Keeplock: A Novel of Crime Read online

  He smiled and leaned back in his leather chair. “I’m not surprised to find you cynical, Peter. I know how hard it is to come out of jail and be homeless.”

  “How?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How do you know? How do you know how hard it is?”

  “We’ve had our share of ex-offenders. In fact, most of our residents have been incarcerated at one time or another.” He paused, looking up to the ceiling for inspiration. “May I ask you how long you were incarcerated? May I ask what prison you were in?”

  “I can’t see how it’s your business.” I was willing to follow the rules, but my life belonged to me.

  “It isn’t, it isn’t.” He waved his hands in protest. “Peter, I’m trying to reach out to you. This isn’t a city shelter. It’s a small community and we share problems. We try to help each other on the road back to independence.”

  “If I was looking for therapy, I would have asked the board to place me in an RT.”

  “You’re quite right, of course. Quite right. We’re not licensed to provide residential treatment, but there’s no law that says we can’t give each other support.”

  “Look, Mr. McDonald …”

  “Oh no, no. We use first names here. Call me Artie.”

  “Yeah, well the thing is, Artie, I’ve only been in the world for a few hours and I need a little time to get adjusted. It’s all kinda strange to me. Maybe in a few days I’ll be ready to talk, but for now, I gotta have some room.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” he said, not repeating himself for once. “You room is number eight, one flight up. Here’s a lock and a key for the cabinet by your bed. Oh, by the way, we have a full-time social worker. Ms. Boronson is her name. She can help you with welfare and medicaid, if you need it.”

  “I’m planning to get a job, Artie.” I was already standing.

  “I understand, I understand.” He shook his head. “But sometimes things don’t work out. You should know that if you do find work or if you’re collecting benefits, you’re expected to pay a small amount, ten percent, toward your maintenance here. That teaches responsibility. Now, I think you’re ready to meet your roomies.”

  He held out a soft, wet hand and I shook it, then wiped my palm on my pants as I left the room. Number eight was right at the top of the stairs, and the two men sitting by the window, pulling at a pint of apricot brandy, turned as I came into the room. They were nearly identical twins, despite the fact that one was black and one was white. Aging juiceheads living in a shelter, sucking out the last drops of life. One of them held a small pair of binoculars.

  “Hey, bro,” the black man said, “come over here. The Flasher’s out tonight.”

  I walked over to the window and looked outside. A single prostitute stood under the light across the street. She was pretty far from the main stroll and maybe she figured she had to go to extremes to attract attention. Or maybe she was just stoned and having a good time. But whatever her motivation, she flipped up her mini whenever a car drove past. It didn’t seem to matter who was driving, man or woman. I watched for a few minutes, then walked over to the only unmade bed and laid down.

  “What’s the matter with you, boy?” the black man said. “The bitch is fine.”

  “Maybe he don’t like pussy,” his twin responded. “Maybe he likes somethin’ else.”

  I might not be very tall, but I’d spent a good part of the last ten years in the weight box with my crew, slowly building myself up to a hundred and eighty prison-hard pounds. The two alkies looked to be in their sixties.

  “We’re not gonna have a problem here,” I said without getting up. I was holding the look (the one that says, “If you disrespect me one more time, I’m gonna kill you before you take another breath”) in reserve. I didn’t think I’d need it and I was right.

  “He’s jus’ funnin’. Don’t pay him no mind. They calls me Monty ’cause I used to flip the cards on the street. My bro’s name is Harry. He’s a little drunk.”

  “Me?” Harry asked indignantly. “Man, I bet five dollars you can’t walk ’cross the goddamn room.”

  Monty laughed happily. “You probly right. I know I ain’t gonna try. Ah’m stayin’ right here and check out this pussy.”

  The two of them returned to the show across the street and I leaned back on the bed, trying to sort out my thoughts. I’d been looking forward to my first weekend in the world, but I couldn’t get Calvin out of my mind. Calvin and how I was going to deal with him. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t surprised when he came into the room ten minutes later.

  I wasn’t surprised by Calvin’s companion, either. He was a short, thick black man with a four-inch scar on his forehead. He fixed me with his best, baddest prison glare, staring at me like I was a cockroach he was about to crush.

  “Time for the real interview,” Calvin announced. He turned to Monty and Harry without waiting for a response. “Take a walk, boys. I’m doin’ bidness here.”

  “But Calvin,” Monty whined, “we watchin’ the Flasher.”

  “If ya like the pussy so much,” Calvin suggested, “why don’t y’all jus’ go outside and fuck her?”

  Monty and Harry looked at each other in amazement. “Let’s go downstairs,” Harry said. “We could watch her from the front room.”

  Calvin waited for them to stagger out the door, then walked across the room and sat on my bed. He took out a pack of Salems, lit one, and offered me the pack.

  “No, thanks,” I said, without sitting up, “I got my own.”

  He put the cigarettes back into his pocket, then lit up. “This here is Rakim. He jus’ come outta SingSing. His P.O. says he’s hostile. Wha’chu think?”

  SingSing is a medium-security institution, a nothing prison compared to the nightmare of Cortlandt. Rakim didn’t frighten me, though he continued to throw me his “vicious killer” look. Nevertheless, I was careful not to show any disrespect. Either one of them, or both, might be strapped, and I really wasn’t looking forward to being shanked on my first night in the world.

  “He seems okay to me,” I said.

  “Okay? What you mean by that?”

  “I don’t mean anything by it.”

  Calvin fixed me with his baddest bad look. “How you like Artie?” he finally asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess he’s tryin’.”

  “The onliest thing Artie’s tryin’,” Calvin said, “is to fatten his bank. Man don’t like to come out the office. He got himself a few assholes that he rehabilitatin’, so the government money keep flowin’ in, but he don’t give two shits ’bout what happens out here. Fact is, y’all don’t have to worry ’bout makin’ Artie happy, ’cause ah’m the man runnin’ The Ludlum Foundation. Y’understand what ah’m, sayin’, white bread?”

  “I understand.”

  “What detail you get? What’s your job?”

  “Garbage. I’m supposed to pick it up and bag it for the sanitation.”

  I allowed a touch of fear to creep into my voice. Knowing it was exactly what Calvin wanted to hear. He glanced at Rakim and grinned. Rakim grinned back, though his eyes never left my face.

  “Now, Rakim,” Calvin said, turning back to me, “he got himself a kitchen assignment. He washin’ dishes. Rakim hate washin’ dishes ’cause washin’ dishes give the boy dishpan hands. Tomorrow night, after the evenin’ meal, you gon’ come back to the kitchen and wash his dishes for him. Ain’t no maybe about it, white bread. Y’understand what ah’m sayin’? You ain’t wanna wash no dishes, y’all better pack yo shit and get yo ass in the wind.”

  His message delivered, Calvin got up and left the room. Rakim trailed behind, strutting for all he was worth. Twenty minutes later, I fell asleep. That’s how scared I was.

  SIX

  I’VE BEEN HAVING THE dream every few months for nearly thirty years. What the psychologist (who begged for dreams the way panhandlers beg for quarters) found most interesting is that the dream recurs over and over in the course of a single night. I wake, sha
ke it off, drift back to sleep, and dream it again.

  I’m nine years old and newly removed to a group home on Church Avenue in Brooklyn. I’m Pete Frangello, now. No more Petey. My adopted parents don’t want me and I don’t want them. Petey is dead as far as I’m concerned.

  Sunlight, filtered by thin white curtains, streams through the windows. A light breeze stirs the curtains, throwing faint shadows across the room. Starched white sheets reflect the brilliant sunlight while the black floors and walls absorb it. Jesus hangs from a metal crucifix on the front wall, his head slumped against his shoulder.

  The door opens and an older boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, slides into the room, a finger pressed to his lips. “Shhhh,” he whispers. “I’m supposed to be sick.” He crosses the room and sits at the foot of my bed. “My name’s Jack Parker. What’s yours?”

  “Pete Frangello.”

  His hair is long enough to cover his ears and swept back along the side of his head. A single curl, a wave, hangs down over his forehead. He has pimples on the right side of his face and the bare beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip.

  “You got parents, Pete?”

  “I had adopted parents. They don’t want me, but I don’t care about them. I’m finished with them.”

  He takes out a cigarette and offers it to me. I shake my head and he lights it himself. “My mother is a drunk,” he announces. “She loves me, but she’s too fucked up to care for me. I don’t have no father. Do you know who your real mother and father are?”

  “I don’t even know if I have a real mother and father.” Jack nods his head slowly. “That’s the way it is with a lot of the kids in here. I asked Sister Margaret to find out who my father is. Maybe my father would give me a place to live. But she wouldn’t do it.” He takes out a candy bar, a Snickers, and offers it to me.

  Suddenly I’m in the shower room. There’s so much steam that I can’t see the kid next to me, but I can hear kids laughing and shouting.

  I soap my hair and lean into the shower. When I pull back the kids have disappeared and the only sound is the splatter of water on the concrete floor. A figure appears, pushing the steam ahead of him. It’s Jack Parker and another boy named Ramsey.

  “Say, Pete,” he says, “you remember that Snickers I gave you? Well I want it back. You took it and now you have to give it back to me. Matter of fact, I want that same Snickers I gave you.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “You took it. Now you gotta give it back. You don’t take nothin’ in a place like this. This ain’t a place where people give you somethin’ for nothin’.”

  “I’ll buy you a Snickers this afternoon,” I say, though I have no money.

  “I want the one I gave you. If you can’t give me the one I gave you, then you have to pay me back the way I say.”

  They fuck me, the two of them taking turns. There’s nothing I can do and I offer no resistance, but they beat me anyway. When they finish, I fall to the floor. The floor is gray and the steam is gray. The blood on my legs offers the only color in a black-and-white frame.

  I woke up for the last time at six o’clock. After ten years of bells and counts, it takes more than a day of freedom to change prison routine. The dream was fresh in my mind and for the ten thousandth time I wondered if that was the way it happened. I can’t remember anymore, but it seems to me that adolescents were kept apart from the younger kids.

  It really doesn’t matter, anyway. Rape is so common in group homes and adolescent jails that the only important thing is your reaction to it. I’d snuck into the kitchen four times and was caught and punished four times before I was able to steal a knife. By then, Jack Parker and his buddy had been transferred to private foster homes (a reward for proper Institutional behavior?) and the opportunity for revenge was gone. But I’d held on to the knife, stashing it during the day and keeping it under my pillow at night.

  A couple of weeks later, two boys my own age explained the facts of life. They knew what had happened to me—everyone knew, except the nuns who ran the home—but they could see that I wasn’t a punk. They were part of a gang composed of the few white kids in the Institution and they had to protect themselves like any other minority. They never mentioned the fact that both of my assailants were white.

  “Survival, Pete,” one of the boys had insisted. “Survival. Anybody fucks with one of us, they fuck with all of us.”

  Don’t Trust Anyone is a prison cliché. You can have allies, but not friends. Today’s bro is tomorrow’s witness for the prosecution. Survival is what it’s about. The ethic is transparently stupid, but at nine years old … The problem is you don’t find out how stupid it is until you’re too old to believe in anything else.

  My two juicer roommates were snoring away. A third man, who must have come in after I fell asleep, also slept soundly. I dressed quickly and went downstairs.

  Calvin was still at his post. His eyes were wide open and he ground his teeth continually, his jaw moving in little circles. He was coked out of his mind.

  “Where you goin’, white bread?” he asked.

  I didn’t turn around, didn’t want to show him anything of what I was feeling. “I can’t sleep. I’m going for a walk.”

  “A walk? It ain’t but six-thirty in the gottdamn mornin’.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I repeated.

  “Yeah, well maybe y’all could do me a favor. Pick up a package for me.”

  He wanted me to transport drugs. In Cortlandt, prisoners unwilling to kill in order to survive, homosexual or heterosexual, are often used as mules by prisoner-dealers. The dealers themselves rarely touch the drugs or the money. Rape isn’t very common in adult male prisons, though it’s rampant in adolescent facilities. Heterosexual prisoners characterized as soft are usually “maytagged.” They wash underwear and socks, surrender cigarettes and commissary, transport drugs and other contraband. The proper translation of the word “maytagged” is “enslaved.”

  “I’m not coming back until tonight.”

  He sniffed loudly, then sniffed again. “You gon’ be back for dinner, right? If you ain’t back for dinner, don’t be back at all. You got a ’pointment with a sink.”

  I left without answering and walked straight across 39th Street to Seventh Avenue, then turned uptown. It was early spring and still chilly, but I was too fascinated with the cars and the fashions in the windows to pay much attention to the weather. The garment center with its unionized workers had been deserted, but even at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, secretaries and executives emerged from subways and cabs to work in the glass skyscrapers. The homeless were everywhere, sleeping in the doorways or the plazas, pushing overloaded shopping carts, or dragging plastic garbage bags stuffed with their possessions.

  I stood in front of the Marriott Marquis for a long time, staring up at the enormous hotel. It hadn’t existed when I went away and I wondered why had they’d put it so close to the 42nd Street sleaze. The Deuce is famous for porno, drugs, and violence. I tried to imagine an Iowa corn farmer checking in for the vacation of a lifetime, then stepping out to get his head busted by a desperate junkie.

  The Marriott’s elevators, visible through the glass facade, looked like space capsules as they moved up and down, carrying early risers to breakfast. I was hungry, too, but I wouldn’t be dining at the Marriott Marquis. I found a small deli and had the counterman grill me a bacon and egg sandwich, added a cup of coffee and a cheese danish, then made my way uptown to the fountain outside the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue.

  Watching the women hurry into their offices was like watching a movie. It’d been ten years since I’d seen women moving freely through the world. I undressed them with my eyes as they hurried past, noted the curve of breast, buttock, and hip, yet my feelings weren’t particularly sexual. It was too exotic for a physical reaction. Besides, I had no illusions about my own situation. From their point of view, I was just another homeless asshole. Another potential menace to be evaluated and avoide
d.

  And, of course, I had Calvin to consider. I wasn’t about to become his slave. I’ve played any number of roles in my life, but slave wasn’t one of them. Still, it was obvious that although I could evaluate Calvin the way office workers evaluated me, I couldn’t avoid him. I couldn’t just walk away and take my chances on the streets. Simon Cooper had threatened to violate me if I changed my residence without his permission, and I had no doubt that he’d do it.

  I suppose I could have called Simon at home, but even if he gave me permission to leave the Foundation, where would I go? I had to have an address or Simon would violate me to protect his own butt. There was no way he could justify letting a documented sociopath like Peter Frangello sleep in the street. He might let me move to another shelter, but the shelter trail from the Foundation went straight downhill. The next stop would be a massive city shelter with as much violence as a prison, but without the supervision.

  The simple truth was that I’d have to deal with Calvin. I was locked in to the Foundation and there was no way to go around him. The question I kept asking myself was why Calvin couldn’t see who I was. If a panhandler in the bus terminal could look into my eyes and turn away, why did Calvin take me for a punk? A prisoner’s cell is his only real possession. To step into another man’s cell without permission is the ultimate disrespect. Calvin had set himself down on my bed as if he owned it.

  There were only two possibilities and they were obvious enough. The first was that Calvin was a stupid punk who thought he could do whatever he wanted to a collection of helpless, homeless men. But Calvin, himself, was living in a shelter, so how bad could he be? Maybe he and his SingSing muscle had been assigned to the Foundation by P.O.’s of their own, but really dangerous ex-cons don’t go to shelters. If they don’t have families, they go back into the shooting galleries and the crack dens and worry about their P.O.’s later.

  The other possibility was that Calvin had some hidden resource that I didn’t know about. He was probably connected to one of the dealers outside the Foundation. Maybe his connection would supply him with muscle if he got into a beef. And maybe his connection wouldn’t. There weren’t more than forty beds in the entire Foundation. How much action could that represent to the millionaires who control the street corners in Hell’s Kitchen, especially if Calvin’s beef had nothing to do with drugs or territory?