Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“John, these women are not interested in talking. All they want to do is fuck.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” John said.

“These girls? You don’t know where they’ve been, John. I wouldn’t fuck them with your dick.”

John laughed and said, “How do they get the chance? They all aren’t in the same dorms, right?”

“Right. They have separate dorms, but everything else is shared. You’re allowed to walk around and hold hands. You can hug and stuff. You can go to the movies together—” Tony stopped to laugh and said, “I’m in the movie, right? The Godfather—God, was that one great movie—and this girl comes crawling along the row—you know, between your knees and the seats?—asking guys if they want a blowjob. She comes to me and I say, ‘Get out of here!’ “

“Right, Tony.”

“Right, John, you schmuck. I can hear you now. ‘Oh,’” Tony mimics John in falsetto, “‘she wants to give me a blowjob. She loves me.’ Jesus! Me, I don’t need whatever she’s passing around. She’s crawling around on her hands and knees giving blowjobs to perfect strangers for cigarettes,” Tony said.

“She gave a blowjob for a cigarette?”

“No, John, this is a high-class girl, someone you’d respect. She charges a whole pack of cigarettes.”

John said, “Man, she’s got a real smoking addiction.”

The back room crew laughed.

“And that’s not all,” Tony said, grinning. He was enjoying the story. “These people are fucking all over the place. It’s like I’m in a zoo during a rut. These women have nothing else to do. They’ve figured it out. They sew their zippers in along the inseams of their pants, you know; not vertical like normal, but along—” Tony put his finger six inches down on the inseam of one leg of his pants and followed the seam across his crotch and back down the other inseam, “that way, sideways.”

“Why?” John asked.

“’Cause they don’t wear panties and they can unzip that zipper and then when they’re hugging their boyfriend, he can just slip it in. When a guard’s around, they’re not moving, just leaning up against a wall, hugging. But the guy’s plugged in. The guards think they’re just making out. When the guard leaves, the guy starts humping, real slow. Pretty soon, they’re fucking their brains out. I saw this with my own eyes! I couldn’t believe it! Fuck, fuck, fuck. That’s all they do at Lexington. Animals.”

Who knows if it was true? It was exactly what we wanted to hear.

We heard they were coming a week before they got there. People were talking in the chow line. Four guys were coming to Eglin. A sheriff from a county jail and three of his deputies. Rumor said these guys were convicted of depriving a couple of black guys of their civil rights by beating them to death at the jail they ran.

Wait! Everybody was saying. You can’t let murderers into Eglin! This is a nice camp! A hack told me the bureau was sending them here because they knew they’d be killed in a real prison.

The day they arrived, the Eglin wimps were prepared. The guys in the clothing room made sure that their pants were short enough to look like knickers, their shirts were too small to button, and their shoes were the oldest, foulest pairs they could find. The new prisoners walked into prison looking like they’d fallen into a vat of some chemical that shrank all their clothes and rotted their boots. They also looked very nervous. By dinner they couldn’t go anywhere without somebody pointing them out. One black guy ran up to the ex-sheriff in a dorm hallway. “You like to kill niggers? Well, kill me, motherfucker!” he yelled, jabbing his chest with his thumb. “C’mon. Kill me!” He glared at the ex-sheriff, and the ex-sheriff shrank up against the wall, petrified. The black guy shook his head in disgust and said, “Damn!” The ex-sheriff slinked away.

The ex-sheriff had nothing to worry about. Nobody at Eglin would actually hurt him and his deputies. We pecked at them, true, but it was like being pecked by ducks. For a few weeks the former cops couldn’t get new clothes or shoes until the staff came over and made us issue decent stuff. Okay, the clothing room gang said, they have good clothes. Try wearing them! Ha! They sprinkled fiberglass insulation into their underwear and “lost” the rest of their laundry. Every time their laundry came back from the base, the clothing room team just sent it right back. After a month of petty harassment, everybody lost interest. Eglin inmates were a real disappointment if you were looking for really nasty crooks. Eventually the cops were left alone. Nobody would talk to them, but they weren’t harassed, either. They were lucky.

Actually, I think there was another murderer at Eglin, but I can’t be sure. He was there for income tax evasion. Jules worked internationally, knew a lot about hiding money. He seemed a very friendly man, knowledgeable about intriguing criminal matters and willing to talk. I enjoyed our conversations. I mentioned something about how hard it was to get the seed money for the kinds of banking crimes with which Jules was involved.