Ronald “Yellow” Horffstein was given a cigarette by the warden, and after two hours of wild, spirited debate and discussion about all kinds of topics, he was also given a small window of time to actually observe this man, this so called tyrant and the Final Word on so many important details and outcomes in the lives of the prisoners. Warden Cansulle looked more like a movie director or a painter than a Prison Warden; he fidgeted with great intensity and was highly particular about minute details, or even just details that were huge and expected, he brought this sense of process although it was fleeting for just about every poor soul in that place.
“It is cold. By nature, I can’t ever fix it – and I’ve tried things that are bulletproof, I’ve made an Eskimo sweat, I’ve gotten a woman’s prison warden friend who says she seen a burka woman – a Muslim, one of the few – she fell down a flight of hard cold prison stairs and my Female Warden Friend, who is similar to me, she will tell you that that poor woman did not break but a nail in her thumb in that fall. Doctor says she was 120° and with a blood pressure of almost five-hundred.”
I inhaled deeply as he placed the pack onto the middle of the table, which in smoker’s body-parlance means take as much as you want. The smoker should be mindful to not smoke all of his friend’s cigarettes, and then laughs as he realizes he can’t just go to the gas station and pick some up for the next pack. Warden Cansulle devoted the entire day for him and I to talk, at great lengths or small paths, to do what ‘real’ intellectuals do, and that I was the only man in his life he could talk to. He said with a deeply suspicious look of himself that I was perhaps the only friend he has ever had in his life.
I thought about the immediate, pragmatic implication: this guy is mindfucking me and will never let me out of his prison because he is in love with me. Does he have a wife?!
“Do you have a wife? Children?”
He laughs and even slaps his knee while doing it. The laugh is so false and mechanical that it could be a life sized action figure, with only the most basic means of articulation… A demented life sized simple action figure, who can only move his mouth and arms.
“I have three children and my wife is… Oh, fuck it. I have three children and two wives, and my second wife seems to be flirting with divorce. And I do have a… concubine… heh-heh-hmm… And her becoming my third wife… Hmmmmmm.”
I lit up another cigarette as he paddled around a puddly mask of rueful and forgotten facial expressions and body articulations. No longer the cheap action figure, he was full-blown lurching and retching and being attacked by some kind of terrorist in his mind and body alike; in an oscillation, pinging back and forth between the two. He tries to say sorry, and his mouth can not make the “why” sound of Y at the end of Sorry and I pat his arm across the table and sshhh shh shh it’s okay Warden Cansulle. His keys are on the floor, along with a picture of him as a very young man seemingly in a place like Thailand, holding and almost cradling a quite old Asian woman with gigantic breasts that she would otherwise use many layers of clothing to obscure or hide in public. But – not in a photograph, with her, lover?
“Do you want to talk about that picture, Warden? That woman is so beautiful. Who is she?”
“I met her when I was 22. Bartender. Thailand, but in a district known for less… constant everything, pounding music, the stench of sex reeling about like a fucked melange ranging from butterscotch to the smell that a dying human body makes once their kidney shuts down. It is an uncanny smell that doesn’t even smell like death – it just is death, coming from every pore, like a fishy sweet rot that I find now hard to explain or poetically describe. I have smelled that once again another time, when a friend of mine was dying from drugs. It pushes a chemical kind of like urine smell out of every pore as your kidneys fail to properly get your piss ready and white and proper. I’m sorry.”
“For talking about piss?” I light another cigarette, and he yells a beckon to his big-butt secretary to fetch him and I a carton of Lucky Strikes on DeliverDaddy.
“You should ask her on a date, you know.”
I was nodding immediately, but not because I agreed in a particularly effusive or impatient way, but I was rather beginning to mimick him and his general tempo.
“She’s a bit old, yeah?” I whispered as I lurched against his ear and across the desk in a very un-prisonerly fashion.
“You are 48. She is 29!”
My heart stopped a beat when he said that. It isn’t like we have fucking birthdays in here. And I don’t mean birthday parties, either. You are just left to your own devices just as the same day after the other… besides the lucky ones, those with cavalcade’s of visitors and special little fuck-rooms that end up resembling a pig stye, with Chinese gifts that will fall apart at the exact moment you actually want to use it, all pyramidical next to the ziggurat piles of garbage and boxes and warranties. The Birthday Boy himself is almost always agitated, because he had done so much for Warden Cansulle and that he just wants five minutes alone in a dark room with his wife and she crosses her arms - obviously horny as he is – and says some blah-blah-blah about getting caught, and he looks her in the eye and says:
“You better go find us a closet right now or I’mma just rape you right here.”
Cansulle is laughing as I tell him this story, he is really laughing hard. He lights up a cigarette, still laughing, and pours us each a shot of, I don’t know. Scotch.
“Do you know what they do with like, pregnant lady prisoners? Is there a separate ward? Is there a woman’s prison abortion clinic?”
He looks flushed and flustered but finds his laugh again and just says with another eruption of happy-noises that he has no clue, and that those are excellent questions. His secretary walks in, holding up two cartons of Luckies and seemingly displaying her round shelfy butt to me as she whispers a secret in the Warden’s ear, which also coincides with an eruption of thunder outside. The Warden tells her to turn off the main fan light as he switches on his desk-lamp and pours another shot.
“You know… There is a door in this place that no one knows about who is still alive. You can just leave whenever you want if you have this door, but it would only be the idiot who doesn’t return to the prison and uses the door on special occasions. One time a man brought in a fucking gun because he knew about the door. Fucking retard. I shot his big toe off, and I created a mock-lock so that he would assume the door is no longer the special door it once was. He told everyone how complex this lock was, too. It didn’t even have half the numbers on it… All he had to do was, well, just dial it to 32. Nobody ever figured it out. 32. 32. Fucking retarded imbeciles.”
I couldn’t tell if the door was real, or if the story was real, or if the story was faked at a certain point, and as I thought more in our ridiculous smoke-chamber I came to the logical conclusion that the door is real, and that the rest doesn’t really matter.
I told him I had to piss, but I was actually going to ask out his secretary, and as I did it I realized I was a prisoner – I couldn’t leave. The money here was pitiful, as if all scales of purchase and labor had been sliced to a tenth. I had a patchy, unappealing beard.
“—-You know what, fuck all that. I’m just thinking I’m hot shit. I’m the Warden’s Best Friend. You know?”
She smiled and licked her teeth in an extremely subtle way and said without missing a beat that she was his best friend.
“Are you gonna let me finish, or are you like every other broad? Just talk talk talk, yap yap yap…” I pretended to smack her face with one hand while actually smacking her butt with the other. We embraced, kissed and smoked and after ten minutes I told her I will probably propose to her if I get out of here soon enough. We will have eight children. You’ll never work again.
“But what if I like to work for the Warden?”