I casually walked over to the COs museum situated in the left corner of the room.
“You got your twelve oh-one, brother,” Fat Tommy said. He was spread across two metal chairs with a Jenny Craig TV dinner on the table in front of him.
It’s only natural that employees pick up the lingo of the workplace; Attica guards often talked like Attica prisoners. And 12:01 meant gaining your freedom — getting your walking papers.
Maybe, I thought. We'll see.
I sipped my coffee, I perused the collection of gats and burners, as Fat Tommy chomped away on a meal he could only find ultimately dissatisfying. He was the only other person in the lounge.
When I finally turned and left, Fat Tommy looked up but didn’t say good-bye.
From the lounge to the classroom, I first had to go through a black locked door — knocking twice and waiting for another CO to clear me. Then I walked down the “bowling alley,” what they call the prison’s main walkway. It’s dissected down the middle by a broken yellow line, like a state highway. One side is for prisoners. The other side is for COs. Or for people who fall somewhere in between.
I passed a CO called Hank.
“Hey, Yobwoc,” he said. “I’m gonna miss you. You were my best boon coon.”
Translation: best friend.
“Thank you,” I said, but I knew he hadn’t meant it.
When the class settled in, I told them it was the last time I’d be seeing them. That it had been fun teaching them. That I hoped they’d keep reading and writing on their own. I told them that in the best classes, the teacher becomes the student and the students the teachers, and that that’s what had happened here — I’d learned from them. No one looked particularly moved; but when I finished, one or two of them nodded at me as if they might even miss me.
Malik wasn’t one of them. He’d passed me a note last time. Where the writer would be waiting for me.
I told the class we might as well use this last class for creative reflection. I wanted each of them to write an essay on what the class had meant to them. This time, I told them, they could even put their names to them.
Then I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
I passed the black CO who was supposed to be stationed outside the door and who, this time, actually was. I said I’d be back in ten minutes, and he said, “I’ll alert the media.”
He’d be waiting for me near the prison pharmacy, the note said.
He worked there.
A pharmacy job gave you shine, a student had explained to me, since it gave you access to drugs.
It also gave you access to something else, I knew. Drug manufacturers. You could call them up to find out things if you wanted to. Like maybe where a certain rare insulin was being distributed.
It probably hadn’t taken him years to track me down after all.
I walked back down the bowling alley. I followed the signs.
The pharmacy consisted of one long counter protected by steel mesh. There are prisons within prisons, I noted, an axiom also true of life. The kind of insight I might’ve pointed out in my class, if I still had one.
I continued past the pharmacy, striding down an empty hallway that veered sharply left and seemed to lead to no place in particular. But it did.
Malik had told me where he’d be waiting for me, and I’d gone and scouted it.
An alcove in the middle of the hall.
A kind of blind. In an older institution like Attica, there were lots of them, hidden little corners where the prisoners conducted business, where they sold drugs and got down on their knees. Where they evened scores. A blind. An appropriate description, except I was walking in with my eyes wide open.
I walked into the alcove where it was quiet and still and stopped.
“Hello?”
I could hear him breathing in there.
“Hello,” I whispered again.
He stepped out of the shadows.
He looked different — that’s the first thing I thought. That he looked different from the way I remembered him.
His head. It seemed smaller, reshapen, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. He had a scar running down from his forehead. That was one thing. And he had a tat on his right shoulder. A prison blue clock face without hands — doing time. And farther down on his arm a tombstone with numbers — twelve — his prison sentence.
“Surprise,” he said.
No. But that’s what I wanted him to think.
“How you doin’, Chuck?” he said. He smiled, the way he’d smiled at my front door the day he’d come to my house and put his hands on my daughter.
“Larry,” I said.
“Larry. Yeah, I’m down. That was some cool shit you pulled off—playing dead like that. Had everyone fooled, huh, Larry? ”
“Not everyone. No.”
“No, not everyone. You’re right. You shouldn’t have let my girl see your wallet, Larry. Bad move. Stupid.”
The hostess in the Crystal Night Club. Widdoes . . . what kind of name is that? she’d said.
“I thought you were dead.”
“You wish.”
Yes, I thought. I wish. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing.
“I’ve been looking for you, Larry. Like all over. You took something of mine, you know. I want it back. So I’ve been looking for you. And I found you, too. I found you twice.”
“Twice?”
“Once in Chicago. Oh yeah . . . that’s right. Surprised by that, huh? Yeah, I knew exactly where you were. Oakdale, Illinois. Then you moved on me.”
“Yes.”
“Bennington. Right down the fucking road. How’s that for lucky?”
“That’s lucky.”
“Uh-huh. You know how I found you?”
“No.”
“Your kid. Through the drugstores. First Chicago. Then Bennington. And then the next thing I know, the very next thing I know, you’re waltzing in through the fucking front door.”
“Yes.”
“I said to myself, Here’s your twelve oh-one, nigger. Here it is on a platter.”
“Why didn’t you say hello?”
“I did. I did say hello. I got my boy to write up my hello for me.”
“Your boy? He can’t even read.”
“Not Malik. My boon. A Jew literary professor who eighty-sixed his wife. Writes all the pleas for parole here. And very cool jerk-off stuff. ‘Charley Schine Gets Fucked’ — his latest. He thinks I made it up in my head. He thinks I’m creative.”
“Yes — it was very effective.”