Praise for Paul D Blumer’s Death or Quarter
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In Paulie Gaeta—bare-knuckled boxer, arrogant Boston underdog, proud father, violent dreamer, quiet reader, closet mystic, petty street hustler, and long-term prison inmate #30583-012—debut novelist Paul Blumer has conjured up a notable trickster-narrator. Factor in Gaeta’s teenage son Dante and his once-tender girlfriend Holly Chen (“The fact that she’s Chinese instead of Italian makes no difference. Similar pouty lips. Sultry dark eyes with a dab of bronze at each inside corner.”); Marty Rosen, the big-time drug dealer who is Gaeta’s cell-block mate; Alonzo Battaglia, the gun-packing, “street-level Mafioso” henchman who initiates Paulie into the life, and whose little sister Francesca was once the slippery trickster’s lover. Artfully served up, this story of youth and age, time and eternity, sways sharply between hard-edged, vernacular and bold, shape-shifter storytelling. As convicted Paulie relives, reweaves and recasts his wayward tale, readers may tease out the devil from the details. They may also unearth the world, the flesh and rushes of dream-spirit. Paul Blumer has penned an exciting first novel.
—Al Young, poet-novelist-essayist
and California’s ex-poet laureate
Death or Quarter
a novel
by Paul D Blumer
Paul D Blumer
Copyright 2011 by Paul D Blumer
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Follow @pdblumer
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Cover art Evynne Blumer-Torres www.EvyNicole.com
To Jen and Ed, without whom it would be a hollow tale indeed.
And for my parents, who mostly encouraged, or at least tolerated the tomfoolery from a young age.
Acknowledgements and a thousand thanks to:
o000o
John Rubadeau, whose indelible teachings have followed me through the days of my life. His language-intricate philosophy, boiled down to Scratch your itch, has doubtless influenced and saved hundreds, if not thousands, of proud Ann Arbor championites.
My lovely lady of the lake—er, Brooke—without whose adoring sustenance I would have long-since perished, leaving behind just a scattering of words in the breeze.
My family members who never hesitate to show me the other side of the looking glass.
The CCA grad-writing faculty, for their openness to and excitement for new voices, new work, and new ideas.
All my willing Readers, with a good balance of praise and criticism—you know who you are. Without you this would be choppy and incomplete.
Ed G; if you've found your way into a copy, give me a call. You have my number.
The giants on whose shoulders I stand: the view is priceless.
And all the naysayers who’ve galvanized my stubborn pen.
Inspired by true stories.
Our
dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and
meaningless
T.S.
Eliot “The Hollow Men”
Pop! Like that moment during an orgasm or yawn. That one instant when everything shuts down, leaving an empty chassis. Higher consciousness forfeit, senses unfiltered. Time and place forgotten.
You notice the world rising all around.
You're falling.
For that one instant, you are falling. A flash vision of that fall continuing all the way to the dust that will soon become your permanent residence.
But then your knees catch—instinct takes over, and you duck the next punch. Adrenaline floods gut chest neck eyes mind, sucking away pain and pumping in rage. An animal takes charge.
Raw reaction and a surge of calm violence. Control.
Squinting at my opponent behind a wall of forearms, I twist my head and crack my neck. Gotta roll with the punches.
The first hit in any fight is the best. You build up this anticipation thinking about the fight, imagining worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario, picturing that jaw-breaking first blow.
But when the knuckles connect, it's never as bad as you expected. Training and toughness. Recognition and experience. The rest of this will be a breeze.
And now I make this man pay.
Luis Corpus. Squared off, wary of retaliation and looking for openings. A born fighter—quick, and more or less wiry for this event. Six-seven, two-forty, tattooed and scarred like nobody's business. Prison ink. He's the Peruvian favorite, brought in from Lima by some of my...associates.
Associates whose names I don't even want to know, guys involved in business networks with fingers in pies of all kinds, these corporations wielding so much raw power and money, that few even know they exist. Who else would organize illegal bare-knuckle fights?
The bets are flying thick and heavy, and everyone is serious. For the spectators, it's serious cash. For the Feds, it's serious felony. For us—for me and this man Luis—it's serious life and death.
And each player thinks his own serious is the most important.
Head bobbing, nostrils flared. Squared-off and circling. Smelling blood, and thirsty. Luis Corpus. A dead man.
There's a reason I'm facing this man I don't know, this Peruvian kid wearing creased-new Carhartts and a pair of Timberlands so fresh, the leather is still unburnished over the steel toes. There's a reason I'm bare-chested and carved like granite. There's a reason my nose is bleeding and broken flat.
And there's a reason I don't give a shit.
We're all in it for the same reason, however many zeros come after it. At the very basic, it's a thing of survival, of continuing to thrive, of adapting to the environment and amassing as much of its fruit as possible. The instinct to possess, to maintain a foothold in this slippery world—to ensure tomorrow.
There's a world full of things people would do for money. Who among us can say he's never done anything other than right, for the almighty dollar? That guy can throw the first stone.
And then I'm gonna throw it right back, straight at his head.
Money.
Money makes the world go round. Money grows on trees—if you own the trees. Money makes men do a lot of things. Money makes me fight—well, money plus a ferocious impulse to win.
There's a lot I wouldn't do for ten grand, but punching the shit out of some other juiced-up gorilla for the pleasure of a bunch of drug lords and tycoons doesn't bother me. Hell, I'd do it for free.
But I don't. I'm paid and honor-bound, contracted and enthralled. Life signed away. Might as well have been my blood in that fountain pen long ago. My blood is in the fight as much as the fight is in my blood.
So here I am.
Winner gets ten thousand. I get ten thousand.
Loser gets two grand. You want to see me fight, you have to have a million cash, just to get in. From there it's side bets worth more than my car, on every little aspect of the fight. Hundred large on someone calling mercy; quarter million on whether a guy gets up from a stumble. Fifty grand on over/under number of punches landed.
I'm a valuable champion, but don't be fooled: these guys couldn't care less about me, and I don't give a shit about them, as long as they don't ever try to get me to take a fall for cash. That day happens, if one of these cologne-soaked glass-jaw gangsters ever offers to buy the outcome of a fight, if a slickie crook ever asks me to go down after five punches, that day I quit. That day I quit by taking his wide colorful tie and adjusting it three or four inches.
Here's a secret: pride is the only thing worth more than money...you just can't buy anything with it.
Here’s another secret: it’s also the real reason I fight. I can make more cash in other ways. But there’s no better way to get that feeling, that thrill when you walk out and start circling, measuring up the opponent, and it’s just you and him, life and death. There’s no other way to make thirty spectators disappear than to face off one-on-one in a game that might leave one of us dead. There is no drug that can compare.
Believe it or not I'd rather fight a guy taller than me. Truth. Against a taller fighter, you throw uppercuts and high-explosive jawbreakers. You drop in under his guard, and right there at eye level is the soft throat. When you fight a big guy, it's all he can do to swing downwards, exposing himself to devastating blows to the chin with each level drop. This isn’t boxing.
No, it's the little dudes you have to watch out for, the little Bruce Lee roosters who dodge in and out, ducking right under your punches. And God forbid you ever lose to someone smaller than you. Can’t let the underdog take away the bone.
This guy, this Luis Corpus, thinks his wingspan and height give him the edge. It's making him cocky—that or he's just got a sloppy, lanky style. Either way, I'm seeing openings.
He's getting careless, throwing haymakers that I easily dodge. He's grown up fighting in prison, where fights are haphazard at best, a matter of wild swinging in hopes of landing some ferocious hits before you take a nightstick to the belly. His style is like using a Mac-10: spray 'n' pray. I've got conditioning and experience on my side.
His chest is heaving, shining with Vaseline and sweat. I can rope-a-dope this guy until he makes a crucial mistake. Just a matter of time…
You don't see a guy's eyes much in a fight. The eyes lie. There's a point in space somewhere around his mid torso and a few inches in front of his chest. That's where you focus. Maximize the field of peripherals, brain concentrating on the whole picture. Motion-sensor mode.
Timing is everything.
He drops a hand to hitch his dungarees, and I dive in with a glancing cross. He stumbles back and shakes it off, blowing a mist of spit and blood before shrugging and returning to his guard. His lips glisten scarlet and tremble slightly as he breathes.
We circle, bouncing on toes in the dust, never still.
Stop moving for one second in this sport, and next thing you know, you're on the ground, and a steel-toe boot is making a hole in your head.
Footwork is essential, and the hours spent hopping over a jump-rope pay off in the end. I don't want to have to think about my feet.
So we circle, bouncing on toes, glaring between uplifted fists in search of openings.
Jab.
Jab.
Tentative. Lunge and jab, lunge and back again.
Left foot forward, right leg flexed like a coiled spring. Round and round.
Get the fuck to it, cabrón! someone shrieks from outside the ring.
And then I get hit.
I'm on my back, rolling away from Corpus' boots and trying to shake the stars out of my eyes and the ringing from my ears. He seems surprised that I'm down, and I take advantage of his hesitation to scramble back and get on my feet again. Distraction is part of the game, and this time it caught me off-guard. If Luis Corpus had been more experienced or more driven, I'd be a dead man.
A fight is a dance. Shuffle back, bob and weave, bouncing toes, back and back, back back and BANG! Lure the motherfucker in and make him pay. Pinpoint punches—hard!—jaw, ear, break the nose, smash the collarbone.
There's a technique and a reason for everything.
It's not chaos.
It's choreography versus choreography. If I can break this guy's nose, his eyes will water, no matter how tough he is. Then I'm attacking a blind man fighting through a blur. If I can snap his collarbone, he's minus a weapon; minus a shield. If I can scare him enough about my ability to deliver pain, he'll make a mistake, and then I'm in.
There's a hole in the ground waiting for him if I catch him just right.
It’s a funny thing about this bare-knuckle death circuit that rotates among a scattering of secluded ranches owned by a file cabinet somewhere. You try it out and it's kinda scary, kind of exciting, like skydiving or racing cars. You're jacked on adrenaline, and it hurts like a motherfucker sometimes, and you're constantly aching: permanent black eyes, throbbing knuckles, cauliflower ear—the works. But it's also addictive like no drug I've ever tried. You get the feeling that you can wreck absolutely anybody, and you cannot wait to start hitting.
I walk through the supermarket, and I want to punch that guy in the Gold's Gym t-shirt just for standing in front of the protein powder I want to buy. I want to slap the bartender for overfilling my glass and spilling beer. I want to pick fights with two, three, four guys at a time. I want to fight fight fight. Nobody can fuck with me, but I have to find someone with the grit to take me on toe to toe, someone who can actually stand against me. There's an instinct we all have, no matter how deeply buried, to find the alpha and bring him down by any means available, to dominate no matter what. Ask Darwin. Ask Brezhnev. Ask the President.
Call me an animal. I agree. We're all animals, kept in line by a set of social standards and hereditary habits. And as an animal, I'm absorbed by an evolutionary need to win win win, to prove my progenitive prowess time and time again—to keep partaking of the sweet juicy fruits of the world. My world.
And to do that, I need a challenge. A challenge. Not this guy. He's just a kid I'm going to demolish.
Luis Corpus. He advances as I swipe a fist across my lips. The stinging pain galvanizes my body, and I leap toward him, juking right and swinging a left-hook pap! directly into his temple as he bobs away from the feint.
His arms drop, his eyes glaze over, and he falls like a cardboard cutout in a puff of chalky dust. My left arm vibrates with pain, radiating all through my elbow and into my shoulder.
I can smell the blood dripping from my split knuckles, and I step back to watch the kid.
He doesn't move.
It's over.
I turn away, and my body sags in the adrenal aftermath. A metallic taste, like sucking pennies, on my tongue. I collect the purse and walk away, past the waiting backhoe, past the food-laden tables, toward a shower, not bothering to see if Corpus gets up. If he does, he'll be sent packing. The loser isn't invited to the after-party.
A wrecked car sits at the edge of a grove of trees, still smoking from the weapons demonstration before the fight. Long ago, after one of my earlier bouts, I bought a concealable Walther PPK to carry around, after watching the arms dealer with a semiautomatic SPAS-12 shotgun rip apart a taxi in seconds. In another show, I'd nearly gone deaf from the concussion of an RPG. And a demo of an AK-47 mod once made me worry about the plight of Democracy. But now, it’s sort of just a pissing match. I don’t even want to know who’s buying what weapons.
At this ranch, where you drive from the highway about six hours up the driveway before you get to the main house, there's an ominous presence of power. You can feel it prickling the hair on your neck, tingling the skin under your balls, dancing at the back of your throat. This is the kind of place where you're on your best behavior.
Despite that, I'm leaving before the party, as soon as I get my suit on. I have to get back to Boston. There are thirty keys of the finest snow stashed in a couple of duffels in the locker room of the gym I’m now the sole owner of, since Alonzo’s demise, and I'd hate for it to melt in the summer heat.
o000o
I grew up like any other American kid. School, chores, cartoons, working-class parents. Except I was short and fat, and had nothing to say to any number of bullies who slouched around the housing project where my parents had been inconsiderate enough to raise me.
My life was basically laid out and hopeless. No matter how good my grades were, I could never afford college. I was set to become a janitor or handyman or mechanic, and my best bet was to get a job working in some nice neighborhood outside the city, where I'd maybe stand to make a decent enough wage to put a down payment on some shitty house and live in debt the rest of my miserable life, raising my own slum kids and riding the hamster wheel of the American Dream.
There was an image I had—a dream sometimes—of myself sitting in a kitchen nodding into a newspaper, pushing reading glasses up my nose every ten seconds, cup of coffee growing cool on a Formica tabletop. I'd wake up from the dream in a cold sweat, clueless as to what had freaked me out, until I went into the kitchen for breakfast, and saw my pops, drowsing into a bowl of soup next to his newspaper, still wearing his nightshift uniform with its aluminum flashlight and laminated badge.
As soon as anyone discovered my father was an LBJ-worshipping rent-a-cop, I became a target. I was used to it. I had a half a dozen spots around the project grounds where I'd scuttle and hide when someone was after my yo-yo or lunch pail or whatever. I kept mostly to myself, avoiding the playground and other kids, reading library books, and swiping candy bars from newsstands when I could. It was a rat's existence, and I look back on it with disgust, but at the time I didn't know any better. There was only one way to pull myself out for real.
I had to get involved in something.
When you have almost nothing, the one frivolous thing you own can mean the world. It can mean a peek into another existence, where money is just part of getting dressed.
One year for Christmas and my eleventh birthday combined, my folks managed to scrape a few extra dollars to buy me a fancy new sled. I remember unwrapping the thing and dancing around the mudroom-sized family room like a chubby little gnome, feeling like a king. That little red sled was my be-all and end-all, with its razor-sharp runners and a brand-new manila rope knotted through the wood alongside the words Flexible Flyer. Pure magic. I wanted to ride that thing every minute of every day, until everything else sort of faded away.
Enter Mikey Stone, the ugly pimp who supervised the project, terrorizing the hundreds of resident families and swaggering around at the head of his little band like the Sheriff of Nottingham.
The son or nephew or cousin of someone with enough influence to get him the position, Mikey Stone regularly rifled through people's mail and purposely lost rent checks to collect late fees. Nobody ever did anything about it. We all lived in fear. I avoided him and his gang at all costs.
The original founders would be disgusted to see what their Welcome-Home-Heroes-V-E-Day Housing Project had rotted into after all the vets had made their way up in the world and moved out to the suburbs.
It was a Tuesday, I remember. Everyone was still talking about Max McGee's unlikely performance in the NFL Championship over the weekend. I’d cut school to play on the sled, bumping down ice-slick steps in front of the building under the kind of blue sky that makes you wonder if maybe everything will work out after all. I was lugging the sled back up the measly hill, when Mikey Stone and his four goons hopped out of a Twinkie-colored Plymouth Duster, and sauntered over.
"That's a wicked-nice sled, kid," whistled Mikey. His companions sniggered and pawed at each other, closing a circle around me. I nodded and kept my eyes on the ground, hoping they'd just go away.
"Kin I try it?" He reached out a hand and flipped it a couple of times, gimme gimme. I looked up.
His eyes were droopy and yellow. A jaundiced undershirt peeped out from his low-zipped Red Sox jacket, half hiding a silver chain winking in the sun. I hugged the sled and shook my head silently, wiping my nose on a mitten knit by some auntie.
"No?" Mikey was incredulous. "Did he just say no, boys?" They nodded and laughed.
Uh oh.
He stepped toward me, glaring down and wagging a finger in my face.
"Listen to me, you little motherfucker," he growled, with breath that would wilt sawgrass, "I was gonna take it for a ride, but now I'm just gonna take it. Give it here."
I shook my head.
Get bent, bully, I imagined screaming. I saw myself lifting the sled over my head and swinging it with inhuman strength directly into his fat purple night-crawler lips, standing over him and chopping the edge toward his neck like a guillotine again and again. Then—even at eleven years old—I'd chase after his motley gang and clean the streets of a few more petty hoods.
Holy dreaming doofus, Batman.
Instead, I just tightened my grip on the sled while Mikey and his thugs sneered and reached for it.
Suddenly I was down, staring at the powder-blue sky through a drifting galaxy of yellow sparks. Ears ringing. Temples throbbing.
I hadn't even seen the fist coming.
Hot coppery blood slid down my throat, and I gagged, tears brimming in my eyes. My face burned. The thugs laughed.
My hands were empty—they'd torn the sled out of my grip and were passing it around the circle over my head. I will not cry. I will not give them the satisfaction. I will not let these rats get to me.
They grabbed my arms. Two of them sat on my legs. Mikey stooped and unzipped my coat. He dug in a pocket and popped a switchblade. Then he grabbed a handful of my shirt and snarled with murder in his eyes, "Don't you ever say no to me, boy. Not if you value your shitty little life." He slit my shirt and pulled it open, exposing my chest.
"Here's a little lesson, punk," he said, "This is my turf. Anything on it belong to me." Then he dropped trou and squatted. I watched his asshole twitch once or twice, and then it bulged slightly and peeled slowly back around a glistening brown torpedo, stretching thin and squelching softly. Underneath, his nuts quivered. Then the shit thumped hot on my chest.
"Including you."
The thugs ran off.
I sat up and spat blood. The turd clung for a second before tumbling into my lap, leaving streaks on my stomach as I watched them skip and hoot, honking the horn as the Duster skidded down the road.
I broke a tooth grinding my jaw.
o000o
Believe it or not, I moved on. No sense wallowing. When you're a slug, you can't do anything against the folks who come pluck you up and fling you around for sport, and so you get used to the abuse and learn to take it with a grain of salt—which makes it that much worse for the slug.
The following fall, newly twelve, I took a job as an assistant janitor at an apartment complex on the Fenway.
How expected.
My job was to run around with a nail-embedded broom handle, spearing bits of garbage, which I did for a whole year before graduating to gathering the piles of filled trash bags around the grounds, hauling them to a pickup which carried them to the dump.
After another year of that, they finally told me that I'd be driving the truck once I got my license at sixteen. And I was supposed to be grateful and proud. More pennies and more respect in the custodial world.
Instead I was thinking, two more years of this? Maybe just kill me now.
But that was the job. There was nothing I could do about my life without some savings. So I plugged on, and pretended to be optimistic about the labor.
Now and then an illegal Mexican—or Salvadoran or Puerto Rican or whatever—would hitch a ride in the garbage truck and stick around to work on some painting or laying new linoleum to replace squares loosened to hide junkie stashes. They'd probably make more money if they went around ripping up the rest of floor, selling whatever treasures they found buried there, but somehow they’re too honest.
I didn't know any Spanish, and I never much trusted anyone anyway, so they were all just faceless migrant workers. Which meant I thought nothing of it when one day the truck pulled up with a dude in a sweatshirt sitting in the bed.
I was carrying four trashbags, holding them with arms straight out, loving the way my sweatshirt stretched taut against my trembling muscles, and how the cotton pulled against the five or eight chest hairs I'd been cultivating. For months I'd been making a game out of work, hoisting the trashbags like dumbbells, and after enough hours of such work, muscles turn to cables, and skin turns to leather. I felt the job turning me into something hard and functional, and I liked that.
Since the day I lost my sled, I'd been ripping pushups at a rate of dozens a day, trying to push out the memory-burned image of Mikey Stone by focusing my anger and exhausting my rage. I was sick of being the fat kid, the quiet acquiescing victim of any bully. A growth spurt this summer had left me bigger than a lot of the other fourteen-year-olds and I worked to stay on top of that. Never again would I face the humiliation and disgrace of bowing before a power greater than my own.
I couldn't afford a weight set, but I had scooped a weight bench from a garage sale. With a bag of concrete from the construction site down the block and some buckets, I made barbells with a pair of mop handles. I spent all my free time in the maintenance shed on that cracked vinyl, relishing the shhh of my sweaty back peeling off as I sat up, breathing in the cold machine smell. I dreamt in rhythmic clinking, and took bodybuilder books from the library to improve my technique.
As the calluses on my palms grew, my anger hardened into something calm and virulent, and I tucked it into the pit of my stomach where it sat and waited. I could feel it behind my bellybutton when I looked in the mirror, finally approving of the scowling figure I saw there.
I could feel it when I mumbled “yes sir, no sir” to my bosses.
I could feel it when Grandpa, in a rare moment of vigor and clarity, scolded and slapped me for letting my grades slip. That ain’t my problem, it's yours. But you GET your GRADES back UP.
I could feel it when I played King of the Hill with neighborhood kids until my knees were oozing and bubbly with filthy scrapes, and I was finally standing alone on the top.
I could feel it all the time.
It had been ages since Mikey Stone had left the projects for grimier pastures, but I still thought about him every day as I let my anger use my body to push its muscles past the point of pain.
I thought about wrapping my arm around his throat, and cranked a few more curls.
I thought about shoving him through windows, and pushed a few more presses.
I thought about stomping his face under my workboots, and gritted out a few more squats.
Between lifting weights and work, I kept myself distracted and mostly out of trouble, but I began feeling a powerful wanderlust. There was no way I could stomach this minimum-wage job much longer. I needed to get out of the projects and into the world—even if that meant something like loan sharking.
"Hey, Paulie, this guy's here to meet the new manager about a job."
I nodded and barely glanced up, thinking mostly about my count. Forty-five...forty-six...forty-seven…
My record was a minute with four full bags outstretched. But something familiar about the guy made me stop and look again. Those lips flapping in the breeze, the hint of a sneer hooking his wide nose, the thick low forehead. I froze.
Mikey Stone. With no goons.
I dropped the bags and lunged toward the truck which had brought me such a nice gift. I leapt up on the tailgate and grabbed him by the collar. His surprise changed to fear as I wrenched him toward the edge. He recognized me.
"Remember me, motherfucker?" I hissed. I hopped down from the truck, pulling Mikey along by the sweatshirt—then I yanked him off and rocked my leg up, slapping his face around my knee like a pumpkin. He collapsed and sprawled unmoving for a moment, and I stood waiting. He pulled himself to his knees and stood woozily, reaching in his pocket for a knife.
No way. It's my turn now. And I'm on him, throwing my entire weight behind a right cross which connects CRACK on his chin. He stumbles back, and I swing around with my left, smashing my fist into his temple. He drops to the sidewalk. The switchblade clatters across the pavement. I'm on him, fists flailing, red mist rising before my eyes DIE you fucking worm piece of shit; my fist again and again socking wet and hard into his ugly brown face, drawing back and throwing myself down again and again, fists elbows fist fist fist blood spraying teeth bared screaming venting MOTHERFUCKER die! as the accumulation of my hatred toward him boils over, and all the anger of feeling helpless takes control, CHOCK chock thuck tap thap DIE the back of his head cracks and spills red on the pavement, wide wet eyes cross lose focus, arms fall to the draw of gravity as his body gives up, and still I'm on him thrashing and flailing and mashing his face again and again with raw knuckles elbows bleeding breath ragged DIE DIE DIE as he goes limp beneath me, my knees soaked through with hot blood, heart thumping, fists pumping, rage shrieking, and spit flecking into his unseeing eyes, and his head cracking against the pavement with each savage blow; I'm on him brap brap brap brap as my fists take on a life of their own, lips splitting, teeth flying, tongue bitten through, skin torn and bruised, losing shape just a DIE mass of blood and cells and follicles of DIE a bully who chose the wrong victim with infinite patience and unceasing hatred.
I was panting and exhausted when I finally got up. The driver of the pickup stared agape, and I leveled a glare at him.
"The fuck you looking at?"
He shook his head and drove off. It was time for me to go.
o000o
Lights on.
Morning.
"Gaeta! On your feet."
Time to be counted. Prisoner 30583-012 is still here.
"Your turn at the phone, right after breakfast."
All you can do is nod and try not to yawn.
A phone call's good. Breaks up the routine; gives you something to think about and anticipate. Even though a lot of times they just go wicked wrong, and you walk away feeling empty, pissed off, dissociative; there's nothing better than a taste of the outside world—like when the news went around that O.J. got acquitted and the homeboys all went nuts. A nibble of caviar in hell's food court. Good.
A yawn's bad. A yawn can get you in all sorts of stupid trouble, like You bored or somethin'? Need to go back to bed instead of out to play? You mocking me, you little piss-ant? How about a nice trip to the SHU where no one can catch your yawn, faggot? They always ask trap questions like that. Best to bite your tongue to keep from answering, or else pay the price for whatever smart-ass words come out. Bad.
Avoid trouble. Keep to yourself.
They say every criminal winds up in the slammer. Honestly, you can't bitch and moan too much about it. If you're all kinds of crook and you're stupid enough to get caught, you go to jail. That's the game.
Years of brawls and assaults, years of loan sharking, years of illegal prize fights that sometimes end in death, and the judgment they finally level is twenty-four years for moving cocaine and Percocet through the gym, plus a handful of tax evasion and laundering charges. With gnarled knuckles soaked in blood, that kind of bid ain't so bad, given a little perspective.
Breakfast sucks.
How many days can you have the same off-gray cookie-cutter crap before you turn into a forty-year-old jellyfish? Some guys deal with it by stealing fruit and fermenting it with sugar into pruno. Then they show up hammered, and meals are magically transformed into something palatable.
Either way, you eat the whole goddamn mess because it's all there is. Pretty soon you forget there's anything else. You forget the lobster-tail. You forget the 18-ounce porterhouses. You forget the crabcakes and gravy and barbecued ribs. Forget all that.
You eat, because otherwise your muscle melts away. Skin hangs in folds. Nails crack. Teeth loosen. Lips split. You eat because if you don't, your status as a fighter is meaningless, and then you can't even defend yourself.
At this point you'd kill for a simple bowl of penne with garlic and olive oil.
Memories from the Outside mingle and run together with memories from the joint, until the whole string of personal history gets snarled and confusing.
Sometimes an old-timer will stand up and declare I am not a crook! as if the cheeky phrase were something new. Sometimes guys will wake up in the middle of the night begging a first-grade teacher not to kick them out of school. Sometimes a guy will demand answers: Where the hell is Corbata? forgetting that compadre died three years ago.
Present and past blur in a twisted clusterfuck, and whatever moment you are in, now is the lens for every aspect of every memory that comes to the surface.
This is the Big House. This is where guys get raped and stomped for being the little man, for being a piss-ant sucker bottom-feeder. There's few real friends. There's no permanent loyalty. There's only lights-on in the morning, lights-out at night, and might-makes-right in between. It's a life-and-death hierarchy here. Which makes it a perfect savage microcosm of the Outside. This is Hell's version of the real world.
You add capital letters to things inside your head, because that's the only place you're Free. That's the only place they can't inspect and toss. It's the only place where you can safely keep contraband.
So you nurture it.
Read books from the cart of donations.
Retreat.
You promise out what's left of your assets, and brownnose and cajole to get a cell without a cellie for as long as possible, and you study and read and correspond with a guy you know, and eventually earn a degree in philosophy from University of Phoenix. You embrace what's inside your head.
Because you can. Because you have to. Because you have nothing but Time. Nothing but a ceiling overhead to stare at and contemplate from every imaginable angle.
At some point even fantasizing about sex hour after hour can get boring.
"Gaeta! Get to the phones. Use it or lose it, chief."
Nod and say thank you, sir. Ignore the biting sarcasm of the address. Then shuffle off to the phonebank after handing your tray to a lackey, punch a number, and wait with the receiver pressed against your ear.
"Hello?"
This is how it goes.
"Hey, sweetheart, it's me."
"Me. Me who?" She sounds tired.
Smile. Always smile.
"There someone else calls you 'sweetheart'?"
Silence roars through the receiver.
"I'm just kiddin', babe, how are you?"
Make a stupid joke like that, expect to get burned. Say something dumb and eat your words. Swallow the bitter pride. Screaming into the phone gets privileges revoked. Or worse.
"Not bad. Good...I mean, I'm used to it, but it's not so pleasant, you know? At least I have Dante."
Yeah.
"Speaking of, he wants to ask you something. Here."
"Daddy?"
"Yeah, buddy, what's shakin'?"
"Daddy, can I go camping!"
"Of course you can, Dante. Put your mom back on."
“Hey.”
"You planning on taking him? Can't get your nails done in a tent."
"Tex wants to take him."
"Tex? Tex does?"
o000o
I asked for a throwaway.
Call me what you will, but it’s my eightieth fight. And I've won them all. I don't even care to imagine how much money I've made for these fat cats, and the least they can do when I'm this close to fulfilling my contract is give me a pushover to mash up.
"Yeah, alright," said a suit whose name I'll never know. "You got it."
I was a little miffed at first when I saw the guy's pretty big, maybe six-three, two-eighty-five, but he's goofy-looking with a smushed potato of a nose sitting atop a mustache like a fat caterpillar carrying a sack. And soft muscle tone. But bouncing around, shadow-boxing, loosening up.
Just like me.
Despite his unimpressive appearance, he looked tight and in control. But so does everyone, mostly. Until they get hit.
"You know," I said to the suit, "he looks kinda worrisome."
"Yeah, but look at him. Everybody's obviously hit him. Nose all over the place. That cauliflower ear."
"I guess you're right."
Bringing myself into the moment, I crack my neck and put up my guard. I'm aiming straight for that ugly mustache. And if that doesn't work, I'll cave in his skinny chest.
He calls across to me, "Okay, boy, let's have some fun."
I feel like destroying something. I forge forward, ready to knock his head off.
Bam!
Stars. Blackness. Fire.
Down and rolling.
The kick came from nowhere. Unbelievable that this bottom-heavy schlub was even able to get his foot off the ground.
He backs off—I'm known for attacking the legs from the ground.
I roll to my feet, crouched and swinging wildly. He stands back, chin tucked, and fists floating.
He's got the stance of a kickboxer.
How did I not see?
Overconfidence is weakness.
Careful.
Pinpoint.
The punches come like heat-seeking missiles. No flailing or wildness here.
Pop! I catch one in the forehead.
Shht! I skin my knuckles on his stubble.
"Close there, fella!"
You can hear the wet-meat smack of the hits all over the compound. Disgusting. Like a pissed-off butcher having a tantrum in the stockroom.
He's wary, but not afraid. Afraid of nothing.
Just like me.
We trade blows like fencers, parry and thrust. Graceful at first. You can feel the electric crackling in the air, the surging force between us. It's a chess game with blood.
His nose is bleeding. Gobs stick to his mustache.
My ear is split and throbbing. Sounds like a freight train.
Shuffle up a cloud of rusty dust.
Circling.
Vultures waiting for the guard to drop.
Darting in. Whack! Darting out.
The average street fight lasts just seconds. At three minutes, we're still going, trading blows like titans with iron faces. At least he’s stopped kicking.
Lips swollen. Cheeks numb. Breath flagging.
Behind each punch, it's all about letting go of that anger and fury, siccing the energy like a junkyard dog to tear and ravage, and then yanking it right back to fuel the next blow.
He grabs my arms, pulling me into a clinch.
"Quit?" he pants, flecking blood on my good ear.
"I will never quit," I snarl.
"Then we die here."
"Then we die."
I push him away and catch him square on the chin with a right.
Popcorn.
He shakes it off. Body shot to my ribs.
Gasping.
Drowning.
Leaning on each other trying hooks, uppercuts, knees.
Fluid seeps out of every orifice. Trying to escape the punishment.
I swing toward him and he clinches again.
"I think I gotta go to the hospital," he groans. "How 'bout a draw?"
"That's fine." Sweet relief.
We shake hands gingerly, broken bones grinding, trying not to wince.
A suit comes up. "What's going on, gentlemen?"
We both turn and glare, lips pulling back from blood-lined teeth in snarls he'll see in nightmares. He retreats, hands up disarmingly. "All right, all right, the fight's over. Say one of you tapped out. Whatever you do with the cash—I don't care." He must not be strapped, or else he'd act more confident.
The winnings plop on the table in thick parchment envelopes. Officially one of us wins, one of us loses; but neither of us cares which is which. We split the purses, six grand apiece, and hobble away from the ring.
"What's your name?"
"Paulie Gaeta. What's yours?"
"I'm Tex."
o000o
Gaping into the phone, watching the counselor riffle through papers.
"Tex wants to take him camping?"
It makes no sense. Tex loves cocaine, and women with fake eyelashes and no rules. He loves gambling and cufflinks and crystal champagne glasses. He loves glitter and glamour and room service.
Hard to picture Tex in a tent.
"Yeah, Paulie, that's what he said. He wants to take Dante up to Vermont."
"What do you think about this?"
"Well, he loves the boy. He's been by several times in the last few years, you know."
What do you do when you're stuck in the pen and your best friend wants to take your son camping? Maybe you suspect he's trying to score the wife. Maybe you try not to think about it. Just sigh and frown into the phone.
"Yeah, that's fine."
"You tell him."
Smile when you tell your six-year-old boy, Go ahead and enjoy yourself. Tell old Tex hello.
Smile because a kid can hear your expression clear as words. Kids see a lot. Even when they see you never.
In the pictures, Tex the peckerwood has jheri curls and a diamond twinkle in his eye. He still has that stupid mustache, and even while keeping up a hard-ass attitude, how can you help missing the guy? At least he's looking out for Dante.
Being a daddy figure.
Jesus.
On the Inside, you get only a few minutes on the phone. Funny, for a guy who always absolutely loathed talking on the phone to dread that moment—
"Gaeta! Time's up. Hang up."
—when it's time to say goodbye.
o000o
After the stalemate fight, Tex and I skipped the party and caught a helicopter ride to the nearest hospital. We both would have liked to stay, but even paid whores won't stick around long to chat when there's blood dripping from both ears and pus gumming together an eyelid or two.
It's all pretty hazy, like a red mist sort of blocks out the memory, but I remember stumbling through sterile hallways looking for someone to help us, lurching past bald kids in wheelchairs, past It's A Girl balloons, past stacks and stacks of flowers, past folks in scrubs checking their watches while gobbling down cafeteria food.
"Whoa," cried a nurse receptionist, leaping out of her chair with a pen-dangling clipboard. "What happened to y'all?"
"Construction accident," nodded Tex.
"Motorcycle crash," I shrugged.
She cocked an eyebrow and bent down to page somebody.
Tex leaned over, darted his good eye back and forth, and stage-whispered, "Where do I get my spongebath?" The nurse rolled her eyes and tugged on her ponytail.
"Over there." She jerked her head toward the Geriatric Wing.
Tex looked, and seemed to consider. "Can I just have one in my room? From you?"
"Sorry, I'm not into blood and black eyes. I'm a nurse." She wrinkled her nose and looked down at the clipboard. "Name?"
"Randall Tex Cobb."
Randall Cobb. It sounded so familiar I had to ask. "Randall Cobb? Where do I know you from?"
"Kickboxing? I'm undefeated."
"Please. I don't follow that shit. Something else?"
"You hear of Pedro Vega?"
No.
"You won't. I knocked him out in my first pro bout five years ago. I think he's still out."
"You're a pro boxer? What the fuck are you doing out in this circuit? You should be sweating in the lights, getting mad endorsement deals—not crouching in the shadow of a backhoe. C'mon!"
"I have a gambling problem."
"Gentlemen. If I might interrupt.” The nurse handed us a pair of clipboards. “Fill out these forms, please. We'll be with you shortly. Meantime, here's some ice."
"Here, take my ice, Paulie. I think you took a worse beating back there."
"Fuck you."
So much for a throwaway. Tex was the top contender against Larry Holmes in the upcoming heavyweight title fight at the end of next year. Real glamorous legit boxing. And the man had a chin! Trust me. It was like punching a chunk of granite. If he could get inside Larry Holmes' reach, he'd win the belt for sure.
"So a gambling problem, huh?” I frowned as I filled out the clipboard paperwork with a sore hand. “What, like you can't gamble on pro fights, so you come out here for a little rough and tumble?"
"No, like I lost a bet to this asshole whose wager was he wanted to see me go at it without the gloves. To see if I—he says—could actually take a punch. You kiddin' me? I'm about to take on the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Seriously, Paulie, your little no-surrender game could've ruined my career instead of just my face."
"Wasn't much left to ruin."
"Ha funny. But that asshole never showed up after he set up this fight. And by then, I couldn’t back down. Mob and all..."
"Some people."
"Mr. Gaeta? Mr. Cobb? Right this way please."
We limped after the nurse's bouncing ponytail into a room with two beds where we were told to sit and wait for the orderly who'd be in shortly to take us into X-ray.
o000o
The day after the phone call with Dante, a C.O. interrupts a good game of chess. "Gaeta, Dr. Schwartz's office. Phone call." Fondling the knob of his nightstick, he cracks a wry grin. “Lucky sumbitch,” he drawls, “Someone must like you.”
This doesn't happen. It's a rare event when somebody from Outside is allowed to make unscheduled contact. Their rules keep everything orderly. To deviate is to invite creativity, imagination, memories of freedom.
"Hello?"
"Hi." Wife. Pissed.
The counselor—a great person to have as a friend—who let the call come through turns slightly away from the speakerphone in embarrassment, but listens anyway. Just doing his job.
"Sweetheart. How are you?"
"Would you like the phone number where your son is?"
The phone number? The hell? A questioning look at the counselor, who half-shrugs and slides a pad and pencil over.
She chirps the number and hangs up.
"Goodbye?" The receiver rattles into its cradle. "Can I make the call, Dr. Schwartz?" Even through a put-on smile, asking permission leaves a bitter aftertaste. Schwartz nods. His office is one of the few places in the joint where non-collect calls can be made.
Brrrrrr. The sound of a phone ringing somewhere. Brrrrrr. A grinding anticipation. Brrr—
"Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, this is Rob, how may I be of service?"
There are many ways of keeping calm. All of them take immeasurable practice.
You can count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
You can breathe deeply:
In.
Out.
You can screw your eyes shut and imagine a happy place.
You can bite your lip.
Gnaw your knuckles.
Do pushups.
The key is to channel your racing brainwaves toward something else.
"I'm sorry," grated carefully through clenched teeth, "I might've dialed the wrong number..."
He confirms that is not the case.
"Is there a Randall Tex Cobb there?"
"Oh yes sir," he croons, suddenly animated. "I believe he checked in yesterday morning. With his adorable son."
He's a dead man. Dead! When you're a thug, you know people who can make things happen. You can make sure Tex doesn't leave Caesar's Palace on his own feet. You can make sure his blood is splattered across the entire bank of penny slots. You can make sure he rolls snake eyes one last time.
The calming techniques work.
"Can I speak with him please?"
Practice makes perfect.
"Umm, yes. Give me one second. Who's calling please?"
"Just put him on."
The wait is interminable, amplified by the Muzak oozing from the phone. Who has the best connections to Vegas? Who could send someone there the quickest? Would Schwartz allow one more call?
"Hello?"
"Tex, you mother fucker."
"Paulie? Good to hear from you, buddy! You seem upset."
"My son is supposed to be in a tent in Vermont."
"Well we're playing blackjack at the moment."
"I've got a counselor right here, otherwise I'd tell you I'm gonna have you killed."
"Relax, pal. Talk to your boy before you kill me."
"Hello?"
"Dante?"
"Hi Dad!"
"What are you doing, Dante?"
"I'm playing blackjacks. I'm learning adding and minus-ing. And I'm learning remembering what cards I saw. Oh!...I wasn't ‘posed to tell that.”
"That's okay, buddy. What else have you been doing?”
“Yesterday we flew a helicopter! And then saw a show. I want to play music and sing.”
“You do? What do you want to play?”
“Well I can sing the Natural Ant-hymn, listen!” He croons lustily, high voice crackling static against the phone receiver. “José, can you siiiing! By the dog’s early light—!” Loud random rustling tapping scraping sounds as he drops the phone…
“Still there?” Tex back on the line. “This kid’s great. The balls on him! I mean, if I could talk to women like he does...”
“Jesus, Tex, are you corrupting my boy?”
“Just teaching him how to play to stay on top of the world. His old man would be proud.”
"I gotta hand it to you, buddy. You’re an asshole, but it's a hell of a thing you're doing here. Put him back on for a minute."
"I got your back. I always do.” He sniffles dramatically, probably swiping at an imaginary tear. “Hey, by the way, did you hear someone stole a tank in San Diego and drove around destroying half the city before they caught him and shot him?"
He continues a mostly one-sided conversation, telling jokes and stories until Schwartz gets impatient and cuts the call short.
o000o
In prison they own your life. You’re not your name, you’re not your family’s name, you’re not your age, not your color, not your lineage, not your hometown.
You’re 30583-012.
Your daily life depends entirely upon the largesse of the prison staff. Corrections Officers. Though if they’re being honest, they really should call them Punitive Officers. The playing field is tilted in their favor, and if you fuck up and they catch you—and they always catch you—you’re going to lose out. You’re a pawn in a field of queens—an analogy that would be lost on most of the C.O.s, who’d think you’re calling them queer. They’re a reactionary bunch.
The primary difference between cons and screws, besides the color of the uniform and the hourly wage, is a divine directive of control. Underneath, everyone’s just people.
Losing privileges like the weekly trip to the commissary is bad enough. Having visits cancelled, phone calls revoked, mail call held—these are things you come to rely on, and when they take them away, you feel like shit and there’s nothing to break up the press of time. But for things like fighting, talking back, stealing, getting caught with drugs—the punishment is orders of magnitude worse.
The hole.
You can’t imagine what it’s like if you’ve never been. Panic sets in. Closed spaces with no escape. Sweaty palms, trembling, chills. The walls close in. The food slot grins like a jack-o’-lantern, always mocking.
Solitary is one of the worst punishments you can get. Officially, anyway. Sometimes a convict who really gets on the wrong side of the corrections staff will find himself with a price on his head. And then it’s open season. There’s no surviving that kind of sentence.
But mostly when you break the serious rules you wind up in the SHU for a little while—just until you cool off, pal. No contact with the other prisoners. No contact with the outside world. No fresh air. Limited interaction even with the screws who come by to fulfill mealtime duties.