I always thought that using inmates to “hit” other inmates was the single most corrupt thing a jailer could do. Nothing really erases the thin line any more emphatically than urging criminals to commit a felony assault on an imprisoned victim. But I came to be even more outraged that the inmates would do it. I used to speak out against it, asking why snitching someone to the cops is such a mortal sin but beating him for them is fun and games. Everybody agreed with that, all right. And everybody was right and ready to pound anybody the cops tossed into their cage with a Fuck Me Off” sign on them. Most criminals are worse than people who don’t play by your rules; they don’t play by their own rules.

Buzz came in double-cuffed, with his face scuffed up from El Cajon “wall therapy”. He didn’t impress me as being particularly alarmed at being shoved into a cell full of riled-up crips, something I would have found extremely alarming and would have reacted by belting one of the cops and taking my chances with them. He was relaxed and looking around with his bright-eyed gaze of a curious kid testing the limits. They slammed the steel door on him and walked off laughing. I would pay a lot to see what happened in the next five minutes, because when they came back an hour later and opened the door, Buzz was the only one left in working order. I was impressed. The cops were bummed. The crips were unavailable for comment.

I didn’t get to know Buzz until months later, when we met at Chino and spent six weeks in the same barracks while having our futures sorted out by the strange point system Corrections uses to pigeon-hole their bumper crop of baddies. He was a great guy to be around; extremely intelligent, totally relaxed, funny, wise, and very dedicated to instructing younger guys in building their bodies and reflexes. His “yellow” complexion, blue eyes, wolf-like cheekbones and wide leonine brow gave him a resemblance to the villain in the VanDamme movie “Cyborg”, which tickled a few of the kids. It turned out his father was a karate instructor and Bruce Lee disciple who had drilled him in fighting forms from as soon as he could walk. Dad saw him as a project to produce the next predominant champ, bigger than Chuck Norris. But, in a weird form of adolescent rebellion, Buzz told his old man to stick his karate and became a kick-boxer. Also a computer analyst, but that just didn’t seem to have the same thrills as his “real” occupation, the one that paid for his new Corvette and collection of unusual automatic weapons. Buzz was an enforcer.

A situation as volatile as San Diego County —with its world-class speed cuisine, wetback and heroin influx, and insatiable maw for rock coke cookies —breeds a certain amount of squabbles that don’t present very well in small claims court, and there are guys who know that grabbing some beefburgers from Gold’s Gym and paying them off in steroids is not an effective scare tactic for experienced wise-guys. Buff isn’t necessarily bad. The wise move is to get Buzz to drop by and restore respect, using whatever methods, measures and machinery that the situation calls for. He once told me, when discussing the TV image of his profession, “Hired muscle runs about a dollar a pound. I’m hired attitude.”

Not a bad life, really. More adventure and creative problem solving than programming, a good way to stay in shape, meet a lot of interesting people and fuck them off, opportunities for high-performance driving on public thoroughfares, lots of really strange pussy.

Buzz told me he met his wife (a eighteen year old of black-Filipina mix and one wicked-looking little fox) at an apartment where he was doing some security consulting that involved kicking two guys’ guts out and having an earnest talk with their boss while holding a pistol muzzle several inches down his throat. Suddenly Miss Tigress Congeniality Runner-Up walked into the room, sheet-creased and naked, and said, “Hey, motherfucker, I could get some sleep if you pricks could kill each other quiet.”

Buzz was in love. He just reached out and grabbed her and said, “Hey, you’d better come with me,” and swept her off her feet right there in the bedroom. His business contact, too —who had to lay there on the floor with his hands behind his head and listen to what must have been a pretty histrionic encounter between Buzz and the psycho little spitfire that had been his girl up until the moment she saw Buzz.

They were inseparable for months after that, until Buzz got his ass in a sling over one of those ethereal conspiracy indictments the DEA lawyers are so fond of and ended up in Chino and later on his way to Donovan. Apparently she never visited or wrote him, just took off somewhere in his Corvette, about the only thing that ruffled his normally ultra-relaxed cool.

One day he was coaching some of us on dips while we were waiting in the hundred-yard main chow line. People listen to Buzz because he can outperform the big guys with the tectonic slabs of muscle. His tips supercharged my dips, butterflies, and pullups. A skinhead with a Supreme White Power tattoo was whining about not being able to dip like Buzz said because of a knife wound (healed, but still pretty red and swollen) in his right pectoral. Buzz snorted at that and lifted his arm to show his left tricep. Buzz never posed, but when he hit a stance like that to show an isolated muscle it was like looking a composite model for heroic Greek marbles. “You see, that?” he said, pointing to a wide, ugly scar that jagged down the muscle to the rotator cuff, “That tore all the way to the bone two years ago —the hardest injury to ever come back from. And I was dipping two dozen four months later. It’s completely recovered now, totally operational.” The burrhead supreme shut up and bore down on dipping Buzz style. I was the only one who asked him how you go about tearing a triceps to the bone.

He gave a sheepish grin and said, “Awww, it was this thing Chuck Norris did, jumping up and kicking through the windshield of a moving car. I heard about it and it really knocked me out. Norris always had this real dramatic flair, you know. But like some kid trying to ‘Do it like Air Jordan’ or something I had to give it a try. Took me four years to get the chance to hurt myself. This asshole was trying to split from a parking garage so I jumped down a floor and waited for him to come. I probably could have got to him before he got into the car. And I absolutely could have stopped him with my Ruger when he came gunning down the ramp at me. But no, not bullet-proof Buzzy. It was a Porsche 924, too. I pulled the Norris move perfect; up, laid out, full force to the windshield with my heel, feet stacked, using the car’s speed. I went in further faster than I thought I would. Killed the fucker, all right, but…you’re not going to believe this…I caught the windshield wiper and that little steel sliver slid right in and slit my arm like a needle in a vein. Can you handle that? Then I was sort of trapped halfway through a windshield with a damaged arm, bleeding like a motherfucker and all sorts of shooting and sirens. Fucking Porsches, anyway.”

Buzz is out now, working with computers. No sign of the Super Vixen (or the ‘Vette.) It’s good to see him making it, out of trouble. But when he moves or stretches or grabs a mosquito out of the air and dashes it to death on a wall it seems like some kind of waste.

I tend to trust Buzz a lot more than most guys I know from the joint. But I once paid a quarter a swat to sledge an old car to raise funds to buy panties for cheerleaders or something. And I got the impression that putting anything, much less your body, through a windshield is not done. They’re made like Oreos with slo-mo stickum in the middle. So I checked into it a bit. All I found out is that Chuck Norris did, in fact, do the trick —on “That’s Incredible”, not in a movie. And I firmly believe that anything Norris could do, Buzz can do. In fact, if I needed a one-man army to wipe out a bunch of heavily armed assholes, I’d call Buzz, not Chuck. No doubt about that at all.

I’ve never been much for reunions, but if they had one for my crowd at the main yard at Chino, I’d show up. We were clumped together by race and general type of crime while being processed through to the real joints. It was a great bunch of guys with a camaraderie I really miss.

Dusty slept in the bunk above me and he wasn’t as big on pranks and jokes and feats of badness as some of us, but he was a main part of the group for some reason. He was a lanky, freckled biker with a wispy beard and the stringy build of a speed-powered motorcyclist. Everything about him said, “Methamphetamine MC”. But he was quiet and decent and likable, maybe what you’d call recovering. He was looking at eight years and a fairly high classification stemming from a contretemps in which his future ex-partner double-crossed him and Dusty filed an objection in the form of a Harvey Davidson drive chain slashed around the face and future ex-ears. I got pretty tight with him after a few weeks.

Tight enough that he offered to show me his wife’s picture. You learn to accept pictures of other men’s women without showing anything in your face. I don’t know how well I did when he handed me the polaroid of his wedding. Front center, staring into the camera with dogged optimism, was a nice-looking blonde, maybe nineteen, in a cheap off-shoulder white sundress that came to mid-thigh. Behind her was the witness, a large Black official with striped pants, large pistol, and “Smoky” hat. The groom was lovely in a bright orange, one-piece, paper coverall; bright stainless steel handcuffs; iron foot manacles; and a very oblique grin. Your basic civil ceremony.

Having seen the picture (and praised it without expression), I was set up for extra pathos when Dusty started suffering whenever his new bride was late in showing up for boneyard visits. The boneyard is different in every joint, a generic term for the anonymous rooms in which inmates enjoy conjugal visits. The derivation of the term has not been academically established.

The wisdom of the state recognizes the sanctity of marriage at least so far as realizing that permitting it provides a little leverage over an inmate’s behavior. So being married counts heavily in lowering classification points. The lower the point total, the lighter the joint. This could be seen as a good reason to be married when in prison, even if it means a double cuff ceremony. A more visceral motivation is that only legally married wives can enjoy conjugal bliss in the boneyard accommodations; no “ol ladies” or common law consorts accommodated. It may just be a piece of paper, but it’s all the difference in the world to a man and his bone. Despite my cut-rate cynicism I think Dusty entered the bond just for being a kid in love and wanting to nail it all down. You can decide for yourself.

Nobody likes it when the wife doesn’t show up with cheer, cigarettes and fleshy delights. But Dusty got completely out of hand. His usual calm would dissolve into temper tantrums, moody sulks and nasty remarks. We’d chide him, reassure him, tell him to put a freaking sock in it, but he’d crawl the walls (psychic walls, not the real ones with the machine-gun guys) until she’d show up with a perfectly good reason for why she hadn’t been in two days before. It was his one big tic. Can you blame him?

Still, it sort of shocked me when he went into a petty snit and wouldn’t talk to me for three days. I’d been hanging and eating chow with Dusty and the usual suspects, but I suddenly got into a complicated series of financial deals with a Berkeley coke dealer we called the “Chicken Hawk” because he stole food from the chow hall and smuggled it back to the bunks. I’d been spending some time with his clique, snacking on contraband chicken and the coffee he swiped in plastic bags, and working on a rotten scam for when we got out. I didn’t associate it with Dusty’s snit until he refused to answer a question that night, then poked his disheveled head over the bunk, peering down at me with real spite, and said, “Why don’t you ask your little friend the Chicken Hawk?” I mulled that one over, aided by knowing that a lot of criminals are dealing from some really thwarted emotional sets. Listen to Crips rap for awhile and see if they don’t sound like a bunch of grade school girls. So I sat with Dusty at breakfast and sort of hung around and jollied him up. When he started talking to me, I introduced him the Hawk, who slipped him some pilfered cookie dough. Things got back to normal and I didn’t even connect Dusty’s frenzies about his wife to his weird little jealousy over the Chickeneer.

Until a week later, when Dusty showed me a picture of his sister. She was a young blonde, looked a little like his wife. He showed me a letter she’d sent him, read it three of four times before filing it away in the usual manila envelope prison luggage. I asked the usual polite drivel about his sister and somehow he let drop that he had only met her a year before he got arrested for the “chain of fools” number. How so? Well, he’d just walked into a K-Mart in Bakersfield…first time he’d seen her since they were little kids. Turns out they’d been raised in separate foster homes and met by complete accident. It took a couple more innocent questions before he started telling the tale on his own. He’d been one of four kids, but one day when he was in third grade, he and his sister had come home from school and found out their parents had moved out. Quite the little surprise. They’d taken the two older children with them, but for whatever reason Dusty and his kid sis hadn’t made the cut.

They bumbled around the house for awhile, then went to a neighbor who called the authorities and started the process that led to institutional care (there’s a good one for oxymoron collectors). After graduating from the state homes and kiddy jails, Dusty had lost all track of his sister, among other things. Since then he’d mostly been alternating lock-ups and scooter gangs. So I got to put all the pieces together for once, and Dusty made some sense to me. And all I could do with it was to avoid jilting him again. No big deal.

I never get to know how my work affects people. Maybe you have no particular reaction to Dusty at all. Or maybe you’ll just lump him in with all the other biker/felon scum. Or retain a rough image of what it might be like for a motorcycle chain to slash through the tender tissues of your face. But if you can see a nine year old boy standing in an empty house trying to realize why he was discarded, then you have to wonder how it would feel to you. And what you might do about it.
]]> http://hyperlit.adorobooks.com/fleshwounds/?feed=rss2&p=95 http://hyperlit.adorobooks.com/fleshwounds/?p=93 http://hyperlit.adorobooks.com/fleshwounds/?p=93#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:13:56 +0000 Author http://hyperlit.adorobooks.com/fleshwounds/?p=93 I never cut my hair in my life, I always loved it long. My favorite thing in the world was having my hair combed by somebody else. I’d just sit there and get all mellow. I remember sitting on my fathers lap while he combed my hair until I’d go to sleep.

I never figured out why my Mom didn’t like my hair. She always said I was going to get into dope or get knocked up or something. Maybe she was jealous because my father paid so much attention to my hair back when he was around. Whatever it was, she was always dogging me to get it cut.

She set the thing up beforehand. She took me to a salon in North County for my haircut, said she was getting a discount. She said it was a waste of money just to get a trim, why didn’t I get a real cut? Like she always said. I said, Fuck that Mom, like I always do. She laughed, which was strange. We went into the shop smiling, almost like we were getting along.

Mom had told the girl I was nervous about cutting it all off, but had decided to go through with it. She said, “Going to get it short, huh?” and I thought she was joking. I said, “Hell, chop it all off, go for the Sinead O’Connor look.” And she thought I was serious. She said, real quiet, “You sure about this, kid?” and I almost looked around at her, but I was looking at my mother wondering why she was staring at me. She lifted my hair up and I heard the scissors, then I felt the ends of my hair flop down on the back of my neck. Right that second two big tears fell out of my eyes. I was sobbing, my Mom was smiling at me. I looked at her and said, “You old bitch.”

The stylist saw my face in the mirror and just freaked out. She said, “Listen, I don’t go in for any of this vendetta stuff around here. You told me she wanted it cut off.” My Mom just paid and walked out. She girl turned my chair around and said, “I’m sorry, honey. If you’d just said something.” I couldn’t say anything, just looked down at the floor, at my hair. She said, “Well, let’s get it looking right, at least.” I said, “Shit, it doesn’t matter now.” But she said, “Yeah, it does. Now more than ever. Let me do what I can.” She did her best. People told me it looked real cute. Right.

I moved out as soon as I could. I wasn’t eighteen yet, but what could she do? I got a job in a PETCO and a room with a friend. She never apologized for the haircut. It’s growing back, but it’ll never be that long again, or as fine. The only thing I said to her, I said, “Well, I guess now I can get into black clothes and hard drugs.” And I did, too. Serves her right, the old bitch.

The reason Brad checked into the slam in the first place was his fondness for driving exotics. Other people’s exotics. In fact, he’d fallen afoul of every police force along the coast from La Jolla to Santa Barbara for that very practice. But car theft is not the absolute hottest priority for cops in Laguna and Newport and Manhattan Beach, so he was getting his jollies without a lot of official interference.

Lots of times he got the cars back to the lots and nobody even knew they’d been put through their paces. Until the last time, when he’d just stepped into a Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Special Corvette that some drunken numbnuts had left idling in front of StarStrip with the keys in, doors open, and the stereo blasting out Paula Abdul. The doors closed kind of automatically when he burned rubber out on to La Cienega, so all he had to do was throw the Abdul tape out the window, snort a little accelerator, and start getting gears.

Unfortunately, the owner was just sober enough to realize that the guy who just left in his car wasn’t him so eventually Brad ended up tearing down the Pacific Coast Highway at speeds around a hundred with about eight patrol cars and a helicopter on his ass. Worse, one of the black and whites (doubtless driven by somebody who watches too much “Dukes of Hazard”) couldn’t make a corner that the Vette could and made a big smash of the kind that obviously puts people into “critical conditions”.

Worse, a helicopter had gotten in on the pursuit (which Brad always considered cheating) and was probably too pissed off after seeing the patrol car eat it because it hit a power line and crashed. After that, Brad wasn’t looking to escape anymore, just to get captured in a way that would leave him in one piece. Because there was one thing he knew for sure: if there aren’t plenty of witnesses around, the cops were just going to flat-out kill him for “resisting arrest”. What he figured out was jumping the curb at Huntington Beach State Park and taking off across the broad sand apron. (Caution: don’t try driving on deep dry sand unless you’re going at least the ton).

When the car slowed down enough to sink in up to the axles, he jumped out and ran into the huge crowd of dumbfounded beach bunnies that were his reason for driving there in the first place. There’s a strength in numbers, particularly numbers of witnesses. He didn’t get far. But he didn’t get killed, either. A year later, sitting in the prison yard, he was still bummed out he’d only had the car an hour. He really had a thing for those white leather seats.

Obviously he’s a guy who knows how to survive—the only kind you’d want driving you around in a man-eater like an ZR-1. I thought he was crazy to be in a stolen car while on parole and we were grinding some curves up through Bonita before I recalled that I was, too. And both of us were consorting with known felons and reputed bad influences. I mentioned this to Brad, in fact; but he was too busy keeping the wheels on the black stuff and looking for somebody. “There’s this Ferrari that lives around here,” he said, “I hope it’s out prowling.”

It was. Brad didn’t mind Ferraris but this one had a habit he couldn’t stand. It thought it was bad.

I saw a black 308 go by in the opposite lane on Otay Mesa Boulevard and put my hands on the dash so I wouldn’t bounce much when Brad did a high-speed, drifting turn, skipped over the median like a skateboarder then whined up the grade, overhauled the Ferrari at a stop sign. The guy gave Brad a glance, one exotic to another but rather superior about it. The girl with him, rather exotic herself, didn’t deign to notice a domestic automobile, even though Brad was doing a slow heel-and-toe that made the LT-5 350 sound like a Doberman about two seconds away from tearing somebody a new intestinal tract.

When the light turned green Brad smoked away from it and the guy finally realized he was being picked and came alive. I was braced for the acceleration, but turned around enough to see him scowl, (like, “The nerve!”), bang a bad gear, and dial on some pretty awesome R’s. The chick’s exquisite little head snapped back like she’d been sucker-punched on the button and she looked like she was screeching when the guy came up beside us and did a very trick continental racing shift while Brad just stuck to good old ‘Merican basics and floored that son of a bitch right to the moon.

We were belting up Otay at that point with the needle topping out. Definitely over one thirty as we came up on the intersection of Brown Road. Where there was a car stopped for the light. Since the car was in the left lane (with its turn signal on, no less) and we were in the right lane, Brad started laughing as he leaned forward, trying to pump more speed out of the car by humping the wheel. There was no cross traffic visible on Brown, but the light was going to change and there were oncoming cars in both lanes on the other side of it. I figured we had the guy beat.

I took a quick glimpse sideways (I hated to–I always prefer facing oncoming death and disgrace so I can worry about it) and saw a guy looking very determined and a chick who looked like she was hemorraging. The guy pulled into the oncoming lane and put a hand on his horn just as the light turned green. Nobody moved. We did a bread-and-butter of the car at the light at way better than one forty-five. Even the small, streamlined mass of the two bullet cars must have rocked that old Plymouth like the wake from a battlewagon. The Ferrari flared a little wider and passed the waiting line of cars on the shoulder apron, then slammed back across into the right lane. But by then we were way ahead and he’d had it.

Brad took his foot out a little and glanced back at the Italian car dropping behind. He said, “Wotta wimp.”

None of the cars at the light had moved. I said, “Yeah, it’s rough when your license numbers are actually yours.”

Brad laughed, “How many of those people need clean seat covers?” I was pretty sure the chick had a miscarriage.

At that point, with limited exits from the Mesa, a high probable that we were a focus of police attention, and the border right there; our best bet seemed to be heading into Mexico. We could already sense cops approaching and hear the sirens. A San Diego Police helicopter showed and even flirted across the border. I couldn’t tell if they had spotted us or not, but Brad waved at them, both hands with an extended finger, as we got out of the car in the Tijuana airport parking lot. The chopper hovered a minute, then flew away. There wasn’t anything they could do, but the sight of the aircraft had teed Brad off. He yelled, “Come and get me copper. See what happens to ‘copters that mess with my ass.”

He calmed down during the cab ride into Tijuana, depressed to be leaving the ZR-1 after such a short ride. I was hot to get out of there before we got arrested by the Mexican cops, but I had to admit that leaving that beauty crouched there seemed like an unnatural act.

I reminded Brad that there were more where that one came from, which was especially true since he’d been practically handed the car by a not-too-sharp salesman in Newport Beach. He said, “Yeah, there’s plenty more ZR-1’s out there. What killed me was not being able to keep that Anniversary model.” I said, “You know, you can get the white leather upholstery on other models now.”

He shook his head, “Yeah, but it isn’t the same. That car was a piece of history.”

I said, “Yeah, so is the helicoptor,” but Brad was in one of his funks.

Brad said, “What do you think we could get for that car on this side the border?” I glanced at it once more before we swung into the taxi stand, “Probably five years eating beans and roaches.”

Brad said, “Yeah. It would look lousy with dingle-balls and tuck-and-roll, anyway.”

We sat there in that mummified stillness you feel after coming down from high speed and Brad suddenly said, “I don’t care, man. Sex, drugs, guns—there’s no thrill like chasing. Limits of the machine, reflexes against traffic and road conditions, taking your life in your hands….It’s way rad, Homes.”

“Other people’s lives, too,” I reminded him.

He grinned and said, “Umm, hmm. Va-va-room.”

Next time I ride with Brian I’m driving. Bore the hell out of both of us.

The guy who stands out in this crowd is a blonde, light skinned Chicano with perfect English and native Spanish, a long blonde ponytail and a pair of gorgeous breasts. Crammed in the black hole with all these cons, the latter two attributes attract a lot of attention. Divided by pleasure in the attention and fear of its possible results, he is alternately flirty and belligerent. I stay outside the door, trying to get as much air as possible, and watch the reactions of two very case-hardened, joint-time cons who just came back from court. The tits mean one thing to them…”stuff”. They almost drool watching the young “transformer” and discussing the possibilities. One says. “I ain’t jacked off today, how about you?” They move into the room. So do I, pushed in by the guards in their periodic tamping of this body depository. Someone has gallantly offered Ponytail a seat, and he has responded by giving in to popular demand to show off his boobies. Bad move, kiddo. I watch from the door as everyone wants a touch. The kid’s pale skin is almost luminous in the dark cell full of inmates, mostly black, in dark jail togs. I watch dark hands swarm over that pale area, almost obscuring the flesh. Finally he shrugs them off with a coquettish no-no and buttons up his shirt. His chest has gotten rave reviews and the kid relaxes a little, asks if he could lay his head in someone’s lap to rest. Worse move yet.

I work my way out of the cell. Minutes later, one of the toughs from upstate lights a cigarette right in front of the door. Furious at this challenge, the guards close the cell. I am spared claustrophobia and such by being called to go downstairs to the transportation holding cells. As I enter the elevator, the cell door opens slightly from two inmates to come out. In the blackness I see a flash of pale, bare thighs on the bench, then the door closes again and the elevator takes me away. An older guy beside me in the elevator, a veteran with the kind of full sleeve tattoos you can only get “inside”, says, “If if weren’t for them tits, that’d be just plain homosexuality, brother.”