The Mute Takes a Beating

"Did you hear what the Mute is going to do now?" Harley asked us
during our coffee break in the U.S.D.A. Office. Judging from the grin
on his face, it had to be something stupid. Of course, given the Mute's
past exploits, something stupid wouldn't surprise us. I mean, this is
the guy who brought nude pictures of his girlfriend to show his
co-workers on the Kill Floor. Ann Landers has never discussed in a
column how to politely handle that sort of social situation. What DO
you say? I had to say something, so I smiled and said, "pretty hot
babe, Mute." He smiled like a youngster who had just been told that his
puppy was cute.

It was a side of the Mediapolis Mutant that I'd never seen before. The
Mute in love. This was the guy who used to cruise the high schools
looking for impressionable young girls to dazzle with his comparative
maturity and his gold Camaro. "I like to find 'em about fourteen or
fifteen years old," he used to say. All I have to do, dude, is keep 'em
in booze and cigarettes and treat 'em like grown up ladies and they'll
do anything that I want them to do for me."

Yeah, the Mute is a character. You have to be a little crazy to work in
a packing house, and it is generally agreed that the Mute is a can or
two short of a six pack. He is a hulking bear of a man with a beer gut
that protrudes out far enough to give him the look of an extremely ugly
pregnant woman, a look accentuated by long scraggly blonde hair that no
hairnet yet has been able to corral. His odd appearance is further
accentuated by a "lazy" right eye that always remains partially closed.
It gives him a permanently befuddled look,sort of an "I'm either into
drugs, stupid or lost; you want to make something of it, asshole?"
expression. Someone once described him as looking something like an
ugly space mutant. Soon "Mutant" was shortened to "Mute." The nickname
stuck.

"What's that anal-retentive idiot up to now?" Growlly demanded. Growlly
doesn't like having to learn information from others. He fancies
himself the distributor, and to have to ask to hear what's new from
someone else will usually plunge him into a fouler mood than he
generally embraces.

This is his packing house face, though. "Compartmentalization" is a
word that's much in vogue right now. Actually, outside the confines of
his job Growlly is a pleasant, easy-going family man, who goes to
church, holds an office in the American Legion and collects Indian
artifacts. He's a woodcarver too, whose creations have won several
awards. On the Kill Floor though, he's the acknowledged master of
creative profanity. Compartmentalization is a defense mechanism in an
environment where sensitivity is looked upon as a sign of weakness. We
all have our packing house faces, as do the employees that we work
with.

Harley pulled a bag of popcorn out of the microwave and made a
prolonged production out of opening it. He had Growlly's attention. Now
he'd tantalize him awhile.

Growlly had been victimized by this psychological ploy before. He
picked up the sports page and feigned total disinterest in Harley's
conversation.

"He's joining a gang," Harley finally continues, throwing the
information out to all of us as though it were popcorn and we a flock
of geese.

"It's the Crips, the Boy volunteered eagerly. "He's been telling me all
about it."

The Mute had been filling me in on his new found playmates too, but I
kept silent and decided to hear what information the Boy had and if it
jived with what the Mute had told me.

"Well, go on," Growlly Hatfield grunted as he glared at his empty
coffee cup. "Let's hear all about the dumbfuck's new friends."

"Well, you know that his old lady is a Gangster Disciple, don't you?"
the Boy asked.

"So why's he joining the Crips?" Growlly asked, trying to make some
sense out of the Boy's explanation.

The Boy looked at our resident redneck as though he had asked a
childish question.

"It's like this," the Boy explained. "The Gangster Disciples are
"Folk." So are the Crips. So are the Original Gangsters and the Black
Disciples. They've all allied, man, and their enemies are the "People,"
You know, rival gangs such as the Vice Lords and the Latin
Kings."

"Good God Almighty," Growlly sighed. How the fuck can anybody keep that
stuff straight. Why don't we just give them all the guns and ammo that
we can afford and just let them blast away at each other. That would be
doing the world a favor."

The Boy ignored Growlly, as he usually does, and continued his
discourse on gangs.

"You know, the Mute has taught me how to tell which gang a guy belongs
to by the way he wears his hat. They even have their own ritualistic
handshakes," the Boy continued, pleased to be the focal point of
attention for once rather than the target of our abuse.

"G.D.Folk; four, seven, eleven. We don't die, we multiply," the Boy
chanted. "That's part of the code that you have to recite to prove that
you're a real Gangster Disciple and not just a wannabe."

Harley interrupted the Boy's flow of information by saying, "you
haven't heard the best part yet. Tell them about the Mute's gang
initiation that's coming up."

"Ten to twelve of the Crips come over and beat the crap out of him,"
the Boy explained, grinning at the thought of the rumble that would
follow. "That way they'll know he'll be able to take it."

"Yeah," Growlly chimed in. Now that you mention it, he was handing me
that line of bullshit too. I gave that dumb son of a bitch an earful,
I'll tell you. How the Christ are a bunch of lowlife gang members going
to respect someone they've just kicked the piss out of?"

"It's a test of manhood," the Boy insisted, trying to defend the Mute
in his absence. "They all have to undergo the same kind off beating
before they're accepted by the gang. This is supposed to bind the gang
together."

The Mute had tried to tell me why he was joining the gang too, but what
he had told me varied from the machismo rationale that the boy was
putting forth as his explanation.

The Mute had settled down since he had met "Brown Shugah," the
affectionate term that he used when he talked about his colored
girlfriend. To hear him speaking of her in loving tones surprised me at
first, given the cynical way he had previously pursued and used his
underaged quarry. Yes, the Mute had fallen in love, and he had fallen
hard.

His girlfriend belonged to the Gangster Disciples though. The Mute
found himself banished to another room or sent outside when gang
matters were being discussed by her and her G.D companions. The Mute
wanted so much to be a total part of her life that he was willing to
take a beating to become "Folk" just like her.

"I told the stupid dipshit that he's going to get a rude awakening when
he's looking at someone's size fourteen boot coming down on his face.
When he's spitten teeth and warding off kicks, he'll realize that it
isn't just the Crips initiating a newmember," Growlly said.
"It's goin to be twelve mans working over a honky. It will be that
truck driver in Los Angeles all over again, only this time he's handing
them the bricks and saying "go ahead, work me over. I want to be just
like you fuckin losers." That dumb son of a bitch."

"You're missing the whole point," the Boy protested. "Mute says that
the call each other "man." Mute too. It's not a put-down when they
use it on each other. It's more like a badge that says "it's you and me
against the establishment, bro.""

"Yeah, like I'd take it as a compliment if some black was calling me a
man," Growlly muttered. "That dumb son of a bitch. All he is is a
black wannabe, and he figures joining this gang is going to make him a
"brother." How many white Crips or Gangsters have you ever heard
of?'

"It's just another phase that he's going through," asserted Harley. "I
remember when he found the Lord. He was calling me "Brother" and urging
me to "get my life right with Jesus" for almost a month.

"Yeah," I said, "until his new Christian friends decided to come down
on him because of his drinking. You know the Mute and how much he loves
his "medicinal barley." When it came to a choice between Christ and
Coors the choice wasn't hard for the Mute to make. He set his bible
down and reached for the Silver Bullet."

Harley laughed. "I mean, this is the guy who advocates the use of
L.S.D. to alleviate stress. Couldn't you have just seen him behind a
pulpit, raising his arms up to beseech heaven?
First he'd have to get rid of the logo of the Playboy bunny that he has
tatooed on his right arm."

"Yeah," I said. "He's given me his LSD spiel too. ""You've really got
to try alittle L.S.D., dude. I do it once every three or four months.
It helps burn away the cobwebs that sort of form in my mind after
awhile. Sort of gives me a new outlook, you know?" Let's face it," I
continued, having finished my imitation of him, "his religious career
was doomed from the beginning."

"You'd be down on religion, Vanderbilt, if it was Mother Theresa that
you were talking about," the Boy protested. "What's wrong with the Mute
trying to find something to believe in?"

"Remember when the Mute joined a Health Club?" Harley laughed. He ended
up selling the rest of his year's membership two months later for
twenty five bucks. Just enough to get drunk on that weekend."

"Now the dumbshit's going to take a beating to join a gang. Makes a
hell of a lot of sense to me," Growlly observed sarcastically. "At
least this time it won't be his wallet taking a beating."

Harley and Growlly laughed. The Boy looked at them angrily and finally
protested. "You guys can laugh at him if you want," he said, "but I
feel sorry for the Mute. Maybe if you guys didn't make so much fun of
him he wouldn't feel so compelled to look for acceptance by joining a
gang."

"I've been pondering that beating ritual," I finally broke in. "Think
about it." Then I tilted my chair back and leaned against the wall with
my hands clasped behind my head as I awaited their response.

Growlly broke the silence. All right, smartass. Let's hear what pearl
of wisdon you think you've pryed from the oyster. You're sitting there
as smug as Mr. Peabody waiting to explain something to his boy
Sherman."

"He's even got Sherman's glasses,:" the Boy laughed.

"No," said Harley, as he readied a thrust to hurl in my direction. They
look more like Harry Caray's."

I ignored their insults, not wishing to side-track the conversation
into a battle of one-upmanship with a clever retort. I'm magnanimous
enough to let them win a skirmish once in awhile.

"The reason for the beatings is to hurt the new member so badly that
he'll do anything that the Crips want him to do rather than to have to
endure that level of pain again. It's rule by intimidation. That way
when the gang wants Mute to make a trip down to Mexico for them and
bring back some weed, or if they ask him to go out and do some dealing,
he'll damn well go out and do it. He'll do anything to avoid having to
undergo another beating. He'll fear the pain more than he does the law.
The way I've got it figured, he'll be in jail in six months if he teams
up with that bunch of lowlife."

"Who runs these gangs?" Harley wondered. "The Mafia?"

"The Mute says it's a goup of 'brothers,'" the Boy informed us, pleased
to be able to wrest the conversation from me. "He says that their
leader is a guy by the name of DeHoover, or something like that. He's
doing time in Joliet, according to Mute."

"So that dumbfuck's going to take orders from some death row deadbeat,
huh?" Growlly said as he got up to refill his coffee mug. "Makes a
hellava lot of sense to me."

"It doesn't make much sense to me," I sighed disgustedly. "I always
thought that the Mute had some street smarts, but if he goes through
with this initiation bullshit all it will prove to me is that he
doesn't have much respect
for himself." I debated telling the other three men of the Mute's real
reason for wanting to join the gang; out of love for his lady, but I
decided not to. The Mute had decided to confide in me for some reason,
and I had to honor his trust by keeping quiet.

"He's going through all this to earn respect," Harley laughed. "What a
joke. All he'll earn is a beating. If he's that fuckin stupid the
dumbass deserves it, I guess."

"I feel sorry for him," the Boy said, shaking his head slowly. "I know
that he thinks these guys are his friends. At least they don't make fun
of him all the time like you guys and the rest of the guys on the Kill
Floor always do."

"When he's talking about doing something this stupid, he deserves to be
made fun of," I said. "The guy's an idiot." I felt like an asshole for
saying what i'd just said, but the Mute had sworn me to secrecy.
Besides, it was in character with my packing house face. It was what
people expected me to say.

"A little respect," Growlly muttered. "What a dumbfuck. Kick me in the
teeth, brothers, break my nose, knock my eyeball out of its socket. All
I'm letting you do this for is to earn your respect, guys."

We laughed. I thought of the Mute walking into a room to take a beating
to impress the girl that he loved, and I felt bad for him. I hoped that
someday my own son wouldn't make as questionable a choice, no matter
how romantically warped the reasoning that would lead him into that kind of
situation.

Growlly brought the issue back to more of a packing house perspective,
though, as he shook his head and uttered his final words on the
subject. "What a goddamned stupid son of a bitch. If he were my kid I'd
beat the shit out of him myself."

(First published in 1995 in "Phizzogs" the Carl Sandburg College
literary Magazine)