k turnaround and another six or eight years inside,
my ‘memoirs‘ contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy
Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn‘t
want my freedom - or my unwillingness to give up the story I‘d worked so long and hard
to write - to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and
I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote
each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my ‘outside
search‘, as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround ... but the
cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las
Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a ‘stock-room assistant‘ at the big FoodWay
Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland - which means I became just one more
ageing bag-boy. There‘s only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the
young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I
may have even taken your groceries out to your car ... but you‘d have had to have
shopped there between March and April of 1977, because that‘s as long as I worked there.
At first I didn‘t think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I‘ve described
prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how
fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster.
And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I‘ve ever had to make, and I haven‘t finished making it yet
... not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of
the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old
women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the
printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their
shirts - a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested
and then had a sanity hearing - women of every shape and size. I found myself going
around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man.
Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always
came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to
check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this toobright
outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all
those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for
the oversight... that was something else.
My boss didn‘t like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that I
sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog that crawls up to you on its
belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I disgusted myself. But ... I couldn‘t make
myself stop. I wanted to tell him, That‘s what a whole life in prison does for you, young
man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every
master‘s dog. Maybe you know you‘ve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone
else in grey is a dog, too, it doesn‘t seem to matter so much. Outside, it does. But I
couldn‘t tell a young guy like him. He would never understand. Neither would my P.O., a
big, bluff ex-Navy man with a huge red beard and a large stock of Polish jokes. He saw
me for about five minutes every week. ‘Are you staying out of the bars, Red?‘ he‘d ask
when he‘d run out of Polish jokes. I‘d say yeah, and that would be the end of it until next
week.
Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of
steam. Now every song sounds like it‘s about fucking. So many cars.

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