Fridays at Enrico's (28 page)

His fellow convicts reacted by trying to get him to use the art shows to smuggle goods into the place. The administration reacted by trying to turn him into a snitch. Eventually he ended up in C Block for his own good. The irony was that the fine arts program went on without him, and was spreading to other prisons. Another irony was that he gave up painting and instead devoted himself to finally getting published as a writer. It was cheaper to write than to paint. Stan liked to paint with fresh oils. He loved the smell of them, and liked to apply the paint with a long thin palette knife, and that was expensive. But he could read and he could write. The library queen came around with the book cart three days a week, and Stan began cutting out the blank pages that books had in the front or back, padding, he assumed, to make the books look bigger and thereby justify a higher price. Stan needed the paper to write on. He already had several pencils, each lifted as the opportunity arose.

With paper being so scarce, Stan decided he'd do his composing in his
mind, only transferring the words to paper when he was sure of them. He wasn't just writing to pass the time. He had a plan. Fawcett Gold Medal Original Books. They were mysteries and suspense novels, usually hardboiled. An article in
Writer's Digest
had informed Stan that Fawcett paid twenty-five hundred dollars for a Gold Medal Original. It had to be from fifty to seventy thousand words. And it had to be like all the other Gold Medal Originals, Stan assumed. He'd write one himself, and then this time, when he got out of the joint, there would be some money waiting for him. He wouldn't have to turn right around and come back in.

Stan had only been on the bricks a total of eight days between prison terms, and he was determined that this should not happen again. The eight days had been very exciting, and a lot of fun, looking back, but insane. He and the two guys he met on the bus leaving Oregon State Prison teamed up for a bunch of robberies in Oregon, Nevada, and finally California. They were arrested after a high-speed chase through the Sacramento Valley, Stan and his two friends escaping in a CHP car and finally wrecking it just outside Manteca. Stan was knocked around a little by the police, but one of the guys, Tommy Sisk, was shot in the head and died that night. So Stan was ready, more than ready, to become a productive member of society. He'd do this by writing fast-paced pulp paperback novels. Once he learned the trick, he reasoned, he could turn them out like Toll House cookies.

It took him four months to write the first book. It was written in pencil on various sizes of paper in various conditions, a thick stash of messy-looking paper under his bunk. When the guards searched the cell they found it, of course, but they were kind-hearted and let him go on working. Technically, he had the right to write a book, but in actual fact he was at the mercy of the administration or any member of it, from the warden down to the lowest guard. But they kindly let him write his book, and for a while he was so deeply engrossed he actually forgot where he was and who. It all came back to him when he finished the thing and had to decide how to get it to the Fawcett Publishing Company in New York City. He was all but helpless. He had no way to get the thing typed, for one thing. Well, he'd skip the typing.
He only chance was to con one of the guards, convince him that by smuggling this mess of paper out and mailing it to Fawcett, he'd be cutting himself into a lot of money. He picked the dumbest of the guards available and sang his song. It took a week, but the guy finally went for, promising to package and mail Stan's manuscript to Fawcett in exchange for eight hundred dollars on the come. Now he had to hope the people at Fawcett would have the perception to read it.

After two months of waiting, Stan finally realized that the guard had not mailed the manuscript at all, just dumped it somewhere. He even got the guy to admit it. “You're a daydreamer,” the guard said in defense of himself. Stan lay on his bunk for three days. It was the worst thing prison had ever done to him. It had killed his hope. He swore revenge.

51.

There was no point in writing anything down. He no longer trusted anyone. Stan had a good imagination and a good memory. He'd work on both, improve both, and write his fucking book in his head. The best part was that they would think they'd beaten him. That was all they really wanted. And for the first time since he'd been jailing, Stan decided to get in shape. He had no muscles, and laying around jail had made him soft and weak. He couldn't go out into the yard and pump iron, so he did what the militants did over in the Adjustment Center, he employed the techniques of “Dynamic Tension,” and pitted his body against itself.

At first he could do only a few pushups. Of course the food was crap, but he decided to stop blaming the food, the administration, the world in general, and start thinking and working for himself. Push-ups, leg-ups, pulling the bars apart, pushing the bars together, grunting and groaning for at least two hours a day. He did not try to write in his head while he exercised. That was
another part of his day, to be exhausted from exercise, and then to let his mind wander around in the outside world. Not just for the freedom, but to see details and try turning them into words. The first task Stan set for his literary imagination was to find the words to describe the thing that frightened him most when they brought him into Block C. Looking up at the five tiers of cells, he could see along each railing festoons of filthy matted human hair, like some insane bunting. It was that hair, not the noise or the dirtiness or the gloom or the cold, no, just those festoons of hair. Once every couple of weeks the inmates were issued buckets and mops and mopped out their cells onto the guardrail (or not, if they wanted to live in filth, fine), and this water always contained a few human hairs, along with other bits of stuff. Then the regular mop con would come down the tier swishing his mop back and forth, taking all the dirty water from the cells and sweeping it over the side, the water dripping down but the hairs catching on all the other hairs left from years and years of mopping. This created the festoons. He wouldn't have known to call them festoons, but for the guards, and it was a while before he found out where they got that name. It was from a limerick:

There was an old whore from Azores

Whose cunt was all covered with sores

The dogs in the street

Would not touch the green meat

That hung in festoons from her drawers
.

The former chief of police on Stan's left told him the limerick, and the old queen on his right told him festoons were festive decorations. “Like my testicles, darling.”

Stan spent a long time trying to come up with a description of the hanging hair that didn't use the word festoons, but finally had to give up. Hemingway was right, words should be right on the money. Charlie Monel had introduced him to Hemingway, asking him to read “The Killers” and tell him if he thought it was authentic. It seemed full of clichés to Stan until Charlie
explained that Hemingway had been stolen from so much that everything he wrote seemed trite. “But he did it first,” Charlie had said. “Him and Dashiell Hammett.” Then he and Charlie had gone down to Cameron's on SW Third, and Charlie had led him through the bookstore to a musty back room filled with stacks of old pulp magazines. They'd spent an hour choking on paper dust looking for old copies of
Mercury Mysteries
with stories by Dashiell Hammett, stories, Charlie pointed out, that had been published before Hemingway's first book, some of them as early as 1923. These stories had the same clipped realistic prose that Charlie loved. Stan, lying in his cell, tried to remember the Hammett stories he'd read so long ago up in Portland, sitting around Charlie and Jaime's on a rainy afternoon, everybody doing as they pleased, Jaime perhaps in the kitchen baking cookies, Kira running around squealing, Charlie stretched in front of the fireplace with his nose in a book, Stan doing the same. Maybe they'd be drinking beer, classical music or jazz might be playing, and the rain would hit the roof with a steady pleasant drumming sound. He tried to remember the smell of fresh beer in a glass, just as you tip the glass under your nose to drink the beer, the little bubbles popping in your nose, the sharp taste hitting your tongue.

Charlie and Jaime had been nice to him for no reason. There actually were such people in the world. Stan had to hang onto that, otherwise there would be no reason to write, to get out of here, to change his life. But they
were
out there. It was possible to live decently. The whole point of his revenge was to become an ordinary citizen, something the system did not expect and frankly probably didn't believe could happen. Well, fuck the system.

Even this honorable wrath died down after a while. It wasn't personal, they didn't want to hurt him, destroy his life. They did only what their limited imaginations allowed them. Stan, having more imagination, should rise above them, not go to war. Do his time. Write his novel in his head. Become the Buddhist angel of Kerouac's dream.

The novel, he decided, wouldn't have the same story or characters as the one he'd lost through his stupidity. He'd write a brand-new story, with a cop as the hero. Only this cop would also be a thief, a murderer, and finally, a
dead man. He even had a great-sounding title, one that, in his estimation, would sell books.
Felony Fuzz
. It rang like a bell, and for a long time he lay on his bunk, pronouncing the title over and over in his mind, experiencing the joys of creation, the pleasures of the poet.

At other times he lost his sense of revenge and purpose and fell into despair. Reviewing his life, as he was compelled to do in this mood, he saw clearly that the fault was not his. He'd been given no chance. He'd not been given two good parents to raise him, in a house full of love, religion, school, happiness. He'd not even been given one parent who loved him enough to keep him. Instead, he'd been given professional parents, in it for the money. He couldn't blame them, sad stupid people incapable of love or tenderness. Not their fault, but not Stan's either. All he had to look forward to was an institutional life. He'd go from one facility to another, with days or hours of freedom in between, and finally he would die and be given one of those big government funerals you hear so much about, where they shovel you into a common grave. At times like this he could hardly breathe, much less write and memorize what he had written.

52.

They'd gone crayfish hunting, Charlie and Dick Dubonet and Marty Greenberg and himself, just the boys, you know, out for a day of sport. He tried to remember the name of the river, but couldn't. A little river, not like the Willamette or the Columbia, just a stream, really, fast-running in the middle, rocks sticking up out of the water and a lot of greenish yellow stuff growing in the shallows. That was where you caught the crayfish. Dick called them crawdads. The whole trip had been his idea. They'd been at one of those guitar and banjo parties, and Dick had been talking about the world falling apart, atomic bombs, crazy governments, it was time people learned
how to hunt and gather. Ending up with the four of them out on the banks, drinking beer and waiting for the crawfish to crawl into their traps.

He tried to remember the traps. Like basketball hoops, he decided, big metal round rings with netting across the opening and a dragline. That was Dubonet's word, dragline. Dubonet had come up with the traps and taken Stan to the farmer's market downtown to beg some fishheads from one of the open-air butcher shops. Stan had been doubtful about the free fishheads, but the big red-faced butcher had just laughed and given them a bucketful. “Good hunting!” the guy yelled.

You tie fishheads to the netting and throw the hoop out onto some of that greenish yellow stuff, where it would just sit under water, the slow current taking the fish smell out into the stream. Stan had been surprised when he saw actual crayfish crawling toward the heads as advertised. They didn't get caught in the netting, they just sat there eating fishheads. Dick or Charlie would haul in on the dragline slowly, so as not to dislodge the crayfish. Then the tricky part, picking up the little guys without getting pinched, and throwing them into the live bucket.

Stan tried to remember all this in as much detail as he could, for a scene in his novel. His cop was going to be a bad guy on every level of his life. Bad cop, bad husband, bad father, bad companion, etc. For the crawfish scene he'd be out on a fishing trip with friends, other cops, honest decent guys who needed this holiday. Only Stan's guy screws up the trip. He gets too drunk, he gets verbally abusive, he makes fun of one young cop for being such a pussy, generally alienates the very people who are supposed to be on his side.

What's the matter with this guy? When Stan began forming the story in his mind the cop was bad just because he was bad, but as he kept thinking of things for him to do, a pattern emerged. The guy was a disappointed idealist. He starts out with the highest ideals, then the real world turns him into a cynic. Stan realized this explanation didn't cover why this guy took such pleasure out of cracking heads, out of sending the wrong guys up, and realized he wasn't only a disappointed idealist, he was a sadist. He got a sexual charge out of hurting people. No. The cop was just like Stan, only with more guts. He
didn't really like hurting people, it was the other way around. He was hitting
back
, only of course he was hitting all the wrong people. He was taking his terrible life out on everybody around him, just as Stan might have done, if he hadn't been such a weak little punk.

The crawdad scene never made it in. A better scene occurred to Stan later, the same scene, only at a police picnic, with women and children, and his cop gets drunk and makes a pass at his best friend's wife. And gets his face busted. And later sends the other cop into a death trap. And then goes and tells the wife she's a widow, pretending to be terribly upset. What a bastard, Stan thought with pleasure. The more bastardly he is, the more fun to kill him at the end of the book. Stan hadn't yet decided how.