The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (54 page)

When Skunk in a Funk walked into the medieval tunnel that connected the outside world to El Morro Castle, she realized that once more she was descending into the depths of hell, and as always, given her sixth sense for horror, she was not mistaken. Nor was this a metaphoric hell, because the castle was an exact replica of the original Stygian stronghold—maybe it even
was
the original. The heat of the walled prison was unbearable, but the noise made by the prisoners was even worse. Day and night, the immense gallery that Gabriel had been sent to was a cacophony of banging cans and sticks, screams, shouts, clapping hands, and the dull sounds of beatings and bellowings. Reinaldo took up residence on a cot that no else would occupy because it was so high up—it was directly under the barred open-air skylight in the roof, so at night the dew would fall on whoever slept in it and the light from the castle’s watchtower keep him awake. There, Skunk thought, at least she could stay out of people’s way. But prisoners have their ways of finding out everything there is to know about newcomers, so in almost no time they had learned, perhaps from the guards, perhaps from the warden himself (a thug named Torres), that Skunk in a Funk was a writer. “The writer,” then, became the name the inmates hung on her, and they took it literally. They would carry their paper and pencils to wherever Reinaldo happened to be and ask him to write a letter for them—to reconcile with a disenchanted girlfriend or a wife who wanted a divorce, or to encourage a faithful, co-conspiring friend or saddened mother. Gabriel, therefore, soon became the official “writer” for the entire gallery, and then for the entire prison. Reinaldo had never written so much in his life. Sometimes he had to find an epistolary solution to really difficult problems. For example, one of the prisoners received a terrible surprise visit one day from his girlfriend, his mistress, and his wife, all at the same time; Reinaldo wrote three letters—pleas with three different pitches. The next visit, he saw how the prisoner was embraced by all three women, who had also brought him a bag filled with his favorite things to eat. (Grateful prisoners would usually invite Skunk in a Funk to these feasts of reconciliation.) Often when Reinaldo saw an inmate kiss his girlfriend or wife, he would think with pleasure that it was
his
skilled letter-writing that had brought about this happy outcome. Other times, his loving letters (written at the behest of a murderer) would lead to a prisoner’s conquest of a woman who’d come to visit her brother or her husband.

Given these triumphs, Skunk in a Funk’s fame as a writer spread like wildfire through the prison. From the seventeen galleries in El Morro came an unending stream of requests for his services, sent him via balls of soap tied to a long cord that the prisoners lobbed with uncanny skill from their galleries into the writer’s. (This clever means of communication was called, with elegant simplicity, “the mail.”) The correspondence that Reinaldo sent out (hundreds of balls of soap whizzing through the air, day and night) was almost infinite. But naturally Skunk did not perform these labors free of charge; for each letter, she charged from two to five cigarettes, which were also remitted to her via aerial soap balls. Soon Gabriel had amassed a small fortune—inside the prison, cigarettes, which were severely rationed all over the Island, were as valuable as gold itself.

Because of his role as writer-in-residence, Reinaldo was a sacred personage within the prison; he was a magician, a wizard, a sorcerer, able with a wave of his magic pencil to send messages and images and emotions into the outside world, calm stormy emotional waters, resolve intrigues, foster reconciliations, mend betrayals. This amazing skill assured him a certain degree of impunity within the walls and, as one would expect, the unconditional admiration of all the men, even those Don Juans who had been jailed for “woman problems” and the most renowned and muscular tops, who wasted no time in propositioning her or showing her (with a certain amount of gentility) their erect members and gorgeous balls. Every day the cook and the cook’s assistant risked their necks to snitch a plate of food from the dining hall and bring it to Skunk in a Funk.

“Oh, I had plenty of offers, my dear, offers I had aplenty, but I accepted none. I put a cork in my ass is what I did. I had seen that when two machos had a fight over a faggot, it was always the faggot who wound up mincemeat while the two machos kissed and made up, and sometimes did more than kiss. Not to mention all the fucked-up fairies with their
own
complexes to deal with—some of them so jealous that they’d kill a guy they thought was poaching on their territory, while the guy slept; they’d run a long thin iron blade up through the guy’s cot or skin him alive with razor blades glued to a stick. And all that on account of ‘platonic’ friendships, as they called them.”

No, Skunk in a Funk wanted nothing to do with sex between men so long as she was in prison—and not just because of the risk that sexual activity entailed in and of itself. In prison, you see,
everybody
did it, which made it practically
de rigueur,
or at least the conventional thing to do—“And, girl, you know I’ve never been conventional.”

For Skunk in a Funk, sex had been an act almost of rebellion, certainly of freedom and
fun
. For Gabriel, picking up a man was a heroic act, and it made him proud. Coming on to a black man at a bus stop, going off into the undergrowth or darkness somewhere with him, facing the whole spectrum of dangers that a homosexual man faced—including the risk that while Skunk in a Funk sucked the black man off, the guy might stomp her, mug her, even slice up her face—that was an act of freedom because it was a risk one
chose.
For Reinaldo, glory lay in free, spontaneous cruising, the unexpected pickup, the pickup free of second thoughts, free of double-crosses, free of complications. If he had cruised men on the outside it was because they were hard to pick up, they were mysterious and free—at least free to choose whether to have sex or not. Now, in jail, where everybody was desperate for a piece of ass, having sex with a man was an act that was neither heroic nor even really pleasuring. It was insulting to Reinaldo to
have
to have sex with a prisoner—a slave—who was doing it with a fairy only because there were no women. “If there’s no bread, let ’em eat cake”—that was the rule among the prisoners. . . . So Skunk in a Funk, who had spent her entire life chasing after men—in fact had wound up in jail because of a man—and who now could have them by the dozen, flatly refused to have anything to do with them.
I’ll never have sex with a prisoner,
she swore to herself. A prick dressed up in a prison uniform was a physical and metaphysical fraud, in her view. After witnessing more than a few suicides (by slitting their throats) by fairies desperate for sex with prisoners but never satisfied, Skunk in a Funk decided to dedicate herself to what we might call professional writing (
letter
-writing), and to setting down the fifth version of her novel
The Color of Summer.
After she’d written the day’s love letters or pleas to women she’d never met, the fairy would climb up to his cot and work on his book. And so it was to the racket of banging cans and sentimental ballads sung by inmates, the screams of men being stabbed and the moans of pleasure of men screwing or being screwed, that Reinaldo finally reached the end of his thick novel, a work he considered central to his
oeuvre.
He knew that he
had
to rewrite it—because he’d sent his mother to consult the Three Weird Sisters about the fate of the manuscript he’d hidden under the roof tiles of the house in Miramar, and the Weird Sisters had told him in no uncertain terms (by way of his sorely afflicted mother) that the manuscript of Gabriel’s novel had been turned over to the police by his Aunt Orfelina and her fag son Tony. Now with the novel completed, all that was left to take care of was one terribly difficult task, the semi-demi-culmination of his labors: smuggle the manuscript out of prison. And I call it the semi-demi-culmination because the semi-culmination would be to smuggle it off the Island and the culmination of culminations, to get it published. . . . But for the moment, the most important thing for Gabriel was the semi-demi-culmination. He had to get the manuscript outside the walls of El Morro Castle.

But that was
not
an easy thing to do. Although inside the galleries the prisoners had a certain degree of freedom (they could screw or suck each other’s pricks practically whenever they got the urge), when they left their gallery for visiting hours (which were allowed every two weeks) they were subjected to implacable searches. The prisoners had to strip naked and walk the length of a long table at which dozens of officers were sitting “inspecting” them. Every article of clothing was minutely inspected. Then each inmate had to stand in front of the officers (“combatants,” as the Revolution called them) and spread his legs, pull up his balls and prick, open his mouth, and then open his asshole to show that he wasn’t trying to smuggle anything out. Skunk in a Funk noticed that during these searches many officers and soldiers became visibly aroused; these were the ones who wore dark glasses so they could ogle the naked prisoners all they wanted to without being called peeping toms or voyeurs—or worse yet, fags.

Through that tunnel with all those inspectors and oglers it was very difficult to smuggle out a sheet of paper, let alone a whole thick novel. And yet Gabriel discovered that under the noses of those guards who watched the prisoners’ every move, one of the most intense smuggling operations of any prison anywhere was going on. The prisoners would smuggle out knives, jewelry stolen from other inmates, hundreds of letters that for one reason or another couldn’t be submitted to the prison censors, and whatever else they wanted to send back home with the family members that came to visit them. And they also smuggled practically anything they wanted
into
the prison—even revolvers and spare clips. How did they manage to carry on such an operation under the very noses of the officers? Well might you ask, you swishy snoop. . . . It was easy—they hired a mule queen.

The mule queens were fairies who had been screwed by so many men that the carrying capacity of their assholes was almost infinite. In the depths of those asses, apparently all tight and puckered-up (even when they had to spread their cheeks for the searches), they could transport just about anything. For instance, there was the famous mule queen who had brought in two bags of candy, ten cartons of cigarettes, a bar of La Caridad guava paste, six pounds of sugar, and a tube of deodorant—all, of course, in the depths of his ass. Then there was also the famous fairy who died of acute peritonitis when she tried to smuggle out the long, sharp iron bar—known in the prison as a “skewer”—that she had killed her lover with. There were literally hundreds of mule queens, and they would all rush off to the toilet when they came out into the visiting area or back into the gallery. In the toilet, they would look like female fish or insects depositing their eggs as they shat out the goods, wrapped in black plastic bags.

But it wasn’t easy to hire a mule queen. All the ones that Skunk in a Funk approached (cautiously hinting at her intentions) absolutely refused to help, saying they’d never been and would never be a mule—though after a little persuading they would confess that they were booked up for months or even years. But since the best coin the mule queens could be paid in was cigarettes (everybody smoked like a chimney), Reinaldo finally managed to hire a famous mule queen who in three trips, for the sum of a thousand cigarettes, smuggled out the manuscript and delivered it, in the standard black plastic wrapping, to Skunk in a Funk’s mother, who whined and protested and complained no end about the shit-covered bundles but finally carried them home. When Skunk in a Funk was sure that his entire novel had been smuggled out of the prison, he breathed a sigh almost of relief.

But the relief was short-lived, because before two weeks were out (one day, exactly, before the next visit) a soldier came for Skunk in a Funk and led him to the warden’s offices. Gabriel was put into a small room with a vaulted ceiling—like all the rooms in El Morro, including the prison galleries, the hospital and the room they did the searches in. In this small room a young officer was awaiting him, the lieutenant who was in charge of Skunk in a Funk’s case, who had interrogated her at State Security, and who was, my dear, a
very
good-looking young man. After furiously pacing back and forth several times while he tugged at his obviously well-stocked basket as though his uniform were more than a little tight, the young lieutenant turned to the little desk in the little room and took from a drawer the latest manuscript of
The Color of Summer,
slamming it over and over again on the little desk, which shivered and shook under the thick stack of papers that assaulted it. Then the officer squeezed his crotch again and, staring at Skunk in a Funk, said: