The Fortress of Solitude (68 page)

Next you get the whole Horatio Alger bit. Guys taking interest in their appearance for the first time—they’ve never before had an hour to themselves, never gotten clean, never went a day without drugs. Walk in howling for a hit of rock, but it’s not coming. That first lockup is a glimpse in the mirror. The older men have ways, ideologies—jailhouse lawyer, Muslim, player or pimp, or the national gangs, Latin Kings, Nietas, Bloods—and every soul’s got a rap, talking endlessly about respect. Nobody’s without a hustle or an affiliation, even as they speak of self-preservation by relying on nobody. Maintaining your space, staying out of debt. No arrears to anyone, that’s the universal principle. So naturally everyone’s trying to loan you cigarettes the first day, two-to-one interest: that’s arrears, son.

Every body’s got a layer of muscle too. Then there’s you, scrawny freak from the street, ninety pounds once you beat the cold turkey.

You’re thinking no arrears but the Riker’s barber gives you a good haircut and then whispers
You owe me half a pack, brother
, and you don’t even argue, you’re just grateful, because you looked so screwed up before he fixed you.

Rikers provides the first audition: What’s your hustle to be? Watches? Faggots? Drugs? Or just broker advice and cigarettes, narrate stories that don’t ever finish, Jailhouse Scheherazade?

This island’s best scam Dose stumbled into, though, his first time, between sentencing and transfer upstate. That September, with a nod to Senior’s ghost, Dose had checked
Hebrew
on his intake form. The CO didn’t blink, just told him when and where services were held. Dose forgot it completely until the winter holidays, when he was issued a box of kosher matzo at dinner and allowed to take it back into the dorms. Some rabbinical authority must have leaned hard to get this perk grandfathered in—whatever the source, the matzo’s an absurd windfall, each day a full box that could keep him snacking a week.

Dose’s bunkmate that December was a hard-ass he knew from the neighborhood, a cat he used to see looming around the Albee Square Mall, selling cakes and pushing pamphlets, dressed like Malcolm X. Just a bullshit Five Percenter out on the street, the dude had actually taken to the study of Islam when he got inside: every five in the morning he and his homies are in the dayroom going
Allah, Allah
on their knees. Now it’s Ramadan, and the motherfucker is starving, since during festival week the Muslims can’t eat before sundown. At Riker’s this means missing all three meals, sitting on your bunk while everyone else is taken out for the five o’clock dinner. So Dose slips him a box of the matzo, and then another for his friends—he’s got a supply under his bunk by now—which wins those cats over quick. He doesn’t even ask for packs in return, figuring he’ll have the Nation watching his back from now on. So a fake black Jew plays Santa Claus to a bunch of famished Muslims: Riker’s logic.

Elmira.

Each institution carries previous incarnations, like sluggish rivers with another century’s silt at their bottoms. Correctional reforms, innovations in prisonology tested and discarded, all these old uses for the same walls leave vibes. Everyone knows Sing Sing’s the juice house, home of the chair, even when capital punishment was abolished the place just has death-row radiation in its steel. Auburn and Philadelphia’s Eastern State are the birthplaces of solitary, stone tombs for driving men into self-hells—though the new supermaxes are working to make Auburn look silly.

Attica’s just bat shit, like
Apocalypse Now
.

Elmira was once juvenile detention, and though it’s officially phased out, they still lean to the young there, like they’re doing you a favor. More lately it’s replaced Sing Sing as the state’s reception center, where you’re tested and classified for placement elsewhere. Your educational level, plus your score on a gross aptitude test, determines what you’ll be paid the entire time you’re employed inside—forty cents, seventy cents an hour. You might be a janitor or trusty, hand out the soap on the block, for ten years, based on an hour’s scrutiny here. Then, having been scoured for hints of gang colors, you’re scattered to the far corners, away from any suspected homeboys. Men serve whole terms at Elmira, not uncommonly; nevertheless, this presumption of just passing through, combined with an air of boys’ prison, makes Elmira You-Ain’t-Seen-Nothing-Yet House. There’s an undertone of
Shut up, boy, count yourself lucky you here.
As though it could get any worse.

Dose spent four years inside Elmira’s walls, like turning the pockets of his youthful self inside out. As on Dean Street, he made himself an old hand, an inside-track man, overnight. He was extravagant with lore, goofy with it, telling men twice his age how to operate the system he’d hardly seen firsthand. All Dose needed to know, really, he learned his first day on Elmira’s yard, at the bench, when he found the free weights fused to the crossbar, so they couldn’t be stolen or used to crush a skull. In other words, you’d best have gotten pumped quickly at Riker’s or you wouldn’t even be able to budge the set here. Plus if you weren’t already a certain size the dudes around the bench won’t let you near it. So much for the illusion your fate was yet untold. Any forking path was further behind you on your journey, further back than you dared guess.

Career.

At Elmira Dose turned himself into a jailhouse artist. Like Riker matzos, the career was a thing he stumbled into. At a table in the dayroom, he’d been curled in an introspective shell around a series of notebook pages, sketching, in blue ballpoint, elaborately rendered designs for train cars of the mind, in blazing colors supplied only
by
the mind. He’d been working the hardest at a top-to-bottom with a Valentine’s theme: goopy bulging hearts speared by feathered arrows, shot by a Porky Pig cherub in Nike high-tops.

A stony-eyed brother in net muscle shirt and doo-rag, one Dose had so far assiduously avoided, suddenly lurched at his shoulder, startling him. The brother pushed a forefinger at the Valentine page.

“Yo, that shit’s
nice
.”

“Thanks.”

“You could do me something like that? For my girl?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Put me and her name together. From Raf to Junebug.”

“Sure.”

“Put it around the edge of a paper, man. So I can write inside.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“How much?”

Dose shrugged.

“Four packs,” grunted Raf.

Raf was one of those who, having likely neglected or even slapped around his girl in his free life, became a romantic inside. What, apart from love talk, flowery letters, promises of marriage, did a man have to offer, if he wished to keep a woman visiting, or from making time with Jody or running away with his kid? Raf had gone through his little vocabulary of woo in a phone call or two, so gestures like the decorated stationery were increasingly urgent. Possibly he felt Junebug turning from him. Possibly her visits had slowed. He commissioned from Dose a series of ornately inscribed love cards, graffiti Hallmark.

One evening Dose had the wit to say: “This one’s free, man.”

Raf narrowed his eyes:
No arrears
was the message flashing in them.
Don’t play me, man
.

“Just don’t mail it right away, okay? Show it around to the brothers.” Raf sat at the Bloods’ table at dinner, an unapproachable zone of latent violence. “Say who did it for you.”

Raf smiled now, getting it. “Aight, Dog. I could do that f’you.”

Dose hadn’t taken long to see that the hand-drawn posters and logos and primitive porn scotch-taped to so many bunk walls were the work of just a few prisoners, and the rest of the population customers of those few. No reason not to crack this wider market—his cards for Raf were head and shoulders above the usual crap, which mostly resembled tracings from 1950s comic books. Graffiti stylings, those were what elicited the oohs and ahs.

Sure enough, a little promotional savvy brought the flood. Dose found himself doodling borders for any number of love letters—the sheer flood of woo being pointlessly pitched from behind stone walls and steel bars could make you dizzy if you dwelled on it. Every one of these retrofitted paramours was a former ho-slappin’ mack daddy, now down on one knee. Dose tried not to learn too much about who was really getting mail back, or visitors, or even their phone calls answered.

But Valentines were only a feature of the market: Dose did hand-over-fist business in cardboard frames for photographs of loved ones, and burner-style name tags on notebook sheets for personalizing bunk spaces—anyone who saw one would say
Yo, I gotta get down with that
, and get in line during next rec. He manufactured custom porn, homemade Tijuana Bibles featuring, for instance, Crockett and Tubbs nailing Madonna, whatever the customer wanted, the customer was always right. He drew prototypes for tattoos, which ballpoint-pen tattooists transferred to biceps and thighs and chests. Dose would see men he didn’t know in the commissary line, wearing his tags on their bodies. Call him King of Elmira. Sometimes it threw him back to Boy Scout days, as if he could get a merit badge for Tit Art or Tattoo.

A Puerto Rican kid asked Dose to personalize one of the system’s standard-issue white T-shirts. He wanted a cartoon of himself, palms turned outward in an expression of helplessness, and the slogan
TEN TO LIFE?!?
Sad but true, the kid wished to wear it, so Dose knocked it out, bestowed the kid big oval Felix the Cat eyes, not bad if he said so himself. The next day an older black CO named Carroll, ordinarily a stand-up dude, appeared at Dose’s cell.

“Stand out for search,” said Carroll.

“What up, man?”

“Put a sock in it and stand out.”

Carroll emerged from his bunk search with all of Dose’s art supplies, plus ten packs of coffin nails Dose had stockpiled. “I have to seize these materials and write you up,” he said. “Holding more than six packs is an infraction.”

“Dang, take the butts, but that’s my drawing shit.”

“Listen, Rude. You make this shirt?” Carroll showed Ten-to-Life’s T, which he’d had balled in his back pocket.

“What if I did?”

Carroll shook his jowly head, weary with all he’d seen in his days. “You’re risking seven years for attempted escape for altering a garment.”

Dose started over, assembling new materials on credit, and leaving all garments unaltered this time around. The second assault on his enterprise came a few weeks after he resumed, at the hands of the Astacio brothers: two older Hispanic jailhouse artists, either real brothers or not, maybe cousins. No one knew, though both were short and chubby, and both wore their hair in a net with an oily knot at the neck. The Astacios worked in a truly pathetic Coney Island–tattoo style, their lettering of any slogans or monikers as crude as a woodcut. Without troubling to notice, Dose had been suffocating their livelihood, so the brothers began stepping up on him, in the food line, in the commissary line, on the yard. They’d growl animalistically, something about quit stealing their customers—as if Dose was expected to screen requests:
You don’t happen to be clientele of the esteemed Astacios?
, some shit like that. Dose only pretended not to understand, like they were speaking Spanish. Then Ramon Astacio stepped up on him at a urinal, in an abruptly vacated F-gallery shower.

Ramon hemmed in near to Dose, now seeming not to have the use of language at all, only body English. He opened his smile and showed why: he was twirling a razor blade in his mouth, flipping it with his tongue like a cheerleader knuckling a baton.

Dose flipped, a year’s accumulated fear brimming in him, the first rage he’d opened himself to feel since expelling the bullet in Senior’s direction. He threw an elbow and hung Ramon on the jaw, causing him to bite on the ritually displayed blade. The move was triumphant and a mistake. As in a yoking, there were rules to follow, an art of encounters. Threat had a rhetoric. Ramon might have a mouthful of his own blood, but Dose had surrendered the rudder of the moment.

A man didn’t just hit another man unless he could go all the way and kill him, and this was not the place Dose had staked out for himself.

Now he rushed from the shower, past Noel, the other brother, sentry at the door.

At dinner that night Ramon was absent and the word buzzing through the hall was he was getting his mouth sewn. Noel sat at the Nietas’ table and he and some of the Nietas were offering heavy glares. Dose knew he would have to move eventually and saw no margin in waiting, so he went right at the unthinkable, and approached the Bloods’ table. Not directly to Raf, but to the place where King Blood sat. It took gulping back his heartbeat to do it.

“I want to apologize for disturbing your meal,” he told King Blood. “But I’ve got trouble and I have to ask if I could speak to Raf.”

King Blood didn’t look from his tray, as if they were all working from a script too familiar to bother dramatizing.

“This a question of mercy, or you looking to do business?”

“Business,” said Dose.

“Go ahead,” said King Blood, only after an appreciable pause, time enough for any pair of eyes in the room to see it was Dose who’d come to them and been made to wait trembling for an answer.

So it was that Raf became Dose’s protector and broker, taking fifty percent out of any payment, and stockpiling a certain vein of big-titted poster work for private dispersal among the Bloods network. In an unseen deal some top-level Blood had a word with some top-level Nieta and the Astacios melted away. The brothers only shot Dose dartlike glances when they were certain no one saw, Ramon salaciously licking his teeth with his scarred tongue, wanting Dose to see the badge he’d awarded and consider its implications.

But Raf was big and strong, and devoted, and so Dose’s safety at Elmira was secured. Dose was one of his several mules; the others dealt “trees”—tight-rolled cheeba sticks, cut with mentholated tobacco to stretch the ingredient—and he would slip Dose a fistful of these once in a while, a small perk. Dose had arrived at a policy of no dope inside, witnessing the rapid spiral of arrears this led to, but getting stoned on the gratis trees was a safe exception. Raf also turned out not to be so faithful to the recipient of his incessant Valentines that he didn’t want his dick sucked a couple of times, and then to suck Dose’s in return once they trusted one another. The Bloods had a broom closet permanently bought for more or less this exact purpose. Dose learned to admire how Raf could want to stretch a suckjob out to defeat time, like relishing a shaggy-dog story. If he even came to crave it a little, in both directions, find himself as entranced by the tensing in Raf’s lifter’s thighs as he was by the avidity of a mouth, that was fine, neither here nor there, not particularly telling. If there was one thing Dose had learned from his father—the Love Man resting on his laurels, lazily taking what came to the house, Horatio’s women or, on occasion, Horatio—it was that it wasn’t a big deal to suck a little dick now and then, so long as nobody girled you out. That had been Dose’s understanding the day Barrett Rude Junior walked in on his son with Dylan Ebdus: there were more things under the sun than what cats might get up to with one another if there were no women on the scene.