wanted m y friend loose and had come to pay for him to go
now, with me; I felt like a child because the prison was so big
and so cold, it was the gray o f the Camden streets, only it was
standing up instead o f all spread out flat to the horizon, it was
the streets I grew up on rising high into the sky, with sharp
right angles, an angry rectangle o f pale gray stone, a washed-
out gray, opaque, hard, solid, cold, except it wasn’t broken or
crumbling— each wall was gray concrete, thick, the thickness
o f your forearm— well, if you see someone’s forearm up
someone’s ass you know how long, how thick it is, and I seen
these things, I traveled a hard road until now; not how a
gentleman’s forearm seems draped in a shirt but what it is i f it’s
in you— a human sense o f size, chilling enough to remember
precisely, a measurement o f space and pain; once the body
testifies, you know. It was cold gray stone, an austere
monument; not a castle or a palace or an old monastery or a
stone w inery in cool hills or archaic remains o f Druids or
Romans or anything like that; it was cold; stone cold; ju st a
stone cold prison outside o f time, high and nasty; and a girl
stands outside it holding all her money that she will ever have
in her cute little clenched fist, she’s giving it to the pigs for a
man; not her man; a man; a hero; a rebel; a resister; a
revolutionary; a boy against authority, against all shit. H e’s all
sweet inside, delicate, a tender one, and on the outside he is a
fighting boy with speed and wit, a street fighting boy, a
subversive; resourceful, ruthless, a paragon, not o f virtue but
o f freedom. Bom bs here and there, which I admire, property
not people; blow ing up sym bols o f oppression, monuments to
greed and exploitation, statues o f imperialists and w armongers; a boy brave enough to strike terror in the heart o f business as usual. I’m Andrea, I say to the guard as if it matters;
I have the money, see, here, I’ve come to get him out, he’s m y
friend, a kind, gentle, and decent boy, I say showing a moral
nature; I am trying to be a human being to the guard, I’m
always a pacifist at war with myself, I want to ignore the
uniform, the gun, inside there’s someone human, I want to act
human, be human, but how? I think about these things and I
find m yself trying; trying at strange times, in strange places,
for reconciliation, for recognition; I decide reciprocity must be
possible
the outermost concrete wall o f the concrete prison. Later,
when I am waiting for his release, I will be inside the concrete
building and all the guards and police and guns will disappear
as if it’s magic or a hallucination and I will wander the halls,
ju st wander, down in the cell blocks, all painted an oily brazen
white, the bars to the cells painted the same bright white— I
will wander; wander in the halls like a tourist looking around
