From then on, reality was someone else's word. What buildings I was trundled through, what men I saw passing before me and what others with whom I was cuffed, all of them and all of it were a mottled, technicolored panorama. None of it was really happening. It had been a lark, to a great degree, this being arrested, going to court, spending the night in a clean cell in the Village.
And the half dozen cliché remarks: "Well, this'll be a good way to get experience for a book, Author." That had been part of it, too. I had had stature. But what stature is there in being chained to a mad-eyed animal who, had used a hammer on a fourteen-year-old girl? What kind of importance is there in seeing another human being so gone in his own sickness and depravity that even pity is wasted on him?
I tried to consider what it might be like for a young
teen-ager, perhaps one of the kids from the Barons, pinched for rumbling or breaking and entering. What would it be like for him to be chained to a man such as my murderer? Would he feel the same sophisticated revulsion or would his, be merely a naive sidewise-shine' at a glamorous figure, a real honest-to-God murderer? I could see the fallacy of a system where the relatively, innocent and the monstrously guilty are thrown together. My concern was not for myself, nor even my delicate sensibilities —more often bruised than I care to admit—but simply for the thought of all the ones gone before, and all the ones yet to come, who would ride in my seat in this paddy wagon, with the darkness closing in around them.
My thoughts ceased as we, arrived at the Criminal
Courts Building, Borough of Manhattan. (To this day I am unsure whether we were taken to another part of the same building, or into another structure entirely. Part of the eeriness and feeling of entrapment results from the sameness of the surroundings. You begin to feel you have been "inside" this great beast for a very long while, time ceases, all walls are the same wall, all eyes dead, and all hope lost. You are in the belly of the creature, and it treats you like any other morsel of food. Hope does not run in the beast's bloodstream.)
We were chivvied out of the wagon, and my arresting officer took a position to the rear of the men herding us. They began pushing and shoving us into a doorway, using phrases like, "Awright, c'mon, heyyy-up!Move on there, c'mon, tchip-tchip, move, g'wan…" almost as though we were cattle or pigs, moving down a running-trough. I expected at any moment one of them would stop us with a simple, "Whoahh!"
Then came a series of twisting corridors, white walls, large barred rooms, through which we moved, till we came into a hallway, and I saw a freight elevator.
The operator was waiting, and the entire group of us herded together. We went upstairs smoothly, the operator talking to one of the harness bulls about some minor official and his new demands on the Force. We reached our destination. (There was no way for me to identify what floor we were on: we'd been so tightly crowded that I was facing the back of the elevator.)
I managed, to elbow around, and we moved out, each of us chained together, and myself being dragged slightly by the man with the hammer.
As we passed down a very narrow neck-corridor, I saw a beefy and florid, bored and disgruntled-looking guard in uniform, at the end of the passage. He stood by a lectern-like wooden desk, with a huge ledger open on its top. I had an insane vision of myself signing in as a guest, or registering to vote, or making an appearance on "What's My Line?"
Q: ARE YOU SELF-EMPLOYED?
A: Yes, I'm a gun-runner and narcotics addict.
Q: ARE YOU BIGGER THAN A BREAD-BOX?
A: Here in prison, I'm smaller than a maggot.
Q: DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY?
A: Why should I; no one makesme happy!
I didn't go on with that train of thought. In that direction lies madness, I suspect. But as we came abreast of the guard, my detective took me aside, and unlocked the cuffs. He took the metal bracelets off the maniac, too, and nudged him back into the stream of prisoners passing the desk, rounding a corner, and disappearing.
"This is my Author," said the plainclothesman who had arrested me the day before. "He's a good kid, so take care of him."
"So…" said the, guard, his little brown eyes coming alive for the first time, "this is The Author I've been hearing about on the radio …"
For a moment it didn't sink in.
Radio? What radio? The police wave-length?
"What radio?" I asked him. My detective passed me smoothly into the guard's custody.
"Oh, there was something on the early morning news about your being picked up," my detective said. He didn't elaborate, and I moved off with the guard in something of a trance.
It was the first suspicion I'd had that my arrest was not strictly confined to the police and the few chosen friends Linda would tell. It was the first suspicion I'd had that someone had spilled the news to the papers.
I wasn't to learn till much later who it had been.
Around the corner was a cell, a minor bullpen, a waiting station for the accused before they were taken to the courtroom for arraignment. It was now eight-thirty, and as yet I'd had nothing to eat, save what I'd been able to gorge down from my bag of goodies. I had emptied the paper bag into the pockets of my trench coat, and they bulged with toothbrush, paste, and books, I still felt scuffy,and unclean, and as the turnkey opened the cell door, I asked him, "Is there any place I can wash up?" He didn't even bother to answer. His keys on their chain were massive, and in his massive hand they seemed to fit. I walked into the cell, and got the once-over from my teammates. The cell was packed, with tired men, unhappy men, spade cats and ofay, handsome men and warped-looking creatures, sick guys lying on their sides on the cement floor, and jaunty swinging hipsters with knees pulled up on the bench, chewing gum and laughing to themselves. It was an early morning roust, a gathering of all the flotsam from Manhattan's streets of the night before. This was the weekend wastebasket duinpings, the guys who had had too much to drink, and the ones who had not had enough to spend, and the ones who came up short, one way or another. Like me. I walked around the big cell, stepping over some of the inmates who wet catching up on their sleep, busy stacking Z's in preparation for the scenes later in the day.
It was bigger than it seemed, perhaps thirty-five feet long by ten feet wide, with a little heavy metal dividing partition at one end that screened the urinal from the sight of the others. A sink was fastened to that partition, and if you pushed the button hard enough, water came.
There were already twenty-five or thirty men in the cell, and they had taken all the space on the metal bench. So I stood. And walked. I paced, and hung my hands outside the bars (Why outside, why always outside?) and studied my fellow inmates. I saw all the faces, and I wondered which were the guilty and which theschmucks who had stepped over the line just enough to incur some cop's wrath. They certainly seemed a rabid lot…but then, how did I look to them?
Against one wall a tall man in an Italian silk suit leaned toward his companion, a-swarthy type with too much hair, badly cut, and falling down into his face as though he had scuffled with someone and had not had time to comb it. They talked in subdued tones and though I couldn't make out what their subject was, I knew the sharp dresser was bugged at the olive-skinned one about a slip-up somewhere in the recent past. Their conversation reached such a pitch of intensity—while maintaining the same level of quiet—that the sharp dresser gave the smaller felon a slap across the forehead with his palm. I looked away and passed on to a huge, muscular Negro with a cast in his right eye, sitting at the end of the bench, his T-shirt ripped halfway across the chest, revealing heavy musculature, beaded with sweat. He caught me looking at him, and there was such a return, glare of hatred, that I turned away.
Lying on the floor, tossed up on himself like'a fetus, I saw a man wrapped in his overcoat, clutching his knees to his chest, and snoring fitfully. Next to him, also lying on the floor, was a young man of indeterminate age—but not much over twenty-eight—covered with blood and home-made bandages. His head was swathed in them, covering the left ear and swinging down over the left eye. His cheek had a ragged cut on it, and his hands looked as though he had tried to grab a knife away from someone. His hands were ribboned with slices, hastily-bandaged with handkerchiefs, soaked through darkly. Or perhaps someone had been trying to get the knife from him.
A drunken derelict lay huddled against the bars, one arm hanging out into the corridor, vomit all around him and his fellows as far away as they could get.
A terribly thin man with no jacket, and suspenders criss-crossing over the top of his long-johns, was wrapped in on himself, sitting on the bench, other men pressed in on him tightly, and he shivered. He shook like a bridge-guy wire in a heavy gale, and his eyes kept rolling up in his head, showing blue-veined eyeballs. I may have been wrong (though the bird-tracks up his bare arms told me I was right), but he looked like a junkie going into withdrawal.
There were more, but suddenly I stopped looking at all of them, and settled on just one. A boy, no more than twenty, with a look of defiance and contempt mixed with helplessness and utter fear. I knew I knew that boy. No, notthat boy, but another boy, someone younger perhaps? Or, someone like this boy, or…then I recognized him. It didn't seem possible…and yet, how great could the odds be? It was Pooch. The Prez of the Barons, here in the Tombs with me, his Boswell. Here we were, how many years later? Seven? It seemed a lifetime. I'd had two years in the Army, the slow torture of a marriage gone bad, a year in Chicago, moral and emotional decay, a comeback and flight back to my New York, months of poverty and the inability to write, a new spate of sales, this arrest, and now, full circle. I was back with the gang. I was still a j.d. and no matter what I had considered myself, we—Pooch and me—had wound up at the same place at the same time.
What were the odds?
No more than a million to one, which is about par for Dumb Fate. There had been many kids in the gang, and the odds of one of them being arrested in the borough of Manhattan (rather than home turf, Brooklyn) the same day I had been arrested, was not that strange. I looked at him, and the years had done their work.
He was still Pooch, with the thin white face and the dark hollows in his cheeks, and the oily curly hair and the bits of anthracite for eyes. But now there were character lines around his eyes, and down his face alongside his mouth. Bitter lines that were not from laughing, and not from scowling. They were from squinting, measuring the angles. His hands were blockier, and his body seemed more tensed, but he was still the same kid. I had two cigarettes left, and asked the guy in the turtle-neck sweater next to me by the sink for a light. He gave me a match,. and I lit both butts. I walked over to Pooch where he sat on the bench, lost in his own brooding, and stuck one of the cigarettes down under his nose. He looked up sharply, frantically, and for a minute there was no recognition. He stared at the cigarette as though I was trying to pick a fight.
"What's the matter Pooch," I said, quietly, "isn't it your brand?" He stared from the cigarette to me and back again, and I could see his mind working, trying to make who I was. Where had he seen this little guy? Where? Whoever it was, he hadn't seen him dressed like this…who?
"Remember Candle, and Fish, and Flo, and Filene, and…"
"Cheech!"
I grinned at him and offered the butt again. "The same." He took the cigarette slowly, and tried to get a handle on whether the last time we'd seen each other he'd been for or against me. I could see him casting back through time with difficulty. The days were too much alike, the years too conformed for much differentiation, but he knew me. He knew I'd gone away, and who I had been when I'd been in his gang.
"I'll be goddammed," he said, rising from the bench. Before he had moved three steps away, an old man bad slid into Pooch's seat. I drew the boy away from the others, to the angle corner of bars and sink. We leaned toward each other and puffed on our cigarettes. We didn't say anything for a while, just gauging each other, noting the changes, seeing what was to be seen.
Finally, Pooch said, "What's Shakin', man?"
I shrugged, a peculiarly bizarre gesture in my suit and trenchcoat, geared as it was to leather jacket and T-shirt circumstances. "Nothin's shakin' but the leaves on the trees," I answered. He gave me a quirk of a smile.
"Helluva place to find you, man." He meant it, too. "You seemed sharper than that." I shrugged again; who can explain how a guy winds up in the can?
"How long's it been?" he asked.
"It's about seven now," I ventured.
He nodded agreement, then shrugged and made a weary gesture. "The slammer, man. Wow." I nodded agreement withhis agreement. The eloquence, the beautiful eloquence of that nod, that shrug, that weary gesture! How complete. He had told me, in one shrug and a half-formed gesture, that all the years between bad been wasted years, had brought him unerringly to this end-residence, as it had been ordained.
He was truly hung-up.
I started to ask him what had happened to the kids-in particular Fish and Filene—when the beefy, bored guard came into sight around the corner.
"Awright, you crumbs, on yet feet, let's move out in snappy style here!"
He unlocked the barred entrance, and some of the more drunken inhabitants tried to elbow past him. He straight-armed them back into the bullpen, and bellowed, "Awright, you buncha shits, wait a minnit!" Then he began reading from a clipboard that had been tucked under his arm:
"Alberts, Charles; Arthur, John; Asten, Clyde; Becker, Wilhelm; Brookes, John; Brown, Tom; Brown, Virgil;Brown, Wallace; Brown, Whitney; Czelowitz, August;Dempsey—"
He went on reading the names, and my name came up and I moved away from Pooch, murmuring, "See you later," Those whose names had been called began to file out of the cell, and made a ragged line around the corner toward the elevator. I didn't see my plainclothesman, but I knew he'd be along any time now. I was both relieved and flattered when he came out of a side door in the narrow corridor; be had obviously taken a liking to me, and wasn't ready to let me sink into the System completely. Either that, or they thought I would bolt. They may have been right.
I was getting panicky, now that we were apparently getting ready to move down for arraignment. I was certain I'd be turned loose at once, at least with a minimum bail. But there was the niggling worry of that remark about my name having gone out over the radio. If it was such a phony and trumped-up charge against me, then why the publicity? I wasn't that well-known a literary figure, God knows. So why? And the thought hit me that it might not be such a shoo-in. That my pretty baby face with its day growth of stubble might not be enough to get me out of this jam.
So my buddy's presence might well have been attributed not to my inherent good looks and ingenious nature, but to a sensible realization on his part that I was just unstable enough to break and run if I thought this situation was worse than I'd first thought. My reassurance vanished.
I joined the line of prisoners, and as I saw the cuffs being attached to the others, I whispered to my buddy in plainclothes, "Can I go without?" He gave me a benign smile and shrugged. Then he cuffed me. But he held the other ring himself, rather than attaching me to another felon.
Anotherfelon?
Yes, I had begun to think of myself as one. The innocence till judged guilty did not hold. It was a lovely theory, but wretched practice. No one who goes through the System can consider himself innocent, while being herded and locked up and treated like a foregone conclusion.
I was a felon, right then.
Yet my thoughts were not free to dwell on semantics. The line was moving out. Not to the elevator, but through the side door from which my plainclothesman had emerged. Down a side-corridor, and up to a larger, sturdier freight elevator. We waited, and finally the door slammed back. A decrepit old man in grey uniform was operating the machine, and he looked at us as though he bad seen a million of us for a million years past. We were fodder for the legal machinery. He was a thoroughly dead old man. I wondered if he was a trusty.
We were loaded into the elevator, and I saw Pooch come on, cuffed to a grizzled veteran of the penal system, busily picking his nose and scratching at his denim shirt.
We went downstairs? Upstairs? I don't even know.
Then began a dizzying series of shunting-abouts, in and out of corridors, pens, cages, enclosures, all of which smelled faintly of vomit, urine and carbolic acid. The smell I of a jail! is a thing you never forget. There are bitter, acrid and sometimes gagging smell-memories of Lysol, carbolic acid and paraldehyde, a chemical used to quiet drunks, one drop, one-millionth of a drop of which, leaves a scent in the nostrils that never really departs.
And there is the stench of human bodies, of the sweat of guilt and tension. The odor of cosmolene from the guard's guns, and the smell of all-purpose oil used on the locks. The smell of rain-wet coats, and the smell of bad breath. The smell of old leather from cracked shoes, and the smell of absolute desperation.
It is a stink that must offend God, for Man can-not take it for too long, and its persistence in realityshould offend God. (But after a few hours in the System, one begins to suspect there is no God. If it be true there are no atheists in a foxhole, then it is equally true that there are no true believers in a prison.)
We came out of the labyrinth, through a door, a heavy fire-door with triple locks, passed a little entrance that showed us the outside, still grey and pelted with slimy rain, and we all yearned to go through that entrance …
But we had been put into the System, and Me the Army, once in formation, you were trapped for the duration: Of the day, of the term, of the lifetime…
All of us—perhaps a third of the number who had been in the larger pen upstairs (downstairs?)—were hustled into a very tiny waiting cell with two benches. The heavy wooden door to the left of the cell opened, and we saw through into the courtroom.
We were there, ready to be arraigned. Ready to. Find out if we would be free men or temporarily placed in durance vile.
My plainclothesman came up to me at the bars and said, "Do you have a lawyer?" It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. "No," I answered, "I'll. Plead my own case." It seemed that simple. I was innocent, what did I need a lawyer for…wasn't a an innocent till adjudged guilty in this court, as in any court?
He looked worried. "You'd better get a public defender," he advised. "It may be tougher in there than you think."
"You really think so?" I asked.
Naive? Jeezus, Pollyanna move over, here comes Ellison.
"I think you'd better."
He was damned serious, and the cold feeling crept up through my guts to my neck and my face, and I had a sensation of falling. "Would you get him for me?" I asked. He nodded and went out through the wooden door to the courtroom.
In a little while he came back, with me still hanging on the bars like a mounted animal, and he said, "The man's name is Strangways; be here in a minute." I thanked him, and the cop added, "Your mother and Miss Solomon and your agent and some other people are out there. They asked me how you were."
"Tell them I'm fighting mad," I said, sounding anything but.
He grinned, tapped my hand in reassurance, and disappeared again. I turned around to see what was happening in my cell, and that was when All hell broke loose.