Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Well, I wrote Jim Lee State but in my opinion he never got back to me, which was sad but not sad like saying so long to Efrain when he got out so recently which was not sad. Jim Lee State said that after the stay of execution and the dreams he came to see the stories as work for someone else: like the last was to pay his lawyer, though he also saw that this was just making the trip his own by paying a real debt not to some abstract Society but to counsel (smile), but if he thought of the story as not money but friendly communication which was the best he could do and his best work, its money-value would be real and then how many others would profit by it?

Until, with no prodding by me to investigate the True Unit of Value because he was answering only my first exploratory letter, he saw that he was into Immortality — for a "him" he could never get hold of or know, so here again he was working for someone else, though I pointed out in that letter I never got a personal answer to that wide-spun readers of his Death Row tales would be an endless surplus distributed according to desire and need long after he had no more use for whatever value they returned.

But on the night in question the dreams had drawn him away from this story he was working on — insofar as he recalled it, for he had destroyed it. He said it was based on a true incident, but in the story which begins on a big outdoor Visitors Day like our P.R. festivals here, a guy who’s got a clean lip under his mustache and is wearing under his correctional greens khaki chinos with a razor in the pocket and two freshen-up wet-wipes, and a but-tondown like he never had on his back before, he peels off here and there piece by piece and in the crowd gets into conversation with two girls who don’t (yet) know why they’re here — that is, they’re with an old lady who visits once a month to check on the rehabilitation of a con she’s been corresponding with for asshole years in the hope that he’ll never get out; and our hero, whom the old lady doesn’t know, just walks out the gate to the bus with the two girls and the old lady later that afternoon; he’s free and making his way to Florida before his greens have even gone to the dump for reprocessing with the paper plates and cups.

But here is the point: he arrives in Florida and seeks employment in a supermarket chain as a security guard (smile). Before he knows it, he thinks up a better system which involves all the employees and a pattern of checkpoints superior to the tilted overhead mirrors or the closed-circuit videowatch, and he calls it security-sharing and Personnel is about ready to give him a change of uniform, the system is security-sharing and depends on the employees looking like average shoppers and tracking a three-cornered (three-person) line-of-sight routine which each employee is on his or her honor to share in at least once every ten minutes. But the day before he’s to be promoted, because they’re afraid his system will get more and more participatory, he’s on the scene when a hold up occurs. He gives the alarm, is wounded in the spinal column; in firing back from the meat lockers, he wings a butcher scale and hits a patrolman just arriving on the scene, who later dies of his chest wound because the hospital does not check to find out the cop was allergic to penicillin.

But now our guard is identified as a vacationing con and when a hysterical out-of-work actor a member of the gang is asked point blank if the guard was their inside man and answers yes, yes, the other members of the gang aren’t listened to when they say, No, No, No, what’s this about a guard?

The ending was in doubt, as was the trick by which in the first place the escape artist got onto the back of his hand the invisible visitors stamp which shows up purple under the machine on the way out. But that problem he left to others, if any, because the alternating dreams of his dead wife had shown him where he was coming from and the gap he had to fill, which was working together with others, and he would never write one of those stories again. He said, "I aim to be the oldest living con" (smile), and this was before his sentence was permanently commuted; and now he works steadily against the death penalty ("against death as a penalty") and for more meaningful careers for prisoners.

But shortly after this initial exchange I wrote him a longer letter concerning the Colloidal Unconscious where center and margins are outmoded ideas, and while I did get an answer back, it was on the letterhead of the committee he’d founded and was from someone else who spoke for him, relaying his message that he was gratified I too was involved in my home state working toward a more meaningful prison experience; but I don’t believe those were his words.

Which young Larry when I told him about Jim Lee State agreed marked a development that was practically a scale model of what went on Outside, and he asked if there was much vomiting Inside, he said his mother’s women friends did it all the time, I said it can’t be just morning sickness, but he was puzzled and he had to go, and we agreed that personal communication is our only hope, and he said Jim’s not hearing of the judge’s stay was hard to believe.

Miriam’s father spotted me and ducked right back inside, not even pausing to defend his cans in the bright full moon of the streetlamp. And before I knew it, he was behind both of the old glass-plated doors of the vestibule that would protect him from the explosion of a small borrowed pistol that no doubt my mother, the police, he, and others had gotten a call about, when all I wanted was to tell him how I’d had it up to here so where’s he get off doing a job on me about the two hours I once spent with a woman not his daughter? So I could figure it only that he had failed to stop the Hungarian from marrying Miriam (I feel you shaking your head steadily at me) — and had taken it out on me—

— that is, if I cared, you say Jim?

Well, yes I cared: enough to face him in all of his faces, galvanized, switched-off, widower, Jew, father, boss of a tenement inhabited by renting tenants where he paid no rent except his twenty-four-hour attention to what he found himself responsible for.

That was it: we’d once been responsible together for Miriam. I heard voices where turning shapes struggled through the dimly lighted glass. And thinking he had regained sole responsibility from me, I saw he couldn’t handle it and had turned the surplus back to me.

That was it, a male figure not in color, agitated and vague, agitating the dim light through the milky glass, and another familiar figure, female but less small than Iris, turning me into a gunman when I would have been glad to make him a present of the gun, when all I wanted was a word with Miriam’s father, who was retreating to call the authorities and maybe turn his garbage cans on but he’s scared Miriam’s going to get shot in her effort to peacemake when she and I knew she’s scared I’d tell him what she and I had sometimes done, and where, and so I called him by name, his first name, to come out like a man. Windows started going up; tenants were getting their feet on the ringing metal grates of their fire escapes. I heard the old man’s voice calling but not to me, the figures merged and wrestled, rattled the glass, and a voice came from deeper inside that multiple dwelling.

But that was it. They didn’t matter, yet they insisted on mattering: but, to a man, they were able to place me only on their well-swept sidewalk and could not imagine any more than a jury of unknowns that I had come to their doorstep as if it was only one center of many rounds, for now I was also in another place round the corner having a long overdue talk with the roughest girl in school, Louise Agniello whatever her name was now, who’d vouch for me in some way more real than words — I heard her thinking at that moment.