Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (10 page)

I
WOKE AT SIX
, as usual. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour, but enough light filtered in from the street to let me get up and dressed without falling over my roommates. All three were snoring, honking away like cabs in a traffic jam. I washed my face and brushed my teeth without any fear they’d wake up. Lost in their alkie dreams, they would have slept soundly in the gutter if that’s where the last drink had taken them.

Clean and dressed, I left them to their stupor and went in search of an empty room. Despite an assortment of aches and pains, I wanted to work out, to feel my body stretch until I had to fight the pain to continue. The Ludlum Foundation was still a foreign place to me. There was probably a day room, maybe even an exercise room, but I didn’t know where they were. I went down to the front desk on the first floor and found Sing-Sing manning his post. He looked up at me through bleary eyes.

“No disrespect, but you better get some sleep,” I said. “You look like you’re goin’ down for the last time.”

“You right, my man. Ah’m jus’ waitin’ on someone. Bidness, y’understand what I’m sayin’? Then I’ll fall out.”

Unless he put a little taste of his business up his nose. “Say, Rakim, you know where there’s an empty room I could use?”

“Just the day room. That good for you?”

“Perfect. Where is it?”

“On the third floor. Arnie don’t want the boys hangin’ out where visitors can see ’em. Look for the door with the bulletin board next to it. The one that advertise all the wonderful programs we got.”

I started to turn away, but he called me back. “Sometime it stinks pretty bad in that day room. Before the porters clean it up. Boys like to drink in there and most times they don’t make it to the toilet when they got to puke. Specially on Sattiday night. The boys gets lonely on Sattiday night and they drink heavy.”

“Where should I go, Rakim?” I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to be friendly. I’d humiliated him and friendship was a way to salvage his ego. There’s no logic to it, but it works. I’d been on the other end often enough to know.

“You could use Artie’s office. He don’t come in on Sundays.”

“Thanks, Rakim. You’re okay.”

“I got to unlock it.” He hauled himself out of the chair. “Anybody ask what bidness you got in there, y’all tell ’em to see
me
.”

He led me back through the building, unlocked the door, and left without ever asking me why I wanted the room. It was his way of showing me respect, of telling me that we could peacefully co-exist. My acceptance of this small favor implied that he could ask a small favor of me, should he ever need one. It didn’t make us brothers, or even co-conspirators, but I wouldn’t have to watch my back.

I went down on my face and began to do push-ups—ten sets of thirty. The last set took almost as long as the other nine put together, and by the time I was finished, my arms felt like they were dead. I let them hang for minute, shaking it out, then lay down on my back, hooked my legs underneath Artie’s desk, and began my sit-ups. Sit-ups are incredibly boring and counting them only makes the boredom worse. Instead of counting, I make it a matter of honor to keep going until I can’t do any more, until my gut begins to throb with pain and my body is covered with sweat.

I took a rest after the sit-ups, five minutes to let my body cool off, then began to shadow box. Before I tore up my right knee in a basketball game ten years ago, I used to run every day to build endurance. Now, even shadow boxing can set it to throbbing, but I’ve found a trick to help me keep going. I imagine an opponent, usually a hack, at the end of my jabs and hooks. Today, I chose a more immediate adversary. I put Tony Morasso’s face out there.

Tony Morasso didn’t begin his sentence in Cortlandt. He had to fight and claw his way to the end of the line. His father was an officer in the Teamsters and he got Tony a twenty-two-dollar-an-hour job driving a cement mixer after Tony quit high school. Twenty-two dollars an hour, plus time and a half over thirty-five hours, plus double time on Saturdays and triple time on Sundays.

Tony thought it was paradise. He married an Italian girl from a good family, had three kids in five years, bought himself a TransAm and a house on Staten Island. I know all this because he bragged about it on the courts. Most prisoners are tight-mouthed about their past, especially the crime that put them in the Institution. Not Tony Morasso. He was always willing to talk about the good life and “the niggers and Jews who took my life away from me.”

“One day,” he told me, “I get to this site on East 78th Street and there’s no fuckin’ place to park the mixer. The scaffolding is out on one side of the goddamn street and there’s a car parked on the other side. Right away I’m thinkin’, ‘What am I supposed ta do, ride around the fuckin’ block like an animal?’

“I leave the mixer in the street and go over to look for the job foreman who’s nowhere around. There’s five mixers waitin’ in line and nobody to pour the concrete. That’s how they run these fuckin’ sites.

“You could see how I ain’t in such a good mood, but there’s nothin’ I can do. You get too loud with the wrong guy, you end up under the concrete. So I give up and go back and find this cabdriver walkin’ around the mixer like he fuckin’ owns it. He sees me and right away starts gibberin’.

“‘You must to please move. I have passenger in cab. You cannot block street.’”

“A fuckin’ foreign nigger, like from India or some shit. Mouthin’ off to me like he was an American.

“‘Back the cab down the street,’ I tell him, which is the logical thing ta do, right? But not this asshole. He keeps on with his bullshit. ‘You must move truck. You must move truck.’ I mean why don’t they fuckin’ learn to speak English if they wanna come here? It gave me a headache just listenin’ to him.

“Meanwhile I tried to do the right thing. I tried to walk away, but the asshole grabbed my arm and I had ta teach him a lesson about American manners. It wasn’t much of a beatin’, because he didn’t fight back and my heart wasn’t in it, but he got a pretty deep cut on top of his head when he fell back into the mixer.

“Then the pigs come and like they take
his
side. I mean the whole thing woulda been nothin’ if the pigs was white, but, my luck, I get a nigger and a spic. Right away, they start writin’ shit down in their little notebooks and I know I’m in fuckin’ trouble. ‘But officer,’ I tell ’em, real polite, ‘it was self-defense. He attacked me and I had to do some-thin’, didn’t I?’ Which is true, because he put his hands on me. How could I let a fuckin’ nigger put his hands on me and not do somethin’ about it?

“‘You are under arrest,’ the nigger pig says. ‘You have the right to remain silent …’

“‘Are you fuckin’ crazy?’ I says.

“‘Don’t give us no trouble. Just get in the car.’

“I’m standin’ next to the mixer with the door open while this bullshit is happenin’. Like anybody who’s got any fuckin’ sense, I had a little somethin’ stashed under the seat for emergencies. In my case it was a sawed-off pool cue which I whipped out and landed on the pig’s head before he even thought about goin’ for his .38. Like one second the nigger’s standin’ there with the cuffs in his hand and the next second he’s lyin’ in the street with his head split open. I’m so mad that I’m ready to off the spic, too, but he gets his gun out before I can make a move on him, so we end up facin’ off. He ain’t gonna shoot me as long as I don’t jump and I’m not gonna jump while he’s got the fuckin’ piece in his hand. Then about a dozen cops pull up and somebody sprays some shit in my face. You wouldn’t believe the fuckin’ beatin’ they gave me when they got me back in the precinct.”

Unfortunately for Tony, the sentencing judge was also black, and despite Tony’s clean record, gave him eighteen months to think about his attitude. Tony was slated to do his time in a minimum-security institution, but he had problems adjusting to the fact that whites are a minority in the prison system. At that time, all state prisoners were shipped up to H Block in Cortlandt where they were sorted out and sent to various institutions, depending on the length of their sentences and the nature of their crimes. Tony began his incarceration by shanking a black prisoner who tried to take his commissary and by assaulting the two C.O.’s who stepped in to pull him off his victim. The C.O.’s don’t really care about prisoners stabbing other prisoners unless the stabbing takes place right in front of them. They shipped Tony to the Albany County Jail to await trial for these new crimes. In the course of that incarceration, he descended into madness.

Experienced cons like myself, who’ve spent most of their lives in institutions of one kind or another, know that hard time gets harder if you try to fight your way through it. You have to establish yourself, but once you’ve settled in, it’s best to keep as low a profile as possible. Tony had no experience whatever and he reacted to the indignities of prison life by attacking anyone who frightened him. Eventually, a judge (white and Jewish, this time) added eight years to his eighteen months and he was shipped back up to statewide reception in H Block.

By this time Tony had earned himself a reputation. Most of the other prisoners, no matter what their color, shunned him and the fury that surrounded him like a halo. But the system didn’t see what was obvious to the prisoners. They sent him off to a medium-security institution where he continued to fight anyone who excited his paranoia. Gradually, they moved him up the ladder—Attica, Comstock, Greenhaven, then Cortlandt, the end of the line.

Most likely, if Eddie Conte hadn’t stepped in, Morasso would have spent most of his eight years in the box. Eddie decided that we needed more muscle in our crew and he personally recruited Tony. I was against it at the time.

“Look, Eddie,” I told him, “this guy is a loaded gun that pulls its own trigger. If he goes off, we’re liable to end up in a war. Who needs that?”

We were on the courts. Morasso was sitting by himself, pulling at a jam jar filled with hooch and eyeing us with suspicion. Eddie took me off to the side and explained the facts of life as he saw them.

“First of all, cuz, this asshole’s got
family
on the outside. He gets a money order every month which he don’t even know how to spend. That’s good for us. Plus, I been thinkin’ we’re too fuckin’ laid back. Sure, Tony’s a bug, but we could deal with that. As long as we keep him under control, we could point him wherever we want.”

What I wanted was to be left alone, and being part of Eddie’s crew was a major step toward achieving that goal. The courts where I hung out belonged to Eddie. I could have walked away, but I didn’t see how isolation would improve my situation.

“So tell me how you’re gonna control him, Eddie.”

“Cuz, it ain’t that hard to figure out. I’m gonna keep him stoned until I wanna use him. Plus, I’m gonna educate him about keepin’ his big mouth shut.”

The drugs and the hooch helped, but the education failed miserably. Morasso still managed to fight his way into the box every couple of months. We’d always lived in peace with the black and Puerto Rican crews—mainly because we weren’t competing with them—but Morasso’s attitude got us into one beef after another. It finally built up to the point where I lost control of my temper and kicked the crap out of him. It happened out on the courts after he told a Muslim that Jesus liked to fuck Muhammad in the ass. That Muhammad spent his time in heaven bent over and begging for more.

There were over a hundred Black Muslims in Cortlandt at the time and they wanted satisfaction. I gave it to them, though I wasn’t thinking about them when I went off on Tony Morasso. I was so mad, I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. Eddie tried to get between us, but I tossed him away like he was a sack of potatoes. If I’d had a real weapon instead of a piece of firewood, I think I would have killed Tony Morasso. But I didn’t and the best I could do was bust his head open before the boys pulled me off.

Eddie was pissed, but like any other convict, he had to accept the reality of the situation. Eddie needed me (or, so he said) for my brains as much as he needed Morasso for his ferocity. My cause wasn’t hurt by the fact that Morasso’s beating had worked out well for the whole crew. The Muslims were accepting it as a kind of blood payment for his big mouth. As for me, my only problem was that Tony would probably try to kill me when they took off the casts. Even when Eddie returned from a bedside visit with a promise of no retaliation, I continued to prepare for war.

But Eddie was right on the money this time. Not only didn’t Morasso want to kill me, he was actually afraid of me. I understood that fear lay at the bottom of Tony Morasso’s violence, but Tony had always expressed his fear by trying to exterminate the supposed source. Now he kept as far away from me as possible, even though he renewed his war on the rest of the prison population. When we were together on the courts, he couldn’t even look me in the eye. I could have taken advantage of the situation, but I never tried. I was heavy into school at the time and glad to be left alone.

The truth hit me as I stepped into the shower, the same shower where I’d confronted old Calvin. Eddie Conte had begun planning this job before he left Cortlandt. While the rest of us were cutting up pepperoni for the spaghetti sauce, he was putting the pieces together. Tony Morasso had been one of those pieces, and it was no coincidence that he and Eddie left Cortlandt within a week of each other. I was a piece, too. That’s why Eddie had spent hours trying to convince me to call him as soon as I got out. Eddie needed someone to control Morasso and I was the man with the track record.

All my fantasies of a straight life went the way of the water when I turned the shower off. Right down the drain. It just wasn’t happening and that was that. I was back to being a criminal and the role felt as comfortable as an old pair of jeans. For the first time, I really felt like I’d gotten out of prison. Even though my head kept telling me that I was turning onto a dead-end street, I was rocked with emotion. Free at last. Free at last. Taking the easy way out. Made even easier by the simple truth that it was the only way out.