The drill the visitors knew was above all that of waiting, in total deference. Complaint had been worn out of them some time ago. We waited in one secured zone after another, as we progressed by degrees inside the Watertown facility. First, approved by some unseen hand, we were taken from the trailer, along concrete paths marked with fluorescent orange-and-yellow paint. I found it impossible not to fear being rifle-shot from a high tower for crossing the painted stripes, for we were now under the gaze of the concrete towers, having put the trailer and parking lot, the whole of Watertown out of sight behind us. Then we passed through what was called an “A/B door”-a metal cage, wired so door A and door B couldn’t be unlocked at the same time. After we were inspected from within a windowed office there came a joltingly loud buzz to switch the circuit. Bolts slammed through the door behind us, and the door ahead opened to permit us to pass from the box.
With that we were inside, sort of. The prison wasn’t, as I’d pictured, a single edifice, a stone Gormenghast or iron Deathstar, but a sprawled compound of structures and fences and gates, a bleak ranch for human livestock. Between everything, safe zones, moats of speckless concrete, protected by razor wire. And, through doors unlocked for us by gray-clad, dronelike officers, the interiors were dully institutional, like 1960s-era school buildings or hospital emergency rooms, full of mint-green tile and wooden paneling worn to matte. Each place we encountered in this visitor’s gauntlet felt provisional, refitted for this temporary use, though they’d likely been used this way for years.
I later understood each prisoner had to be located, cleared, brought to the visiting room hidden deep inside the walls-there was no motive for the guards to finish processing us until the prisoner had been escorted to wait for us in that room. This was a place of canceled time: it had no value. We weren’t customers, to be pleased or reassured. Yet for all the waiting, I was always guiltily startled when my name was finally called, was always gazing in the wrong direction, distracted by the stuff pinned to the walls, yellowed notices, ten-year-old memos requiring block sergeants to remain at posts until the arrival of replacement block sergeants or forbidding visitors skirts higher than 2 inches above the knees or “bear midriff,” advertisements for shuttle services and child care, twelve-step and pregnancy clinic solicitations, and a long, hypnotic list, photocopied into a runic blur, of commissary items: toothpaste $1.39, comb 19¢, ketchup packet 19¢, jar chicken $1.79, jar lima beans 89¢, jar instant coffee $1.59, peanut butter $1.39, conditioner $1.29, hairnet 29¢, bun 25¢, chocolate bun 30¢, and on and on from there-the list was schemeless, incantatory, horrible.
“Ebdus.”
“Yes.”
“Belt and shoes off, contents of pockets in the wooden box.”
I waddled up, the only one who needed to be told.
“All in the box.”
I scooped out my pockets, offered them my shoes and belt.
“No pens.”
I shrugged helplessly.
“You can throw it out here.”
“Sure.” I put my ballpoint in the green steel garbage pail. Other visitors streamed through the metal detector while I fidgeted with my crap.
“What’s this ring?”
“Wedding ring.”
“Why ain’t you wearing it?”
“Uh, it’s my mother’s wedding ring. I just carry it around, it doesn’t fit.” Don’t make me put it on, I prayed. The officer squinted, frowned, let it pass. Something else was more interesting.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
She pointed to a single pale-orange conical earplug which had sprung to the top of the change and rental-car keys I’d heaped into the wooden tray along with the ring. The plug had unsquished, breathed open as foam shapes will do.
“Earplug,” I said.
“What for?”
I considered the appearance of the earplug, the vaguely sexual fitted form, through the officer’s eyes. “For the airplane,” I said.
She looked at it closely. Now I wondered if it more resembled drug paraphernalia.
“That’s for an airplane?”
“For blocking out the sound of the engines. So I can sleep.”
“Just one?”
“I guess I lost the other one.”
“Huh.”
I’d never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. The officer scowled, but placed my tray full of stuff on the far side of the barrier. “Give me your right hand, sir.” From a stamp pad she marked my knuckles with some invisible stuff. “Take your box, sir.”
Once through, I began slipping into my shoes, repocketing my stuff.
“Sir, not here.”
“What?”
“You can’t stay in this area. Take your box to the bench in there.”
Five of us were called, to have our hands examined with a black-light wand that exposed a purplish emblem. The keys on the fistlike ring at the escort officer’s belt varied in size and shape, some as modern as my rental car’s ignition key, others as medieval as those wielded by the Wizard of Id ’s bailiff. As our group strode the corridor I learned another subtle art, of slowing so that the officer, who’d lingered to relock the door behind us, had time to overtake us and open the door ahead.
I tried to absorb the others’ expert docility, as a balm. We were being transformed into inmates, I began to understand, as our reward for asking to go inside. We’d crossed seven or eight levels of lock-in before I was led to meet Mingus Rude in the visitor’s room, a bleach-redolent chamber of pale blue tile. There, we were sealed from one another by a Plexiglas window covered with minute scratchiti, and allowed to converse on telephones.
He had to speak for both of us, at first. I couldn’t find a word.
“D-Man. I can’t believe it’s you, shit.”
I nodded.
“Check you out. Boy done growed up. Hah!”
I’d journeyed back, from that distance at which Mingus had sometimes seemed an implausibility, a myth. Now he was before me, in the all-too-human flesh. His skin was skull-tight, the whites of his eyes sickly yellow, he wore his father’s ridiculous Fu Manchu mustache and a filthy red sweatshirt, his wide grin revealed a chipped incisor, his raised eyebrows a thin scar seaming his eyelid. Still, I persuaded myself he didn’t look bad, or so different from the man I remembered. In Junior’s photograph on the Bothered Blue cover I’d seen a resemblance to Mingus, but now, despite the mustache, I didn’t see Mingus in terms of his father. Mingus was only Mingus, the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover. Seated across from him, I knew he’d already grown into a man at some point before the last time I’d seen him, the day of the shooting. I hated to recall the boy I’d encountered in the mirror when I first arrived at my Camden dorm-the frightened boy, desperate to impress with his fresh punk haircut, who’d go on spend his life pretending not to have seen and known so much.
“I can’t believe it. Where you been, son?”
He spoke as though resuming where we’d left it, my year before graduation from Stuyvesant. As though I’d been at high school in Manhattan these decades, and now we only hadn’t run into one another, to exchange a quick handclasp on Dean Street, for a few long months.
So where had I been? I answered, “California.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard from your pops you was out that way. Someday I got to get out there myself- the Golden State, damn.” Like Marilla, Mingus merely hadn’t gotten around to it. “Dillinger’s gone way out west, checkin’ out the Golden State. Yet despite how the boy’s livin’ large, he don’t diminishize his roots, he comes back to represent.”
Mingus was authoring a romance, wrapping my awkwardness in his old raconteur’s warmth. It was nonsense and a gift I took gladly. No mention of the special nature of the setting for our reunion, though his jive happened to be piped over an intercom. The setting didn’t bear mentioning. His smile’s warmth, the way he beamed himself across that thickness of Plexiglas, suggested a capacity for a binocular vision which excluded surroundings. Recalling how the city had reeled from us as we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway gazing at spray-painted stone, I thought now that that had always been one of Mingus’s talents.