Women and Men (139 page)

Which isn’t your facts of prison life immortalized by girl sports writer that made research visit here to check out a black basketball joust in the yard and wound up giving us (surprise, surprise) the complete treatment: smells of clean steel and surplus soap, the hawk-song pigeon-voices, nutritional strategy, educational programs (if not the amazing chemistry that brought
you
here), license plates she had to touch like Braille, painting by the numbers on glass that some here learn, under-the-bunk postcard sales depicting our seldom-used sacrifice chapel, the individualized mail privileges too complicated for words, the resident writers, the guards’ blue blazers, the physical jeopardy step by step, the Rican family picnics (‘‘festivals"), the death-row chaplain’s safety-valve seminars but not the guru woman’s one-shot sex and diet rap, the Box Efrain did his farewell solo in for redecorating his cell—all data, from the dimensions of cells and inmates to rising cost per unit-con; all specifics from Anatomies of Anger in her top-dollar title, clear into dreams slept through by inmates then gladly given up to be published under this girl sports writer’s byline though her younger, chess-master house-husband did a downside rewrite and typed it for her—yet this latest exhaustive chapter on prison life is missing what /,
Foley,
had to tell:

and this not just your George Foley Economic Plan (documented for the eyes of our generous Chilean gentleman by private mail drop so private Efrain the bearer didn’t even feel it happen on a city street corner granted swirling with hookers, tourists, beggars, basketball hoopoe-wackoes blocking all lanes continuing out into the night of a thousand whistles the game they paid ten bucks a stub to see refereed in the Garden—and other messages Jim some worth it some not), but a greater thing even than the Economic Plan her prison piece missed was no less than the Way, the Way which swirls colloid in all of us, her too, by which Way and Chemistry we Get Through, though those who have it may not know they do:

as I told our gentleman from South America when he headed south to launch the Moon (smile), who thinks constantly of that southern continent some here abscond to on their nightmares—while he heart-targets with dignified rage and noble economy of word "that former country" he called his Chile to a certain anti-Castro Cuban inmate who we hear though (what with their political differences) doubt he has something going with—i.e., beyond that generous gentleman’s human interest, which you said wasn’t news (to you) yet not
no
news which no matter what my father says is
not good
news, but what mail does my father ever get?

Meanwhile, in lieu of news, Jim, we have on tap all economic learning the generous gentleman got out of Chile with, exiled from that stranded, coast-

WOMEN AND MEN

like nation that the anti-Castro (if he really is anti-Castro) Cuban in question recently spoke in my hearing about (in peril of his life inside, yet anxious for his wife and son he thinks of moving from a doubled-up apartment two blocks from the American Indian Museum in Manhattan to a new Hispanic quarter of Poughkeepsie)—and, in the same breath, spoke of
you,
Jim, as if you worried him (that nation concealing mountains and estuaries within its single-minded length, dense mines below rivers running with the cold blood of glaciers, a south pole of anti-land and a northern border hot in temper as in mercury)—oh all our Chilean gentleman knows more about than you and I of surplus value, skewed capacity, which brought him and I together by eavesdrop, mail, interview, colloid way, for I had felt he would need me, just as I am with you, Jim, in this, whatever it is.

Which leaves me often where I was, opening in the void, and if a mere vessel (like my mother said, meaning her Lord’s), my kind’s a vessel moving through a solid so long as in mid-trip you don’t come to and find yourself a chunk of fruit in the Jello Museum, and the light of my life if Miriam can’t get back to me might be having her own experience elsewhere that loving is more than being loved or "George, tell me a story, tell me anything."

So we have tabled for now the Foley Plan for this correctional facility, Jim; and so on into a new vein where a messenger came but didn’t know he was one.

And so on through all blocks of this multiple dwelling, this seventeen-hundred-toilet redoubt (for where there’s children you need plenty of toilets), walled by hills and woods (the trees in a book I have, and in the trees birds I think), walled by barns, brains, and moving figures I have heard—their limited-use autos, their working animals, all injecting tax dollars into the bird-pie to keep us and our ungodly potential at rest between the lines and from escaping this (strainer-with-built-in) jug where fourteen grand (you said, Jim, updating to ‘76 or so, my figures) pumped into each man’s annum inflates day and night as the Inside gets more inescapable (where the sale money’s spent—
from
the Inside), gets more cloudy, and so on. But in an adjacent vein—

(you with me? for believe that more than one of us are in touch with you, if only through your unused power—

(to get me
outa
here! (smile))

after our trip into the nuts, bolts, and budget lines of a scheme to make this jail more than a bird preserve so we who’re inside (not just I) grow into Insiders living to keep the Outside in its place—let’s say a messenger arrived not knowing he was one.

New vein after all Foley’s Wide Load to you of unused capacity (almost all we got here), trade-off bartering one-to-one hand-sewn shirts for another man’s talent to entertain a thousand people all by himself, one man’s instinct for engines for another man’s legal mind, a born chef coming out of the closet to inspire that tired genius with the green thumb; surplus value ploughing the collective heart back into the labor value of the use value, which is true value in the Foley prison economy still merely ho-hum to scanners of outgoing transmissions—hence all this has covered the coming of the messenger like all our talkers inside who never heard the rest is silence, who’ll tell you why they’re here if they ever find out. And, Jim, a different vein now—and we’ll trust that the correctional scanners of mail who never knew ol’ sex-box Premier K’s adage "A long wind that is too long forgets the mountain it has come down from," got gross-dipped with foregone lode of Foleynomics (constructive as jailhouse lawyers’ nit-picking here where cleanliness long since killed all nits but not the body oils) so that the above-mentioned correctional scanners didn’t comprehend Foleynomics (with its self-contained prison cooperatives of craft-skill, revenue management, marketing, and retreat) as part of the long-term continuum I’m really sending you, the shadow
thrown
by the words— and by now the scanner powers in this Multiple Dwelling that is Nowhere but walled inside Somewhere may have passed this particle transmission by, as it them; whereas my Dago friend Dante’s
Life Inside
got intercepted by our scanners on its way to a humor contest and Dante took them to federal court where you
also
have to talk fast only to have the judge tell him insanity was no defense of such writing and he should be ashamed to submit such a critique of authority when guys like him drove
authority
crazy not the other way around, and better go back and try again—which is why I contact you not mainly by word-unit or real-page but as I do, including voice-over and memory-merge and the twin-scopes to come. So in the case of
this
communique which can be as long as you want to be equal to, Jim, let’s hope them frogs have let us bugs limp past their slimy, froggy nose holes on one wing looking for air; so let’s assume the coast is clear. Look there, and there—if possible both at once. Stay with me; this was all you needed. Prison is not just full of murder or of bodies.

So what’s the issue, Jim, you visitor, me captive host? Me making sure you shtick around to the end, and no judge is going to send you off to jail because you took your eyes off the road, looked in the mirror, checked the nervous alternator or the fuel, looked at the passenger on your right to see she was still there, fellow-pro you said got you into this once-a-week experiment but how come you didn’t bring her, Jim?, I can see her so clear I know you love her.

So in a different vein, say the messenger arrived but didn’t know himself to be, and didn’t know the room. Yet this room was it, all right. Hadn’t he aimed for it, driving his rented car through the hills up tree-lined parkways we remember and down rock-bound hairpins so fine they are timeless, across trout pool, by a stream’s sheer rock with writing on it along tree-guarded parkways above New York taking our poisons and breathing back green oxygen—so giving back better than you get is the sign of a vegetable!

While because of the mail scanners I had to get here my way, by our full account of the Foley Plan for 5-to-20-year development of this retirement compound, prison, or, some bad days, all I know.

This here then is not just what you the pro with life experience asked us for, as once a statuesque woman asked of you when you didn’t, you said, pick up on what was really on her mind until you had blundered ahead and put your
self
to test. But you know I couldn’t fit it all onto one screen. And I didn’t come yet to my girlfriend Miriam’s father’s four-star garbage cans, or the space under the float at the Y camp one July, or a substitute teacher at my gorilla-training school; nor have I come yet to the guy with your name Jim but less hair, who slept through his own eleven-o’clock execution ‘cause nobody bothered to tell him his attorney got a routine stay from the afternoon judge! So maybe my communication to you here and now, this penetration of your head, Jim, by chain (clunk) reflection, given as
well
as written you from way back before I knew who you were, and half-unwritten now like primal scripts among many unsnarled (smile) thoughts, is what’s transmitted here by need, to put it in a nut’s hell (smile again), not some expose of prison life, its secret suicides posed as murders, its historic farts and mutterings in the night.

So maybe it’s not what I should have sent you, what you asked us for, you driving alone arriving from many times I felt; but the messenger I said has meanwhile passed his road signs and such signs of the Outside as the low guard-rail dividers we remember so close to the road that your fender bypasses the air between, unless you go faster, yes there’s a thing I miss. The guardrail divider that moves because you and the road move, always in the left lane ready to pass, and so close your left fender’s tracked on a point of the divider rail that’s always a few feet ahead though the fender looks like it’s touching, am I right?—and the optical flicker stream is enough to make you epileptic. Hear the pain of your steel-belted rubber (as on TV, which we get on Honor Block) rubbing out the road, turning gas into gas, eating it up. Messenger driving the highway to get to prison on time, through hills, valleys, forests, sheer rock, you name it, get there on time before his time is up, am I right? And I know that some of you out there dream of getting us out of here at last and us killing you for your time, but a guy in here can’t know for sure if silence means friends haven’t written because my mail’s been held up and that is why I’m connecting between the lines.

No Andes here, Jim, no lone Indian shepherds along the parkways and no work here for wild llamas watering head up head down, along the Chilean shore drinking straight brine (turning salt water to blood—now there’s economy for you). You’ve flown to far-flung climes, to seas, cities, mountains, seen only by astral projection which reached unprecedented range in New York State prison system if this bunk tourist hadn’t learned a better; doubtless you’ve woken up, Jim, in Southern Hemisphere with a girl on your arm, the two of you flying high, am I right?, rented car, the works—while I have been to Peru with Karl Marx in a footnote, the fine print’s how Foley snuck in.

No Andes here above New York, but make no mistake, our supposed messenger driving an old Indian trail had to pay attention to his driving at that sly twilight the Motor Vehicle authorities threaten us with, between night and day, each margin your last along the tree-lined roads and into the steep, rock-bound curves Slippery When Wet (you see I remember). I remember the road signs, Jim, the shapes alone, as the authorities like you to know them. Signs of the Outside. Signs that, when they’re put to you, are just shapes you could enter right into, never hear from you again ‘less you’re a messenger getting to prison on time.

Your
time, Jim. So taken for granted that it’s unknown to you who have it. Think of the problem it is spending yours, whereas our solution is to spend by doing. Good time, they call it. Time done. But take time to come, Jim.

Time well known by seventeen hundred wall calendars here and known so to the day and hour of future rain and shine that it decays into what I call a suspension where anything could fall out, looking for an opening, even past time, well how you gon’ teach Chemistry without a lab?

So let’s say the messenger’s got a purpose if he didn’t always see it. He had something his host wanted. But some of the criminal types waiting for him wanted not a message but to be
him.

They waited up against the walls at first in the long, one-hundred-odd-yard-long green concrete corridor with your white-line two-layer corridor long as the city block between the jugular training school I attended in my extreme youth and the brown-brick fire-escape tenement where I practically lived because my girl Miriam lived there with her family and she was my girl and practically my sister from seventh grade until I left school, and later so did she, if I’m going to tell about her.

You came into Room Four of what we call the South Forty in this our temporary home-retirement institute where you won’t need your rented, purchased, stolen on time, or second car, looked from face to face, you formerly of (let me introduce you) the Associated Press (was all I knew) and now on a once-a-week basis voluntarily deputized to a posse of criminal types unless you’re CIA—you walking into the room and the guys getting off jokes and kidding (like the kids that this place condemns them to stay) while they acted like they’re not paying attention to you—this pro in a suit, red tie, cordovan shoes, who’d come once before—how I got wind, who might best profit from the experience, the only new man at this second meeting of the group in this pocket of human waste imploded into a toxic mountain—and while the guys are kidding around and not (you might think) paying too much attention or when you stopped by the desk and took out your cigarettes and put them down on the desk I know I heard you say, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here," so quiet you maybe hadn’t decided to be heard. Right?