By Joshua Ryan

“What’s the matter, Jason? You look pensive.”

I was at the Alibi, which is a pretty quiet place, especially in the early evening; and it was Terry, the bartender, I was talking to. Terry got out of the Navy a year or so before, and he had that look that some of the ex-Navy guys keep. I liked that look, and I liked talking to Terry. “Pensive” was a joke between us. It was a word I had used one time, one of the many words that Terry had never heard before.

“Not really. Just drinking. Give me another one, will you?”

“Sure thing. But I still think there’s something wrong. You and Joey having a fight?”

“Joey? You mean the guy that’s always in my apartment?”

“That’s the one.”

“I never fight. I just like to be alone sometimes. Believe it or not.”

“Sure you do,” Terry said, pulling me another beer. “Since when?”

“Since now,” I said. “Since always. I hate the way these queers can’t be alone for a second.” I was so drunk, it was a miracle I got through that sentence.

“You do?”

“Sure I do.”

“Which means you’re thinking about some guy that you’d rather be alone with, all of the time.”

“Well, what if I am? I’ll never get him.”

“Well, I’ll see if I can get rid of Jeff tonight . . .”

”Very funny. If I fought . . . thought you were serious, I’d take you up on it.”

I wouldn’t have minded putting Terry through another course of basic training. He and Jeff were happy, though, despite the fact that both of them were just working in the bars, and probably always would be. Maybe when they were 45 they’d finally scrape enough money together to buy their own bar. I could see it in the “Gay and Lesbian News”: “Now Opening: Trixx! Your Hosts, Jeff and Terry.” There was something wrong about that. On looks alone, Terry deserved more. Maybe Jeff did, too. Guys should get what they deserved. Terry should, and Jeff should, and I should too. I was drunk all right.

“Sounds like fun,” he said. “But listen, man. I don’t worry about nothin that I can’t get.”

“What if you didn’t like what you’d already got?”

“You mean Joey? Joey’s a sweet guy. Cute, too.”

“Sure he is. I’m not talkin about Joey.”

“Then what are you talkin about, man?”

“I don’t know. If I’m not talkin about him, I guess I’m talkin about me.”

“It’s a free country, Jase. You can talk about anybody you like.”

“I’d just like to be somewhere . . . that I belong. You know? You know what I’m sayin?”

“You mean you don’t belong in the Alibi?”

“You’re a cute guy, too, Terry. What I mean is . . . I don’t know, I thought when I had a lover, that would be it. I’d be at home, sort of. You know? Now I’ve got a lover, but I’m not at home. I’m not even at home with me.”

“I don’t know, Jase. But you sound like that guy in the kids’ book.”

“Kid’s book?”

“Yeah, my little nephew’s got one. It’s about this guy, this ancient guy, that’s tryin to get home to his island. But there’s this girl that’s keepin him on her own island, so he can’t get home. It’s pretty interesting, for a kid’s book.”

“I think I know that story. What do you think, Terry? Does he ever get to his own island?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t finish the book.”

“How about another beer, Terry?”

Next morning, it was the same as before: me and 351699, noticing each other at the shuttle stop. But this time we had an appointment.

The weather was turning cold. I was shivering inside my jacket while I waited in the shadows beside the fence. But is it that cold? I thought. Of course it wasn’t. That wasn’t why I was shivering. Then Jake came out of the shadows on the other side.

“Hi!” I said, too soon, too nervous. “How are you, Jake?”

“Doin good. Cold today, though. Thanks for comin.” He was wearing his big convict coat, but he hadn’t bothered to button it. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled, like he was proud of me for braving the elements, despite the fact that I was such a weak little guy.

“Want a sandwich?” I said. I’d brought two.

“Thanks anyway. They’re gonna feed us pretty soon.”

“Coke?”

He looked like it was hard to decide.

“Sure, man.” I held the can out over the fence, and I felt his hand gripping the other end. That was as close as we’d come to touching. Was that my hand shaking, or his?

“Haven’t had one of these things in a long time,” he said, looking down at the can. “Not sure that I like it anymore. Listen, man. Yesterday, when I grabbed your food . . . I was just horsin around with you.”

“That’s OK,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. This guy is amazing, I thought: nobody else would have brought that up, then dropped it like that. With Joey, it would have been just the start of a whole evening’s “talk” about what it “meant” to our “relationship.” With this guy . . .

“What do they feed you, man?”

Another downward look. “It’s mush, man. Mush, stew — whatever. The officers call it con chow. We call it turd balls.” His head was down, but I think he was smiling again. “It’s like . . . like mush, you know, with some gobs of meat and stuff floatin around in it. They give it to you cold.”

“Sounds disgusting.”

“I dunno. You get used to it. It’s OK.” His chin went up. His eyes were bright. “I got sick on that sandwich you gave me yesterday. I was shittin all night, man.” His nose crinkled, and he broke into a grin.

“I’m sorry!”

“No big. Hey! You gotta do SOMETHIN in your cell at night. Why not shit?”

Man! I thought. I can think of other things to do. I almost told him that. But I stopped myself.

“So you . . . live by yourself?”

“Right. I’m the only one in my cage. I used to have a cellie. I don’t have one now. They put him in another gang.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I dunno. Probably. Usually they don’t do that. Usually you’re stuck with the guy they give you. But what they do is, they’ll put a new con in with an old one. I don’t mean old, like 40 years old or somethin. I mean some guy that’s been in for a while. The old one trains the young one. It’s easier that way. And they’re together, so if somethin goes wrong, the guards have a lot less to think about. I mean, they can just whack em both; they’re both responsible. See?”

“I see.”

I wasn’t sure that I did. I just kept thinking, two guys in a cell, two guys in a cell. . .

“My cellie, he was the old one. He’d been there . . . he was one of the first cons they sent to Durant when they opened the place.”

“It was closed for a while, right? I mean, it’s really old?”

“Oh, yeah. The joint goes back to the middle ages, practically. But they had it closed. Then they started it up again, when they got these laws. You know, the anticrime things. And my cellie, he’d been around, like, almost from the very first day. I got there a little later. Anyway, he’s gone now. So I guess I’m the old one in the cell. They’ll use me to train whoever’s next. Pretty funny, right? I’ll be the trainer.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“I’m 19. He was 25.”

“How was he?” I asked. Then I thought, oh Jesus, that’s what they’d ask in a bar! “I mean, what was he like?”

But my first question was the one that asked what I really wanted to know. How was he when they got it on? IF they got it on. Maybe they didn’t! Maybe Jake never got it on with anybody. Maybe he was still a virgin. God, for one night with this guy . . .

“I mean . . .”

“Jerry was all right. He kept the cage clean. The cages are pretty small. When you’re livin with a guy in a cell like that, you’re always in each other’s face. But Jerry was OK. He showed me a lotta stuff.”

He said it like there was no way it could have a double meaning. It said it like he was talking about the boy scouts tying knots. But was he as innocent as he sounded? I could see a glint in his eyes. . . .

“That’s good,” I said. “Now tell me about yourself, man.”

“I’m a convict. What about you?”

“I’m . . . uh . . . I’m an assistant managerial analyst at Freer and Sons.”

“Oh man,” he said. “That’s another world.”

“You’re right.”

“I don’t know anything about shit like that.”

“It’s not important.”

“Sure it is. I want to know.”

“I spend my days making phone calls that my boss doesn’t want to make.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Did you have to go to college to get that job?”

I guess that was one way of putting it. “Yes, I did.”

“Was it hard? College, I mean.”

“Not really.”

“You must be smart!”

“Not really!”

“So you’re maybe 21, 22?”

“I’m 23.”

“I’ll be 20 next week. But then you knew that.”

Innocent, my ass! He had to know what was going on. If I was the kind who remembered his birthday, then I was the kind who was jerkin off over his picture, too.

“Happy birthday, man.” I hoped that wasn’t another stupid thing to say. I hoped he wouldn’t come back at me and ask how I expected him to be happy, considering that he was gonna spend next Thursday workin his butt off in the fields, just like it was any other day, while I was gonna spend it with my butt planted firmly in my cushy little chair at Freer and Sons, drinking diet cokes and chatting with important people. But he didn’t say that. He looked pleased.

“Thanks man! Good-bye to bein a teen-ager, huh?”

He smiled and pushed his chest out, like he was saying, I’m doing pretty good for an old man, don’t you think so . . . punk? He didn’t say “punk,” but that’s what I felt he said. Or should have said. I had that body sickness again. I was three inches taller than he was, but he looked like he was about a hundred times tougher. I had never looked like that, and I never would. I was a geek that worked in an office and went to a “health club” twice a week to “work out.” I was only 23, but lately I’d been noticing that my wrists were limp most of the time and my eyes were already getting that campy look, the look you get from checking guys out and sneering at the guys you can’t get. . . . I didn’t want to discuss the aging process.

“Jake,” I said. “How did you . . . why are you . . . ”

“You mean, why am I in prison?”

“Yes, if you want to talk about it.” Yet another stupid remark. It was the kind of thing that a guidance counselor would say.

“I don’t mind talking. That’s what my cellie used to complain about. I’m a big talker, once I get going. You know that I’m in for kidnaping.” When he said that word he raised his chin, like he was proud not to be in prison for some petty crime. Everybody needs to be proud of something, I thought. Then his chin dropped slightly, and his eyes got dark.

“Actually, though . . . what I did was deal some drugs.”

“You don’t look like a drug dealer, man.”

“Yeah. That’s what they told me, when they busted me. They told me what a nice kid I looked like. I didn’t look like a dealer at all. Well, maybe the earrings. So OK. Maybe I wasn’t a dealer. Maybe there aren’t a million drug dealers in this country. Did you ever buy drugs?”

“Uh . . . sure.”

“Well,” he said, “somebody sold you those drugs. Right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I remembered Ricky Gavin. He was a skinny kid who lived in my dorm. Everybody called him Nose. “I see what you mean,” I said.

“Anyway, that wasn’t my job. I was a janitor. You probably never met a janitor, did you?”

Christ, I thought. Where is this going? I’d met janitors. There was a janitor in our office. He shambled past my cube every afternoon about 5 and dumped my wastebasket out. His name was Tony. I knew that because it was written over his shirt pocket. Good looking guy, too, if it hadn’t been for his attitude. I complained to him once about the soap running out in the john. “I don’t do the johns,” he said. “Then what do you do?” I said. He just walked away from me. I felt embarrassed after that. I was an incredible faggot.

“Not really,” I said. “They come around at night.”

“So did I. That’s how I met a couple of guys like you. No offense, dude, but that’s what they were. They’d all be hangin out, you know, workin in their cubes, and I’d come around and empty their trash for them. One night I walked in, and there was a bunch of em hangin out, and they were talkin drugs. When they saw me, they got quiet. I was pullin out the wastebasket when one of em said to the other ones, ‘What’s the matter? It’s just the janitor.’ Then one of his buddies said, ‘Maybe HE knows how to get us some.’ That guy had been talkin to me before, the second guy. I thought he was a nice guy. I used to run into him when we were waitin for the elevator. When it came, I’d step aside for him, since I was the janitor, but he’d tell me to get in first. That was nice. He told me one night that his name was Tom. He was sort of like you, actually. I mean, he was a nice guy.” He stopped, like that was the end of the story.

“So what happened next?”

“Well, after Tom said, ‘Maybe he knows how to get us some’ — meaning some blow — I said, ‘Sure. How much do you want?’”

“You said that?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why. I guess I wanted to show off for Tom.”

“Did you get him some?”

“Sure I got him some, and those other guys, too. I knew where it was. I wasn’t exactly living in the best part of town. Tom and his friends all looked in their wallets and so forth, and they collected their money, and they gave me five hundred dollars. I said I would get them some coke.”

“Five hundred wouldn’t buy much coke.”

“They were gonna give me the rest after I did the deal. They weren’t gonna give the janitor a big wad of money up front. They thought I was a dealer, though. And I wished that I was. I thought, maybe this is the way you start. I had some money that I got from my mom. It was the insurance, you know, after she died. $25,000. It got split up, of course, but I got some, and that’s how I bought the coke. I thought maybe, if this starts paying off, I could get enough to go to college. And I liked that Tom guy.”

“So that’s how it started.”

“Right. It didn’t last long, though. I bought the stuff, and I took it to the office, but they wouldn’t pay me, man. I gave em the coke, and I asked for the money, and they stiffed me. Tom, the guy I liked — he took the coke and he put it in his briefcase and he put the briefcase on the other side of his desk, where I couldn’t reach it, and he said to me, ‘Thank you, Jacob. I appreciate your help.’ I remember looking at that briefcase and seeing his initials — TCW, Thomas C. Williamson. He was a big, buffed out guy. He was always workin out in this exercise room that they had for the suits. I guess the company thought that workin out was good for their attitude or somethin. More buff, more aggressive, maybe. Anyway, the company put one in.”

“We’ve got a room like that.”

“Do you use it?”

It was like that was his purpose in life, to make me ashamed of my body. But I knew he didn’t mean it that way.

“Sometimes.”

“I wished I’d been able to. That would have been fun, dude — just me and all those junior executives, workin out together. I used to think about that. Just the suits and the janitor, man. As it was, I could’ve used the exercise. Back then, I was just a puny little runt.”

“Like me, in other words.” That’s what I thought. But I didn’t say it. What I said was, “That’s hard to imagine, looking at you now.”

“Thanks, dude!” A minute ago, he’d been gloomy and angry. Now he was grinning again. “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a fight. I got mad and went for the briefcase and grabbed it, and the rest of them grabbed it back and threw me down and kicked me a couple times; then they marched me down the hall and tossed me out of the office and locked the door. I heard them inside, laughing. They thought it was funny. I guess they were right, in a way. The strange thing was, they weren’t that old. They were about the same age you are. But that’s what they did. So then I had to figure out a way to get that money back.”

“You never thought about just letting it go?”

“Letting it go?” He looked puzzled. “You can’t let something like that go. Something you care about.”

“No, I guess you can’t.” I suddenly thought, I wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of Jake Cleveland. Not if I got there because of something he cared about. “So what did you do, man?”

“I got this buddy of mine, that I’d been in high school with, and we got a gun that he had from somewhere, and we went over to his house, Tom’s house, which was this house that he’d just bought. There wasn’t any furniture or anything, just a lotta cardboard boxes and one of those bed things that you lay on the floor. So maybe he didn’t have any money, after all. But he had that house. And he had his friends. So if he didn’t have any money, he could’ve gone and got it. Anyhow, we went there and knocked on the door, and he opened it, man, without even lookin to see who was out there. Just opened it up for us. I mean, the guy was that . . . confident, or somethin. So we showed him the gun and told him to come with us and we took him to this motel where we’d gotten a room, and we were holding him there till he called the rest of them and got them to come up with the money.”

“Did they?”

“Shit, no! All they did was, they played for time. They knew we couldn’t keep him very long. We couldn’t hold out forever. They were afraid to call the cops, but they wouldn’t give us the cash, either. Happens all the time in the drug business. You know that.”

“Sure.” I didn’t know anything about the drug business.

“They knew we probably wouldn’t kill him. So they wouldn’t pay. Anyhow, what happened was, my buddy got nervous, after a day or so, and he went out to get some cigarets, and he never came back. The next thing I knew, the cops were breaking down the door and I was riding the bus to the Durant Unit.”

“What happened to your buddy?”

“I dunno. I guess he’s in college. That’s what he was planning to do. Anyway, kidnaping is a mandatory life sentence. ‘Life without possibility of parole,’ as the judge told me. That’s something I didn’t know at the time. I guess that my buddy knew it, or he wouldn’t have taken off and told the cops. What he told them . . . he said I’d tricked him into giving me the gun and then I’d forced him to help me with this kidnaping thing, which was holding Tom for ransom, cuz I thought that he had money — just that, no drugs involved — but my buddy finally managed to escape.”

“And the cops believed that?”

“Yeah. I know it’s stupid, but people believe in a lotta stupid stories, when they want to. And my buddy knew that Tom would back him up, cuz it left the drug thing completely out of it. Which he did. They’d fixed it up between them. And it didn’t make any difference to my case, anyway, cuz I really did kidnap Tom.”

“But Jesus, what a couple of slimeballs!”

“I guess so. I used to think so. I used to lie in my cell and stare at the ceiling and hope that they’d both get caught committing some other crime, so I could watch em stumblin off that prison van and start crawlin into their first suit of browns. Oh man . . .! How I wanted to see that!   But now, lately . . . ”

“Lately?”

“Just lately I . . . I’ve been thinking that they betrayed me, that’s true, but you don’t betray somebody if he doesn’t . . . you don’t betray somebody into something that he doesn’t . . . already want.”

That made no sense at all. He looked like he knew it too. Two little lines had appeared, one on each side of his nose; two precise little lines. There was some idea that he was trying to find.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Neither do I. But now I think, maybe I don’t need to worry about any of that. Not anymore.”

What could you say? I was completely confused. It sounded like he’d decided that he didn’t mind being locked in a cage for the rest of his life. But maybe that’s not what he meant. Maybe he meant that he didn’t intend to stay in that cage.

 

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