Lucky Us by Joan Silber Read Free Book Online

when I entered that room. It smelled like a very old urinal, and the men, who were sitting or lying on cots, looked miserable and exhausted and furious to find themselves washed up on this miasmal shore. But they did look like men to me, like an assemblage on some particularly grim corner, not like demons or wolves, and some of them talked to me when I came in. I would not say they were friendly but they were almost social. I knew something about how to have that kind of conversation, and I didn’t look as young as I was.
    It is true that I was terrified as well. They kept the lights on all night and some people dozed but most people talked. The transvestite could not keep quiet. She cawed and hooted and when people threatened her she giggled. She said, “I’m leaving soon. My boy is so late. My boy is late to come for me.” Around dawn a man in an orange T-shirt took her by the hair—it was her own hair and not a wig—and dragged her across the floor. “Let me sleep,” he said. “You won’t let me sleep.” Whenever she shrieked, he said, “You have to shut up.” Everyone was looking but no one was doing anything yet. And then—very fast—he swung her head against the base of the toilet. We could hear the crack, under her screaming, and her smeared face was streaming with blood, her face was a bloody mess. We were all shouting. He was just about to whack her again when the guards showed up.
    W HEN THEY TOOK me into the court for the arraignment, I was very shaky. I didn’t shake, in fact, but I knew I looked like someone who’d been in jail all night, pale and funky and sullen. My lawyer was there and my brother Dom. After I was charged and released, I tried to tell them how someone’s head had just been smacked against a toilet in the cell. They couldn’t figure out why I was talking about that now, and they listened as if I were crazy. They waited, fish-eyed and embarrassed, until I was finished. And then I knew (I had not really understood this before) that I was about to enter this craziness, and no one was going with me.
    M OST STAGES IN anyone’s life have their own same-old anecdotes, tales told a billion times over, but the days in prison are an unsorted mess to me. I don’t have stories.
    When I was in prison, people always complained about what happened when they telephoned home. Somebody’sgirlfriend acted as if a two-minute conversation was a big favor, somebody’s sister bitched about how much the collect calls cost, somebody’s parents were less than chatty. There was a lot of whining about all those people who didn’t give a shit and had no understanding at all. It was clear that we were not the same familiar characters they’d known; we’d become something they didn’t want to think too much about.
    But I didn’t mind being out of people’s ken for my eight-months-to-a-year. I wrote a few letters to keep my mother from getting too distressed, and otherwise I was just as glad not to have to connect what was going on inside to whatever was happening out there. Aunt Angie sent me some food (dry sausage and pignoli cookies) that I never got, which was nice of her. I told friends and old girlfriends not to write and they didn’t. For me it was all right to be left as I was during that time.
    W HEN I CAME out of prison, I wasn’t blinded by the light of day or anything. People say you get out and things are too stimulating or there are too many choices or you forget how to read ordinary social signals, but I wasn’t in long enough for that. I went in in August, I came out in March.
    On the other hand, I wasn’t the same either. I had runmy life before—insofar as I ran it—on a kind of pirate’s faith, a sense of harvesting what was there for the taking. That was over, all that sunny mischief.
    In prison, I got good at two things, amusing myself on my own and not thinking