Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

17

THERE WAS A CERTAIN morbid fascination in watching the gang put the pieces of the robbery together. Like, no doubt, the condemned man gazing out his cell window as the scaffold is being built.

I lived the next several days in a combined state of dulled terror and fatalistic interest. The caper movies I’d seen over the years had led me to understand that a major robbery was a complicated affair, and yet the movies had somehow glided over those complications; if a gang needed a truck, or a centrifuge, or a Warsaw telephone directory, they simply got one between scenes, when no one was looking. The truth I was living turned out to be equally complicated, but much more difficult.

There were so many elements to the thing. Either some way had to be found to borrow a truck from Twin Cities Typewriter on the afternoon of the robbery, or some other Ford Econoline van would have to be stolen and stored and repainted with Twin Cities’ name and colors. A uniform had to be found for Eddie Troyn to match the uniforms worn by the bank guards. The names and addresses and home phone numbers of the late-staying bank employees had to be learned, to cut down the possibility of a doublecross-a teller, for instance, phoning police headquarters rather than his wife. A typewriter had to be picked up somewhere for delivery to the bank, and it had to be the same color and make as all the other typewriters used there.

Then there was the laser. That was another entire robbery in itself, as major in its own way as the bank job. And, in fact, even more frightening; forcing entry into a bank began to seem like kid stuff in comparison with breaking into an Army storage depot patrolled by rifle- toting soldiers. So Camp Quattatunk had to be cased, more uniforms had to be obtained, the specific location of the laser had to be determined, a getaway vehicle had to be provided for, and a complete game plan had to be organized.

It turned out that Phil Giffin, Joe Maslocki, Billy Glinn, and Jerry Bogentrodder all had experience in this line of work-were in fact professionals at it. Phil and Billy were both in Stonevelt because of capers that hadn’t quite worked out-another cheerful thought-while Joe and Jerry had been sent up for activities outside their professional careers: manslaughter during a barroom argument on Joe’s part, check-kiting during a slack robbery season for Jerry. Max Nolan’s professional qualifications were more along the line of burglary and credit card thievery, Bob Dombey it turned out was a forger by trade, and Eddie Troyn never quite got around to mentioning what it was that had brought him here. As for me, the role I was called on to play was that of general thug, a utility hoodlum with more of a social and educational veneer than most. All of the members of the group subscribed to the theory that the toughest guys are the ones who brag about it the least, which I suppose made me the toughest tough guy any of them had ever met in their lives. I did no bragging at all.

But I did play an ongoing role in the robbery preparations. I followed the bank manager’s secretary home one evening to get her address, then hung around and got the family’s last name from the mailbox. I was not present when Max Nolan bought the Minox camera with the stolen MasterCharge card, but I was exceedingly present when Phil Giffin used it to make an interminable photographic essay of the interior of the bank. I was along to shield him from curious eyes that time, though he did complain later that I tended to spend most of my time shielding him from the things he was trying to take pictures of. There were three or four pretty good pictures of me when we got them all developed, but Phil didn’t offer them to me and I didn’t feel I should ask, so I never did get them.

I was also present to stand chickee when Max Nolan burgled the appliance store late one night to steal a beige Smith-Corona electric typewriter, and he felt I was so assured and helpful on that little sting that he chose me to be his partner two nights later when he broke into the Army-Navy store for military uniforms. Standing out on the sidewalk both those nights, watching the flashlight flicker here and there in the depths of the store, cowering as the occasional late automobile drove by, I shivered and my teeth chattered and it was not at all from the cold.

During this same time, my efforts to rehabilitate myself as a practical joker and booby trap setter went into total decline. Gimmicks and snaffles poured from me like some sort of nervous tic, bedeviling my fellow prisoners like a sudden outgrowth of poison ivy. Coffee cups when lifted turned out to have no bottom, or the sugar put in them was salt. Ankle-high cords mined the hallways. I learned that the hot and cold water lines to the main shower room could be reversed and did so on Thursday morning, just in time for the Joy Boys. Benches in the mess hall turned out to have loose screws holding them together, so that when ten men sat down the bench would drop with a clatter and a chorus of startled cries. Sink faucets were plugged so that water didn’t run down into the sink but shot straight out onto the belt of the man turning the tap on. Floors were greased, doorknobs were soaped, milk pitchers in the mess hall were buttered; I’ve seen a half-full milk pitcher spurt from the hand of the man trying to hold it, sail up and out into the air, arch over the flinching man on the other side, and land in a bowl of green beans on the next table.

Of course there were occasional fights, loud recriminations, every once in a while some angry soul dripping water or ketchup or egg yolk yelling that the joint was infested with a practical joker, but the place was just too large for my activities to become generally noticeable. The prison population was nearly six thousand, and even in a good week I couldn’t expect to drench, draw or drop more than a hundred of them-usually less than half that number. And not every one of my victims realized he’d been deliberately attacked; a man trying in vain to open a greased doorknob, for instance, was more likely to curse the stupidity or dirtiness of the person preceding him than to think this gook had been put on here on purpose.

I also left my fellow bank robbers strictly alone. I’d done a few things to them in the beginning, but my terror of the robbery had spilled over into a general fear of the men planning to commit it. I decided to be discreet for once, and did none of my little tricks anywhere around the gym. All I needed was for Phil Giffin, say, to start looking for a practical joker, and to talk to some trusty from the warden’s office who might know the truth about me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about bank robbery or anything else ever again.

On the following Saturday, three days before the robbery, Max and I double dated again, this time with another pair of girls, whose names were not Mary Edna or Dotty. I have no idea who they were, what they looked like, what they did for a living, or anything else about them. I was in a kind of immobile frenzy, unable to think about anything other than the steps leading to the robbery or my string of little land mines. After the inevitable double feature-I retained no memory of either movie-we went to the Riviera for the inevitable hamburgers and beer, and all at once I began, in a loud and cheerful and obnoxious voice, to tell dirty jokes. I never tell dirty jokes, and I was amazed at how many of them it turned out I knew. The girls and Max-and probably everybody else in the place, too-seemed stunned by me, but I just went on recounting my stories, whether I was rewarded with hollow laughter or not. I had no idea what I was doing, but I’d lost control a long time ago so I just sat there and let it happen.

Finally I got to take the girl home. Remembering Mary Edna, I ordered myself to kiss her, because I didn’t want her to feel slighted or insulted. But when the time came, she repulsed me with something like real panic, and fled into her house without even giving me the ritual line about having had a real good time. My dirty jokes, I decided, must have convinced her I was a mad sex fiend rapist. I wanted to feel bad about that, but walking back to the Dombey house all I could think about was that three days from now I was going to become a bank robber.

The next day, when Max asked me how I’d made out, he informed me that his date had become sexually inflamed by my stories and that they had had intercourse first in a parked car on the way to her place and then again on the living room sofa once he got her home. So you never know.