sure it was him rolled Louie-’ He touched his left hand to his shoulder: in the excitement one of the biddies had torn the sleeve again.
The young men had engraved their bitterest disappointments upon the walls beside their fondest hopes. They had exposed their betrayers there, mocked their lawyers and doubted their wives. One had assured his sainted mother he was going straight the moment he could make bail and with the same stub end planned straight mayhem, the moment bail was made, upon one Crash Kolkowski. No reason was offered; yet the emergency stood plain:
If it wasn’t for Crash Kolkowski I wouldn’t be in here and where he should be is in hell with his back broke. Every time he comes around shooting off that big flannel mouth us good guys should get together and break his back five or six times. Nobody should even buy him a shot.
The prospect of Kolkowski sweating out an eternity with his spine in a cast while all the good guys in purgatory stood around refusing him just one small snort was sufficiently dismal. Yet even sadder, it seemed to Frankie Machine, was another second guesser’s plea:
Don’t go by Dago Mary she give bad drink
Had Dago Mary prepared the sodium amytal the night before? Or was it only that the coils hadn’t been cleaned? A deed premeditated by midnight and executed with deadpan deliberation in the dangerous noon? Or some casual midweek evening’s error achieved in innocent merriment? Upon the gray confessional of the walls Frankie Machine found no answer at all.
With tedious attention to detail someone had illustrated precisely how a certain aging judge would look, gavel in hand, wearing nothing but high-button shoes and a flowered cravat, while sentencing a sensibly clothed civilian to the electric chair for indecent exposure: a single button had been found loose upon the offender’s fly.
To leave nothing to the imagination the chair, sizzling invitingly, had been sketched in beside his honor. To show how no time was lost, locally, in appeals for pardon, parole or probation, the judge had his hand in reaching distance of the switch and was sweating with impatience to fry this miserable joker personally. There would be no commutation of sentence here.
Chicago justice was in a bad way all right. One could see that at a glance: not a single finger of scorn was pointed at the judge for his own nakedness.
Indeed the Irony of It All had inspired another amateur to scratch a second portrait: a beat-out, tattered, crooked-limbed wreck, groping in two directions at once and captioned
While another commented knowingly:
By the yellow night light’s glow Frankie saw how the four walls, as well as the floor – and by some frenzied acrobatics the very ceiling – recorded with equal fame the damned and the saved: those who would surely ascend the golden escalator reserved for good guys and their true-blue pals, the real sports and square johns capable of breaking any Kolkowski’s back; while upon the rusty freight elevator clanking miserably downward forever would go all copper johns, double clockers, lush workers and mush workers, deadpickers and turncoats, rats, pigeons, stooges, short faders and crap catchers, deadheads and deadbeats who had ever stood drinks for Kolkowski, loaned him a dollar or applauded that big flannel mouth.
Frankie could smell the walls. They were closer now than they had ever been; they bent together above him till the door seemed a part of the walls.
Walls which revealed that, by and large, the young men preferred the simple, straight-from-the-shoulder take- it-or-leave-it sort of warning:
All cops are stooges
Never rat on a pal
Get a steady job and stay home nights and keep off
N. Clark.
While at the very bottom of the cell some latter-day Moses had written off all preceding commandments:
In the growing light the wall legends continued like the continuation of a dream begun in another place: the legends that follow upon each other in all the tongues of man, from cell to cell and jail to jail, linking seas to cities and cities to plains, down the streets of all the world wherever a thief stands waiting behind steel bars and a turnkey waits by the wall.
In one corner some repentant bravo had inscribed a prayer for the salvation of all such sinners as himself, recommending them to John 3:7, and adding piously that he’d leave his body to the Board of Health and his ivory- tipped cue, locked in the middle rack at Spongy Kaplan’s Snooker Palace and Pool Parlor, to Hines Memorial Hospital, providing such sacrifice would bring just a bit more sunshine into the lives of his fellow men.
While dated in the same week some revived will to live and still to do great deeds had come into the same wavering hand. Couched there in formidable obscenities the repentant bravo promised that same Lord he’d burn his old man’s house to the ground within the hour he made the street and found the matches; adding an invitation to all rogue males within the city limits to enjoy his wife’s favors on their first night out of the clink.
My wife only sleeps with her friends and she don’t have a enmy in the world. Call her at Madison 1-6971 and have yourselfs one hell of a time. The tramp married me for my alotment and my old man and her played the horses on my cash 19 months while I got scabies for my country overseas. Now I’m headed for almoney row my old man & that tramp still playing them on my dough I cant even get a winner off her she just gives them to the old man I can go scratch my dirty scabies and she says thats my todays hot tip for you soldier – How you like them onions?
Whether anyone like them onions or not, there they were, all ready for peeling.
Frankie rolled over onto his side to examine the opposite wall in a sluggish hope that there might be some drawings of women there.
But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.
Girls who would and girls who wouldn’t. If they did they were no good and if they didn’t what good were they? One biographer wanted to know and another replied smugly:
All women are deseased
Yet went on to offer consolation for this blow:
We’re all victims of circumstance
And for further consolation to all of Circumstances’ victims:
Drink Dr Jesse Blue’s bay rum and get six months
While another hand countermanded all preceding instructions by commanding everyone, simply and to the point:
DRINK DERAIL
