"What if the balloon breaks?" I asked.
Manley smiled. "Well then you go out happy," he said.
Slide Step was quiet. We were lying on the grass talking.
"The drugs in prison are always the best," Manley said.
"How come?"
"Because they have to be," Slide Step said. "There's nowhere to hide."
"You can run, but you can't hide," Manley chimed. "You can't be selling no shit."
Every now and then a balloon would break, and someone would get rushed to the infirmary, but it didn't happen that often.
"How do they get it into the visiting room?" I asked.
"The women smuggle it inside their pussies," Manley said.
"Mmm, Mmm," Chet walked up. "Finger licking good."
Manley said, "I don't be eatin' no pussy, now."
"That's why you been eating them little boys," Red snapped.
"Now how the tuck are you going to play me?" Manley said.
Slide Step raised his hand before Manley could get up.
"That's all right, Drag," Red said. "He ain't gonna do nothing." He was staring at Manley with a sadistic grin, happy to have gotten a rise out of him.
"That mouth of yours is gonna need a tampon in a minute," Manley said. "You keep talkin' out the side of your neck."
Slide Step was silent, but I could detect a slight grin.
"They'll be a long, white-ass string hanging out that niotherfiicker," Manley said. He shook his head back and forth, as if wiggling an imaginary string.
The three of them laughed.
Red said, "Well if you're feeling like a frog-Jump! Motherfucker."
"It's true," Manley said. "A real nigger ain't eatin' no pussy, now."
"But them drippings sure does make them balloons slide down," Chet said.
They all nodded.
In addition to running the drugs, Slide Step also ran the rec department, sat on the inmate benefit council, and had a hand in a couple of card games. He had the juice, he had the money, and he knew how to serve his time comfortably.
I was out of my prison blues within a matter of days. Convicts were constantly stopping by us with pants, shirts, shoes, watches, and other items for sale from the outside world. "Here," Slide Step would say. "Go check these out, Squeeze." And off I'd go into one of the dorms to try them on. We were allowed street clothes, but they had to be shipped from the outside or purchased from one of the catalogs-JC Penney or Sears. The money would be taken from an inmate's account.
When I first arrived, the resident unit counselor said I should hold off on having my clothes shipped, since I'd be going back to court in a few weeks. That meant I would have to go through Quarantine all over again. They'd ship everything back home as I went through the bubble, but Slide Step wasn't going to have his prize boy looking like a scrub, so he had me out of any state blues nearly as quick as that coin dropped into Chet's hand.
One day, while I was getting my split-ends clipped in the barbershop opposite the guards' station, Big Cat the barber stepped out and whispered something into Slide Step's ear. When Big Cat returned, he announced that I was getting a facial. When he finished cutting my hair, he pulled a lever on the chair and reclined it, and began pouring hot water over some hand towels. For the next couple of weeks, every afternoon at three, I reported to Big Cat for a hot towel and mudpack facial. The results were amazing. My face began to clear up. Now, I was starting to look, act, and feel like a bad motherfucker.
17
What's in a Name, Anyway?
"You're a sissy," my brother Rick sneered.
I don't remember why he'd said it, but it was as if he had kicked me square in the stomach.
Our parents were separating, so we had just moved into Grandpa's house on Cook Street and we were starting a new school the next day. It wasn't any wonder why, when my kindergarten teacher told me that I had to walk with the safety girls-that I didn't want to go. The Safety Girls were the ones who wore the orange safety belts, and helped the kids cross the street.
"No way," I said. "I'm not walking with girls."
But Miss Greenport insisted. "You have to," she said, "at least until you cross Telegraph Road." It was a large intersection with four lanes of traffic.
"I hate girls," I said.
"I'm sorry, Timmy, but there aren't any other boys thatgo that way."
"No," I said, defiantly, "And you can't make me."
"Oh yes I can," she said.
"Well, if you try and make me, I'll break your glasses."
Well she did, and so did I. Before she could say another word, I jumped up in the air and snatched them off her face. When we heard them crunch underfoot, we both froze in place with our mouths wide open.
I was notgoing to be called a sissy.
Inmate movies were shown every Wednesday and Saturday night. The gymnasium was converted into a theater with rows of folding chairs that were stored on stage, behind a red velvet curtain that looked as old as the Riverside complex.
The Inmate Benefit Council, the majority of which was black, selected the films. Slide Step chaired the committee of six black and two white inmates. The movies included Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown, and The Black Lolita. I'd never heard of these titles and was amazed at how many had the word black in it, like Blacula, Blackenstein, Black Belt Jones, and Black the Ripper. Occasionally, the warden would make them order something that appealed to whites, so they'd invariably pick some low budget flick that was either about CB radios or some outlaw trucker with a sidekick chimpanzee.
Every now and then, they chose a movie that pleased everyone, like The Sting or The Godfather or some other film about gangsters and con artistsmen getting over in some form or another. And everyone liked a good comedy like Cotton Comes to
