The Animal Factory (15 page)

“Who?”

“Friend McGee in the hospital.”

“McGee! You’re jivin’!”

“Un-uh … him for real.”

“What about saving face? I can’t imagine someone like you letting it go.”

“How can you stay mad for fifteen years? I’ve been on the streets twice and he hasn’t been out. He doesn’t talk about it. Even T.J. and Bad Eye don’t know … just Paul. I’m not afraid of him, and when he transferred in a couple of years ago, it went through my mind. I almost ribbed myself up, but I’m getting old and weak. I want out on the streets one more time. If something comes up and I can’t get around it, I’ll do what I have to do. I’m not gonna let anybody fuck me over … Besides, it taught me a couple of things—that everybody’s mortal and to respect everybody.”

Ron digested the story, looked out over the guard with the rifle on the wall to the necklace of clouds around the peak of Mount Tamalpais.

“You said you’d tell me why … why you’ve helped me.”

“You really wanna hear it?”

“Yes,” he said emphatically. “I’m not a punk. I’m already obligated to you, but I’m not paying off by being your kid, queen, or
whatever
they call it. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“Man, I haven’t—”

“I’m paranoid. I feel like I have to hold one hand over my prick and the other over my asshole. I’m suspicious of anyone who’s friendly. I see it in everybody’s eyes.”

“You haven’t seen it in mine.”

“No … ’cause you’re a lot more slick than most of them.”

Earl looked off, thinking, and then when he spoke the laconic twang and grammatical barbarisms were gone. “All right, I’ll explain … as well as I can. There’s some kind of homosexuality involved, psychological if not physical … if you want to call it that. It’s the need for feelings—to feel—that might be given to a woman. Frankly, if you were ugly, I probably wouldn’t be interested.”

Ron felt an uncontrollable trembling. He disliked this; it reduced him. He started to interrupt but Earl held up a hand.

“But that’s my problem, not yours. Even the little I’ve seen shows me you’re neither stupid nor weak …”

“I’m just not in my element around here. This is new to me.”

“And most of us grew up in it. Anyway, I need somebody … a friend. I love T.J. and Bad Eye and Paul, but that’s a different thing. They don’t fill a certain need. So I’m your friend. I’m not scheming on you. I don’t intend you anything but good, and you probably need me. I’m not the baddest motherfucker here, not by far, but my friends are really bad. Prison is a separate world and you have to build a life separate from the world outside. I don’t have a family, so my friends are my family. If you try to live in both worlds, you’ll go crazy.”

“But if this becomes your whole world, you’ll forget how to cope out there.”

“That happens to a lot of people, and you’ll change here … if you survive. Maybe you can make me think about the streets. C’mon, let’s go up. I have to take a shower and get ready for work … not that I do any.”

“I can’t shower until tonight.”

“Yeah, you’re still in the East block. Maybe we can get you moved over.”

“That takes nine months clean conduct. I haven’t been here two yet.”

“But I’ve been here eighteen calendars and I know how to get things done. We can probably get you better accommodations in a week or two.”

Gathering their shirts, they trudged toward the big yard. The vast cellhouses dominated the skyline like the battlements of castles on mountain crags. As they went up the stairs a Mexican stopped Earl and told him that someone was selling good heroin in the West cellhouse.

On the yard, Earl slapped Ron on the back and disappeared into the cellhouse. Ron felt a sense of loss, realized how swift
dependency
was growing, and sighed in aceptance. He found a bench in the sunlight and again read the book he’d checked out of the chapel library.

Now that he didn’t have to go to the furniture factory, Ron followed Earl’s example of sleeping through breakfast and coming out on the lunch unlock. He ate that meal with Earl, and sometimes with T.J. or a couple of others. He liked Earl’s friends, the warm
camaraderie
, and yet never felt entirely at ease. The unease grew to discomfort when many of them gathered in a crowd, so he avoided them when they flocked together, finding that he had to go to the library, chapel, or elsewhere. Earl watched his nervousness and understood, but usually stayed with the clique himself. In the
afternoons
, after work call, they went to play handball or to sit in the lower yard and talk. The conversations were more deeply personal than any in Ron‘s life. He was unaccustomed to analyzing his
relationships
with his mother, Pamela, or why he put such an absolute premium on money, which was an obsession with him. He talked about his life outside and could tell that Earl respected him. He told one lie, thinking it would please Earl; it was in answer to the question if he was committed to crime. He answered, “Yes,” but the truth was that he didn’t know. His future was undecided; the clay wasn’t yet hard.

Earl explained why he sometimes kept away from Ron. The unlikely relationship was bound to be viewed by many convicts as that of a jocker and his kid. “I pull ’em up,” Earl said. “But I can’t stop thirty-five hundred convicts individually … and if I did it would be, ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much.’ So it’s best if I keep as much heat off you as I can.”

“I couldn’t care less what they think.”

“In a way you’re right, but in a way you’re not. You may spend a lot of years kicking around these places. You never know. If you get a
jacket
as a punk, you’ll have that wherever you go. It’ll come up twenty years from now. It’s the next worse thing to being
jacketed
as a stool pigeon. All a man in prison has is his name among his peers.”

Ron thought it was an exaggeration. As long as he himself knew the truth, it didn’t matter what ignorant convicts thought. In the coming months, his attitude would change. He learned that a good name was important, critically so. He saw a man with friends get slapped and do nothing about it. The friends turned their backs and the man was thereafter made to pay his canteen for protection until he finally checked into protective custody and got transferred. Any sign of weakness invited aggression, and the greatest sign was to get buggered. He saw a good-looking young man with blond hair, from a middle-class background, come in and the wolves descend. The newcomer had no friends. In a month he was wearing skin-tight jeans without back pockets. His eyebrows were blocked, and in the eyes something had died. The tough young Mexicans who had turned the blond into a queen eventually “sold” him. Ron then was glad that Earl was as concerned with appearances as with reality.

On Saturday, after two weeks of running with Earl, he passed through the yard gate late in the afternoon. A square-jawed
lieutenant
with billed hat cocked to the side was standing with a tall sergeant. The lieutenant called, “Hey, Decker.”

The lieutenant’s nameplate said “Seeman,” and Ron knew it was Earl’s boss. Still, Ron was embarrassed. The yard was full of convicts and it was always embarrassing to be seen talking to a guard.

“You’re Earl’s friend, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I talked to the North block lieutenant, trying to get you moved over. He owes me a favor and he’s willing … but somebody’s been writing the warden snitch letters about people jumping the waiting lists. But … there’s one way.” He winked. “We assign you as a tier tender … if you don’t mind getting up at six in the morning to pour water. When you’re there a while, we get you a job change. You don’t have to move out once you’re there. How does that sound?”

“It’s fine, except I’ve still got two weeks on a medical lay-in.”

“I’m sure you know somebody to take care of that.” The
lieutenant
grinned.

Ron smiled back, nodded, started to leave.

“One more thing,” the lieutenant said. “He tells me you’re not his kid. I don’t care. That’s your business and his business, but don’t get him in trouble. He’s been clean around here and he’ll get out in a year or so if he keeps it up.”

“I won’t get him in trouble,” Ron said—and as he walked away, the statement was reinforced in his own mind. The last thing in the world he wanted was to get Earl in trouble. The older convict was already the best friend he’d ever had, like an older brother, maybe a father. It was difficult for Ron, even silently, to articulate the word “love” where it involved another man, but he managed to say it to himself.

One week later, Ron loaded his property on a flat-bedded,
iron-wheeled
cart and moved to the last cell on the fifth tier of the North cellhouse. By nature acquisitive, he already had more possessions than Earl, including oil paintings purchased from convict artists. One was a huge impression of the prison viewed from the Bay, the other of an East Indian barge man in cruddy turban, with distended pupils and a permanent disfiguring bulge in his jaw, the result of holding wads of coca (cocaine) leaves in there year after year. The first night he had the painting, a black came by, blinked, and went away, returning minutes later. “Say, man, what you doin’, makin’ fun a’ da bro’s toothache?” The tone was accusing. Ron explained, but resented the necessity for doing so. He understood black suspicion, but paranoia was a disease. Thereafter he turned the painting to the wall. When Earl heard about it, he laughed. “That ain’t nothing. In Soledad they have a race riot over anything. One went down because the white car in a Shell T.V. commercial got better mileage than the black car.”

In the North cellhouse Ron began to work as the a.m. tier tender. At 5:00 a.m. a guard woke him by banging a key on the bars. He could go to breakfast then, but he never did. At 5:30 he filled a fifty-gallon drum with hot water and pushed it down the tier on a wagon, filling the cans through the bars with a hose. He had to make three trips. When the other cells were unlocked after 6:00, he swept and mopped, and once a week picked up sheets from the bars, making a list of who turned them in. Until 2:00 p.m. he kept the heavy spike key to let men on the tier in and out of their cells, though after a few days he knew who lived where and handed them the key. Most of them worked, so the only traffic was during the lunch hour. It wasn’t a really hard job, and Ron had less
aversion
to work than the average convict. It gave him time to read, to exercise his mind, to escape the prevailing ugliness and view the endless vistas of articulate men. In a matter of weeks he
accumulated
a cardboard box full of paperbacks, many brought by Earl, who shook his head in mock disdain whenever he found Ron reading frivolous entertainments. Ron quickly ceased to enjoy trash; it could not knead his mind like Dostoevsky, Hesse, Camus, and Céline, who were Earl’s favorites. Ron had always assumed that Jack London wrote children’s books until Earl gave him
Star Rover
and
The Sea Wolf
. He liked to listen to Earl talk about books. The older man’s demeanor changed. He became enthused, his grammar precise. He had no interest in art forms other than literature, but he didn’t necessarily like everything accepted as great. He disliked Dickens and Balzac, and thought Thomas Wolfe shouldn’t be read by anyone over twenty-one. In three months Ron read more than he had in his entire previous life. He felt his mind widen, his perceptions become more acute, for each book was a prism refracting the infinitely varied truths of experience. Some were telescopes; some microscopes. Once Ron wanted to take his books to the Saturday-morning book swap, but T.J. was on hand when he mentioned it. “Boy,” he said, “don’t ya’ll know we’s gangsters and bullies? If we want some books, by Gawd, we’ll just take ’em. You can give yours away if you want, but fuck all that
nickel-and-dime
shit.” It was often hard to tell when T.J. was joshing, but Ron didn’t go to the swap. Neither did he give the books away. Eventually he sold them for three cartons of cigarettes and a hand-tooled wallet.

One morning he passed Earl’s cell and found him reading
The Happy Hooker
.

“Reading serious literature?” he said.

“Damn sure educational.”

“Let me see it when you’re through.”

“Un-uh, too young. This lady is depraved.”

“Shit!”

“Now you wanna be a jack-off idiot. That’s what I’ve raised. You’ll get warts on your hands.”

“What about you?”

“I’m already crazy. Must be. I keep coming back here. I must like it, too, don’t you think?”

Ron shook his head, but felt guilty, for he couldn’t deny that anyone who kept returning to prison had to be a fool, or sick, or something. Even Earl. Yet Earl was his teacher, his family behind the walls, his friend. It was disloyal to have such doubts.

The tier-tender job also gave him time to write letters, two or three each week to Pamela, and one every other week to his mother. And one a month to Jacob Horvath. Pamela’s replies became fewer and shorter. Vito picked up a battered portable typewriter on a debt and sold it to Earl for a fix, and thereafter it rested in Ron’s cell and he used it.

Although Ron never became comfortable on the crowded yard, he temporarily lost his fear. Stabbings decreased for a while after the strike, and when they picked up again, Ron, who normally would have identified with the victim, knew that his associates were the deadliest white clique in San Quentin, and this gave him a feeling of power—until one lunch hour. He and Earl had just come from the mess hall, were walking under the shed where the majority of convicts had been driven by the hot sun. Earl was flipping pellets of crushed bread to the sea gulls and seemed completely relaxed and unaware of the flux of the yard. Suddenly he grabbed Ron’s sleeve at the wrist and shouldered into him, turning him as a sheep dog would a lamb.

“Let’s go … quick!”

“Huh?” But Ron went along, stepping lively away from where they’d been standing. From the corner of his eye he saw a flurry of movement a few feet from where they’d been. He looked more closely. A big Chicano was spinning like a dog chasing his tail, his hand clutching at his chest where the black-tape handle of a shiv jutted forth. His mouth was open in an O, as if he were yawning, but blood was flying out. The crowd was scattering from him. Ron saw a small, dark Chicano fleeing with his head down, weaving into the crowd. The big Chicano saw him and started to give chase, but after two paces, his steps weakened—and suddenly his knees gave way.