Impossible Vacation (36 page)

I was fascinated by this, by the level of depravity I found myself so suddenly in. It was much more interesting than the casino activity—I guess because it didn’t have to do with money. Also I was surprised to find that something like that could happen so quickly, so fast, in America: that I could be Brewster North walking on the street, going home to my vibrating bed, and then suddenly be this prisoner, arrested for what I didn’t know—for coming from California? And strange to say, it was not anger that took me over so much as it was a deep sense of curiosity.

After a few hours in the holding tank, a guard came and took me to another room to book me. It was there that they fingerprinted me and took my photograph. I expected to be taken back to the holding tank, where I would try to make my one phone call to Meg and ask her to help me. But instead the guard led me down a long battleship-gray metal corridor, past a series of dormitory cells. Then he opened two big gray iron-barred doors and pushed me into a very large room filled with bunks and about thirty men sitting and standing
around in different positions all slowly turned and looked at me as though they’d been expecting me to come and join them.

The guard told me to choose a bunk. I took the first empty top bunk that I came to, then immediately lay down on it, covered my head with the stinky pillow, and softly cried for about twenty minutes. After crying, I came up more resigned to my new quarters. I looked around at my new home and all those very strange strangers in it, and I decided right then and there that I better start socializing and get to know them before they got to know me and noticed my New England accent and took me for a Boston Brahmin or, worse, a Harvard graduate, and crucified me at dawn.

So instead of talking to them, I just drifted among them, all through that large dormitory cell, trying to be as casual as possible, trying not to look like an educated weirdo they might want to crucify. As I did this I began to see that the men were sort of divided up into groups, or at least that’s how I began to perceive it. I divided them all up into professionals, night people, poets, madmen, and, last of all, losers. I did not put myself in any category outside of the one that might be called “I alone have escaped to tell you.”

The professionals were a very cautious and private group. They seemed to have consciously chosen a life of crime and were resigned to serving some time in jail as a consequence of that choice; it was their occupational hazard. They all seemed to be dealing with it like adults, without too much bitching or complaining. They had photos of their families and loved ones hanging on the walls beside their bunks. They were family men. They were dedicated criminal family men, and they spoke mainly in a rather dry legalese, a language that you might associate more with lawyers or lobbyists in Washington. They spoke without passion or imagination or love, and when I came too close to them, they’d just shut up and eye me with suspicion. After I moved on, they’d begin to talk again in low, secretive tones.

There were no windows to the outside world. It was a totally enclosed little world, with twenty-four-hour air conditioning belching down through a number of ceiling vents. At the back of the cell were two toilets without seats. They were completely exposed. There was no privacy. As I made my way around the cell I saw that some of the
prisoners who had bottom bunks had made their own privacy by taking the one blanket that had been issued them off their beds and hanging it from the top bunk, to make a little tentlike enclosure where they hid out all day. I came to call the men who lived behind those blankets the night people. That was their category. They were mostly black and spent the whole day sleeping behind their blankets and the whole night playing cards and gambling for push-ups. The lights of the cell were never turned off; they were on twenty-four hours a day, so the night people could play cards all night. And they were in great shape, particularly the ones who lost all the time, because they had to do the most push-ups.

There were really only two outstanding losers. The first was a man who was originally from Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. He had one of those consistently sad lives and had been in and out of jail since he was busted for passing bum checks at age eighteen. That was the same year his girlfriend was killed falling off the back of his motorcycle. After that he just kind of lost it and would spend his nights going down to Weirs Beach, where he would shoot off the mortar he had bought from a buddy who had brought it back from the Korean War. Then he became a truck driver, and when he was stopped outside of Vegas recently for a traffic violation, he gave the cop that stopped him a lot of lip, so the cop roughed him up and tore his leather jacket off him and threw it in a trash can, and when he told the cop to get it out of the trash the cop refused and hit him with a blackjack. Then he told the cop that if he hit him one more time he’d take the blackjack away from him and hit him back, and he did. So that was that, and he was in the slammer for a while. “I wish I had my fucking piece under my seat where it usually is,” he said. “I would have blown that fucking cop away.”

So this loser had been there on that bottom bunk for quite some time waiting for his trial to come up, and while he was there he had created a beautiful pencil mural on the wall behind his bunk. It was a drawing of all the things he loved—a New Hampshire covered bridge arching over a little stream, and bouncing like little cartoon figures down a New Hampshire country road, all headed toward the covered bridge, came his big semi truck, his old motorcycle, his mortar, and his piece, which looked like a hefty .45. There they all were,
dancing toward the covered bridge. The mural had no people, not even the ghost of his dead girlfriend, just a bunch of guns and machines headed for a covered bridge somewhere in New Hampshire. This man was sad, and under his sadness I could sense a deep, deep anger.

As for the other loser, I hardly got to know him because he was in and out of there so fast. He was a dark, wiry guy, maybe Mexican-American, with a little dark mustache. Just after he was brought in I noticed him madly scraping something in the corner. He was giving off a kind of frantic energy, and at first I thought he had some kind of drug paraphernalia over there that he was fixing to shoot up with, because I could see he was unzipping his jumpsuit and beginning to expose his torso. Then he got up and walked over to the barred doors and, with his jumpsuit now hanging off his hips, he called to the guards. Just as the guards came running, he lifted into the air what I could now see was the well-sharpened end of a coat hanger and brought it down full force into his side. His crimson blood gushed and ran down his dark skin. The metal coat hanger was sticking out like the bolts that stick out of Frankenstein’s head. The guards dragged him away, and then when they came back to check on the cell, one of the inmates said, “Did he die yet?” And the guard retorted, “If he hasn’t, he should. That’s the second time he’s pulled that shit on us.” Then everyone in the cell started yelling at the guards and calling them assholes, but the guards didn’t even respond or pay attention. They knew who had the power; they knew who was in charge. They were blond and big and looked like pleasant, smiling astronauts or like captains of some football team. They knew who had the power.

As for the madmen, there were two that I remember most. The first was also of Mexican descent, and he just loved to steal transport vehicles of all sorts—the greater the variety, the better. He was not only into stealing cars; he had stolen an army jeep, an army truck, a Greyhound bus, and, at last, the vehicle that had landed him in jail: a police plane. He told me how the police all chased him in their planes, broadcasting over speakers behind him, “Land that plane. This is the police. Land that plane.” His eyes lit up when he said, “Land that plane.” His eyes lit up like Shanti’s eyes when Shanti said, “Do it again.” I could tell he had a real good time stealing that police plane and that he hadn’t done it for the money, but for fun. His eyes shone
in a bright devilish way, a way that made me like his more than any other eyes in that prison. While listening to his story I could clearly see the image of him hunched over the joystick of that police plane. His story was like a bright cartoon, lighting up that bleak gray prison cell.

The other madman was as regular as some odd cuckoo clock going off every day around cocktail hour. He always told the same story, and it always came just before dinner, after a whole day of lying on his top bunk with a blanket pulled over his head. He would suddenly tear the blanket off and sit up and cry out to everyone, who ignored him, “You want to know how I got here? Well, I’ll tell you how I got here,” and he’d proceed with this great rapid-fire diatribe that went so fast you could hardly catch it. His story started somewhere in the South Bronx as a teenager and moved its way through many turbulent years to that Vegas jail.

Then, last of all, the poet, who was this young, sensitive con man. I got closer to him than anyone else in that cell, in the sense of having a dialogue with him. He was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old and was really only into petty conning. He was also writing poetry and rock-and-roll songs on the side. His crimes were relatively innocent and somewhat creative, most likely not committed exclusively for the money, at least not yet. That was soon to come. For instance, he had made copies of credit cards from discarded carbons he’d found in dumpsters behind restaurants and then with these new counterfeit credit cards he made long-distance calls to China just for fun, just to see if anyone was there. Oh, sure, he would have bought hi-fi equipment and cameras and stuff like that if he had a place to put them, but he didn’t. He was always on the move. He’d also do false setups, as he called them, to create parties. He loved parties, and no one could ever throw enough for him. He’d never had any as a kid. In fact, it was all for want of a party that he ended up in jail. He worked with his pretty sister and his buddy. That was their con team. His pretty sister would go into a casino bar and hang out until she was noticed by the owner or maître d’. She was pretty and hot, so she always got noticed real fast. When the owner started coming on to her, she let it all heat up real nice to the boiling point until the guy was about to make the big move. Then she’d give the cue to her brother and his
buddy to enter, and they’d come in and put on this great show. She would start squealing and crying, “I don’t believe it—it’s Mickey! It’s my long-lost brother, Mickey! What are you doing here? My God, I haven’t seen you in ten years! Oh, lord save us, this is a miracle, a true miracle! What are you doing here in Vegas, Mickey?” Then she’d burst into tears. She’d actually break down and cry, and nine times out of ten the owner of the club would be so impressed and moved by this rare coincidence, this joyous chance family reunion, that he would order champagne for all, and more champagne, until a big party would take place. But one day, after a number of these parties, Mickey got busted for drinking underage.

It was strange, but a part of me was fascinated by everything that was going on in that jail, and that part kept me from demanding my one phone call, although each day I put in a written request, and each day I received no response. Once I got over the fear that I was going to be raped, beaten, or persecuted, I was more at ease there. People didn’t seem to notice my New England accent, perhaps because I was listening more than I was talking. After all, I was in a prison suit just like everyone else, and I was even beginning to adopt a rather tough prison posture. At the same time, I really did want to get out, but for the first time in months I was experiencing a feeling of being centered. It was as though at last, because I was required to stay in one spot, I was able to enjoy it. I sensed that this was a necessary break from my perpetual motion. I now had a new order, a new force upon me. I’d been conscripted into a weird monastery in Las Vegas, and was being held there until all parts of me slowed down, stopped and grew into a stronger, calmer center. It was, I was sure, the daily, simple, ordering jail routine that did that.

They would wake us up at 5:30 a.m. Why so early I didn’t know. It was not as if there was a whole busy and productive day ahead. Perhaps they just wanted us to be awake so we could contemplate our crimes and suffer more for them. Maybe that’s what they meant by “doing time.” They did time to you. They made you feel time. That was the punishment. I still had not been charged so I would meditate upon all the minor sins and crimes of my life as I staggered along that early-morning line down to breakfast, the first of the day’s two meals. On the way down to the basement dining room, I would walk past
the one window that we could look out of, and as I passed I would see all of Vegas still going full steam, spinning and flashing at 5:30 in the morning. And never once did I wish I was out there. I was surprisingly relieved to be in that air-conditioned prison where I could think freely about all the places I was not in.

All the jail’s inmates were seated at breakfast at the same time, so that meant there were about two hundred and fifty men eating powdered scrambled eggs and grits and drinking very weak coffee together. After a rather subdued breakfast, we’d be herded back to our cells, where we would pace and smoke and sit and talk and pace and walk, never go out, maybe read an old tattered Ellery Queen paperback mystery book that came around on a little cart. It was as if every day was a rainy day in summer and we were all little kids shut inside, condemned to do our best to entertain ourselves until the sun came out again and Mom said we could go out and play.

But the thing that saved me the most from the monotony of those long lunchless days was writing letters. We were all allowed paper for letter writing and I took as much as I could get. I wrote one or two letters a day but never mailed them. Just writing them felt like enough, and besides, in most cases I didn’t know the addresses of the people I was writing to. I wrote a letter to Mom asking her to forgive me for running off to the Alamo Theatre in her hours of need and then I ended the letter with my fart story. I knew she’s find that funny, since she had a great history of it herself. I wrote Dad a letter thanking him for all his meat, all those great steak and roast beef dinners on Sunday and Monday nights. Then I thanked him for sending me to college and asked if he would lend me some money to pay my bail so I could get out of jail.