244
JOHN HOLLANDER
unusually complicated wrought-iron framework in which was set a
perfectly ordinary barred door. It was a little too low, one realized
on being pushed through it. The lights were recessed in the ceiling
and covered over with a heavy grille, as in a gymnasium, and a large
clock set high in the wall opposite the door was covered in
the
same way. Around the sides of the room were wooden benches, not
so narrow as to be really uncomfortable, but tipped, I soon learned,
at such an angle to the wall that the eventual impulse was to get
up
and run toward the center of the room. A rather soft, dark-brown
asphalt-like material gave the floor an illusion of yielding, yet
with·
out any real resiliency. In many ways it was a very nasty room
in
which to plunge some twenty or so nondescript males, the immersion
accompanied in each case with a clanging reminder, as the door
swung shut, that much as it resembled a junior high school gym,
this
was really a jail.
I picked my way across the floor. Standing and squatting shapes .
lounged about among a few prostrate ones; I made for one wall and
tried out an empty section of bench. Without quite realizing why, I
got up after a few seconds and walked toward the wall opposite
the
door. A faint drone of echoing conversation drilled through the room,
obscured from time to time by the amplified shuffle of feet, the brush·
ing noise of bunched clothes dragging across the floor, an occasional
cry or groan. A burst of frenetic whistling emanated every so often
from a short, nervous one with absolutely no hair. Of the more than
thirty men in the room, he seemed to be the only one with any ob–
vious physical defect, although most looked, in some way or another,
to
be
ailing. The tune that he whistled, so rapidly and so high that it
could hardly be made out, was the first strain of "Take me out
to
the ball game."
Spalding, or so the other men called him, had little to say.
I remember him for his near-idiocy and for the constant intrusion
of
his whistling. He was the only man I cared to single out for any
attention at all. I had no wish, you must see, to come to terms
with
the place at all, particularly since I should be out of it tomorrow, '
none the worse for the boredom. The other men's shapes remained
shapes only as I kept focusing my eyes on the dreadful green tiles
of
the walls. Finally, I sat down on the floor, stretched myself out on
one side, curled my arms about my head, and half shut my eyes while
I indulged in the minor restorative of watching a man standing
