Doing Time (37 page)

At once I am approached from every direction by fellow inmates asking, “Did you hear them call you to the captain's office, Jude?” and, “What's going on? Why does the captain want you?” I feign indifference as I take a long final drag of my cigarette, then flip the butt with practiced skill into one of the pink-painted coffee cans nearby.

“Who the fuck knows,” I respond with just the right degree of flippancy. My voice is sure and steady, and that pleases me. I can feel my face rearranging itself into a mask of haughty insolence, a half-sneer claims my mouth, one eyebrow hitches itself a quarter-inch upward on my forehead to indicate arrogant disregard. It is my intention to appear poised, untroubled, faintly amused, and slightly bored. I am quite sure I achieve such a look.

My guts belie my measured outward calm. They twist and grumble and roil, threatening to send my lunch to the sidewalk. My heart is beating much too fast. My mouth is dry, my tongue feels like a landed trout thrashing about in that arid, alien place. My hands are trembling, my knees belong to a stranger, I am grateful for the first time ever that it is so goddamn hot in Phoenix. Everyone glistens with a fine film of perspiration; perhaps no one will notice that I smell of fear.

I affect a hip-slung swagger for the amusement of the gathered crowd, and head for south unit conttol to ask for a pass. It strikes me that I am asking permission to go to a place I haven't the faintest glimmer of desire to go to, and I giggle. The officer issuing my pass looks up at me and says, “Hope you still think it's funny when you get back, Norton.” I shrug. The walk across the yard is a long one, made longer by my determination to stroll casually under the scrutiny of a hundred watching eyes. I can feel them on me, can almost hear the thoughts behind them:

“Poorjude!”

“… ‘bout time that goody-goody bitch got hers.”

“Damn, hope it ain't bad news …”

“Gir'fren', please, look who be in trouble now!”

“Sheee-it…”

I knock purposefully at the polished wooden door with the brass plate that announces this as the Mount Olympus of DOC.
captain,
it says, in big carved block letters. Fuck you, I mouth silently.

After just enough time has elapsed to make me feel insignificant and small, the door is opened by a fat, oily sergeant. She is damp and rumpled in spite of the cool, air-conditioned comfort of the room. She turns wordlessly from me and installs her sloppy bulk at a desk littered with forms — applications, requests, petitions — paper prayers from the miserable and needy. She selects one and peers importantly at it over the tops of her smeary glasses, then picks up a red pen and makes a large unmistakable red X in a box labeled
denied.
I imagine a look of malignant glee on her greasy flat features as she does it.

Having not been invited to sit, I am still standing near the door, feeling awkward and displaced, when the phone rings. She picks up the receiver, says, “Yeah?” into it, and after a moment looks at me, nods, and replaces it. She jerks her head in the direction of the door through which I have just come and says, “Go back outside for a minute, if you don't mind.” Fleetingly, I wonder what she would say if I responded, “Oh, but I
do
mind, I mind very much, in fact; it's hotter than the devil's dick out there, you see, and I
so
much prefer it inside.” What I actually say, though, is, “Oh, sure, no problem,” and am mortified to find myself blushing.

Once outside, it occurs to me that if this was sly, psychological weaponry, designed to unseat and disadvantage me, it is quite effective. I feel humiliated and disgraced in a way I cannot identify. I light a cigarette and arrange my limbs carefully into a posture of indolent apathy. I hook my thumbs in my belt loops and squint with what I hope is an air of monumental unconcern through the smoke that curls up into my face.

At last the door opens again, and I am ushered into the cool depths of the anteroom, and this time I get a nod from the sergeant to proceed into the next room, the sacred chamber where sits the captain, enthroned behind a gleaming expanse of mahogany desk. He is leaning back in a maroon leather swivel chair, rolling a gold Cross pen between his startlingly white palms. He is a black giant, all teeth and long-fingered hands and military creases. His hair is cut very short on the sides and back, and the top flares out and up several inches. It is decidedly and perfectly flat on top, as though his barber used a T-square. I am reminded of the enchanting topiary at Disneyland's Small World; he appears a welt-tended shrub. Then he smiles at me and I think to myself viciously that he looks like the offspring of Arsenio Hall and Jaws. He motions me to a small chair, carefully chosen and placed so that I am directly in front of him and several inches lower. I feel like a beggar, prostrate at the foot of the king. I am determined that he should not know this. I meet his gaze with a cool look of studied dignity.

“You're Norton?” he asks.

No, you moron, I'm Smith, Jones, Appleby, Wellington, Mother Teresa, Doc Holliday, Jackie Onassis, anyone in the world besides Norton, at least I'd like to be right now, dontcha know,
I think wildly, Aloud, I say, “Yes, sir. I'm Norton.”

The chair creaks as he leans forward and picks up a piece of paper, pretends to study it. “Without looking at me, he says, “Norton, I called you in to talk to you about your son's at-ti-tude,” pronouncing all three syllables distinctly as though to a slow child.

“My son's attitude?” I repeat, feeling exquisitely stupid.

He gives a derisive little snort, as though to indicate that of course we both know what he's talking about and it's damned silly of me to pretend ignorance. Bewildered, I ask, “What attitude, sir?”

The captain closes his eyes and leans back again, rolling the gold pen in his hands. It clicks annoyingly against his rings,

“Your son, Adam,” he begins with an air of great forbearance, “seems to cause a problem every time he comes to visit you. My officers tell me that he is rude and disrespectful, a troublemaker.” He opens his eyes and looks at me expectantly.

I am dismayed to notice that my mouth is agape, that I have been caught so unawares as to be, for one of the very few times in my entire life, speechless. “A troublemaker, sir?” I say, realizing with no small degree of consternation that thus far I have only managed to echo what has been said to me.

“Ap-par-ent-ly,” he replies, again dividing the word carefully into all its syllables, “he demanded a full explanation of the visitor's dress code a couple of weeks ago. And last Sunday, according to the report, he questioned the policy that forbids inmates or their visitors to sit on the grass.”

I have a quick vision of an official report, complete with the Seal of the Great State of Arizona, titled
troublemakers,
and can see my son's name emblazoned at the top of a long list. His sins are red-lettered: DEMANDING EXPLANATIONS and QUESTIONING POLICY. Suddenly and against all reason and prudence, I have a powerful urge to laugh, to say, “You're kidding, right, dude?” But I fight it and win, and say instead, “Sir?” as though it were a question in its own right, and the captain obliges me by treating it as such.

“Your son, Adam,” he says with exaggerated patience, “insists upon knowing the reason for every rule and regulation DOC imposes, which we are in no way obligated to provide to him. He disrupts my officers in the performance of their duties.”

I am beginning to hate the way he says my son's name, and I feel the first stirrings of anger. The visitation officers' “duties” consist of sitting in a cool, dark room with a bank of closed-circuit TV screens, looking out onto the baked parking lot where a line of parched visitors wait for the regal nod of approval that will allow them entry into the institution. Their “duties” include watching us chat with our loved ones, making sure that there is no “prolonged kissing,” no hanky-panky under the tables, no exchanging of other than words. The most arduous task they will perform all day in the fulfillment of their “duties” is bending over to inspect my vagina after I squat and cough and “spread those cheeks
wide'''
for a strip search at visit's end. I fail to comprehend how my son's questions interfere with these odious “duties,” and I say so.

The captain's response is brusque, and it is obvious that he, too, is becoming annoyed. “It is not your place, Norton, to determine whether or not the officers' duties are being interfered with. It
is
your place to ensure that your visitors comply with procedure.”

“What ‘procedure,' sir, says that my boy can't ask questions?” I challenge, against my better judgment, which has long since flown. A little voice inside my head says,
Oh boy, now you've done it, you smartass,
and the voice is surely smarter than I am, for the captain stands up so fast he nearly topples his chair. His breath is coming fast and his eyes blaze.

As quickly as he is losing his calm, I am gaining mine, and from some place deep inside I thought was forever closed to me, I feel a surge of fearlessness. I stand also, and face him squarely and unblink-ingly, an intrepid lioness defending her cub. It is a sensation that will not last.

“Sit,” he commands.

I sit.

A moment later, he sits, crossing one elegantly trousered leg over the other and picking up the ubiquitous gold pen again. “Tell me,” he says congenially, “what happened in the blue jeans incident two weeks ago.”

“What happened, sir,” I begin reasonably, “is that my son came to visit me wearing a pair of gray Dockers, you know, men's casual pants, and he was told that he could not see me because he was not in compliance with the dress code that specifies ‘no blue jeans.' He was understandably upset, and asked that a higher authority be consulted.”

“And were they?”

“Yes, sir, someone called the OIO, who didn't want to take the responsibility for a decision; she in turn called the lieutenant, who ultimately allowed him in.”

“So he
was
admitted,” the captain says, in a tone which implies that, after all, the whole point is moot, and why ever in the world am I so agitated about it?

Warming to my subject, and not liking one bit the look of smug self-satisfaction on his face, I throw caution to the winds, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes, devil take the hindmost. All pretense of civility leaves me, my instinct for self-preservation is gone.

“Oh, he was admitted all right,” I say, making no attempt to disguise my disgust. I note with detachment that my hands and arms have bravely joined the recitation and are describing sharply eloquent shapes and forms in the air, punctuating my mounting fury, underlining my passion. The pitch and timbre of my voice have changed and the words rush from me, unstoppable. “He was admitted, sir, twenty whole minutes before the end of visitation, after taking a filthy stinking city bus all the way from Tempe and being allowed to stand in the blazing sun for three and a half hours without a square inch of shade or so much as an offer of a drink of water. He was admitted after he begged, pleaded, cajoled, and tried to reason with every know-nothing brownshirt in this whole sorry place. He was admitted after repeatedly pointing out to every available cretin with a badge that his gray, pleated, slash-pocketed, cuffed, pleated and creased, one-hundred-percent cotton
slacks
were, in fact, neither ‘blue' nor ‘jeans' and therefore did not violate the ‘no blue jeans' rule. He was admitted after being chastised like a naughty schoolboy by that loser of a sergeant, after being called immature, impatient, juvenile, and demanding, after being threatened with dismissal from the premises, after being subjected to an outrageously erroneous judgment call on his goddamn
pants,
sir. Disrespectful? Oh, I hope so. With all due respect to you, sir, I hope to Christ he was disrespectful to them.”

By this time, I am shaking with rage. I am remembering my fair-skinned boy's sunburned face. I am remembering the awful took in his sky-colored eyes, that bright liquidity that tells of a boy perched on the brink of manhood, trying not to cry. I am remembering my own inability to explain, to soothe, to mend as mothers do, as they must, for if not they, who?

It is an omission of some seriousness that I did not notice earlier the twin spots of color that had crept to the captain's cheekbones. On his ebony skin they are the color of dried blood, and his eyes snap and sparkle at me. There is a vein pulsing at his left temple. I have an abrupt vision of myself cutting out my tongue with his letter-opener and simply leaving it flopping about on his desk in expiation. Too late.

“Norton,” he says slowly, “it is clear to me where your son got his attitude.” I notice that he does not divide his words into all their separate parts for me now. He taps his chin thoughtfully with the pen. “It is my feeling that for the continued secure operation of this institution, it will be necessary to discontinue your son's visits until further notice. Perhaps he only needs time away from you to learn to deal with the fact of your incarceration in a mature and sensible manner. An attitude adjustment period.” He smiles.

My heart lurches and I feel the color staining my own cheeks even as it leaves his. “Sir,” I say, hating the quavering, desperate sound of my voice, “surely you're not saying he can't come to see me anymore.” I can hear the humble, supplicating tone I use, and I despise myself for it. “Please,” I say, strangling the word.

Having regained his equilibrium, the captain sits up straighter in the chair and allows a wider smile. “That is pre-cise-ly what I am saying, Norton.” In control once more, he has gone back to hacking his words apart. I hate him for that.

I am consumed by impotent rage, I wrestle with a crushing and mighty urge to rise and beat that superior face of his into a bleeding pulp of unrecognizable jutting bones and torn flesh. The desire is so intense as to be palpable. I can hear the dull wet crunch of gristle and cartilage, can feel his warm slippery brains between my fingers, can smell the dark coppery odor of his blood, can see it splashing up, up, onto the walls, the carpet, the desk, my face, my hair, crimson and joyous.