My first subject was a Negro who was entirely innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted, viz., lying in wait in the alley behind a bar after an altercation with two of the establishment’s patrons, after which he was falsely accused of battering the two men to death with the use only of his hands and a brick wall that presented itself as a convenient, if immobile, weapon. Or so he claimed. Nearly all the prisoners we interviewed, particularly the sex offenders, harped continually on the subject of their innocence. At any rate, he was led into the cell by a guard with a disapproving face (universally, the guards thought our locking ourselves in with their charges was a bad idea, even suggesting that we wear whistles round our necks in the event we needed to summon aid), and I offered him a chair, cigarettes and a Coca-Cola out of the eight-ounce bottle, a real luxury in prison, since, for reasons that should be obvious, glass was strictly verboten.
The Negro was thirty-one years old, short but powerfully built, with a cast in one eye and a habit of ducking his head and mumbling his responses so that I often had to stop the interview and ask him to repeat himself. As for his sex history, it was surprisingly unremarkable, very little consensual activity with the opposite sex and a burgeoning list of activities of the H-variety, owing to his long incarceration. He talked freely, seemed even to enjoy himself, the novelty of the situation appealing to him, I think, as well as the special consideration with which I treated him, the Cokes (he consumed three) and the largesse of the cigarettes (he smoked half a pack, then pocketed two others). At the very end of the interview, he leaned across the table and said, “You know, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I want to be straight with you, because you been straight with me, know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said, holding fast to my clipboard. “We try to be — that is, we pride ourselves on our, how do you say it? — our hep. Or hepness, that is.”
“Well, listen: I’m not really as innocent as I might have made out.” A pause, a tap at the fresh cigarette he’d stuck for safekeeping behind the lobe of one ear. “The two of them outside in that back alley? That night?”
I nodded.
“Well, I did croak them. My hands — know what I mean? — my hands were like when you get a piece of meat out of the butcher before he wraps it up, just like that. That was their brains, Jack, squeezing through my fingers.”
I had no response to this. This wasn’t what we’d come to hear — this was a different kind of science altogether. My eyes were fastened on his, on the one that wasn’t rolling. There was no sound but the dry wheeze of our internal furnaces, of our lungs pumping in and out. We were in a tomb, deep down, buried deep. Was I frightened? Yes. Absolutely. I mastered myself long enough to say, “Yes? Go on.”
He took his time, the undisciplined eye rolling like a porthole in a storm, and then he reached across the table and took hold of my wrist. “That fat fuck,” he spat.
“Who?” Do not react, I kept telling myself. Let nothing show.
“McGahee.”
I was puzzled. “Who’s McGahee?”
A look of incredulity. “The guard!” he shouted. “The fat fuck of a guard.”
Another long pause. If I’d screamed through a megaphone no one would have heard me.
“I’m going to croak him. Tonight.” He glanced once over his shoulder at the door and the olive-drab blanket hanging like an arras over the peephole and then pulled a sliver of honed blue steel from the waistband of his trousers, and what was it, a spoon worked to a point, the fragment of an iron bed frame, the blistered head of a meteor flung down out of the heavens? Metal, steel. He had it — here, in prison. The man held it there in the light of the freestanding lamp I’d set up along with the desk and chairs. There was an edge to that steel, and it caught the light in a quick sharp gleam of menace.
“Going to shank him,” he breathed, and now I was in on it too, complicit, one of his soldiers, one of his gang. “The fat fuck,” he added, for emphasis, even as he rose from the table, pocketed the two unopened packs of cigarettes, and moved to the door so he could hammer the cold slab of steel with the underside of his fist and roar out to the guard at the end of the halclass="underline" “Open up down there! This here innerview is quit!”
Of course, I bring this up because of the moral dilemma with which it presented us. I was numb through the next two interviews — I got the boxer next, and then the chief Mexican — and the minute we climbed back into the car, I opened myself up to Prok and Corcoran. The fog had closed in on us, and we sat there in the cab of our rental car as if we were prisoners ourselves, confined forever, confined to this, to these questions and this procedure, and the confidences that weighed on us like a judgment. I wanted to scream. Wanted to turn to Prok and bawl till there was no air left in my body.
Prok sat stiffly beside me, so close our thighs were touching; Corcoran was on the other side of me, gazing out the window into the opacity of the atomized light. Prok had been about to start up the car, all business, all hurry, but he paused now, his hand arrested on the key he’d inserted in the slot of the ignition. “I see your dilemma, Milk,” he said after a moment. “But it could be a test, you realize that, don’t you? If word should get back that we’ve broken confidentiality, then we’ll be washed up here — or in any other correctional facility, for that matter.”
“But a man’s life could be at stake — the guard.” I named him, and it was like reading a name off a tombstone: “McGahee.”
Prok had dropped his hand from the ignition. The fog breathed at the windows. “No,” he said finally, “we can’t do it, no matter whose life might be at stake. It’s regrettable, no doubt about it, and I wish it hadn’t come up at all, but we just cannot compromise the project. And, too, it may well be a test, never lose sight of that. Corcoran, you’re in agreement? Milk?”
As it turned out, no one was murdered that night. Or the next night either. To the best of my knowledge, none of the guards was assaulted in all the time we were connected with San Quentin, during that visit and subsequent ones as well. I thought of that Negro, with his dirty shaft of steel and the eye that wouldn’t hold — I think of him now — and wonder if Prok wasn’t right after all. It was a test. That’s all it was. A test.
But then we were on to Berkeley and what has to have been the single defining moment of all my years with Prok: the grand lecture in the field house, attended by no less than nine thousand souls. We were fresh from our confinement at San Quentin — one-on-one in the silent sweating depths, at a remove from everything life has to offer — and now we were on the familiar turf of a university campus, exposed to all the world, nine thousand of the unincarcerated and free-breathing, students and faculty alike hurtling over one another to have a chance to hear the world’s leading authority speak on the one subject that held more fascination than anything their books and philosophies could ever hope to reveal.