Women and Men (142 page)

Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to—did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.

Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where
he
was coming from, he was right.

I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.

Fill out—thank you in advance for filling out—the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one—smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.

Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam—I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college—listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go!—you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.

Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.

I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here—plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas
you
got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes—because there’s no reason you should open with us.

Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook—and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.

And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length—you laughed— closer still.

I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.

(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60
MPH
on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)

Well the night I met you, I was in the room ready for the messenger. The room he aimed for, though he was not entirely into his message. It was not just a room your course was set for.

Because Charlie, rounding us all up—because here you don’t sit down and put in a call to some guy in his cell that you want to meet with him later in the week, but you find the guy maybe in the mess hall, if he is not doing his own food trip or fasting; or you pass a message to somebody in his block—Charlie didn’t know I had heard Smitty’s tape of the prior meeting, and Charlie told me you said you sometimes felt you’d been unconscious a lot of your life, between bedrooms, pressrooms, twenty-some years of assignments, many small-scale units but no one overall shtik. Charlie said he could relate to it, because he says he is also very aware of his unconscious.

But Charlie did not say what I found on Smitty’s tape—that
you
were obviously into the unconscious and it was chemical.

So then I knew, you see; but, the first three, four sessions, I held off broaching this with you. You see I knew maybe more than you.

The South American in question; yes?

I had known he might contact me. I knew he might need me. Even me. But I could not say this in short when the workshop broke up at eight-twenty and the guys crowded round the desk.

Now why did I think that you were unaware of the message you were being used to convey from the South American to me? Your interest in the kernel of corn Juan had picked up in the yard seemed more than your interest in me, a bearer of other things.

But no, you were no go-between, Jim. And would not use someone, though I feel that first letter is getting scrambled with my longer second— and shortened, especially after your hoped-for visits.

But
I
know when I’m being treated like a person!

The guys felt this in you. Efrain came out with things I didn’t know he knew. Like the guys thought of you as a friend. Hang loose; no sweat; the guy’s in the business, he wants to share some of his shit, give something back. I could have told you they’d be saying before you knew it, Hey Jim you ever need someone taken care of on the outside, you let me know—hey did you ever cover a contract? how about armed robbery? Ever cover a war? (But you knew the Cuban contact of our Chilean gentleman had asked where you in particular were coming from.) One guy who never said a word before tells of sticking up a drugstore with a piece of wood and a Volkswagen waiting outside. I had never seen you before. I said, "Were you ever in Brazil?"

You turned at me and said hard factual stuff, but I felt that the messenger might be hearing double signals; and I know the message was meant for me while the response here must, in kind, include the cover: so do you recall you said quick-like, "I met Goulart before the coup. Some revolutionary
he
was!" All dollars and cents was what you said it was, the middle class losing their wages advantage over the working class, Goulart refusing to stabilize at the expense of the workers, so U.S. development money went to provincial anti-Goulart groups, the CIA went ahead via AFL-CIO to infiltrate Brazilian labor (listen, we ought to have a union, let the Teamsters take us on)—but it was all dollars and cents, you said, and liberals in Washington you said thought it was beautiful, undermining Goulart. ("A liberal," said Ahmed Williams who came one time in four, "is someone who wants for others what he doesn’t want for himself"—the talk gets abstract in here but penetrating.) All bucks, forget the change, you said.

Something’s wrong with that view, Jim. I sound like my mother, who always had high hopes for Miriam, whose own young mother had shared at least the Catholic faith.

Tell the South American he can get in touch with me direct.

(Thanks for filling out the correspondence form.)

He will understand, and I’ll get back to you whether or not you make it up here for that afternoon visit, be assured. Readers of outgoing mail say now and then they read these letters but when they get past first few lines like mine so little smut or legally inflammatory—and you ask does that teacher Ruth M. Heard ever write?

Well, she could
run,
I’ll say that; small, not too thin, thick around the shoulders, lithe arms, prominent head of curls and when she faced you, her azure eyes came at you and at you, which there’s more of to come, though you understand that my account of the Norseman economist’s view of woman and my fascination with the Scot financier of kings, projector of Mississippi schemes, demand-and-supply monetarist who was first a man and far beyond the moneys he dreamed in, all this, Jim, is no mere opening screen played upon those outgoing-mail scanners who when they’re at the end of their rope have been seen actually holding a page upside down like they’re looking for something. Perhaps, like us, to
do.

And so let us say they never got to the mythical messenger. No more than they the spendthrifts of this state’s at last account fourteen grand per inmate-annum (who can’t imagine the lights of that messenger’s car seen intermittently round curves, through trees, like a series of signals, signal fires, smoke signals) will find each the key to his own nature, that "invisible government," Jim, but not to be confused with your liberal nightmare, that CIA they call the "invisible government" right down to the "evenings" they sponsor. Which isn’t—if you can stand one prison inmate’s non-violent reality—the invisible government I mean (though you as a stranger even to yourself whose motion’s a way of waiting, know what I mean?) the skeleton key to what Jim Mayn can do: and this home wherever you go or are, the two the same. You would not go to a siege zone and expect immunity from snipers (or Cubans!) because you’re Press. Alcatraz is where it was, but now nobody home, not the Spaniards or the British, and the Indians who "landed" there were not the first ones there, and during their protest wrote their high slogans on its walls so to the passing ferry the walls might speak. The Feds, in essence they gave it back to the Indians, but the Indians didn’t want it, I said to you; you laughed at me seeing me anew and deja vu and I would be willing to be your reincarnation, if you let me. If I was to plan—thanks for sending back the correspondence form—to be elsewhere, like Outside, I would get my wish one day but arriving there victorious I might find nothing to occupy, it’s like that communication system world round we discussed, Jim, when maybe you got nothing to communicate, that’s what Ruth Heard once said.

And so I am here. Consumer of unseen leisure. A pat on the back for you that you don’t save letters much (you said—and I report—I the maker of carbons near-sighted reader of fine print practically on the end of my nose, in a book-lined study with grid-exposure on the west whence comes the mountain of my inspiration rumored in the stacks of force that one correspondent thinks is widely if slowly approaching, an old man sciencing radioactive weather, yes wrote
me
—and you boil all letters down in your mind, saving on head space since you doubted there could be as much unused brain capacity as the authorities are trying to make us believe. You saw me grin, man, I knew what you were saying. I who have diversified and know letters need to get lost if thrown away, just as I know what is small is better, idle need not be unused. But you don’t have to be so honest all the time with your new pen pals—Efrain, who’s writing a lot to his Iroquois girl sending her dreams; Smitty, who I wonder if he can smile with his eyes closed—please fill out the correspondence form—and if you write them you will find them very idealistic, Jim, souls, so with an exception here and there I wouldn’t expect these men to tell you their lives, if that is what you came for. Do we want
your
life?—there’s Shin, a Cambodian social worker (not assigned to prison), who seldom comes and come to think of it seldom writes except to apologize for not writing and to hint at problems in his personal life; so his marriage is on the rocks, maybe he’s got something going.

Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract!, in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together—soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all—which is their secret from themselves.

My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said—I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality . . . ? What are we going to do about it?"—yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!