Ink from the Pen
Mark and I are just working on finishing touches for Ink. I have enclosed a favorite sample to whet your appetite.
Avocados
Some of the deputies hated that our dorm possessed the only big screen TV in the entire jail, but somehow the owner of the Silver Lake disco who had donated it — coincidentally, a man I’d worked next to when we both tended bar in the early 90s — had secured a guarantee that they wouldn’t pull it off the wall and hand it to the boys in a regular dorm. However, as a form of group punishment, the cops did take away the extension to the plug for days at a time.
Another political concession to the gay community was the weekly distribution of condoms. Each Wednesday, a very butch young lesbian would be shown in by reluctant guards and deliver a short but defiant statement about the right to and necessity of safe sex before she proceeded to hand out Trojans to whomever wanted one. My choice to take one was strictly aspirational, as my libido had set sail for the moment and would not be sighted again in quite some time.
That didn’t mean a condom didn’t come in handy. One weekend when our viewing privileges had been taken from us, I blew one up and made a balloon. Soon a bunch of us were playing indoor volleyball in the area where we normally watched TV, laughing and carrying on as if we had turned the tube off ourselves because this was so much more fun.
Very few of the deputies seemed to like working at the jail much more than we liked being inmates there, but it was an increasingly rare union job that could support a family and came with a pension. The younger deputies were putting in their requisite time en route to becoming motorcycle cops — the glamorous job they’d joined up for in the first place. Among those guards, we steered clear of a certain type: the ones who’d made it out and blown it, usually because of bad tempers that caused minor traffic stops to escalate into lawsuits. They’d liked riding around town in their shiny boots and aviator glasses, and were furious that threatening a studio exec with their nightstick had gotten them demoted to a windowless dungeon full L.A.’s flotsam and jetsam.
Unfortunately for us, it was a lot easier to get away with being an angry asshole inside Twin Towers than it was on the wide boulevards of the city. Most of them knew they’d never make work “up top” again, and that just pissed them off even more.
We only rarely saw “gen-pop” prisoners (the straight prisoners in “general population”) but a line of them would occasionally pass a line of us in the hallway, each group silent, hands behind our backs. We might be going to and from the mess hall, to the library, or back from weekly exercise on the roof.
Once our lines were stopped just as we were perpendicular to each other. We were probably waiting for some kind of “all-clear” because a fight had broken out somewhere in the prison and calm hadn’t yet been restored.
The two deputies leading each line engaged in some languid, water-cooler banter as they waited. Then someone from their line raised his hand and the deputy asked what the problem was.
“Abogado. Yo quiero ver un abogado.” There was a look on his face of real despair, as if he’d been languishing anonymously for weeks until, finally, another Spanish-speaking inmate had told him he had some rights here, that this wasn’t Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras.
“Avocado? You want some avocado?” The deputy’s response was in a tone just shy of overt sarcasm, intentionally designed to frustrate the questioner into wondering if he was being mocked or had sincerely been misunderstood.
“Abogado. Yo quiero ver un abogado,” repeated the inmate, no doubt suspecting as he heard the words come out of his mouth that his efforts were in vain.
Strictly speaking, this guard may not have spoken Spanish, but no one in L.A. can drive three blocks without seeing huge ads on the back of every bus trumpeting “abogados” who will fight like pitbulls for your “derechos” in court, so I wasn’t buying it.
Then the other deputy decided to join in the fun.
“I want an avocado too, but I don’t think my wife packed one in my lunch today.”
His buddy snickered. Humiliated, the inmate gave up. Evidently, he was going to have to wait for a C.O. named “Vasquez” or “Pacheco,” and even then have to rely on luck.
I silently fumed at the deputy’s contemptuous disregard for someone who could be, for all he knew, completely innocent. I squinted to see the officer’s name as I walked past, but got a “Head down, inmate!” barked at me for my trouble.
The perverse thing about law enforcement is how often you hear over and over again: “I love being a cop,” or “This is all I ever wanted to do.” And yet what I mostly saw were people who didn’t seem to like their jobs at all. They might have gotten off on the petty powers they wielded — but that makes for such an ersatz satisfaction.
A few weeks later, one of the “avocado” cops was actually on duty outside of the nurse’s office as Jojo and I waited to be called in for a blood draw. (Whether it was Deputy Fric or Deputy Frac I can’t say, just that it was one of the two.) Jojo had been telling me about the drama that had landed him in jail, and the way he pronounced a particular word that kept coming up in his story popped a pun into my head. By the time Jojo caught a breath, it had become a punchline, but I hesitated trying it out. Not without a caveat first.
“Hey, Jojo, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, Mark,” he answered a little too quickly, perhaps hopeful I was finally going to gauge how he felt about bringing my hairy chest down for a visit to his bottom bunk after lights-out.
“I need to know if this joke in my head can be told by a white person without sounding racist. ‘Cause I think it’s kind of funny.”
“Don’t worry baby, I’ll be honest with you.”
So I told him, and he laughed. He laughed hard.
“Oh honey, no, you can’t tell that joke. I mean you can, but you can’t.”
Then he added gleefully, “But I can!”
His laughter had already drawn the attention of the deputy, in a distracted sort of way. Jojo, an entertainer to his core, took immediate advantage.
“You wanna hear a joke, boss?” The C.O. shrugged, feigning indifference, so Jojo spiced the pot.
“It’s about cops.”
This did evince a slightly perceptible raised eyebrow from the deputy, suddenly curious. Was this black inmate going to diss him to his face?
“Sure.”
Jojo winked at me and dove in.
“So, why do you guys deserve a raise?”
The cop eyed him suspiciously, afraid it was a trick question. But he couldn’t back out now.
“I’m game. Why?”
With expert timing, Jojo paused, only long enough for the guard to cock his ear. Then he brought it home.
“Cause you ain’t the rich-lice. You da po’lice!”
The cop’s smile was thoroughly slow and completely reluctant, but he was unable to suppress it. Here was a joke with a little bit of edge but not really mean-spirited, right? He could tell it in the station locker-room. And he could preface it quite truthfully with the qualifier that a black inmate had told it to him.
Yet I suspected that somehow after telling the joke with much success to white officers, he would get cocky, and then share it with some black officers. Even if they laughed, he would know it didn’t quite sound right when he told it. Suddenly he would be one of the guys the black officers exchanged silent glances about. That guy.
The nurse called Jojo in, and I just sat on my little bench, feeling an odd elation, as if I’d just seen the cop sprinkle laxative on his own guacamole.