Heaven, she’d tell her husband. Paid cash, and I hadn’t even asked for a receipt, never mind a lease.
She was the only one around when I came Thursday morning. Told me about ten times that I must be very strong to carry all that stuff upstairs in one trip.
After she handed over the key, she gave me a little speech about not “changing” anything. Meaning the lock, I think she was saying.
I was patient while she gave me another little speech: how the microwave worked, how it was better to leave the air-conditioning off when I wasn’t actually there, all this fussy stuff. She saved what I guess she thought was the big finish for last: the apartment not only had a flat-screen TV, it came with free cable.
The only way to get her out of the place was to check my watch, grab my cell phone, and punch in some numbers.
“I’ll let myself out,” she said.
Probably let yourself back in soon as you’re sure I’ll be gone for a while, too, I thought, but I just gave her a little salute and went back to the conversation I was having with myself.
You’d think a man with as much prison behind him as me would be an ace at killing time. And I guess I am, in some ways.
As long as I know how to act, I can do it. In prison, it’s as clear as if they painted it on the walls. There’s only so many things you can do in there, make the time go by. So what you do is, you pick one, and get as deep as you can into it.
Some guys, it’s the weights. They do it in groups, spot for each other, talk about “reps” and “delts” and stuff like it’s a secret code. There’s steroids for sale Inside, and they were gold to the body-boys. Mostly pills, but there was even needle stuff around. The trick was getting clean needles.
Steroids aren’t much of a racket—you need tranqs to really bring the cash. You don’t have to risk a smuggle to do that. A lot of the loons on scrip, they’re happy to sell their meds. They don’t even want them in the first place … unless they’re saving them up until they get enough to check out. Some of them, you could see they’d already left. Locked up, sure, but not on this planet.
Some cons work on schemes. Letter-writing, that was always a good one. You just had to be careful. The real pros, they kept charts and everything, so they never got the women they were working mixed up. Once they got three, four of them on the string, just keeping up with the letters would take all day, every day. That’s why some cons have really fine handwriting, all that practice.
There’re guys who can play cards. Or dominoes. Chess guys, they could even play by mail, have a couple of dozen games going on at the same time, all around the world.
But if you run a racket, there’s no such thing as part-time. You have something going for you, there’s always going to be people who want it going to them.
Gang guys, they always had business. Meetings, karate practice, praying, plotting … it all eats time.
For some guys, doing time was no different from hanging out on the corner. Same routine: play the dozens, tell lies, brag about what they had going for them. Prison’s perfect for that. It’s a lot easier to lie about what was than what is.
Only thing missing was the girls walking by. Nobody ever complained about that—you could be walking into a shark tank if the wrong guy took it the wrong way.
Religion, that’s always big. No matter where they lock you, there’ll always be some “fellowship” or “ministry” or whatever. If you’re Christian, I mean. The Muslims have their own thing. A few Indians, they would get together, too. I hadn’t seen that before, but I guess there’s more of them Upstate than in the city.
I remember asking Eddie how come there’s no Jews in there. “Oh, they got ’em,” Eddie had told me. “But not enough to form no crew. So they find their own ways to get by.”
That’s also when Eddie told me about Reno, that Nazi guy. He was one of them. A Jew, I mean. I don’t know how Eddie found out, but when he told me, I got the joke. That’s what Eddie called it when you understood something—that you