Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
phoenixes over each pocket to a club in downtown Boston on a street close to its Combat Zone. During summer afternoons, hookers, young girls from Ohio and Tennessee would stop in for a drink or dance before going to work. They giggled and paired off like shy children.
“Look at the teardrops,” my father sang to them, “running all down the streets.”
He was eighteen years old.
I don’t know.
Actually, he never sang.
He was a minister. That’s how they met. It is another part of the country, one dry with dust, and my mother is in the audience. She is beautiful then.
Or, she is ugly. Or dead.
And he is an undertaker.
They never meet at all. . . save once.
As for myself, I am living in prison.
Sometimes, listening to the days sweat themselves dry against the grey square plexiglass skylight fifteen feet away out in the corridor I imagine myself, while pulled into this cell, waiting out too the same rainstorm in a bar with vodka tonic and country girls and outlaw music on its stage.
Otherwise, after two free letters for the week and a pack of Bugler rolled into cigarettes I’m out of options. During the morning it’s quiet. Then someone will start. Yo, whiteboy. Or nigger. Anything at all.
On the afternoon Morris Boyle had first been brought to security lockdown everyone got up on him fast, as they did whenever a new man came down. This was about two o’clock. Hey baby, it started. Come to daddy. And then they were all up on the bars—What is it mamma oh whitebread whitebread, whistling slung hip and eyes, testing, and it turned out him being slight and frail, meaning nothing, but also in protective custody and having asked for it himself his first day down. Which is what he told real quick. How two niggers stole his Reeboks. Then came back later about some jewelry—
Why didn’t you . . ., Danny Spencer began.
Boyle asks him: What? Get stabbed over some watch, there was something I was supposed to do—it was all completely out of control.
The whole wing began rocking. He seemed to be exactly what they were waiting for.
That night I heard Gregory Angels, who was in the cell next to him, running the facts down to Boyle. “Man, you already let yourself get run off the compound. . . . Everyone gets tested. . . . And they know, my friend; what they know is you can’t live in p.c. forever. Sooner or later you got to go back to population, and when you do, they want you thinking you’re more afraid than you really are. That you got to hook up with one of them . . . that you got to, so might as well do it now. Someone to look over you, you know what I’m saying?
“You will be giving them cigarettes, you will be giving them money. You will have a daddy, and anything he wants, belongs to him.”
It did no good.
They gave Boyle a name. Holly, because he was from California and to them that meant Hollywood.
“Come on, Holly,” June-Bug told him, “why you checked in? Come on out to my cell, you be safe.”
And then Country Cool soothed, “Fuck them niggers. You my friend, I get out there—no one on the compound gone mess wit you.”
Always trying to run that smooth shit.
“What you think you’d do if I was in your cell,” Boyle asked, and they loved it. They all laughed, saying they couldn’t tell him, they had to show him. And every time he was taken to shower or sick call, every time, the whole cell block got on the bars talking that shit. But Country Cool was different. He was in love. Flat out in love. Had Boyle cut out and owned, and talked real soft, sweating in the heat, and he’d moan, “Oh Holly, what they gone do—what they done wit you now, baby?” All day long he ran his game, mostly soft, sometimes with that real easy threat you hear in prison, and always making Boyle believe that he knew him better than he himself did. “Oh Holly, what they done wit you, baby?”
Boyle couldn’t take it. A week after coming down he was ready to sign himself back onto the compound. The cops made him fill out a form saying he no longer felt his life would be in danger, and then upgraded his status to administrative confinement and moved him out of his segregation cell overnight while the paper work was processed. They put him in with Boo-Boo. We all knew what was coming, and waited.
And of course it came.
I don’t know. My beliefs may run counter to what you assume. I enjoyed none of this. It wasn’t all that long before Boyle was brought back to protective custody from the hospital. This time they moved him into the cell next door. Two cops walked him down. Mine is the last cell on the wing. Everyone had an even closer interest in him now, and I didn’t like to see it. He might have been alright if he’d fought when Boo-Boo tried to take him off, that alone could have done it. Sometimes, fighting once will give a man the heart he needs. But he hadn’t. Boo-Boo tried to force him—he had a shaft of straight razor bedded in a pen and its point was sharpened, but it was mostly for slashing. Boo-Boo had stuck Boyle once or twice, and then, when Boyle fell into a ball screaming for the cops, he’d really gone to work, cutting him across the face and arms. That was how the guards found them. Boyle bleeding pretty good and rolled into a ball. . . . Boo-Boo, who is not right in the head, more confused than anything else.
At mail-call on the same day they brought Morris Boyle back to lockdown the fat guard asks what I would’ve done, he has two letters for me in his hand—“Listen, he says, “if you’d found out about the contract before we did . . . what then? Maybe think about asking for protective custody, huh?”
He holds the letters just beyond my reach. “And what about after leaving here,” he asks. “If it follows right along—anywhere you’re transferred . . .”
Nickerson is his name. He holds my letters chest high. He wants me to look at him.
This is what he’d like me to think about: how it would be about money, period . . . if I was in population there would be no one person to go after—nothing I could do to make everyone stand back. And every night, sleeping in an open bay dorm—less than two feet between row after row of double bunks, the bunks themselves and clothes hanging and string lines making the whole dorm a blind spot. . . .
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