Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

3

MY FIRST CELLMATE, who was also the man I would be replacing in the license plate shop, was named Peter Corse, a stout wheezing old man with watery eyes and dough-white skin and the general aspect of a potato. When I met him he was a very bitter man. “My name is Kunt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

And he said, “Who pays for my upper plate?”

I said, “What?”

He opened his mouth, showing me a lower set of tiny teeth of such porcelain-white falseness that they looked as though he’d stolen them from a doll. Above were gums that looked like a mountain range after a forest fire.

Thumping these gums with his doughy thumb he said, “Oo ays uh iss?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was beginning to believe I’d been locked in a cell with a mental case, a big overweight dough-white old man who was crazy as a loon. Wasn’t that unusual punishment? I looked back through the bars at the corridor, but of course Guard Stoon was already gone.

Corse had finally taken his thumb from his mouth. “My upper plate,” he said in a fading whine. “Who pays for it?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

He stumped around the small cell, complaining in a querulous voice, gesturing angrily with his big soft arms, and gradually I got the story. He had been in this prison thirty-seven years, for some unstated ancient crime, and now all at once he was being paroled, before he could chew. The prison dentist had taken away his teeth, but had so far replaced only half of them. In the outside world, who would pay for his new upper plate? How would he live? How would he chew?

He truly did have a problem. He didn’t have a Social Security number, so far as he knew, and had never heard of Medicare until I mentioned it; would either of those pay his dental bills? He had no family or friends on the outside, no skills other than packaging license plates, nowhere to go and nothing to do. Even with his teeth his prospects would have been bleak.

He insisted they were pushing him out only because the prison was overcrowded, but I believed that what had happened to him was simply some horrible misapplication of man’s humanity to man. I was convinced some official somewhere was delighted with himself for rescuing Peter Corse from oblivion and sending him out into the world again with no hope, no future, no family and no upper plate.

I did sympathize with him. I offered to write a letter for his signature to his Congressman-I couldn’t write mine, he being one of the two in the accident that had brought me here-protesting the situation, but he refused. He came from that last generation of Americans who would rather die than ask anybody for anything, and he was determined to keep his toothless integrity to the end. He spent much of his time muttering and grumbling dark threats about how he would get back in here one way or another, but they didn’t mean much. What could a man in his age and condition do, really?

We only had a week together, but in that time we became fairly good friends. It made him feel better to have somebody he could complain to, who would neither laugh nor ignore him. He also liked playing the role of the old pro, showing the new boy the ropes. He’d developed simple cleaning and storing rituals in his cell over the years to make life easier for himself, and I adopted them every one. On the yard he introduced me to some of the other older cons, including the gardener I’d watched through Warden Gadmore’s window. Butler, his name was, Andy Butler, and up close he had masses of thin white hair, a round nose, and a simple beautiful smile; I wasn’t surprised when Corse told me Butler traditionally played Santa Claus in the prison Christmas pageant.

Corse also told me which cons to stay away from. There were three groups of tough guys on the yard that I should avoid, and there were also the Joy Boys. This last bunch never caused trouble on the yard, but they had made the shower room their personal territory on Mondays and Thursdays. “Never never take a shower on Monday or Thursday,’’ Corse told me, and rolled his eyes when he said it.

At work, too, Corse was my Virgil. It was his job I was taking, and during the week which was his last and my first he showed me how it was done. It was a simple job, but satisfying in its way. I was to sit at a wooden table, with a stack of thin paper envelopes on my left and a stack of just-painted license plates on my right. In front of me I had a rubber stamp like a supermarket price marker and a stamp pad. I would take the top two plates from the stack, check them to be sure they were both the same number and that the paint job had been properly done, and then insert them together into an envelope. I would then adjust the rubber stamp to the same letter- number sequence as the license plates, wump it onto the stamp pad, wump it onto the envelope, and toss the package of plates and envelope onto the far side of the table in front of me, where a rawboned tattooed man named Joe Wheeler would check the number off on his packing list and put the plates into a cardboard carton, ready to be sealed up and shipped out to the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Albany.

There was a strangeness about the week I shared with Peter Corse. He had been here thirty-seven years, prison had freeze-dried the juice and the life out of him-like a cancer victim frozen after death to await a cure-and now he was leaving. And I had arrived, to take over his cell and his job and his relationships with his old cronies. I’d been looking forward to the new life I’d lead in prison, but this was maybe going too far.

Corse always kept his lower plate in a glass of water under his bunk while he slept, and the night before he left I hid it in the foot of the bed. When he found it he would think he'd left it in his mouth last night, lost it in his sleep, and that it had traveled to the other end of the bed because of his movements while asleep.

Except that he didn’t find it. I can’t think why not, it wasn’t hidden that well. He was frantic when he got out of bed, of course, but he was poking through his blankets when I left for my license plate job and I assumed he’d have his teeth back in his head in just a few minutes.

That night, however, when I transferred to his bunk, the lower plate was still there. That made me feel bad for a while-particularly because this was the kind of thing I was trying to stop doing-but after all half a set of teeth hadn’t been that useful to him. He was better off starting from scratch than trying to suit a civilian upper plate to these institutional monstrosities.