The Frozen Rabbi (48 page)

At that juncture the lawyer had begun to clear his throat with a roosterlike crowing, either by way of warning his client against the wrong turn his statement was taking or simply to drown out his words. “Let’s start at the point when the young Mr. Karp entered your quarters,” he interrupted.

“That I don’t remember. Like I say, the last thing I remember is when Rosalie the mama—she’s a little zaftig, Rosalie—on my face she sits while I’m beyn regel le-regel if you know what I mean with her daughter…” The courtroom, to gauge by its rumbling, knew precisely what he meant, the court reporter’s fingers stumbling over a machine whose keys jammed like a crowd stampeding an exit.

Mr. Frizell tried to alert the old man with gestures that the court had heard enough of his smutty talk, but the rabbi seemed to have found his stride. “You see,” he continued informatively, “as it is below, so is it above; it’s a emb-a-lem, the holy zivvug, the sexual union from humans, for what happens in heaven. HaShem, when He sees what on earth we’re doing, it gives to Him ideas. Then with His bride, His Shekhinah, He does the same, and is restored for a while the order in the universe. For a little while everybody got a extra soul—”

The hush the tzaddik’s speech had induced in his audience was punctured by his attorney’s shouted appeal to “Shut up!” with which the rabbi graciously complied. Facing the judge, the lawyer Frizell removed his glasses with their befogged lenses and announced, “No further questions, your honor.” Then he bowed to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury and sat down again in careless defeat.

Judge Few, as if to break the spell that still held the courtroom, took a pecan from his robe and cracked it with his gavel, then said to Mr. Womack while chewing the nut, “Your witnesh, shir.”

Mr. Womack hoisted his full-buttocked bulk from his chair and blew his nose in a monogrammed hankie whose contents he inspected closely like tea leaves, frowning at what he saw. He reminded the jury that reputable members of the psychiatric community had interviewed the rabbi and declared him competent to stand trial. Having made his point, he directed a steely stare at the rabbi, then turned back to the judge and said, “No questions, your honor.”

In their closing remarks Mr. Womack recited again the litany of the rabbi’s enormities, insisting that the jury had no choice but to find the defendant et cetera; whereas Mr. Frizell, almost devil-may-care in his final argument, said only that appearances can be deceiving. But despite the hostile atmosphere that had pervaded the proceedings from their outset, something had changed since Rabbi Eliezer had taken the stand. The press reported that his blasphemous and obscene testimony, rather than further antagonizing the courtroom, seemed to have inspired in the onlookers a curious sympathy. Schooled though they were in prejudice, the jury nevertheless took an inordinate amount of time to deliberate, the foreman reading their decision like an apology while pausing at intervals to mop his perspiring brow. But once the verdict was delivered, the sentence pronounced, and the old man ushered away, the whole episode receded into the fleeting diversion it had been all along, the attention of the citizenry having been redirected toward the issue of a world aflame.

♦♦♦

IN
THE
TRANSPORT
bus on the way to the state pen at Brushy Mountain, Cholly Sidepocket fought an urge to chew off his legs at the ankles in order to rid them of the irons he’d been made to wear. Now why was that? He’d done bids before; he knew the drill. He’d been in and out of joints since the gladiator schools of his youth, where, though he’d hardly shot a rack of pool since, he’d earned the street name that dogged him to this day. It was a foolish name, though no more foolish than the Two-Tones, Sheetrocks, and Sic Dawgs with which the other homies he’d run with were saddled. The handle had of course nothing to do with who he really was, which was the point, since Cholly had never had much to do with who he really was, at least not until he’d hooked up with the Old Man. Before that, the world was a place you visited like the bone yard in the prison compound, where the conjugal trailers were kept and the housebroken cons received their families. The world was the place where you peddled your crank, shacked up with your skank, as some wannabe rapper was chanting on the tier above; the place you did the crimes they fetched you back to do the time for, which you tried to do so that the time didn’t do you. The system, once you were in it, was everywhere the same bad dream, the problem being that Cholly himself was different now.

Something had got switched on in him during his time with the Old Man, and he didn’t think he could turn it off; he couldn’t shut himself down like he’d done during his previous stretches. Before, despite his size and physique, Cholly’d been able to shrink himself, to fold up his soul like a doodle bug and secrete it in some part of his person where even he couldn’t find it anymore. Because to show signs of humanity in the can was an invitation to the man to break you of those habits that distinguished you from the animals; and you could rest assured they had the means. So the best strategy was to beat them to it, to stupefy yourself, and sleepwalk through the years like some lumbering stiff. It was a condition that couldn’t be faked, for even the most dimwitted hack could sniff out a human being. There had so far been no human beings in evidence at the Brushy Mountain Correctional Institution. Certainly none were at large when they marched Cholly through the monkey house on that first night of his incarceration, though the monkeys were all on view. Some did calesthenics or perused their short-eyes porn with a hand bobbing pistonlike in their lap; some flashed mirrors in an overt semaphore or peeped out through the bars at the new fish with bleary, tombstone eyes.

Familiar as it was, Cholly couldn’t seem to get cozy in the double cell they’d assigned him during the mandatory six weeks’ quarantine on the fish tier. He couldn’t stand the company of the baby gangsta who wept all night in the bunk above his, a weeping interrupted only when the kid jerked himself off, which he did every hour or so. But rather than contemplate strangling him, the obvious solution, Cholly had the wack impulse to speak words of comfort, though he knew better, as sympathy was a sign of weakness and would come back to bite your ass in the form of some sucker hustle later on. So, between the sobs of his cellmate and the other animal sounds that swelled at dawn to an uproar like the Tower of Babel Zoo, Cholly wasn’t sleeping too good. Then the day would begin again with its flimsy pretense of order, which collapsed with the least bit of pressure the way a maggoty carcass crumbles to powder at a touch; only, on A Block the powder was flammable. You had the monotony of chow runs, work runs, rec runs, and showers, the bug juice and special-programs calls, the law library or hospital if you could finesse them, visitations if you had any people left on the outside. But along the way you ran the gauntlet of cell soldiers and screws looking for an excuse to go off on you. There were jailhouse lawyers giving you advice you never asked for, entrepreneurs who ran regular commissaries out of their cages, peddling everything from hot electronics to shanks fashioned from Plexiglas or flint. You had the sad fucks of no known gender exiled to the untouchables table in the mess hall, the pay-him-no-minds shuffling about in their rubber flops, too far gone for the pigs to take notice of anymore, though the inmates, having no better diversion (the TVs in the common areas were unreliable), paid attention to one another, and no matter how forbidding your game face, you could bet that before the day was out some joker was going to get all up in your business. Cholly preferred to keep his business to himself.

He was a big man, Cholly, but that didn’t discourage the gadflies and solicitors. Take for instance Daktari Brown, doing a twelve-year jolt for (as he claimed) smoking in the boys’ room, who suggested that the new man might want to avail himself of his services. Wearing a kufi from beneath which his dreadlocks hung like stogies, Daktari ran a tattoo parlor out of his house, where he was as handy at etching the swastikas of the Aryan Nation as the pachuco crosses of the Raza Unidas and Bloods. Cholly curtly declined his offer, but Daktari, whose ambition was to leave his mark on all and sundry, was persistent, and one afternoon during gate time he prevailed on some power-lifters from the yard to jump Cholly Sidepocket and drag him into his cell. The following knock-down-drag-out raised an alarm that brought the screws running in their extraction gear with truncheons raised.

Coming to in a windowless box stinking of disinfectant, bare but for its stainless steel toilet and sink, the thin pallet and the light fixture that was never dimmed, Cholly wondered if this was what he’d wanted all along. Here he could maybe think straight, his aching head notwithstanding, and review the chain of events that had brought him 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 looking to make a reputation. He kept his own counsel and gave the screws no excuse for writing him up, resisted eyeballing them during the frisks and shakedowns. By forgoing trips to the commissary he amassed a small fortune in scrip, which he could use to bribe the COs who swapped it with the mules for drugs and smuggled loot. In this way Cholly accumulated favors he could call in along with the kites he floated for a release to labor details that might otherwise take years to obtain. Still, a season passed before he was given permission to work in one of the “shops.” Cholly’s was a concrete warehouse with huge fans expelling a hot elephants’-breath, where for eight hours a day he treated rubber gaskets by plopping them into a skillet of boiling water with a pair of tongs. Over time he graduated from vulcanizer to grease monkey in the small engine shop, and always he kept a weather eye open in his movements from building to building for some crack in the facility large enough for a big man to slip through. But Brushy appeared to Cholly Sidepocket to be seamless, its stone cell blocks hermetically sealed by center gates, end gates, and sally ports. Everywhere you looked there was hardware in the service of captivity: tiller-size brakes operating a multitude of deadlocks, systems of brass-handled levers protruding from their panels like organ stops. True, there were windows, unwashed in memory, through which nothing could be seen but the hazy outline of concertina wire and octagonal towers—and beyond them, what?