Jailhouse Blues

By John Skow

HOMEBOY by Seth Morgan

Random House; 390 pages; $19.95

The boy is Joe Speaker, small-time heroin peddler and barker for the Blue Note Lounge, a scumbucket strip joint in San Francisco's Tenderloin. The home is prison, out of which he is not likely to stay long. This is partly because his dim sidekick Rooski foolishly shot a Chinese druggist when the two of them were fumbling what was supposed to be a peaceful, harmless burglary. The main reason is that Joe belongs in jail, feels comfortable there. Not secure, understand, because dope selling in the lockup is even tougher than it is on the streets. Everyone there is a villain, and every villain has at least a shank, a homemade knife. Black and Aryan gangs feud murderously. Studs and lovers brutalize each other. And Joe, of course, misses Kitty Litter, his stripper girlfriend. But he is an outcast, and jail is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Seth Morgan began writing this first novel during a prison term for armed robbery. The cuff marks show, and not just in detail that seems accurate. The novel is funny and fast moving, but its air stinks slightly of decay. As it should. A couple of Nelson Algren's low-life adventures come to mind, such as A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren was a better writer and a more lyrical artist, but Morgan is better acquainted with dead souls.

There is more than a slight whiff of jailhouse self-pity: Joe loves Kitty, goes to the lockup, survives the schemes of bad villains with the help of good villains, and gets out to find true-blue Kitty and the child he has never seen waiting for him. The best of the book is Morgan's wildly reinvented con lingo. His ear fails him occasionally, when he uses lace-curtain language -- "caparisoned," "implacable mien" -- that some editor should have yanked from the manuscript with tongs. But at other times he's cooking: "Saturday night movies in the Gym were the social climax of the week. Everyone put on the Big Dog. The hucklebuckin hambones Afropicked and jerrycurled their cornrows . . . the vatos and street bravos wrapped their cleanest bandannas around Dippity-Doed razorcuts . . . the whiteboys splashed on fifi water . . . the Q Wing punks and B CAT queens greased on party paint and shimmied into tightass state blues."