Three Balconies Page 3

  After a three-hour flight, Kahn rented a car to take him to the prison. As he stepped off the plane, he could have sworn he smelled barbecue sauce. But as he drove the seventy miles to the prison, there didn’t seem to be much South in evidence. Perhaps an occasional indication of it – a Fox Run, a Buzzard Emporium – but for the most part, with its myriad service stations and fast food spots, it reminded him of the discarded outer peelings of any large city in the North. He stopped once to eat local red snapper in a luncheonette. Leaning across the counter to reach for extra French fries, he saw shotguns stacked near the soup bowls. As he ate his fish, a fellow in the next booth, for no apparent reason, began to kick hard at his table legs, as if to chop them down. Maybe this was Southern stuff, he thought.

  Kahn had never been to a prison and wasn’t quite sure how you got at one. Did you just walk up to it and knock on the door? From the outside, the prison seemed drab and generalized, an electronics firm that kept missing out on lush defense contracts. He found the Warden’s office easily enough. Just outside was an exhibition entitled: “A So-Called ‘Harmless’ Utensil.” A rack of malevolent-looking weapons, worse than knives, had been arrayed in a glass cabinet; each had been fashioned out of a toothbrush. A Chicano guard approached and said: “They make some beautiful stuff, don’t they.” His eyes were moist and wondrous, as if he was looking at a famous statue. Kahn had never spoken to a Chicano before and was surprised – shamefully – to find him in a guard’s uniform, not on the inside. The guard took him to see the Warden, a stocky man who wore a neat wedding band and had a fat and friendly neck of the kind that got pinched by granddaughters. The guard took a seat in the Warden’s office, as if he, too, were going to be in on the proceedings, but the Warden made a disapproving face and the guard slipped into the corridor.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Kahn?” asked the Warden.

  Kahn reminded him that he was the one who’d been summoned to the prison. The Warden scratched his head and said, “Oh yes, I forgot.” Kahn enjoyed the man’s absent-mindedness, although it seemed an unusual quality for a Warden. Did he forget where he put prisoners, too? The Warden said he had come up through the ranks, starting his career as a ‘picket’. Kahn enjoyed hearing the word, his first taste of prison slang. The Warden said he lived on the prison grounds with a houseboy who was an ax murderer but behaved gently so long as he was inside the prison.

  “Outside, though, Wheeler can’t cope.”

  Kahn did not like the idea of anyone having a houseboy in this day and age, but he let it pass, reminding himself that he didn’t come down there for a debate.

  The Warden had a new intercom and ordered two coffees; he seemed more interested in trying out the equipment than in the beverage. A secretary brought in two hot cups of it; her face was gray and concerned, as if she was in a constant state of emergency. There was a racket behind a door in the Warden’s office. The official opened it brusquely, his first show of impatience. Kahn caught a glimpse of men in Stetsons who looked like board members and others who might have been prisoners, all boiling up together in an adjoining room. The Warden looked in, muttered something and slammed the door, taking care not to let Kahn look inside at what may have been all his prison troubles, in the one room. As the Warden sat down, Kahn noticed that it was hard to get a clean look at him; one side of his face seemed to be glassed-off, a prison in itself. Kahn concluded that he had an injury, from an old rebellion. He noticed, too, that the Warden wasn’t quite so stocky after all; the effect came from a bullet-proof vest.

  “Did I arrive at a bad time?” asked Kahn.

  “We’re having trouble at our hard-core Unit . . . Pardee.”

  Of course they were having trouble at their hard-core unit, Kahn thought. That’s what hard-core meant, didn’t it. But Kahn liked the Warden’s frankness. On his own, there was little chance Kahn would have found out about the recalcitrant unit.

  “I guess you have to be on your toes every second in a job like this.”

  The Warden snickered. He didn’t spend any time being ingratiating, which Kahn appreciated. He led Kahn to a “transfer station” where prisoners were held temporarily before being shifted to other units. To take one step, you had to wait until a gate slammed shut behind you. Then another one opened. Kahn couldn’t imagine the actual prison being any more secure than the transfer facility.

  “I guess that’s when they’re the most dangerous,” he said. “When they’re being shoved around.”

  “Something like that,” said the Warden.

  From his wallet, he took an old folded-up picture of prisoners in a van with iron collars around their necks, one collar linked to the next. “That’s how they used to get moved,” he said, “in Black Nellies.”

  He shook his head in vague amusement at the good old days, then put the picture back in his wallet. It took them awhile to weave their way through the steel puzzle. When the last gate shut behind them, they broke free into the Prison Yard, an immaculately appointed space the size of a football field. In the center stood a dazzling modernistic sculpture, a mythical creature stretching its wings to the sky, hooves struggling in tropical shrubbery, all of it exploding with concrete beauty. Kahn thought he recognized the work as that of Barnet Mandel, a sculptor who had been jailed in his lifetime for his support of extreme left-wing causes. Was Mandel showing his solidarity with the prisoners? Or perhaps with the prison, for being so forward-looking? Either way, it was amazing that Southern board members had allowed it to be there. A hundred or so prisoners stood about in shy clusters of three and four, trying not to look at Kahn and the Warden. They wore almost surgically white uniforms and might have been hospital employees. Kahn was unprepared for such cleanliness. He had assumed that a prison would have a kind of prison smell, in the way of all public facilities, but this one didn’t.

  “Do they wear the same uniforms at Pardee?” he asked.

  “The exact same,” said the Warden.

  In one section of the Yard black inmate wrestlers, naked to the waist, pawed at each other in the dirt like lion cubs. The Warden said they were members of a crack wrestling team that would compete in another part of the state, all proceeds going to recreational facilities for the prison. They had an inordinate number of scars on them – still, Kahn marveled at the shape they were in, also the terrific physical condition of the other inmates. He was in decent shape himself, but for all his efforts, still a little slack around the middle. He saw a few teams of older fellows in great blacksocketed sunglasses go limping by on crutches.

  “What about them?” he asked.

  The sun tipped against the glassed-off section of the Warden’s face. He said something about threshing machines, but his voice was barely audible.

  “It’s funny,” said Kahn, after inhaling in vain to try to pick up some kind of prison smell, “you can imagine what a prison yard would look like, but you can’t actually get the feel of it till you’re in one.”

  The Warden said nothing. Kahn decided to make no further comments along that line.

  Discreetly salted among the prisoners were almost absurdly young guards. They carried no guns, giving their empty holsters an open-snouted look, like fish gasping for air. The Warden led Kahn up a street ramp to the Prison dining room. It was empty, but the tables were neatly set and covered with cloths so blindingly white that Kahn almost felt he had to turn his head away. There were four place settings to a table, arranged in geometrical precision.

  “They’re not allowed to talk when they eat,” said the Warden, amazingly answering a question Kahn was going to ask. “It works out better that way.”

  Kahn, who loved fresh vegetables – and had recently taken to steaming them to seal in the flavor – suddenly smelled wonderful ones, hot and spicy and aromatic. The Warden led him over to the serving counter where proud prison chefs in great white hats stood beaming over vats of them – not only string beans and carrots, but also more obscure varieties that Kahn rarely got to eat such as okra and turn
ips, all simmering in their own hot juices. In truth, the meat didn’t look that terrific, but the overall aroma was profound and seductive; Kahn felt it was his first real contact with the South since he’d arrived.

  “The vegetables sure do look appetizing,” he said, longing for a heaping plate of them, but too shy to ask.

  “An inmate can have any five he likes,” said the Warden. (So why not just two for me, thought Kahn.)

  “We grow our own,” the Warden continued. “That’s why they’re so fresh. Of course, you’d get tired of it after four or five years, like anything else, and yearn for a pizza.”

  Again, Kahn was struck by the Warden’s balanced attitude – but he was still disappointed when he wasn’t asked to sit down and have a plateful of the vegetables.

  “Would you like to go into the cellblock?” he asked Kahn.

  “Of course,” said the visitor, who wasn’t quite sure what the invitation entailed. Once, in the service, a Major had asked Kahn if he would like to shoot landings in a night-fighter. He’d said yes, and before he knew it, he was vomiting acrobatically in the sky. Kahn started to walk toward a white building with bars on the window.

  “No, no,” said the Warden, “that’s the hospital. You don’t want them sawing your nuts off.”

  It was the Warden’s first tasteless remark; still, Kahn decided to write it off as rough-hewn correctional humor. The Warden led Kahn to yet another building, this one older than the hospital. For a moment, it reminded Kahn of the apartment house in which he had grown up, before his father made a little money in shoulder pads. It also occurred to him that perhaps most of the prison funds were put into outward display – the sculpture in the Yard, the spotless dining room – and that the cellblock itself would be a hellhole. But it wasn’t quite true. The cellblock appeared to be a decent place, on the order of an old public school. He wasn’t quite prepared for all the steel, also the small amount of space between the bars. Only exceptionally slim fellows would be able to stick their arms through. Again, the building had a pleasant smell to it, which was surprising, considering all the tense bodies that were packed together in there. The Warden said that all the prisons were built as maximum security units. If they got a nicer group of inmates, they could always thin out the security. But the opposite wasn’t true. “You can lighten up, but you can’t tighten up,” said the Warden, using what Kahn assumed was a slogan for board meetings.

  “Am I seeing a typical facility?” asked Kahn.

  “Pretty much,” said the Warden. “Although I guess Pardee is a little tougher.”

  Maybe I should be over at Pardee after all, Kahn thought. On the other hand, the Warden didn’t have to bring up the subject of Pardee at all. They walked up three flights of skeletal stairs, everything above and below them visible, the same with the sides. If you scratched your ear, they could spot it from one end of the prison to the other. When they got to the third tier, the Warden stopped and said: “This one’s as good as any.” A guard opened a gate and Kahn had the sensation of being shoved lightly into a cellblock. Suddenly, he was alone in a small space with seventy odd prisoners. He hadn’t expected the Warden to remain outside, but again, it was no doubt in the interest of being fair. If the Warden accompanied him, the prisoners would probably clam up and there would go Kahn’s objective view of life behind bars. Some of the inmates were in their cells – they looked almost like doll houses for children – while others watched a Western on television, in the thin strip of space that made up the day room. Kahn felt a light tremor of panic – he had a history of blacking out in confined places – but he settled himself down. The prisoners seemed to be waiting for him to say something.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m with a newspaper on Long Island.”

  At first, he looked through them, his eyes focused on no one in particular, but then he decided to single out one man – his theatre training – and talk directly to him. He probably picked the wrong fellow, a powerful white man with a lot of cut marks and tattoos and syrupy features that appeared ready to slide down his face. So he quickly shifted over to a younger man with a shy smile and rural features, one he took to be an injured ranch hand. Thus anchored, Kahn was able to sweep his eyes around and talk to everyone. Apart from the fellow with the cut marks, they seemed to be a friendly group. He particularly liked a sleepy Mexican with a fat junkie’s nose who was listening attentively while his hands pretended to carve something invisible in his lap. Kahn had to remind himself that he wasn’t in hard-core Pardee. But maybe Pardee wasn’t so bad either. A prisoner, who really didn’t seem to care, asked Kahn how to get started in writing; he gave him a tip or two and then said: “I’m trying to get started myself.” They laughed at that. The give and take went on, lightly, superficially, Kahn all the while wondering if he could survive in such a place. He decided that if he had to, he could get on nicely, although he was over the norm in the age department. He had been worried about the smell. It smelled just fine. He would avoid the fellow with the cut marks, or perhaps challenge him quickly in the tool-and-die shop and get it over with. He would try to room with the shy ranch hand. If they got the Mexican in with them, they would have an unbeatable trio. Who would dare to fuck with them – three principled but quietly hard men, including Kahn himself, no pushover, especially after he had toughened himself up a bit behind bars. Once he got used to the narrowness of the bars, and all the noise the steel made, he would be fine. The exercise yard was a big plus. He loved volleyball. And oh those vegetables! Imagine getting any five you wanted, every day of the week! How could anyone tire of those delicious little treats, even after years of confinement?

  “Make sure you put me in your movies,” said a chubby, good-natured black fellow who thought Kahn was a director. Kahn realized he had been in the cellblock for twenty minutes, right in the center of check-forgers and possible ax-murderers. When he had first come in, he had been afraid to touch them for fear of being contaminated or taken hostage. Now he was ready to move in with them. He wished them well. They made him promise to drop by again and bring along some “goody-goods” (for this, they made a dope-smoking sign). He could have sworn that even the cut-up fellow’s face softened a bit just before he left. As he walked out of the cellblock he took a quick look at the TV set and was surprised at the clarity of the picture, every bit as good as the one he had in his house on Long Island.

  “It wasn’t too bad in there,” said Kahn, as they circled a pair of handball courts in the prison yard.

  “Yeah,” said the Warden, allowing himself a trace of bitterness, “and we’re supposed to be backward.”

  Off in the distance, Kahn spotted gray sheds and some tense activity in the dust.

  “That’s where they keep the dogs,” said the Warden.

  “Are they trained to kill?”

  “No, just to track down an escapee and scare the shit out of him. Of course, we don’t get too many.”

  Well, that was fair enough, Kahn thought. What was the prison supposed to do, let them walk out of there? Child-molesters and killers? Just as long as the dogs didn’t tear somebody’s leg off.

  The Warden led Kahn on a brisk tour of the laundry where the bone white tablecloths and uniforms were turned out; then they visited the “tag” shop, the automotive training unit and a facility that made dentures for the whole state.

  “At sixty dollars a set,” the Warden said, holding one up and chopping the air with it, “they’re the equal of any in the Sun Belt.”

  Outside the Denture Unit, the Warden excused himself, turning Kahn over to a short and edgy man in his fifties, Father Campesano, the prison padre. Kahn had the feeling that he had once been jovial and twinkly-eyed in the traditional manner and then given up the style. The padre told Kahn that whenever there was a rebellion, in previous administrations, he was the first to be taken hostage; several years back, he had been caught, twirling like a weathervane, in the middle of a shoot-out.

  “My stomach’s supposed to go this way,” he said,
lifting his cassock and pointing, good-naturedly, to a network of scars, “and instead it goes that way.”

  As they walked through the Yard, the fidgety padre peered about, as if to check for snipers. He had an ax to grind with grifters and con men, who for some reason annoyed him more than mass murderers.

  “I’d put your domestic killer back on the street in a minute,” he said. “He did it once, that’s it. But a con man’s got a sheet fifteen pages long. He was born with one leg and, spoiled devil that he is, he’s never learned to get by on that one leg. A con man will never mend his ways.”

  Despite his edginess, the padre still held on to a reservoir of kindness – or so Kahn felt – and the prisoners were lucky to have a man like that around.

  Prisoner art hung on the walls of the library, clowns and bullfighters, blandly sketched. Kahn tried in vain to find one rough jewel in the batch. The prisoners were all penned up. He was positive that their art, if allowed to flow freely, would be hot and sexual. Maybe a lot of it was, but why should the Administration put such works on display? Was it the Rhode Island School of Design? Of course not. It was a prison. Scanning the shelves, Kahn found only books on tannery work and pig iron. Disappointed, he asked the padre: “Don’t you have any other kinds of books?” The padre, possibly praying behind a world Atlas, gestured silently toward a partition. Kahn walked that way, noting with irony that the library was the one section of the Prison that had the bad smell he was worried about. On the other side of a divider, and through a door, Kahn came upon a small and charming section, uncannily similar to the library he remembered from his old neighborhood where he went each afternoon to leaf through The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a favorite. Stacked neatly in old-fashioned covers were hardy perennials such as Dombey and Son and Gone with The Wind. No bestsellers were in evidence, but there were some surprise entries such as Decline and Fall and If It Die. If you’d asked him, Kahn would have expected to find the kinds of books given to people in hospitals such as Cycling Through Vancouver. It occurred to Kahn that if he were doing time in the prison – and it was permitted – he could really “read around” in such a library, and with enormous pleasure. By quick estimate, he guessed there were at least two or three years’ worth of treats in there, before he would have to double back. Reflexively, and not without hope, his eyes traveled over to the “K” section. There on the shelf, between Kaffle and Kensington was The Settlement, by Alexander Kahn, his own first novel, written eighteen years before, a book that had sold only modestly but had been received nicely by a handful of serious critics. Kahn’s second novel, more ambitious, had been annihilated by the very same critics, joined by others. This had given him a sick feeling that never went away. Losing heart, he had become a producer.