Jailing

August 28, 1972: This morning, I ate a good breakfast of orange juice, French toast, crisp bacon and a pot of hot coffee and then surrendered to the U. S. Marshal at the courthouse in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He handcuffed me, shackling the cuffs to a steel bell chained round my waist. We drove off on a dusty road to the Federal prison camp at Allenwood, about 15 miles away. The day was hot and cloudy. When I arrived, they took everything I owned--clothes, the works--including my diving watch and the gold ring I inherited from my father. In its place, they gave me my Federal prison number--00040. "It's yours for life," one of the guards explained to me.

Now I'm in a ramshackle single-story wooden building that was once painted white but has since acquired the color and texture of a sheet that hasn't been changed for months. The smell of sweat predominates. A constant mutter, sometimes ascending to a din, assaults the ears; the entire population laughs, yells and curses continuously.

Two blacks are my neighbors, both of them the size of N.F.L. defensive guards, and they get into a religious debate after a supper of meat loaf and baked beans. "Listen, brother," one says. "I tell you one thing--in this life, they ain't no such thing as no motherfuckin' salvation. This is just one mean motherfucker from the beginning when you born to the motherfuckin end when you die. Do you dig my meaning, brother? You better mother fuckin' well believe it."

They've given me an upper bunk next to the showers The mattress is thin and gray, the springs sag, so that my back aches when I lie down. They give me clean sheets and I make the bed neatly. I want to behave. Just like summer camp back in Maine when I was a kid.

Do I feel depressed? Better mother-fuckin' well believe it.

August 29: I was called down to the office of Mr. Max Weger, the camp superintendent, who looks like a 35-year-old, dapper version of Elvis Presley. He struck me as a bright, mean-minded man. He assigned me to a job: clerk in the office of the prison factory. The factory makes wooden furniture for the Government, for judges' offices and the FBI. I'll be paid 21 cents an hour, tax-free

I went down there and met the men I'll work with: Scarlati, Willie Polk, Lembke, Joe T. and Claude. Scarlati was a big bookie. Willie's a hillbilly who transported stolen cars from Kentucky to Ohio. Lembke was mayor of some town in Pennsylvania; he pocketed Government funds. Claude, a printer, went for the big score and counterfeited $4,000,000. Joe T. is a medium-echelon mafioso doing time for possession of stolen securities. He's already taken me under his wing (even though he's eight inches shorter than I am) and shown me around the camp.

September 3: Allenwood is a minimum-security "honor camp," whatever that means. It spreads over 4500 pastoral acres and supports about 900 head of scrawny beef cattle, butchered periodically to feed the inmates of various Eastern Federal prisons. No gates, no walls, no gun towers--just a wire-fenced perimeter.

It's easy to escape from Allenwood. You just walk out when no one's looking. Some men go out for a few hours to meet their wives or girlfriends at a local motel. It's risky, though.

September 5: Sure enough, four men went over the hill this weekend. One of them had only five weeks left to serve of a two-year sentence. They say he got a Dear John letter from his wife. That's common, I'm told. The three others flipped out after the Saturday-night movie, 99 Women, a skin flick about dykes on an Italian island prison. The men took off early the next morning. I had to leave the movie in the middle and go back to bed in the dorm and, surrounded by clouds of steam, jerk off. I don't want to be reminded that there's an outside world with women in it.

September 10: Joe T. is about 45, short, neat, slick, olive-skinned, with warm, liquid brown eyes.

He tells me about the Wall, Lewisburg Penitetniary, where he recently spent a few years:

"There's no Mickey Mouse at the Wall. It's a five-star penitentiary--max max max. You're the garbage of the world and that's where you belong. You're constantly searched. The Man examines you, sticks his nose up your asshole.

"It's not really so bad over there. You get good food at night--I mean steaks stolen from the kitchen, packed in laundry carts. There are 1300 men at the Wall, kid, scheming day and night-- got nothing else to do. The Man condones this to avoid pressure building up. The wops run the gambling. They play for cigarette cartons, but it adds up, and if you can't pay up inside, you better fucking well have your old lady pay up on the street within; week or they give you a blanket party." A blanket party: During the night, they pull your blanket up over your head, pin you down and beat the shit out of your brains with short lead pipes. "And then there's always, I'd say, $30,000 or $40,000 in cash floating around inside the Wall at any given time, hidden here and there.

"Booze is made inside--yeast from the bakery, alcohol from the medical department. And they get drugs, too. They steal the drugs meant for other inmates. Their attitude is, 'Fuck you. You're here today, gone tomorrow, maybe doing a nickel, but I'm doing 20 years, man--I live here.' You pass some guy in the hallway over there at the Wall and just brush his sleeve and you better say. 'Excuse me.' A guy doing natural life don't care if he kills you. What can they do to him? Put him in the hole? He's been there. He don't care. While I was there, a man was shanked in the chow hall over a jelly doughnut. These guys were on the chow line. There was one jelly doughnut left on the tray. The guy at the head of the chow line was about to take it when the guy in back of him reached around and took it from under his nose and laughed and said, 'Fuck you, bubblehead.' So the guy in front reached up his pants leg and whipped out a shank he had taped there and shoved it into the other guy's stomach. And he laughed and said, 'You a bubblebelly, bubblehead.' He took the jelly doughnut from the guy's tray as this guy started to fall. Then he went over to a table and ate the jelly doughnut while the other guy lay on the tile practically at his feet, blood gushing out of him and crying for help. I saw that happen."

October 5: The man sleeping next to me on the left, toward the door, is a young black queen named Gerry Barker. She said to me the other day, rather sweetly, "Please call me Geraldine. Everybody does." And so I did. She's doing time for a bank robbery she committed in Philadelphia--in drag.

She's as friendly a neighbor as I could want. All she asks in return is a reasonable amount of discretion, for I'm privy to the miraculous transformations that sometimes occur next to my bed in the small hours of the Pennsylvania night. Nearly all the dorm is asleep when suddenly, after much clandestine huffing, grunting and moving about beneath the covers, Geraldine rises like a phoenix in the weird golden light, wearing a black wig, false eyelashes, lipstick and--I can't figure out where she got it, much less hides it--a sequined dress. Then she roams off to wherever that night's assignation is to be held, or else she gets a visit, and the customary nocturnal sounds of snoring, farting and groaning of exiled men are punctuated by slurps and distinctive little moans. I've learned to sleep through it.

October 7: A reporter and a photographer from Time magazine visited the camp today. I managed to take the photographer aside. Their assignment, he readily told me, was to do a piece showing Allenwood as a country-club prison, a great place for a long vacation. "It's not quite like that," I said.

"No," he admitted, "that's my impression, too."

In which case, of course, Time won't run the article, because what doesn't conform to the editors' fixed beliefs just doesn't see print.

November 20: Willie Polk's father died and he went home to Toledo on a furlough for the funeral. Before leaving, he made a promise to his friends. And, sure enough, when he got back this evening-- three days later--he took us into a corner of the dorm and extended the middle finger of his right hand. It smelled of pussy--rank pussy, at that. "I promised you, dint I?" Willie said. Coming back on the Greyhound bus, he had wrapped his hand in gauze bandages, he said, to keep the smell intact.

December 19: I'm teaching a course in creative writing to both interested and uninterested inmates. Previous session I'd asked the men to sketch a brief plot of something they'd like to do. One of the younger men, Leroy, read his sketch to us. "Goes like this," he said. "Me and these other dudes is thinking of knocking off a bank. Here's the plot. John will stand by the door, keep an eye on the street. Eddie sticks a gun in the teller's face. I take care of the bank guard. That's the plot."

I restrained myself from laughing, but the other men howled, whereupon Leroy said angrily, "You badass motherfuckers're so fucking smart, how come you're in here? You got a better plot, how come you got caught?"

Hard to answer that one.

December 22: Joe T. was busted yesterday for possession of a five-dollar bill, a Pennsylvania state lottery ticket and some postage stamps. They hustled him over to the Wall in handcuffs and today I heard he was shipped east to Danbury.

I bought a six-pack of Genesee beer from Fitz, the runner, and got quietly drunk with Scarlati. I'll miss Joe. He was a friend and he taught me a lot.

Christmas Day: A rape this morning, about two A.M. A new kid arrived last week and some black dudes have been propositioning him. The kid complained to a hack but wouldn't name names. So this morning they dragged him outside the dorm, stuffed a yellow towel in his mouth and raped him.

Nick, one of my black neighbors, explained, "Man, they tell some dude, 'I wanna fuck you.' He say no, they feel insulted. They didn't wanna hurt that boy--you right, they gentle as lambs-- they just need some place to stick they meat."

Some country club.

By the way, I was right. I heard from the Time photographer that they won't run the piece on Allenwood.

January 3, 1973: A fight broke out New Year's morning in the dorm. Hogg was drunk and babbling to his buddy, Blaine, around two o'clock. No one could sleep and Claude told them to shut up. Hogg said, "Fuck you, faggot," whereupon Claude catapulted out of bed, clutching a baseball bat, and slammed Hogg across the side of his shoulder with it--a good, solid swing. Hogg just stood there, completely stunned, but he didn't fall, so Claude hit him again: home run. Next thing, Hogg was down on the concrete floor and Blaine was out of bed with a lead pipe in his hand. I jumped up, too. I didn't have a weapon. What really rattled me was that practically everyone else did--shanks, pipes, bats, wooden clubs, coiled springs, even one guy with a golf club, a six iron, I'd guess. Where did they all come from?

Somehow, it calmed down and, except for Hogg, no one was hurt before the hacks arrived. The weapons vanished as quickly as they'd appeared. They asked Hogg what happened to his arm, which was purple and swelling up fast. "I slipped in the shower," he said. He was very pale. They took him off to the hospital at the Wall.

Later, Claude said, "I have to sleep with one eye open from now on."

On Scarlati's advice, yesterday I bought a combination lock in the commissary, put it inside a knotted white gym sock, and now I sleep with it under my pillow. Scarlati says if the hacks shake down the dorm and find it, it's not technically a weapon.

January 10: You can buy booze here for $20 a fifth. Fitz brings me the list from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. You can choose your brand and they have everything, including some good California wines and French cognacs. I take a six-pack of beer a few times and then a bottle of Chivas Regal. It's risky, and not the most intelligent thing I've ever done.

Fitz works on the cattle detail. He just slips under the fence, through the trees to the road, Route 15, where a taxi's waiting. He makes his buy in Williamsport through a friend, comes back and hides it under a haystack.

This morning, he told me that all the beer froze last night under the haystack.

January 22: A new man arrives, a bird-like, bespectacled 50-year-old accountant named Dershowitz. He's serving a 30-day sentence. He's so frightened he's afraid to talk to anyone.

Today, on the chow line, Dershowitz is in front of me carrying his tray. A glass of milk, some thin pea soup, the inevitable meat loaf, lemon Jell-O. He's surrounded by chattering blacks. They don't menace him, he doesn't interest them at all, but they flow around him like big, smooth, shiny dark sharks, teeth so white and sharp, and he starts to shake and then the tray slips from his fingers. Pea soup, milk and meat-loaf gravy spray in all directions. Dershowitz starts to cry. Tears leak down his thin pink cheeks. His glasses fog.

"Oh, my," he says. "Oh, my, oh, my, oh, my."

Not many people laugh. Cadillac Jones, some badass 200-pound black dude in for bank robbery, gently helps Dershowitz out of the line to an empty table. Dershowitz, misty tears blocking his vision, doesn't even know who's got hold of him. "Thank you," he says. Now and then, en route, he says, "Oh, my."

Cadillac Jones plants the little man safely in a wobbly plastic chair, looks around, finally spots a group of white men nearby, watching. "Here," he rumbles. "Here's a brother of yours needs help. Take care of him."

I went over, too, but Dershowitz didn't need anything then that Cadillac Jones hadn't already given him.

January 30: Finally, yesterday, I went out. This was lunacy and I know it, but I gave in out of a weakness or strength I can't and don't want to define. Scarlati Claude and Willie Polk were going and talked me into it. They've been planning it for weeks.

Unless there's an emergency, the longest stretch of free time is between the four-P.M. count, just after we quit work, and the ten-P.M. count, just before lights out. It had snowed again, it was awfully cold, and Willie said to me as final reassurance, "Them hacks'll be jerkin' each other off in front of the electric heater down at Control."

So at 4:30, with a cloudy, bloated sky already darkening and shutting out all light from the stars, we put on our warmest clothes and walked casually out of the dorm one by one, pretending to jog down the road in the direction of the weight room. At the agreed place, we ducked under the barbed-wire fence and crawled through the virgin snow into the hickory forest. My teeth chattered from the cold. The branches of the trees were tufted with snow that fell down our necks. Willie led us about a mile, mostly downhill, along what the men call the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We went over the chain link fence at the road and Claude's brother from Pittsburgh was waiting in a Buick with the motor running, the exhaust pipe sending a cloud of smoke as high as the tallest tree.

He drove us to a motel on the outskirts of Williamsport. Scarlati wanted to stop at an Italian restaurant for lasagna, but we outvoted him. The feeling of driving in a warm car, bundled together that way, was unreal, eerie, and we were alternately silent and cackling with laughter. Claude's brother had roast-beef sandwiches on rye bread and four bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label and two hookers waiting for us in the motel. The hookers were from Pittsburgh and they were already drunk. They were both brunettes with enormous tits and bushy cunts. Not my ideal. But I couldn't believe how warm and soft their flesh was. Mindlessly, I fucked them both--with a roast-beef sandwich and three shots of Scotch on the rocks in between--and so did everyone except Willie, who couldn't raise a hard-on. "I knew it," he groaned. "My luck don't change."

"You beat your meat too much back in the joint," Scarlati said seriously. Scarlati slept diagonally across from Willie.

It started to snow again and Claude's brother drove us back at eight o'clock, and we dove over the chain link fence again into a snowdrift. The snow made it hard to see and we were all tired and dizzy from the Scotch. Scarlati stumbled in the snow and fell down--we were going uphill now, and all of us panting. I helped him up, but he clung to me and couldn't stop shivering. We could hear everybody's teeth, a kind of crazy chorus in the darkness.

"I can't make it," Scarlati said weakly, and fell again.

I said, "Come on. Sci," and tried to help him, but I couldn't lift him this time.

"I can't do it," he whispered.

"What?"

A snow flurry hit us in the face. "I can't do it," he said. He was drunk. "You guys leave me. Go ahead. Save yourselves." It was like a bad World War Two movie.

Willie floundered back to us and said, "You beat your meat too much back in the joint, Scarlati," and then he grabbed him powerfully under the arms and hauled him up the hill through the hickory forest.

February 16: A dude named Chester was badly hurt last night. The men had decided he was the one who ratted on (continued on page 187) Jailing (continued from page 172) Joe T. I don't believe it, but once an idea like that gets fixed in the men's minds, it's almost impossible to dislodge it.

So: If you flush a toilet in the john, it uses cold water and the showers run very hot for a moment. Usually, you can hear the toilet start to flush and step out of the way in time; you become adept at this. The men waited until Chester was in the shower, alone, and then flushed a single toilet. Chester heard it and ducked out of the spray a moment. Then he started back under. Nicely timed, at a signal, they flushed every toilet in the shithouse at the same time. Chester's whole back was scalded and they took him off to the hospital in Williamsport.

March 5: I'm in the hole at Lewisburg, the Wall. Incredible!

About a week ago, Fitz borrowed $50 from me. He had to make a buy and he was broke. I didn't see why not. I trusted him. You can't be the runner and a rat at the same time. Two nights ago, he asked me if I wanted a drink. I said sure, I invited a few friends to share it with me and around ten P.M., after showering, I picked up a paper bag in his house containing a Taster's Choice coffee jar with a pint of vodka in it. Sarkany, one of the hacks, was waiting for me in the corridor. He said, "What have you got there, Irving?" He knew. Someone had ratted on me. I asked where he would take me and the other hack laughed and said, "To jail, Irving."

At 11 P.M., they drove Fitz and me in a van through the snowy darkness to the Wall. We were strip-searched and sent to individual cells on the fifth level of the hole. The doors were steel with just a tiny slot. A bare bunk, no pillow or blanket. I was in semishock and I slept like a child.

In the morning, I looked out the barred window and could see a pearl-gray sky, fog, half of a pitted, unused concrete tennis court and some men in gray sweat suits jogging through the slush like ghosts. I could see a gun tower, too, in the fog. Around noon, the hacks gave me paper and envelopes, so I could write this. It's cold out there. No birds sing. The cell has a shitter, sink, bare bulb with a long string. Meals are shoved in through the slot on a tray. You can talk to the men in the nearby cells, but you can't see their faces.

There's a black dude across the way they call Crazy. Crazy's been in the hole, he tells me, for eight months. What did he do? "Don't remember," he says. "Musta been somethin' pretty good, though." He deftly passes me a pack of cigarettes with a long wire that he tosses four or five times across the corridor until I can catch it. Now I'm in Crazy's debt, and so I can't tell him to shut up when he talks--that is, when he shouts at the top of his lungs--all evening long, until nearly midnight.

We're supposed to get a shower and an hour's exercise twice a week here, but so far I haven't had either. One of the hacks told me there was a murder in the shower room last week. Some dude called Peanuts, who'd been in the hole for a few months, went berserk and killed two blacks and wounded two others--he'd been carrying a shank under a towel. He'd had a feud with one of the men he killed. The hack, whose name is Heisman, asked why he stabbed the three others, too. Peanuts said, "Well, Mr. Heisman, they was standing right there."

March 10: I'm in Danbury. Not the town but the Federal correctional institution. I went before what's called a forfeiture board hearing. They took away 30 days of my accumulated "good time" and told me I was being transferred to Danbury. Three days ago, three of us were driving across barren, icy Pennsylvania and part of New York State on a cold, gray day. Arrived at Danbury in the late afternoon: a prison as gray and grim as the day. I hate it.

March 31: I seem to get on best with the Italians. They can be trusted. Here, so far, I'm most friendly with Pete Costa and Tony M. There are some pezzo novante in residence, too--big guns, allegedly, in organized crime. One man they call Charley the Blade: He carries a wad of $100 bills in his pocket and his friends serve him breakfast in bed. Charley's an old man and not well. And then there's Johnny Dio, who has a freshly pressed shirt and trousers brought to him every morning from the laundry room and browns his face in the midday sun while holding court with Pete Costa and Funzi and Gus on the benches outside Hartford House (the dorms have wonderfully pastoral names). Also John D., who looks exactly like my grandfather and is the same kind of warm, cordial man; he plants flowers and bushes and tends them lovingly in the little yard outside the Control Center. Straight out of The Godfather. He ran the garbage racket for the Syndicate in Yonkers, they say. He makes a daily telephone call home and it's assumed that one or two of the hacks have been bribed. Tony M. brings me an occasional ice cream from the commissary, where he works. He wants nothing in return. Tony's in his late 20s, a hit man for the Gambino family--one of the best, they say. He's here for income-tax evasion. He couldn't be a sweeter guy. We toss a football around whenever we can and jog together around the yard, two miles a day.

May 12: A vote was taken a few weeks ago and I was appointed a representative of Providence House (my dorm) on the Inmate Committee. We're supposed to air the complaints of the men, make proposals, get feedback. Of course, the administration doesn't have to act on our proposals and can tell us--in administrative language, naturally--to go fuck ourselves.

This year, the committee won the right for each inmate to make a monthly telephone call, collect. That's a big gain. Some men's families live too far away or are too poor for regular visits and the sound of a voice, while it may bring tears, is a living memory.

The committee has also forced the administration to conform to Bureau of Prisons standards and bring the law library reasonably up to date--that's important, too.

One subtle, unstated purpose of the committee, from the administration's point of view, is that it gives them a fairly accurate pipeline into the population. They know what we're thinking, what's bugging us. Or at least they think they do.

"The institution does what suits them," Pete Costa says. "If you suggest something and they act on it, that's because it benefits them, not us. They liked the telephone-call idea because they can listen in. They record those calls on tape. Didn't you figure that one out?"

May 22: I realize now that the basic function of prisons like Danbury is not merely to warehouse a man but to break his adult-male spirit--his machismo, if you will--and reduce him to the psychological level of an obedient child. Basic techniques are: physical removal to isolated areas (Allenwood, Danbury, et al.), which weakens or severs close emotional ties to family and friends. Segregation of all natural leaders. Use of cooperative prisoners as leaders. Use of informers. Placing individuals in new and ambiguous situations for which the standards are kept deliberately unclear, and then putting pressure on the men to conform and blindly obey authority in order to win favor and a reprieve from pressure and the ambiguity. Rewarding submission and subservience. Building a group conviction among the prisoners that they've been abandoned by, and are almost totally isolated from, the social order.

The parole system puts the icing on the cake. You're told, essentially, "Be good and you'll earn parole." So, to a certain extent, you behave. But they're lying to you.

So, having tried to convey the impression that you have behaved, you're still ordered to "continue to expiration of sentence." Bring it all, schmuck. I went before the parole examiners 15 days ago and today I heard the news: a six-month set-off from the parole board to January 1974, when they'll review my case once again. I feel terribly depressed--and outraged. Pete Costa says to me quietly, "Coraggio. Pazienza."

August 7: Today it happened: My prick awoke from its long coma. I was expecting a visit this weekend (or next) from Tim and Mary, whom I'd last seen at Allenwood in December. But only Mary arrived. The marriage is finished: She and Tim have split up and he's gone off to finish his new book and live in the East Village with some other woman. Mary said, "I couldn't disappoint you. So I came alone by bus."

The day was hot and she wore a loose, tentlike red-cotton dress--no belt, no bra. I could see her breasts shift and swing a little beneath it when she moved. I could see a woman. I think she saw in my eyes what I was thinking and feeling, because her lips started to flush deep pink, her eyes took on a certain blue luster and I could see her nipples pop out. I had remarked before that her dress was like a tent. Then she said, a little breathlessly, "I wish we had a real tent we could crawl under."

"Yes," I said, "I'd love to fuck you."

"It's a date," she whispered.

She had smuggled in a corned-beef sandwich on rye, a dill pickle and a cool, fresh, fat red tomato. I ate them while Mary kept an eye out for the hack. They were delicious.

August 12: I've written to my attorney in Washington, Jim Sharp, and asked him to make formal application to the parole board for an emergency rehearing as soon as possible, on the grounds that my two small children are parentless, under psychiatric care, and one of them is diagnosed as being in an acute state of depression. Christ, he's only four years old.

I just won't sit back and let it happen. I'll fight these cocksuckers any way I can.

August 20: Sol, a new man, told me his beef. Here's a winner! He set two scientists to work developing a laser beam to stun horses so that he could bet a front runner at the trotters. The other horses would break stride when the beam hit them and they'd have no more feeling than that of a bee sting, wouldn't be hurt at all. One of the scientists informed on him and they got him on a conspiracy rap. The story sounded like a joke until Sol showed me some confirming clips from the Saratoga and Miami papers.

October 2: A letter from my attorney. The parole board, under pressure, has granted me an emergency rehearing next month. Hallelujah! Now I have to follow the fundamental tenet of life in the joint: Hope for the best, expect the worst.

October 4: Today, after more than 13 months of dormitory living. I finally reached the top of the list and was transferred to what's called a room--it's a cell--in Hartford House. It has a bed, a shitter, a sink, an unbarred window because it looks out onto the yard, a locker and a solid plank of wood that rests on the radiator and serves as a rudimentary desk. I don't think I could be happier if I'd been given a key to a suite at the Pierre Hotel facing Central Park. The point is that I feel now that I live here at Danbury and my room in Hartford House means I'm at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid in terms of comfort and privileges.

The awful point of this whole process is that man can survive anything. He can accept anything. He can learn to be content, or at least exist without the need to shout and rebel, in almost any circumstances. This accounts for the fact that most people in this world, in jail or out, lead lives of misery, degradation, boredom, frustration and personal unhappiness--job, marriage, family, social obligations, the whole catastrophe--and yet haven't got the energy or even the urge to vault out of their personal prison cells and head for the hills. Escape? To where? We're all prisoners. Some know it, most don't.

This is such a terrifying thought that I don't want to pursue it any further.

November 29: I lie in bed, can't sleep, again outraged. Mr. Lefebvre, my caseworker, called me into his office this morning and told me that at a special hearing of the board in D.C., I'd been granted parole--for February 14th. That's two and a half months from now! If I'm parolable, if my kids are in the deep shit and need a parent at their side, why not now? Why wait? Well, I know why. Because of no reason at all. Because these people are insane and there isn't a glimmer of humanity behind their decisions.

I'm going to keep fighting. I'm going to file a writ demanding immediate parole or else immediate release to a C.T.C.--community treatment center, or halfway house, as it's called--in Manhattan. I've checked the official bureau policy statements for standards of eligibility and I fit them all perfectly. Of course, that's reason enough to turn me down. Got to remember that there is no system, no logic, just chaos under wraps. Got to keep hope at a minimum and, at the same time, fight.

December 13: Motherfucker, I'm in the hole again! I can't believe it!

A few weeks ago, the administration let out a rumor that there would be Christmas furloughs for all men with minimum-security status, Friday, the announcement: two-day furloughs for minimum-security men with less than three months left to serve and no shots against them for the past 60 days. It was quickly calculated that of the 600-odd men, perhaps 25 qualified. The other 575 became enraged. They overreacted. The men gathered in their various houses, truly spontaneously, and said, "Fuck this shit. No furloughs, no work." Then some bright guy said, "Get our fuckin' Inmate Committee to tell 'em what we want!"

Cochairman Ron Riley and I nailed Steve Grzgorek, the assistant warden, in a corridor near Control. "If the men don't get a better furlough policy," I said, "I don't think they'll go to work on Monday morning."

"That would be a mistake," he said grimly. "Refusing to work is a punishable offense, Mr. Irving."

"Hey, Mr. Grzgorek, I'm not threatening anything. I'm just giving you my opinion based on what I hear around the campus. No more, no less."

Last Sunday, with no change in the situation, each house and cell block met and voted to strike.

Monday morning was cold and overcast. The hacks came around. "You men going to work or not?" Everyone shrugged. The hacks locked all our outside doors. Those big key rings really jangle.

An hour later, the goon squad came around, six hacks led by a lieutenant. Work or off to the hole. They were serious and we could tell it. We looked out the windows and saw a dozen men from Maine House being inarched off, then about the same number from Boston. They got to us in Hartford and the lieutenant reached the door of my cell.

"Irving, you've got some influence around here. You're chairman of the Inmate Committee. Now, don't be a fool, don't jeopardize your parole. Are you going to work or not?"

"Not," I said. I wasn't going to make a speech.

He had two of the hacks march me out of the dorm. To get to the hole, I had to pass Providence. I'd lived in Providence and had friends there. They saw me being hauled off-- "That dude just got paroled, man, and he's goin'! Right on!"--and they began to cheer and stomp. I thought, Thanks, you dumb fucks, that's just what I need.

I should have figured it out when they put me in a cell in the hole all by myself and then, ten minutes later, marched Riley in there with me and then two other members of the Inmate Committee. The hole began to fill up. The cells were meant for two men at the most; even two's a crowd. They were shoving four and five in each cell. There were three tiers of 12 cells each. It was a scene from an old George Raft-James Cagney movie. I'd thought that was all Hollywood, but now I realized they must have had some good technical advisors. Men stripped the metal mirrors off the walls, then the taps from the sinks; they began to rattle them on the bars, back and forth. Then they began tearing up the pillows in the cells and tossing the loads of feathers out into the corridors, over the catwalks, so that they floated down like snow. The snowstorm lasted an hour. They gave us tomato soup for lunch and the men threw that out of their cells, too, so that the floor looked as if chickens had been slaughtered there. And they screamed and sneezed and shouted abuse at the hacks and kept rattling the metal mirrors against the bars. "Don't you think this is fuckin' counterproductive?" Riley asked me, and I said, "Oh, yes."

"Hey, you guys," he yelled. "Knock it off! We ain't animals! They ain't gonna respect us, ain't gonna give us what we want if we act like fuckin' lunatics!"

The men quieted down for a few minutes, and then the lieutenant came in and passed the lower tier, stopping at each cell to ask which men wanted to stay in the hole and get a shot and go before the Adjustment Committee, a kangaroo court, and which men wanted to go quietly back to work, with no reprisals and no black marks on their records. Some dudes on the top tier had a brilliant idea. Spare lockers were stored up there on the catwalk. They could reach out and shove the lockers over the catwalk and maybe kill a lieutenant and a few hacks. Those big green lockers flew by our eyes, thundering off the concrete floor, and it sounded like Hanoi under a B-52 raid. The lockers bounced, boomed and caromed in all directions, metal smashing and clanging against metal. The lieutenant ran to safety and shouted shrilly, "Who did that?" He was scared, rightly so. And someone on the second tier yelled, "Fuck you, faggot!" And then someone else yelled, "Fuck the warden!" and that soon changed to "Kill the warden!"

By evening, the administration had won the battle.

I didn't sleep well. About four P.M. the next day, the lieutenant came by again and, before I could say anything, handed me a piece of flimsy paper, a carbon copy of an incident report: an accusation, a shot. It was filed by a hack named James Sherwood. Sherwood says he was standing outside our cell yesterday afternoon and last night and heard Riley and me chanting, "Kill the warden," and then we incited the other men to chant. He also heard Riley confess that he was the active leader of the uprising and heard him say to me, "You're the brains behind this riot, Irving, you have to control it." The lieutenant passed a copy of the same shot to Riley and looked at me with a slight lift of the eyebrows.

I said quietly, "Lieutenant, this man isn't telling the truth. He hasn't got the brains to make it up, so someone told him to do it."

He didn't smile, he just walked away.

December 14: This morning, they took Riley away to a separate cell. Riley had somehow arranged a noon meeting with a visiting professor from Yale Law School and just before they took him away, I scribbled a note. It had the telephone number of Maury Nessen, my lawyer in New York. I said, "Ask the man to call Maury and tell him what's happening. Tell him I'm being framed." A bad movie again, but it's a fact. Riley gave me back the paper and said he could remember the number and the message. Oh, Jesus.

Five P.M.--I was taken out of my cell and led up to a sealed bare room. Maury was waiting for me. He looked around him with big eyes. Very few lawyers ever sec a prison and fewer get to see the hole.

He looked worried. "What the hell have you done now?"

I told him the story.

"I'll go talk to them," he said, relieved. "I've already spoken to this man Steve Grzgorek. He's friendly. And he seems like a reasonable man."

"Maury, listen to me. You can't talk to them. You're a great lawyer, but you don't know what you're up against now." I was pleading with him and I broke out in a sweat. "These people aren't like you and me," I said. "They're more fucked up than any of the inmates in here. They may seem reasonable and friendly, but they're evil." I waved Sherwood's pink sheet at him. "Here's the proof."

"But Grzgorek----"

"They'll all lie to you, Maury. They've got to do it to protect their ass. I beg you, believe me. They'll all lie to you. They'll tell you they're going to follow reasonable, just and ordained procedures laid down by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and it will all sound right and fair to you, but they'll be lying. It will be a kangaroo court and they'll convict me on this hack's word--they've got to take his word over mine--and they'll have me in Atlanta or Leaven-worth before you even know about it. They'll move fast. And they can indict me for this. Will you come down to Atlanta to defend me, Maury?"

"What should I do?" he asked slowly.

"Threaten them. Tell them you know I'm being framed. Don't be lawyerly. Don't try to be a nice guy--it won't get you anywhere. Threaten them. Stomp around, shout; they can't touch you. Tell them that if they don't submit me and this hack Sherwood to a lie-detector test immediately--and the lieutenant, and Grzgorek and the captain, too, because I know someone put the hack up to it--you're going to the courts and the newspapers tomorrow morning. Publicity's poison to them, and an inquiry means they could lose their jobs. All of them, Maury--tell them you'll insist they all take a polygraph. They'll shit. Say you can get a court order----"

"But I'm not sure the court----"

"They're not sure, either. Maury, please. I know these people. You don't. Threaten them and yell. Pick up a phone in the warden's office and call the Danbury paper and then the Times."

He thought awhile. Then the hack appeared to say that time was up. "All right," Maury said quietly.

December 15: Yesterday evening, after I wrote that last paragraph, they came for me and took me out to a room near Control. They had called a special meeting of the Adjustment Committee. The air was smoky and the ashtrays were full; they'd been in there awhile before I arrived. Their expressions were stony and I thought that was a good sign--if they had been smiling, I would have thought, I'm dead. The captain asked for my version of the events. I recited them calmly, trying to keep to the facts I was sure of.

"Are you saying the Inmate Committee--in particular, you and Riley--had no leadership role in this work stoppage?"

"None," I said. "The committee was a conduit for information. We told the A.W. what we believed the men were going to do."

He handed me Sherwood's incident report. "What about this, Mr. Irving?"

I had debated with myself about that for a long time and I had an answer carefully prepared. I said, "It's inaccurate. There was a lot of noise. Mr. Sherwood may have misheard. I prefer to think that's what happened."

"Go outside. We'll call you," the captain said.

I went out for 15 minutes and then the chief caseworker called me in. He explained that a careful study of Mr. Sherwood's incident report had revealed to the committee that Mr. Sherwood was not actually accusing me of anything but only quoting inmate Riley's statements relevant to my alleged leadership of the strike, and the Adjustment Committee was not prepared to prosecute one inmate because of statements made about his activities by another inmate. I was acquitted. No punishment.

"What about Riley?"

"Get out, Irving," the captain said.

And now I'm sitting on my bed in Hartford House, in my little cell, and it's midnight. The men could hardly believe that I was freed. A few of them, I think, are wondering if I ratted on Riley, but I spoke with Riley before I left and he'll get the word out that it's not true.

"You one lucky motherfucker," Shorty Bigshoes said to me.

Amen.

I also heard I was turned down for transfer to the halfway house, but I'm going to file a writ with the Federal court appealing the decision.

New Year's Day, 1974: Funzi and Gus sitting today on a bench in front of Hartford House in the cold winter sunlight, reminiscing about the good old days with the Mob in New York--"the night Fast Eddie got snuffed at the delicatessen on Delancey Street, remember, Gus?" And me sitting there, quietly, hardly daring to ask a question, listening openmouthed and big-eyed like a little kid. The Mob! It exists! I know them.

January 4: Someone shook me awake this morning at 7:45 and said I was wanted on the double in the caseworker's office. Mr. Lefebvre was waiting for me. He said, without a trace of expression, "You've applied for admission to the halfway house in Manhattan, Mr. Irving. The Bureau of Prisons has reversed its negative decision and authorized your transfer."

I think I asked him, "When?" and he said, "Today. Now. Get your things together, sign out and go."

I'm sitting now at the bus station in downtown Danbury. I've called Maury in New York to tell him and to ask him to cable Spain and get my kids over here. He couldn't believe it at first--I think for a minute he thought I'd escaped. "I won, Maury," I yelled into the bus-station pay phone, so that a lot of heads turned. "I won forty-one days of freedom. You don't know what that means. I'll meet you at P. J. Clarke's for lunch. Bring money."

The sun is almost blinding, blazing off the snow. I walk around, waiting for the bus, taking deep breaths of the cold air.

Now I'm on the bus. Last entry in this journal. The bare trees, the highway, the cars with patches of snow on their roofs, the world rushing by look like a Cinema-Scope movie. I feel like I'm in that movie, clutching my cartons and my release papers, dressed like a goon. I'm going to check into the halfway house. They give you the first weekend off, I know that. I'm going to have a beer and a mediumrare cheeseburger at P. J.'s, Then I'm going for a long walk, alone, through the snow in Central Park. Then maybe down Fifth Avenue.

Tonight I'm taking Mary to Broadway Joe's Steak House, on 46th Street for oysters, a bottle of burgundy, a baked potato, a rare sirloin steak and cheesecake. I'm going to ask her to wear her red-cotton dress without a bra, and after dinner, I'm going to find a tent somewhere and crawl under it with her.

This journal, in its original form, was composed of brief handwritten notes smuggled out of prison.

The guy in the next bed wants to be called Geraldine. When everyone is asleep, "she" rises like a phoenix wearing a wig, make-up and on evening gown.

"There was a murder in the shower room. A dude called Peanuts went berserk and killed two blacks."