even hear them, as if his will had unconditionally surrendered. When the official administering the aptitude test had asked him what he wanted to do, his answer was noncommittal.

“You’ve got to do
something
,” the man insisted.

“Anything’s fine. It doesn’t matter,” said Kiku quietly, hardly looking up.

The psychologist assigned to his case examined him and decided that the severe emotional withdrawal for which Kiku had been hospitalized immediately after the shooting had not yet been cured. “My conclusion,” he wrote, “is that rather than overcoming the psychological trauma of having killed his own mother, he has retreated into the trauma itself, using it as a kind of refuge.”

On entering the prison, each inmate was given a complete physical examination which, in addition to checking his height, weight, eyesight, and hearing, involved a whole series of X-rays. He was then made to take a variety of intelligence tests before being sent to the training division for a Vocational Aptitude Test and a Kraepelin Personality Census. Finally, when all this probing was over, he sat down for an interview with a vocational counselor who had studied his academic and, usually, his criminal records,
and together they worked out a “vocational goal.” In a case like Kiku’s, however, where the prisoner was still experiencing emotional complications, or in cases where the inmate had difficulty adjusting to the idea of prison life, this counseling was put off for six months and the prisoner was assigned to work teams involved in the day-to-day operation of the prison. Thus, when his time in solitary was up, Kiku found himself attached to the Food Service Unit No. 3, and getting up two hours before everybody else to help make breakfast.

On the day of his reassignment, Kiku was moved to a group cell reserved exclusively for this Food Service Unit. When he arrived, he found that Yamane, the tall, pale man with the masklike face, had been put in the same outfit. Together they were made to kneel at the entrance to their new home and pay their respects to their new roommates, four older prisoners who identified themselves as Fukuda, Hayashi, Sajima, and Nakakura. After the newcomers had finished their introductions and the guard had left, Fukuda, who seemed to be the oldest, spoke up.

“There’s something we’ve got to know right off,” he said, scratching his head. “It’s kind of a rule with us: new guys have to tell us what they did to get put inside. Then we clue them in on the stuff they need to know to get by in here…”

“Murder,” said Yamane, still kneeling, before Fukuda had even finished.

“A killer,” murmured Hayashi and Sajima, turning to give each other a look.

“Well, it’s always good to know what you’re dealing with,” said Fukuda. “So how ’bout you, Kuwayama?”

“Me, too. Murder,” said Kiku.

“Full house,” laughed Nakakura, and the others were chuckling as well. Kiku and Yamane remained silent, eyes down. “Us too,
we’re all in for murder. Kind of funny, isn’t it? Our little family here helps keep the country from getting overcrowded: all told, we managed to lower the population by six.”

“A bit more,” said Yamane. “I killed four people myself.” The laughter died.

“Four?” said Nakakura, leaning forward and cocking his fingers into a gun. “Whaddya use? Zip gun? Saturday Night Special?”

“No. My hands.”

“Your
hands
?! Whaddya mean? Karate? Boxing?” he asked, staring at Yamane’s hands.

“Karate.”

“And how many years you get for that?”

“Ten.”

“
Ten fuckin
’ years! What kinda sentence is
that
? You ain’t no minor. Kills four people and all he ends up with is ten fuckin’ years.” Nakakura was indignant.

“I got pretty messed up myself,” said Yamane quietly.

“You mean that head of yours? Yeah, I can see that. OK, let’s drop it. Anyway, now we know you’re a tough guy, so don’t go beatin’ on any of us, even as a joke. I can’t think of anything dumber than getting yourself killed while you’re in jail.”

Nakakura, they learned, had worked in a restaurant. One day, while he was learning to trim pork from the bone, his grandmother came in to see him. Apparently she was a funny-looking old lady, and the other guys in the kitchen had started making fun of her. Before he knew what he was doing, Nakakura had planted his carving knife in the chest of the man next to him. “I didn’t even mean to stab him,” he explained. “I was only trying to make him shut up, and the thing went in up to the handle. Human meat’s a helluva lot softer than pork.”

Sajima had worked on a sport fishing boat. The day of the
murder, it had been cloudy since morning and his back right molar had started hurting as it always did in that kind of weather. Despite the pain, he’d had herring for lunch, and some little bones had got stuck in his teeth. Just as he was trying to pull the bones out of his mouth, one of their clients had puked all over the deck. “I started thinking how I’d have to clean up that asshole’s mess, and how bad my tooth was hurting, and then another guy started complaining ’cause I wasn’t watching the wheel, and I just kind of flipped. I ended up kicking the guy; I didn’t even kick him that hard, but he fell on the screw and got all tangled up in it. Chopped him to bits, and I end up a murderer. If you ask me, they should have tried the boat, not me.”

Fukuda had cleaned boilers in a shipyard. During junior high school he’d been a pitcher on the baseball team. In high school he’d been moved to the outfield, but he’d always been proud of his strong arm. Soon after he got the job in the shipyard, he’d married and had a son; he got through the long days at the yard by telling himself that when the boy grew up he’d be proud of his dad’s strong arm too. He worked for two years hammering clots of hardened oil out of boilers before he realized that a hundred thousand strokes of the heavy hammer had ruined his arm. A couple of days after he found out he would never throw a ball again, he got drunk, got dragged into a fight, and ended up killing a man with a chair. “I used to be able to throw a softball sixty-five meters. A fuckin’
softball
! Big as a grapefruit. That was something.”

Hayashi had been a water-skiing instructor. With money problems he couldn’t handle, he’d robbed a barbershop. When the old man who ran the place caught him at it and started yelling, he’d tried to shut him up. The barber, though, had bitten him on the hand, and Hayashi had strangled him. “I hate the
smell of shampoo, makes me think of that old bastard. They all stink of shampoo, those barbershops. Other thing I can’t stand is somebody’s tongue. When you choke a man to death, his tongue flops out. And it’s longer than you think; hangs down below his chin. I’ve told the other guys before, but I’ll never forget that tongue, flopping out right there in front of me.”

The six men of the Food Service Unit No. 3 had more than murder in common: all of them were licensed, or at least qualified, to handle small boats. This was natural enough for Sajima as a fishing boat hand and Hayashi as a water-skiing instructor, but before taking the job in the restaurant, Nakakura had operated a cable-laying boat for a salvage company, and Fukuda had been a keen net fisherman when he worked at the shipyard. Realizing he and his fishing buddies could never afford to hire a captain for their weekly outings, he’d decided to cut costs by getting a license for himself. In Yamane’s case, the family of a friend at school had owned a large yacht complete with a motorized launch which he’d learned to use. Before his head injury, he had also learned to scuba dive. And Kiku had picked things up from trips on the dilapidated scow his foster father went fishing in. With the exception of Kiku, the group had one more thing in common as well: all five had failed the test to get into the fifteen-man team that made up the prison’s small-craft training unit. They had been assigned to this kitchen outfit while they waited for the next chance to take the test, six months down the line. Kiku was bunking with them because the counselors thought that the enthusiasm of the other five for the small-craft program might rub off on him and help bring him out of his shell.

The detention center was a model institution, and even one of the inmates was supposed to have said that if it weren’t for the high concrete perimeter wall and the double-plated iron doors at the
entrance, the place could easily be mistaken for a decent boarding school. Its guiding principle was that even the slightest hint of open resistance should be swiftly and firmly dealt with, but as long as you obeyed the rules, the daily routine wasn’t particularly harsh. After all, the facility was equipped with almost everything a young man could possibly need or want, and care was taken to make him feel that he was being fairly treated. Once every other month, for example, a survey was taken to gauge prisoner satisfaction, and a special system had been set up to adjust an inmate’s daily portions of rice or bread according to the amount of physical labor required in his work unit. Still, despite this solicitous attention on the part of the management, whenever the prisoners had a few minutes of free time in the TV room after a hard day’s work, or when they were lying in bed at night before going to sleep, two things inevitably came to mind: the high wall and the double-plated iron doors.

Inevitably, when a prisoner had a minute to himself, he thought of the world outside. Almost to a man, the inmates of the Juvenile Detention Center, like those in any other prison, drove themselves half-crazy thinking about their families, about life beyond the wall, and like men in any other prison, they spent a good part of their waking life looking for an opportunity to escape. But what was needed in most cases, more than the opportunity perhaps, was a reason—something to drive them to the decision to escape, someone who made them mad enough they
had
to escape. More often than not, though, a look around failed to turn up the necessary motive, and that was when it hit them: they were caught, shut in, watched every moment, but it was exactly because they tended to lose sight of that fact that they never seemed to work up the dissatisfaction needed to attempt an escape. Here were the guards and the counselors, at every turn, making their
life on the inside as comfortable as possible, and distracting them with all this vocational training, clubs, sports, and what have you. And for a while, typically, a prisoner would be distracted. Then, without fail, the wall and iron doors would return to haunt their idle minutes and a new round of wishful thinking would begin: if only the wall would disappear, if only my family were here. The system was perfectly designed, or so it seemed, to keep a prisoner oscillating between these two states until enough oscillations had convinced him to do his time quietly and get the hell out. In the end, the men came to see that what separated them from the outside was not the wall and the double-plated iron doors but time itself, and with this realization came a new determination to shorten their sentence in whatever way they could. The usual appetites and urges were tucked away for the duration, as the toughest of the tough turned themselves into model prisoners bent on accumulating an armful of silver and gold stripes. Once this bitter time-pill had been swallowed, escape was never an issue, and the residents of the Juvenile Detention Center went about their business in a state of semi-hibernation.

There was no question that this was an almost ideal way to run a jail, with the one drawback being it required the maintenance of a fine balance that could be upset at any moment by a single defector. The greatest potential danger, and the thing that the administration feared most, was suicide. The day-to-day mood in the prison was much like that in a retirement home: low-level, chronic, communal depression; and in such an atmosphere, a single suicide was almost bound to set off a chain reaction. A sufficient number of suicides and the tension level among the inmates would rise, stability would crumble, and the entire prison population would spew out the foul dose of time it had been convinced to swallow. It was with this in mind that Supervision
had transferred Kiku to the Food Service Unit; drawn into the common goal of passing the seamanship test, his withdrawal would never progress to the point where he might consider harming himself—or so their thinking went.

As the steamer began to howl, announcing the rice was done, the din in the kitchen rose to a roar. The whole Food Service division, eighteen men in three teams, was responsible for preparing and serving four hundred people with three meals a day. The teams worked in rotation, two days on and one off, under the supervision of two cooks who provided them with an endless string of chores: chopping onions or cabbage, washing rice, stirring mountains of pickling vegetables, soaking beans, measuring sugar and salt, and so on. When enough for four hundred portions of something was ready, it was divided up among the serving buckets, a ladle with a long handle being used to dredge up the sediment from the tanks of miso soup.