Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [148]
Gary explained, right in that yellow room, with these four dudes monitoring Gary's hand every time it touched her tit, he spoke out on this hospital system where the doctors let the patients control everything, why they could even elect their own President of all the patients. It was the hottest kind of horseshit. That was what the patients controlled. The horseshit.
Gary had always told her stories about prison, but now he got into the nitty-gritty. Spoke of the way prison was supposed to work. It was a war. It was supposed to be a war. Convicts might do a job on other convicts, convicts might even kill other convicts, but they were on the same side. They were against the guards. It was a war where there was nothing worse than a snitch.
The guards and the Warden did everything they could to build an intelligence system. So they depended, for what they knew, on snitches. A snitch, said Gary, would even suck your cock and then run to the Warden with what you said. So the convicts did all they could to wipe out such inmates. In a good prison where the convicts had it down, there weren't too many snitches. Prison, after all, was a city where convicts lived, and had the real control. Guards just passed through for eight-hour shifts. That was the way it should work.
Here they had it inside out. There were no guards. Just a few aides. The inmates supposedly had the power. But the inmates who got elected to the posse became the new guards. They worked for the doctors. "They are in the throes of brainwash," said Gary, pointing at the posse. She wanted to giggle at the way he told them off right to their faces. "Self-seeking snitches," he said. "Not a spark of life in them. Nobody looks at anybody. They just have agenda meetings."
He would say this while she sat on his lap, say it while he was feeling her, and the four dudes were looking, boiling, hurting, from what he said. Then he and she would just hold each other and whisper and talk of other things. He would want to know how Sunny and Peabody were getting along. He would speak of how sorry he was that he used to yell at them and let them get on his nerves. In fact, they were remarkable children. Right in front of the posse they talked.
Then he would get mad again. The way they worked this hospital, he said, was worse than student government. Everybody was always taking everything up at a meeting. Committees for everything. A committee to sweep the hall. A committee to pick up straws from the brooms of the fuck-up committee who swept the hall. Each committee ran around snitching on the other committee for doing a bad job. A punk could go into a real prison, Gary announced, and if he had balls, he could come out a convict. In this hospital, men came in as convicts, and got released as punks. "This place sucks. I've never seen the like." The posse listened.
After a few visits, Gary gave up riding them. It was as if the hour was too valuable for such talk. They would sit and hold hands and be silent. They would think of places they used to go to, and live in the breath that went back and forth. Sorrow would visit from one to the other. Not a flood of waters, not the way she would cry on Tom Dynamite's naked shoulder for what she had done to Gary, or cry with Cliff because the high-school sweetheart he had married wouldn't even let Cliff's son talk to him now, no, sorrow lifted out of her heart and passed into Gary's chest and returned with the breath of his sorrow. It was as if they stood on a ledge and sorrow was as light as all the air below the fall.
Then they would feel loving again and he would grope her until she wouldn't have minded taking off a thing or two. Something new for the posse! Then,