You Got Nothing Coming Read online

  For light reading pleasure he studies the humor page of Reader's Digest, lips moving, inching toward the jokes. Then he insists on my reading them aloud to him and gets insulted when I don't join his laughter. He can "read" (from years of rote memorization) arrest warrants, conviction notices, and PSIs.

  "Yogee! I ain't lookin' to get up in your business or nothin', but what kind of name is Lerner?" This query drifts up like poison gas from the bottom tray, where Kansas is perusing one of his rags.

  Of course, I tell him it's a fine old German name, probably German-Irish.

  "Scandalous, O.G.! You're all right. So… Lerner— kind of like Wernher, right?"

  "Exactly! We were practically cousins with Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist."

  "Straight-up business? On your skin, bro?"

  "On my skin." This temporarily puts the Jewish Question to rest in cell 47 of the Fish Tank. Swearing on one's white skin is sacred to Kansas. Carries more credibility than swearing on a truckload of Bibles. Or on one's mother's eyes.

  "Right on, O.G. You know you gotta get yourself some stand-ups when you hit the yard. Walking the yard by yourself could be bad for your health. Especially with a big nigger like the Hunger wandering around. Y'unnerstan' what I'm sayin'?"

  "I'm not worried about Big Hungry," I lie.

  "I hear you, dawg. All I'm sayin' to you is that when some motherfucking two-ton toad gets up in your face, starts pressurin' you, sweatin' you, playing you, you're gonna want some righteous woods to stand up for you. Some good old dawgs to fuck that toad's shit up. Know what I'm sayin'? You get a punk jacket in here and you are just meat— y'unnerstan'?"

  Kansas also clears up the concept of "punk" for me. He hates punks almost as much as he hates snitches— but not as much as he hates toads. Or Jews, for that matter.

  "A punk, O.G., is someone you make suck your dick and lick it clean. Over time you got yourself what we call a punk-ass bitch. He wants to suck dick, know what I'm sayin'?"

  I indicate my preference for sexual abstinence while incarcerated.

  "That only because you ain't never been down a long time… Fuck, in a nickel you'll be wanting to fuck the crack a dawn. In a fucking dime you'll wake up with a hard-on for some guy's hairy ass just because he's wearing lipstick."

  I pray I never get that lonely.

  * * *

  Wednesday evening. The heat in the cell is torture.

  Until we receive store in two days we depend upon the kindness of our strange neighbor, Big Bear. Big Bear is not a fish— he's being held indefinitely here "pending investigation" for assault, rape, and extortion. Not the kind of neighbor one would wish for.

  But Big Bear has store.

  And Kansas wants a cigarette— specifically a 4 Aces rollie.

  He reaches up to pound on the bottom of my tray, the Kansas method of saying "Excuse me."

  "What now, Kansas?" I am studying the obituary pages of the New York Times, comforting myself with the thought that things could be even worse for me.

  "Yogee— you got a Cadillac?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "A Cadillac, bro? Ya got a fuckin' Cadillac?"

  "Actually I have— had— a Honda Accord."

  Kansas, eternally vigilant to the slightest signs of disrespect, stands up to study my face and neck for symptoms of sidewaysness. Sweat drips down and over his neck swastika, about four inches from my nose. Apparently he detects nothing but sweat leaking out of the side of my neck.

  As always he's wearing only his state-issue 4XL boxer shorts. Temperatures in the cell won't drop till about one in the morning. Kansas backs off a foot.

  "O.G., I keep forgetting you're just a fucking fish. I'm gonna make us a righteous Cadillac so we can score a couple of rollies from my dawg Big Bear. You play lookout."

  From the comfort of my penthouse tray I look out the cell door window and watch Strunk while Kansas does God only knows what. A moan comes through the air vent. Kansas claims the real function of the central "ventilation" system is to dispense tear gas to every cell whenever the Shit Jumps Off.

  "I need your shoelaces, O.G. Don't trip! I ain't takin' 'em— just borrowing." Without waiting for an answer Kansas is yanking all the laces out of both our tennis sneakers. Ties the four laces into one long string, then grabs our little bar of hotel soap. With a few jabs of the inch-long nail of his index finger (nail clippers can be bought at the store) a small hole is gouged in the soap.

  "What's that punk Strunk up to, O.G.?"

  "Still in the office, just chillin'."

  "Chillin'?"

  "Picked that up from you young dawgs."

  "It don't sound right coming from you— but good looking out."

  In seconds Kansas has a soap-on-a-rope device. He's on his stomach on the floor yelling under the door.

  "Yo, Big Bear! Cadillac comin' into your house!"

  From the vent: "Whatchu need, dawg?"

  "Bear— hook me up with a couple of rollies."

  "Aiight. Got no light, though, bro."

  "It's all good. We got a working outlet."

  Kansas makes a slipknot in the string, then takes a few test swings on the floor before flinging the soap in a tight arc under the door.

  A second later Big Bear (whom I secretly think of as "Little Squirrel") has the soap/slipknot end of the Cadillac while Kansas still holds on to his end of the string.

  Big Bear bangs on the cell wall. "Pull, dawg, pull!"

  Kansas reels the string in slowly, landing the soap and two rollies secured in the knot. His face is lit up with the same triumphant glee that my younger daughter displayed after tying her shoes for the first time.

  "Now, that, O.G., is a fucking Cadillac!"

  I am impressed. "So why do you call it a Cadillac?"

  I might as well have asked Kansas why a certain hypothesized subatomic particle is called a quark. He has never given any thought to this. Things in the joint just— are. Things have names— you don't question why.

  " 'Cause, O.G."

  " 'Cause why?"

  " 'Cause… 'cause a Cadillac, you see, dawg… you can drive a Cadillac round a corner! Shit, dawg, why I gotta break everything down to you? Gotta paint a big fucking picture like we're in Hollywood."

  No matches, no lighter.

  No problem for Kansas.

  He's back on the floor rummaging through his yellow plastic tub, where he stores his precious Nazi newsletters. Finds a paper clip, which he breaks in half.

  "Gimme your pencil, O.G."

  "No way— it's the only thing I have to write with."

  "I ain't gonna hurt your little punk-ass pencil, dawg. Now, kick it down if you want to smoke."

  The paper clip prongs get inserted into the outlet, set parallel, about a half inch apart. Kansas chews furiously on my punk-ass pencil, a dog on a bone. He finally spits out the prize— a one-inch-long splinter of lead, the conductor.

  He lied. He hurt my pencil. I start to protest.

  "Just chill, O.G. Skell will get you a nice new Bic fine-point pen— makes a great shank, y'unnerstan' what I'm sayin'?"

  Kansas wraps a small piece of toilet paper around the middle of the lead and then drops the exposed ends on the paper clip prongs. A flash. Sparks! Then flaming toilet paper and two dawgs are back on their trays happily inhaling carcinogenic fumes.

  "Yo, O.G. Big Bear was my cellie for a minute in Folsom— me and him did a deuce together behind them bad walls. Now, that motherfucking joint wasn't nothin' nice. Not as scandalous as the Kansas pen, though…"

  A half hour later our lights are out. I roll against the damp cinder block wall. Close my eyes. In the joint, sleep, I am told, is a man's best friend.

  "Night, Kansas— thanks for the cigarette."

  "It's all good, O.G. What comes around goes around."

  Outside our cell the usual screaming, laughing, and occasional sobbing from the other cells. Kansas mutters to himself from the bottom tray. "Damn, dawg— you're getting too old for
this shit. You're all tore up."

  Sometime in the middle of the night I wake to the sound of Kansas whispering.

  "…and forgive us our trespasses…"

  Kansas is reciting the Lord's Prayer.

  * * *

  I treasure the one-hour tier time if only because it's a sixty-minute mental holiday from Kansas's nonstop war stories. Every morning Bubblecop pushes buttons, and about fifty inmates come racing out of their houses.

  Whenever the small Fish Tank exercise yard is closed for sandstorms (the outside guntower cop needs a clear shot), most inmates simply procure a perch on one of the round metal stools that are attached by steel spokes to the tables.

  Although a few tables host a pinochle or spades game, the chief amusement consists of "just kickin' it." You hear a lot of "Whassup, dawg?" followed by the inevitable "Just kickin' it, bro." It's a highly democratic divertissement, open to all dawgs regardless of breeding or skill sets. In fact, kicking it in prison often rises to the level of a conversational art form whereby four or five convicts shout at each other at the same time, rehashing criminal triumphs, current grudges, and future felonious schemes.

  As in all discretionary activities in prison, convicts automatically self-segregate at tier time— blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Native Americans all at separate tables. Most of the convicts here are white, so they occupy most of the tables.

  Even when a table usually taken by blacks is empty, no other ethnic group will sit there. "That's a toad table, O.G., you don't want to sit there," Kansas tells me. "Why don't you come kick it with the woods over here?"

  I probably would have if I hadn't spotted the chess board and pieces at the vacant "toad table." I'm setting up the pieces when the Bone approaches. "Whassup, O.G.! You fittin' to play chess with yo'self?" The Bone is sans shower cap for once, his exuberant big Afro hairdo restrained by giant pink plastic rollers.

  "You want to play, Bone?"

  "Nah— I ain't got no game. But here come my homeboy Big Bird. Now, that old-ass muthafucka got game! And he love whuppin' white boys, fo sure he love that shit."

  By prison standards Big Bird is ancient, a tall thin black man with a gray beard and a full head of bushy white hair. He's probably sixty.

  "Yo, Big Bird— Bird! This here be the O.G. what was down with me in that punk-ass county. Could be O.G. got hisself a little game."

  Big Bird takes a seat across from me and pushes a white pawn forward two squares. "All right then, O.G. Show me some game. I be tired of whuppin' on these ignorant niggers round here."

  "I'll do my best," I tell him, countering with the Sicilian Defense my grandfather, a chess grand master, drilled into me long ago. Grandpa George, when he wasn't teaching me chess or algebra, drilled the teeth of strangers. "Dentistry is a good profession," he would say right before destroying my ten-year-old chess defense.

  After a few moves Big Bird grins up at the Bone. "This here O.G. do got game. Indeed he do!"

  In seconds every seat at the toad table is taken by black youngsters as Big Bird and I battle furiously for control of the center board. More black Fish Tank guests surround the table kibitzing or just kickin' it with their homies.

  "White boy got no game— the Bird fittin' to fuck his shit up behind that bishop."

  "Nigger, you don't know shit 'bout no chess. The Bird's queen be laying in the cut. That's what I'm talkin' about, the motherfucking white bitch queen!"

  Two moves later I trap the white bishop with a pawn.

  "That O.G. got game— his game be cold!"

  Big Bird brings his queen into play, lining up on my castled king.

  The peanut gallery cranks up the volume. "O.G. scared now. Bird fittin' to bust some pawns, know what I'm sayin?"

  Big Bird, perceiving an advantage, starts cackling. "I be owning you in two more moves, O.G." He doesn't sound anything like a bird when he cackles.

  This is street chess. No chess clock, move fast and bang your pieces down to distract or intimidate your opponent. If the banging doesn't work, it's considered acceptable to taunt your opponent, his sister, his mother, whatever it takes.

  I'm loving it! Reminds me of those endless sweet summers in Brooklyn when I was ten, my brother, Michael, eleven. We would buy egg cream sodas (no egg or cream in them) at Louie's candy store on Parkside Avenue. We'd read the latest DC comics— Superman and Batman— then go play baseball with the neighborhood kids in Prospect Park.

  There were always these old men, black, white, and Puerto Rican, who seemed to live on the park benches. Sometimes one of them would set aside his brown paper bag and invite passersby to beat him in chess. For money.

  For fun they would play me or Michael. And these old guys had game! Could also talk shit all day long.

  Bird's queen starts picking off my pawns. "Watch out now, O.G. My bitch be tearing your shit up. Fittin' to come in the back door next!"

  Bets are placed— rollies, stamps, Hershey bars.

  Across the rotunda, seated in the wood section with Big Bear, Kansas and his dawgs are glaring over at the chess game. In the rigid world of the wood, hanging with toads is, to borrow a word, scandalous.

  Big Bird is just figuring out that my pawns were poisoned when I sweep my rook down to the seventh row, immobilizing the white king. The Bird scratches his nappy white dome.

  "That some cold shit right there, O.G. Motherfucking rook be layin' in the cut!"

  The Bone, who seems to consider me a comrade from county jail, feels compelled to flesh out my background a bit.

  "O.G. got a cold jacket. He be up wid me in county, 'cept he be chillin' with the J-Cats."

  I give Bone my best Murder One stare. He backs away from the table. "It's all good, O.G. I ain't fittin' to pull yo covers. Everybody in Vegas jail be knowin' they put the cold-ass killers in with the J-Cats. Ain't no shame to your game, O.G."

  "Thanks for sharing, Bone," I say, pondering the strangeness of this world where a murderer is held in higher esteem than, say, a dentist.

  The Bird makes a belated defensive move. The crowd, smelling Bird blood, surges against the table, everyone shouting.

  "Where yo game, Bird?"

  "Whassup, Big Bird? You fittin' to let Mighty Whitey kick yo scrawny black ass?"

  "Nigger got game, but got no heart, know what I'm sayin'? Can't handle a little pressure."

  I advance my knight, forking his rook and king.

  "Check." I say this softly, respectfully. It's mate in three moves. Big Bird sees it too. He tips the white king over, gently— surrender. He offers a handshake and the brothers go nuts. Rollies and candy bars fly across the table.

  "That's one cold motherfuckin' white boy!"

  "I tol' yo ass! The Bird got no heart, bro."

  Big Bird takes exception to this comment, standing up to confront a small young brother called Little G.

  "Nigger, puh-lease! Whatchu talkin' shit 'bout heart when you got no motherfuckin' dick, Lil G!"