Eureka Man: A Novel (31 page)

“He was in the cell you're in,” said
Oliver.

“Who?”

“Fat Daddy. He talked my head off for three
days. I couldn't believe how civilized he was. Hey, how well do you
know him, anyway?”

“Oh, I've known Fat Daddy for about twenty
years now. Why?”

“Because I told him I needed to get an
extremely important message out to my boss. He said he'd get it to
him for me. So I wrote it down and fished it over to him to take
out. I was just wondering how thorough he is.”

“Oliver, he may be a crazy-ass pervert, but
he's as thorough as they get when it comes to something like that.
If he told you he would take care of something for you, you can bet
he did it before he unpacked his belongings.”

“I hope you're right, Oyster. Otherwise, my
ass is up shit's creek tomorrow.”

“No way in the world they can hold you
responsible, Oliver. Stop worrying.”

There was another long procession of silence
between them before Oliver said, “Worrying's all I got right now,
man.”

WHEN OLIVER WALKED into the hearing room the next
morning, he nodded to the stone-faced security captain before
sitting in the chair directly in front of the hearing examiner.
“Good morning, Mr. Priddy. My name is Arnold Jerry, and I'll be the
decider-of-facts for these proceedings. Let the record reflect that
Mr. Priddy is present, along with Captain Twyman and Ms. Jan
Christopher, our in-house stenographer. Mr. Priddy, you have been
charged with misconduct number 39987, inciting a riot and being in
possession of an unauthorized document, namely the October
newsletter containing an essay bearing your name as the author. I
take it you acknowledge being the author of this essay, 'HOPE FOR
THE HOPELESS'?”

“Yes, sir.”

And you were the editor of this newsletter,
The Wire? Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pertaining to these two charges, Mr. Priddy,
how do you wish to plead?”

“Not guilty. I need my witness present. My
boss, Mr. Sommers.”

“You indicated that on the hearing form. I
called Mr. Sommers' office this morning at eight-thirty. His
secretary informed me he would not be in the institution today. I
take it you wanted your boss here as a character witness?”

“There's more to it than that.”

“I've read your jacket thoroughly, and I'm
more than willing to stipulate into the record that you have made
remarkable academic achievements over these past ten years, that
you've been an asset to the prison's education department and have
been a model prisoner as well. Other than attesting to these
things, I can see no other reason why we would need to hear from
Mr. Sommers.”

Oliver's face went red with laughter, and
then he turned to look at the Captain. “Hey, there's more to it
than that. My boss can clear this whole thing up.”

“And how's that?” the Captain asked, raising
his thick black eyebrows.

Oliver was almost compelled to tell them, but
he didn't. He recalled Fat Daddy's admonition two days ago to keep
his mouth shut unless he wanted to be the victim of a cover-up.
“All I can say is that Mr. Sommers can clear this up,” Oliver
repeated.

The examiner looked intensely curious as he
took a sip of black coffee from a tin cup before he stood and
walked to a corner table to retrieve more documents. He was short,
almost a dwarf. His Afro was neat, not ragged, and he wore silver
around his neck, one matching stud in his ear. He sat down again
and said, “Mr. Priddy, you have already acknowledged being the
author of this essay, and there is nothing your supervisor or
anyone else can say to negate that fact. So we are going to proceed
with this hearing at this time.”

“All right,” said Oliver, going red again.
“What about Deputy Maroney? Call him in here.”

“Deputy Maroney has been working in Central
Office for the past two and a half weeks. I'm afraid he can't help
you.”

“A fucking kangaroo court,” Oliver
muttered.

The security captain stiffened. “What did you
say, Priddy?”

“You heard me, Captain. I said kangaroo
court. That's all this is!”

“Keep your opinions to yourself, Priddy,” the
captain admonished. “Let that be a warning.”

The examiner shifted his eyes from the
Captain to Oliver while he took another swig of coffee. Then he
said, “I'm going to begin by asking you what you meant in the very
last words of your essay, when you wrote 'or does it explode?'
”

“That line is an allusion, man.”

“An illusion? You mean like a large mirror
giving the illusion of more space in a small room?”

“No. An allusion. That line came from a
famous poem by Mr. Langston Hughes, called 'A Dream Deferred.'”

“I see. That's real clever,” the hearing
examiner said. “This situation reminds me of a legal case I read
about in my second year of college in which the famous U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you cannot go around
falsely shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre because it causes
panic. One could make a good argument that your essay amounts to
shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre.”

Oliver sighed and shook his head from side to
side. “Come on, man. You can't be serious.”

The captain gestured with his hand and cut in
before the examiner could go on. “I have just two questions for
you, Priddy. Why did you emphasize words like insurrection and
anarchy in big bold letters, and why did you wish the young bucks
God's speed in their endeavors?”

The captain leaned back in the chair with his
hands clasped together and slowly rolled his thumbs in circles,
obviously pleased with his questions.

“The whole thing's a satire, man. It's not
meant to be taken literally.”

The hearing examiner said, “Well, do you
agree, Mr. Priddy, that what you wrote was tantamount to telling
your fellow lifers that their conditions are hopeless?”

Oliver didn't hesitate. “No, I don't. If
you're going to take what I said literally, my essay was about
offering hope for the hopeless.”

“But you don't believe that telling a man his
life is doomed could be enough to incite that man to riot? You
don't believe your modest proposal set these men off?”

“That's a laugh.”

“No one's laughing, Mr. Priddy, and I would
advise you to take these proceedings a little more seriously.
You're obviously a talented writer, but what you've written is
highly offensive and highly inflammatory. Being a writer carries a
certain responsibility with it. And as long as you are a prisoner
of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you do not have the same First
Amendment rights as people in free society have. Mr. Priddy, do you
have anything else you'd like to say on your own behalf?”

“I'm innocent, man.”

The examiner scoured through Oliver's essay
one last time, wrinkling his forehead and eyebrows each time he
read something that offended him. When he was finished writing, he
flicked his pen back and forth several times before dropping it on
the table.

“This is not a court of law, Mr. Priddy, but
if it were, I would still find beyond a reasonable doubt-we call it
a preponderance of evidence-that your essay inflamed the hearts and
minds of those men who participated in the riot. I therefore find
you guilty of this Class 1, Category A misconduct. Your punitive
sanction will be eighteen months in the Disciplinary Housing Unit.
You have thirty days to appeal this decision to the Superintendent.
Good luck to you, Mr. Priddy.”

A MONTH TO THE DAY of his hearing, Oliver and the
rest of the prisoners confined inside the Home Block were moved to
the bottom tiers of the little St. Regis. During the riot the
prisoners had broken every windowpane in the cellblock. Now the
cold December days were not warmed much by the installation of new
panes. There was no notable difference between the thin, noisy air
inside the cellblock and the air outside. Oliver stood by the door
of his cell watching the prisoners who were being escorted from the
lockup tiers and those being led towards them. Not one seemed
interested in departure or arrival since the entire prison was a
Home Block anyway.

When he discovered on that first day that the
St. Regises had not been reopened since the riot, that every man in
the joint was locked in a cell somewhere, he stopped feeling
betrayed by Fat Daddy. Thinking of his predicament and Fat Daddy's
efforts to help him, he sighed heavily, but there was no point in
just sitting there moping. First, he sent an official request to
his boss letting him know he'd been moved to the little St. Regis
and needed to see him as soon as possible. Then while he waited and
prayed his request would reach its destination, he turned his
thoughts to how he would spend, and not just deposit, his time in
solitary confinement. What to do for the next hour, then the next.
It took forty-five minutes to clean the floor and all four walls
with a wet rag. Writing letters, two hours. Ninety minutes of
reading, another hour taking notes.

Contrary to popular belief, planning was
everything. Gauge the hours. Recognize yourself. You're all you
have.

But after a week of trying that routine, his
thoughts failed him-he couldn't write a sentence that made sense,
he couldn't comprehend what he read and he lost his drive to
exercise.

As the days passed, he could hear the
swelling and straining of a yellow diesel caterpillar that had come
to make way for two new high-rise cell blocks in the middle of the
yard. He listened as it demolished the Young Guns Boxing Gym, the
Free-Yourself Law Library, the hundred-year-old chapel and the
redbrick Home Block. In all that destruction he knew that the
magnificent old oak tree had been torn from its roots, too, along
with Early's flowerbeds and shrubs. Hearing all the devastation
going on outside only added to his suffering. All he could tell
himself was that his stretch of good fortune was over. His
self-created world of hope was gone. The prison he had for ten
years called his university had finally been ruined and in the
process had capsized his world and broken him. He found little
consolation in knowing that, in this oppressive place ruled by men
whose power to control was out of control, he had at least felt and
heard about the esprit de corps of his fellow prisoners.

More and more he did not know how he was
going to get from one minute to the next. He felt as though his
mind was slipping away, he was terrified. One morning he called out
to Oyster, but Oyster was gone. Alone, without witness, he let go
of his logic, his reason, and soon all the voices in his mind were
rehearsing to themselves every pathological theme of literature he
had ever come across: betrayal, cruelty, injustice, loss,
vengeance, dishonor and grief. All hope had abandoned him. What's
the use? Your life is over! You're going to die in this prison
cell, hopeless and alone, he told himself.

Every day he fought these voices in his head
while the prisoners around him immersed themselves in conversations
about murder and suicide. One morning the man on his left called
out his name and Oliver shrieked for all the prisoners to hear,
like a child might if his mother had been snatched away from him
forever.

“Priddy, I know you can hear me,” his
neighbor said. “That essay you wrote was pretty tough. I ain't
ashamed to tell you I almost took my own life once. Went so far as
to dump four bags of the most potent smack in the city into a spoon
and cook it up.” The neighbor on the other side said, “Well, you
obviously didn't go through with it. What happened? You chicken
out?”

“Yes, I did, brother man.”

A prisoner two doors down said, “Having a
change of mind don't mean he chickened out. Some people might call
following through with it chickening out on life. Some might say it
took a lot of courage not to follow through. This may be prison,
but we're still alive.”

They continued on tediously in this vein more
or less for the rest of the day and others within hearing distance
of the conversation joined in. An intellectual named Minarik said,
“The whole act of taking your own life is the one sole thing a man
can control in his life. He writes the play, he inhabits it and he
enacts it. He stages everything-just the way he'll be found and
how.”

Believing that the nightmare he was living
was the only reality there was, Oliver laid down on his side with
his face on his hands, closed his eyes and pictured a parade of
prisoners returning to their cells from the commissary and tearing
open their newly purchased Euthanasia kits.

“Slide this deep inside my vagina, Oliver.”
He imagined Donnie Blossom speaking those words as he took off his
clothes and picked up the deadly nine-inch vibrator. He imagined
Donnie lying on his stomach and posing salaciously as he cried out,
“Do me, Oliver. Do me. I want you before I die.”

“Why me?”

“Don't you know, Oliver? I have always loved
you. Don't you know that by now?”

He imagined himself saying, “You know I don't
swing that way.”

“Then put this inside me,” he imagined Donnie
replying. “I want to die happy, Oliver.”

“Don't we all?” Short of breath and
dry-mouthed, Oliver blinked that image and conversation away for
another one: Geppy, a vicious dope addict, squatting in the corner,
a shoelace tied tightly around his bicep. “Get your own, Priddy!
Ain't enough here for you!” He imagined Geppy saying this while
injecting the massive air bubble into his thin blue vein. And after
he pictured a schizophrenic prisoner he knew hanging from the
ceiling light fixture with a designer noose around his neck, he
cried out, “Fellows, this was all supposed to be humorous! A joke!
I never meant for you all to take me serious! It was satire, a
stupid literary technique. I learned it in school, for Christsake!
I was just trying to be witty, man!”