James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Shroud Shifter’s counsel blunted my nightmares, eased my memory of the moment when I touched flesh, and let me concentrate on surviving my sentence. Our dialogue was so constant that even while holding sustained physical silence, I felt hyper-verbal inwardly, with typefaced warnings imprinting themselves across my field of vision whenever I felt especially frightened:

Counting the “good time” and “work time” you will receive for working as a trusty, you have 9½ months in jail to endure. Your confreres will be stupid men and violent men prone to victimizing those weaker than they.

Therefore, you must utilize your outsize physicality without affecting a macho demeanor that will attract violence;

Therefore, you must never let your fellow inmates know that you are much more intelligent than they are, or that your own criminal tendencies derive from deeper needs and curiosities;

Therefore, you must utilize practical silence, and psychic invisibility, and a new, finely honed “protective invisibility” — assuming the personas of those you are with, blending in until you are indistinguishable from your fellow inmates.

Thus, mentally armed, I arrived at the L.A. “New” County Jail to serve my sentence. The structure itself, only recently completed, was a massive angularity of steel and glossy concrete, all painted blue-gray and orange, with long corridors inset with holding tanks and inmate “modules” — four-tiered cellhouses fronted by narrow catwalks. Escalators connected the six floors, each of them equivalent in height to a three-story building; the corridors ran the length of three football fields. The mess halls were the size of movie theatres, and the string of administrative offices was an eighth of a mile of steel-reinforced doorways. After a ten-hour stint of holding-tank waiting, skin-searching, lice-control spraying, blood-testing and more waiting, I was assigned with five others to a four-man cell to await trusty classification and my work assignment. With miles of trudging blue-gray/orange concrete behind me, and an accumulation of obscene conversations ringing in my ears, I stretched out on the bunk I had snatched from a pudgy Mexican youth and let overall impressions overtake me. Containment was the word most summarily accurate, and I knew it would come from the concrete and steel that held me in, and from the impoverished minds of my keepers and fellow prisoners, and from the noise level of the air I breathed. And with Shroud Shifter beside me, I knew that my self-containment within that containment would be impenetrable.

I waited four days for trusty classification, learning jail nomenclature and sharpening my skill as a dissembler. Aside from “chow calls,” I spent all my time in the cell, sleeping and listening to hyperbolized accounts of criminal and sexual exploits, participating in conversations only when asked direct questions. I began to get the impression that boredom overruled violence as the salient fact of jail-house life, and that my greatest personal danger would come from laughing out loud at ridiculous tales told with straight faces.

So, when Gonzalez, the fat Mexican kid whose bunk I grabbed, opened a line of talk with his standard, “You talk about bonaroo pussy, man,” I bit at my gums until chuckles were forestalled; when Willie Grover, aka Willie Muhammed 3X, came in with his standard, “Sheeeit! You talkin’ pussy, you talkin’ my language! I poked my ten-incher in more Brillo pads than you fuckin’ seen!” I poked my fingers against the cell wall to stifle belly laughs. The other inmates — two white men named Ruley and Stinson and a Mexican named Martinez — played off Gonzalez and Grover conversationally, and I was soon able to determine the sex and crime sub-themes that would induce them to talk.

Thus, the first days of my formal sentence became a crash course in socializing under duress. When queried about my “beef,” I said, “B and E. I was rippin’ off pads in West Hollywood.” When asked about my hand, still swollen from trying to dig a way out of my nightmares, I said, “I wasted this dude when he caught me in his crib.” The nods I got when I spoke the words encouraged me; the appraising eyes that roamed my newly muscled body told me that none of my “cellies” could risk voicing disbelief. My criminal verisimilitude was holding.

And, while lying on my bunk pretending to read back issues of Ebony and Jet, I listened, picking up colloquialisms and etiquette information to inform my jailhouse pose with even greater authenticity.

My year sentence was called a “bullet”; the mess-hall slang for Salisbury steak, hot dogs and breakfast jelly was, respectively, “Gainesburgers,” “donkey dicks” and “red death.” Inmates awaiting sentencing and classification were called “blues,” a reference to the denim uniform I was now wearing; an informant was a “snitch”; a homosexual was a “punk”; the deputy sheriffs who served as jailers were “bulls.”

If an inmate offered you candy or cigarettes, refuse him immediately, because he wanted to “turn you out.”

If a “fruit jockey” made a sexual advance toward you, “wail on his head,” even if the “bulls” were right there, because if you didn’t “put him straight,” you would acquire a “fruit jacket” and be “hit on” by all the “boodie bandits” looking to travel up the “Hershey Highway”;

Address the “bulls” as Mr.___ or Deputy___, but never initiate conversations with them on matters not germane to your “khaki gig” or “righteous business”;

Do not seek the friendship of blacks, or you would be considered a “nigger rigger” or “spook juke” and be subject to attack from the “Paddys” (whites), “Beaners” (Mexicans) and the “War Council” (whites and Mexicans who banded in emergencies to form a united front against blacks);

And always, always, “be frosty” and “hang tough.”

On my third day in the cell I got a letter from Uncle Walt Borchard. My hands shook as I read it.

10/16/69

Dear Marty—

Your bust tears it, I guess. I didn’t come to see you at the West L.A. Substation because the officer who called to tell me where you were also told me about the burglar tool he found on you, and I’m no dummy — I can put two and two together. I was the one who got your sex beef cooled, because no 21-year-old kid should have to go through life as a registered sex offender — unless he hurt somebody, which apparently you didn’t — except me.

You could have talked to me, you know. Most kids steal a few things, it’s like a phase. But you pumped me for burglary Info and stole from me, and that cuts it.

I cleaned out your pad, and I stored your stuff. I found your bankbooks and your safe-deposit box slips and keys, and I’ll hold them until you get out. I don’t know where you got the money, and I don’t care what’s in the boxes. The West L.A. Sheriffs impounded your car, and it’s not worth trying to reclaim — let them auction it. When you come by to get your stuff, go to Mrs. Lewis in #6 — I don’t want to see you, and she’s got everything in her closet. — Walt Borchard.

Finishing, I felt a brushed-steel door close on a long part of my life. Another door opened, this one embossed with dollar signs I had thought would be lost. Willie Muhammed 3X said, “You look happy, homeboy. Your bitch get some sex shit past the censor?”

“My uncle died,” I said.

“And you happy about that?”

“He left me six grand and some other goodies.”

“Righteous, but he was your kin, and you happy?”

I threw the letter in the toilet and flushed it, then screwed my face into my newly patented white-trash glare. “He was a punk, and he got what he deserved.”