Authors: Stephen Solomita
Pat Sheehan watched Al Rosenkrantz’s performance with private amazement. Sylvia Kaufman’s assessment of Pat as gay was only partially accurate. Certainly, his roommate, Louis Persio, was a feminine homosexual, but if that’s all “gay” meant, Pat Sheehan would have rejected the label without a second thought. The couple had met while doing felony time in Dannemora State Prison. The homosexual unit happened to be full on the day Louis Persio arrived and the administration, with typical sensitivity, assigned him to the first available cell, which happened to belong to Pat Sheehan. What followed was a contract, every bit as sacrosanct as Precision Managements leases, in which Louis Persio agreed to satisfy Pat Sheehan’s pent-up sexual fantasies while Pat Sheehan guaranteed Persio’s physical and sexual survival in the institution. What followed that, after a year’s cohabitation, was only love, but it surprised the shit out of both of them. Especially Pat Sheehan, who found that even after their release, even after he’d spent a weekend in bed with an enthusiastic seventeen-year-old whore from the stable of an old jail buddy, he still wanted Louis Persio.
When a second and a third and a fourth visit did nothing to diminish the intensity of this need, Pat Sheehan, ever the realist, hopped the 7 Train out to Persio’s Jackson Heights apartment, a single suitcase dangling from his hand. That had been four years ago, two years before Louis had woken up one morning with badly swollen lymph glands and a fever that defied aspirin and ice packs.
Fortunately, nobody had ever caught wind of the roommates’ jail backgrounds. Being gay was enough trouble. Pat was short, only five foot seven, but weighed a solid hundred seventy-five pounds and was prison-hard. Louis Persio, by Dannemora standards, was a fox and foxes are not protected with bullshit. Pat, however, tried to avoid any display of his street sense; he passed his days driving a UPS delivery van, which was a very good job for an ex-con, and he didn’t want any complaints getting back to his Parole Officer, Juan Profantes. Profantes was overlooking Pat’s relationship with Louis Persio. For the time being.
But even if Pat Sheehan’s smarts had been repressed for a hundred years, he could still spot a bullshitter like Al Rosenkrantz. The guy
smelled
like bullshit and Pat sniffed the odor like an old con probing for fear in a new prisoner. Pat had read the move when the pimp first showed up with the two women. Nobody could sign a lease with Rags Ragozzo without washing their hands immediately afterward. The guy sweated olive oil. Like fat Al Rosenkrantz with the drops starting to slide along his temples. Rosenkrantz was so obvious that Pat Sheehan was tempted to call him on it. To slap him with his bullshit. He could feel every warden he’d ever known speaking through Al Rosenkrantz’s lips. “If you give the institution a chance, the institution will work with you.” The lies made him want to vomit.
But Pat Sheehan held his peace. He didn’t tell his fellow tenants what (or who) was coming in behind the whores, though he’d made the new tenants in 4B, right across the hall from his own apartment, as heroin junkies the minute he’d found them struggling with their few pieces of cardboard furniture. Shit, he ought to know about dope. That’s why he went away. Because of an unfortunate accident in the middle of an armed robbery while trying to get the money to sustain his habit.
“A
gonif
you can’t recognize?” Mike Birnbaum shouted at Myron Gold. “You got to wait until he cracks your skull before you wake up?”
J
ONATHAN “BORN” MILLER WAS
, among other things (crack addict, mugger, prostitute, pimp), a vegetarian. At twenty-four years of age, and fresh from Rikers Island, he felt himself to be at peace with a world he finally understood. True, he was using crack again, but at nowhere near the suicidal pace that had preceded his incarceration. He had been crazy back then, crazy enough to smash the side window of a car waiting for a light at 39th and Ninth, just off the Lincoln Tunnel. He remembered reaching through the broken glass to grab the old broad sitting behind the wheel; he could still hear himself screaming at her for money like she was deaf. A poor helpless old vic in a pearl gray Mercedes-Benz, with cars in front of her and behind her. Where could she go?
Into her purse. Into her mother-fuckin’ purse for a can of mace. When she splashed that shit in his eyes, he stumbled back into the side of a moving delivery van and the mirror knocked him just flat enough for the police to arrive before he could crawl away. Who would believe such bad luck? Who could believe the mace after staying awake for three days and nothing to hold his head up? On top of which, the old cunt, instead of hauling ass like they always do, waits calmly for the pigs, then files a complaint.
The arresting officers (after they put a
major
beating on his ass) charged him with assault, assault with intent to kill, assault with a deadly weapon (the window glass), reckless endangerment (to the other drivers on Ninth Avenue), possession of a controlled substance, felony possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to sell a controlled substance and paraphernalia. It was enough, considering the string of plea-bargained misdemeanors that had dominated his street life, to effectively put him away until his sixtieth birthday.
But the DA was sure to cut a deal in return for a guilty plea. All those charges were only there to frighten him into taking the
wrong
deal. That’s what the jailhouse lawyers, who listened to his case in return for the chicken cutlet sandwiches he smuggled out of the captains’ dining room, predicted. But he didn’t buy it. Fact is, he only turned to those bullshit artists because he never had a lawyer of his own. Never went to court, either. Or saw a cop or heard from anyone in law enforcement except for correction officers, who had less than no interest in his legal situation.
Six months later, his body strong from hundreds of hours in the gym, he had his act together, courtesy of an older inmate, Brian “DeadDog” Patterson, who had taught him (in exchange for certain reciprocal sexual favors) how to discipline his mind while he nourished his body by cleansing his system with fruits and vegetables. Only then, when he was pure in mind and body, when his act was tight and he was ready for the world, did he seek out a correction counselor and ask why his case hadn’t gone to trial. Three days later, after a chagrined Assistant DA named Myra Baines admitted to a phenomenally sarcastic Judge Calvin Smith that inmate Miller’s case had somehow been closed before his trial, Born Miller was out on the street.
Strong and confident, he wandered back to St. Nicholas Avenue, in Harlem, and begged twenty dollars from his mother. “I got to get me a place to stay, mama, else the man gon’ dump me back in the jail. I’m on probation.”
His mother, Maria, nodded maternally, then handed over the twenty because she was afraid of her son. She knew about his prior record, of course, both as a juvenile and as an adult, and she didn’t understand why they had let him out. She
did
, however, fully understand that twenty dollars would get rid of him, at least temporarily. At least long enough to make preparations for his return.
After six months of abstinence, the first hit on the pipe stem exploded simultaneously in his brain and his crotch. He was in a crack den/shooting gallery on 143rd Street and one of the women, a Dominican crack whore, offered to get him off for a hit on the pipe.
“Suck first, bitch,” he growled, careful not to betray how desperately horny he was. The girl, called Choch, turned the trick so fast and so efficiently, that Born Miller alternately fucked and smoked until the vials were empty. Then he went out to look for money.
At first he considered returning to his mother’s apartment, but now that she knew he was on the street, she’d either have her brother there or refuse to open the door. Born Miller wasn’t afraid of the brother, but he wanted crack and he wouldn’t get it there, no matter how many times he kicked ass. Better to take his chances in the street.
Ten minutes later, he was in a room on the second floor of an abandoned tenement near Convent Avenue, watching for prey, when three kids, teenagers, strolled by. The boys were fresh in their Task Force jackets, Guess jeans, and white Reeboks. One, the smallest, had a dope rope, a gold chain thicker than Miller’s thumb, hanging all the way down his chest. Man, did Born Miller want that fucker. That chain would keep him stoned for two weeks. Keep him stoned until he connected with DeadDog who was up in the Bronx somewhere.
The kids stopped to bullshit. Miller could see their lips moving, though he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then a miracle happened. Two of the boys left, walking west toward Riverside Park, while the third, the one with the chain, already unzipping his fly, turned into a narrow alleyway alongside the tenement.
Born Miller’s spirits jumped almost as high as they would when he fired up the pipe again. The broken piece of cinderblock someone had chipped out of the window seemed to leap into his hand. The boy with the chain was right below him, as if waiting for the hand of God to descend, and Born, leaning out over the empty windowframe, let the cinderblock go like a World War Two bombardier over Berlin.
The stone seemed to drift downward, as gently as a parachutist dropping onto a spring meadow, but when it found the boy’s head, it made a very audible sound, a solid chunk, and the boy, still pissing away, dropped to the concrete and lay motionless as the blood ran down along the side of his face and pooled up under his head.
Born Miller took the chain to a pawnshop in Chinatown and sold it for a straight one hundred dollars per ounce. The pawn broker, a squinty-eyed ancient who peered at him from behind two-inch plexiglass, would get three times as much when he offered it at retail, but Miller didn’t mind. The fucking thing weighed more than twelve ounces and the cash made a satisfying pocket print when he slipped it into his worn Levis. Talk about fresh—he had enough to tighten his threads and still beam up for a week.
“Say what, my man,” he called to the Chinaman before walking back onto Bayard Street. “Could y’all direct me to a public phone. I have to make an important call.” The Oriental responded with a shower of high-pitched Chinese, but Miller wasn’t insulted. It’s hard, he speculated, to disrespect a man who’s about to get as high as he was. “Bye-bye, li’l Chinaman,” he called. “Don’ eat too many wontons.”
He found a phone on the corner which not only worked, but, even more miraculously, was not in use, and dialed DeadDog’s phone number.
“Speakin’,” the voice on the other end announced without preamble.
“That y’all, DeadDog?” Miller asked.
“Born Miller?”
“That’s my name. Dope is my game.” He tried to be cute. The man always liked him when he was cute.
“Homeboy,” DeadDog shouted. “Just the man I been waitin’ on. I got plans for you, baby. We openin’ up new territory and you gonna be the main man. You gon’ be mah banker.”
Born Miller, under DeadDog’s spell as if they were both still at Rikers, nodded as he took in the information. Most drug operations revolve around a banker who collects the money and a mule who hands out the dope, a structure which makes it hard to rip off both ends at the same time. DeadDog was in the midst of setting up a crack and smack distributorship in a quiet Queens neighborhood. “Virgin territory, y’unnerstand what I’m sayin’? No competition. We gon’ start workin’ out this apartment, but we be on the street in a month. Turn these white boys and these yellow boys on to some good crack and we have more customers than we can handle. Y’unnerstand what I’m sayin’? Y’all hold yo head together, you gon’ be one rich nigger.”
Born Miller dutifully memorized the address DeadDog gave him, but the minute he was off the phone, he headed straight up the Bowery to the Lower East Side, where every kind of drug was readily available. The first dealer he saw, part of a crew that worked Allen Street, sold him twenty vials of crack and a battered .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog for three hundred dollars, throwing in a dozen extra rounds as a sign of good faith.
The tool felt good tucked into his waistband. It made him feel bigger, an insurance policy to prevent some punk from lifting his roll the way he’d yanked the gold off that brother’s neck. He did have every intention of heading out to Queens, but he made the mistake of ducking into a doorway for a quick hit on the pipe and didn’t stop sucking on it for two days, when a sudden burst of paranoia warned him that if he didn’t move soon, DeadDog’s offer would, indeed, be dead.
Two hours later, he was standing across the street from 337-11 37th Avenue and wondering just what kind of bullshit DeadDog was tossing these days. Except for a trio of moving men filling their truck with furniture, there wasn’t another black face anywhere on the street. Born was wearing his working clothes: nondescript Levis, cheap sneakers, a down jacket that reversed from black to blue and a throwaway Yankee baseball cap. His hair was close-cropped, without any of the fashionable designs black barbers shave into the scalps of their customers.
“You got to be cool on the streets, my man,” DeadDog had explained. “These boys with the fancy cars and the dope ropes all gon’ do long bits. Y’all shove yo shit in the man’s face, he get you if it take twenty years. Shit, the pig got all the money, he can afford to wait. Y’unnerstan’ what ah’m sayin’? We talkin’
survival
here.”
But
this
scene didn’t have any cool to it. If coming into a white neighborhood (as far as Born Miller was concerned, the Orientals were even whiter than the maggots) and opening a crack den wasn’t throwing it in the pig’s face, he wasn’t a stoned-out coke freak. Born Miller was accustomed to tenements and projects, had never been outside Harlem until mama took him to the circus on his fifth birthday. He could deal with situations that would paralyze ordinary citizens; could, for instance, creep through an abandoned tenement on a pitch-black moonless night in search of a dealer. Or of prey.
Unfortunately, there were no abandoned tenements in Jackson Heights. The apartments and the two family homes, Born Miller noted in amazement, were nearly spotless. Even the shrubbery and the lawns had the look of a neighborhood holding its own against the tide of urban decay. How could DeadDog be such a fool? Anyone trying to work these streets would be busted in a minute. This was a place you came to do a quick rip-off, then subway up to Corona where the brothers lived. But even as he started to turn away, a black woman, Yolande Montgomery, came through the door of 337-11 and walked left, toward Broadway.