Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

tell you again.”
    Yellow and green and brown and black; black and brown and green and yellow. The only way to shut out the sounds and the smells of this place was to concentrate on the colors, and to walk. Up past the latrine to where the cop sat; turn, back past the mess hall to the other end; turn. A small man could move unnoticed in a crowd like this if he kept his mouth shut and his eyes front and his arms close to avoid touching anyone. He could breathe at measured intervals and keep his own counsel; he could even burst into tears if he did so quietly; nobody would notice.
    Instead of crying he sat down in the only vacant place on one of the corridor benches, and a brown hand slid onto his thigh.
    “It’s all right.”
    “Huh?”
    “It’s all right. You can kiss me if you want, but only if you say ‘I love you’ first.”
    He was up and walking again, and he’d made three circuits of the ward when he found an empty mattress in the alcove at the far end. Sitting was better than walking and lying down wasbetter still, though it sank him deeper into the smells of sweat and feet. He squirmed and sprawled facedown in total collapse – the hell with everything – and he even slept for a while, or thought he was asleep, until his eyes came open and saw that the men who lay very close on either side of him were masturbating.
    But after lunch there was another call of “Nourishment, gentlemen!” and another round of ward cigarettes, and he found himself walking with Dr. Spivack. He didn’t recognize him at first because he wore fresh pajamas and had combed his hair and his face was free of hysteria: it was a tightly clenched, sardonic face.
    “You come in last night?”
    “Yes.”
    “Half these poor bastards don’t even know where they are. You know where you are?”
    “Bellevue.”
    “Gotta be more specific than that, buddy. Bellevue Hospital is a great public medical institution. It’s—”
    “Okay; the psycho ward.”
    “And you honestly think there’s only one? My God, man, there’s an entire psychiatric
wing
in Bellevue. Seven floors, each one worse than the one beneath, and this is the top. The worst. This is the Men’s Violence Ward. Are you blind? Can’t you see these clowns in straitjackets? Can’t you see that cop? There’s got to be a cop on duty here because some of us inmates are police cases. Criminals. Nobody knows who; I don’t even think the orderlies know. I don’t even think Charlie knows.” He had been walking briskly, making Wilder stumble and hurry to keep up with him, but now he stopped short, grabbed Wilder’s arm and spun him around to face a stiff, jabbing index finger. “How about you? Huh? You a police case?”
    “No. How about letting go of my arm?”
    Spivack laughed and punched him on the shoulder. It seemed to be meant as a punch of camaraderie, but it hurt. “Hell, I’m only kidding; I knew you were okay from your face. Know how you look? Like some little kid’s lost his mother in a department store. What’s your name?”
    And for at least an hour Dr. Spivack talked, steering Wilder through the crowds on either side of the corridor, pausing only to interrupt himself with little advisory asides – “Don’t ever take a flop in there unless you
really
have to,” he said of the alcove with the mattresses; “that’s Jerk-off City” – and most of his talk was autobiography.
    He came from what he called a medical family. All his male forebears had been distinguished doctors in Germany until his father fled with his own family to this country in the thirties. His oldest brother was “tops: a first-rate heart man at Cornell Medical Center,” and the second was doing all right too, considering he’d never been the brightest guy in the world; he was a radiologist up at Mount Sinai – “
You
know, he’s dumb, but dumb in a way that doesn’t show. And he’s married to the most glorious piece of ass you ever saw, this big blonde Wisconsin girl with legs