Chapter 6

Within a few minutes of his arrest, he noticed that the handcuffs were way too tight on him. The female officer had locked the steel rings tightly against the bones of his wrists, and he couldn’t move them without it paining. It was hard to walk down the stairs, and he tried to keep himself balanced as she led him by the arm. On the street below, three squad cars waited for him, their lights flashing in the dead of night as though a rocket ship had landed amidst the quiet cool of the evening. They blocked off half the street and ostentatiously made a vibrant scene out of an arrest that he thought would be routine. A few of Charlie’s neighbors hung out of their windows in their pajamas and hair nets as the cops pushed him by the back of the head into the squad car. The belch of radio chatter and loud static was near ubiquitous, and the back of the squad car became a pressurized cage where laptop hardware and other radio equipment in the front of the cruiser blipped in the darkness through steel mesh. He also felt sick to his stomach, as the toxins of the beer he drank passed through him like contaminated waste. Vomiting in the car wouldn’t have helped him any, but he called out to one of the officers that a good puke was on the way. As soon as one of the officers raced around to the back door, Charlie heaved and vomited all over the officer’s shiny black shoes as he opened it.

Charlie was more aghast by this than the officer was. The officer cursed loudly, which was just as bad. The officer pushed his head back into the squad car and slammed the door with such piercing alacrity that Charlie expected at least a little brutality when no one was looking. Even the officer’s partner cursed. It took about ten more minutes of waiting before they pulled out and drove along an empty avenue to the precinct on the other side of town.

He made sure to keep silent and still until the squad car came to a complete halt at the precinct. Once inside amidst the empty chairs and clanky desks where peak-hour officers would have normally filled out their paperwork, they threw him into the one cell they had and locked the full metal gate. He propped his legs up on a short stretch of wall where flakes of cracked paint fell on his clothes, the bench too small to fit the length of his body. He finally passed out from confusion and exhaustion.

The dream that he had within the cell seemed real enough, because he awoke in an oversized bed beneath a canopy that brought the comfort of shade and coolness to his eyes. In the dream his sheets were made of fine silk, and the air in this special chamber was fresh and scented. He was completely naked underneath the single silk sheet that covered him, and when he awoke he adjusted to the welcoming light of the room. The floors were made of white marble, and running water trickled down a marble fountain. He had been sleeping in some inner-sanctum or sanctuary, or perhaps in heaven or even on Mount Olympus where the Gods convened. When he opened his eyes, he saw shelves of feminine health products that reached all the way up to a domed, painted ceiling that featured the goddess Aphrodite wearing nothing but a scanty sash over her body and offering her heart and bosom with open, alabaster arms. Boxes of tampons, vaginal creams, cosmetics, cotton balls, panty-liners, pregnancy tests, premenstrual relief medication, water pills, thin maxi-pads, winged maxi-pads, disposable cleaning cloths, three different brands of douches, sex lubricants, jellies, and contraceptive pills were stacked in columns that reached all the way up to the painted ceiling. The light pink-and blue packaging of these items alerted him that he may have been granted access to a strictly feminine sanctuary, as though he himself belonged to the female gender and had been unaware of his membership all along. And being a part of this gender threatened the only shred of manhood he had left, as though women and his intense ideation of making love to them and becoming their perfect mate also imposed restrictions on his manhood that he just couldn’t tolerate.

A young blonde woman appeared next to him on the bed wearing the same white garments that the Goddess Aphrodite wore in the painting above him. She wore her hair in drooping curls, and her eyes were the color of the sea. And when Charlie focused his eyes and saw that this woman was indeed Renee from the old pub he used to frequent, he intuited that somehow he had changed into a woman, or that he at least had the soul of one.

“Is there anything I can do for you,” asked the woman, as it was quite possibly the only gesture of care, sensitivity, and friendship that a woman of her kind had ever given him.

The question, in fact, seemed so odd and brazenly unusual that he immediately stopped her and said,

“No, no, no! Don’t do anything for me. Please!”

He ran out of the feminine chamber in a heated rush, the silk sheet wrapped around his body and trailing behind him, wondering how on earth the same woman whom he had once obsessed over now treated him as if he were one of their sex, or at least as though she shared the same feminine soul. After closing the door on this sanctuary, he suddenly found himself in a dank and smoke-filled saloon where beer- drinking toughs dropped their wet mugs to the counter and attacked him from all sides. Charlie didn’t put up a fight, as his reaction to their jabs, punches, and headlocks was strictly passive. He somehow had to accept their punishment in order to gain their respect and admiration. Someone then gave him a swift kick in the back that pained him miserably. He opened his eyes to find the police officer who had arrested him standing over his dehydrated body. He had kicked him right where the sciatic nerve met his tailbone.

“Alright, Zero,” said the cop, “we’re taking you to the county lock- up. On your feet.”

They cuffed his hands and his ankles, all joined together by heavy swooping chains. The equipment seemed unnecessarily medieval, but it enforced the understanding that he was now a prisoner. Almost immediately he wondered when he would be allowed to go home. He didn’t think his crime so monstrous or malicious to merit the regalia of full-body cuffs, but apparently what he did was a serious violation of the law that demanded his incarceration with a bail set for one thousand dollars, which he in no way could pay. It meant seven days at the county jail until his court date arrived. He had to rely on a public defender for his defense, and the idea of having a court-appointed attorney didn’t sit too well with him. These types of lawyers were mainly a part of the same legal apparatus that wanted him punished.

He arrived at the county jail about a half-hour later. It was a huge, sprawling complex that was fenced in by razor wire, and the current of dread and fear that cascaded through him at the sight of the jail’s high, impersonal walls and vacant courtyards only reaffirmed his belief that he had always been trapped by forces that were too powerful to name and too intelligent to outmaneuver. The real imprisonment came when a cadre of officers journeyed with him through the bowels of the jail. Charlie simply limped along.

They uncuffed him when they arrived deep within its belly, and a beefy prison guard took his fingerprints several times over—both computerized fingerprints that were registered in some monolithic database that would follow him the rest of his life, a database that now knew everything about him and could send his infraction to anyone in the world, and also the traditional method of fingerprinting where the guard pressed his digits to inkpads. Afterwards, they told him to stick his hands in a white goop to wash the ink off. They also had him strip naked, spread his butt-cheeks, and lift his balls up to make sure he wasn’t importing any contraband. He donned a pair of orange neon coveralls. The large letters ‘D.O.C.’ were ironed on the back. He had only seen such overalls in prison-themed Hollywood movies and gangsta-rap videos, and he couldn’t believe that he would soon be included in the same category. But they didn’t send him into the main jail just yet.

Near the entrance they had a separate cell with walls of bulletproof glass that they shoved him into first. They handcuffed him to a hard narrow bench that was bolted to the cement floor, and behind a concrete barrier a stainless steel toilet jutted out of the wall like a sculpture commissioned by octogenarian disciplinarians and hand-crafted by a deranged lunatic artist. He had no choice but to sit and wait under bright fluorescent lights until his ass got too numb from sitting in the same position. His only activity for the next several hours involved moving in and out of various sitting positions so that his ass wouldn’t fall off completely.

As he sat there, he noticed that in no way could he simply get up and leave the room without the assistance of one of the armed guards who paced outside of it. There was no way to leave or exit the room, period. There was no way to walk to the other side of the room if he wanted to, no way to go outside and breathe in the natural air if he so desired, just nothing to do but sit, wait, and anticipate what it might be like when they finally integrated him with the rest of the criminal population.

This population stirred beyond a set of heavy white doors which he eyed with dread. Each time a guard passed by, there was at least some hint of getting out and moving into the general population, or that they would give him something to eat, or at least vaguely connect him to the fantasy that they may allow him to walk around to stretch his tired bones. But the guards simply walked passed while attending to their various duties, all of them getting to go home after their shifts, to recline on their sofas and drink a few beers, watch a ballgame— anything to relieve themselves of the stress of being in a controlled environment where the walls were empty zones of sterile white and the cells they guarded were these locked-down incubators that made time stand still, where a prisoner’s complete and utter boredom and idleness slowly oozed into a frenetic madness. Yes, the guards got to go home, but Charlie would stay. He would be there a week until his court date. And even though this was a very short time compared to what the murderers and the rapists usually got, there was no question that once confined to a cell with no one in it, one stays there for an eternity through the gradual dissolution of any conception of time or space whatsoever. It could have been night or day outside, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Every second elongated into infinite blocks of time that made it seem like he were dead but still freshly alive in his own body to witness its own gradual deconstruction. This, perhaps, was the worst punishment of all.

He slept while sitting up, and after several hours of wondering and looking and gazing and contemplating the activities of the guards to determine when and where they would take him next, the guard who initially processed him unlocked the door. Charlie was too much of a zombie by this time to feel either happy or sad by this new development. Like a man who had worried himself to death over the nothingness he had melded with in his cell, he was brought into the general population of prisoners where the lights in each cell were turned off. The coughs, snores, wheezes, and restlessness of the inmates accompanied him through a long, shadowy hallway. Once at his cell, the guard flicked on the bright lights, and to his utter dread, Charlie found a six-foot- tall, muscular black man who was jarred awake by his arrival. Charlie figured at this point that he would be eaten alive, beat up, or even raped if they stuck him in with this foreboding prisoner. He could do nothing more than climb into the top bunk over the sweating body of his new best friend and terrify himself into getting some sleep.

“Can you at least turn off the lights?” said his new roommate from below.

But Charlie couldn’t move an inch, as he was petrified by what the savage prisoner may do to him. Charlie figured that his cellmate would simply cut his body open in the middle of the night just for kicks, or at least gag him and then sodomize him.

“My God, why do they always send me the scared little white boys,” complained his cellmate to the heavens.

With a deep sigh, the black man turned off the lights himself. And with his nervous exhaustion promulgated by the sheer stress of anticipating some pointed shank or razor blade that would undoubtedly cut him open as he slept, Charlie finally sank deeply into a nervous sleep.

The next morning wasn’t so charming either. He was woken up by his cellmate who shook him out of a dream he didn’t remember. Charlie could hardly stand he was so exhausted, but when his feet hit the ground, his cellmate introduced himself. He told him to call him ‘Dawg,’ as that’s what everyone in the jail called him. He towered over him, and it was a small wonder that the two of them were able to fit in the same cell. But Charlie was much more relaxed now, and his earlier fears had subsided a bit.

The breakfast in the jail’s cafeteria certainly helped, but he did think it odd that Dawg took leave of the chow line to sit where all of the black prisoners congregated, and how Charlie, by default, had to sit with all the white prisoners. The Mexican and Hispanic prisoners had their own separate sections as well, as there were already certain boundaries that he could not cross by dint of his skin color. He knew right away, however, that what enforced this separation among the various colors that inhabited their small space was the gang-related activity on the outside that demarcated such boundaries. The prison cafeteria was merely a reflection of the social demography of the county neighborhoods beyond the jail—a microcosm, if you will, of the strict social striations that divided most men from each other. And at the core of each group there resided a criminal contingent that had known the disparities of race and class so well that it had no other choice but to trust only those members who were of the same skin color and class, of the same language even, in order to live any sort of livable existence beyond the jail after their release. There was certainly the awkwardness of having to sit with white people when his cellmate was black, as though he and his cellmate represented exceptions to the rule of jail life where they both had to separate themselves at meal times in order to maintain the tenuous balance the jail demanded. And in between mouthfuls of powdered eggs and lukewarm milk, Charlie would sneak a quick look across the aisle of tables and see Dawg eating his food silently with those who were painted like him.

While sitting at his ‘whites only’ table, Charlie remained silent, and no one asked him his name or what brought him to the jail. Everyone ate somewhat begrudgingly, especially when there were eyelashes, shards of fingernail, and kinked hair lodged in the food. Charlie hardly ate that morning, and after breakfast he returned to his cell where he found Dawg ready and waiting for him.

“So what are you in for?” asked Dawg.

“I got caught trying to hire a prostitute. How about you?”

“Armed robbery. They brought me down from upstate for good behavior.”

“This is where they send people for good behavior?”

“Hey, man, county jail is a walk in the park compared to state prison, son. Up there you have to watch your back twenty-four-seven. Down here it’s much easier, and everyone does their time nicely. Everyone here learns from what they did wrong.”

“What’s there to learn? They put me in here for what most white men do the world over.”

“You will learn from me,” said Dawg quite suddenly, his eyes staring squarely into Charlie’s. “You may think yourself a victim of the criminal justice system, but you will learn from me, because that’s the only way you’re getting out of here.”

Charlie noticed Dawg’s Bible at the head of his bed, and already he thought that Dawg would try to convert him into some religious fanatic. He kept his mouth shut, though, as Dawg maneuvered around him to make up his small bunk. Charlie also made his bed, not knowing what else to do.

“So what do we do next?” asked Charlie.

“There’s nothing to do but wait,” said Dawg who now read his Bible and had stretched his massive body over the bottom bunk. “But aren’t there any programs or activities or anything?”

“I think you have this place confused with summer camp or a country club. There aren’t any activities here. You just wait in your cell, and if you’re lucky the guards will take you to the library. Lunch is always at twelve, and dinner’s at six. Other than that, we bide our time. Don’t worry, though. I won’t bite you and neither will anyone else in here, provided that you stay cool and at least open-minded to the things I’m going to talk to you about.”

“But I hardly know you,” said Charlie, somewhat relieved to hear that jail wasn’t as dangerous as he had initially expected.

“We’re all the same people in here. By the time you’re sprung, you’ll realize you’re just the same as everyone else in here.”

“Then why am I in jail? I didn’t do anything to anyone.”

“Seeing hoes is not why you’re in jail. There are other reasons and circumstances involved that you can’t see just yet. Tell me something—why did you start seeing hoes? What was the reasoning behind it?”

“I dunno. I guess because I couldn’t find a girlfriend.”

“And why do you need a girlfriend so badly?”

“Because I’m a man, and I get lonely—just like any other man.”

“And so you wanted a girlfriend for purely selfish reasons?”

“I think that’s why every man wants a girlfriend. I’m certainly not alone in that.”

“What were some of the things you did to get a girlfriend?” asked Dawg, putting his Bible aside.

“I must have tried everything. I went to the bars, I followed them down the street. I tried talking to them. None of it worked. Not one thing. Without a woman I was turning into an animal. It’s as plain and simple as that. They wouldn’t talk to me. They went with guys with the big bucks and fancy cars and big muscles, and they wouldn’t give me the time of day, no matter how forcefully I tried to get them to. What’s a man to do? In fact, I have to give a lot of credit to these prostitutes. They saved me from killing someone or turning into an axe murderer or becoming some guy who takes a rifle and starts shooting people from the tops of buildings. They really did save me. Imagine being without a girlfriend for one’s whole life? Being completely ignored and insulted by them?”

“You know what you sound like?” asked Dawg, “if you take that last statement? Do you know what you sound like?”

“What?”

“Like a bitter man who wanted revenge, because you couldn’t possess the heart of a woman on your own terms.”

Charlie thought about this for a moment and said,

“But when I was with the prostitutes, I gave them all of my love. I loved them, I really did. I was the perfect gentleman. I paid them and tipped them. I kissed them before they left. I saw to it that they liked me as a person. I made it a point of making them feel comfortable when around me. That’s a helluva lot better than how most of their clients treat them.”

“And you call that love?” laughed Dawg. “Jesus, you sound to me like someone who’s incapable of loving a woman. Tell me something—what was growing up for you like?”

“Well, my father died in Vietnam. I don’t remember very much of him. And my mother, she died of cancer when I was young.”

“And who took care of you?”

“Hey, I practically took care of myself.”

“Oh, yeah. The rugged individualist. The self-sufficient guy who goes it alone. The homo-economus.

“I ain’t no homo,” said Charlie angrily.

“No, no, you misunderstand. Homo economus just means that you’re a man who has tried to do everything by yourself, everything on your own terms, and the only thing you have to be proud of is how you raised your own damn self without anyone’s help or aid.”

“That’s not entirely true, y’know. There were people who looked out for me.”

“Yes, I’m sure there were people who looked out for you, but you’ve got to realize that at some point all of this self-sufficiency, all of your self-determination, your drive and your self-will to get a honey, never taught you how to love or to be a good boyfriend. You were going after the perfect girlfriend when you couldn’t even be a good boyfriend.”

“That’s not true at all. I can be a great boyfriend if given the chance. There was never a single opportunity in my life. Not one damn time. I was ignored, put down, and made fun of by them. And when I needed a woman the most, all I got from them was turned-up noses and their hatred. Does it make any sense? No, of course it doesn’t. That’s why I had to act, and action is what I took.”

“You know what you sound like right now? Honestly?”

“What?”

“Like a man off on his own mission to fight some kind of battle that you know deep down that you’ll never win, but you do it anyway, thinking that it’s glorious what you’re doing. But Charlie, let me tell you something—what you’re getting is the opposite of glory. What you’re getting is damnation. You’re fighting so hard for the girl that you don’t even know who you’re fighting against. That’s the real reason why you’re in here—you’re too wrapped up in yourself, and you expect the rest of the world to comply with your demands as though you’re holding everyone in the world hostage, as though the world should pay homage to your suffering.”

“Life is a battle,” said Charlie suddenly. “You have to fight for every inch and every yard. You have to fight for the girl if you want to win her.”

“That’s why you’re in here, man. Along the way something slipped in to make you think that way. What you’re describing now is how animals think. And animals like you and me wind up behind bars until our humanity is returned to us. And that’s not something anyone on this earth can do for you. There’s no earthly creature who can do that, Charlie.”

“And how do you know so much? You hardly know me or what I’ve been through.”

“I’ve seen it many times before, especially when they bring the live ones in.”

He didn’t feel like talking to Dawg anymore, so Charlie rolled over on his bunk and thought about what he said. The man seemed more like a philosopher than an armed burglar, and some of the things he said he doubted, considering that he just met the man last night. There was certainly something mystical about him, though. It was something he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t seem like such a threatening figure as he did before, and perhaps he did make a good point or two, even though Charlie didn’t agree with him on anything he said. Charlie certainly didn’t see himself as an animal, because life was indeed a battle of sorts, but perhaps he had gone too far in thinking so. Maybe he did rely on himself too much and less on others. There was no question that he didn’t see the nice parts of human nature—only the selfish parts, and perhaps this is where he had erred. The question now became how to begin to recognize the nice parts in others and not just see them as ravenous beasts that he had to fight and do battle with and do better than others in order to achieve any happiness in life.

Where and when, for instance, did he start thinking that every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth was merely out for themselves or entitled to boyfriends and girlfriends? Where did the idea pop up that most families were just ersatz gangs that fought with other families, clans, and gangs? Where did the idea slip in that the world was based solely on self-interest and nothing more, and that competition for a woman’s hand had to include killing people off who had effortlessly won what they had sought?

“It’s greed,” said Dawg from the bottom bunk all of a sudden. “You take, but you cannot seem to give. No one can live in a society that is constantly at war with itself, Charlie. You especially.”

“And how am I supposed to get out of it?”

“Your perceptions have to change,” said Dawg, “and there’s no person here on earth that can change them.”

“Well, thanks a whole helluva lot,” he said, not wanting to speak with him anymore.

He heard Dawg chuckle from down below, and both of them napped until the guards summoned them to lunch. It happened to be the worst lunch he had ever eaten. What posed as a thick slice of ham was actually a chewed-off chunk of half-cooked lunch meat that tasted vaguely like bologna, and the mound of chilly that had been clumped together in the side-section of his tray was actually a pile of undercooked kidney beans with a soupy orange sauce that runneth over the top, the same litter of pubic hair and long, crusty eyelashes mixed in with every mouthful. He even found a tiny white mite that lived within the juices of the lunch meat, and once again he didn’t touch any of his lunch after taking the first few bites of it. Instead, he slammed his tray down and marched back to his cell in a hot, seething tantrum that struck him like lightning. It was the same kind of anger he had dealt with all of his life, and he knew he had better stuff it in and keep it to himself lest anyone find out about it, because frankly he hated being in jail, and he hated his life, and being incarcerated was worse than suicide. The armed guards would surely stop him if he were to be found toying with a belt or a lengthy piece of rope from which to hang himself. For the first time in a long while he admitted that he hated being alive, that life itself was a torturous construal perpetrated by a vengeful God who wanted to see him suffer.

But just when he arrived at his cell, Dawg fast approached two steps behind him. Dawg had followed his entire heated march down the jail hallway, and when he caught up to Charlie, he grabbed him by the shoulder.

“What the hell was that all about?” barked Dawg, his face dripping with sweat.

“What the hell do you care?”

“You haven’t eaten a damn thing yet, and slammin’ your tray like that could have given one of the guards reason to shoot you. Someone could have blown your head off.”

“The question is why the hell do you care? What are you? My mother?”

“Oh, I get it now,” said Dawg, moving in on him. “Now I’m the problem, is that it?”

“Just leave me the fuck alone.”

“So I am the problem. Well, if I’m the problem, why doesn’t your punk white ass do something about it then?”

“Don’t fuck with me, man.”

“Oh, now I’m fuckin’ with you. Not having a woman for so long must have turned you into a real pussy-bitch now hasn’t it? Sure. You can’t get a girl by being a man about it. Instead you have to buy a girl like every other fairy-faggot in your neighborhood. You ain’t no real man. You’re just a plain-old white pussy waiting for someone in here to fuck you up the ass—”

Charlie couldn’t contain himself any longer. He took a wide swing at Dawg’s head, but he ducked his punch. Dawg then grabbed him by the back of the neck and threw him into the concrete wall of the cell. He grabbed Charlie’s arm, yanked it behind his back, and pinned his face and body against the concrete wall.

Dawg’s strength was overpowering, and Charlie had no choice but to slacken and stand still lest Dawg break his arm off.

“Now you listen to me,” whispered Dawg into his ear. “You think you know what it’s like to be a man, huh? You think a man has to be angry all the time, has got that angry temper in his mind, telling him to do things he normally wouldn’t do? Well, let me tell you something: most of the niggers in this joint have that same temper, and most of them upstate have it too, and that temper that we all have in common is causing all of us mother-fuckers to be locked up in prison after prison instead of going to schools, colleges, and universities. There are more black men in prison now than there are in the schools, did you know that? A man is not defined by how many women he gets into bed. A man is not defined by how many things he owns or how fat his wallet is. A man is not defined by how many people he can kill or how many enemies he can attack or put down. A man is defined by how much punishment and how many blows to his swelled-head he can take, his ability to receive those blows to his pride and manhood, and change them into a willingness to help others who are suffering and in pain—to help those who are in despair. A real man has the ability to love humanity in spite of itself. So you listen to me good— you want to follow the path that every young gangsta Negro in this joint took, then you go right ahead. You’ll spend the rest of your life fighting and winding up in places like this. But if you want a better life for yourself—you have to change, and I can’t change you, and you can’t change you either.”

“And I suppose God is supposed to do all that?”

“There ain’t no one else,” said Dawg. “You’ll be dead in a year otherwise.”

Dawg gave him one last hard shove against the wall of the cell and then let him go. He marched out of the cell and back to the cafeteria. Charlie could only let his wet, sweating body slide down the face of the granular cell wall. He collapsed in a ball on the floor of the cell, his body trembling as he tried to stifle the hot emotion that flowed through his eyes.