Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [267]
Once he had their trust, he was careful not to lose it. Caskie Stinnett, editor of Travel & Leisure, solicited a piece on what it's like for prisoners, who, after all, enjoy little in the way of travel if not leisure, but Cheever (who found the idea “interesting” and certainly needed the money) declined: “He explained that his acceptance by the inmates was an extremely sensitive thing,” Stinnett recalled, “and that it could be easily derailed.” And meanwhile, of course, he was hoarding his material for a higher purpose. Almost every set piece in Falconer—almost every detail—appears somewhere in Cheever's journal entries about Sing Sing, based on information he'd extracted from inmates: a robbery gone awry, for instance, when the victim, chained to his refrigerator, had dragged the thing out of the kitchen and down the hall to the nearest telephone; or the way Stacy went to the infirmary each morning to get his methadone, and was almost beaten to death by “assholes” (guards) when he caused a ruckus in the midst of withdrawal; or the way convicts were photographed for loved ones standing next to a Christmas tree. Nobody, however, was grilled as relentlessly as Lang, who was grateful for Cheever's help in getting him paroled that December. Lang gave Cheever nice details about, say, the cats in the mess hall, one of which was clubbed by an asshole on the “goon squad” named Tiny, who organized beatings of difficult inmates (“dead by natural causes”). Lang also described an elaborate plan of escape he'd worked out as chaplain's clerk, whereby he'd disguise himself in a surplice and board the helicopter of a visiting ecclesiastic. Most fascinating to Cheever were Lang's stories about the casual homosexuality of prison life. Movie night, for example, was an excuse for mass blow jobs: “As soon as the lights went down [Cheever wrote] so too did Larry and Petey and Harry and Georgie and a real freak who called himself Margot. 20th Century Fox presents was wasted on us and even with that loud music they play for the credits you could hear slurping noises. Cocksucking is very noisy. … [One guy] stood right up and said, Hey men I just came seven times. Everybody clapped.”
THAT CHEEVER MANAGED to pursue his Sing Sing duties for two years is more than a little remarkable. At home, the situation deteriorated almost daily. Each morning, as Cheever put it, he did “everything but shout ‘fire’ “ to clear the pantry so he could get at the bottles, and his body continued to bloat in protest. Shortly after he began teaching that summer, he was stopped by police while driving home—very, very slowly—from a dinner party at the Cowleys’ house in Connecticut. “Put me in jail!” he angrily expostulated. “If it's a crime to drive carefully, put me in jail!” The policemen, who couldn't fail to notice that the gentleman reeked of alcohol, diffidently insisted he take a Breathalyzer test. A few weeks later, Cheever recounted the sequel while thanking an admirer for sending him a copy of Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery, a temperance tract by an alleged nineteenth-century forebear, George Barrell Cheever: “I trust he hasn't heard—in heaven, his resting place—that his great-nephew was arrested last month for drunken driving. I didn't hit anything but the State Police stopped me at two in the morning and asked me to breathe into a bag. The bag exploded.”
Cheever's license was suspended for sixty days, and so he had to ride shotgun when he went to Treetops later in July for his daughter's twenty-eighth birthday. One reason he was willing to make