Bronx Requiem(4)

He had a change of clothes in a decent weekend bag and a very short plan of action. First stop—Smith’s bar on Forty-fourth and Eighth for a few shots of Jameson and a cold beer. He’d been looking forward to hitting the old Irish dive bar for months. Maybe even getting a sandwich from the steam table. But his plan hadn’t taken into account the passing of eight years.

There was no steam table. The bar had been renovated and expanded, gobbling up the ground-floor space next door. The old-school Irish bartenders in white shirts and black ties had been replaced by young girls who needed to be asked for everything: a glass for the beer. Another shot. A check. And they still acted like they were doing you a favor serving the overpriced booze. Amateurs.

Beck left the bar only slightly put out. All of New York City awaited him. The swirl of freedom and jolt of booze after a drought of eight years made him slightly disoriented, but also euphoric. He walked along the teeming streets, his weekend bag strapped across his shoulder, disoriented by the crush of cars, lights, and pedestrians. He hadn’t crossed a traffic-filled street in eight years. Twice he waited on a corner to get his bearings before stepping out into the moving throng.

He zigzagged north and east until he reached the Plaza Hotel at Fifty-ninth Street. Even though he had a reservation, when he checked in he fully expected there’d be no record of it. But the name James Beck did appear on the computer. He did exist outside the walls of the New York State prison system.

Beck asked for a room on a high floor overlooking Central Park. The hotel clerk stared at his computer screen, moving his mouse and clicking his keyboard for an inordinate amount of time. It began to annoy Beck, and the aura of menace he had cultivated during his years in maximum-security prisons pulsed off him.

“What’s the problem?” Beck asked.

When the hotel clerk looked up at Beck, he stopped fiddling with his keyboard and mouse and came up with a room that delivered most of what Beck wanted. Nestled on the eleventh floor but offering a view of Fifth Avenue. Good enough.

Beck remembered thinking the room felt huge after spending years in cells where he could spread his arms and almost touch the walls on either side. And the room felt almost unbearably quiet and luxurious. But it was the bathroom and the shower that had eased his soul that day. He still remembered the shower. He’d stood under the endlessly warm relaxing spray for twenty minutes, the extravagance and solitude almost too much to bear. Under that shower, for the first time in eight years, Beck felt his mind and body releasing the tension and dread he had been living with for so long.

The Plaza Hotel shower had given him a glimmer of what normal might be like, although for him normal would never be what it had been. He’d never lead the life most people lived, but he would construct a life he could be proud of and satisfied by, no matter who or what tried to stop him. His days of unbearable tension, of always being on the alert, suppressing who he was, were over. He knew two things: He would never return to prison. And no person, or institutions, or circumstances would ever stop him from being the man he wanted to be.

As he rushed into the south wing of the bus terminal, Beck knew Packy Johnson would also never be able to have a completely normal life after prison. He would help Packy find a job, and a place to live. Perhaps someday Packy might have a relationship with a woman. Be part of a family. But lurking under it all would be the decades of incarceration that had changed him forever.

Packy Johnson had gone to his first juvenile detention center at the age of ten with his twelve-year-old brother, Ramon. Their mother had been lost to drugs, and no family members had stepped up to take care of them. They had two older sisters, but they were barely able to fend for themselves.

Within a year, Packy and Ramon took every opportunity they could to escape the hell of that first juvenile facility, where abuse had been a daily occurrence. They’d find a way to slip out and run the streets of East Harlem trying to find their mother, living a feral existence until the cops found them and returned them to the prisonlike juvenile institution, or later on to an overcrowded, repressive foster home.

By the time he was seventeen, Packy was a full-fledged drug addict and strong-arm robber. He was fearless, yet on some level utterly terrified by what he was capable of doing. He would rob anybody, at any opportunity, anywhere. He would take down a commuter walking to his car, a hooker and her john parked on a dark street in Hell’s Kitchen, a pimp, another junkie, a businesswoman leaving an ATM, a drunk leaving a bar. He had a gun; he was strong; he burned with a crazed intensity, and could practically outrun a police car. Packy never hesitated. When he shoved his gun into somebody’s face, opposition evaporated. He hit hard and fast and moved faster.

His only loyalty was to his brother, Ramon. When Packy went after two drug dealers who had threatened Ramon over a debt, he nearly killed both of them. The assault sent Packy to prison for the next seventeen years, much of his sentence served at Clinton, where he and Beck had formed their friendship.

Now, nine years later, on a muggy spring day in New York, James Beck’s friend was about to take the monumental step from in prison to out of prison. Beck did not want to be one minute late for it.

Unfortunately, Beck burned up five minutes running to the south terminal and finding out Packy’s bus would be arriving back at the main terminal.

He ran back to the main terminal and hustled through what looked to him like a cross between an old airport and a mall, trying to find the escalators that would take him up to gate 313.