The Sing-Sing
Literary Society
(continued)
By Dean Borok
"In the middle of the night, this other kid comes and gets Gavroche because they need him for a job, and Gavroche goes out.
"And here's the good part! Back in those days the cons had this dodge that, they'd take a coin, called a 'sou', which was like a nickel or a quarter, and they would use a wire to very metriculously cut it in half down the center of it, so it was like two coins. Imagine how much work that took! Then they scraped out the inside of both halves and they would hide a piece of a saw blade inside the coin and snap the two halves together, so they would always have a saw blade on them for when they could use it to saw through bars.
"And when the CO's made them empty out their pockets, they would just say 'That's my money. And the bulls never caught on ha ha ha!
"Unfortunately, that kind of workmanship doesn't exist today, and it's a pity, 'cause I ain't shovin' no jigsaw blade up my ass, that's for sure!"Anyway, Thenardier, who is Gavroche's father, has been locked up by Inspector Javert, who has broken up his plot to torture Jean Valjean to get all his money, and he's lookin' to break out. So he saws through the bars. But he has to get word out to his boys, so they'll be outside waitin' for him to make his move.
"So, get this! He writes a note and puts it in a dinner role and throws it over the wall into the exercise yard of the next cell block, so when his partner's wife comes to visit him, he can pass along the message to her, and she can get word out to Thenardier's gang.
"It's a good thing they don't try that here, 'cause the rolls they feed you in this place, if you threw it and it hit somebody in the head, you'd end up doin' twenty-five to life for manslaughter ha ha."So Thenardier crawls through the bars of his window and gets up to the roof, and when he whistles to his boys in the street, they send Gavroche up the drainpipe with a rope and Thenardier goes down the rope and escapes.
"And you know what? When Thenardier went to thank his son for breakin' him out of the joint, Gavroche had already split!"
"Thank you, Kareem. Keep reading, and don't do any of that stuff yourself. Now we'll hear from our fellow scholar Vito Mustociolli on the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire."
"Thank you. I want to start off by saying that if I would have known what I know now, I prob'ly would have been some big banker, or at least had a job, anyway.
"What the Romans had goin' for them was organization. You had a direct line of command from top to bottom, and everybody knew what his job was. Not like today when you got too many independent contractors steppin' over each other's toes and confusing everything up.
"Rome was started in about 500BC by Romulus and Remus, whose mother was a wolf. Now, they got in a fight and Romulus killed Remus, which was definitely the wrong foot to get started off on, because as time went on a beautiful thing kept getting ruined by hot-headed people who kept flying off the handle and killing each other for bullshit."Now, back in those days, Italy was ruled by the Greeks in the south and the Etruscans and the Gauls in the north, and Rome was just a small city. But as it kept getting richer, it kept growing bigger and bigger. Like a guy who starts with a candy store, and then he takes over the whole block, and then he finally owns everything. First the Romans took over Campania, then Tuscany and so on and so forth. In the early days, the Roman army was just like we got the reserves today - they would fight a campaign and then go back to their farms. At first they would form alliances with the other Italian kingdoms, but they kept all the loot for themselves. Finally, the other kingdoms and cities said 'What is this? We are doing all the work any you are keeping all the loot for yourselves! We need to eat too!' So the Romans cut them in for a piece of the action, let them be citizens, but they couldn't vote. If you wanted to vote, you had to be from Rome. It's like Brooklyn; you can do the crime, but you can't vote unless you're a made guy.
"The first time the Romans came up against some real opposition was about 200BC, against the Carthaginians, who were originally Phoenicians from Syria but became their own gang. Carthage moved into Sicily, which was owned by the Greeks. The Greeks from Syracuse complained to Rome, and the Romans came down to fight Carthage. Now, the Romans captured some Carthaginian ships and copied them, and Rome became the masters of the Mediterranean Sea. They threw Carthage out of Sicily and then went to Spain and took that away from them as well. Finally Carthage crapped out and threw in the towel. But that wasn't good enough for Rome. By now they had gone over to a professional army, and their philosophy was 'it's my way or the highway.' In order to get along with Rome, you had to kiss their ass on a permanent basis. The Carthaginians took it for as long as they could, and then they rose again. They went back and re-took Spain and then Hannibal, with an army composed of Africans, Spaniards and Gauls crossed the alps and pillaged and raped the shit out of Italy for twelve years, defeating the Romans in battle after battle. They used elephants for tanks, but those tanks left piles of shit ten feet high ha ha!
"Now this is where the true nature of the Italian people came into the picture. You can knock us down, or you can knock us out, but we're too thick-headed to recognize defeat. Hannibal said 'They're beat! Why don't they stay down on the mat like a sane person?' But uh-uh, no Italian is going to crap out while he's still got breath left in him. The Romans just kept raising armies and building ships until they wore down Hannibal and he had to evacuate.
"But that wasn't enough for Rome. They landed an army in North Africa and laid siege to Carthage, and once again Carthage crapped out. Rome demanded major reparations from Carthage, which Carthage agreed to, but there were elements of Roman politics, notably a guy named Cato, who felt that as long as Carthage lived and breathed they would be a threat to Rome. Which I totally agree with. If you got an enemy, and if the enemy is not dead, then you got a problem.
"So Carthage paid off its war debt, but as soon as Rome got the money in its pocket, it attacked again. But this time they finished off the job, leveling the city until not a brick or a blade of grass was left standing. In fact, they turned over the soil and poisoned it with salt so that not even a weed could grow there.
"The Romans didn't fuck around.
"The Punic Wars brought Rome into the modern age, the same as World War II did for the Americans. Now they were masters of the world with an empire stretching from Asia to Spain, from Africa to England. But all that success brings with it a new set of problems, mainly: what do you do with all the soldiers who did the legwork? What about the people forced off their land and were flooding into Rome?
"The old-timers who ran the place, the Moustache Petes as we liked to call them, said 'Fuck 'em, who needs 'em.' But by this time there was a progressive element who depended on the votes of the proletariat (by this time they could vote), headed by Julius Caesar. Caesar instituted free food for Romans, and for the returning veterans, he advocated free land to farm.
"A civil war ensued, which Caesar won. He became the whole deal, but behind the scenes the old guard plotted its revenge. On the Ides of March they assassinated him in the senate. He was succeeded by Caesar Augustus, then by Tiberius, and then by a whole lot of dictators, but they always kept the name of Caesar. Because he was the man, baby. Nobody ever came again that had his class, not even Napoleon!"Finally the Roman Empire just ran out of steam. You can't be Numero Uno forever. No matter how good you are, someday you just run out of motivation. It'll even happen to the Yankees. In 324AD, the Roman Empire divided in two and Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, which was the beginning of the Byzantine Empire, the same as Carthage evolved from Phoenicia.
"And that's as far as I got."
"That was fantastic, Vito! You probably know more about the Roman Empire than 99% of the people livin' on the outside. What are you going to study next?"
"Well, I figure I got time for the British Empire. I'm not up for parole until 2132."
"Keep pluggin' away, man. OK, folks, Corrections Officer Garrity is telling me that we're running out of time. Before we adjourn, I'd like to extend a hearty welcome to the newest member of our group, Judge Waxner. A lot of you probably already know him as the judge who sent you here. Well, now he's here to join us, learn how the other half lives, so to speak.
"Hey, it could happen to anybody! Remember what Petronius wrote:The courts are an auction where justice is sold
The judge who presides bangs a gavel of gold
"In the case of Judge Waxner, sitting up there for all those years, sending people away like an assembly line, he started to get a god complex like one of Vito's Romans, bragging to people, 'I sent this guy away for so many years, I sent that guy away for so many years'. He probably lost touch with the reasons he was elected to that position in the first place, which was 'To Serve and Protect.' He started ruling on cases in which he had a conflict of interest (if a guy is smart enough to get elected judge, he should be smart enough to remember what stocks he owns in his portfolio), then, when his girlfriend left him, he started harassing her with ugly phone messages and threatening letters, even sending condoms to her little daughter.
"Hey, you lost it, bro, and now you're one of us.
"The only problem is, they put you in with a guy who you sentenced to life for stealing a set of golf clubs under the 'Three Strikes and You're Out' statute. Now you get to spend every day and every night with the guy.
"It's tough the way he banged you up like that, but the way he explains it, it was all the result of a lovers' quarrel.
"Anyway, judge, maybe when you get fitted for your new dentures you can give us a lecture on the judicial doctrine of:
Justice Tempered With Mercy.
