Then began the horrors, as I went through the police detention routine, while awaiting the arrival (from Lord only knew where!) of my thousand dollar bail money.
The Tombs are very clean, brightly lit, and because of this more frightening than, the typical romantic conception of Torquemada's inquisition chambers.
The closed-in feeling, the almost claustrophobic terror of being chivvied, harried, moved wherever they want to move you, in a line with dozens of other men, faceless and without freedom—the entire weight of the building, the city, the law, life—everything weighing down on you… this is the most terrifying single reality of existence in a jail.
Don't believe it: a grown mancan cry. Frighten him long enough and hard enough, it'll happen.
Pooch came back as they were unlocking the cell. He had done no better, than me, and since his bail was set at two thousand dollars—this was the second arrest for ADW—he was considerably worse off. At least I had people on the outside presumably trying to bail me out.
(I was not to learn until much later that day just how hard theydid try, and the heartbreaks and personal sacrifice involved, nor how my friends truly came through for me.)
I don't know how conditions run in the other, more permanent, prisons of the New York area-Hart or Rikers Island to name just two—but in the Tombs, the goal is to turn you from a human being into a number, a piece of flesh that will obey, a body that will bewhere they want it, when they want it. The total de-humanization of a man. And for some of the unfortunates I saw in the Tombs, this was a short step.
The first batch of us who had been remanded to custody were moved out of the waiting pen, and the men tried to hold back, to stay near the little door to the outside world, so grey and cadaverous with rain. The guards shoved them forward roughly, though not with any real brutality, despite the fact that one old man screamed like a chicken, "Keep your f—kin' hands often me, hack!"
That was my first occasion to hear the prison slang word for guard used. From that moment on, I thought of them as "hacks" also. After all, wasn't I one of the boys?
We were led out through the fire door and down the twists and cross-corridors of the rabbit-warren that is the Tombs maze. We got in an elevator (perhaps the same one we had been on before) and went down…way down. It was like being taken beneath the Earth forever.
When we settled, and were led out of the elevator, we crossed a large open area to another heavy barred door, with a metal fire door arrangement bolted to it, and a thick pane of chicken-wired glass set in the middle. The hack who was leading the caravan banged with his fist on the door, and then rang a bell. After a second another face appeared in the glass, noted who was waiting, yelled something we could not bear through the glass, over his shoulder, and unlocked the door.
We marched into the reception area of the Tombs, where I was to spend the next five or six hours, the worst five or six hours of my life. It was a huge marshalling area, with pens along both walls, and, to our left as we came in, a high-countered desk behind which uniformed hacks were busy arranging records and dossiers, preparing files, typing reports, slamming the drawers of filing cabinets, arguing about undecipherable subjects, and in general making a helluva racket. Down the spine of the room ran two long wooden benches—back-to-back—like the kind they have in railroad waiting rooms or in the principal's office of the high school. At the end of the left-hand bench, at the far end of the room, was a grey-slate-colored counter, behind which two men were busily working. One of them was stuffing possessions into a manila envelope; and the other was getting men to sign something in a huge ledger. Our line stood there for two or three minutes, and Pooch moved up through the ranks to stand beside me. "I think I know a couple'a these hacks," he confided, with a tinge of youthful pride in his voice.
"Awright, let's go," said the hack who had been leading the procession. He had asked some instructions of the Captain, a chunky man wearing a regulation police cap with badge attached, a black tie (a shade too wide for the current fashion, and a shade too slim for the 40's style), and a white shirt. The Captain had apparently advised him where to put us till he was ready to process us.
The hack shoved one of the men forward, and the man stumbled a step, turned and swung heavily, awkwardly at the guard. "Sonofabitch, you better treat me better'nthat! " he snarled, as the blow went wide of the mark.
The hack stepped in, ponderous operator though he seemed, with amazing agility, and chopped the prisoner across the top of his chest. The man staggered with the blow, so accurately and heavily was it dealt, and fell back. The hack, moved in, his fist balled for a direct clubbing. He drew back, ready to belt the prisoner, but the Captain's voice came from the other side of the line of men, from the counter right near us: "All right, Tooley, that's it. Let him alone. He's drunk."
Tooley back-pedaled and snapped a curt, "Yessir, Cap'n," at his superior. He proceeded to get us into a waiting bullpen. Tooley was an exception among the hacks I saw while in the Tombs. While none of, them was charming nor debonair, most were just bored and cynical enough so that if you jumped when they said jump, you had no trouble. There was no actual physical brutality, in the strictest sense of the word, though on several occasions I saw hacks defend themselves from out-of-their-nut winos or psycho cases who wanted out. In those instances, they leveled the quickest club or fist and settled the offender's hash without comment. On several occasions I saw men struck by the hacks in a glancing sense, that is, they didn't move fast enough, or they lipped the guard, or were just generally, surly. But since none of the guards carried guns, they tried to keep their hands to themselves as much as possible.
A hack with busy fists could get himself very squashed in a matter of seconds if a crowd of outraged pen-residents decided to gang him. So they only nudge when necessary. Yet their attitude is the damning condition. They don't see their charges as men. These are so much meat, to be processed in a certain manner, at a certain rate of speed, and when you speak to them, it's almost as though they have to readjust their thinking to comprehend that you are a human being, and not some lower form of life.
I would ascertain that-most of the hacks were nice guys in private life; family men who loved baseball games and dogs and old ladies, and who would never think of being anything but gentle outside of this grey room that was a Universe in itself. But in the processing room they were something else. They were far from sadistic (though Tooley, to my mind, was a cat who could do with a little pounding), but they were not quite human either.
It was as though having worked around chained prisoners for so long had rubbed off on them. They were notof us, but they were not entirely free of the imprisoned taint, either. It is a peculiar feeling, a strange aura they possess, and I can't explain it any more fully than to say that though they were ostensibly on one side of the Law, and we were on the other, we were very much brothers chained together by what they did to us and what we were forced tolet them, do to us. It is a strong bond, based in hatred, but identifiable with the authority of a father or brother.
There were exceptions, of course.
Tooley, who seemed to be a thoroughgoing bastard who delighted in the kicks he could get by humiliating his prisoners, on the one end of the chain … and the Captain, who had given indication of moderation, intelligence and humanity, on the other.
But at that moment we were prey to Tooley, not the Captain, and as we were hustled into the bullpen, I bad a feeling that if Tooley could,get away with thumbing our eyes behind the Captain's back, he'd do it.
The beefy hack slammed the barred door and locked it. Now began the waiting, till they had processed the bunch of prisoners in the next pen down the line.
I sat down on a hard bench and looked around. The pen was much larger than the one upstairs, but it was the same gun-metal grey color, with a floor that was covered with bits of paper, empty candy wrappers, pools of moisture that might have been urine and might have been anything, with a barred window at the back of the cell (but outside the cell itself) in a little narrow space between the wall of the building and the pen itself. The window was open and the wind was blowing in, and it was damned cold, with the rain slanting through, making it impossible to stand in the rear of the cell without getting wet.
I looked around at my compatriots, and the men therein assembled were as miserable a bunch as I'd ever seen. Not miserable in the social sense of the word, but miserable in the strictest literal sense, They were unhappy men. Tormented men, perhaps. They ranged from the oldest, dirtiest rag with his rose-nose and bloodshot eyes to the youngest Ivy cat all wide-eyed and terrified at being tossed in here with all thesecri-min-als.
A hack came up to the door and said, "Okay, a couple of you guys clean up them loose papers there." Two of the eager young tots, anxious to seem cooperative, hustled about and cleaned up the floor of scraps. Now the bullpen around me was clean and bare, except for the puddles I now recognized as water that had come in through the open window,
Clean and bare, like my spirit at the moment. Fresh out of platitudes and pithy observations. Pooch sat down next to me. "Crumby buncha shits, ain't they?" he asked. I shrugged. They were no better or worse than the ones on the outside. The only difference was location.
There wasn't anything else to do, the waiting now haying begun, so I talked to Pooch. "So tell me, what's happened to the bunch?"
He gave me a peculiar expression, as though I should have known, and if I didn't where bad I been, and come to think of it wherehad I disappeared to, after the big rumble?
"You been away, huh?" he asked, suspiciously.
"Yeah, uh, I moved out of the neighborhood," I partied.
"Y'know," he observed, a bit sluggishly, I thought, "you don't look the same's I saw you last time. You look, I dunno, older or somethin'."
"Well, it's been seven years," I covered.
He nodded acknowledgment, trying to conceive of seven years as time. "Whatcha been doin' with yourself?"
"Oh, you know," I stalled, "the usual. A couple years in the Army, and I got married, and kicking around here and there. You know." That seemed to satisfy him, and he settled back. If he had only known. I was surprised that he hadn't asked me why I'd disappeared after the big fight, but it was a mark of personal integrity in Pooch's set not to ask a man why he had chickened out … if that was what he suspected.
"So where's the gang we used to hang around with?" I asked.
He blew air between his pursed lips, puffing his cheeks like a hamster, and said, "Oh, man, whatta drag. I'm just about the onny one left. They all either split orgot split."
I urged him to tell me what fate had befallen the tots I'd ran with in the Barons, and at first it was as though he was reluctant to talk because they were gone—almost like speaking ill of the dead. But then he started talking, and he told me each kid's story. This is what I learned:
Candle had fallen in love. The boy who had despised Puerto Ricans had fallen in love with a dark-eyed, thin-ankled muchacha, and had not known it. Her name was something very Anglicized, and Candle had met her at a dance. They had started going together, and after three months the girl was pregnant. Her family pounded Candle's name out of her, and one night a three-car caravan had come down from her neighborhood and caught the boy. They had offered him the chance to marry her, but as he stared into their faces, seeing their flat peon look, reflecting his own accursed features, he had spat at them and called them garbage. They had taken him into an alley and beaten him. They did not stop with the bike chains or the boards with nails in them. They went on with a broken bottle, and changed Candle's appearance so completely he would never again have to worry about being mistaken for a Puerto Rican. In fact, he would have difficulty being mistaken for a human being. They cut his right eye so severely that he was blinded, and the muscles of his face went completely limp. They left him for dead and took the girl to a Puerto Rican abortionist who specialized in the love-children of attractive young Latin misses. The girl died on the table. Candle was taken to Bellevue and for what it was worth, they saved his life. He was now living in another neighbor-hood, somewhere uptown, working as a clerk in a grocery store, and paying periodic visits to an institution to help the handicapped, and a grave in a Harlem cemetery.
Filene had been broken in properly. She had discovered sex as it should be discovered, and had found it was not as frightening as she had believed. After Cheech had disappeared (and she had spent Saturday nights cruising 42ndStreet, hoping to get a glimpse of him in the Pizza joints and flea-bag movies) she took up with Tarzan, who, once he was informed how she liked to be handled, treated her initials in her breast, and so when Tarzan contracted a serious case of breaking and entering, she moved on to a new boy in the neighborhood, a blonde boy named Speed, who had come from Pittsburgh and knew all sorts of new ways to dance, and have fun in the bushes. She was arrested for indecent exposure in Central Park with Speed, and though she was not booked, her mother and father beat her severely, and she left home. She took thirty-five dollars from her mother's purse and got as far as she could on a bus. When her money ran out, she worked for a time as a waitress in a roadside diner, until she had enough money to get to an Aunt's home in Boise, Idaho. The Aunt tried to send her back, but Filene would not go, and when the family said they did not want her back, the Aunt let Filene live with her. Six months later Filene met a young man who sold health insurance, and they were married the following June. Her picture in bridal veil was run in the social section of The Idaho Statesman, She clipped the picture and sent it to her parents, with the words drop DEAD scrawled across the face in red marking crayon.
Fish had taken to shooting pool for a living. He got very good at it, and was considered by the sharks in that particular sea a very good man with a "bridge" or "ladies' aid" as they sometimes called it. He ran one hundred and eighteen balls during a certain high-stake game of rotation, and was declared the absolute champ of the neighborhood. When he hit eighteen he enlisted in the United States Army and served eight months at Fort Dix, New Jersey before he was arrested by the C.I.D. for pilfering foot lockers, He was court-martialed, sentenced to six months at hard labor and a dishonorable discharge, which was invoked at the end of his term in the stockade. He returned to Brooklyn, found most of the gang gone their ways, and cut out cross-country for Las Vegas. He was struck down and killed by a Thunderbird in Salt Lake City, Utah, while fleeing the owner of a Chrysler Imperial who had discovered him trying to jimmy open the door with a coat hanger. He was returned to Brooklyn for burial, an expense his father had to go to HFC carry off.
Fat Barky became a bartender in the bar where his father got down on all fours and barked for his booze. He very often gave his father free drinks and paid for them out of his own pocket. Shit managed to get a scholarship to CCNY and became interested in geology. He majored in the subject and graduated with a Bachelor's degree, to find he could not obtain a position with the government Interior Department. He went to work as a floorwalker in a department store. He was still there. Goofball had moved away with her family when they became aware of her alliances with the Barons. No one knew where they had gone. No one cared. Flo became pregnant, no one knew by whom, and managed to extract seventy dollars from nine beaus, each of whom suspected it might be him. She used the money to go to a "rest farm" where the baby was born and sold to a family that could not get a child through normal adoption channels. She drifted back to New York, this time Manhattan, and began a very unspectacular career of getting picked up in bars and selling her body. She was around, as far as anyone knew. Or perhaps they meant she was "round." Pooch had been unable to grow up. He had been Prez of the Barons for too long. It was his glory, his only status, and he needed it as badly as a lush needed his juice. When the contemporaries began drifting away, and the junior gang members began growing up into his place, Pooch was forced out by democratic vote, and took to hanging around the streets. He managed to get picked up for attacking a garage owner with a switch-blade, and served six months in Bellevue Detention Home. When he was released he tried to enlist in the Marines, but they would not take him because of his record as a delinquent. He tried the other services and was treated the same. Belligerent, he started robbing candy stores, toy stores, pharmacies, garages, private homes, getting what he could, whether it was worth fencing or not. He was arrested for breaking and entering, petty larceny and resisting arrest, and served one year on Rikers Island. When he got out he tried to get a job, found himself hanging around the streets with the same kids he had known as junior Baron recruits, and when pushed by his parole officer to get straight or go back to the Island to finish his sentence, attacked the man with a fireplace poker. .He was arrested for ADW and found himself back in the Tombs, sitting beside a guy he had not seen in seven years.
I listened to all the stories of the kids I bad known, and the view was a terrible one. They had gone the way they had started. The seeds of rot had been planted so early, and they had ripened to produce diseased fruit. Every one of them…every one in some way inadequate or hostile or seared or corrupt. And I wondered, then, how much I could have done for them. I wondered if I'd failed them as much as I thought I had. Could I have done anything to save them, to turn them away from the dead ends?
I didn't know, and my heart ached in me as I thought of all of them; the ones I'd liked and the ones I'd hated, and the ones I'd even loved in a way. And it seemed that I was more guilty than any society that had done this to them. I was more guilty than the teachers who had not taught them, and the clergymen who had not given them faith, and the parents who had ignored and corrupted them. I was more guilty than all of them, because Iknew and I had ran away to write about it.
To keep my bands clean.
To play the dilettante.
I had refused to pay my dues.
And now I sat here beside Pooch, seven years later, and I was a big-deal pillar of the community, and he was a gutter urchin, and neither of us was better than the other.
We were both in Hell.