Trash and Freight;
Listening;
Protective Invisibility.
The next six weeks of my sentence were spent juggling those pursuits. Assigned as a khaki trusty to the T&F detail, I worked the hardest job in the L.A. County jail system and received the rewards that came with it: a private cell, three meals a day from the officers’ dining room, and weekends off, with the free run of the honor trusty’s module — four tiers with ultrawide catwalks suitable for crap shooting, T.V. and card room, and a library filled with paperback Westerns and picture histories of Nazi Germany. The rewards were dubious, but, strangely, I came to love the work.
At 2:00 each morning, the module jailer awakened us individually, racking our cells one by one, then flashing a penlight in our eyes. I always snapped awake with a sense of relief. Since beating up Lopez, my sleep had been 100 % dreamless, but the fear of nightmares was always just a half-step away, and a quarter-step beyond that was the certainty that the jail/nightmare combination would be horrific.
After head count on the bottom catwalk, we were fed breakfast in the officers’ dining room. A dietitian employed by the county theorized that large men doing twelve-hour shifts of heavy labor required a commensurate fuel intake, and we were loaded up with huge trays of bacon, eggs, overcooked steaks and potatoes drenched in a nauseating gravy made up of flour, water and salt pork. My fellow trusties reveled in their special menu, devouring the food with the what-the-fuck panache of men determined to die young, and, not wanting to seem different, I greedily “scarfed up” along with them. And when we broke for lunch at 11:00, I was hungry.
Because the work was nonstop lifting, hauling, stooping and shoving. The jail was the distribution point for all correctional facilities within the county system, and every stitch of its institutional linen hit the T&F dock before being loaded into the trucks that would take it to its final destination. We did both the loading and unloading, and every laundry bag we moved weighed at least a hundred pounds. That part of the job was relatively easy and clean. Then, after lunch, with our muscles burning and aching, and stuporous from thousands of more calories, the slaughterhouse trucks pulled in.
Here I both worked and listened, and used my protective invisibility to its greatest advantage.
The other inmates found the meat transfers revolting, and mitigated their disgust by talking themselves through it. It was understood among them to save their best stories and crime schemes for the two hours or so we spent wrestling sides of beef and pork out of the trucks and into the storage freezers some hundred and fifty yards from the dock, With blood soaking my khakis, and fat and gristle sliding beneath my hands, I took in tales of good sex and hilarious sexual misadventures; I learned how to hot-wire cars and procure a variety of fake ID’s. I nodded and laughed along as the stories were told, and since I always strained with the heaviest pieces, no one seemed to notice that I had no tales to tell.
Women, beds and fast cars;
Shoplifting techniques;
The going prices for dope;
Pornographic details on women once loved, but later despised;
Wistful sighs over women still loved;
How to successfully exploit homosexuals for favors.
All this came to me while my body was pushed to its limit, with the blood of dead animals trickling down my pants. I knew that the stories I heard were now my stories, a part of my memory, and that the ritual of strain/ache/lift/blood/learn that gave them to me made them belong to me more than to the men who had actually lived them. And when the last slaughterhouse truck was unloaded, I always lingered on the dock, letting the autumn Santa Anas warm the crimson sheen on my body.
In a sense, Trash & Freight gave me my body.
My gym workouts had been the start, changing me from skinny to rangy, but my first six weeks of T&F added bulk and muscle definition, giving me a big man’s symmetry. Constant flinging of thirty-pound laundry bags made my wrist muscles bulge to twice their old size; stooping to lift the hundred-fifty-pounders built a wedge of hard ripples along my lower back. Hauling beef sides resulted in a thickening of the chest and a cording at my shoulders, and my arms, continually pulling, tossing and lifting, hardened to the point where a pin could not easily penetrate the muscle. During laundry hauls, I surreptitiously scrutinized the other bodies working beside me. All of them were strong, but beer bellies and ugly barrel chests predominated. Mine was the most nearly perfect, and by the time I was released it would be that much closer to perfection.
After work and a long solitary shower, I would listen to the men playing cards on the catwalk, then retire to my cell and read the texts of the Nazi picture books. The subject matter did not interest me, but the juxtaposition of printed horror stories and shouts from the catwalk felt somehow reassuring. Then, after evening chow and lockup, I segued from observation and invisibility to rituals of affirmation.
When the cell doors were racked shut, I stripped nude and imagined a full-length mirror in front of the bars. I felt my body for signs of new muscle, and mentally collated both the day’s practical criminal information and the sexual anecdotes I had heard. After a few minutes, other rituals made themselves heard — the creaking of bunk springs on either side of my cell told me that fantasies and touching were happening. Here I moved straight into the meat-hauling stories, assuming both gender roles alternately, using the name “Charlie” when I played the man. The process felt like usurping the memories of others, loading myself up with experiences I had never had in order to make myself more inviolate for not having had them. As the mattress squeaks surrounding me escalated, so did my recreations. Without touching myself, I always came in the role of “Charlie,” staring through blackness at my own mirror image.
On December 2, I found out who “Charlie” really was, and my self-containment exploded into pieces.
Banner headlines of the Times and Examiner delivered the news: Charles Manson and four members of his “family” had been arrested and charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders. Manson — known to his followers as “Charlie” — ruled a “hippie commune” at the near-deserted Spahn Movie Ranch in the Valley, and presided over nightly dope and sex orgies. Statements made by the three female members of Manson’s “death cadre” pointed to the killings having been perpetrated out of a desire to create social upheavel — an unrest that would ultimately lead to the Armageddon that Charlie called “Helter Skelter.”
I was taking a break on the laundry dock when I read those first accounts, and I shook from head to toe as memories of my own recent past blipped across the newsprint. I saw the two buffoons in the restaurant and heard one of them say, “They’re recruiters for this guru guy Charlie, and they tell you the fuck bread is for ‘The Family,’ and you should come out to this ranch where they live”; Flower squealed, “Helter Skelter is coming down fast”; and Season described the man the Examiner labeled “an ex-con Svengali with mesmeric brown eyes” as “a wise man, a shaman, a healer and a metaphysician.”
The T&F jailer called out, “Back to work, Plunkett.” After reading a concluding paragraph that promised pictures of the “satanic cult savior” in the next edition, I obeyed. On the slaughterhouse dock that afternoon, I was incapable of assimilating anecdotes, and my body churned with only one thought: Charlie Manson had brown eyes, and so did I. Given that one identical point, would the resemblance grow or crumble?