to this sorry pass. But the truth was that the Special Housing Unit, for all its isolation, wasn’t much quieter than the main line; you could still hear the jabbering of the monkeys with their catcalls and threats, their complaints that the CIA maintained a base of operations in their brain. Cholly didn’t know if it was them or him that needed turning off. In the absence of his ostrichlike faculty, he was forced to listen to the noise that rattled the pipes the cons used as their “phone.” From the hole it was hard to even recall the peace of mind he’d come to take for granted in the employ of the old Jew preacher man. Even now Cholly couldn’t have said what it was about his attachment to that old rounder, with his string of bitches and dingbat disciples, that triggered the memories he seemed to have borrowed from someone else, some warrior he might have been had he not been himself. Had he not been brought up in foster homes where he proved himself unmanageable, and “industrial schools” from which he’d emerged with an arsenal of perfidious skills. Still it wasn’t long, as he squired ‘round the rabbi and watched his back, before Cholly had begun to think he might in fact be someone else, and that someone, he believed, did not belong in stir.
The voices he heard: Were they living men or only the ghosts of past deseg confinements, the jobbers whose names and gang devices were smeared in faded blood over the walls?
“Yo, Argo, holler atcha boy are you there.”
“Franklin, dawg, that yo ebony ass?”
“Honey, if the SHU fit.”
“Good one, dawg! Wha’s crackin? Gimme the dily yo.”
The only lulls in these disembodied dialogues came when the voices dummied up for a passing CO, or when a trustee delivered the sawdust loaves of affliction in their Styrofoam clamshells. But as soon as the coast was clear and their rations choked down—“Holla back”—the chatter would begin all over again. It continued in the chain-link exercise runs that the solitaries were released into for one hour out of every twenty-four.
“Y’all heard the back fence bout them niggahs up on Cee Block? “That the gorilla wing? Nothing but red eyes and booty bandits up there.”
“Tha’s what I’m sayin’. Tier Three, Block Cee, brothahs up there livin’ ghetto fabulous.”
“Dude, you in the O-zone? You done miss me with all that.”
“Got a griot up there; suckah’s tore-up-from-the-floor-up ugly, be teachin’ em to catch theyself a ride without rock or reefer…”
Chinning himself on the bars of his cage to try and glimpse the mountains beyond the walls, Cholly was snapped back to where he was at by their noise, which elbowed his own thoughts clear out of his head. He resented the Old Man now for having given him a taste of possibilities, only to land him back in the drama by his antics. Still, time was he’d have laid down his life for that ragged-out old spieler, and probably would have had not the ladies come running bare-assed out the House of E screaming heart attack. Then Cholly’d left his post to see what was the matter and was instantly bushwhacked by SWATs; he was tossed in the county hoosgow doing dead time till his long-delayed trial, during which he was judged guilty of some imprecise charge and sentenced for an indeterminate term. He was sent off in a transport chain to a facility he’d only caught sight of from the window of the bus, which looked with its looming stone parapets surrounded by shrouded mountains like Dracula’s castle. And all that time he’d been unable to get any news of the rabbi—heard only the rumor he’d been indicted for homicide or some such smack accusation that made no sense. In any case, here was Cholly back on the shelf, where his vintage anger festered under a hide that had once been so impenetrable. In the can your capacity for inspiring fear was your trump card, but in order to inspire it you had to feel it. Well, Cholly felt it now in spades. It threw salt in his game, the fear; it shook his control, and though he’d never even teased himself with the idea before, he began to entertain the possibility of escape.
Eventually removed from the hole and sent back to the general population, Cholly resolved to become a model citizen. He fell into lockstep with the prison routine, walked the tightrope between the man and the trash-talking toughs