Literary Society
By Dean Borok
"Fellow inmates and literary cognoscenti, welcome to the monthly meeting of the Sing-Sing Literary Society. I'm your moderator, Angel de la Cruz, otherwise known by my nom de plume of Inmate 733506.
"It's been a great honor for me to assume the leadership
of a society with such a great tradition of erudition as ours. Before
coming to Sing-Sing, I essentially believed that a book was something
you used to write down bets. The only time I had ever been in a library
was when I broke in at four in the morning to smash through the wall to
the adjoining jewelry store. I thought that Balzac was something that
happened when your pants were too tight.
"Now, it's a common saying that an education can break
down barriers. Unfortunately, it cant break down guard towers with searchlights
and sentries armed with high-powered sniper rifles, or wouldn't none of
us be in the mess we're in. Dale Carnegie may have been instructive on
How to Win Friends and Influence People, but he never explained
what to do if you get caught alone in the shower room with Porky O'Reilly.
"Nevertheless, the love of literature can lift a great
weight off our shoulders, even if it can't get rid of the ball and chain
around our leg. The weight I'm referring to is that of ignorance. In some
ways, being in the joint has been good for me (not that I'm thinking of
sending a candygram to the cop who arrested me). Who would have thought
that a guy like me, Angel de la Cruz from Spanish Harlem, would ever contemplate
the beauty of a South Seas sunset, an infinite, rolling carpet of azure
teeming with biological life forms and a live volcano spewing black smoke
across the horizon as in Victory by Joseph Conrad? Or a raging
battle in the streets of fifteenth century Paris as Catholics and protestants
shot and hacked away at each other with swords as in Queen Margot
by Alexander Dumas? An airline ticket can get you to Miami, but a book
is a ticket across space and time that can take you to the floating gardens
of Tenochtitlan before the arrival of the conquistadors, where painted
courtesans beckon to you from dugout canoes.
"Now I am going to turn over the floor to my esteemed colleague, Kareem al-Shabaz, who will apprise us of his progress in the study of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo."
"Thank you, Angel. When I last spoke, Petit Gavroche had rescued the two little orphans who had been abandoned on the Paris streetcorner and got them something to eat. Little did he know that they are his little brothers, and that their father, Thenardier, has rented them out to some other hoods who are using them in a plot to extort money from a rich family.
"Now, I don't have nothing against extortion if it's for a good cause, but I think anybody who would sell out his own kids to a bunch of fuckin' swindlers should be shot.."But that's just me talkin'. Anyway, Petit Gavroche takes the kids back to where he lives, which is inside a gigantic white elephant that was built by Napoleon Bonaparte, and they all go to sleep inside this giant steel cage which he had built to protect them from the rats, 'cause the whole place is filled with rats, not just a few rats but hundreds and thousands of rats, which take up all the room in the place except where the kids are sleeping.
