Free Forced Entry by Stephen Solomita

only partially accurate. Certainly, his roommate, Louis Persio, was a feminine homosexual, but if that’s all “gay” meant, Pat Sheehan would have rejected the label without a second thought. The couple had met while doing felony time in Dannemora State Prison. The homosexual unit happened to be full on the day Louis Persio arrived and the administration, with typical sensitivity, assigned him to the first available cell, which happened to belong to Pat Sheehan. What followed was a contract, every bit as sacrosanct as Precision Managements leases, in which Louis Persio agreed to satisfy Pat Sheehan’s pent-up sexual fantasies while Pat Sheehan guaranteed Persio’s physical and sexual survival in the institution. What followed that, after a year’s cohabitation, was only love, but it surprised the shit out of both of them. Especially Pat Sheehan, who found that even after their release, even after he’d spent a weekend in bed with an enthusiastic seventeen-year-old whore from the stable of an old jail buddy, he still wanted Louis Persio.
    When a second and a third and a fourth visit did nothing to diminish the intensity of this need, Pat Sheehan, ever the realist, hopped the 7 Train out to Persio’s Jackson Heights apartment, a single suitcase dangling from his hand. That had been four years ago, two years before Louis had woken up one morning with badly swollen lymph glands and a fever that defied aspirin and ice packs.
    Fortunately, nobody had ever caught wind of the roommates’ jail backgrounds. Being gay was enough trouble. Pat was short, only five foot seven, but weighed a solid hundred seventy-five pounds and was prison-hard. Louis Persio, by Dannemora standards, was a fox and foxes are not protected with bullshit. Pat, however, tried to avoid any display of his street sense; he passed his days driving a UPS delivery van, which was a very good job for an ex-con, and he didn’t want any complaints getting back to his Parole Officer, Juan Profantes. Profantes was overlooking Pat’s relationship with Louis Persio. For the time being.
    But even if Pat Sheehan’s smarts had been repressed for a hundred years, he could still spot a bullshitter like Al Rosenkrantz. The guy smelled like bullshit and Pat sniffed the odor like an old con probing for fear in a new prisoner. Pat had read the move when the pimp first showed up with the two women. Nobody could sign a lease with Rags Ragozzo without washing their hands immediately afterward. The guy sweated olive oil. Like fat Al Rosenkrantz with the drops starting to slide along his temples. Rosenkrantz was so obvious that Pat Sheehan was tempted to call him on it. To slap him with his bullshit. He could feel every warden he’d ever known speaking through Al Rosenkrantz’s lips. “If you give the institution a chance, the institution will work with you.” The lies made him want to vomit.
    But Pat Sheehan held his peace. He didn’t tell his fellow tenants what (or who) was coming in behind the whores, though he’d made the new tenants in 4B, right across the hall from his own apartment, as heroin junkies the minute he’d found them struggling with their few pieces of cardboard furniture. Shit, he ought to know about dope. That’s why he went away. Because of an unfortunate accident in the middle of an armed robbery while trying to get the money to sustain his habit.
    “A gonif you can’t recognize?” Mike Birnbaum shouted at Myron Gold. “You got to wait until he cracks your skull before you wake up?”

FIVE
February 20
    J ONATHAN “BORN” MILLER WAS , among other things (crack addict, mugger, prostitute, pimp), a vegetarian. At twenty-four years of age, and fresh from Rikers Island, he felt himself to be at peace with a world he finally understood. True, he was using crack again, but at nowhere near the suicidal pace that had preceded his incarceration. He had been crazy back then, crazy enough to smash the side window of a car waiting for a light at 39th