Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison (22 page)

"You can run, but you can't hide," Manley chimed. "You can't be selling no shit."

Every now and then a balloon would break, and someone would get rushed to the infirmary, but it didn't happen that often.

"How do they get it into the visiting room?" I asked.

"The women smuggle it inside their pussies," Manley said.

"Mmm, Mmm," Chet walked up. "Finger licking good."

Manley said, "I don't be eatin' no pussy, now."

"That's why you been eating them little boys," Red snapped.

"Now how the tuck are you going to play me?" Manley said.

Slide Step raised his hand before Manley could get up.

"That's all right, Drag," Red said. "He ain't gonna do nothing." He was staring at Manley with a sadistic grin, happy to have gotten a rise out of him.

"That mouth of yours is gonna need a tampon in a minute," Manley said. "You keep talkin' out the side of your neck."

Slide Step was silent, but I could detect a slight grin.

"They'll be a long, white-ass string hanging out that niotherfiicker," Manley said. He shook his head back and forth, as if wiggling an imaginary string.

The three of them laughed.

Red said, "Well if you're feeling like a frog-Jump! Motherfucker."

"It's true," Manley said. "A real nigger ain't eatin' no pussy, now."

"But them drippings sure does make them balloons slide down," Chet said.

They all nodded.

In addition to running the drugs, Slide Step also ran the rec department, sat on the inmate benefit council, and had a hand in a couple of card games. He had the juice, he had the money, and he knew how to serve his time comfortably.

I was out of my prison blues within a matter of days. Convicts were constantly stopping by us with pants, shirts, shoes, watches, and other items for sale from the outside world. "Here," Slide Step would say. "Go check these out, Squeeze." And off I'd go into one of the dorms to try them on. We were allowed street clothes, but they had to be shipped from the outside or purchased from one of the catalogs-JC Penney or Sears. The money would be taken from an inmate's account.

When I first arrived, the resident unit counselor said I should hold off on having my clothes shipped, since I'd be going back to court in a few weeks. That meant I would have to go through Quarantine all over again. They'd ship everything back home as I went through the bubble, but Slide Step wasn't going to have his prize boy looking like a scrub, so he had me out of any state blues nearly as quick as that coin dropped into Chet's hand.

One day, while I was getting my split-ends clipped in the barbershop opposite the guards' station, Big Cat the barber stepped out and whispered something into Slide Step's ear. When Big Cat returned, he announced that I was getting a facial. When he finished cutting my hair, he pulled a lever on the chair and reclined it, and began pouring hot water over some hand towels. For the next couple of weeks, every afternoon at three, I reported to Big Cat for a hot towel and mudpack facial. The results were amazing. My face began to clear up. Now, I was starting to look, act, and feel like a bad motherfucker.

17

What's in a Name, Anyway?

"You're a sissy," my brother Rick sneered.

I don't remember why he'd said it, but it was as if he had kicked me square in the stomach.

Our parents were separating, so we had just moved into Grandpa's house on Cook Street and we were starting a new school the next day. It wasn't any wonder why, when my kindergarten teacher told me that I had to walk with the safety girls-that I didn't want to go. The Safety Girls were the ones who wore the orange safety belts, and helped the kids cross the street.

"No way," I said. "I'm not walking with girls."

But Miss Greenport insisted. "You have to," she said, "at least until you cross Telegraph Road." It was a large intersection with four lanes of traffic.

"I hate girls," I said.

"I'm sorry, Timmy, but there aren't any other boys thatgo that way."

"No," I said, defiantly, "And you can't make me."

"Oh yes I can," she said.

"Well, if you try and make me, I'll break your glasses."

Well she did, and so did I. Before she could say another word, I jumped up in the air and snatched them off her face. When we heard them crunch underfoot, we both froze in place with our mouths wide open.

I was notgoing to be called a sissy.

Inmate movies were shown every Wednesday and Saturday night. The gymnasium was converted into a theater with rows of folding chairs that were stored on stage, behind a red velvet curtain that looked as old as the Riverside complex.

The Inmate Benefit Council, the majority of which was black, selected the films. Slide Step chaired the committee of six black and two white inmates. The movies included Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown, and The Black Lolita. I'd never heard of these titles and was amazed at how many had the word black in it, like Blacula, Blackenstein, Black Belt Jones, and Black the Ripper. Occasionally, the warden would make them order something that appealed to whites, so they'd invariably pick some low budget flick that was either about CB radios or some outlaw trucker with a sidekick chimpanzee.

Every now and then, they chose a movie that pleased everyone, like The Sting or The Godfather or some other film about gangsters and con artistsmen getting over in some form or another. And everyone liked a good comedy like Cotton Comes to Harlem or a disaster film like The Towering Inferno.

During the movies you could usually see someone giving his man head, especially if they had been separated into different housing units. They would have to find some other places to hook up, and the movies were dark and convenient.

Occasionally, some boy would end up blowing several guys in a row. It was done as punishment if someone was caught cheating; or it could be his man was just sharing him; or perhaps he was being made to hustle by turning tricks at $5 a pop. It was hard to focus on the movie when you could hear the heavy breathing and slurping behind you.

I looked up at Slide Step and curled my face. "I'd never do that."

"You better not." He grinned.

I hit his arm.

Slide Step looked over his shoulder at Bottoms, who was bobbing his way down the line. "That boy's been banged more times than an old screen door," he said.

"In a wind storm," someone next to us added.

Slide Step said it was the usually the bucket heads that did that sort of thing, meaning the punks and ugly boys or the nasty queens.

I felt sorry for Bottoms.

"In Jackson," Slide Step said. "They hooked up in church."

"In church?" I couldn't imagine anything more sacrilegious.

"Square business. They'd meet up in the balcony." Slide Step smiled and turned to watch the movie.

The film that night was The Mack, starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. It was about an ex-con named Goldie, who, in an early scene, told his mother he had to go out and fight The Man the only way he knew how. So he became a Mack, a big city pimp, complete with a hat and velvet cape. He drove a Cadillac and carried a gold-tipped cane.

You could always tell what the inmates thought of a movie because they talked throughout it. They would yell up at the screen, as if they were home in their own living rooms. "Kill that peckerwood," someone screamed, or if they didn't like a character-"Aw, motherfucker! You ain't shit."

Entertainment was important to convicts. It broke up the monotony of being confined, but if it wasn't happening, they were quick to make it up on their own. Like when a character came on the screen with an obvious flaw that was similar to one of the inmates. Someone would yell, "Look at Dexter up there, y'all, with his big old nasty fangs."

In The Mack, when Goldie and his brother killed two white cops who earlier had killed their mother, the auditorium went crazy. Mothers were sacred to inmates so it was like lighting had hit one of the gun towers. "Man, don't nobody want to fuck with a motherfucker's momma," someone in the front of the auditorium said.

For the most part, the guards left us alone. I think they understood that movies not only killed time, but they helped us burn off some of our hostilities.

Slide Step said The Mack showed what it was really like on the street. I was fascinated by the whole concept. Why did a girl need a pimp anyway, and how did they get her to have sex and turn over all her money? Slide Step pointed out Silk Daddy to me, a convict who was serving time for pandering (the legal name for pimping).

Silk Daddy, at forty, was older than most of the others there. His welltrimmed mustache was sprinkled with a few gray hairs. He had dark brown skin that glistened and a short-length afro that was perfectly shaped by the pick he kept in his front shirt pocket. I was standing maybe three feet away, but I could still smell the scent of cocoa butter.

"How do you get them to do it?" I asked.

"Well now," he said, "let's kick it around and see." He took a Kool cigarette from his pack by neatly unfolding the silver tabs and then replacing the foil so that it looked like it wasn't opened. "But before I answer that for you, let me ask you a few things first." He took out a lighter and lit the cigarette. "You like to have sex, don't you?"

At that point, no, I didn't, but he didn't give me a chance to answer.

"Of course you do, Baby, everybody do." He blew smoke in my direction. "It's one of the most enjoyable things we Homo sapiens like to do."

I smiled, because I knew what the word meant, but wondered if he had a double meaning in mind.

"And," he said, pausing to take another drag from his cigarette. "It's one of the few things The Man can't stop us from doing. Even in here. So what's the one commodity you can give up, but you still gets to keep?"

He stared at me with a dazzle in his eyes, as if he were getting high on the sound of his own words. "Sex," he said. "Now ain't that a wonderful thing? It's the only thing in the world you can sell and still maintain ownership of. Can you dig what I'm sayin'? You're doing it any way. So it's like getting paid for what you like to do. So you get to give it up, you get to keep it, you enjoy doing it-no, make that love doing it-and you get paid for it all at the sane time. Now what could be more beautiful than that?"

Wow, I thought, it did make a lot of sense.

"Thanks, Silk Daddy."

"All right now," he chuckled. "Be sure to tell Slide Step I said hello."

As I ran down the stairs to catch up with Slide Step, Silk Daddy's "girls" were standing at the bottom of the landing. They were two black queens, Pootie and Miss Pepper, and they were made up as usual with red-colored lips and shirts tied at the mid-drift. Pootie had long braded hair and Miss Pepper's, which was shorter, looked nappy and tussled. It was probably from all the fun they were having getting paid during the film. Pootie's pockets were packed full of tokens, and the others teased as they walked past.