The bullpen around me was clean and bare, and filled with the naked faces of men who were guilty, except for the innocence in their hands.See , their hands said, as they scratched at stubbled jaws, or lay soddenly in laps, or hung outside the bars (why outside the bars?),see, this body I'm attached to may have done evil, but I'm innocent . The lily-white hands, so pure and free of guilt. I sat among them and wondered what I had done to get involved in this treadmill horror underneath the city of New York. I honestly thought I might go out of my mind at any moment.
From the larger marshalling room, outside the bullpen, sounds of typewriters and filing cabinets belied the fact that we were imprisoned. It sounded like an office, with busy little secretaries filing inconsequential reports. But it wasn't an office, it was the records-preparation area of the Tombs, and they were cataloguing human beings. Punch carding and numbering them, and with each black mark made by pencil or typewriter key, the humanity of the subject vanished a little more. Reduction to symbol and file, disappearance by folio and reference number. The cold, mechanical equations of salting a man away in a cell, and knowing which cell to go to when you want him. An iron, inflexible system, prone to error that can never be traced, that keeps a man in that cell or under those tons of steel and concrete for hours longer than he should be kept. The regimentation of callousness.
I could feel the entire weight of the city on me. I had been in custody for twelve hours now, and it was one automated step after another, with no opportunity to get humanity back into my actions. I was a cipher, one of a great string of bodies run through a computing system that would break me down into component parts and file me away like a piece of fruit in the proper bin.
Sitting in the bullpen, looking around me, trying to comprehend all the facets of what had befallen me, and at the same time trying to understand these others whose hands said they, too, were innocent, I was not so much a participant as a victim.
It had all happened so quickly, the arrest, the accusations, the dawning realization that this was not, indeed it was not, a hoax. All idea that this was an elaborate gag, rigged by my bohemian friends in the Village, had vanished like morning mist as the two police officers had hustled me into the unmarked squad car, and transported me to the Charles Street police station.
Now as I sat in the bullpen, grey and cold and filled with men who might have been the best or the worst of any culture—Who could tell, when the mechanical thumb of the System had pressed down on each, making each the same, all equal, all guilty save for the hands?—now I tried to recall every slightest memory and tactile sensation, every sight or snippet of sound, that had come to me since the officers had walked into my apartment.
We had gone down in the elevator at 95 Christopher, and the doorman, an easily-bought type named Jerry, was watching us with the beady ferret eyes of the short-line entrepreneur. "I've got some business to take care of, Jerry," I told him. "If my mother comes in, please ask her to call Miss Solomon." He nodded and smiled with that obsequious double-meaning known only to Manhattan doormen and bellboys. He knew something was up; I wasn't to learn till much laterhow much he had known, and how that could hang me up, nearly ruin my career…
They hustled me into an unmarked squad car, and started down Christopher Street to the Charles Street station house, just a few blocks away. "Hey, listen," I said, trying to get some hold on myself or the situation, "do you think I'll have to stay at the station very long?"
They tried to be helpful, and said something reassuring, but it didn't make me feel much better. I began to get the full idea that I justmight have to be locked up for a few hours, and the prospect did not entice me.
"Are you going to mention this narcotics thing?" I asked. They gave each other a brief, knowledgeable look, and the officer driving said, "No, I don't see any reason why we have to mention it at all. I don't think there's any doubt that was a phony charge from the start."
I felt better when they said that, and decided being open with them had been the smartest course. So if they weren't going to mention the junk nonsense, and they were satisfied I had the weapons for a perfectly valid reason, why was I being taken in?
I asked them.
"Because a complaint has been lodged," they said, simply. "Someone has raised a beef upstairs, and it's filtered down to us. Nowwe have to act on it." It was my first really chilling encounter with the mindless, soulless, heartless machinery of the law as practiced in a great metropolitan area.
"We have to do our job, orwe'll be in trouble," one of them added. I couldn't really blame them. They had homes and families to protect, too, and after all, what and who was I to them?
We arrived at the Charles Street precinct house, with the smell of the Hudson River and the docks flowing up the block to us. The Charles Street station, famed in song and story (and mentioned so notably in Gelber's play "The Connection"), is a great grey mass, completely blended into the surrounding warehouses and falling-down buildings. It almost seems to hunker, as though it were trying to go unnoticed in the street foliage. I've gone back to look at it many times, but each time I come away from it, the details fade and merge in my mind's eye, and all that is left is that inhospitable, grey dawdling mass.
That was the building into which they took me, a stranger and terribly afraid.
We went up the steps and into the cool interior. It had been drizzling outside, a formless, slanting sadness that collected along the gutters and ran over my shoes. It seemed appropriate, somehow. Now, as we came inside, the rain still seemed to be falling indoors. I knew it was only an illusion, but the windows high and fat on the walls carried the rain like paintings. It was cool but sterile in the main hall of the station, with that faint odor of lye or detergent or whatever it is they use to keep the floors dirty-antiseptic. The front desk was shoulder-high on me, and the Sergeant behind that desk looked up with a bored, uncaring nod to the two plainclothesmen. They exchanged words and the Sergeant, holding a thick black marking pencil (almost like a manuscript pencil), jerked his thumb toward the stairs. "Take 'im up to the detective section," he said.
One of the two officers gently tapped me on the bicep and I moved between them, one in front, one behind, up the stairs to the squad room.
The squad room was perhaps sixty or seventy feet long by thirty feet wide, with, a high ceiling, drab and colorless walls, a floor whose color was so grey, it must have been non-existent, and heavy light fixtures (the ones with the milk-glass globes,you know the kind) hanging down from the ceiling on thick chains.
Desks were scattered in a neat disorder, all across the room. Bulletin boards contained directives, circulars, wanted posters, departmental information and "cop cartoons" from various magazines. At the far left end of the room was a floor-to-ceiling barred enclosure, the "tank," where felons were summarily heaved until disposition could be made.
Two men were working at desks across from one another. One of the detectives was called by name, and the man looked up with the most everlastingly weary eyes I have ever seen.
"Hey," he said. It was a greeting, and a recognition, and not much else. The weary cop went back to his paperwork. A burst of static and some garbled code-numbers erupted from the squawk-box on the wall, but no one paid any attention. My two companions indicated a chair beside a desk, and I sat down. The two detectives who had been working at the desks looked up, almost at the same time, as though their heads had been worked by strings.
One of them said to my enforcers, "Listen, you want to hold down the fort till the Old Man gets in? We haven't had any dinner yet."
One of my cops nodded assent and the two detectives collated and tapped their papers into neat stacks, filed them away in drawers, and left the squad room. I lit a cigarette.
It wasn't bad, this waiting. There was almost a flavor of excitement about it. But I was beginning to suspect that it wasn't all going to be as simple as leaving my books with the officers and having them call me later when the matter came up. I had a suspicion I might have to spend the night in the can—but I put that thought out of my head at once…it was ridiculous. After all, I hadn'tdone anything.
The taller of my two friends, now free of his raincoat and carrying the paper bag with the weapons and my books, sat down behind the desk. I sat in a chair to the side of it. He looked at me for a moment, gave me a reassuring grin and reached into the desk for the forms. He wanted a statement.
I tried to think what day it was, and how old I was, and what I was doing here, and without any difficulty the answers came: September 11th, 1960 … twenty-six…I've been nabbed on the Sullivan Act, illegal possession of firearms in the City of New York, state of New York, borough of Manhattan. That was right; I knew it was right. I was ready to give him his statement.
He took it all down, including the name of Ken Bales, the fact that I had done lecture tours and been on TV with the weapons, and the additional information that I had let them search my apartment without hindrance. The detectives clued me that though this was a serious charge, he didn't think I was in much trouble.
We waited for the Old Man, the Captain.
The other two cops who had been in the squad room when we'd arrived did not come back. I assumed they'd gone off duty. While we waited, Linda Solomon arrived at the station house, and was sent up to the squad room. She had brought me a toothbrush, a tube of Gleem, some money, my reading glasses, a bar of soap, and three books:
"Nostromo" by Joseph Conrad
"The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum
"Eichmann: The Man And His Crimes"
I sometimes wonder about my friends.
I took the paper bag of goodies, noting the titles of the three paperbacks and grimacing strangely at her rather morbid sense of humor. She grinned back like the large Cheshire she resembles, and shrugged eloquently. She wanted to hang around and "soak up the atmosphere" of prison, but my temper had frayed by that time and I suggested not too politely—despite her kindness of trudging over in the rain with my belongings—that she get the hell out of there before they began examining her butt for needle marks.
She gave me a sisterly kiss on the forehead and advised me to keep a stiff upper. Or something in that category.Jeezus, I wanted to get out of there .
Perhaps forty-five minutes later, the Captain arrived. A tall and muscular fellow with kind features, he ushered me into his office, and proceeded to read my statement, checking points for clarification from time to time. He called in the senior of the two detectives who had arrested me, and asked him a number of questions about my personal behavior. The detective gave him a faithful, concise account of what had happened. Then he showed the Captain my books. Thus far I seemed to be doing okay.
I got the impression that the Captain would rather not have been troubled with me, as it was fairly obvious by that time that I was not an ax murderer, a narcotics pusher or an exposer of privates in playgrounds. But the complaint had been filed, and he was duty-bound to follow it up.
The report read, the Captain looked at me and asked me if I had any idea how the police had been put onto this matter. I told him about Ken Bales. He didn't say anything. It was obvious: the call had been anonymous, and there was no way of proving if it had been Bales or someone else. I had never thought of that…someone else.
The names raced through my mind. All the petty enemies a guy can make in a lifetime, the stupid ones, mostly, who would take such a punk, cowardly way to get even with someone. And then I considered a name I had not offered up before. My ex-wife, Charlotte, now living in New York, in the Bronx. Could it have been her? I didn't want to think about it too hard. I didn't want to think anyone I'd known so intimately could hate me so completely. I tried to think of other things.
After several hours of sitting, waiting, in the squad room (and I must offer truth where it comes; the Captain did not put me into the barred tank, where he could by all rights have stashed me), the Captain told me I'd have to be booked, printed, and put in a cell for the night. I was panic-stricken. They had taken the revolver, to check it out, to see if it matched up with any unsolved cases of shootings they had had in the recent past, but I thought, right up to that moment, that I would be allowed to go home, to be called up whenever the case came to court.
But the silent, deadly machinery of the law had begun to grind, and caught in its yearning wheels and cogs, I was trapped till the cycle had run its course.
I had vivid images of my two years in the Army, and the almost pathological terror I had of being regimented, being ordered and confined, not allowed to act or speak or function as I wanted. But this was a thousand times worse. I was being locked up.
They printed me, then, and the black stains on the fingers were a visible pronouncement of my guilt, even before I'd been tried. There was one more indignity. They had no soap to wash off the black ink from the pad. A coarse paper towel merely smudged and deadened, ingrained the ink. I took to staring at my fingers, all through that night, and it was a feeling I cannot readily express.
A feeling of having been imprinted by my Times, by people who did not know me, who couldn't care less about me, who only knew that ten fingers deserved ten blots on them. "Can I have some soap?" I asked them, and they stared at me as though I was a trifle insane. "It'll wash off soon enough," they said, without comprehension.
I had been turned into a criminal by the simple act of blackening my fingers. I could see it beginning: the studied process that can take a teen-age gang kid with too much rebellion in him, and make him into something else … a loser, a thief, a kid with inked fingers.
There wasn't any use trying to explain to them—they would have commiserated, but never understood. No one reallycan understand how an individual feels about something so personal. To maybe only one out of a million people would the sight of ink on the fingers be comprehensible as stigmata. But my heart sank.
It was to sink even lower during the next hours.
They took me downstairs and booked me. Complaint 1897, Police Ledger for Charles Street Station. Booked on the Sullivan. I was now officially and forever listed in the records of the New York Police Department.
(I was to find out only months later that though the complaint may be dismissed eventually, and the prints and mug shots requested from the Police Department, though they may in effect say the records have been struck from the files, they never are. Once printed, once catalogued, you are there till the day you die. You have a record. This is one of the unsung attributes of the often-over-zealous New York Police Department. Many innocent men have their faces in mug books in the five boroughs.)
Then I was taken back upstairs, and turned over to a guard for placement in a cell. They took me through the huge grey fire door, and down the row of tiny gun-metal grey cells, and stopped before one. Another guard down the line released the master control of the bank of cages, and the man beside me opened the individual cell with his key. I took a step forward, and stopped. I turned to the detective who had arrested me and I suppose the look on my face was mournful as I said, "Uh, hey, uh, how about if I don't uh have to go into here tonight, uh, maybe I could sit up in the uh the room back there, huh?" The detective tried to be gentle, but firm. He shook his head.
The guard was not quite so pleasant. "C'mon, kid, c'mon, get your ass in there, I haven't got all night!"
Itwas night by that time.
And getting darker every minute.
I stepped inside the cell. The guard said, "Gimme your belt and tie and that bag of stuff."
I asked to keep the books and my cigarettes and lighter, and he was about to refuse when the detective intervened. "Let him have them," he said. The guard gave him a piercing, altogether unfriendly look, the sort of look a lackey gives an official, and let me keep everything but my lighter. I had to light one cigarette and keep smoking all night if I wanted nicotine. Chain smoking. All night.
The guard slid the door shut and I heard the master bar slam home. The detective said something reassuring, something about coming for me early the next morning and I should try to get some sleep. I grinned mawkishly and said, "Helluva hotel you've got here." He grinned back, and went away.
The guard stayed and stared at me for a few more seconds, trying to figure out what my pull was, that I had the plainclothes bulls going for me. Then he put my bag of goodies (which I now recall had some fruit and chicken in it, that my mother had sent with Linda) on the window ledge outside the cell, across the thin corridor…and he walked back the way he had come.
The light in the corridor stayed on, the fire door slammed with a J. Arthur Rank clang, and I was all alone in the tier.
Itwas night by that time.
And getting darker every minute.
I smoked.