Дональд Уэстлейк: Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded past me at the guard, saying, “All right, Stoon.” Then, looking down at his desk as though I’d already left his office, he closed the file of my records and tossed it into a half-full tray on the corner of his desk.

Prison etiquette requires that the guards hold the doors for the inmates. Pretending not to know that, moving quickly while pretending to move slowly, I reached the doorknob before Guard Stoon. The chewing gum I’d been packing motionless in my left cheek I quickly palmed while turning, and pressed it to the underside of the knob as I pulled the door open. It’s a brand of gum which, so long as all the flavor hasn’t been chewed out of it, remains semi-moist and gooey for half an hour or more after leaving the chewer’s mouth.

I had opened the door, but Stoon gruffly gestured me to precede him. I did, knowing he would only be touching the knob on the other side while closing the door, and the two of us left the office building and headed across the hard dirt prison yard toward my new home.

My name is Harold Albert Chester Künt. I am thirty-two years old and unmarried, though three times in my early twenties I did propose marriage to girls I’d become emotionally involved with. All three rejected me, two with embarrassments and evasions that were in a way worse than the fact of the rejection itself. Only one was honest with me saying, “I’m sorry. I do love you, Harry, but I just can’t see spending the rest of my life as Mrs. Kunt.”

“Koont,” I said. “With an umlaut.” But it was no use.

I don’t blame my parents. They’re German, they know their name only as an ancient Germanic variation on the noun Kunst, which means art. They came to this country in 1937, Aryan anti-Nazis who emigrated not because they loved America but because they hated what had become of Germany. So far as possible, they have remained German from that day to this, living at first in Yorkville, which is the German section of Manhattan, and later in German neighborhoods in a number of smaller upstate towns. My father eventually learned to speak English almost as well as a native, but my mother is still more German than American. Neither of them has ever seemed aware of any undercover implications in the name we all share.

Well, I have. The wisecracks started when I was four years old — at least I don’t remember any from further back than that — and they haven’t stopped yet. I would have loved to change my name, but how could I explain such a move to my parents? I’m an only child, coming to them rather late in their lives, and I just couldn’t hurt them that way. “When they die,” I’d tell myself, but they’re a long-lived pair; besides, thoughts like that put me in the position of wishing for my parents’ death, which only made things worse.

I came to the early conclusion that my name was nothing more than a practical joke played on me by a rather sophomoric God. There wasn’t any way I could get even with Him directly, of course, but much could be done against that God’s wisecracking creatures here below. Over my life, much has been done.

The first practical joke I myself performed was in my eighth year, the victim being my second grade teacher, a woman with a rotten disposition and no heart, who regimented the children in her charge like a Marine Sergeant with a bunch of stockade misfits to contend with. She had a habit of sucking the eraser end of a pencil while thinking up some group punishment for a minor individual misdemeanor, and one day I gouged the gray-black eraser out of an ordinary yellow Ticonderoga pencil and replaced it with a gray-black dollop of dried dog manure carefully shaped to match. It took two days to infiltrate my loaded pencil onto her desk, but the time and planning and concentration were well worth it. Her expression when at last she put that pencil into her mouth was so glorious — she looked like a rumpled photograph of herself — that it kept the entire class happy for the rest of the school year, even without the array of frogs, thumbtacks, whoopee cushions, leaking pens, limburger cheese and dribble glasses which marched in the original eraser’s wake. That woman flailed away at her students day after day like a drunk with the d.t.’s but it didn’t matter. I was indefatigable.

And anonymous. I’ve read where Chairman Mao says the guerrilla is a fish who swims in the ocean of the populace, but I was already aware of that by the age of eight. The teacher invariably gave group punishments in response to my outrages, and I knew of several of my classmates who would have been happy to turn in the ‘guilty’ party if they’d had the chance, so I maintained absolute security. Besides, my activities weren’t limited to authority figures; my classmates, too, spent much of that school year awash in molasses, sneezing powder, chewing gum and exploding light bulbs, and would have loved an opportunity to chat en masse with the originator of all the fun. But I was never caught, and only once did discovery even come close; that was when a group of three fellow students entered the boys’ room while I was stretching Saran Wrap over the toilets. But I was a bright eight-year-old, and claimed to be taking the Saran Wrap off the toilets, having discovered it there just in time to avoid a nasty accident. I was congratulated on my narrow escape, and was not suspected.

So. In the second grade, the main elements of my life were already firmly established. My name would be an object of crass humor, but I would return the insult with humor just as crass but much more decisive. And I would do so anonymously.

Until, in my thirty-second year, I would leave a carefully painted naked female mannequin sprawled leggily on the hood of a parked Chevrolet Impala on the verge of the Long Island Expressway just west of the Grand Central Parkway interchange on a sunny afternoon in early May. Returning from a neighborhood bar forty-five minutes later, I would find that one result of my prank had been a seventeen-car collision in which twenty-some people were injured, including the three children referred to by Warden Gadmore, plus two members of the Congress of the United States and the unmarried young ladies who had been sharing their car with them.

Neither the warden nor I had mentioned those Congressmen, but they were the deciding factor. Even with the injured children I might have gotten off with a suspended sentence and a warning; the Congressmen got me five to fifteen in the state pen.

My first cellmate, who was also the man I would be replacing in the license plate shop, was named Peter Corse, a stout wheezing old man with watery eyes and dough-white skin and the general aspect of a potato. When I met him he was a very bitter man. “My name is Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.” And he said, “Who pays for my upper plate?”

I said, “What?”

He opened his mouth, showing me a lower set of tiny teeth of such porcelain-white falseness that they looked as though he’d stolen them from a doll. Above were gums that looked like a mountain range after a forest fire. Thumping these gums with his doughy thumb he said, “Oo ays uh iss?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was beginning to believe I’d been locked in a cell with a mental case, a big overweight dough-white old man who was crazy as a loon. Wasn’t that unusual punishment? I looked back through the bars at the corridor, but of course Guard Stoon was already gone.

Corse had finally taken his thumb from his mouth. “My upper plate,” he said in a fading whine. “Who pays for it?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

He stumped around the small cell, complaining in a querulous voice, gesturing angrily with his big soft arms, and gradually I got the story. He had been in this prison thirty-seven years, for some unstated ancient crime, and now all at once he was being paroled, before he could chew. The prison dentist had taken away his teeth, but had so far replaced only half of them. In the outside world, who would pay for his new upper plate? How would he live? How would he chew?