Walton, my stockbroker neighbor, and Doug Norton, the inmate tennis pro, were in the aisle with a tennis racket. Norton was showing Walton the importance of a follow-through with the racket. Norton had a client list of about ten inmates he was teaching to play tennis. Like Walton had said, he wanted to improve his game. I watched them, interested, while I undressed. I’d tried playing a few times with Tony Abruzzo. He kept telling me, “No, Bob, the idea is to hit the fucking ball over the net.” I smiled. Tony, at sixty-five, could slaughter me in tennis. I watched Norton show Walton how to hold a racket for a backhand. I stripped down, wrapped myself in a towel, and went to the showers.
I always used the same shower stall, and I noticed that so did most people. Inmates would actually wait if “their” stall was busy. I think it must have been a small way to personalize our lives here. I liked my stall because it had a shower head that delivered a thick stream of water which felt like a massage. There was no worry about running out of hot water at the camp, and I spent at least fifteen minutes letting the water stream beat on my shoulders and neck. While I basked in the steam, I noticed plastered on the tile wall a new soggy fuck-book foldout page. There was a different one every day. Today it was Nancy. Nancy was wet and wrinkled on the tiles, but she was still smiling as she exposed herself to viewers who needed to see one again. I wondered if she knew where her picture would end up when she posed for the shot. Probably. She seemed to be thinking: Here it is, jerkoffs. I tried not to pay attention to Nancy. The pose was brazen, vulgar. Cheap titillation. I faced the shower and lathered my hair with Johnson’s Baby shampoo and things went normally until the shower stream hit low. I could feel myself stiffen. I looked down. I was standing out like a coat peg. It was really impressive to me that I could consciously be offended by pictures like Nancy while my body was clearly in love. I wanted to be home where I could give Patience some loving hints like: “Feel like fooling around?” But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be home for a year. I felt myself getting stiffer. Apparently Nancy was plenty good enough for my dick. I rinsed off the shampoo and stood back and watched the stream of water hitting me. In two minutes, I went off like a gun. Well, that was sex for another three or four days. The average was three or four days, at the end of which time I must have had testosterone saturating every cell in my body. I had sexy dreams like I did in high school and sexual urges so strong I could think of nothing else until I did something about it. I would be a failure as a monk; or did monks take a lot of showers, too?
I soaked in the steam awhile longer and then turned the water off. I thought, Thanks, Nancy. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me, and stepped out to towel off.
I went back to my cube and put on a clean set of clothes. All my clothes were new—as you would expect of the guy who runs the clothing room. I put on a new pair of pants and a sweatshirt I’d bought at the commissary and stood for a minute, watching the section buzzing with inmates, deciding how I’d spend my evening. The section had a homey quality about it. I knew most of the twenty-five men there, and they all knew me. It was home.
I unlocked my locker and got out my big radio and the earphones. I hung the radio on a hook on the partition above the head of my cot. I had made the hook with coat-hanger wire so the radio was up high enough to get the PBS station in Pensacola.
The loudspeaker called an inmate to the control room. That meant a urine test. It was random. They called up two or three men every night. Some of the inmates who had been here a few years said the piss tests really cut down on the pot smoking. Not like the good old days, they said, when the guys had parties in the woods next to Dorm Five where Tarzan fell out of the tree.
I listened to the radio no matter what I was doing. Sometimes I answered mail. I was getting about fifty letters a week from readers, most of whom, I was surprised to know, weren’t Vietnam veterans. I read them all, and tried to answer them, too, but I was falling behind. I got a thousand letters from readers while I was at Eglin.
Sometimes ideas for new inventions popped into my mind, and I made drawings. I sent an attorney friend of mine, Tony LoPucki, in Gainesville, my idea for a quartz wristwatch that didn’t need batteries. LoPucki, who used to be a patent attorney, liked my ideas, but he thought the world was doing okay using batteries in their watches. Fine. The only reason LoPucki talked to me at all was that when I first met him, I showed him my scheme for three-dimensional television. I got the idea looking at the display of a quartz wristwatch, oddly enough. I’d experimented with 3-D movies in New York. I exposed single frames of a still life in an 8mm movie camera, moving the camera left or right for each frame. I projected this film and tried looking at it through a spinning disk with one hole near the edge. The idea was that if the disk spun at the right speed, then my left eye would see a left image in one frame of my film, and then, if everything was timed right, my right eye would see the next frame, a right image. Persistence of vision, I figured, would create a 3-D picture. I mounted the disk on a hand drill, and by varying the speed, I got it to work. But I couldn’t figure an easy way to synchronize the disk with the flickering left and right images. The blinking seconds on the liquid crystal display of a watch gave me an idea: Wear glasses with liquid-crystal lenses. Then send a signal from the TV to the glasses, and the lenses could be switched alternately from opaque to clear in synch with the thirty images per second on the TV screen. I had no idea how to build something like this, so I sat on the idea for a year before I met LoPucki. LoPucki was going to Washington anyway, so he said he’d do a search free, because he knew I was poor. He came back very impressed. The idea was patented, yes, but only three months before. I didn’t know where these ideas came from, but they weren’t coming tonight.
I decided to read. I selected a book out of the dozen or so I had on the shelf over the built-in desk. I picked out The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
I’d finished At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen, a book Bill Smith sent me. Smith had been sending me books to improve my essentially illiterate background. So had Larry Heinemann. Heinemann sent me Life on the Mississippi because he said I wrote like Samuel Clemens. Heinemann was gracious as hell. At Play was stunning, and I wondered how Matthiessen ever got to be so smart. His writing is like poetry, every page of it. The book was written in 1965, while I was living in a pup tent in Vietnam. I missed it, though I probably wouldn’t have read it had Bill not sent it. At Eglin, in addition to the technical books I read—layman physics stuff about fundamental particles, black holes, artificial intelligence, computers, and so on—I read a lot of novels, hoping that some of what makes writing a novel possible would rub off on me.