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wine the chicks were always made to pay for, and roll in the laughing blood they caused themselves or anyone else to lose. A few times --too few--he was invited on runs with the club, which made him understand that he really hadn't seen all there was to see in being "1% FREE," once more.

Emmett went to Los Angeles for the umpteenth time, but he didn't go alone. He was with a slender, soft, milk-skinned blond of an always-by-your-side-when-you-want-me, good woman named Blanche who wore a mink coat and hardly anything else at all. The moment he decided to stay in that town awhile, he already stayed too long. Two years to the hour of the day that George Jackson was going to go down in the San Quentin prison yard with a bullet in his back, Emmett was arrested driving a car. The cops charged him with having kidnapped and robbed a man at gunpoint, someplace else. It didn't matter to them that there was no gun or money in the car or that the guy who actually pulled the caper only a few minutes before was described as being short with black hair. Nothing seemed to matter to them, except getting Emmett booked and locked up in the Hollywood police station where a few of them used him for exercise.

Early the next morning, he was cuffed to a chain around his waist, shackled, and brought downtown for arraignment on the nonbailable kidnapping and other charges. Then he was transferred with many other prisoners to the Los Angeles County jail where he was separated from them and taken upstairs to a tier of six-by-ten-foot cells, each occupied by a single inmate. Although the rest of the jail was comprised of larger cells which usually held four or five prisoners and more on weekends, this section only had cells built for one person. Emmett recognized it immediately as the high power module of the L.A. County jail. There were no low riders in this section, just alleged capital offenders, four-time losers, and those considered violently dangerous. As a guard escorted him to his cell, shaving mirrors began popping out from between the bars of each cell so the inmates could see who was coming down the freeway.

Emmett lay on his bunk and thought about the word "module," remembering he had heard it repeated often a month before, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and onto the moon, but failed to claim it as territory, thus voiding the concept behind every national boundary in the world, and theoretically making imperialism obsolete. "Module?" Emmett thought. "Mod [end page 483]

 

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