Noodle Head

Retired professor of linguistics Gaylord Hemingway was charged with non-payment of 10 years of parking tickets. He went before a judge, was found guilty and given a 30 day jail sentence. A routine physical conducted upon his intake at the jail indicated excellent health with only one deficiency – a condition known as logorrhea.

Within minutes of incarceration while sitting in the day room with the other prisoners, Gaylord began talking. He went on for hours. The subjects he spoke on were dense and esoteric —tokamak fusion reactors, abstract expressionism, ontology, molecular biology, string theory, quantum mechanics, space and time, number theory, existentialism, structuralism, absurdism, dialectic materialism, this ism and that ism, etcetera, etcetera. The guards and inmates were dumbfounded. No one understood a word he said. One of the guards warned him to ‘pipe down!’ Gaylord wasn’t listening. He kept talking. He was warned again but he continued on and on the words tumbling out of his mouth hole in a steady stream. Two guards finally called him out and escorted him to the head jailer where he was written up with a formal reprimand for excessive talking. The head jailer asked him if had anything to say. Gaylord was quiet for a moment and then promised that going forward, he wouldn’t talk so much.

During the next few days of self imposed silence Gaylord became increasingly morose. He was sinking in a lonely sea of quiet. It was killing him. After a week, he decided to test the waters. He went back in slowly with just a few words here and there. This time he chose subjects that might be of interest to the others— sports, movies, money, sex, religion. It worked. A few others began talking about these things. The infection spread. Within days the jail was a babbling cacophony of noise. No one could hear anything. Gaylord sat smack dab in the middle of it all, a panoptic of noise and distortion surrounding him. The guards were pissed. They yelled at the prisoners to ‘shut up’ and ‘pipe down’. They blew an air horn and the noise finally settled. The senior guard pointed at Gaylord. Two guards grabbed him by the arms, pulled him out of his chair and shoved him out into the hall where he fell down. As he lay on the floor, one guard gave him a quick hard kick in the side and then reached down and jerked him up. Gaylord limped along as the guards took him down to the head jailer’s office where he was written up again and warned that a third time would result in serious punishment with possible additional jail time. He bowed and promised to do better.

It was no use. Very soon the incessant vomiting of words was flowing again. The guards talked it over and decided ‘Fuck it. Let the idiot yammer. Maybe he will wear himself out.’

Gaylord’s fellow prisoners were tiring of him as well. One day a few of them were sitting around a table in the dayroom eating their lunch of cheeseburgers and pink grapefruit juice and discussing how to deal with the new prisoner. The unofficial king of the kingpin Brass Knuckle said, ‘I’m gonna break his fuckin’ face if he doesn’t shut the fuck up. Fuckin’ Noodle Head!’ The other guys laughed. One of them said, “Noodle Head! Hell yeah. That’s gonna be his name from now on.” He looked around for Gaylord. He spotted the gaunt and spectacled target of their disdain standing in the corner of the room talking to himself. The prisoner yelled out, “Hey Noodle Head!” Gaylord turned. “Yeah you, mutherfucker, shut the fuck up!” Gaylord trembled and was quiet. The prisoners chuckled and then continued their conference. Suggestions for how to deal with the Noodle Head were tossed around—gutting, shiving, jawbreaking, ball breaking, head bashing, bumming and other forms of cruelty and violence were suggested. Arguments broke out about the best form of cruelty. It was getting loud with all of them talking and shouting. Finally the king of the kingpin held his hand up to demand silence. The table was quiet. The prisoners turned to hear Brass Nuckles’s words of wisdom. He said softly and quietly almost in a whisper, ‘We give him the shun.’ Murmurs and nods of approval. The telegraph went out– give Noodle Head the ‘shun’. From then on Noodle Head didn’t exist. Any prisoner he approached simply ignored him and walked away. If he came up to a table at meal time, everyone sitting at the table got up and moved away. If he tried to engage a fellow prisoner in the yard, the prisoner would walk past him as if he wasn’t there.

So Gaylord aka Noodle Head sat here and there by himself talking to himself. The subjects became ever more random and far reaching. Nothing could tie them together. He talked of left wing politics, right wing politics, imaginary numbers, cabalas, lyric operas, lizard people, alien life forms, communism, socialism, anarchic syndicalism, dwarfs and giants, swine flu, avian flu, amniosis, symbiosis, asexual reproduction and anything that crept into his head.

One day in the prison yard, a couple of prisoners with bulging biceps, tattoos and shaved heads decided they couldn’t take it anymore. They would break ‘the shun’. They walked up to Gaylord who was yammering away at nothing at all and told him in hushed and menacing tones to ‘Shut the fuck up mutherfucker!’ He looked up at them and started to say something. One of the prisoners made a fist and put it up against Gaylord’s face. Gaylord became quiet. The two bulging prisoners walked away. Five minutes later he started up again. The two prisoners came back over. The guards saw it coming and were rushing to the scene. Too late. It took only two seconds – one of the two muscle heads came up behind the jabbering Gaylord and swiftly violently lifted him in the air and turned him towards the other prisoner who slammed a giant fist into Gaylord’s face. His glasses flew off. He cried out in pain and fell to the ground spitting out blood and broken teeth. One of the prisoners stomped on Gaylord’s glasses. The other one was aiming a fierce kick towards Gaylord’s head. The kick would surely have been fatal if the guards hadn’t arrived in that instant to pull the assailant away. Additional guards took control of the other assailant and Gaylord. The three prisoners were hustled away.

Gaylord and the two muscle heads were taken to the head jailer who was given a report of the incident. He reprimanded the two assailants and sent them back out. The two men were surprised at the head jailer’s leniency towards them. The head jailer couldn’t tell them what he was thinking to himself - ‘Hopefully these two gorillas knocked some sense into his head!’

As the two made their exit, Gaylord was escorted in to the office. The head jailer leaned back in his chair. He looked at the swollen faced quivering figure standing at the other side of his desk and shook his head. “Just couldn’t keep your stupid mouth shut, could you?” For the first time in 29 days, Gaylord looked down and said nothing. Then suddenly his head pricked up as he seemed to hear something like a tiny scream. He glanced around searching for the cause. His wandering eyes stopped and gazed at the top corner of the room behind the head jailer where a fly was wiggling in a spider’s web. A large brown spider was creeping along the web towards the nervous fly. Gaylord stared in awe at this tiny struggle for life. After several moments he took a deep breath and sighed, a single tear spilling from the corner of his eye. He felt a shiver. Then he was still and he looked straight ahead at the head jailer. There was a nervous silence in the room as the head jailer followed Gaylord’s epiphany. For a moment he felt pity for the man but rules were rules and they had to be followed. The prisoner must be punished. The head jailer averted Gaylord’s eyes. He turned to the guard and quietly gave the order: “Put him in solitary for 24 hours.” The guards escorted Gaylord to the basement, opened a heavy steel door, shoved him in and slammed the door shut.

It was a small white room with the usual prison accoutrements of cot, toilet and sink. There was one other thing in the room that no other prison cell had—a TV was mounted in the wall out of reach. The TV was turned on and tuned in to the FOX News channel.

For the first time in his life, Gaylord found himself confronted with something more noisome than himself.

After two hours of lock-in, the guards heard strange mumblings and babblings coming from the solitary confinement room. Later they heard wailing crying and sobbing. And then came the screams and pounding on the door as Gaylord begged for them to open it and let him out. In the final hour of punishment, there was silence. They guards opened the door to check on the prisoner. Gaylord Hemingway aka Noodle Head lay dead on the cold concrete floor, a trickle of blood coming from his ears.