I recently slipped into the
* * *
*
I had been in the old
Moreover, they can deprive
us of something nowhere else at risk—time. Time
was the overarching currency, not just in
terms of judicial decisions, but in the minute‑by‑minute procedures of the
courthouse. Everyone is rewarded for saving the system time. Everyone in the court room is doing
time.
There is much at stake, and
while the violence of injustice and violation lurk, the system channels passion
into routine. Comes now the bailiff, knowing and bored, to
order the day like a camp councilor with a clean‑up wheel. Bailiffs and
clerks stage manager these ceremonial displays of respect and place—this theater
of the routine. They are the
strictly brought up sons (perhaps politically connected in that old, local sense
of a favor returned, a silence kept) with short hair and tempers to match. They
are the rule‑followers, waiting to be angered; and one revealing rule, strictly
enforced, is the prohibition against reading books even in the very back rows.
We are allowed to look down, but not down at something. The acoustics belie this
pose of concern, but then, showing contempt for the legal system is
illegal.
I was bureaucratically
confusing because my status as a fugitive conflicted with both my voluntary
arrival and my attitude of near total obsequiousness. I was assured that I would
be out in "no time at all." In a sense that proved to be
prophetic.
First, I was channeled.
It began in a small
interrogation room, on loan, apparently, from central casting. The battle‑worn official was pleased to
be able to pull strings to get my case processed quickly (it took about three
phone calls). I was a cooperative "client" (we are all professionals here), but
it was clear that she would rather be in that small, poorly lit room with a
person accused of very violent behavior. Then she could pull bureaucratic
strings and talk in the jargon of the TV cop shows and be close to the fire of
someone who stood to lose real time. Her tough talk marked her as a bureaucratic
handler of those too hot for society. I was of no use to
her.
After much inter‑office
commuting I found myself facing "my" Probation Officer in a sterile cubicle.
(Two hours off the street, and I had my own probation officer!)
I was, despite myself, proud to provide
prompt information about my finances, my mother's maiden name and so forth, but
all this did was reduce her job to absurdity. I knew my place, but this was not
it. I attempted informal, non‑flirtatious contact, something I am usually
successful at. Not here. The more cooperative I was, the angrier she became.
Clutching my blue sheet of paper, the bureaucratic passport I refused to dignify
by reading, I was curtly told to revisit one of the many offices I had been at
before.
I had begun to grade each
room by the friendliness of its inhabitants, and these were my favorites. They
were the sort of folks you ran into on a good day in government offices: not the
stereotyped incompetents that columnists thrive on, but friendly, resigned
clerks (generally older and Irish in this city) with a perpetually bemused look,
waiting for irony, hungry for something out of the ordinary. Besides, they had
an interesting collection of handcuffs which got me to wondering whether there
were enough police to install them all.
By this point I was
mourning, as had so many before me, the loss of a productive day. I shared my
growing annoyance with my friends in this room who responded with knowing looks
and tired smiles. I chatted easily with the latest arrival, and he put me in
handcuffs.
"The Judge runs hot and cold
about the rules, and strictly speaking you're still a fugitive until the warrant
is returned," he explained.
* * * *
I stood in the middle of the
room, hands in an unnaturally supplicatory position,
near prayer. The outside of my field of vision blurred as I focused all
attention on the surprisingly comfortable devices binding my wrists.
The moment I realized this
was not a joke I started thinking about how I might get them
off.
There was no way I could get
them off.
I no longer remembered what
the person who put the cuffs on looked like. I couldn't look at him. I had just
been involved in an annoying, middle‑class,
paper‑chasing tangle. Now I was being frisked for
dangerous weapons.
"Don't you want to check his
briefcase?" taunted a clerk. "That's where he keeps the bombs." Even in jest, my
briefcase was transformed from a mark of respectability to a possible source of
danger. Such mock threats, like frivolous highjack jokes, imply a lack of
respect which can seriously anger people in authority. But here the
representatives of the penal system were making them. They were now untypically close to the "action," but it was with someone
who had comparatively little at stake because he was not really risking time. It
was probably as confusing to them as it was to me. I couldn't judge its impact
on the person who had put me in cuffs. I still couldn't face him.
Someone else approached,
saying, "We have procedures we have to follow" and led me out of the office into
the hands of a uniformed officer who took me a short distance (it may have been
a long distance. At that point I was just floating). He put what seemed like a
large key in a large lock, opened an old metal door and motioned me
in.
To the extent that I
expected anything, it would have been a bored, slightly bemused Judge at a
well‑used conference table who would let me explain my situation and let me get
out of there, get out of there, get out of there.
* * * *
Instead, I was led into a dingy
room with bars on the tiny windows and an open toilet bowl in the corner. A holding cell.
I was with the people the
system was there to protect me from.
There was a timeless moment
of personal orientation during which the emotions that ran over my face must
have been insultingly transparent to the 9 black, 1 Hispanic and 4 white faces
who checked me out briefly and resumed their
activities. After a perfectly timed, echoing silence, a sardonic black voice
said, "We're all your friends, here."
I blushed, letting out an
inadvertent laugh at my predicament, my vulnerability and the classic
embarrassment of the middle class child trapped in shorts while the tough kids
wore jeans. A nice middle class Jewish boy.
Here.
I put my head down, walked
purposefully to the nearest and only window and pretended to look out. I glanced
at them: a bunch of young, working class guys hanging around a grimy rec room; some playing cards, some wandering, some in small
groups talking, all casually passing time. All wearing
handcuffs.
I tried to make sense of all
this as quickly as I could.
The first thing I looked at,
being in
With a sudden lunge, he
began banging on the steel‑barred cell door and screaming for food. He didn't
appear to be weak with hunger, and it was not clear to me what was going to
happen next.
Of course it was clear what
was going to happen next. That is what it means to be imprisoned. The guards
came rushing in, and one of them informed us through words and sneers that we
could make just as much noise as we wanted because the Judge would just give us
more time when we came to trial. So we should, he concluded, make even more
noise, "assholes". Not since I had been at summer camp had I heard that tone
coupled with that invitation. I was momentarily transformed into a rebellious
con, testing the limits of the common enemy. I tried to foment a rebellious
bond, a smirk, with the fellow nearest. He turned away, of course, facing the
wall of his time. I remembered who
I was.
I tried, not for the first
time, to check my watch. I looked at it. Forgot what it said. Double checked it. Forgot and checked
again. I simply could not read my watch. I was trying very hard to remember
everything about my experience, and it seemed to be sticking, but I could not
read my watch. I looked out the dingy window and saw people walking around the
street. They didn't know I was here.
As soon as the guards left,
the black man who had "welcomed" me approached the white fellow, made small talk
and shook his hands. (I had forgotten that they all had cuffs on. They
maneuvered them as naturally as hockey players maneuver skates). They held what appeared to be a summit
meeting on one of the long benches. The black man acted as warden, and it
appeared that the white man had fulfilled an initiation of rebellion. We're all
niggers here?
Shortly thereafter (I could
no longer testify even remotely as to how much time was passing), the white man
started in again. This time, however, he was immediately intercepted by the
black leader who quite professionally cooled him out without any apparent
humiliation or threat. The other blacks monitored them with the knowing looks I
had seen white guards use on black prisoners.
Perhaps the black was not
simply congratulating him the first time. Perhaps he was taking his measure in
anticipation of just such an outbreak. We're all administrators here.
With exceptions, the blacks
seemed somewhat more "normal" than the whites. (One of the whites, for example, had not
only handcuffs but manacles. He stood alone throughout). This echoed the results
of previous research I happened to have done about prisons. Being in this
setting was less out of the mainstream for young black men than for their white
counterparts. Blacks didn't have to do as much to get there.
Things settled. I kept
trying to read my watch and eavesdrop on my compatriots. They spoke of judges and lawyers,
strategies and hopes, betrayers and betrayals...shop talk. One talked with wry
understatement about how he had mistakenly failed to get a deposit slip on his
way out of the bank. There was enormous emphasis on details — consciousness
imprisoned. Every facial twitch of the defense lawyer or some other actor in
their court room dramas was chewed over endlessly and mercilessly.
As I listened in on their
conversations and the details of their lives (how many times over the next years
would some of them replay those last moments!) it dawned on me that I had been
there for a very long time. I kept trying to work my watch, but I was no longer
sure why.
I tried to remember if my
outside obligations were under control. I...was...not...
getting...out! I couldn't even approach the
window to look out. I couldn't even look at the window. All of a sudden time
ceased. There was no progression of events, thoughts or feelings. I was
suspended in time just as I had been suspended in space when I was first entered
the room. These surroundings were all I would ever see — always these walls; the
other men were the only companions I would ever have — always these faces. There
was no movement, just an anxious awareness that I couldn't move. Might never move. Count to five, and it could be five seconds
or five minutes. I tried to take some control. Walked across
the room. Walked back. I don't know if I
repeated this; there was no sequence to things, no end. What could I control? I
once commuted interstate and noticed that a certain driver would periodically
and without justification accelerate and then decelerate. I initially chalked it
up to bad driving, but it began to make more sense as an unconscious need to
create the illusion of control, of autonomy. The endless rural stretches were
not challenging. He was, I think, asserting his expertise, his decision making
capacity, by accelerating and decelerating. He was re‑creating his skill, like
the circus elephants that sway to the music, do the routine, even after the show
is over. I felt nausea without release. Suffocation.
The room didn't spin. Nothing moved.
A guard came in and intoned
the typical
* * * *
The question of what time it
was ‑‑ what time itself was ‑‑ began to fade, but there was still some question
of who I was. Paraded down the aisle in steel constraints and under police
guard, I was torn between the desire to disassociate myself from my apparent
status and the desire to sneer at those not yet in cuffs. Such is the power of
circumstance that even as part of this transient theater, I felt an
uncharacteristic kinship to street toughs. I had "survived" the magnetic north
of their lives.
I had done time—not in the chronological
sense or in romanticized solidarity with street‑wise dragons, but rather in the
sense of having involuntarily lost touch with the world, with who I was and with time itself.
Yet I was unable to make eye
contact with the "audience" as I walked down the aisle. This was revealing, from
an inveterate starer and
* * * *
I was led to a special box
by the side of the judge. I stood shielded from the pristine sensibilities of
the "audience" with the shrouded intensity of a Medieval confessional. It felt as though there were an arched
hood over my head. Perhaps there was.
I had an emerging sense of
who I was, what I was "in" for, and what I had been through. The rule of the
short tempered clerks had reasserted itself, probably triggered by the Judge's
outraged remarks which I began to discern.
"There are rapists running around the
streets and he's in there like this?"
The Judge quickly ordered me
out of my confessional to appear before him and demanded to know who had put me
in handcuffs.
No one,
apparently.
I was ordered to pay a small
fine to the man who quickly freed my wrists. ("Don't do the crime if you can't
pay the fine...") I was told to go
to the site of my handcuffing and get my belongings. The Judge apologized
for my treatment. I didn't point out that it had occurred because someone
believed He might be angry if it hadn't.
Easy time, now.
I would soon walk out onto
the same street that was dimly visible from the small, dirty, barricaded window
of the holding cell. The prisoners wouldn't notice me (none of them ever looked
out during my stay) any more than I had ever known they were up there (how
strange to go to jail in an elevator). I had experienced through a finite,
protective bubble the reality‑without‑limit for many of those young men. While I
was there, they made indelible stamps on my consciousness. I began to forget
them.
I found my way back to the
site of my official capture, picked up my briefcase and make small talk with the
clerks. "Out so soon?" smiled one. (Ah, yes, 'no time at all...') "They haven't
made the prison yet that can hold Bill Fried!" I joked, emphasizing the
correct pronunciation of my dual purpose last name. They laughed and went back
to work. I glanced at my watch on the way out.
-end-