Seeking Rep

A few days after I was released from the infirmary, still sore and stiff from the beating--the eel-like red welts raised by the nightsticks nearly shrunken back to skin level--several guards entered my cell again.  This time they came to transfer me somewhere, and before leading me into the hallway one of them strapped a plastic bracelet with a bar code around my left wrist.

I was surprised when we got out to see most of the other inmates being escorted along the halls as well, a great mass of shackled humanity shuffling along the prison corridors.  Guards brandishing nightsticks and braintasers were stationed every ten feet or so to insure that prisoners were funneled into single-file lines against the inside walls.  Having only been in the agententiary proper two times before--once upon initial incarceration and once recently to spend a week in intensive care, where I was nursed back to health by the sweetest young woman (Candace Stryper)--I had no idea where we were going.

We filed down four flights of stairs before arriving at a huge space that seemed like an indoor holding yard for cattle.  I saw then that, interspersed at regular intervals around the entirety of the enormous room, were doorways that led into darkened chutes where prisoners were being led one-by-one.  The head of the line I was in ended at the nearest chute on the left, and we had to stand, literally, for hours before the queue began to move.  Another half hour more and I had reached the door and started down the ramp through a darkened corridor lit only by the kind of LED aisle lights found in old-time movie theaters.

There were guards close in beside the prisoners in the chute, and they made sure the line kept moving forward and that inmates weren't talking to one another.  A claustrophobic quiet reverberated within the dim tunnel.  Several times I had to ward off a near-panic attack, gripped by the need to turn and flee, to swim, like a crazed salmon, back through the raging current of prisoners to the well-lit holding pen.  But each time I calmed myself with relaxing breathing techniques I had mastered while studying Aikido at the dojo in Phoenix.

When there was only one prisoner ahead of me--a grizzled veteran whose gray-and-black goatee resembled the tail of a mangy geriatric cat--and the guard had dropped back ten paces to assist somebody with a pin-prick inoculation for what seemed to be an asthmatic attack, I whispered to the guy in front, "What are we doing?"

After a cursory look into my eyes he quickly scanned the corridor, an expression of distaste etched into his chiseled face.  "Twice a year we're all required to run the gauntlet at Agents' Row," he whispered.

"Agents' Row?"

"SILENCE!" the guard behind us screamed.

The grizzled veteran swiveled his head back around just as the door opened.  It closed behind him as he walked through.

A few minutes later the door opened again and a guard beckoned me inside.

Instantly I recognized the scene.  It was what I had witnessed in the peep show a week-and-a-half ago.  As I approached the first open station I noticed the grizzled veteran at station #2 holding his plastic bracelet in front of a scanner to the right of the seated representative.  When I stood in front of the middle-aged woman whose white name tag read "Valerie Teaburn" I held my bracelet up to the electronic reading device.  After the electronic beep of recognition I watched her raise her weary eyes to the monitor screen in front of her.  Tired, pea-green eyes magnified by saucer-sized, red-framed bifocal lenses scanned back and forth a few times before dropping to a keypad.  She quickly punched a key, the result of which was the production of an almost inaudible low tone resonating with rejection.

"No," she said.  "Next."

As I sidled over to the next station I realized she had never once looked at me.

Dressed in a white shirt that seemed as if it had been soaked in starch overnight the next representative's piano-keyboard smile went right through me as if I were a ghost smiling.  His name was printed in bold scarlet letters across the white name tag:  "Nathan Bronte."  After I held my bar code bracelet to the scanner and heard the corresponding beep, I watched as he passed his eyes back and forth along the upper portion of the monitor screen.  His phony smile instantly deflating into a frown, he said, "It'll never sell.  Didn't your tutor teach you anything?  Next."

And so on and so on for what seemed like hours until finally, somewhere in the middle section of the indeterminably long table, I stood in front of a woman representative whose name was "Mimi Motley."  Her chair, different from the others', had a comfortable-looking padded back, and it was raised higher than any of the previous chairs by at least six inches.  And, unlike the others, she wore some kind of hairpiece atop her head, a silver ribbon that bore the likeness of a slender crown. The bar-code-to-scanner routine had already become second nature to me, and I watched disinterestedly while she scanned the screen in front of her.  Slowly I grew aware of the fact that she was reading more of the words on the monitor than the other representatives had.  But when she finished, her handsome face grew grotesque under a mask of abject cynicism.

"I'll guarantee you I've read far more of this book than all of the others combined, and I can say without reservation that it's mediocre at best.  This all comes out of lust, a perverse masculine need to sexually objectify all women in order to subjugate them.  There are no real characters here--just sexual acts meant to fulfill one man's distasteful fantasies--fantasies that might be believable if the MC were a recently-pubescent adolescent with raging hormones.  It's back to the drawing board for you, mister.  I suggest you scrap this whole project and begin again.  There isn't a kernel of meaning here worth salvaging."

During the dressing down the decibel level of her voice had risen in a crescendo that culminated in a high-pitched shriek, attracting the attention of everybody in the vicinity.  I looked at her in stunned silence, noticing that her carotid arteries were bulging like high-voltage electrical cables.  I was so pissed I felt like screaming at her, but before I could, she said, "Next."

I don't think I calmed down until I was ten or twelve representatives away from her, and only then because I caught a glimpse of the table's end.  By the time I reached it I was literally numb, and I stood in front of the final station watching as the grizzled veteran ahead of me was shown to a door and ushered out of the room by a guard.  While I waited for the final verdict, which could be any of several different responses--"Won't sell," "Not commercial enough," "Not up to snuff," "Doesn't target a large enough readership"--I took a glance at my surroundings.  The enormity of the whole project was stunning:  incredibly long tables paralleling each other throughout the space, line-upon-line of inmates moving from station to station, doors to feeder chutes opening and shutting to eject prisoners--like pieces of candy from an ancient Pez dispenser--into the main chamber.

Turning back to the last representative, an affable-enough looking man whose neck fat had swelled to near-goiter proportions, I watched as he lifted his battleship-grey eyes to stare at me.  Nodding his head, he said, "Right.  I understand.  I'll give him the message."

It was then I realized he had a miniscule listening device in his right ear, and he was talking into a tick-sized microphone at the end of a wire no thicker than a strand of angel hair pasta.

Pointing to a glass-walled booth which stood at an oblique angle ten feet removed from the table, inside of which a dark-haired young woman dressed in a tan business suit sat behind an elevated desk, he said, "You are to report there."

She was waiting for me when I arrived at the door, and she nodded to signal I should enter.  You couldn't have missed her name even if you were nearly blinded from advanced cataracts.  It was emblazoned in bold orange letters on a green placard:  HORTENSIA NARANJA.  Across from the desk was a tasteful grey leather chair, and she gestured toward it.  "Please, sit," she said.

She was a classic Mexican beauty:  black olive eyes, a Roman nose, full ruby lips, the latter of which were smiling at me.

"I think I understand what you're trying to do here," she said, the timber of her voice like the low notes of a cello.  "If you're willing to work with me I think we can come up with something really decent."

I couldn't believe my ears.  I had just been through an exhausting ordeal, yet her words of encouragement were energizing.

After monitoring my face briefly, she said, "So what do you say.  Do we have a deal?"

"Deal," I said.