lace in the auditorium, during a movie-show. Nowadays we get the
movie-shows once or twice a week, but back then the shows were a monthly event
Usually the movies we got had a morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The
Lost Weekend, was no different. The moral was that it's dangerous to drink. It was a
moral we could take some comfort in.
Andy manoeuvred to get next to me, and about halfway through the show he leaned a
little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. I'll tell you the truth, it kind of
tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell,
almost embarrassed, as if he was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those
sheepskin-lined gadgets that are supposed to 'enhance your solitary pleasure,' as the
magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing his radiator.
'I can get her,' I said. 'No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the little one?' At
that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been Betty Grable) and she
came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little Rita. For two-fifty you could have
the big Rita, four feet high and all woman.
'The big one,' he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch that night He was
blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show with his big brother's draft-card.
'Can you do it?'
'Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods?' The audience was applauding
and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray Milland, who was having a
bad case of the DT's.
'How soon?'
'A week. Maybe less.'
'Okay.' But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one stuffed down my
pants right then. 'How much?"
I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at cost; he'd been a
good customer, what with his rock-hammer and his rock-blankets. Furthermore, he'd
been a good boy - on more than one night when he was having his problems with Bogs,
Rooster, and the rest, I wondered how long it would be before he used the rock-hammer
to crack someone's head open.
Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and cigarettes, usually half a
step ahead of the reefer. In the 60s the business exploded in every direction, with a lot of
people wanting funky hang-ups like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster.
But mostly it's girls; one pinup queen after another.
A few days after I spoke to Ernie, a laundry driver I did business with back then brought
in better than sixty posters, most of them Rita Hayworths. You may even remember the
picture; I sure do. Rita is dressed - sort of- in a bathing suit, one hand behind her head,
her eyes half closed, those full, sulky red lips parted. They called it Rita Hayworth, but
they might as well have called it Woman in Heat.
The prison administration knows about the black market, in case you were wondering.
Sure they do. They probably know as much about my business as I do myself. They live
with it because they know that a prison is like a big pressure cooker, and there have to be
vents somewhere to let off steam. They make the occasional bust, and I've done time in
solitary a time or three over the years, but when it's something like posters, they wink.
Live and let live. And when a big Rita Hayworth went up in some fishie's cell, the
assumption was that it came in the mail from a friend or a relative. Of course all the carepackages
from friends and relatives are opened and the contents inventoried, but who
goes back and re-checks the inventory sheets for something as harmless as a Rita
Hayworth or an Ava Gardner pin-up? When you're in a pressure-cooker you learn to live
and let live or somebody will carve you a brand-new mouth just above the Adam's apple.
You learn to make allowances.
It was Ernie again who to

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]  ... 下一页  >>