Street Raised Read online

  STREET RAISED

  Copyright 2006 by Pearce Hansen

  Cover Copyright 2011 by Mark McKenna www.mmphotographic.com

  Edited by Anthony Neil Smith

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  Thank you to James Frey, Jess Mowry, Andrew Vachss and Richard Ramirez. Many thanks to Phyllis Parsons of the Parsons Company, and to director Vladimir Vitkin.

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  Chapter 1

  When he raised from prison Speedy left in his stocking feet.

  Item by item, the C.O. managing Speedy’s release made Speedy return his state issue clothing, starting with his blue chambray shirt. Speedy stood bare-chested in front of the shatterproof plexiglas window separating him from the guard, watching in practiced patience as the screw tallied each returned item on the checklist. The screw kept licking his lips throughout the process, squinting at the clipboard as if taxed to his mental limits by the exercise.

  The Man read out, “One pair, dungarees.”

  Speedy shucked his prison issue trous. He folded and pushed the denim pants across the narrow counter through the horizontal slot in the plexiglas window, then stood naked except for his boxers and socks.

  There wasn’t any guard out here in the egress room with Speedy, so it wasn’t mace pepper spray or the riot stick that kept him in line as he waited to hit the bricks. He was only one door away from freedom, seconds really, and the Man knew Speedy wasn’t about to blow it now. The accuracy of the Man’s smug condescension was an irritant, and so was the necessity to submit and truckle this one last time.

  The penal officer (whose name was Wysocki, not that it mattered) looked at Speedy’s face for the first and last time, still squinting as if myopic. Maybe this turnkey wasn’t the mental deficient he appeared but was instead just nearsighted, and simultaneously too vain to wear glasses but too cheap to buy contacts.

  In quick succession Wysocki pushed out a heat-sealed plastic bag containing all the (legal) property Speedy had on him when he was popped: an open envelope containing his paltry gate release money; and a hanger-topped mesh bag filled with the civilian clothing Speedy was wearing at the time of his initial arrest. The mesh bag was the same kind public swimming pools supplied for bathers to store their street clothes in.

  “Sign the receipt.” Wysocki pushed a copy of Speedy’s release inventory through the slot.

  Speedy scribbled his John Hancock on the line before looking to all he had in the way of worldly possessions. He hauled out his Dickies trousers and stood stork-like to don the pants one leg at a time. Next he took out his tie-dye tee-shirt, slipped it on. He pulled out his baggy surplus field jacket from the mesh bag, but stopped short as he realized there was no footwear inside.

  Wysocki watched Speedy staring into the shoeless mesh bag and smiled.

  “You were arrested with no shoes, you transferred here with no shoes, you leave with no shoes,” Wysocki explained.

  “Maybe I need to talk to the watch commander – this is bogus and you know it.” Speedy kept his tone reasonable. He even considered pasting an unashamed puissant smile on his face like they were two old chums joking around. But he wouldn’t knuckle under here even enough to lubricate and expedite his release from the Big House.

  Wysocki was enjoying his power; a little ghost of a smirk haunted his lips as if making up for the step-n-fetchit grin Speedy refused to wear.

  “Sure,” Wysocki said. “Let’s just file your Form 602. Let’s stick you back in lockup and I’ll set up an appointment for you to talk with the Skipper – when I get around to it, and when he has time to see you.”

  A wave of loathing rippled through Speedy. He could offer to buy back his prison issue kicks with some of his gate money, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that either. He’d rather leave shoeless.

  What would Wysocki say if Speedy told him what all the inmates knew? That whenever Wysocki was on duty getting fatter and fatter on pogie-bait junk-food while stroking off to confiscated skin-mags between performing cavity searches on mace-sprayed convicts, Wysocki’s equally doughy wife was banging every other guard in the prison – and even some of the released cons.

  The knowledge made Speedy smile as sincerely as Wysocki was. Speedy let the contempt he felt for this little tin puke shine forth from his eyes without concealment for a foolish second.

  The dangerous moment passed and his face returned to its usual bland, almost placid neutrality. Wysocki appeared confused as he hid there feeling safe behind his plexiglas shield.

  He aimed a scowl at Speedy until finally either deciding he hadn’t really seen the look he thought he’d gotten from this convict, or that it wasn’t worth the effort of getting off his pimply ass to do something about it.

  Speedy tore open the heat-sealed plastic bag, pocketed his foldie knife and his wallet (which he put his meager gate money into) and tossed the trash into the garbage can. He faced what he’d refused to as much as glance at since entering this room: the electrico-magnetically locked door to outside.

  There was an industrial buzzing that would have been obnoxious under any other circumstances, followed by the weighty clunk of the gate door’s locking mechanism disengaging.

  “Hey convict,” Wysocki called. Wysocki’s gaze dropped to Speedy’s stocking feet then leapt back up to stare him hungrily in the eye.

  “Walk a mile in my shoes,” Wysocki crooned.

  Speedy suspected that singing lessons wouldn’t do Wysocki much good.

  The floor’s asbestos tiles were chilly through Speedy’s socks as he headed toward the entrance. He briefly considered paying a visit to Wysocki’s woman on his way out of town.

  “Not even with your dick, Wysocki,” Speedy said out loud as his hand hit the door. Even with as high a sperm count as he had to be lugging around right now, he shuddered at the very thought.

  “What?” asked the Screw.

  But Speedy was already beyond Wysocki’s grasp, on his way out the sally port and into the World.

  The town serving the prison was on the Northern California Coast. Unsurprisingly, it was raining. The wet streets all led, as if inevitably, to Highway 101: the artery Speedy had to follow south to get home to the San Francisco Bay Area.

  Speedy’s field jacket easily shrugged off the rain. But as it was winter the mist-slick sidewalks were ice cold, and the wet soaked Speedy’s socks into frigid sodden masses inside of a block. Every hundred feet or so he had to stop and tug up the waterlogged pieces of increasingly tattered fabric. But as clammy as his ragged hosiery felt now, he knew his tootsies would really suffer once the socks were completely gone.

  He passed a rescue mission, hymns in cracked voices spilling out to irritate him: “This is my story, this is my song,” howled forth from inside there in a cacophony as desperate as any at the dog pound.

  Speedy’s lipless mouth quirked in a rare light hearted moment for him: having a good idea just what kind of stories the soggy old boozers in there had to tell, he would have been semi-interested to hear just what they felt they had to sing about.

  There were shoes in there with those singing voices; food and a cot too – but the price of admission was insurmountably high. Still, as he considered his current shoeless state he wondered if it was possible to have too much pride.

  When Speedy reached State Highway 101 he found a bus-stop shelter kiosk and stepped in out of the rain. He plopped his narrow ass down on the bench to consider his paucity of assets; his lack of options for effective action.

  Now that he wasn’t sharking forward he inspected his feet, tugging off the wet, holey socks to inspect the fish-belly white soles of his feet as if in self-triage. His feet were already blistering and he decided clinically that he needed footwear, bad.

  Across the street he saw a thrift store.
He stood and threaded his way through the desultory flow of traffic to look in the display window, which was filled with a depressing array of dingy cast-offs. He couldn’t see anyone on duty in there, which was very appealing.

  Speedy went inside. The warmth of the thrift store was a shock after the cold rain outside and he shivered in paradoxical response as he scanned the dim interior for any eye witnesses.

  “Can I help you?” he heard from his elbow, and he had to squeeze down on his instinctive impulse to spin that way in reflex. Instead he turned as if casually, to minimize any body language that might startle a potential mark to flight.

  She reminded him of a drowned cat, this tiny wrinkled old woman holding a white cane and not even coming up to his shoulder, with glazed sightless eyes looking through him making him suddenly unsure as to whether or not he was even there.

  Speedy looked away from the old blind lady at the till, which waited unattended and undefended for him back in the depths of the store. It was an old beater of a mechanical cash register, one of those antique indestructible NCRs.

  The imagined loot inside the till was almost maddening in his present impoverished state. It would be stupid to pass up this opportunity. His gate money was a joke; he barely had enough for cancer sticks and a couple of artery-clogging fast-food meals. Speedy needed to get paid fast, and scoring before he’d even left town would be a pleasant slap in the face to the Man.

  But when he looked back down at her she was smiling, and he found himself smiling in reply as if against his will. Her and her store weren’t prey; this wasn’t a situation Speedy needed to own nor was he willing to dominate it.

  He even imagined bragging about it later to an imaginary group of admiring cohorts: ‘Yeah, I sure punked that old bitch up north, man.’ Sure.

  “No thanks ma’am,” he mumbled, taking a resigned step toward the door and the cold wet out-of-doors. Speedy’s sodden socks squelched on the floor as he headed toward his open-ended impromptu camping trip.

  “Wait,” she said, cocking her blind head at the soggy sound of his shoelessness. “Follow me.”

  Speedy trailed her in wary puzzlement as she walked along an aisle flanked by mothball-smelling coats long out of style. She was so sure of her step here in her thrift store domain she didn’t even bother to use her cane.

  When she stopped, it was in front of a bin filled to the brim with a variety of footwear: sandals and slippers, sneakers and cowboy boots, all sizes and styles.

  “Pick a pair,” the blind woman said.

  Midway down in the heap Speedy could see some well-worn vibram-soled black combat boots, the same kind he’d always worn before going down.

  He hesitated. “I ain’t got enough to pay for them ma’am.”

  “That’s all right. You know, I’ve often thought they should make better provision for you boys when you get released.”

  Speedy let out with an embarrassed chuckle at this blind old lady’s perceptiveness. Or was she just making a lucky guess? “Maybe some of us don’t deserve no better.”

  “Nobody deserves to suffer,” she said without a smile. “Now pick a pair.”

  Speedy snaked out the combat boots and lifted one foot to compare sole sizes. He grunted at the approximate match and then sat on the linoleum floor to pull them on and lace them up snug. They were steel-toed, and they fit even over his raggedy waterlogged socks. Speedy stood, his wet tortured feet pressing against the confines of the inside of the boots as he wriggled his toes.

  “Are you sure you’re all right young man?” she asked, the honest concern in her voice awing Speedy as much as the wealth this gift of footwear represented to him.

  “I’m fine ma’am.”

  Her smile beamed wide again, delight making the wrinkles on her tiny face disappear and giving Speedy a glimpse of the young woman she’d been long ago. Speedy figured she’d been a real beauty. He would’ve been horndogging on her if he’d been around back then, chest bumping all the competition away.

  He made sure the store’s front door latched firmly on his way out, to prevent the cold from coming in to bother this lady.

  The streets felt even wetter and chillier after the thrift store’s warmth – but at least his feet were warm now, and the rain had stopped for the moment. The sky was still a claustrophobic white dome overhead however, making the world appear drowned inside a sno-globe of milky water.

  Speedy humped down the highway toward the outskirts of town, not even bothering to thumb inside city limits. The town piggies would love to roust a newly released ex-con and he wasn’t about to give them a free crack at him.

  At the nearest freeway onramp Speedy looked inland appraisingly at a distant railway-switching yard – crossing bells were clanging over there and an engine’s whistle moaned as it dragged a long line of reefer cars to a halt.

  It would have been more convenient in some ways to hop a freight, but that wasn’t really an option for serious consideration. Speedy was shanked up with his pocket knife but he wasn’t in the mood to fight off a rat pack of Freight Train Riders of America on board a moving railroad car. He’d met a couple of those FTRA bos in prison – to prove in to that gang you had to off a railroad bull. Those boys were real carnivores.

  Besides which, Speedy’s knowledge of riding the rails was strictly theoretical; he’d never actually done it. All he knew about climbing on board a moving train was that if you couldn’t see the individual lug nuts on the rotating train wheel, if the nuts were no more than a circular blur – then your potential ride was going too fast to safely hop on board.

  Dying slow and alone with a broken back on a railroad track embankment staring at the sky sounded like a messed-up way to go. He’d stick with thumbing.

  Some off-the-map dreadlocked dude was lurking at the onramp entrance as Speedy shambled up. Dude had a ‘Will Work for Food’ sign in his hand and his black neoprene garbage bag bindle parked carefully at his feet, in physical contact with his toes.

  “Get much work that way?” Speedy asked him, jerking his chin at the sign. Dude only grinned, revealing a couple of missing front teeth.

  Speedy already knew the drill on this particular scam: the Citizens were so jazzed to see a panhandler willing to work, they’d just vomit forth the money. Any would-be task master that actually had a (*shudder*) job for Dude would be brushed off with the story that someone else had already hired him for the day, and that he was only waiting to be picked up to commence his honorable slave labor. It was seamless as such things went.

  Dude shook one long dreadlock out of his face and offered Speedy a bite off a pastrami sandwich. It tasted damn good after prison food. Speedy cadged a smoke off him too, a Pall Mall non-filter.

  Not wanting to cramp Dude’s style by hovering too close to his game, Speedy trudged further up the onramp before sticking out his thumb.

  Speedy channeled a portrayal of nonchalance, keeping anything approaching animosity or desperation from marring his carefully expressionless Doberman face. But still he waited because he had no choice, comfortable inside his own head as the Citizens’ cars climbed the onramp past him in an unending parade: tires hissing on the asphalt, vapid cattle faces staring out at him blankly or with contempt.

  Hours passed and his stomach growled in reminder of its existence. The bite of pastrami sandwich had long faded into digestive peristaltic history when Speedy’s dreadlocked panhandling acquaintance apparently decided to fold up shop: Dude pulled a brand new Walkman from his trash bag of worldly possessions, inserted a cassette and pressed play. He faded off with his neoprene bindle over his shoulder, bopping to his personal tunes as he ambled along to where ever.

  The sky was darkening and the podunk small town streetlights were flickering to feeble life, as if in an effort to illuminate the Citizens’ world, as if to convince them the clammy darkness could possibly be held at bay for more than a heartbeat at a time. The moon’s light was no more than a white blob futilely trying to rend its way through the overcast cloud c
over.

  A brushed-steel DeLorean DMC-12 swooped out from the onramp parade and pulled up next to Speedy. He lowered his thumb as the driver leaned across the front seat to inspect him with seemingly benevolent interest. The driver was an older Citizen in a pinstripe suit and vest worn low under a narrow necktie, his eyes concealed behind Rayban Wayfarers.

  Speedy flicked his gaze to the miniscule backseat of this midlife-crisis car: no restraint gear he could see, no serial killer cohort waiting back there to yoke an unwary passenger. Speedy put his hand on the door handle and raised his brows interrogatively.

  “Hop in if you’re headed to San Francisco,” the driver said, smiling. Examining the lines on the man’s face Speedy figured the expression was one the driver used a lot.

  Speedy ducked under the DeLorean’s gull wing door to get in, and they gunned up the onramp to join the American Freeway Experience.

  Endless highway, the wheels of the DeLorean hissing across the asphalt through the night, the radio playing New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ way down low. Endless redwoods seeming to lean in from off-road, barely seen at the outer limits of the DeLorean’s obtrusive headlights.

  The driver wanted to talk. His name was Buck. He rattled on about his wife, and his kids, and his dog, and his house and job. Just as if Speedy cared, just as if he and Speedy had any point of reference in common.

  Speedy had given up wondering years before what it would be like to live the straight life, or own any property he couldn’t either carry on his person or stash in a motel room. Still, he made noncommittal sounds of agreement in response to all the appropriate verbal cues, honorably paying his conversational fare by pretending to belong to the same species as Buck.

  Speedy started nodding in and out despite himself. The emotional exhaustion of this first day of freedom was already creeping up behind him like a mickie finn; he felt sluggo as hell. He kept momentarily sagging down into dream infested unconsciousness only to slam back up and awake to the night and the road and the DeLorean’s overheated interior. But then Buck’s singsong recitation of his banal existence would pour into Speedy’s ears like drugged honey, and put him back to sleep again.