A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born

Chapter 2

The judge leaned forward and looked down at me, not unkindly. "Now come on, Jimmy, tell me what this tomfoolery is all about." Judge Nixon had a summer house on the river, not too far from our farm, and I had been there often enough with his youngest son for the judge to get to know me.

"My name is James diGriz, buster. Let us not get too familiar." This heightened his color a good deal, as you might imagine. His big nose stuck out like a red ski slope and his nostrils flared. "You will have more respect in this courtroom! You are faced with serious charges, my boy, and it might help your case to keep a civil tongue in your mouth. I am appointing Arnold Fortescue, the public defender, as your attorney..." "I don't need an attorney-and I particularly don't need old Skewey who has been on the sauce so long there isn't a man alive who has seen him sober..." There was a ripple of laughter from the public seats, which infuriated the judge. "Order in the court!" he bellowed, hammering his gavel so hard that the handle broke. He threw the stub across the room and glared angrily at me. "You are trying the patience of this court. Lawyer Fortescue has been appointed..." "Not by me he hasn't. Send him back to Mooney's Bar. I plead guilty to all charges and throw myself on the mercy of this merciless court.

He drew in his breath with a shuddering sigh and I decided to ease off a bit before he had a stroke and collapsed; then there would be a mistrial and more time would be wasted.

"I'm sorry, judge." I hung my head to hide an unrepressed smile. "But I done wrong and I will have to pay the penalty." "Well, that's more like it, Jimmy. You always were a smart lad and I hate to see all that intelligence going to waste. You will go to Juvenile Correction Hall for a term of not less than-" "Sorry, your honor," I broke in. "Not possible. Oh, if I only had committed my criraes last week or last month! The law is firm on this and I have no escape. Today is my birthday. My seventeenth birthday.

That slowed him down all right. The guards looked on patiently while he punched for information on his computer terminal. The reporter for the Bit O'Heaven Bugle working just as hard on the keys of his own portable terminal at the same time. He was filing quite a story. It didn't take the judge long to come up with the answers. He sighed.

"That is true enough. The records reveal that you are seventeen this day and have achieved your majority. You are no longer a juvenile and must be treated as an adult. This would mean a prison term for certain - if I didn't allow for the circumstances. A first offense, the obvious youth of the defendant, his realization that he has done wrong. It is within the power of this bench to make exceptions, to suspend a sentence and bind a prisoner over. It is my decision..." The last thing I wanted to do was hear his decision now. Things were not going as I had planned, not at all. Action was required. I acted. My scream drowned out the judge's words. Still screaming I dived headlong from the prisoner's dock, shoulder-rolled neatly on the floor, and was across the room before my shocked audience could even consider moving.

"You will write no more scurrilous lies about me, you grubbing hack," I shouted. As I whipped the terminal from the reporter's hands and crashed it to the floor. Then stamped the six-hundred-buck machine into worthless junk. I dodged around him before he could grab me and pelted towards the door. The policeman there grabbed at me, then folded when I planted my foot in his stomach.

I could probably have escaped then, but escape at this point wasn't part of my plan. I fumbled with the door handle until someone grabbed me, then struggled on until I was overwhelmed.

This time I was manacled as I stood in the dock and there was no more Jimmy-my-boy talk from the judge. Someone had found him a new gavel and he waved it in my direction, as though wishing to brain me with it. I growled and tried to look surly.

"James Bolivar diGriz," he intoned. "I sentence you to the maximum penalty for the crime that you have committed. Hard labor in the city jail until the arrival of the next League ship, whereupon you will be sent to the nearest place of correction for criminal therapy." The gavel banged. "Take him away." This was more like it. I struggled against my cuffs and spat curses at him so he wouldn't show any last moment weaknesses. He didn't. Two burly policemen grabbed me and hauled me bodily out of the courtroom and jammed me, not too gently, into the back of the black Maria. Only after the door had been slammed and sealed did I sit back and relax - and allow myself a smile of victory.

Yes, victory, I mean that. The whole point of the operation was to get arrested and sent to prison. I needed some on-the-job training.

There is method in my madness. Very early in life, probably about the time of my Get-Stuffed successes, I began to seriously consider a life of crime. For a lot of reasons - not the least of which was that I enjoyed being a criminal. The financial awards were great; no other job paid more for less work. And, I must be truthful, I enjoyed the feeling of superiority when I made the rest of the world look like chumps. Some may say that is a juvenile emotion. Perhaps - but it sure is a pleasurable one.

About this same time I was faced with a serious problem. How was I to prepare myself for the future? There had to be more to crime than lifting Get-Stuffed bars. Some of the answers I saw clearly. Money was what I wanted. Other people's money. Money is locked away, so the more I knew about locks the more I would be able to get this money. For the first time in school I buckled down to work. My grades soared so high that my teachers began to feel there might be hope for me yet. I did so well that when I elected to study the trade of locksmith they were only too eager to oblige. It was supposed to be a three-year course, but I learned all there was to know in three months. I asked permission to take the final examination. And was refused.

Things were just not done that way, they told me. I would proceed at the same stately pace as the others and in two years and nine months I would get my diploma, leave the school - and enter the ranks of the wage slaves.

Not very likely. I tried to change my course of study and was informed that this was impossible. I had “locksmith” stamped on my forehead, metaphorically speaking of course, and it would remain there for life. They thought.

I began to cut classes and avoid the school for days at a time. There was little they could do about this, other than administer stern lectures, because I showed up for all the examinations and always scored the highest grades. I ought to, since I was making the most of my training in the field. I carefully spread my attentions around so the complacent citizens of the city had no idea they were being taken. A vending machine would yield a few bucks in silver one day, a till at the parking lot the next. Not only did this field work perfect my talents but it paid for my education. Not my school education of course - by law I had to remain there until the age of seventeen - but in my free time.

Since I could find no guidelines to prepare myself for a life of crime, I studied all of the skills that might be of service. I found the word “forgery” in the dictionary, which encouraged me to learn photography and printing. Since unarmed combat had already stood me in good stead, I continued my studies until I earned a Black Belt. Nor was I ignoring the technical side of my chosen career. Before I was sixteen I knew just about all there was to know about computers - while at the same time I had become a skilled microelectronic technician.

All of these were satisfying enough in themselves - but where did I go from there? I really didn't know. That was when I decided to give myself a coming-of-age birthday present. A term in jail.

Crazy? Like a fox! I had to find some criminals - and where better than in jail? A keen line of reasoning, one has to admit. Going to jail would be like coming home, meeting my chosen peer group at last. I would listen and learn and when I felt I had learned enough the lockpick in the sole of my shoe would help me to make my exit. How I smiled and chortled with glee.

More the fool - for it was not to be this way at all.

My hair was shorn, I was bathed in an antiseptic spray, prison clothes and boots were issued - so unprofessionally that I had ample time to transfer the lockpick and my stock of coins - U was thumbprinted and retinapixed, then led to my cell. To behold, to my great joy, that I had a cellmate. My education would begin at last. This was the first day of the rest of my criminal life.

"Good afternoon, sir," I said. "My name is Jim diGriz." He looked at me and snarled. "Get knotted, kid." He went back to picking his toes, an operation which my entrance had interrupted.

That was my first lesson. The polite linguistic exchanges of life outside were not honored behind these walls. Life was tough - and so was language, I twisted my lips into a sneer and spoke again. In far harsher tones this time.

"Get knotted yourself, toe-cheese. My monicker is Jim. What's yours?" I wasn't sure about the slang, I had picked it up from old videos, but I surely had the tone of voice right because I had succeeded in capturing his attention this time. He looked up slowly and there was the glare of cold hatred in his eyes.

"Nobody - and I mean nobody - talks to Willy the Blade that way. I'm going to cut you, kid, cut you bad. I'm going to cut my initial into your face. A 'V' for Willy." "A 'W'," I said. "Willy is spelled with a 'W'." — This upset him even more. "I know how to spell, I ain't no moron!" He was blazing with rage now, digging furiously under the mattress on his bed. He produced a hacksaw blade that I could see had the back edge well sharpened. A deadly little weapon. He bounced it in his hand, sneered one last sneer - then lunged at me.

Well, needless to say, that is not the recommended way to approach a Black Belt. I moved aside, chopped his wrist as he went by — then kicked the back of his ankle so that he ran headfirst into the wall.

He was knocked cold. When he came to I was sitting on my bunk and doing my nails with his knife. "The name is Jim," I said, lip-curled and nasty. "Now you try saying it. Jim.

He stared at me, his face twisted - then began to cry! I was horrified. Could this really be happening?

"They always pick on me. You're no better. Make fun of me. And you took my knife away. I worked a month making that knife, had to pay ten bucks for the broken blade...." The thought of all of the troubles had started him blubbering again. I saw then that he was only a year or two older than me - and a lot more insecure. So my first introduction to criminal life found me cheering him up, getting a wet towel to wipe his face, giving him back his knife - and even giving him a five-buck goidpiece to stop his crying. I was beginning to feel that a life of crime was not quite what I thought it would be.

It was easy enough to get the story of his life - in fact it was hard to shut him up once he got in full spate. He was filled with self-pity and wallowed in the chance to reveal all to an audience.

Pretty sordid, I thought, but kept silent while his boring reminiscences washed over me. Slow in school, laughed at by the others, the lowest marks. Weak and put upon by the bullies, gaining status only when he discovered - by accident of course with a broken bottle - that he could be a bully too once he had a weapon. The rise in status, if not respect, after that by using threats of violence and more than a little bullying. All of this reinforced by demonstrations of dissections on live birds and other small and harmless creatures. Then his rapid fall after cutting a boy and being caught. Sentenced to Juvenile Hall, released, then more trouble and back to Hall yet again. Until here he was, at the zenith of his career as a knife-carrying punk, imprisoned for extorting money by threat of violence. From a child of course. He was far too insecure to attempt to threaten an adult.

Of course he did not say all this, not at once, but it became obvious after endless rambling complaints. I tuned him out and tuned my inner thoughts in. Bad luck, that was all it was. I had probably been put in with him to keep me from the company of the real hardened criminals who filled this prison.

The lights went out at that moment and I lay back on the bunk. Tomorrow would be my day. I would meet the other inmates, size them up, find the real criminals among them. Befriend them and begin my graduate course in crime. That is surely what I would do.

I went happily to sleep, washed over by a wave of wimpish whining from the adjoining bunk. Just bad luck being stuck in with him. Willy was the exception. I had a roommate who was a loser, that was all. It would all be different in the morning.

I hoped. There was a little nag of worry that kept me awake for a bit, but at last I shrugged it off. Tomorrow would be fine, yes it would be. Fine. No doubt about that, fine....