BOOKS

SOLEDAD BROTHER: THE PRISON LETTERS OF GEORGE JACKSON; Introduction by Jean Genet; Bantam Books; $1.50

Huey Newton called George Jackson, “The greatest writer of us all.” It was that high praise that moved me to this book. Without making any comment about Newton’s other positions, it was the best advice I’ve taken since Soul On Ice.

George Jackson is the most inspiring writer I’ve ever read. That he managed to become such a brilliant and astute social critic as well, despite a! 11 the normal disadvantages inherent in toeing a Black American, and despite the fact that he has been continuously in California prisons since he was j 18, is little short of amazing.

Jackson’s tale is incredible eijiough, on its own. After growing up in Chicago and Los Angeles ghettos, in thej usual degrading environment that leads to such economic desperation thht the Black youth is inevitably forced to deal with crime, George was finally apprehended, for robbing a gas /station of $70. “I accepted a deal,” he writes ten years later, “I agreed to conftess and spare the county court costs in (return for a light county jail sentence. I confessed but when time canjie for sentencing they tossed me into the penitentiary with one to life. Thjat was in 1960. I was eighteen years old. I’ve been here ever since. I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas ij .. We attempted to transform the\ black criminal mentality into «; black revolutionary mentality. As a 1 result, each of us has been subjected to years of the most viscious reactionary violence by the state. Our mortality rate is almost what you would expect [to find in a history of. Dachau. ” (Italics; mine)

That is the key to Jackson, a| nd the key to this book; George Jackson is involved, deeply, with transforming the mongoloid features into a very hideous combination and growling, “Fucker!”, he first doubled me over with a frankly massive blow to the abdomen that caused my gogggle-glasses to fall from my nose to the floor, grabbed my left arm and jerked it to a painful ninety-degree angle against my back, spun me around, and pushed my head into the sink, against which he proceeded to slam my forehead. The last utterance of his I remember before either fainting or being bludgeoned unconscious was, “Got anything else to say, faggot?”

On regaining consciousness I discovered that I had been left slumped over the toilet, my head drooped over its very bowl. Predictably,, my first reaction was to remove myself from this humiliating position, lest someone come in and think me drunk. Stumbling to the mirror, I discovered that my heartless assailant had gone so far as to allow my hair to hang down into the water of the toilet. AsT began drying it with paper-towels I noted also that my back was soaked.

The brute had, I rapidly inferred, urinated oil it while I had been unconscious in the toilet bowl.

Peeling . off my formerly exquisite Keith Richard multi-colored gambler’s shirt that I had bought at Sy Amber’s, clothier to the resplendent,, I discovered also that I had been sprayed head to toe with my own Aqua Net unscented hairspray.

ooking such a horrible sight, it I p would scarcely have done for me to have attempted to return to the midst of the Whisky. Therefore, as I wrung out my Keith Richard shirt in the sink, swabbed my forehead with damp papertowels, gently wiped the blood that had caked at the corner of my mouth away with dampened toilet-paper, and attempted without much. success to restore some vestige of order to my dripping hair, I resolved to postpone my further ravaging of the Whisky’s ladies untill such time as I could return home to shampoo my hair and then dry it in place with my professional hand hair-dryer, ingest some thorazine to inhibit my various aches and pains, and ehange into something dry, albeit equally devastating.

Thus, after attending as best I could to my momentary visual deficiencies, I exited not through the club’s main entrance (to have done so would have *been to suffer the disapproving scrutinization of those in the Club’s very center), but through the rear upstairs entrance, which route required that I pass only those seated in the balcony area. That I resolved to take this latter - route will no doubt seem completely reasonable to those who are aware that the balcony area customarily accomodates only those hopeless souls who, for want of capital, dificiency of social grace, or similar affliction, compromise their conspiciousness simply to avoid the mainfloor necessity of purchasing two drinks per show.

I attained the top of the stairs with only minimal discomfort and made my way through the twisted tangles of humanity sprawled across the hard benches of the balcony with so ominous a grimace on my face that no one dared to derisively comment on the sorry state of my clothes and hair.

At the landing of the steps leading down to the San Vicente exit I nearly bumped into Teddi, who was standing coolly against the northeast wall of the hall smoking a Winston while allowing the equipment manager of one of the groups scheduled to appear that night to fondle one of her hard tiny breasts beneath her blouse. She gave no sign of having noticed me as I walked past her to the door and thither onto the street. Some day I shall have to do something nice for her.

f crossed Sunset at the corner and began making my way east through the armies of perspired amphetamined hippies that were congregated as usual on that side of the street. As it is hardly unusual for the populants of this region to look as if they had just been assaulted in a dark alley, I was scarcely noticed.

As I approached the Cinematheque-16, though, my path was blocked by a legion of those wild-eyed acne-infested wind-up evangelists of the sort nightly loosed upon the Strip by Arthur Piety, that f,amous methedrine-addict-turnedpreacher who, in the six months since his much-publicized reformation in the mental ward of Los Angeles County Prison, had attracted much notoriety for his success in transforming hordes of local amphetamine freaks into frothing proponents of Christian fundamentalism.

I went so far as to hop off the curb in an attempt to evade them, but they quickly surrounded me anyway in the distressingly efficient way they had been taught by Piety’s staff of former physical-education teachers.

nstantlv I was handed half a dozen copies of The, Big Question (“If KC you were to die right now, would (1^ your soul go to Heaven?”), which I dropped to the ground as they were forced into my hand. One of the eight or so of them, a tall dishevelled brute with filthy nipple-length hair and a faceful of malignant red splotches, began bellowing, “You been sinning, man! You been shooting something, man! Christ loves you, but you been sinning anyway, man!”

Another one, a middle-aged black with pierced ears and the most vacant maniacal stare I have ever encountered, began chanting in an impossible bass monotone:

“You gotta ’cept Chris’ now, bro’ ... You goin’ burn in hell-fi’ res’ ’ternity, bro’ ... You gotta give up ya sinnin’, bro’ ... You gotta take Chris’ in ya heart ’fore it’s too late, bro’.”

When a hideous sallow little whore looking no more than sixteen years old grabbed my sleeve and stuck her ugly metal crucifix not two inches from my face I began to panic. I swatted her fat arm down, causing her to drop her icon to the sidewalk, implored them, “Let me through!”, and tried to push past one of them, only to be thumped roughly in the chest by the splotchy one and grabbed from behind by one I couldn’t see.

“Don’t worry, man, we can turn the other cheek, man! We can turn it! We can turn it, man!” the splotchy one screamed, and then he hit me with all his might on my right cheek. I wanted to faint but I couldn’t.

“Christ told us to go out on the streets, man,” he continued, shrieking like a lunatic. “We’re gonna save your soul, man! You need Christ, man! You’ve been sinning and you smell of piss, man! You’ve been taking reds or something, man!”

With all my remaining strength I screamed back at him, “You dirty motherfucking animal! You filthy smegma-eating shithead! You get your fucking hands off my shirt or I’ll get the Man!”

When I regained consciousness again I was in the back of a police car, there was dark brown blood caked on the front of my lime-green crushed-velvet pop-star trousers, and my hands were chained behind my back. The cop who was driving, when he noticed that I had come to, turned around and jovially inquired, “Couldn’t keep your hands to yourself, eh, faggot?”

I’ve found , that sometimes the hardships of being impossibly glamorous and coincidentally haughty sometimes exceed the rewards thereof.