John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

His touch was something else in the middle of this. Light fingers, gently spread — an embrace, in the middle of this. Together they fell into the nearest wall, rolled up so tight that Kit might have caught a vague heartbeat. But when he and Junior hit the wall the wind went out of them both.

When Kit got a breath, he tasted no gas, only Junior’s stink. Also there was some sort of warm drool down the back of his neck. Kit wrung himself over, facing up from within Junior’s limp hold. At his first glimpse of the kid’s face and he was bucked free and got to his feet.

He discovered the wrench in his hand and dropped it.

Come on, look. Even a tourist can look. From this angle, Junior appeared merely sleepy and out of it again. Saving his strength, clap clap. But the gas had gotten to the other cells, the bitter industrial air. Even the guard and the inspectors couldn’t get away from it, choking and spitting as they struggled with the jammed closet door. Even a tourist couldn’t pretend it had never happened. Junior might have been bleeding from the eyes, from the inner corners of the eyes. His face was enlarged but hard to read, a carnival balloon that had started to deflate, a pocked and smudged documentary face whorly and gray with bad reception. Then a shudder passed under the undone prison uniform, a chest-lifting flinch, and for a moment there Kit was watching a different kind of documentary, Junior Rebes in the hundred-yard dash, the kid in slo-mo trying to steal an extra fraction of a second at the wire. He would have made a good man in the dash.

Then Junior’s chest heaved, and some mess swilled up between his parted front teeth, a winy pulp. It swilled up and Kit went down — down again while his legs still ached from getting up, his white-boy desk-job legs. Junior’s last spasm had left his neck arched, his chin in the air. Most of what came out of his mouth ran towards his hairline. Under the seepage his looks disappeared.

How could he breathe? Kit pawed through the sticky shirt, squeezing up a double-handful of hairless unmoving chest. How could Junior breathe?

The guard had hold of his tool belt.

WHITE NOISE ZIA SEE

Boston Media Cleans Up Monsod

Dilettantes in the Demi-Monde: Mr. Right’s Got It Wrong . The Monsod on TV isn’t there. It’s a fairy tale. Thursday’s violence at the state’s largest prison facility was the worst yet, resulting in at least one death. Coverage by the Boston mainstream media has proven woefully off the mark — even deliberately misleading. Television, radio, and the Globe have avoided the real story.

How can you tell a tourist?

I mean, no question, already our scene has tourists. Our leathery late-’70s punk scene, our search for something or other across cellars by starlight — already it’s attracting fly-bys and poseurs . No question. It’s attracting the folks who have some notion of being hip, right?

The MBTA ran nearly empty at this hour. Past drivetime, well into dinnertime, Kit rode a car that held at most a half-dozen others. Students, swing-shifters. And these people kept their distance. Kit clung to one of the seats for the handicapped, his elbow hooked round the vertical pole. A bandage sawed off one corner of his forehead. Under that his ear and temple bulged, purple, and across his long jacket exploded uncertain new colors: graveyard-red, trowel-black. When Kit blinked his whole upper body shivered.

The emptier the car, the worse the sway and rattle. People kept their distance.

The trolley’s racket got through Kit’s painkillers. Back at Massachusetts General, over an untouched cafeteria lunch, he’d taken only half the prescribed dose. In the Law Library he’d gone pretty much cold turkey. Cold turkey, he’d kept the hours he’d assigned himself.

He’d done his research cross-legged on the floor, on the neoprened concrete between the stacks. Down there, he could tell when someone was coming. Even when his eyesight turned murky and his ears filled with moans, so long as he stayed on the floor he could feel the approaching footsteps.

After finishing at the Law Library, Kit had hobbled back to the “T” station in Harvard Square. He’d ignored the turnoff towards his own apartment. He’d headed downtown.

Yet he hadn’t been able to get to the office either. He’d come near, the end of the block. Then for an hour or so Kit had struggled through the wind tunnels of the financial district, the high sheer urban development. What few storefronts he came across staggered him. He got lost in the glare of a record store, the checkerboard of new LPs.

In time, he’d allowed himself alcohol. The bar was as murky as the Law Library, with Happy Hour chili. He’d gulped another half a painkiller. He’d decided to climb back into the “T”. But Kit still wasn’t heading home, to Cambridge, to Bette. He was riding the other way, out of town, towards the ethnic-pride suburbs beyond Dorchester. Zia should be there, at the Sons of Columbus.

Big media has been actively avoiding telling the truth. When it comes to Monsod, they can’t face the truth. Instead, Boston’s primary news outlets have fallen back on quick and easy notions of crime and punishment. On Hollywood. They won’t run any story too complicated for a thirty-second plug.

Once again, it’s up to the alternative press to set the record straight.

This reporter caught Thursday’s early-evening news on a TV at a downtown tavern. Even in these first reports, the major media distorted the facts. Editors had no idea what they were up against.

You know the kind of lames our scene’s starting to attract. The ones who dream all week about slumming on Saturday night. Dream about waking up hip.

My basement boys and girls, to these lames our scene amounts to nothing more than a fairy tale. It’s Sleeping fucking Beauty — one kiss and she’s hip. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by a fairy tale. But when you encounter a tourist, down in our dank — how can you tell? Clothes, hair? An uninformed line of talk?

Ah, it goes deeper. Zia see, boys and girls. Zia see.

At the Sons of Columbus, he’d find Zia and he’d break the news about the next issue. A special issue, a double issue, devoted exclusively to the scandal of Massachusetts building contracts. Kit would include the Monsod story, of course. Sea Level would tell the real story, not the kind of pap they ran on TV. Kit would tell the whole truth. He’d figure out whatever was going on with those overhead pipes, that uncertain buzz. Seepage, drugs, violent death — the whole truth. Of course.

But this issue had more to it than that. More than today’s trouble. It goes deeper , Kit thought.

Or possibly he said it aloud: “It goes deeper.” With the rocking and screeching of the trolley car, it was hard to tell when he was talking to himself. Also, the line hooked south through Roxbury, the ghetto. For a few stops Kit’s was the only white face in the car, so he couldn’t be sure what the other riders were staring at.

Editors have no idea. One station actually ran the Monsod story second. Apparently some deep thinker at Channel 3 believes that a prison riot matters less than a visit from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan , that doddering perennial also-ran! And not one of the local stations could spare more than five minutes for Monsod coverage.

Then there werethe errors of fact. On Channel 7, a prolonged exterior shot showed smoke erupting from a smashed top-story window. According to the voiceover, this fire was in the prison workshop.

No way. Hollywood. The workshop is three stories below the window in the shot, on “D” Level. This reporter himself passed the workshop, Thursday morning. This reporter was there, the alternative. A spokesman for conscience.