And me too, me too Brother John. My life is the amazing truth. Like Dad says “I put down one foot on the Road of Regret, and set out on my journey.”
Just to sketch out the last four years—broke, lost, detox, homeless in Texas, shot in the ribs by a thirty-eight, mooching off the charity of Dad in Ukiah, detox again, run over (I think, I’m pretty sure, I can’t remember) then shot again, and detox right now one more time again. Might’ve been one or two more detox trips and humiliating vacations at Dad’s in there. Shot twice by the same guy, first he just grazed me when I was stealing his money and coke, second time he hunted me up and got me in the shoulder with a twenty-two derringer. Those twenty-two long-rifles HURT. I pity the folks who get the experience of the bigger calibers. Guarantee you a forty-four would take the arm right off a wiry sort of guy like me. More than once I’ve woke up with some medical professional saying, “You should be dead.”
That’s what it’s gonna say on my gravestone—
“I Should Be Dead”
Your Brother In Christ,
Cass
You hop into a car, race off in no particular direction, and blam, hit a power pole. Then it’s off to jail. I remember a monstrous tangle of arms and legs and fists, with me at the bottom gouging at eyes and doing my utmost to mangle throats, but I arrived at the facility without a scratch or a bruise. I must have been easy to subdue. The following Monday I pled guilty to disturbing the peace and malicious mischief, reduced from felony vehicular theft and resisting arrest because—well, because all this occurs on another planet, the planet of Thanksgiving, 1967. I was eighteen and hadn’t been in too much trouble. I was sentenced to forty-one days.
This was a county lockup, with its ground level devoted to the intake area and the offices and so on, and above that two levels for inmates. They put me on the lower tier among the rowdies and thugs. “Down here,” the deputy promised me, “if you sleep late, you’ll get your breakfast swiped.” The air smelled like disinfectant and something else that was meant to be killed by disinfectant. The cells stayed open, and we were free to go in and out and congregate in the central area or stroll on the catwalk that girded the whole tier. This resulted in a lot of wandering around by as many as twenty men in denim pants and blue work shirts and rubber-soled canvas moccasins, a lot of pacing and stopping, and leaning and sitting, and getting up and pacing again. Most of us would have fit in perfectly in a psych ward. Many of us had already been there. I certainly had.
My cellmate was an older guy, late forties, with a bald head and a bowling-ball paunch, awaiting final disposition and sentencing. When I asked him sentencing for what, he told me, “something juicy.” My second night there I overheard him talking to Donald Dundun, a boy about my age who had a habit of wandering the catwalk after lights-out, climbing on the bars and propping himself in cell doorways, stretching out his arms and legs, spread-eagling himself against the jambs and suspending himself in the air that way, and striking up idiotic conversations.
“My attorney already made the deal,” I heard my cellmate tell Dundun. “I’m waiting for a date to go to court and plead out to twenty-five years. I’ll get released the day I start drawing my Social Security.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Dundun said, “what are you down for?”
“A misunderstanding with the wife.”
“Ho ho! Maybe you can talk to mine!” Dundun danced away, apelike, and left us alone. He’d been caught leaving a third-story apartment by the window. He wanted to stay in shape for future high-elevation work.
The sounds of the cellblock faded, the last stray remarks, the thumping and coughing, and the bunkmate below me said, “You’re the one they call Dink, right?”
“I have another name,” I said. I lay in the top bunk, talking to the metal wall inches from my lips.
“Not in here you don’t.”
“What’s yours?”
“Strangler Bob.”
After a while I peeked over the bunk’s edge and studied the face below me, now only a black oval, like a fencer’s mask, and because I stared too long in the dark, the face began to boil and writhe.
The lower tier’s standout resident was a young giant with a blond pompadour hairdo and an urchin’s face—apple cheeks, fat forehead, happy blue eyes. The jailers called him Michael, but he referred to himself as Jocko, and the other prisoners did too. Jocko hustled around all day looking for somebody to listen to his opinions or, even better, arm-wrestle him. He said he’d been in county jails here and there a total of eighteen times, never for shorter than thirty days. He was not yet twenty-one. This time he’d been arrested for giving a man some well-deserved punishment in the dining area of the Howard Johnson’s, which he described as the wrong kind of restaurant for that. Jocko knew all the deputies and staff around the jailhouse. He whispered to me that the sheriff’s wife, who worked downstairs in the administrative office, had many times propositioned him. He lacked any ambition or strategy for crowning himself king of the cellblock, but he was nevertheless a star, and the lesser lights constellated around him. “Zit-suckers,” he called them.
My first morning on the tier I did sleep through breakfast, and somebody did steal mine. After that I had no trouble rousing myself for the first meal, because other than the arrival of food we had nothing in our lives to look forward to, and the hunger we felt in that place was more ferocious than any infant’s. Corn flakes for breakfast. Lunch: baloney on white. For dinner, one of the canned creations of Chef Boyardee, or, on lucky days, Dinty Moore. The most wonderful meals I’ve ever tasted.
After lunch most days Jocko organized a poker game that worked as follows: Hands of five-card draw would be dealt out and the draw accomplished, and the player with the highest hand got the privilege of slugging each of the others in the meat of his shoulder with such a smack it echoed around the metal environment. Only half a dozen prisoners took part. The rest of us could see that damage was being done. I kept to the farthest margins. I stood five-seven and weighed a hundred and twenty. As previously acknowledged, my nickname seemed to be “Dink”—not my choice.
One guy I never heard addressed by any name. He had no friends, never said hi or what’s happening. He spent hours shuffling pigeon-toed around the catwalk, his skinny frame clenched and twisted by inner tension, throwing punches at the level of his waist as if pummeling an invisible child while whispering, “You sonofabitch fuckin pig, you fuckin cop,” punctuating his speeches with explosive sound effects: “shhssprgagahaBLAMMO!” He had signal-flag ears, a chinless chin, scrunched forehead, his whole little face rushing out onto a really big nose, a regular beak—a face like a Mardi Gras mask. After his episodes he sat on the floor, rolling the back of his head from side to side against the steel rivets in the wall. The others watched him from a distance. But closely.
Early in December, on an afternoon proceeding no differently from any other afternoon as far as I could see, as usual very slowly unmasking itself as a damnation without end, Jocko screamed, “Fifty-two pickup!” and scattered the cards in the air and left the central area and disappeared into his cell. It was that moment in the day when time itself grew outrageously lopsided, getting farther and farther from lunch but somehow no closer to supper, and the bars became harder than iron, and you really felt locked up. The whole tier—common area, surrounding cells, and the catwalk enclosing everything—wasn’t much larger than a basketball court, and anybody in there could have told you that if you went promenading on the catwalk, two hundred sixty steps would bring you back to where you started. It was the moment for another nap, or for staring at the television. But this day the card players, weary and sore and absent a leader, turned their eyes toward the rest of us, and as soon as they landed on the nameless one, the crazy boy with the Mardi Gras face, we could feel a quickening, an igniting of certain materials that had been swimming around in our atmosphere all along.
The poker players were well into their twenties, a couple in their thirties, men awaiting tria
l for felonies or serving lengthy misdemeanor time. “Zit-suckers,” Jocko called them, but today these six or seven men who played card games with their fists—including, today, Donald Dundun—were playing an even crazier game out on the catwalk, making themselves heard, hollering back and forth as they stalked the perimeter and took up positions on the outermost points of the compass, this handful of them commanding the whole cellblock and talking only about the kid, conspiring against his life while he watched TV and pretended not to hear.
“Come out on the catwalk.” But he wouldn’t come.
“Come on—it won’t hurt.”
Strangler Bob and I sat in our cell, side by side on his bunk. I didn’t want to try and climb into mine because I was afraid to move.
“Somebody push the button!”
“Who said that?”
The boy was out of his chair now, and halfway to the button. “I didn’t say it.”
Dundun said, “Don’t push it.”
“I won’t.”
“Then who said push it?”
The big red button waited on the catwalk’s wall between the electric cigarette lighter and the clanging door to the rest of the building, the same door through which our meals arrived, and in case of any trouble, this button would alert the deputies downstairs. But there was usually a sentry, one prisoner or another, posted beside the button to make sure it got no use.
Dundun made himself the sentry now. “Don’t try it.”
“I said I wasn’t going to.”
With his primitive hair and compact musculature, Dundun looked like a nasty little Neanderthal. “You’d better just face the situation.”
The boy went back to the central area and sat down. He grabbed the seat of his chair with both hands and pretended to watch the TV bracketed to the corner of the room.
Dundun followed the boy and stood beside his chair. Together they watched a commercial for half a minute before Dundun reminded him, “What has to happen, has to happen.”
“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” the boy said.
Jocko lost his cool. He pretty well combusted in his cell and came out already burning alive. Leapt onto one of the two long dining tables and stood there looking at the ceiling, or the heavens, somewhat like a movie star in a climactic scene, and allowed a terrific energy to consume and become him.
Whether because he hated the idea of killing the crazy boy or because he thought they were taking too long to do it—well, he wasn’t making it clear where he stood, except in the most general way: “I have HAD it!” Standing on the table, he lifted his arms and strained against invisible bars. He really was enormous, both muscular and overfed, looked fashioned from balloons, at least usually, but at this moment looked sculpted from quivering stone, his face plum-purple under the heap of yellow hair. “I have HAD it!” With a certain grace he stepped from tabletop, to chair, to floor. He marched around with vicious movements, crushing hallucinatory animals. His footsteps thundered on the catwalk. “I have HAD it. HAD it. HAD it.”
No one knew what to make of these fireworks. Whatever its motive, Jocko’s display had a quelling effect on the scene, if only because we all knew the guards were hearing it. Through the afternoon Jocko settled down by very slow degrees, and the next day he was his obnoxious, overly fraternal, scary former self again.
In the meantime, on this afternoon of the conspiracy against the kid with no name, the others went from blatantly murderous to ruminative and confused, and their plan for assassination climaxed in nothing more violent than sneaking up behind the boy on tiptoe and shooting rubber bands at the back of his head while he dedicated all his focus to The Newlywed Game and refused to flinch, refused to give them the satisfaction. The next morning the deputies called the boy away from his breakfast and moved him to the upper tier.
Rubber bands were permitted, yes. Books, magazines, candy, fruit—also cigarettes, if someone brought them to us, and if they didn’t, then every two or three days the county provided each of its prisoners a packet of rough-cut tobacco called Prince Albert and a sheaf of cigarette papers—remember, 1967. Pets and children wandered loose in the streets. Respected citizens threw their litter anywhere. As for us lawbreakers, we lit our smokes on a pushbutton electric hotwire bolted to the cellblock wall.
Donald Dundun showed me how to roll a cigarette. Dundun came from the trailer courts, and I was middle-class gone crazy, but we passed the time together freely because we both had long hair and chased after any kind of intoxicating substance. Dundun, only nineteen, already displayed up and down both his arms the tattooed veins of a hope-to-die heroin addict. The same went for BD, a boy who arrived the week before Christmas. We knew him only as “BD”. “My name cannot be pronounced, it can only be spelled.” That was his dodge. I, on the other hand, didn’t know the meaning of my own handle, “Dink.” Some grouchy, puffy-eyed prisoner would walk by, look at me, and say, “Dink.”
Dundun was short and muscled, I was short and puny, and BD was the tallest man in the jail, with a thick body that tapered up toward freakishly narrow shoulders. His head, however, was pretty large, with a curly brown mane. On the outs with his girlfriend, and consequently drunk, he’d decided to burgle a tavern. In the wee hours after closing time he’d climbed onto the roof with some tools to see if any way in could be found, stepped through the panes of a skylight, and landed flat on his face on the billiard table sixteen feet below; and the police woke him up.
BD didn’t seem any worse for his plunge. It was understood he’d be collected soon and taken to the hospital and checked for invisible damage, but days passed, and it grew obvious he’d been forgotten.
Dundun, BD and I formed a congress and became the Three Musketeers—no hijinks or swashbuckling, just hour upon hour of pointless conversation, misshapen cigarettes, and lethargy.
BD told us he had a little brother, still in high school, who sold psychedelic drugs to his classmates. This brother came to visit BD and left him a hotrod magazine, one page of which he’d soaked in what he told BD was psilocybin, but was likelier just, BD figured, LSD plus some sort of large-animal veterinary tranquilizer. In any case: BD was most generous. He tore the page from the magazine, divided it into thirds, and shared one third with me and one with Donald Dundun, offering us this shredded contraband as a surprise on Christmas Eve. We gave away our suppers and choked down the paper on empty stomachs and waited to get lost. Jocko, the blond blimp, said, “God dang, your lips are black. And yours—and yours. Lemme see your tongue. What is the story? Did you catch the plague or something?”
“You got three extra suppers, so don’t worry about it.”—Jocko had eaten all three of our meals, plus his own.
BD came from the town of Oskaloosa about eighty miles away. A lot of disorderly characters rattled loose from there and ended up in Johnson County, often in the Johnson County jail. Prior to this encounter I hadn’t known BD, but I was acquainted with his girlfriend Viola Percy, who lived right there in our town, in fact in the neighborhood of slum apartments where I myself had spent the summer—a formidable, desirable female in her late twenties, with a couple of tiny kids and a monthly stipend from the welfare department or Social Security, altogether an excellent woman to have in your corner. But Viola, whom BD described as both an angel and a devil, both the sickness and the cure, refused to visit him at the lockup, wouldn’t even talk to him. “The situation that got Viola Percy so mad at me,” BD told us, “was that I fucked Chuckie Charleson’s wife—but,” he hastened to say, “only once, and practically by accident. I dropped by Chuckie’s just to say hi, but he was shopping for shoes or something, and there’s his wife all bored and itchy, and pretty soon we did the evil deed. And when I left the house, there was Chuckie sitting in his car out front drinking a beer and puffing on a Kool. Parked right behind my rig. Probably sitting there the whole time me and Janet are rolling around in his bed. And when I open the door to my truck, he flashes me the finger. And he’s crying. Well, I feel sorry for Chuckie that he
got married to a whore and a nympho, but shouldn’t that be his own shit to carry? So I shut the door and drive off, and you figure that’s the end of it. But no. Charlie has to go and tell Viola. God! It baffles me! Running to a guy’s woman and saying, ‘Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.’ It’s so sleazy, and so wrong, and so tiny. As a logical result, me and this guy Ed Peavey—do you know Ed Peavey?”—I had heard of him. Nobody else had.—“Okay, one guy’s heard of Ed Peavey. Anyway, me and Ed Peavey, we dropped by Chuckie’s, and we said to him, ‘Chuckie, hey, even if you’re a compulsive snitch and a certified eunuch, no hard feelings. We’ve got a case of beer, so let’s be friends and go check out the river and sit in the shade and get drunk or something,’ and we got him in my truck and took him maybe ten miles out of town on the Old Highway, and I stuck a gun in his ear and Ed wrestled off his pants and his undies and his shoes and socks and we drove off and left old Chuckie walking barefoot down the road like that toward town in just his teeshirt with his not very attractive ass hanging out. But…Viola. Viola will not forgive, and Viola will not forget. Hey. Is it snowing in here?”