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For my dear friend, Suzie MacKeigan, whose
generous spirit has embraced many a girl like
Harry Sue
All you fish, listen up. I’m talking to you. While you’re sitting there, cooling your heels in the tank, you might as well know the story of Harry Sue. Everything moves slower here. It’s like walking underwater. Time, my friend, is something you have too much of, and you’ll learn that a story well told—even if it’s full of joint jive you can’t fully comprehend—is worth more than all the personals you collected on the outs. Especially if it lifts you out of your skin.
You got a lot to learn if you intend to survive the joint, and finding the right teacher is no easy matter. Everyone wants to play you on the inside. Maybe you think the cast-off child of two convicted felons is not a good bet. Well, you’ll soon find that on the inside, up is down and left is right.
Or maybe you’re a buster, the kind who raises his hand and says, “I’m no fish, Harry Sue. What are you on about?”
My answer to that is plain and simple: “Yes, you are.” I don’t mean fish, fish, fool. I mean fish. New to the system. And if you still don’t follow me, go on and look it up on the next page so you don’t fall behind.
Now I know I can count on at least one waterhead to say, “There must be some mistake, Harry Sue. I have no intention of getting on the wrong side of the law, let alone being sent to the joint.”
Whoever said it was a choice?
It’s time you learned something for real. Not all prisons have four concrete walls and a steel bunk. I say prison is a lot like home. It all depends on where your heart is. Language gets out of prison every day, Fish. You may already know some slammer slang from your life on the outs. But just in case you get tangled, here it is:
Harry Sue’s Joint Jive Glossary
all day: going to prison for life
backstory: the story of how you got to prison
bug: go crazy
bumpin’ your gums: talking too much
burn the spot: ruin the moment
buster: a jerk
Category J or J-Cat: a person who is or acts crazy
catnap: a short prison sentence
cell warrior: a con who talks a good game from his cell but backs down outside it
change: some part of a year
cheese eater: a tattletale. What eats cheese? A rat, of course.
click: to gang up on someone. “Click up” means to join a gang.
con: a male convict, prisoner
conette: a female convict
cooling your heels: waiting
couple up for count: an order to prisoners to pair up to be counted
crew: the gang you hang with
crumb snatcher: little kid, toddler, child
deuce: a two-year prison sentence
dime: a ten-year prison sentence
ding wing: the mental ward
direct order: a command from an officer
doing time: living out your sentence in prison
down letter: letter saying you don’t get parole
dragon’s tongue: the overcooked roast beef they serve in the prison cafeteria
drop a dime: tell on another con
dry up and blow: disappear
ear hustle: eavesdrop
eight ball: an eight-year prison sentence
eyeball: when a con stares down a guard. It’s a bad idea.
eye hustle: see something you’re not supposed to
fish: a new prisoner
flat-talkin’ fool: a con or conette who talks nonsense
foo foo: anything that makes you smell sweet, like aftershave or perfume
funky: smelly
gas house: prison bathrooms
get shanked: get wounded by a shank
give it up: share information
gladiator fight: a fight to entertain the other cons and show you’re tough
green light: when a prisoner is marked for death by other prisoners
hack: a prison guard
hard time: a long, hard sentence, usually for cons who don’t play by the rules
hog: a prisoner who won’t back down from a fight
hole: solitary confinement in prison
home release: when you get out of prison for a little while
homes or homey: short for “homeboy” or friend
inside: in prison
it’s on: a challenge, a call to fight
joint: prison
joint jive: prison language
joint mentality: so used to being bossed around, you don’t try to fight
KO: knockout
lay it down: start a fight
lockdown: when prisoners have to stay in their cells during a crisis
low pro: keep a low profile, keep it secret, between two road dogs
mad-dog: mess with by insulting
MCC: Metropolitan Correction Center, a big-city prison. If you have a choice, don’t go here.
monkey: another name for a guard
nick: a nickname for “nickname” … get it?
nut up: go crazy
on the low: keep it to yourself, a secret
outs: life on the outside
PC up: when a con or conette asks to be put in protective custody because he or she’s afraid
personals: your stuff
play you: fool you
put grass under your feet: walk away from a conversation
R & D: receiving and departure—coming in and going out of prison
rap sheet: a list of your crimes
rat: a tattletale
retired: a life sentence without a chance of getting sprung
road dogs: the friends you know you can count on
roadkill: cigarette butts cons pick up by the side of the road when they’re part of a cleanup crew
sent up: sent to prison (in some parts of the country, it’s “sent down”)
shake the spot: leave
shank: a homemade knife or other homemade weapon
shower hawk: a con who gets you in the shower
signifying: showing your gang colors
snitch: a tattletale
special-handling unit (SHU): pronounced “shoe.” Solitary confinement.
sprung: get out of jail; be released
super-max: joints with the most security—“super-maximum”
tailor-made joe: a brand-name cigarette
tangled: confused
tank: a holding pen where new prisoners are held
tat-sleeved: arms covered with tattoos
tight crew: same as road dogs. Your closest friends.
T-Jones: a prisoner’s parents
toss out: search a prison cell
waterhead: a prisoner who says stupid things
yard: a place outside for prisoners to get exercise
yellow brick road: the yellow l
ine that marks the edge of the yard. Cross it and you might look like Swiss cheese.
yoked: prisoners with lots of muscles; built
yokin’ up: lifting weights
Part 1
Revenge
The Wicked Witch was so angry when she saw her black bees in little heaps like fine coal that she stamped her foot and tore her hair and gnashed her teeth. And then she called a dozen of her slaves, who were the Winkies, and gave them sharp spears, telling them to go to the strangers and destroy them.
—The Wizard of Oz
Chapter 1
Harriet Susan Clotkin is not the sort of name you’d imagine for the first lady president of the United States. That’s just fine by me, as I never had designs on running for political office but planned instead on following in the family tradition: a career of incarceration. As soon as I was old enough, I was headed for the joint. First I had to have the required fourteen to sixteen years of rotten childhood. So far, I had only served eleven years and change.
Time was running out on my becoming a juvenile delinquent. The really impressive cons started their rap sheets by nine or ten. Unfortunately, I had a heart condition that needed fixing before I could begin a serious crime spree.
Yes, Fish, my heart was as lumpy and soft as a rotten tomato. I couldn’t stand to see things hurt, especially anything weak and defenseless. Watching Jolly Roger and his road dogs pull the legs off a spider made me grind my teeth down worse than if I slept with a mouth full of sandpaper. When those boys clicked the little kids on the bus, I had to sit on my hands just to keep from breaking theirs.
In the joint, where I was headed, I’d need a heart filled with cement and covered in riveted steel. I was working on it. But so far, I wasn’t making much progress.
Now, there’s a thing or two you need to know if you want to do time with Harry Sue. First off, you got to keep it real. Most everybody I know, they just see what they want to see. Aside from my road dogs, the people I have to deal with—including my teacher, Ms. Lanier, and that bunch over at Granny’s Lap—they just see my mask.
It’s like my favorite book, The Wizard of Oz, which just so happens to be the last one my mom read to me before she was sent up. Most people, they have only ever seen the movie. But me, I read the book. Twenty-seven times. If you didn’t read the book, then you think it’s all about singing and rainbows and skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.
You don’t know anything about the real story. In the real story, those horrible winged monkeys help
Dorothy. They do! And the Tin Man murders forty wolves, and when Dorothy gets to Oz, the Munchkins think she’s signifying because her dress has white in it and that’s the color of witches. There’s monsters in that book whose names you can’t even pronounce right. And they’re not in any dictionary, either, because I checked.
There’s so much they don’t tell you in the movie. And people don’t think to ask afterward. They just take what they see as the real story.
Me, I’m a little like Dorothy myself, searching for my own Aunt Em. I don’t care where I have to live when I find her. It’s been six long years since I set eyes on my mom. Some days, it feels like she’s as far away as Oz is from Kansas and like I’ll never see her again. In the real story, they don’t have any of that hokey-pokey crap where Aunt Em calls out, “Dorothy! Dorothy! We’re looking for you!” from the magic crystal ball.
The real story is more like my life. You have to wonder what Aunt Em is up to while Dorothy’s trying to get out of Oz. Is she going through the motions, milking the cows and shucking the corn? Or is she wrung out with grief, sitting paralyzed on the back step, her eyes fixed on the flat line of horizon?
Chapter 2
Life at Trench Vista Elementary School was something like doing time. There was “the yard,” what the principal, Mr. Hernandez, liked to call the courtyard. It sat next to a playground that pushed up against the wet edges of Marshfield’s water treatment plant.
On days with a northeasterly wind, we were marched to the playground to play kickball, freeze tag, and other games designed to use up our energy. But on days with a southeasterly wind, when the smell from the treatment plant filled our nostrils and made more than one kid remember what became of lunch, he’d hustle us into the courtyard for jump rope and four square and tetherball.
That’s when I felt the closed-in, clamped-down feeling of prison. I’d pace the edges of the yard, ducking in and out of the ragged lilac bushes and honeysuckle vines that were planted as a pathetic defense against the smell of Marshfield’s liquid garbage. Our sixth-grade year was only thirty-eight days into a nine-month stay, but I knew things were heating up considerably. There are days when I can feel the trouble in my bones.
Violet Eleanor Chump was what we considered the lowest form of life in the joint: a snitch, a rat, a cheese eater. Old Violet would drop a dime as easy as batting her eyelashes. Since Mr. Hernandez was particular about keeping the students in alphabetical order—to line up for recess, to line up for chow, to line up for the buses—I spent more time around Violet than I’d’ve liked. I had to sit next to her, too, and there wasn’t much chance of that changing unless an eleven-year-old with a name between Chump and Clotkin had the misfortune to enroll at Trench Vista.
Fish, don’t make me say this twice. If you want to hang with Harry Sue, you got to learn to do your own time. It was hard to imagine anyone choosing to go to school at Trench Vista. Yet here we were by accident of birth—or maybe just plain accident, as in my personal case. But if you have to be here, stop messing around in other people’s business and attend to your own.
Violet’s problems were mostly due to her notion that she was special. She thought someone should care about how she felt. She thought her needs mattered. What kind of family did she grow up in? I wondered.
I was filing back in after recess, observing the rule of “closed lips, hands on hips,” when Ms. Lanier put a bony hand on my shoulder and pulled me into the coatroom.
“I’m afraid those,” she said, pointing to my soggy shoes and holding out a plastic Family Fare grocery bag, “will need to stay in here.
“It’s possible we’ll need to have a talk about personal hygiene, Harry Sue, and the importance of bathing on a regular basis. You are getting older now and your body is undergoing changes.”
Ms. Lanier put one finger inside the tight collar of her blouse and pulled it away from her damp neck. I had a sudden image of Granny loosening jellied cranberry from the can with a long-handled butter knife. At Granny’s Lap, we ate canned jellied cranberries as a fruit serving from December to March because it was cheaper than dirt and made most of the crumb snatchers want to heave. Whether you ate it or not, it still counted as one fruit serving for Granny to put on her federal forms.
Ms. Lanier’s neck quivered in just the same way the cranberry did as she stood there contemplating my body undergoing its changes.
I kept my eyes to the floor. Somewhere in my chest my heart started to throb as I knelt to untie my shoes. They were cheap and worn, the kind you pick up in the bin next to the flip-flops at Value Village.
The pounding inside me was so loud it threatened to give me away. She would bathe regularly, it throbbed, if there wasn’t always a baby in the bathtub. The shoes stink, it complained in its trembly way, because we had to haul Spooner from the pond again this morning.
I caught my breath, checking for the mask, letting it handle the damage control. My jaw set, I looked up at Ms. Lanier, imagining my gaze passing through an invisible magnifying glass, like sun does, heating it to the burning point.
It worked. Suddenly, we were just two conettes on the yard who didn’t have permission to take it outside. Ms. Lanier looked away, but I kept the gaze on her, not bothering to glance down at the laces disintegrating between my fingers.
It was the best look in my catalog and I used it a lot. I called it “mad and dumb.” You didn’t want to appear too intelligent. What you wanted was a look that said: This dog bites
.
“Violet has a very delicate constitution,” Ms. Lanier said. “On bad days like these, what with her asthma and her allergies, she just can’t take the added assault on her senses.”
She removed the finger from the collar that was choking her and shook open the bag. I held the stare as I dropped the shoes into it.
“Socks, too,” she squeaked.
Did she really expect me to spend the afternoon barefoot?
Before I could think what to say, she dipped down and picked up a pair of wool socks, man-sized, from the bench we used to remove our boots. Then she grabbed her can of Fruit Fresh Peachy Keen aerosol spray and proceeded to douse my new socks with the sickening-sweet scent of factory-made fruit smells.
I focused my stare. Little dewdrops of sweat formed in the tiny hairs above Ms. Lanier’s mouth. Without breaking my gaze, I peeled off my soggy socks and dropped them into the grocery bag.
My temples were throbbing and the bone that ran between my neck and my shoulder, the one that never got straight since the fall, was pressing against a nerve. What was it about Ms. Lanier that always made things hurt worse? The pain made me think of a line from Mom’s favorite fairy tale, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” where the giant tears apart the kitchen looking for the kid who’s been lifting his golden eggs.
I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.
The entire class was twisting in their seats, straining to get a view of my entrance. I tried to look dignified with a pair of man’s socks dragging at my ankles. A couple of busters in the back row covered their mouths and pointed.
“If anybody laughs, it’s on,” I hissed.
But then I told myself not to get distracted. What was most important was to find Violet. I needed to communicate with my eyes my look that said:
Somewhere, somehow, when you least expect it, I will exact my punishment.
Chapter 3
Before we go any further, we have to go back. Way back. Seven years back, to the day of my accident. You can’t fully appreciate the saga of Harry Sue unless you know the backstory. Every conette has a backstory. It’s hard enough returning to the night that changed my life forever, but if it was up to my road dog, Homer, we’d go back even further.
You see, Homer would argue that my father, Garnett Clotkin, didn’t just show up to our apartment that night swearing and spitting like a rabid dog for no reason at all. Not everybody expresses their anger with violence. Garnett had to be trained to it.