Memories of West Street and Lepke

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-wormingin pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

I hog a whole house on Boston's "hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"where even the manscavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,and is "a young Republican."I have a nine months' daughter,young enough to be my granddaughter.

Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,and I am forty.  Ought I to regret my seedtime?

I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.

O.,and made my manic statement,telling off the state and president, and thensat waiting sentence in the bull penbeside a negro boy with curlicuesof marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,

I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a shortenclosure like my school soccer court,and saw the Hudson River once a daythrough sooty clothesline entanglementsand bleaching khaki tenements.

Strolling,

I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")and fly-weight pacifist,so vegetarian,he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.

He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.

Hairy, muscular, suburban,wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things,

I'd never heardof the Jehovah's Witnesses."Are you a C.

O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird."No," he answered, "I'm a J.

W."He taught me the "hospital tuck,"and pointed out the T-shirted backof Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,there piling towels on a rack,or dawdling off to his little segregated cell fullof things forbidden to the common man:a portable radio, a dresser, two toy Americanflags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,he drifted in a sheepish calm,where no agonizing reappraisaljarred his concentration on the electric chairhanging like an oasis in his airof lost connections….