.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. Hard Time by Mark W. Tiedemann

The cell is six by six. Somehow, on television, it looks smaller. There is a cot that folds down from the wall, a steel sink, and a steel toilet bowl. Unlike standard cells, there is no desk. All I do in the cell is lie on the cot, eat twice a day from the tray that slides through the door and hangs there, wash my hands and face, and eliminate bodily waste. I am without hope. I am serving hard time. People see me and know that prison life is dull, empty, merciless. Hard time, authentic scenes of prison life, brought to you by your tax dollars, four hours a day, except on Sunday.

There are five cameras in the cell, one in each corner and a fifth one maintained at eye-level in the wall opposite the cot, hidden in the sink fixture. I hardly notice them anymore. It’s been four years. The presence of the cameras is just another aspect of the cell, another part of the apparatus, like the sink, the toilet, the cot. What prisoner pays any attention to these things? I did once, for about six months. I examined every centimeter of every object in the cell, leaning close to them, running my hands over them, looking for flaws and imperfections, any detail that might give variation to the monotony of my enclosure. I was asked to stop. The ratings went up but it was feared that my performance would distort the whole purpose of the broadcast. People were turning me into a hero instead of seeing me for what I was supposed to be, a felon doing hard time.

At the end of my four hours the wall bearing the eye-level camera draws back and my director comes onto the set.

“Great, wrap,” he says, clapping his hands. He always claps his hands, as if the sound signifies approval or excitement. No one pays any attention anymore. The crew goes about the process of shutting down for the day and preparing for tomorrow.

I’m unzipping my uniform as the director pats my shoulder.

“You’ve got a week off,” he says.

“Injunction. Another dignity group has filed suit, we’re going off air for a week. Maybe a little more, depending.”

“I thought that was all finished.”

He shrugs elaborately. “What’s ever finished? They timed this one with the funding appropriations bill in the House. Don’t worry about it, the numbers are better than ever.”

“How long have you known?”

“I’d heard some rumors, but no one confirmed anything till this morning. I didn’t want to say anything in case it affected your performance.”

My performance. I almost laugh, but I’m still partly in character, such as it is. We’re walking toward my dressing room. I consider calling my agent to see if he can do anything for me, but I probably won’t until I know what the outcome of this latest public exercise is. The work is steady, the pay good, under the circumstances.

“I’ve got personal time due,” I say. The director lets his hand fall. “Maybe I should take it now.”

“You’re due shrink time, too, maybe you should make an appointment. You missed the last three, you know you shouldn’t do that.”

“I’m fine, I don’t need a psychiatrist.”

“What can I say? It’s in the contract.” He shrugs again. “This ought to blow over. The ratings are too good for the judiciary to take this crap seriously.”

“Right.” I open my door. “A week.”

“Maybe more.” He laughs. “Hey, you know what they say, it’s impossible to kill a government program.”

I step into my room, which is, by contract, larger than the set, and shut the door. There is a bed, a couch, a shower, a dresser and closet and make-up table. I could live here, I think sometimes. It’s a palace compared to my cell. I sit down before the mirror and start pulling off the make-up over my eyebrows. I have a false nose as well and a tightly-fitted wig that covers my thick blondish hair with a dark buzz cut.

5159789 is stitched above my left breast, about where the opening of a pocket would be on a normal shirt. When I first put the coverall on, four years ago, 5159789 had a name and a hometown and a felony and little more. I have since learned quite a lot about Elmer Shackly, often congratulating myself that I am not him.

I pick up a towel and start wiping at the make-up, excavating for my own name.

Security is an odd combination of high and casual. No personal cameras are ever allowed on the set. I have a separate exit out the back of my dressing room that leads to a locker room, wired with sensors to tell me if it’s occupied. The crew only sees me in make-up. The director knows what I really look like and so does the make-up artist, Sally, and maybe a few others, but for the most part I am just one of the stage crew at the end of the day, a gopher, one of the “writers” union rules say must be attached to the project, and when I leave for the day in the company of one or two others, who may or may not have guessed who it is they’re escorting out the stage door, I am anonymous.

Crossing the lot to the commissary I see a woman approaching from another sound stage. I’ve seen her once or twice before, but I have never done more than nod and say hello. Today she is frowning thoughtfully and paying no attention to anyone around her. I feel sympathy with her expression. I think I understand it. Worry is a universal, looks the same in any language.

She reaches the commissary before me and disappears through the sliding doors. When I enter the low-ceilinged room I do not see her.

I go to the counter and get a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie and find a table off by myself.

There aren’t many people in the commissary at this time of day. The crew working on my own show are still cleaning up and won’t start filing out of the stage for another hour or two. I’m not sure about other stages; I don’t even know if anything else besides the Hard Time spots are shot on this lot.

I’ve been daydreaming. The images, whatever they were, vanish at the sound of her voice and I look up, baffled, and see her standing a couple of feet from my table, holding a tray, one-handed, like a waitress.

I wave my hand at the opposite chair. She shifts the tray to two hands and sets it on the table, pulling back the chair with a foot. She sits and smiles.

“5159789?” she asks, pointing vaguely at my chest as she pours French dressing on her salad.

For a panicky, insane instant I freeze. I study her more carefully now that she’s less than three feet from me. Dark hair, almost black, and solemn grey eyes, small chin, wide mouth, and high-arched eyebrows. She is wearing a floppy sweatshirt but she seems athletic. She doesn’t seem to be the groupie type—and if she were, it seems unlikely that she could get onto the lot—but you can never tell.

“Sorry,” she says and laughs softly. She taps herself between the breasts. “6225753.”

Immediately I feel relief. “Women’s prison.”

She nods. “I’ve seen you,” she says and takes a bite of salad. “I didn’t think it would be a good idea to say anything till now.”

“I assume you got the word about the delay? A week off, minimum.” She shrugged as if to say makes sense to me. “So I thought this might be the right time to say hi to a fellow Hard Timer.”

I’m anxious again, though specifically why I cannot say. Perhaps it’s the confirmation of the first off-air time the show has had since it began four years ago. Perhaps it’s just the idea of one more person knowing who, exactly, I am.

“There’s probably something in our contract forbidding this,” I say, making it sound like a jest.

“Probably. But fraternizing has always been a prison tradition, hasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Has it?”

“Well, if it hasn’t, then maybe it’s time to start.”

I’m not sure what to say to that, but I don’t have to answer. The doors open and several people enter the cafeteria. Stage crew, they look like, and the shop talk ends. She glances over her shoulder, nods, and continues to eat her salad. After several seconds I lean over my pie and in silence we finish our brief meals without looking at each other.

We leave together, although we walk to the parking lot a good four or five feet apart, neither of us sure of the protocol. It is unlikely either of us would be recognized singly, but what is the math for doubling the unlikely? Half as unlikely? Twice? She gives me a look as she reaches her car, a small blue something, nondescript. I drive a small pick-up, the color of fresh mud.

“Do you know where Miglio’s is?” I ask.

“Seven-thirty,” I say and walk on, feeling a brief thrill, as if I had just gotten away with a proscribed act, slipped it past the warden.

Driving to my apartment twenty-two miles away from the set I’m doubtful that she’ll show up. How brave can you expect a stranger to be on your behalf? I’m not even sure I’ll show up.

I pull into the garage below my place, shut the motor off, and sit in the truck, listening to the engine ping as it cools. I feel as though I am on the verge of trouble.

I get out and walk between the truck and my Nissan and walk up the stairs into my apartment.

I like hard wood floors. The Hard Time set is so quiet that I crave the clatter of shoes on a solid surface. I go to my living room and kick on my stereo—Howard Hanson—and strip out of my clothes. As the strains of the Nordic Symphony fill the empty spaces around me I make myself a gin and tonic and sit naked staring out the window at the tree just outside.

A week off. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I haven’t had a time off in three years and the last one wasn’t voluntary. My choice, of course, it’s in my contract to get one, but Hard Time has no reruns. My segment has one of the highest ratings and I still have a year left to do.

The phone rings. On the fourth insistent bleat, I go into my office and pick it up. It’s my agent, asking if I’d been informed of the shut down.

“It’s just a week,” I say.

“Don’t bet on it. A week becomes a month, before you know it the networks are scrambling for something new, by next season Hard Time will be replaced by a game show. The League of Human Dignity is pressing the injunction, backed by Amnesty International. Serious weight. This could be your chance to get out of the contract.”

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Last time we spoke about it you said you wanted a prime time drama. Still interested?”

“Let’s see if this is what you think it is first.”

“Hey, sometimes you have to take a chance.” He’s quiet for a few moments. “Don’t you want out?”

“What if I—” I stop myself. What if I can’t make it outside? I swallow hard and shudder. “What’s available?”

“Steve Hillis over at CST owes me a favor, I think I could get you a spot on one of his new cop shows scheduled for next fall, depending on your review and all that nonsense.”

I laugh. “I go from a felon to a cop in one season. That’s a stretch.”

“You can still act, can’t you? Let me call him for you.”

“You really think this could be longer?”

“Hey, the ACLU has been on this since Hard Time was first proposed. Personally, anything that sticks it to that fascist asshole Berenson from what is it? the Forum for Family Decency? the people who think this is ‘morally uplifting television’? anything that gives him and them a hernia I think is a good thing, but I have to take care of my clients, too, so professionally I’m not too sanguine about a court victory shutting the program down. But success is in the numbers and the fact is people are beginning to agree that what Hard Time is doing is unnecessary anymore. Crime is down.”

“Depends on which set of numbers you look at. Our ratings are up.”

“That’s Berenson again, every time the appropriations bill comes up he beats the bushes for the faithful to tune in. Listen, you want me to ask around or not?”

“Yeah, sure. It might be fun to have some dialogue for a change.”

“Great, I’ll get back to you.”

There’s a framed photograph above my desk of a man in orange state correctional coveralls. He is Elmer Shackly, the convicted murderer-child molester I portray on Hard Time. He is the real inmate, the one a court decision several years ago protected from being shown on television, a legal battle still being waged over the whole idea of public exhibition of penal justice. The ACLU argued that it was an invasion of privacy to air a prisoner’s time. The government argued that showing life in prison as-it-is rather than a “dramatization” as had been tried up till then was a potentially effective deterrent. The original show took footage from one camera mounted in the prisoner’s cell and was marginally less boring than what we do now.

The question then, as now, was whether people would watch. I watched. I don’t know about anyone else.

Did it have an effect on crime?

I don’t know. Statistics say a lot of things, sometimes contradictory. Who can say what has an effect on anything?

It has been a steady, sizeable paycheck for me for four years. It has effected me. My life is different now from before. I’m not sure what I’d do if it ended. If I had had a choice about it, I wonder what I would have done differently.

I go back into my living room and listen to the rest of Hanson’s rich, anachronistically romantic symphony, then sit in the silence, staring out the window, and try to imagine a different life.

Of the four I frequent, Miglio’s is my favorite restaurant. Small, intimate, dark, I dine here at least once a week. They give me a sense of privacy I need.

I’m surprised when she shows up. I had expected her to demur; the studio doesn’t have to actively discourage socializing among the cast of the show, it generally never happens, as if we can’t get past what we do to be who we are with each other. But she walks in, dressed smartly in dark grey and red, and asks the maitre d’ where I am. Before he answers she sees me, smiles, and thanks him before coming to my table.

“I wasn’t sure you really meant it,” she says. “I was prepared to be disappointed. The rest of the evening is a bonus.”

“We’re even. I didn’t expect you to come.”

She cocks an eyebrow. Before she can say more our waiter brings us menus. “What do you recommend?”

“The fettucini primavera is excellent. And the house wine is a zinfandel, also excellent.”

“I’m convinced.” She lays the menu aside.

I am grateful when the waiter returns to take our orders. I feel off balance, having expected to spend the night alone, and now that I have company I don’t know what to say. It’s embarrassing, as if suddenly I’ve become an awkward high school student trying to ask someone to the prom, knowing she’ll refuse and terrified she’ll accept. By the time the food arrives and we’re halfway through the first bottle of wine I realize that she feels the same way. What can we talk about? Not work, no. Not only because we do basically the same thing but because it seems inappropriate, somehow taboo.

“You’re right,” she says. “Excellent.”

I signal for another bottle. “I don’t get much chance to share this.”

“I gather you live alone.”

“You make it sound inevitable.”

I look at her, wondering, and ask, “How long have you been on the set?”

“Were you . . . ?”

“No, there wasn’t anyone before I signed.”

“Well. The studio does what it can to protect you. Make-up is great, people just can’t quite make the connection between what you really look like and what you play, the appearance is just too different. The state helps with beefed up security and stalking complaints get taken very seriously. But even with all that, word leaks out, you get identified in the tabloids. Most of the big national papers won’t publish it, they’ve been cowed by the IRS, but there are dozens of little garage publications. Fans find out. It gets awkward. Anyone living with you has to deal with it, too, and it’s not the kind of celebrity other actors on regular shows get. We’re not talking faithful fans who want to get your autograph or tear off a piece of your clothing or have your love child. We’re talking people who aren’t sure what you are—criminal or actor? It gets ugly.”

“I think people have a better sense of what’s real.”

“I’m not sure the studio shrinks would agree. Consider—the show is designed to convince people that they’re seeing a real inmate in a real cell. It achieves that rather successfully, if you want to believe the stats and the polls. If people can’t make the distinction, then we’ve done our job. But that means there’s a high degree of public confusion when they then spot you on the street.”

She looks tolerant, unconvinced, but says nothing.

“Anyway,” I continue, not sure what point an explanation serves now, “I had someone, but it got too much. I find it easier to live alone.”

“What about this?”

“What about it?”

“In terms of security, what’s the difference between seeing someone and living with someone?”

“Are we seeing each other?”

She speaks then in a fairly good approximation of Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke, close enough that I do not miss the reference, drawling, “Boss ain’t he-ah now, son, you cin do whatchoo wan’.”

I cannot stop watching her. It’s amazing enough touching her, running my hands and my mouth over her, sliding against her, but even after I think I have absorbed everything about her I cannot take my eyes off of her.

She wanders through my apartment, slowly, the lights low, a ghost poking into corners, studying me. She only glances at me from time to time and I feel more naked because she is examining my walls. I cannot hide from her when she does not look at me; she sees what she wants and I am powerless to lie.

She lingers over my book cases, then she stops before the portrait of Elmer Shackly and stares at it for a long time, then looks at me. She points at the picture then at me, asking wordlessly, and I nod.

“What did he do?”

“Child molestation, aggravated assault, murder.”

“He’s in for life?”

“Will you play him till the end?”

It is a question I never ask myself and never bring up at meetings with the studio or review boards. How long? As long as there is a show. I shrug. She seems dissatisfied.

“I read a novel once about an actor who was drafted to play the part of a world leader who had been kidnapped,” she says. “Then the leader died and the actor was stuck with the part. He played it till he died and no one ever knew. His greatest role.”

“Is that how you see us?”

“We speak for them.”

I laugh. “His attorney appeals once a year, like clockwork. He speaks for Shackly, I don’t.”

“That’s a formality, it isn’t really representation. We are their true representatives.”

“Be careful not to over-identify with the character.”

“Is that what I’m doing? Have you done that?”

She turns toward me, her back to the picture, and leans against the desk, her palms against the edge. She is a beautiful woman, with an athletic body, and the stray half-light from the lamps deepens the shadows in her belly, between her breasts and legs. I wonder briefly what it would be like to have her here every day. I think for a moment that I would like that very much.

“Do you think incarceration for life is just?” she asks.

I am disappointed, but I do not want the evening to end. “Not in all cases,” I say. “But sometimes . . . .”

I shrug, hoping she’ll change the subject or let it drop. Instead she looks at Shackly’s picture again. “Why do you have it hanging on your wall?”

“Character reference. I sit in front of it every morning for half an hour before I go to the studio.”

“You try to understand him, to do the part better.”

“Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

That is a question I find difficult to answer. Instead of trying, I turn it around. “What is yours in for?”

She frowns. “She was railroaded. Lousy attorney.”

“What was the charge?”

“Child endangerment and possession of narcotics. But—”

“Have you talked to her?”

“. . . No . . . .”

She looks caught, as if embarrassed about a lapse in personal hygiene. I can use that, I realize, and make her very uncomfortable, but instead I ignore it.

“I had a few conversations with Shackly,” I say. “I wanted some idea what he was like when he wasn’t ‘on’.”

“Yeah, on. On stage. In court, on the tapes, the transcripts, the televised interview right before Hard Time went on. He was acting then, putting on a show. I needed to see him, as he is in private.”

I go to the desk, stopping in front of her. I smell her, hear her breath, and I feel a feathery thrill. Instead of touching her I pull open the drawer to her left and take out a hammer. It is old, the handle worn from use, the steel head pitted.

“He was a chronic spouse abuser for ten years. Alcoholic, uneducated, ignorant, bigoted. What surprised me was how amiable he seemed, how innocuous and nonthreatening. I didn’t get a clue until our fourth talk what drove him over the edge.”

“You assumed he did what he was accused of.”

“Oh, he did it. He admitted it to me. Told me he’d do it again, although he was very sorry he had done it. But it wasn’t his fault. His wife made him do it.”

“How did she do that?”

“She left him. Not only that, she took his kids. His kids. That was the clue. ‘My and mine’ was his favorite phrase. His wife—no, let me do this right.” I imitate the pool parlor drawl I remember from my talks with Shackly; I’m fairly good at it. “My fuckin’ bitch wife thought she had a right to take my kids from me. First she had the gall to think she could leave me, then she thought she had the right to take my kids.” I let the drawl lapse. “He kidnapped the two children and fled the state. When the police caught up with him, he abandoned them and returned. He killed his wife in her apartment with a claw hammer.” I hold it up. “This one.”

She is no longer looking at me but at the hammer. “This . . . ?”

“I had some trouble getting it. Not much. Some.”

She takes a long breath. “And?”

“He’s absolutely unrepentant about it.”

“You said he regrets doing it—”

“No. He regrets having been forced to do it. As far as he’s concerned, he was just tending to some property.”

The silence stretches uncomfortably and I realize that this is probably the last evening we will spend together.

“So,” I ask, “how come you never talked to yours?”

“I read the court transcripts.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She answers slowly, staring at the hammer. “I think we have a responsibility to show these people for the human beings they are.”

“You think that, do you?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I’ve been doing it for four years.”

“So you discover one day that somewhere along the way you’ve started to become like they are. You’ve begun to take on aspects of their personalities. You start to think like them, act like them. And you make excuses for yourself the same way they do.”

She looks a little frightened now and I feel a small thrill, different than the earlier one.

“Did you know that the Nazis invented methadone?” I ask.

“What? No, I—”

“They did it to wean the guards at the deathcamps off narcotics. Heroin, morphine, cocaine—addiction was rampant among the long-term guards at the camps. They couldn’t function. They were destroying themselves. Something had to be done. So they invented a drug that would substitute for the addiction but itself was more addictive than anything else it was substituting for. They used it and reasserted control and discipline.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“The guards were taking on the worst aspects of the camps, of the people they were guarding.”

“What about those people? They were innocent . . . .”

“They were doomed.” I let that hang for a few moments. “We become what we despise when we get too close to it. The Nazis could have solved the problem by shutting down the camps. Instead they invented a new way to live with them.”

She swallows audibly. I consider saying more but I think I have said enough. I am pleased that I can back off.

“I,” she croaks, clears her throat, and continues. “I think we’re here to give them a voice.”

I nod. “We do. And believe me, in time it is their voice.”

She sniffs, then walks past me, into the bedroom. I listen to her gather up her clothes.

“Well,” she says, coming back into the room, “I’m . . . thank you . . . I better . . . .”

“It was fun. Thanks.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“The one who left you. Did you hit her?”

“No, but . . . .”

“You came close. Is that why you do the show? To atone?”

I give her a sharp, harsh look. She steps back. “I do the show because after I got drunk and wrecked the car the night she told me she wanted to leave, I had a choice—jail time or public service.”

The look on her face is almost gratifying. She had not till then realized that she was in the company of a criminal. Not a very bad one compared to Shackly, but still enough to challenge her principles with a heavy dose of personal discomfort.

She nods, then leaves quickly. I stare for a time at the picture of Elmer Shackly and tell myself again that I need to find a new gig. A year left on my sentence, but if the show gets shut down perhaps they’ll suspend the rest of it and I can get on with my life. I put the hammer back in the drawer and remind myself how dangerous it can be to own anything, and I wonder why I lied to her about not hitting Jenny, about the broken nose and the threats. But of course lies go both ways—a lie to someone else is a lie to yourself, about yourself.

Maybe a cop show is just the thing. Perhaps then I will have been rehabilitated enough to try to live a normal life again. I look up to where the cameras are hidden to give me the illusion of such a life and I wonder if they saw that I put the hammer away, that I treated her decently if a little brutally, that I told her most of the truth. Isn’t that what counts? The truth and how much of it you tell?