Chickenhawk: Back in the World

I now had custody of Foster’s programmable adding machine and the job of figuring the markup on the receivables. It only took me an extra five minutes a day doing it, and it got me into the commissary.

I hand delivered the commissary receiving forms to the commissary office in the afternoons. Miss Reed read them and signed them. I usually lingered there because it was interesting to be somewhere besides the clothing room, and Miss Reed was friendly. I could sit at a visitor’s chair in front of her desk and we’d gossip. I kept her up on what was happening at the clothing room; she told me the latest stuff going on in the administration building. Grumbles often joined in our conversations. Grumbles had his own desk across from Miss Reed, a radio, and his own IBM Selectronic typewriter, which he didn’t know how to use. I watched him type. Two fingers? No wonder I did all the typing for the commissary.

Two other guys, Frank Short and Joe Leone, worked as stock clerks in the commissary storeroom, which was piled floor to ceiling with boxes. They seldom came into Miss Reed’s office. If they had work to do, they were very busy. When they didn’t, Miss Reed let them off because they had to work every night in the commissary line. Grumbles and these two guys were the highest paid inmates in the camp. I made fourteen cents an hour at the clothing room, which adds up to nearly twenty-five dollars a month. Grumbles earned fifty a month, Frank and Leone split fifty, the other half of the hundred-a-month budget the prison provided for inmate pay at the commissary.

I liked being in the commissary. They needed me. I helped them do inventories. They needed to get organized. I was, after all, a school-trained former U.S. Army supply officer. Much of the stock was packed sloppily, leading to incorrect counts and inefficient restocking; there were several brands among rarely used items like chewing tobacco— a wasteful repetition; unnecessary duplication of ice-cream brands, which only took up more space; they needed better inventory forms. I might get a chance to straighten this place up—Grumbles was leaving. He’d told Reed they offered him two months at a halfway house, but he told them to stuff it. He was leaving in four months.

Despite our initial confrontation in the clothing room, John and I became friends over a period of a couple of months. He and I had to work closely together to manage the place for Baker. John and I did all the inventories in the clothing warehouses and decided what to order and how much to order for Baker. John and his crew did the grunt work. I handled the paperwork. We never mentioned the desk incident again, and I spent most of my free time sitting at his desk bullshitting with him and his team while they worked, like Foster used to do.

Tony Abruzzo had been a member of a New York street gang in the thirties, saw combat in World War II, eventually ended up working for the Mafia after the war. Crime, he explained, was his salvation. He grew up poor, his father a carpenter. He’d hijacked his first truck, in Manhattan traffic, when he was fourteen. When he was sixteen, his father gave him fifty cents pocket money. He had forty dollars in his pocket at the time and a car parked around the comer. His dad didn’t own a car.

“We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing,” Tony said. “We just figured a whorehouse was a place we’d see some money.” Tony folded shirts while he talked. “You know, a guy comes into these places to get laid, he’s got to have some money on him. So we, three of us, march up the stairs to this cathouse on Eighth and go inside. We timed it so we’d be the first. We tell the girls, ‘Hey, we’re taking over for a while.’ The madam says, ‘What?’ Joey, my partner, says, ‘You know, we’re the bosses now. Get to work.’

“The madam says, ‘Nobody’s here,’ and Joey says, he’s grinning like a kid, he says, ‘I’m here, sister. Start on me.’ “ Tony broke into laughter. “That fucking Joey was always a gas,” Tony said, tears welling in his eyes.

“So what’s the point? That’s the crime? You raped some whores?” John said.

“No, you dumb fucking cripple,” Tony said. Joey and John and I laughed. Abruzzo was abrasive and rude and everyone liked it. He called Baker a hillbilly redneck to his face and even Baker laughed. “Besides,” Tony said, “Joey pays the whore. Of course, he takes the money back, but that’s robbery, not rape. Anyway, what we did was to wait until the customers showed up. I’d pull my gun when they got inside, tell them to empty their pockets. They’d go, ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’ and I just smile and wave the gun. The gun does all the talking. They empty their pockets. Then I send them back to the girls, saying, ‘Hey, maybe you’re getting fucked, but at least you’ll get laid.’ I’m feeling like Robin Hood, here.” Tony stopped while we laughed.