Jailbird

5

Almost twenty years later Richard M. Nixon, having become President of the United States, would suddenly wonder what had become of me. He would almost certainly never have become President, of course, if he had not become a national figure as the discoverer and hounder of the mendacious Leland Clewes. His emissaries would find me, as I say, helping my wife with her decorating business, which she ran out of our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Through them, he would offer me a job.

How did I feel about it? Proud and useful. Richard M. Nixon wasn't merely Richard M. Nixon, after all. He was also the President of the United States of America, a nation I ached to serve again. Should I have refused — on the grounds that America wasn't really my kind of America just then?

Should I have persisted, as a point of honor, in being to all practical purposes a basket case in Chevy Chase instead?

No.

And now Clyde Carter, the prison guard I had been waiting for so long on my cot, came to get me at last. Emil Larkin had by then given up on me and limped away.

"I'm sure sorry, Walter," said Clyde.

"Perfectly all right," I told him. "I'm in no hurry to go anywhere, and there are buses every thirty minutes." Since no one was coming to meet me, I would have to ride an Air Force bus to Atlanta. I would have to stand all the way, I thought, since the buses were always jammed long before they reached the prison stop.

Clyde knew about my son's indifference to my sufferings. Everybody in the prison knew. They also knew he was a book reviewer. Half the inmates, it seemed, were writing memoirs or spy novels or romans ? clef, or what have you, so there was a lot of talk about book reviewing,, and especially in The New York Times.

And Clyde said to me, "Maybe I ain't supposed to say this, but that son of yours ought to be shot for not coming down after his daddy."

"It's all right," I said.

"That's what you say about everything," Clyde complained. "No matter what it is, you say, 'It's all right.' "

"It usually is," I said.

"Them was the last words of Caryl Chessman," he said. "I guess they'll be your last words, too."

Caryl Chessman was a convicted kidnapper and rapist, but not a murderer, who spent twelve years on death row in California. He made all his own appeals for stays of execution, and he learned four languages and wrote two best-selling books before he was put into an airtight tank with windows in it, and made to breathe cyanide gas.

And his last words were indeed, as Clyde said, "It's all right."

"Well now, listen," said Clyde. "When you get yourself a bartending job up there in New York, I just know you're going to wind up owning that bar inside of two years' time." This was kindness on his part, and not genuine optimism. Clyde was trying to help me be brave. "And after you've got the most popular bar in New York," he went on, "I just hope you'll remember Clyde and maybe send for him. I can not only tend bar — I can also fix your air conditioning. By that time I'll be able to fix your locks, too."

I knew he had been considering enrolling in The Illinois Institute of Instruction course in locksmithing. Now, apparently, he had taken the plunge. "So you took the plunge," I said.

"I took the plunge," he said. "Got my first lesson today."

The prison was a hollow square of conventional, two-story military barracks. Clyde and I were crossing the vast parade ground at its center, I with my bedding in my arms. This was where young infantrymen, the glory of their nation, had performed at one time, demonstrating their eagerness to do or die. Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die.

There were faces at some of the windows — feeble old felons with bad hearts, bad lungs, bad livers, what have you. But there was only one other figure on the parade ground itself. He was dragging a large canvas trash bag after himself as he picked up papers with a spike at the end of a long stick. He was small and old, like me. When he saw us coming, he positioned himself between us arid the Administration Building, and he pointed his spike at me, indicating that he had something very important to say to me. He was Dr. Carlo di Sanza, who held a Doctorate in law from the University of Naples. He was a naturalized American citizen and was serving his second term for using the mails to promote a Ponzi scheme. He was ferociously patriotic.

"You are going home?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Don't ever forget one thing," he said. "No matter what this country does to you, it is still the greatest country in the world. Can you remember that?"

"Yes, sir — I think I can," I said.

"You were a fool to have been a communist," he said.

"That was a long time ago," I said.

"There are no opportunities in a communist country," he said. "Why would you want to live in a country with no opportunities?"

"It was a youthful mistake, sir," I said.

"In America I have been a millionaire two times," he said, "and I will be a millionaire again."

"I'm sure of it," I said, and I was. He would simply start up his third Ponzi scheme — consisting, as before, of offering fools enormous rates of interest for the use of their money. As before, he would use most of the money to buy himself mansions and Rolls-Royces and speedboats and so on, but returning part of it as the high interest he had promised. More and more people would come to him, having heard of him from gloatingly satisfied recipients of his interest checks, and he would use their money to write more interest checks — and on and on.

I am now convinced that Dr. di Sanza's greatest strength was his utter stupidity. He was such a successful swindler because he himself could not, even after two convictions, understand what was inevitably catastrophic about a Ponzi scheme.

"I have made many people happy and rich," he said. "Have you done that?"

"No, sir — not yet," I said. "But it's never too late to try."

I am now moved to suppose, with my primitive understanding of economics, that every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme. It accepts enormous loans that can never be repaid. How else am I to explain to my polyglot grandchildren what the United States was like in the nineteen-thirties, when its owners and politicians could not find ways for so many of its people to earn even the most basic necessities, like food and clothes and fuel. It was pure hell to get shoes!

And then, suddenly, there were formerly poor people in officers' clubs, beautifully costumed and ordering filets mignon and champagne. There were formerly poor people in enlisted men's clubs, serviceably costumed and clad arid ordering hamburgers and beer. A man who two years before had patched the holes in his shoes with cardboard suddenly had a Jeep or a truck or an airplane or a boat, and unlimited supplies of fuel and ammunition. He was given glasses and bridgework, if he needed them, and he was immunized against every imaginable disease. No matter where he was on the planet, a way was found to get hot turkey and cranberry sauce to him on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

What had happened?

What could have happened but a Ponzi scheme?

When Dr. Carlo di Sanza stepped aside and let Clyde and me go on, Clyde began to curse himself for his own lack of large-scale vision. "Bartender, air-conditioner repairman, locksmith — prison guard," he said. "What's the matter with me that I think so small?"

He spoke of his long association with white-collar criminals, and he told me one conclusion he had drawn: "Successful folks in this country never think about little things."

"Successful?" I said incredulously. "You're talking about convicted felons, for heaven's sake!"

"Oh, sure," he said, "but most of them have plenty of money still stashed away somewheres. Even if they don't, they know how to get plenty more. Everbody does just fine when they get out of here."

"Remember me as a striking exception," I said. "My wife had to support me for most of my married life."

"You had a million dollars one time," he said. "I'll never see a million dollars, if I live a million years." He was speaking of the corpus delecti of my Watergate crime, which was an old-fashioned steamer trunk containing one million dollars in unmarked and circulated twenty-dollar bills. It was an illegal campaign contribution. It became necessary to hide it when the contents of all White House safes were to be examined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and men from the Office of the Special Prosecutor. My obscure office in the subbasement was selected as the most promising hiding place. I acquiesced.

Somewhere in there my wife died.

And then the trunk was found. The police came for me. I knew the people who brought the trunk to my office, and under whose orders they were operating. They were all high-ranking people, some of them laboring like common stevedores. I would not tell the court or my own lawyers or anyone who they were. Thus did I go to prison for a while.

I had learned this much from my mutual disaster with Leland Clewes: It was sickening to send another poor fool to prison. There was nothing quite like sworn testimony to make life look trivial and mean ever after.

Also: My wife had just died. I could not care what happened next. I was a zombie.

Even now I will not name the malefactors with the trunk. It does not matter.

I cannot, however, withhold from American history what one of the malefactors said after the trunk was set down in my office. This was it: "Whose dumb fucking idea was it to bring this shit to the White House?"

"People like you," said Clyde Carter, "find yourselves around millions of dollars all the time. If I'd of went to Harvard, maybe I would, too."

We were hearing music now. We were nearing the supply room, and it was coming from a phonograph in there. Edith Piaf was singing "Non, Je ne Regrette Rien. " This means, of course, "No, I am not sorry about anything."

The song ended just as Clyde and I entered the supply room, so that Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and lifer, could tell us passionately how much he agreed with the song. "Non!" he said, his teeth gnashing, his eyes blazing, "je ne regrette rien! Rien!"

This was, as I have already said, a veterinarian and the only American to have been convicted of treason during the Korean War. He could have been shot for what he did, since he was then a first lieutenant in the United States Army, serving in Japan and inspecting meat on its way to the troops in Korea. As a gesture of mercy, his court-martial sentenced him to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

This American traitor bore a strong resemblance to a great American hero, Charles Augustus Lindbergh. He was tall and big-boned. He had Scandinavian blood. He was a farm boy. He was fairly fluent in a weepy sort of French from having listened to Edith Piaf for so long. He had actually been almost nowhere outside of prison but Ames, Iowa, and Osaka, Japan. He was so shy with women, he told me one time, that he was still a virgin when he reached Osaka. And then he fell crashingly in love with a female nightclub singer who passed herself off as Japanese and sang word-for-word imitations of Edith Piaf records. She was also a spy for North Korea.

"My dear friend, my dear Walter Starbuck," he said, "and how has this day gone for you so far?"

So I told him about sitting on the cot and having the same song run through my head again and again, about Sally in the garden, sifting cinders.

He laughed. He has since put me and the incident into a science fiction story of his, which I am proud to say is appearing this very month in Playboy, a RAMJAC magazine. The author is ostensibly Frank X. Barlow. The story is about a former judge on the planet Vicuna, two and a half galaxies away from Earth, who has had to leave his body behind and whose soul goes flying through space, looking for a habitable planet and a new body to occupy. He finds that the universe is virtually lifeless, but he comes at last to Earth and makes his first landing in the enlisted men's parking lot of Finletter Air Force Base — thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia. He can enter any body he likes through its ear, and ride around inside. He wants a body so he can have some sort of social life. A soul without a body, according to the story, can't have any social life — because nobody can see it, and it can't touch anybody or make any noise.

The judge thinks he can leave a body again, any time he finds it or its destiny uncongenial. Little does he dream that the chemistries of Earthlings and Vicunians are such that, once he enters a body, he is going to be stuck inside forever. The story includes a little essay on glues previously known on Earth, and says that the strongest of these was the one that sticks mature barnacles to boulders or boats or pilings, or whatever.

"When they are very young," Dr. Fender writes in the persona of Frank X. Barlow, "barnacles can drift or creep whence-so-ever they hanker, anywhere in the seven seas and the brackish estuaries thereof. Their upper bodies are encased in cone-shaped armor. Their little tootsies dangle from the cones like clappers from dinnerbells.

"But there comes a time for every barnacle, at childhood's end, when the rim of its cone secretes a glue that will stick forever to whatever it happens to touch next. So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, 'Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.' "

The judge from Vicuna in the story tells us that the way the people on his native planet said "hello" and "good-bye," and "please" and "thank you," too. It was this: "ting-a-ling." He says that back on Vicuna the people could don and doff their bodies as easily as Earthlings could change their clothing. When they were outside their bodies, they were weightless, transparent, silent awarenesses and sensibilities. They had no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies. Clarinets and harps and pianos and so on would have been redundant, would have been machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls.

But they ran out of time on Vicuna, he says. The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere — to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make clothes out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.

"On Vicuna," says the judge, "we lived as though there were no tomorrow."

The patriotic bonfires of time were the worst, he says. When he was an infant, his parents held him up to coo and gurgle with delight as a million years of future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen. But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.

So all the Vicunians had to get out of their bodies and sail out into space without further ado. "Ting-a-ling," they said to Vicuna.

"Chronological anomalies and gravitational thunderstorms and magnetic whirlpools tore the Vicunian families apart in space," the story goes on, "scattered them far and wide." The judge manages to stay with his formerly beautiful daughter for a while. She isn't beautiful anymore, of course, because she no longer has a body. She finally loses heart, because every planet or moon they come to is so lifeless. Her father, having no way to restrain her, watches helplessly as she enters a crack in a rock and becomes its soul. Ironically, she does this on the moon of Earth, with that most teeming of all planets only two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away!

Before he actually lands at the Air Force base, though, he falls in with a flock of turkey buzzards. He wheels and soars with them and almost enters the ear of one. For all he knows about the social situation on Earth, these carrion eaters may be members of the ruling class.

He decides that lives led at the center of the Air Force base are too busy, too unreflective for him, so he goes up in the air again and spots a much more quiet cluster of buildings, which he thinks may be a meditation center for philosophers. He has no way of recognizing the place as a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals, since there were no such institutions back on Vicuna.

Back on Vicuna, he says, convicted white-collar criminals, defilers of trustingness, had their ears plugged up, so their souls couldn't get out. Then their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement — up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered speedboats at their heads.

The judge says he himself sentenced hundreds of people to this particular punishment and that the felons invariably argued that they had not broken the law, but merely violated its spirit, perhaps, just the least little bit. Before he condemned them, he would put a sort of chamberpot over his head, to make his words more resonant and awesome, and he would pronounce this formula: "Boys, you didn't just get the spirit of the law. You got its body and soul this time."

And, according to the judge, you could hear the deputies warming up their speedboats on the pond outside the courthouse: "vrooom-ah, vrooom-a, va-va-va-roooooooooooooooooooooooooo-oooooooom!"