“Well, no, Sarge, he didn’t exactly resist arrest.”
The Tombs were overcrowded because of the previous night’s sweep, and Winston was hustled to a storage space that had been converted into a temporary billet. Designed to hold forty men, it currently held fifty, not including the seven corrections officers. Winston walked directly to an empty cot, shook the pillow, lifted the foam rubber mattress, then ran his hand underneath the bed frame. Turning to face the rest of the inhabitants of temporary holding pen D-6, he said, “Any motherfuckers got some shit hid up in, near, around, over, or under my area, come get it now. I’m not trying to catch no kind of charges on this bid, but I will get in your ass if I have to.” Winston immediately recognized at least two-thirds of the inhabitants, and his caveat, though earnest, was inflected with a bit of whimsy. No one spoke, though judging by the grins on their battered faces, most of his bunkmates were happy to see him.
“Stop woofing, yo! This is a Blood thing, son.” A slim boy of about seventeen with a red bandanna tied around his neck stepped out of a pack of twelve rumpled, red-clad black men languishing about the center of the room. “We’ll hide anything we want, where we want.” Winston glanced at the nearest corrections officer, who was reading the paper and not paying much attention to the conversation. “I know you will,” he said, opening his hands and taking an easy stride toward the goateed young man. “But I’m just letting you know, you don’t want to hide jackshit my way.”
Winston knew who he was talking to: Yancey “Whip Whop” Harris, member of the upper echelon of the Spanish Harlem Bloods, and once a gifted comedian. When he was younger Yancey was as far from the thug life as a boy could be. An honor student, he was the neighborhood funny man, whose antics and impressions made two hours’ worth of grade-school detention fly by. Whip Whop was the type of guy people fought to sit next to on the subway. When a merchant killed his two brothers during an armed robbery three years ago, Yancey stopped telling jokes, stepped off the stage, and joined the shock troops.
Winston and Yancey both knew that in a fair fight Winston would beat Yancey like a slave, but none of the soldiers standing behind Yancey were fair. They also knew that after a night of police brutality from arrest to arraignment, Yancey wasn’t spoiling for a fight, just asserting his leadership. “Zero-zero-one,” Yancey said to his aide-de-camp, relaying some command in their coded binary language. The acolyte muttered back, “One-Zero-One-One-Zero,” then asked a guard to turn up the volume on the boom box, an implicit okay that it was now safe for Winston to turn his back.
There was some temptation for Tuffy to throw his lot in with the Bloods — sit at their table, playfully pinch their wounds, thump their bruises, and stare down the Puerto Ricans. Though he remained alone, he found himself staring at the Puerto Ricans anyway. Not long ago they ran the city’s jails. Powered by overwhelming numbers and a loose coalition, the Latin Kings and La Ñeta regulated every aspect of a prisoner’s life, from what hand he ate his meals with to when he could defecate. The two groups feuded and the Bloods stepped in to fill the breach. Now reduced to being the French Résistance of the New York State prison system, the Latinos sat on their beds, observing the occupying forces. Scattered about the makeshift holding pen were the independents, most of their anuses puckered tight with fear. Three Asian boys huddled in a corner doing cigarette tricks. Two stray white boys, arrested on the wrong weekend for minor violations, changed positions every few minutes, trying to stay within the guards’ sight lines. The unaffiliated colored kids congregated in the corners. Those who had their sneakers stolen wore orange foam-rubber slippers that made a sickening crinkly noise when they walked. The mentally ill were the only ones who mingled.
Tuffy, the collective eyes of the Bloods hawking him, approached a stocky Latin King, Brody Onteveras, known as King Bro. “You got case quarters for a dollar?”
“Here.” King Bro slapped three quarters in his palm.
Winston straightened. “Give me my fucking quarter, motherfucker. How you going to show, charging me a quarter for a dollar change?”
“You lucky I don’t charge you four dollars a quarter.”
“You better stop playing. Did I charge you when you needed a place to stay after Marisol …? Motherfucker, don’t let me put your shit in the street.” Blushing, King Bro handed Winston the fourth quarter.
Winston cut the line of inmates waiting for the phone and placed a call home. No answer.
“What’s this I hear about you running for City Council?” King Bro asked, his question quickly followed by a chorus of “For reals?” from every corner of the room.
“For reals. I’m running.”
“Why you doing something foolish like that?” asked Whip Whop, rising from his seat and almost treading into the Latin King side of the bunker.
Winston grabbed a chair, spun it backward, and sat in it so that his chin rested on the top of the seat back. He positioned himself between the Latin and the black camps. “Because I was talking out the back of my neck and said some shit without really thinking. Then someone put some money in my pocket.” The prisoners gathered around Winston as close as warring factions could gather around anything. “Man, can you imagine if a nigger like you won?”
“No, I can’t.”
“That be some out shit, though.”
“But if I did win, you know what I’d do?”
“What?”
“I’d sit in the meetings, take my shoes off, and put my funky feet on the table, and say, ‘I don’t know what you stupid motherfuckers is making laws about, but don’t forget the poor smelly motherfuckers like me.’ At the very least I’ll tell y’all niggers when the next roundup is.”
“On the real, though,” Whip Whop and King Bro said simultaneously. With a nod Whip Whop yielded the floor. “We need a voice. One of us speaking, instead of some television nigger speaking for us. Tuffy, if you ran I’d vote for you just on some ol’ humbug-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-type-shit.”
Winston took out a couple of empty petition pages and some voter registration cards, items neither the police nor the guards who frisked him deemed dangerous weapons. “CO,” he called out, “pen, please. I’m writing a letter to my lawyer.” The guard tossed him a felt-tipped pen. “All y’all sign here then, put me on the ballot. You nonfelony motherfuckers, fill these out. I’m going to send you misdemeanor bench warrant niggers absentee ballots.”
While the men passed around the petition, Winston spoke until lights out, not politicking a bloc of potential voters, but just simply getting some thoughts off his chest. “Look at us — in jail, treated like animals. Take a last look at the white boys, because they fixing to get desk appearance tickets. Judge going to wave his finger in their faces, ‘Don’t do it again.’ For us it don’t matter if we do it once or two million times, we headed for Rikers to spend sleepless nights listening to jet airplanes take off and land, and niggers getting tossed. Look at y’all niggers, niggers I’ve known since back in the day when we was shorter than shorties. I played in the johnny-pump with Ramón, Peehole, Felipe, Point Blank, Carlos, Tony Bump-off, Yancey. Stolen petty shit with Foster, Pan-Pan, Hard Top, and Hennessey. Lent money, borrowed money from damn near everybody in this piece. But I realized soon as I walked in here, seen so many niggers I know to be down decent motherfuckers, I was like, ‘Damn, there’s some good niggers in jail.’ Most of us in here because we was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Been that way since our births, if you think about it.” As he spoke, the circle tightened around him, cinching like a drawstring to a felt bag of valuables. With Winston as the midpoint of the circle, the friction between the gangs eased. The arc of each gang circumscribed a disjointed circle around him. Winston imagined the ghost of Musashi Miyamoto, stick in hand, filling in its gaps. The young gangsters listened, sucking on razor blades lodged alongside their callused gums, rubbing the crescent-shaped scars on their faces with their fingertips.