Part 37 (1/2)

Sure, all kinds of locks.

Shrink lights a cigarette. He uses a black holder like President Roosevelt and smokes a foreign brand that smells like an electrical short.

So your father, who never spoke to you, made locks. And you are now locked up-in part for picking locks. You think that's all coincidental.

Isn't it?

Shrink smokes, shrugs. Tell me more about Bess.

Willie would rather not. But he picks a story at random, tells Shrink about their first night at Coney Island, then summarizes the robbery of her father.

It's commendable, Shrink says. In a way.

What is?

You remain devoted to this girl, even though she used you, destroyed your future, without so much as a by-your-leave.

I didn't say that.

But it goes without saying, Willie. She led you into a life of crime, then ran off, got married, and left you holding the bag.

Willie feels his cheeks growing hot. Her father forced her, he says.

She doesn't sound like the sort of girl whose father can force her to do anything. In fact, wasn't it her rebellion against her father that was the start of all your troubles? Forced her? Willie, come now, you know better than that.

Willie asks if he can b.u.m a cigarette. Maybe these chats with Shrink aren't so informal after all.

Later Willie researches Shrink, as he once did Mr. Untermyer. This time he doesn't have the resources of a great library at his disposal, so he ransacks the doctor's office files. Once again he's shocked by what he learns. Besides being the world's leading expert on the criminal mind, Shrink is an authority on hypnosis. So there it is. Shrink is somehow putting Willie under. Why else would Willie be spilling his guts? How else would Shrink know so much? Many of the stories Willie tells Shrink are lies, but Shrink still manages to find the seeds and kernels of truth within. How else but through hypnosis?

In early 1936 Shrink sits in his leather chair, smoking, reading a book by Bertrand Russell, while Willie types up his most recent Jungian session with a murderer. Willie has played chess many times with this murderer-he never knew. He makes a mental note: from now on let the man win. As he stacks the typed pages, and slides them into a folder, Willie thinks about the way Shrink spoke to the murderer. Gently, without judgment. Willie slots the folder into the filing cabinet, eases into the chair across from Shrink.

Excuse me sir.

Shrink looks up from his book. Yes, Willie?

Can I ask you something?

Of course.

Willie purses his lips. Can I ask you to be totally honest sir?

Yes.

Do you think I belong here?

Oh Willie, I don't know.

No. Really. Do you think I should spend the next fifty years of my life in this stinking tomb?

Shrink shuts Bertrand Russell, sets the book on his lap. He watches the smoke curl up from the tip of his cigarette. Willie the Actor, he says under his breath. The Actor who doesn't like the roles in which he's cast himself.

Willie already regrets asking the question.

The Actor who has a conscience, Shrink says-or thinks he has. Okay, Willie. Why not. Since you asked. But remember, you're not my patient. This isn't a diagnosis. Just an opinion.

Right.

So then. The alienation from the mother and father, the sibling abuse, the grim poverty of your early years, the simultaneity of your life span with a series of the most violent economic convulsions in history, it all created an uncommonly dangerous and potent witches' brew. By the time you came of age you were very likely to go down the wrong path, to have a great deal of trouble controlling your impulses, but my G.o.d, Willie, add to all that the convergence of your first crime with this overpowering first love-that sealed it. We don't know if criminal natures are born or made, but you were certainly shaped to some extent, to a large extent, by external events, and by an environment that rendered criminality all but inevitable. Now, what makes you different, what makes you more dangerous than other men in this inst.i.tution, is your first-rate intelligence. Thoughtful, sensitive, articulate, empathetic, an inspired storyteller and a determined self-mythologizer, you're also alarmingly-what's the word? Cunning. All of which makes you highly appealing, seductive, charismatic, to accomplices, to casual observers, to newspapers, even to some of your victims. I've heard you say that you've never hurt anyone, a point of pride with you, but look at the people with whom you've crossed paths. How have they fared? They're all in jail, or blind, or dead. A likable criminal can be more lethal than a snarling ax murderer, because people don't take the necessary precautions. People think a gentleman bandit is cute, cuddly, and so he is, like a newborn lion cub. But take him into your home and one day you'll discover how cute and cuddly he is. People will always want to embrace you, Willie, to follow you, to imitate you, to throw in with you, to write about you-to diagnose you-and they'll often pay a dear price. But no one will ever pay more dearly than you, Willie, you, because you still don't think yourself a criminal. You see yourself, or portray yourself, which amounts to the same thing, as an honest person who happens to have committed crimes. And yet your dedication to crime, your great skill-well, I believe you're every bit a criminal, in your marrow, drawn ineluctably to the life because you're so good at it, and because every time you rob a bank or open a safe I believe you feel what you must have felt that first time with Bess. That thrill of first love and that arousal of complicity and illicitness and danger. And s.e.x, of course. s.e.x, Willie. s.e.x and parents-I can't think of a single neurotic complex that doesn't originate with one or the other. Imagine the human psyche as a skein of different color yarns. We spend our lives trying to understand and organize all the colors. Let's say s.e.x is blue yarn, Mom is red yarn, Dad is white yarn. In you, Willie, in your skein, I see these three colors being extremely tangled. When you rob a bank, I believe, that blue yarn becomes a bit less tangled, a bit looser, for a brief while, and this must provide a tremendous, though temporary, relief. That's why-I'm sorry to say, Willie, but you asked-yes, I do, yes, I think, yes you belong exactly where you are. Yes.

When they let you out of Semi Iso, Mr. Sutton, did they give you anything to do? A job?

I was secretary to the prison psychiatrist. He was one of the leading authorities on criminology in the country. He wrote the textbook that's still used in colleges.

Did you read it?

I typed it.

Did he ever try to a.n.a.lyze you?

Nah. I was too complex for him.

EIGHTEEN.

Baseball is everything at Eastern State. It's the best way of killing time, of forgetting time, and one of the few sources of triumph and manly pride. The six prison teams, therefore, play to win. Murderers pitch inside. Mob bosses crowd the plate. Arsonists steal home every chance they get. Things can get out of hand quickly.

And yet every game also features a moment or two of pure calm. With each home run comes a tranquil pause, not just for the batter to round the bases, but for everyone else to stare in envy and wistfulness at the spot where the ball went over the wall.

Throughout the 1930s, home-run b.a.l.l.s from Eastern State become coveted souvenirs in downtown Philadelphia. Then they become vessels. Instead of hitting them over, players toss them over, with letters attached. Prison mail is censored, but no one can censor a horsehide. Whoever finds this please deliver to Mickey Whalen, 143 Spruce Street, Phila, PA. Reward!

In time b.a.l.l.s start flying into the yard, stuffed with drugs, money, razors. One ball contains a midget stick of dynamite.

Willie is a star in the Eastern State League, an agile second baseman with a quick bat, who rarely strikes out and always hustles. Baseball helps him reacclimate, finally, rejoin the community of prisoners. Then his knee gives out. June 1936. Done for the season, he's consigned to the stands with the other middle-aged players. Between innings he trades newspapers, cigarettes, rumors.

Most of the men at Eastern State are inspired liars, so Willie tends to ignore all rumors. But one keeps cropping up. Again and again Willie hears that somewhere below the baseball diamond is a sewer pipe, which snakes all the way to the wall and beyond. Then, while watching the Eastern State Pirates whip the Eastern State Yankees, Willie hears a new twist on the familiar rumor, hears it from Tick Tock, an old con who seems to know everything except the time. He's forever asking Willie for the correct time of day even though Willie is forever pointing at his watchless wrist. Tick Tock says he recently found a loose floorboard in the bas.e.m.e.nt under Cellblock 10, and far beneath the floorboard was the unmistakable sound of rus.h.i.+ng water: It's gotta be the sewer, Tick Tock says, and if the sound is that loud, there must be a hole in it-and if a few guys could pry up that board, and if a guy with a slight build could maybe slip down into that sewer, then maybe, just maybe.

Willie nods.

Nasty down there though, Tick Tock says.

Nasty in here, Willie says.

They make a deal. In exchange for help writing a love letter to his girl-How do you spell t.w.a.t, Willie?-Tick Tock agrees to help Willie sneak into the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Christmas 1936. While Shrink is seeing patients Willie hurries across the yard. With him are three lifers, friends of Tick Tock. Willie barely knows them, but Tick Tock says they're right guys.

One nice thing about Eastern State-it operates like a small village, with dozens of shops and guilds humming all day long. Even the cells are left open during the day, so prisoners can come and go to their jobs. Guards don't think twice, therefore, about Willie and three lifers walking briskly, at midday, toward Cellblock 10.