The Lexicographer's Rules

It can still happen. Susan's friend Caryn was found dead on the third floor of the Bowery Hotel after two days in the city, her body sweating from steam heat and an overdose of heroin. Three cops threw a rug over her head. At 17, her internship represented a precociousness also marked by graduation from high school a year early and advanced placement at Michigan State based on college prep classwork. It was clear that her the time in the city held higher rank than the hastily acquired internship at a weekly magazine. One week she applied for the internship, the next she was in the East Village, Alphabet City, sharing a studio with Susan, a copy editor in her mid-twenties. Caryn packed two bags, one of them completely filled with compact disks, the other filled with clothes and camera equipment. She looked 17. She wore her straight hair to her shoulders and added red tint every other month. Her fashion choices were based on what her pocket book would let her get away with, whatever scraps a scholarship education left. No Gap, but men's dress slacks cut to suit and hitched up with a spangled belt, no socks, black leather shoes beaten about the toe and heel by years of wear, no bra, and t-shirts marked with band names and call letters. Her build called into question any claim to adulthood, predicting hips and breasts to come, and she still walked like a freshman in the senior's hallway. She watched the world not at all, but partook of events marked by groups of people and excitement. It was in this way that as the city slowed during her first evening she found herself sitting on the curb at Houston watching a pair of men pull a third man from the middle of the street. One with mustache and pear torso, the other in sweats top and bottom, the men dragged the body arms first and feet skidding to the dirt under a struggling tree, leaving a shoe behind. A van honked and swerved and the shoe flew from beneath its tire with a thump and lay motionless on the inside lane and nobody paid any attention. Unhurt, its owner lay covered in blackness, public and private, and belched. Whatever persons that remained moved away, headed for other pursuits, some disappointed by the lack of anything more gruesome than a homeless drunk, others disgusted by the idea that a man would crawl into the street on his own, no worse than an animal, like a snake or an opossum that might seek the warmth of the pavement. Caryn sat on the curb and watched as one of the rescuers wiped clean his hands on the grass and the other nudged the awakening body with his foot. It rolled over in an exaggerated motion, and spoke, and the black man's chin now hung over the edge of the curb, both his arms at his sides, palms up, and his socks baggy on his feet. "Mah-huh?" he said finishing the roll of his body, now on his back, his eyes trying to focus on the flat orange sky. His jeans were rust and unraveling at the cuffs, his sleeveless shirt unbuttoned, his face marked by ancient acne pits and recent whiskers.

With patience Wool waded through the paperwork, the body search, the questioning, the handing out of uniform, wash cloth and soap. The only thing that had really bounced around his skull was whether there were razors. His new haircut needed maintenance, and he knew that the back of his neck was prone to develop an odd fuzz, where the hairs would take turns advancing by inches, random black threads sprouting thick and dark, like out of a mole. Yesterday the sideburns were trimmed even with the corners of his eyes, bringing them up from the edges of his ears, less trendy, less retro, less obvious. Right now the bright orange jumpsuit he could do nothing about, and the plastic made-in-China sandals (over his socks) were his only footwear option, but the hair he could take care of. In most areas it was short, no need for a brush, or chemicals, just a shower in the morning and a good head-shaking as it dried. Block managers searched each cell that night. Wool woke to a bright light in his eyes, as they pulled him from his bunk and pressed his back to the wall. "We were told you have marijuana. Where is it?" They were kidding, and although they smiled, it was difficult to laugh or grin. "Take that down." They pointed to the pages of a paperback pasted over a vent above the concrete cot. Those pages kept Wool from freezing at night when the whole cell block was flooded with cold air. The blue-suited guards moved to the next cell, with more late-night repartee, and Wool reordered the room. Books and magazines that were his pillow were re-stacked, and the mattress was turned back around so that the heavy end made up the difference in the slanted concrete sleeping platform, and then Wool went back to sleep, and half-awoke at 6 a.m. to the buzz and click of the echoing door release. He woke again later to the sound of pounding on his cell door. "If you want breakfast, get it." Two other inmates looked in the reinforced window. He stumbled up and found cold eggs and warm milk and toast. He missed a chance to shower, and didn't want to do it now because the shower was simply a drain and a nozzle in a corner of the common area with hip-high walls. Nobody showered with non-showering inmates watching. If you didn't shower immediately after lights up, then forget it. Wool could shit in peace, though, and read in his cell, or look through the translucent window at indistinct glares from cars in the parking lot. It only took a day for him to learn the system. He could have the razor, and towels, if he asked a day in advance. The cell doors locked if you pulled them shut. If you wanted it open, you had to holler from within your cell or, if you were locked out, you pressed the intercom and asked. The phone could call anywhere, but only collect anywhere, and you had to wait on the stairs that led to the upper five cells if you wanted it. You couldn't sit down and talk on the phone, because the cord wasn't long enough, unless you were tall and it could reach your ear when you sat on the stairs. The television had a set channel-tuning routine, agreed to by some earlier consensus, and it never changed. Wool did not think that he had ever been so bored, where the very words in a book became gold, and felt that he should re-read certain sentences that he may have glided over too lightly. He read everything. Magazines from twenty years ago, all pictures of women ripped out. Old tracts on sin, books on redemption, trash novels. Nothing of value, nothing to change a man's life, plenty to pass the time. Until now, Wool had not seen the inside of jail as a prisoner. He moved to the city from a small house in small town where the factories and farms were failing. His father ran a nine-man police department there and sometimes on weekends Wool would sweep the adjoining floor of the fire station or clean the two jail cells or flip through the nudie mags behind the beer cooler next to the pump truck. That was a real jail: the black bars were welded and bolted like a span of bridge, the cell sitting away from the cinder block walls in the middle of the room, the big padlock bragging about the impossibility of escape. This prison was no prison at all. It was all concrete and reinforced glass, it was a warehouse locked on accident, trapping people inside. There were no marks on the wall indicating days left, "For a good time call..." was not written on the wall next to the phone, and there was a business-like efficiency about meals and recreation. At no point during the arrest, or anything leading up to it did it occur to him to exercise his right to a phone call, or to think of who might be a good lawyer, or to even call a friend. There was nobody. His buddies in another block were the only people, and had they not been able to convince him to return, he would not be locked room reading about last year's best-dressed from a coverless magazine. Two weeks ago Wool, Herman and Jerky stole a gun and a full change purse from Jerky's cousin Janet who watched them leave her mobile home and called the police. This plundering ordinarily would not be a big deal, except Janet was alone, and scared, and the boys were drunk, and they had caught her wearing nothing in the trailer, and chased her into the yard behind the storm cellar where she cursed and ranted. The boys took off, and hid out in the state park. At Black River, where the quarry had filled with water a dozen years before and the water, brackish, thick, served to keep strangers away, they read the police briefs in the "Crime Watch" section of the Daily Journal for three days and laughed at the physical descriptions. Herm, it said, was a tall black man of about forty with dreads, but Herm's fade and 17 years were nothing close. Janet did not know him. Herm ripped grass clumps from the earth and decorated his head and danced around, drunken. There was no real description of Jerky, who'd been in the truck the whole time, and Janet didn't want to really want to finger him. It bothered him that he barely earned a mention. Sixteen and fat, he needed recognition. The newspaper nailed Wool's look exactly: faded jeans, a Cards cap, boondockers, a wide belt and the gait of an athlete, although the Free Press said "quick-footed thief." As they fled the house Wool leaped in the cab window after Jerky's cousin Janet hollered and came screaming from behind the storm cellar waving a rake. Chicago-bound after the newspaper report, Jerky called Janet from a Kwik Go, cursed her, and lied and said she was responsible for Herm and Wool drowning in the river. "They jumped, and they took the gun and I'm never coming back," he told her, and she cried and asked him where he was calling from. Jerky hung up. The newspapers reported on the drownings, and the river was dragged, and then the lakes, and then creeks and ponds in the county. The search and rescue team dragged the river again. As Highway 55 flew past the three fell into silence, Jerky's head lolled over the back of the Ford's bench seat, where his raggedy hair danced in the full sun. The coin purse had barely enough for fries all around and the greasy bag made the cab of the truck stink like warm turkey. Wool drove carefully and stared straight ahead, patience his rule. Patient with the trouble and the sick feeling, knowing that with patience the feeling could fade to a lump in his gut where it could be ignored, and that in a few years the event could be forgotten, and by then he'd be another person. Herm and Jerky didn't want to go to Chicago. They wanted to return because they knew nowhere else and they didn't want to give up what small things they'd worked for, karate fighting trophies and basketball for Herm, Jerky a novel filled with lustful princes and evil beings from outer space. He said it would be a movie one day. Wool spun the wheel into the B-B-Que Barn lot, and let the truck recover the distance as they headed back to the way they had come. At three a.m the Dodge parked, hidden from the street next to the trailer, empty as it had been before. Jerky's aunt and uncle were scouting for homes in Memphis, and his cousin Janet was now staying with a friend down the block, and the place belonged to the boys for now. For two days the trailer became home, and they watched all the movies taped from cable, and burnt and ate the steaks from the freezer. They hadn't let them thaw first. After midnight of the second day, early in the morning before the wave of morning sounds rolled in from the east for the start of another morning, an light unlike the sun glowed outside. "Boys, come out of there slowly," yelled a tin voice with a steel badge. Herman stood up stiff and frantic. Jerky drew his jeans on and stuck out his jaw, scared, and clenched it, like it was wired shut. Wool, awake, lay there on the flowered couch. Herm screamed. "What the fuck are we gonna do? Fuck, fuck. Fuck! Ohmigod they've got guns!" It went on, and Wool knew what they were going to do. What other way could it turn out? Would they have stayed there forever? Who would not see the truck? If they hadn't known they would be found out, they would not have returned. Herm crashed out through the front door and tripped over the stairs, then looked up, now even with spotlights, paired eyes and gunmetal. He crawled forward, his foot caught in the wooden steps, and from the side two cops snagged him by the forearm, made him reach for his shoulder blades and cuffed him. He sat in a car, head down, tears running. Jerky came out with his hands in front of him, palms out, as much to block the lights as to reassure the assembled law that he had no weapon, and he walked to the nearest cop and looked him in the eyes. His fat bare belly glared white, and as the cops spun him, he fell, and was rescued by the arm, and they took him in. Wool still lay on the sofa, fingering the butt of the gun where the cross-hatched rubber grip was glued. The wood was dead, the metal unfunctional, the rounds live. "Come out, now! or we're coming in!" Wool rolled off the couch onto his knees, held the barrel aloft and swung it around, sweeping pictures from tables, mementos off shelves, knick knacks from the top of the television. He surged from a squat to his feet and pounded in the paneling in the narrow hallway, and crushed the thermostat and felt ceiling tiles fall as he thrashed about in anger. A window went, and he turned around and around in the living room, smacking the television, the couch, the wall, and he fell over as three cops charged down the paneled hallway. They took the gun. He wished he had used the gun, that he'd've charged the pigs firing, that maybe he'd have had a better chance and he wouldn't've been so humiliated, that maybe there would have been glory in risking it all in the fight. It was too late now. In the County Correctional Facility, with its rules of etiquette for guards and inmates alike, there was humiliation. Humiliation of the slightest, insidious kind, lacking in real volume, but running rich in quantity. Cheap worn orange jumpers. No television remotes. Bland reading. The chained shuffling of newcomers. Showers in the small open stall. No toilet seat. The boredom. Twice a week the kids and first-timers in C Pod of A Block took recreation in a wooden gym in the center of the prison complex, where fierce games of basketball took place, and where if you didn't play, you got out of the way. Wool stretched, leg high on the wall, even with his head and bounced to touch his nose to his knee. With no identity, no look, no style, with even the colored bands of his tube socks scissored off, Wool remained a single name to the other inmates, and a cell number to the voices on the intercom. He made no friends, but he worked hard a developing a mystique. A deck of cards with three jokers and no jack of spades became a constant companion, and he spun the cards around his fingers and back palmed the only blue joker in the deck. The card movements represented other cleverness he might know. The karate stretches learned from Herm, practiced now during recreation, became representative of cunning and speed that he might have as a martial artist, and when asked about his skill in either cards or karate, he just grimaced and in a small side-to-side, shook his head, lying in his silence. They took the grimace for modesty, or reluctance to talk of something that was so obvious, and each person walked away from Wool certain he had abilities, although undefined. He learned the overnight search had been a hunt for a shank, some piece of metal or plastic used as a weapon. Wool had no idea where someone might get such a scrap, but he was sure the veterans would know. He had watched as Carmine, locked in solitary in the end cell of the bottom row, spit words out under his cell door and convinced Mike to slip him a cigarette. The small reinforced window in the cell was papered on the outside and Carmine was bored, too. From a transitional inmate, who had been given permission to wheel the meal cart around, Mike traded three milks and several rolls of toilet paper for a pack of Marby reds. The television was just within reach on the wall, and the power cord went into an inaccessible opening on the wall, the cord available. Part of the rubber insulator had been worn away, exposing both twisted cables of copper. Mike touched them together, sparking them, lighting the cigarette to flame, and with a few puffs, passed it a couple of times, jogged to Carmine's cell and slipped it under the door. Two minutes later a fight broke out in the meal line. The T.I., serving Mike, flailed with an instrument and spooned out Mike's eye, a fair trade for soured milk. As the commotion settled Wool leaned on the wall under the television. "You got a stick?" they asked him, thinking he meant to spark the cord, thinking he had a cigarette, but he shook his head in a terse left-to-right motion, and with a book in his mouth and a grimace he held the two bared patches of copper together. The flyleaf caught, and burned orange on the edge. He took it back to his cell and pulled the door shut behind him, the stack of books on the concrete platform, and sat on the floor. He watched the book burn, the smoke drift indecisively, and threw it on the pile of books where he lay his head at night.

She sent me an e-mail thanking me for something, and she put "thank you" in a number of different languages. One of them said "shenoragalem." I sent her a message back saying, No problem, but what the hell language is "shenoragalem"? In the meantime, I hit the Internet trying to figure it out. I find out that it's Armenian, so I send her another message that says happy holidays and happy new year in Armenian. Before she got this message, though, she sent me one with a "clue" to the meaning of "shenoragalem." It says something like "has to do with Flemming." What? "Flemming"? I couldn't find squat out about it. I think I spent an hour trying to figure out what the hell "Flemming" meant. Now, remember that I had already figured out "shenoragalem" without the so-called clue. Lois's secretary speaks some Armenian (which is where Lois got the "shenoragalem" from in the first place), so when my reply was translated, Lois was extremely impressed that 1) I figured it out and 2) that I sent back something else in that language. Meantime, when I complained about the "Flemming" clue she said it's a solid clue. I told her "horseshit," cause by that time, even though I figured out what language "shenoragalem" was, I was frustrated that I couldn't connect her clue to the right answer. She sent me another clue: "007/Goldfinger". Of course I went nuts. That's not how you spell Ian Fleming's name! Everybody knows he created James Bond! You said the clue was solid! You spelled his name with two "M"s! That's not a solid clue! And what in God's name does he have to do with Armenia or Armenians? She said: "Ian. You know, lots of Armenian names end in -ian" No kidding. Yossarian from Catch-22. Benjamin Bagdikian, the media critic, etc. That's the lamest clue I ever heard in my life. She said I was upset 'cause I didn't figure it out, and I guess that's mostly right. Stupid clue, though.

This Week In The News. In a week, three of us stand
and laugh, having a good time.
But we are a person short
so we go home early. The next week, I call. My friend's roommate
answers and we both laugh after a second
and keep on laughing cause we both know
I forgot my friend was out of town
for quite a while. So I write a letter and put extra stamps on
to make it arrive quicker. The third week, a woman down the block
has a cat for give away. I know
just the person, I tell her. She, I say, is recently
without a cat. If you can imagine it. I try to figure out a way to send the kitty.
Can't just put kitty in a box. How would I do this? We would need a smart cat,
with a keen interest in exchange rates
and customs regulations. Kitty could probably go for cheap,
for maybe for a child's price.
I don't think they have a kitty rate,
but I'd ask. I'd put a note under the collar
saying, "My name is Kitty. Please seat
me by the window and pet me a lot.
I want a margarita from the drink cart." Maybe kitty would get lucky and the
flight would be empty and she could
lounge around in a big first class
seat and look out the window.
But I think she might have
a problem making the connecting
flight in Miami. She has short
kitty legs and it's a big airport. The fourth week, I stand in line. Some
guy says he likes pad thai. I say: Pad thai! Don't talk to me
about pad thai! I know this girl
who can eat pad thai like it 's
coming back in style. He says: Pad thai? I said, that guy. I was
talking about a friend of mine. Yeah, me too. Me too. The fifth week the bottom falls out of
my personality. Ego and id jump from as
high as possible so it's a sure thing. I wish my friend was here. I always feel cool
when I hang around with her. The sixth week I start to tell a story and
everyone on the receiving end looks at me.
What? Did I tell this one already? Yeah, we heard it all before, they say. You mean the one about my friend and how she...? Yeah, yeah. We heard it. Seventh week I see this chick in funky disco clothes.
Her skin sparkles and her eyes don't shut. I think it's my friend. Turns out it's somebody
famous, which is close, but still not my friend.
I follow her around for a while anyway. Eighth week I run into a mutual acquaintance
of me and my friend. I haven't seen him in a while.
He asks about my friend. Are you kidding? I say. She's been gone for two
months, like, forever. I wish I was this guy, cause as far as he knows
my friend is still around. He's got the idea he can be called by a bunch of
pet names at anytime,
just by picking up the phone and dialing my friend. He can't. I write my umpteenth letter. The post office tells me I can't ask for a return receipt
from another country. It's not that she's not writing letters, I say.
It's not her handwriting on it that I have to see. The woman hands me my change. It's that I want to see if I can send something
to another continent and have it come back. She hands me my cat stamps.

Listening to the radio, I hear the crowds cheering at election primary rallies. They sound fake. College-aged women yelling "wooooo" and the ball-cap hatted undergrad men yelling individually in imitation of the roar they perceive when watching television. There is no difference between the crowd noise, no matter the politician, no matter the location, or the day, or the rally. They are the same. The noises are forced, emitted by cookie-cutter cardboard cutouts. In-authentic, un-genuine. As well as boring. A crowd of politicians in waiting. A group of incompletely educated upper middle class youth bused in to spread their willful ignorance of details via the content-less message of hooting and hawing and hollering. These are the same people who, when in a group about to be photographed, perhaps at a formal dance, or fraternity party, or on the beach at Padre Island, lean in together toward what they perceive as the center of the frame. They are conscious of the end result. They have a distorted idea of what is necessary to be properly perceived on film. A distorted idea of how their cheering sounds to the microphones. Naturally, there is plenty of room in the frame. They need not lean in. Were these arena-sized crowds, individual voices would disappear into the throng. They do not. They are isolated, and so their failures are revealed. The shouts are unsustained. They lack spontaneity, do not respond to the text, do not respond to context. Were their cries original, a shouted slogan, a personal appeal to the stumper at the podium, of the moment, there would be something more authentic. Instead, there is lock-step chanting, started by organizers on the sidelines, who are concerned with forcing the noise of 577 people to resemble the noise of 1077 people. Crowds do not yell at the right points, perhaps because they are uninspired. Their shouts are perfunctory, the sole goal to give themselves and onlookers the impression of high volume, a rising river of support, an unstoppable candidate. Candidates do not know how to deal with the crowd noise. They talk over it. Or they stumble, stop. They, too, are aware of the microphones. They perceive the crowd noise drowns their small voices. No projection, no confidence in the mix. They want silence, but they want cheers. They are poor orchestral conductors. The best speeches I have heard have a man who pauses at the natural pauses in his speech. He has designed the speech in such a way as to cue applause, cue cheers, cue the stomping and sign-waving. It is not written on his script. It need not be. If there is no pause in his speech, he does not stop. His crowd goes mad because they are drawn to it.