Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

What I’m in for — the appeal hangs fire. So when you said you don’t save letters, were you letting us down gently? A package deal of friendly help but when you get it open — well… the letters you said all get boiled down in your mind, you probably had them all, so that, never fear, while you would remember us — our stupid fish faces boiled down to veined pulp — you had to save on head space (there being not the unused capacity some claimed, and I was grinning because you knew I knew what you were talking about and not to think our letters were lost when they got thrown away, but you don’t have to be so honest all the time, did you know that, Jim?).

You saw I knew you meant who had written the letter didn’t matter, the name could detach from the words though the person was still there and the letter’s message turned into you and you had it in a new vein so I was glad to grin and also at the two former missionaries I get mixed up, you never see them together, they wear sweaters. I was sweeping, and one quick-steps by and with a shake of his head he says to my uncomprehending automatic pushbroom, Such a waste, such a waste; and I to my broom which suddenly goes off Automatic and weighs like a live thing on my hands, In my keeper’s multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.

This I thought, thinking of you, Jim: He’s been all over. I been here. Years going on lots more. But what’s he know? Said he skimmed stuff more than before; needed the information, distrusted eyewitness.

Then I thought, He wouldn’t be here for the hell of it.

Neither would I.

The guys wanted to ask you about yourself. I can speak for them, because I know they did. Your family, if any; your history: brother in haberdashery in Jersey, the brown-and-orange tie (the next time you came) came from his place. Much of it better forgotten, you said, if you recall.

You were shown the prison newspaper. Front-page shots, Puerto Ri-quenos, Indian hair and headbands, don’t know what you thought. You don’t see our whole picture. What is intrinsic here?

What the messenger’s hosts wanted, waiting for him in a mile-long corridor, then a weather-proof room (look, no windows!), was not a message at all (unless an emergency greeting from the state parole board); what they wanted was to be not the messenger himself but the message. Or so they think. But while some did, not I.

What could they know of you?

The lines you gave them straight — the news article simple and clear at the outset, separate from everything else under the sun except its subject. Subject in hand, get in get out, that’s your rule, and "How is the Rican mafia taking over the prison newspaper?" "They like to get their boys into all the photos looking like Indians," Charley said; and Efrain, "Hey man, I got to get out of here," like an inmate here who escaped a month before his release date.

But between the lines a message the guys would not find: I saw Juan write it down and put a box around it. "Don’t get too curious around here," Efrain said, didn’t he? He knows because he had a long elevator ride one morning, and the building he’s in only got two floors.

Curious about the law — you got a laugh; we got a law library here where some guys go to dream. You said dreams passed you by.

Curious about people: what questions do you ask an interview? You got a laugh, some questions you don’t ask, man! What makes people tick, what sets them off, look at a man, an ordinary man at a run-of-the-mill international conference, and you report what he said, not what’s going round in his mind, but I think you know that also, Jim, and pile it up as you encounter this prominent character again months later: "it’s like chemistry," you said — you looked my way — you never knew much chem ("Makes two of us," Juan said)— ’ ‘Like between a man and a woman," said Efrain, and the guys laughed ("Oh darling," called Jackie, and I hear Miriam saying on the phone, "To whom am I speaking?") — but molecules, you said, if they are in the body, who says they are not in the mind? The guys sensed we were loose in inner space and they were ready for some personal history all around, but I knew where we had gotten to, and was glad I had broached the molecule problem.

Miriam I heard between us.

And most of them did not wait first in the room that our strange messenger had aimed at as he drove billowing parkways into twilight headlights coming on and oncoming. They waited in the mile-like corridor.

They waited in order to see the evening’s arrivals lest these be in part female. To whom am I speaking? For whom am I waiting. They’re good guys; there is some beautiful understanding going down here, don’t doubt it. Here comes the lifers’ legal liaison (young mother of three), keeps them up on the law (popular in her own right).

And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?

Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend — a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it — and any other females, the more the merrier, why not? the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour — the program people — and you among them but not of them, Jim.

Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs — no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper) — start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read — and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you want to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk — but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise — about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son — taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?