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 too-bright 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