Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

29

ANDY BUTLER WAS SYMPATHETIC, but in order for him to be sympathetic I had to tell him an awful lot of the truth: the practical jokes I’d pulled here in the prison, mainly, so he’d understand why Warden Gadmore was so convinced I was the one leaving the help-i-am-being-held-prisoner messages. “I had no idea you were doing that sort of thing,” he said. His kindly face was full of a combination of sympathy and humor. He did see the funny side of it, thank God, which was a bit more than I could do at the moment.

I said, “But you’ve got to keep it to yourself, Andy. Please. If some of those guys find out-”

“I won’t say a word,” Andy said. “Guaranteed.”

“Thanks, Andy. Thanks a lot.” But it seemed to me things were getting too tangled. There were too many secrets, with too many people knowing too many fractions. One wrong conversation, in or out of the prison, would blow the whole thing sky-high.

My friends at the gym were properly sympathetic. “Tough titty, pal,” Phil commented.

I asked Max if he’d get word to Marian James that I wouldn’t be seeing her for two weeks, and he said he would. Of course, in making the request I did have to admit that Marian knew the truth about us-another secret, another fraction, another person I had to trust to keep things to himself. Max, obviously, shouldn’t let Phil and the others know I’d told an outsider about being a prisoner. Good God, the complexity of it all!

Anyway, Max was a little disgruntled at first to learn I’d given his secret to Marian, but when I explained about Stoon being at the party he agreed I hadn’t had much choice. He himself had managed to miss Stoon by missing most of the party; when he and Janet had finally come downstairs most of the guests had already departed.

So. One way and another, I now had secrets and portions of secrets being held for me by my mother, the seven tunnel insiders (with an extra parcel just for Max), Andy Butler, Warden Gadmore, Fred Stoon and Marian James. Let just one of them say one indiscreet word and the whole tottering structure would come collapsing onto my head, like the bricks falling one by one onto Oliver Hardy’s head as he sits in gloomy fatalism in the fireplace.

I spent the rest of Wednesday, after making my deals with the warden and Andy Butler and Max, fretting about the house of cards I had built, trying to think of some way to shore it up a bit here and there, and Wednesday night was full of dreams about floors, lawns, chairs, platforms and airplane bottoms giving way beneath me. After a night of sudden drops, I was so twitchy by morning I was almost ready to say the indiscreet word myself and get it over with.

Then Andy stepped in, with a distraction that more or less saved my life. He was traditionally Stonevelt’s Santa Claus in the Christmas Eve pageant put on every year by the prison amateur theater group, known rather wistfully as the Stonevelt Touring Company. STC, generally called Stick by its members, assayed high in Joy Boys, and put on five or six plays a year, tending mostly toward comedy. Their version of “Stalag 17” had a great echoing vibrancy to it unavailable in other circumstances, and the production they did of “The Women” had to be seen to be believed.

Anyway, Christmas Eve was coming up next day, Friday, and Andy asked me to help him with his costume and props. Grateful for anything at all to take my mind off the shrinking ice floe I was standing on, I threw myself into the production, becoming a kind of extra stagehand, which startled the Stick people and made them very happy. They never, they explained to me, had enough backstage people; if I would like to make ‘grip’ my in-prison career, they would be delighted to have me. Some of them, I think, meant that in more ways than one. In any event, I thanked them all and told them I'd think it over.

What I was actually thinking over was my own life. Warden Gadmore had either been very shrewd or very lucky in rubbing me up against Andy Butler; in listening to him, talking with him, watching the way he interacted with the people around him I became truly aware for the first time of the possibility of a life passed in cooperation and amicability with other human beings, rather than a life passed as a sort of running gun battle or ongoing guerilla operation.

He was so nice. Niceness always sounds bland, but by golly it was a pleasure to be around. In books and movies the devil always gets the best lines, and in truth Andy didn’t have anything memorably witty to say, but whenever he spoke the people around him smiled, and how can you do better than that? He made people cheerful by his presence, and he didn’t try to sell them anything once he had them softened up.

And he was a perfect Santa Claus. He looked the part, from the round cheeks to the round belly, from the white hair to the red nose, and when he delivered his lines, in a deeper resonant voice than his usual speaking style, ‘ho ho ho’ seemed to ripple through every sound.

We talked a bit on Friday afternoon, during the pauses and delays of the dress rehearsal, and I told him I felt maybe I’d been doing things somewhat inaccurately all my life. “I used to be like that,” he said, nodding, grinning at some memory. “My right hand never knew what my left hand was doing. The first time I ever planted a little garden I pulled everything up again before it was half- grown.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, and gave me a broad sunny smile. “That was my sense of humor around that time,” he said.

I didn’t get it, but on the other hand my own sense of humor would probably baffle a lot of people, so I didn’t push the point.

This was my first experience with the world of the theater, and I found it interesting and bewildering. An incredible amount of running, screaming, arguing, weeping, jumping, chaos and frenzy seemed to be required in the backstage area before one small quiet moment could be presented out front. And even when the show was on, with the wise men in procession, for instance, there was still whispering, rustling, rushing about, finger-pointing and hair-tearing taking place just out of sight of the audience-to such an extent that a returning wise man lifted his own voice once he’d exited to ask how anybody expected him to maintain a performance out there with all of this clatter going on. I didn’t hear him get a useful answer.

The show itself was a series of tableaux on The Meanings of Christmas, with here and there a nod to Chanukah for the benefit of Jewish prisoners, plus an occasional bewildering reference to Islam for the sake of any Black Muslims so frivolous as to have attended. Actually they weren’t really tableaux, as one of the shepherds that watched by night explained to me when his stint was over. “In a tableau,” he said, “you just stand there and don’t move.” He demonstrated, with a pose that seemed more pin-up than shepherd. “Sort of like a living painting,” he said. “And usually there’s a narrator or somebody to read something out loud that tells the audience what it’s all about. What we’re doing is sort of moving tableaux; we walk on and off, and go through our little movements, like when I pointed at the star in the east-did you see that part?-but we don’t say anything. Except for Santa Claus, of course.”

Of course. To fill in the silence otherwise there was a traditional narrator, reading a commentary on The Meanings of Christmas that had been jointly written by three staff members of the prison newspaper, the Stonevelt Ripple. The narrator was a onetime Mafia bigwig who had a beautiful operatic baritone. When he rolled out with, “And they come from out of Egypt,” you could see it. Besides seeing it in the tableau, I mean.

The show was actually pretty interesting, at least from backstage. A lot of work had been put into the costumes and the sets, and everybody took it all very seriously. I thought the fellow doing Mary was an absolute knockout, if maybe just a little too flouncy, and Joseph had just the right nebbishy feeling I’ve always thought appropriate to that exemplar of passive inactivity.

But the highlight of the show was Andy Butler, who came romping on in his Santa Claus suit and reeled off a list of gifts he said he’d be leaving in people’s stockings later on tonight. They were all local gags, referring to well- known prison personalities, both convict and administrative. The assistant warden charged with unearthing plots and conspiracies among the inmates, for instance, was given a canary, and one of the more notorious Joy Boys was given a subscription to Family Circle. A convicted murderer who’d spent the last ten or twelve years going on death row every time the death penalty was put back on the books and coming off death row every time the death penalty was abolished again was given a lifetime ballpoint pen guaranteed to skip. The audience ate it all up, howling with laughter, and only once did Andy come up with something too obscure for the crowd to appreciate. “And for Peter Corse,” he said that time, “a new set of teeth.” There couldn’t have been more than three of us in the auditorium who knew what that one was all about, and none of us would have thought it funny. In fact, I thought it was touching, Andy in this happy moment remembering his unfortunate friend. I remembered having hidden Peter’s lower plate on him, and winced in misery at the memory. How bad I’d been!