“We arise from deeper forces, but our choices cannot be known in advance–so we have free will as long as the processes that give rise to our consciousness are able to be expressed through our actions in the world.”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer (Viking, 2024)
Prelude
Chit chat and chatter, mostly pointless blather.
Like chickens in a coop or birds flocking or
crickets warmed by the afternoon heat:
the constant talking of the inmates
like the wash of waves on a shore
silent only after lights out.
Here represented:
lawyers and doctors
teachers and stock brokers
the evil and good
old men in wheelchairs
and boys from the hood.
Here are their voices, mostly noise
background static
Hear their voices
and take them to heart.
Mostly ignored and mostly forgotten
are these the words of the misbegotten?
Or are these voices ours
human and real
shut up behind fences
wire and walls?
What are we locking up but parts of ourselves
those things that disturb us and make us afraid
things deep inside us we must put away
we dare never listen, the danger is close
that we may join their ranks
live the life that they chose.
But who really chooses, what then is free will
enter this realm these places we fill
the world of the misfits
where no one belongs beyond right and wrong
beyond dark and light
these are their songs.
O.G.
Sixteen-and-a-half years down, one and a half to go. They call me OhGee, old guy. Don’t move as fast as I used to. Hard walking to and from chow hall. Don’t have much appetite anymore. Don’t have nobody on the outside left. The ones that are hate my guts and wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.
First thing you wanna know, like everybody else, is why am I here. I’ll tell you what I always say. What the hell does it matter? I didn’t kill or rape anybody and didn’t steal anything. But now I’m labeled for life as dangerous. I’m dangerous AND old. I’ll come back around to that, not that it makes a difference cause once you’re here you’re here you’re not getting out. I see all these newbies come in all peppy and bushy-tailed talking about how they’s gonna file a motion, a twenty-two-fifty-five. Well good luck with that. One outta ten thousand of those appeals get you anything and what they get is a few months off. The U.S. government likes to keep people locked up for as long as possible. They gotta keep beds filled. Prison is a 1.9 billion dollar industry, and that’s just off commissaries and sales. It doesn’t include what they make off of the on-site factories, UNICOR and so on. No. Nobody’s getting out. And after you get out there’s a whole new phase of money- making. That’s the re-entry business. The halfway houses. The therapy guys. The registries. The probation department. The Marshalls.
It’s all one big merry-go-round and once you’re on you can’t get off. So you might as well be in for the ride, sit back and watch television or read books. Some guys think they’ll get an education, learn a foreign language, get a degree in business administration, or become preachers. The system doesn’t make any of that particularly easy. They’d rather you sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and watch old sitcoms and reality shows. So I do that for a large part of the day when I’m not walking around aimlessly or drinking twenty cups of coffee a day. Every now and then I’ll get a magazine subscription, but it’s getting too hard to read the small print now and getting new glasses here is mission impossible. Some guys play chess or cards or dominos, mostly the Black guys. Mostly drug offenders. The ones that aren’t dealers stay in their rooms a lot and don’t associate. This place I’m at is a PC yard–protective custody. Snitches, Tex-Mex cartel or immigration violators, sex offenders, like that. It’s quiet for the most part but there’s always some questionable shit going on somewhere. Guys making hooch or smoking dope. Fights or beat-downs over debts or insults. I hear guys yelling at their wives on the phone to send money. I remember doing that years ago. A long time ago. My wife stopped sending money. She stopped talking to me. She sent me divorce papers. It’s what you can expect. I’m an old guy. The O.G. What the hell have I got to live for? Nobody I knew before prison wants anything to do with me now. I’m permanently retired and might as well be dead. Lately, I’ve been waking up and hearing somebody, different voices at different times, call my name. Like they’ll call my name and I’ll wake up and there’s nobody there. My cellie is asleep. The lights outside the cell are out. Who is that? Who is calling me? I don’t recognize the voices. They seem pleasant enough. Like a nurse in the hospital waking you up to take your meds. Different voices. Male. Female. This happens in the middle of the night. The most dead time in prison. TV’s are usually off. Only the insomniacs are around and they’re usually just sitting there doing nothing. So I wake up and go to the bathroom which is across the common area and go back to bed and now I can’t sleep and start thinking about my life before. Or about what I’m heading into when I get out. Who can sleep with all that in their head? It’s torture. Generally I can shut it off but sometimes I can’t. Some old song will play in my head over and over. I’m an old man. The longer you live the more memories there are to haunt you. There’s something to be said for dying young. Hell, there’s something to be said for fricking suicide for that matter. Why live when there’s nothing to live for? Life is highly overrated.
Being locked up is just a bad cosmic joke. I long ago stopped thinking of right and wrong and guilt and all that. The honest truth is that when you’re down long enough none of that matters. I see on the news where some poor schmuck did thirty or forty years and they finally let him out because he wasn’t guilty after all. So I ask: what the hell’s the difference whether you’re ‘guilty’ or not? This system is not primarily interested in guilt though that’s what it purports to be all about. It’s really all just about winners and losers and power over other people. What I did…I downloaded illegal porn off the internet. An old man getting his jollies from pretty little female bodies. That’s my ‘wrong’. That’s ‘exploitation’. So it’s okay to destroy me for my orgasms. How wrong is wrong? How guilty is guilty? Lock ’em up and throw away the key is what some of these senators in DC say. But look at all the shit they do and the mess the world is in. Guilt? I no longer know what that is. I didn’t kill or rape anyone or steal anything. I paid my taxes. None of that did any good in the end. Here’s my label: sex offender. Scarlet letter for life. And we call ourselves a ‘free society’, a country of laws? Don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for where this society is heading. Right up and over and off the cliff. I’m only sorry I won’t be alive to see it.
WAYNE
I say, “Nigga give me a honeybun.”
Richie say, “I can’t give it to you for nothin.”
I say, “Damn, ain’t we homies?”
He say, “Homie, you owe me seven stamps for the last honeybun, you ain’t never paid.”
But Richie’s awright. I mean he’s a baaad muthafucka but he awright. Later he give me that honeybun. I aint paid him yet but I plan to. There’s niggas on this yard comin off the bus every day and I dont know ’em. Richie and I were on the street together. Some of these niggas now, they all suspicious and shit and they keep to theyselves. Thass alright. Prison’s what it is. I think summa them be chomos, like the white guy chomos, and I can see why they dont wanna mix. I’m sick of all the chomos and retards in here. This place is full of em. I don’t want nothin to do with em. I’m doin man time, not like summa these dirty baby rapers and diaper sniffers. Sick muthafuckas. They opened up a unit for the military guys here. Like, they get their own unit and shit, and a lot of them are chomos. Ain’t no Black soldiers in that unit. Only white soldier chomo boys.
Niggas say “when we gonna get our own unit?”
I say “You crazy. There’s too many niggas in here. They have to give us the whole damn yard! Fuck that.”
Richie gets skin mags in the mail, like hoes with big butts, when they get past the mail room. Sometimes he lets me borrow em. It’s hard in here with no pussy, and I ain’t goin offroad like summa these here jokers: “Gay for the stay, straight after the gate.”
Unh-unh! Not for me. I aint goin near no hairy man ass nohow! Richie got put in the SHU last year cuz he mouthed off to one-a-dem rent-a-cop COs. We got a lot of Texas cowboy redneck guards and they like to pick on the Black inmates. And the Black CO’s, they alright but they a bunch of Uncle Tom house niggas, like to joke around wid us but they aint no different than the white po-lice. They run your ass down in a minute when they want to. I bust Richie’s balls sometime in the mornin when I say, “Look out, Richie!’ ‘Richie, look out!”
I keeps sayin that until all them white chomos watchin the TVs in the common area give me dirty looks. I like to rile ’em up. ‘They gonna call breakfast, Richie!’ Some time he come out. Most of the time he dont. He dont like the shitty breakfast in the BOP. I don’t either but I eat it cuz I ain’t got nothin else. My hoe stopped sending money on account she got some new dick out there. I don’t care. Comes wid the territory, know what I’m sayin?
Straight up: I was sellin dope and guns. Coupla snitch muthafuckas gave me up. The feds sent a undercover and I fell for it. Same ole, same ole. White man locking up the Black man. Make our life hard, put us in the ghetto and when a dude try to make a coupla extra dollars they toss him in the slammer. I got a prison lawyer lookin at my case. OG told me to check the dude out in the law library. Jack. He seem like he know what he talkin about. But I don’t hold out a lotta confidence, know what I’m sayin? Nobody gets out. Once you checked in, you checked IN, sucker. In a way, maybe its good I aint got money on my books. I’d be gamblin it all away. I ain’t never had enough of anything and it looks like I aint never gonna have it. Guess I’ll just go on bummin shots of coffee and honeybuns off of Richie, at least til he get tired of it. Or til I score some cash somewhere. Now theys gettin on us to clean up our rooms. Man, fuck all that. You put a dude away for fifteen years and you expect he gonna live in a eight-by-eight box with nothin but a metal locker to put shit in? I’d like to see them live like that. Damn po-lice. Naw. Seriously. Fuck all that. They can just kiss my big black ass or put me in the SHU. I don’t care. I’m done carin.
JACK
I told you to find me ten cases. And this what you come back with? This is useless.
Look. Look. This case doesn’t have anything to do with yours. Nothing. This one either! Get back on that computer and keep looking. I know, I know. It’s a pain in the ass, but that’s the way it is. The law is the law and if you go to a judge with some bullshit it just gets thrown out. I read the motion you wrote last year. That’s just useless. You didn’t even cite your cases properly. I don’t know what you were thinking. It look – you didn’t reference the case you were citing for what it was. You tried to make it fit your case! You gotta find a case that’s LIKE YOUR CASE! I don’t know how else to say it. Look at me. You see how many hours I spend in this library on this fucking computer. This is ALL I do! Am I happy doing it? Hell no. But you know why I do it? And why I don’t charge for my work? Because I want to make these damn judges and prosecutors eat their words, that’s why. It’s all about logic, logic, logic. If A, then B. If B, then C. I know this sounds like some foreign language to you. I hear guys say all the time that it’s just a bunch of gobbledygook. But its not. It’s logical and if you find the right logic to fight you’ll win your case.
How many cases have I won? Well…look…alright. I did get a couple of guys a few months off. I got a dude a year off. I got a guy who had cancer transferred to a medical facility. They were gonna let him die in his bunk. I got a guy who wanted a Buddhist prayer mat in his room to have it. It took almost a year but they had to give in. It’s religious practice. I found fifteen cases to back up my motion. It cost the guy a thousand bucks to go to court, but he won and now anybody who wants a damn Buddhist prayer mat in his cell can have it!
I know you don’t know what equitable tolling is or collateral attack. I know it sounds like mumbo-jumbo. But look at it this way: you play games, right? Monopoly? Parcheesie? Life? Dungeons and Dragons? You play something. Sports. Okay. Whatever. That’s what this is like. It’s a game and you have to stick to the rules of the game if you want to play. Doesn’t mean you win, it just means you get to play. And the rules? Some guy asked me the other day about the Sentencing Commission, like did I understand all the bullshit that went down when they made up the rules in the 1980s. What do I care? What’s the difference? The rules are the rules. That’s all there is to it. Think of the judges like the refs in a football game making calls. You gotta live by the calls they make, right? Kind of, but you can dispute them. Dispute, dispute, dispute. I know it’s not like going back to check the video playback, and there’s no audience watching. Look. These judges and prosecutors will try to get away with whatever they can get away with, charge you with shit up the kazoo. You’re fighting a war here and you better load up with the right ammo. Now throw these cases you found out and get some other ones. I know it’s a big time investment but what else are you doing? You got twenty years. You wanna shave some of them years off? Alright then. Get to work.
DOC ANDERS
I was looking in the mirror. This was about maybe a year before I got sentenced. The Feds had been on me for about five years before that, looking through my books, checking my tax records. I owned a nice clinic in Knoxville. Brand new building. Ten employees. These goons came in with their warrants. They started ruining my reputation. But that day I saw it wasn’t them. It was me. I brought it on myself. I was an addict. I knew the symptoms and there it was, right there in the mirror. A forty-nine year old man on opiates shaking like a leaf and trying to keep away from the next hit.
I was smart and the Feds couldn’t find anything at first. But they kept looking. They never give up. Bastards. Searching and searching. More and more warrants. The IRS got in on it. I was fresh prey, and they could smell it. It took them six years but they finally tracked down everything they needed for an arrest warrant for Doctor John Theodore Anders, fifty-five years of age at 745 Point Moore Oaks. A posh home it was, and well enjoyed by my wife of ten years who proceeded to leave me as fast as her feet could carry her.
But who had I seen in the bathroom mirror that day a year earlier? Well, a junkie. My scam was this: I’d prescribe oxys and fentanyl popsicles for patients with chronic pain. There were three women, all on SSI, losers really, but not drug addicts. Just individuals that had too few prospects and too many kids. I gave them a chance to make some money. They picked up the prescriptions and brought them back to me and I paid them off. Medicare fraud? You bet. But the feds weren’t happy to leave it at that. They added tax evasion, medical malpractice and, yes, even murder. The court didn’t like pill doctors, which is how they defined me even though I wasn’t selling pills. I was buying them for myself.
The feds leaned on the three women and they gave me up. Can’t say I blame them. But then the prosecutor, a bald, overweight, middle-aged windbag who didn’t understand medicine or much of anything else, claimed I was responsible for four deaths. All had been patients at my clinic. One man was also a drug addict but I didn’t know that. It’s not something people will generally confess to in the doctor’s office. He suffered from back pain so I prescribed him opiates. Standard practice. Two years after his last visit to my clinic he was in a car accident. Ran off the road and smashed into a tree. Died instantly. Apparently he was still taking meds I had prescribed, along with heroin, so according to the windbag prosecutor the death must have been my fault. How could I possibly know he’d get high, nod out and lose control of his car? That was a mystery that the jury didn’t care to ponder. Another of the deaths ascribed to my malpractice was woman who fell out of a wheelchair and into a pool and drowned. A third was of a man who had a heart attack as a result of extreme stress in his workplace. The fourth, as far as the coroner’s report went, was from natural causes. But somehow all four of these deaths were used in the case against me, boosting (or ‘jacking’ as they say here) what might have been 15 years of prison up to a 25 year sentence. The court produced ‘expert’ medical witnesses. My lawyer did nothing. He was as useless as tits on a boar. He sat through the whole thing and raised no objections as absurd claim topped absurd claim. In court it sounded like they were describing some other person and not me. But then I would remember the face in the mirror, unshaven, hair uncombed, dark bags under the eyes, sallow skin. And I would remember how my body began to pay the price. I’d lost weight. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely concentrate at the office. All I could think about was the next hit, the oxys, the fentanyl candy. It was obvious to me as a doctor.
I was, am, a GOOD doctor. I was with Doctors Without Borders out of med school in Africa, up in Nigeria and Ethiopia. I was an ER surgeon for ten years. In prison inmates come to me for advice or with problems. Some I can fix – for a price. Nothing in prison is free. A guy had an ugly boil on his back and the medical team would do nothing to help him. I took care of it. We went in the bathroom and I used a shaving blade sanitized with alcohol sneaked from medical by an orderly. There was no anesthesia, but the guy was a tough Latino gangbanger and he took it stoically without a sound. Ten flats. Two hundred stamps. The equivalent of 80 dollars on the street. A sweet deal he could only have gotten in prison. So yeah, I was and am a good doctor, but I went off the rails. Way off. Should someone like me get this kind of sentence? What’s the point of it exactly? Punishment? As far as I can tell, the only real victim in my case was me. My female accomplices got off with probation for their testimony in court. Those four deaths were not my responsibility. Only in the pretzel logic of a federal courtroom could such an outcome happen. I’ll never practice again, except here in prison…for stamps. At least I’m not a junkie anymore. That may be the only good thing that came out of all this. I don’t have anyone out there now but my mom who is in her late eighties and who will probably die before I leave here. Justice? I don’t know what that means anymore.
EDDIE
Guys here have told me that I’m not really Black. Why? Because I don’t speak ghetto?
I’m educated. I’m from Boston. I went to college and got my MBA. My family was middle class. Should I apologize? To these street thug clowns?
Yeah, I got into the drug business, but they also slammed me with a weapons charge because I had a handgun in the warehouse where we stashed the stuff. I never used it. I never had to, because we were not street dealers. We were strictly high-end suppliers, and I invested the money that I made with the drugs. I played the stock market and did it well. Lived in a nice upscale house. Drove a nice car. Had a fine girlfriend. I’ve played the drums all my life, mostly R&B. It was a hobby. Here in prison, I’m in high demand. There aren’t many good drummers in the music program. I’ve been in two prisons, my first one in Memphis where I caught my case and this one in Texas. I’ve played music in both. Back in Memphis they used to call me Beatman. I love music. There’s nothing like locking into a groove with a good bass player. But I always get the same thing. “Man, you’re not like… Black Black.”
I say, “Motherfucker, look at my face. Look at my skin. My mom was Jamaican, my dad was New York Harlem. That be my pedigree, alright?” Now my mom’s dad was Dutch, so maybe I got some white genes but I never had a need to be anything but Black. And I don’t disrespect my people. Most of ’em’s had it hard out there trying to claw their way up. Most white people don’t know anything about it.
Another thing I’ve learned in prison is to cut hair. I’m a barber, and a good one, in high demand. The prison barbershop is in the Education building and that’s where I’ll be, cutting hair three or four days a week, making flats. And what can I say? I like gambling. I like playing the odds on sports. Mostly basketball and football. I do that pretty successfully too. Maybe I’m the prototype of the “uppitty nigga,” but that’s the way I deal.
That and my faith in God. Not that I go to any of the services here. I’ve always believed. I have faith. But my relationship with God is personal. I read the Bible but I understand it’s not literal. It’s poetry written in another age and time. But humans still behave in similar ways, fall into the same traps. I know I did. Not that I feel guilt for my illegal activity. It was greed that drove me, stupidity, and I’m paying the price. Seventeen years behind bars. Is that extreme? You bet your ass it is. But these laws are extreme, made by extreme people who had no real stake in punishing others except to get votes.
About three years ago I started getting dizzy spells and headaches. Turned out I had a brain tumor. I’m one of the lucky few who got medical attention here. I was taken to a medical facility and they cut the tumor out. For a while it was touch and go there. When I got back to this compound people told me I was not the same. Shit, of course I’m not the same. I just turned sixty and I just had a fucking brain tumor. But I can still get around, I still play the drums and in five months I’ll be out of this shitbox for good. What will I do on the outside? Probably cut hair and play drums. There’s not much else I’ll be able to do as a felon. Once a felon, always a felon. But I’ll get by. I always have and I always will.
KYLE
Who cares why I’m here? I’m here, and I’m doing my time. The real important thing to me is how do I get to Level Seven in Swords and Castles. That’s the game I’ve been playing for the past year or so. There are 25 levels. I play with a gamer group, and we play just about every day for four hours whenever all of us are free from prison work. We play in a corner of the common area. The Blacks hate us but they don’t bother us for the most part. I’ve been a gamer all of my life. I was six when the Internet started, and I’ve been playing video games and RPGs as far back as I can remember. First Legend of Zelda, Mario Brothers, and Sonic the Hedgehog, then Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Tomb Raider. Then I got into Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder Online. We’ve played some of that in prison.
But back to Swords and Castles. You can only beat the ogre if you have at least twenty life points and a hundred gold pieces. The goblins are easy to kill. They’re more annoying than anything. I have the video versions of Swords and Castles and Dragonfest on my tablet here, and, like the other gamers, when I’m not playing the RPG version you’ll find me busy in my cell trying to level up on the tablet games. I was a math teacher at Woodson Elementary in Dayton. The feds raided my mom’s house and took my computers, so I’m doing ten years for porn. I’ve lost most of my hair and I’m not even fifty.
BSwords and Castles. The best strategy for defeating King Darkmusk is getting him to use the gold orb instead of the laser sword. Once he does that then you can use the zenian power pills to deflect the aura and redirect it back at him. It’s sort of cool how that looks on the video version. When we play the RPG, somebody gets to be Darkmusk and it’s harder to beat them because they use whatever strategies they come up with rather than just the AI. Level Seven is hard because of the orcs and the Blue Wizard. I’m still not sure what to do about the blinding effect of the Wizard’s spell. How are you supposed to navigate the underground caverns if you’re blind? And how do you know if you’re using your silver sword or your gold sword to fight the orcs if you can’t see? I’m always talking game. I talk game in the chow hall every day, and I think a lot of guys that are not gamers find it annoying. But I don’t care. I’ve got to get to Level 8 and I want my gamer group to move up levels too so we can all fight the Golgothan Dragon on Level 15. I heard Edwards has a few ideas on beating the dragon, so I’ll be looking forward to that. I hate my prison landscaping job. Not like my friend who plants all kinds of flowers and plants out there and takes care of them diligently. He’s got a green thumb. Not me. I can’t wait to get inside out of the Texas heat and back at the gamer table. It’s great when we’re on lockdown because we get to play for hours on end. I guess I’ll be gaming until I drop dead.
WHACKY TRANNY AMY
Hee hee hee! That was a diversion! I walk fast. Real fast. Out of chow hall at breakfast with my shorts stuffed with extra milks and chocolate cake and bananas, and the dumb cop didn’t know cuz I pretended I was gonna walk in the wrong direction and he said NOT THAT WAY! and he didn’t look at what I was carrying! It was a diversion. I’m good at diversions. Hee hee hee! This morning I’m not singing to myself like usual, just talking. Everybody thinks I’m crazy, and I probably am but the faster I walk and the more I sing the faster time goes by and I won’t have to stay as long in prison as the judge said. I’m on meds, sure. I’ve been on meds most of my life. I knew I was a girl when I was about seven but nobody wanted to believe me. Nowadays it’s easier, and here in low security prison it’s great. Nobody bugs me about it. I can buy makeup and undies for girls in the commissary. They’ll also give us the all-the-way surgery if we request it. But I’m not sure I wanna go that way just yet. I just turned thirty five. Oh boy, I walk so fast. Nobody here walks as fast as I do. They don’t let you run so I don’t run but it’s almost as fast as running. My name is Arthur Combs but I’m really Amy. I always get confused when they call Arthur Combs for a piss test to the lieutenant’s office and I always have to explain that I’m on meds. Hee hee hee! Ha ha! Nobody wants to be my cellie cuz I’m nuts and I drive people crazy. If everybody was crazy like me I tell you this would be a great world. There’s too much seriousness and sanity and laws and all kinds of shit that make people miserable. Not me I’m singing and laughing all the time. Wacky Tranny Amy. That’s what they call me. There are a lot of trannies and gays here so it’s pretty cool. I guess a few of ’em are chomos like me. Most of ’em was probably just looking at pictures on their smartphones. But when you get to court and all those serious prosecutors and judges (I love those robes they wear, don’t you?) take one little look at you, they say ‘crazy faggot’ or ‘lunatic’ and that’s it. They send you right to prison. Chop chop. And they don’t think twice about it. Guilty until proven innocent. That’s how it works now. Most people plea out. Who wants to go to a jury trial and get stared at by all them serious church-going rubes? Hee hee hee! The faster I walk the quicker I get where I’m going. And who knows where I’m going? The cops ask me sometimes HEY, YOU! WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING? And I say, who, me? Nowhere, sir. I’m in prison. I’m probably the only crazy tranny on this compound. The others are super sane. One was a dental hygienist or whatever, another one was a stockbroker. There’s a real pretty one that could really pass for female, Asian, small and cute. She was a receptionist at some big advertising agency in Chicago. I guess here they all let their hair down and who cares? Be all you can be in federal prison! Just kidding. Them soldier boys would kill me if they heard me make fun of their Army song. Hee hee hee. The faster I walk the quicker the time goes.
MARTY
Where I came from, my spot before this one, everybody carried shanks. No question. There were fights and killings almost every damn day. This place here is Disneyworld man. They got birds and squirrels and flowers. What the fuck? I got in trouble a couple of weeks after I got here with a stupid ass CO. He gave me some petty shit about not walking on the grass. I said: “You lucky I don’t have a gun right now.” I got sent to the SHU and got a shot (what they called a ticket in State) for making threats to a CO. As I told the discipline officer that interviewed me: “I wasn’t makin no threat. It was a statement of fact.”
He told me I should stop making “statements of fact” unless I was eager to go right back up to a medium or a penitentiary. So he gave me one more chance to fuck up. So here I am. Two years later. No more ‘statements of fact’. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut and stay in my lane. It’s comfortable here and I still have twelve years to go, so why spoil it? Besides, there’s lots of dumb hustles. Selling food from the chow hall or hooch or K2 or cellphones. I keep a low profile and stay out of the way of the players that are already here. Maybe I’m learning some humility after all…
Right. I got an annoying cellie who was a professor or some shit. He said he was working on his Ph.D. in music ed. He teaches music here and everybody on the yard knows him. He’s always out there. They call him Master Class. I work in compound services every day. Six hours. Painting walls, fixing pipes, patching up whatever breaks or falls apart with the other CMS guys. And in these old buildings everything is always falling apart. My cellie has an annoying habit of singing to himself when he don’t wanna talk, but he don’t bother me and I don’t bother him. We’re on different schedules. Master Class with his music and me with my toolbox. I don’t think Master Class really gives a shit about what’s going on in the world and I don’t blame him. He got a longer sentence than me, old Master Class. The few times I’ve talked to him about something I saw on the news he mumbled and kept reading his books. He gets dozens of books in the mail. He speaks French and Russian and reads novels in those languages. For a while he was busy with trigonometry and what not. A real brainiac. But he’s quiet and respectful and what more can you expect from a cellie?
I’ve had my share of dumb ass and stink-bomb cellies. That’s one more reason to stay on the down low on this compound and ride out my time. My brother died in a boat accident last year and that was–I went through a bad time. There’s no way to let out grief here, you know? I loved Tim. He was my older brother and always looked out for me. He was a damn drunk though and he liked to go out on the water up by Hilton Head and just fly on that pretty little speedboat he owned. I guess he was coming back to port when he hit some kinda floating debris and the boat smashed up and he went in the water. He was drunk to the gills and he drowned. Tim had testified to the judge at my trial and stood up for me but it didn’t do any good. I was off the rails and doing all kinds of stupid shit with meth and whatnot. I’m just glad mom wasn’t around anymore to see any of it. My dad never showed up to the court. He was sick of me and Tim pretty much. Two black sheep is what we were. Only one left now. But I’m done making a wreck of everything. Patience and humility. That’s what you learn here if you learn anything at all. I’m not done learning yet. Got a ways to go before I graduate but what the hell. I’m doing the best I can.
FAT SAM
I was at 380 when I came in a year and a half ago. Now I’m at 460. I need a walker to get around this prison because things are all in different buildings. At county prison everything was in one place and you didn’t have to go outside. This place looks like a school or something. The distance between buildings is like one or two city blocks. The food’s a lot better than county. That’s for sure. And they have lots of goodies in the commissary. I go through six packs of frosted cinnamon cookies and five packs of duplex cookies and fifteen honey buns plus four boxes of crackers every week. The commissary is hell though. We stand outside the store building waiting for them to call our name, sometimes for hours in the heat or the cold or the rain. There’s nowhere to sit. Luckily I have a walker but some of the old guys end up sitting on the ground, under the porch roof. It’s torture. I buy trays from people in the chow hall so I end up with two or three extra trays. I go through a couple of packs of Dr. Pepper or Pepsi every week, too, and lots of tea and coffee. Federal prison’s good that way for somebody like me. I love to eat and they don’t stop me. They give me a hard time in medical, but they just keep giving me blood pressure meds and happy pills so I’m good.
Nobody here believes me when I tell them I was never fat before prison. I got pictures. The most I ever weighed was 225. I mean I was never THIN thin, but in my twenties I got into porn and lost my job and things went downhill. My girlfriend left me and I was living in a shitty apartment and on the internet all the time. When I got arrested I was already in the three hundred pound zone. I had stopped trying to stop eating. I just didn’t give a shit anymore. My dad killed himself when I was ten and me and my mom lived in that house for another couple of years. Then we moved around a lot. She worked at one of the Hyatt hotels in Fort Lauderdale for a while and I started college but I dropped out and went to live with my girlfriend. I worked at a furniture warehouse for a while. Ashley was into pot and coke some but not real bad, and she tried to get me into it, but the stuff never did much for me. We used to go to stripper clubs, Ashley and me. She was sort of bi but not real hard. We messed around some with three way stuff but nothing all that serious.
I don’t know when food became the thing but it is definitely the thing now. Psych says maybe it took the place of porn when I got locked up. They don’t want to admit porn is an addiction but they’re happy to agree that food is. Nothing they say over there makes sense, but I go every week anyway to their dumbass counseling sessions. I’ve got eight more years of this place and I have no idea what I’m gonna do after. Maybe I’ll try to slow down the eating. Carrying around nearly five hundred pounds every day is no fun, what with all the walking back and forth here. I guess if I’d ended up in some other prison where there was less walking I’d be even heavier. Fat Sam is what they call me when they think I don’t hear. I’d like some day to be just Sam again. And now I’m a sex offender so I’ll have to register for years and live where they let me live. For now all I do is read my Manga magazines and comic books and read sci fi and fantasy and play games on my tablet. What else am I gonna do? I grew a beard and long hair for the hell of it. I guess I don’t have much by way of a future but neither do a lot of the SOs here who aren’t fat. I’m not sure how I look makes a whole hell of a lot of difference anymore. Lately it doesn’t even matter much to me.
“ONESPOT” MEJIAS
Horale! You want to know how I got my goofy prison name? Heh heh. You see the tattoos on my head and face? A lot of tattoos, no? Good artwork too, perro. The guy who did it was a lifer over in Beaumont. Bad dude. What happened is a few days after I got all the tattoos some dumb nigger yelled over at me when I walked by in the chow hall. He said ‘Yo. You missed a spot.’ So I smashed my tray across his stupid face. I must have hit the sonofabitch too hard cuz he keeled over with a broken nose and one eye hanging out. Heh heh. They put me in segregation for almost a year after that. Good thing too because all the niches wanted payback. And eventually a coupla years later they sent me to this place. By then everybody was calling me Onespot. Hey Onespot, how ya doin? Heh heh. I’m doing better than the other guy. Nobody made fun of my tattoos after that and here in this place? No mames. All you got here is a bunch of pussies and pendejos. Mira, la verdad es que I look kinda scary, right? I was an enforcer for Sinaloa. I wanted those putos to know I’m not somebody to mess with. I don’t snitch and I don’t take what ain’t mine, entiendes? If we make a deal we make a deal. If you go back on your word and screw me we have a problem. Out on the street I settle those problems with a gun. In prison I use a shank or my fists. I don’t need any of that here in this place. This is low security. I play nice. I have to. I want to finish my time and go back to Mexico. I’ve had enough of Texas. Twenty-five years worth. I’ve done some things in prison that I wouldn’t do on the outside, me entiendes? I’m no marica but a man has to use his, ah, energy, somehow when there’s no pussy around. A la verga! Don’t worry. I won’t come after you, perro! You’re not my type! Ahha ha ha ha ha! Did I ever kill somebody? I did what I had to do. The feds don’t know anything about any of that. That’s shit that happened on the other side of the border. It’s none of their business. A lot of shit goes down over there that nobody wants to ever talk about. Its crazy. It’s like dogs fighting. There’s some things I didn’t like but I had to do. Cutting a guy’s throat. Too messy. A shot to the back of the head. Es mas limpio, entiendes? I had a woman over there and a kid. I love that kid. I talk to him on the phone every week. I’m going back there when they let me out.
Right now I got a problem. Since I’ve been here, SIs ripped my cell apart a coupla times. They’re trying to pin something on me. The other day they took me to talk to Lieutenant Elizondo. Hey, amigo, he says.
I’m not your ‘amigo’. I say.
He laughs. Listen, he says. You don’t belong in low security. I’m gonna do my goddamn best to make sure we send you right the fuck back up the ladder where scum likes you fucking belongs, in the zoo with the other animals. It’s your kind that makes Latinos look bad, ese. You fucked up, Onespot. You fucked up big time ending up in jail.
I fucked up? I say. I FUCKED UP? Look at you, you dumb beaner. You’re wearing a Yanqui cop uniform. You work here forty fifty hours a week for shit money. You in jail, just. Like. Me. Now who fucked up?
He say, I get to go home at night. You get to stay in here in the stink. I read your file. I think that guy that you put in the hospital was right. Whoever did them tatts on you, he missed a spot or two.
When he say that I almost lose it but I keep my cool. I laugh in his face. I know the best way to fuck with this jerk is to stay clean. They can rip my cell apart all they want, they ain’t gonna find nothing. Unless they plant it. I’m definitely going back to Chiapas when they let me out. And they know they gotta let me out when my sentence ends. Where else can I go? Sure I’ll end up in the same shit I was in before I crossed the border. Es mi destino, guey. Nothing I can do about it. As far as Lieutenant Elizondo…fuck him. I’ll find out where he lives. And maybe before I go back to Chiapas I’ll pay him a little visit. Senor Elizondo, and his lovely family.
MICHAEL
Out to breakfast and it’s a beautiful early fall day in North Texas. I’m incarcerated in what inmates call compound cupcake, a low security prison with little violence and lots of landscaping. Birds are chirping in the trees. Doves coo from the bushes. I walk alone. I have no real friends here and have never sought any. I walk alone to chow hall, as usual among the last stragglers out of the unit. Many of the other guys prefer to sleep through the meager breakfasts the BOP provides.
Chow hall is about two city blocks from the unit so it’s a nice walk, but only on days like this. There’s no protection from rain or from the blazing sun of summer. There’s nowhere to sit out on this beautifully landscaped, fairy tale, Disney-ized compound. We’re not allowed to ‘hang out’. Most of the buildings are old, chipped red brick. They stand as somber institutional reminders, built decades ago for the same purpose they have continued to serve. There are cracks along the walls that have been sloppily filled in, most probably by inmate compound workers assigned the task. Inmates do everything. They cook. They fix pipes and electricity. They maintain the landscaping. They run the commissary and assist in the medical building. Without their absurdly (and forcibly provided) cheap labor the institution would fall apart. We are the lifeblood of prison. We’re not treated that way. We are treated like scum with enough minimal respect to avoid legal attention from overseeing agencies. But there’s not a lot of oversight and there are a lot of lawsuits pending. People are raped, beaten or allowed to die through medical negligence on a regular basis. You don’t see a lot of that on this compound, only some, and this lovely morning everything seems fine with the world.
I’m a few days past my forty-fifth birthday. I’ve lost pretty much everything that mattered in my life, or I should say, it was snatched from me by the United States government. Birthdays in prison, by the way, are terrible. Like those old buildings on this prettily landscaped compound, reminders of the inevitable passing of time. What did I do to deserve a seventeen year sentence? I looked at pornography on my laptop that involved juveniles on the internet. In my case teen and preteen girls. Is that seventeen years worth of wrong? Is it lose-everything-in-your-life worth of wrong? Is it be-an-outcast-and-a-pariah for the rest of your life worth of wrong?
Anyway, I’m beyond all of that now, twelve years into my sentence. There is no parole in the federal system, so regardless of how well I behave or have behaved, or how I may have modified my thinking patterns, my release date is fixed in stone. If I were to flaunt the rules here however, my time could be increased and I could spend a lot of it in the SHU, segregation. But I choose to avoid that. I was a straight arrow. Catholic high school in Miami. Quarterback on the Loyola football team. Michael the Archangel they used to call me for the Hail Mary passes I managed to pull off bringing us almost to state championship. Almost. Now, mostly I’m a quiet, non-confrontational guy, but the system does challenge you. Some of the guards, a small number, are sadistic lunatics, most are rough, low class people who might have easily ended up on my side of the fence, if not on Walmart or fast food payrolls.
To underscore my point, as I approach the chow hall I hear the two chow hall guards outside carrying on loudly about the upcoming football season. They are Black, like a large percentage of the inmates. Sometimes, except for the uniform, it’s hard differentiate their attitudes and style from the people they are supposed to be “guarding.” Some even sport dreadlocks and look more like street dealers than BOP corrections officers. I don’t have a racist bone in my body, but I recognize that race has played a serious role in the socializing (or lack thereof) of both guards and inmates. I’m a white second generation Latino and I’ve experienced a limited amount of racism myself, so I stay away from judgmental attitudes. But sometimes it’s hard to resist a tendency toward stereotyping. Some inmates here, and also guards, actually adopt a Hollywood version of sleazy or violent that is nothing like what they were (or are) like on the outside. I don’t know if the reason for that is some kind of social camouflage, an attempt to fit in or to ‘live up to’ the accepted idea of prison, but I find it ridiculous. I want to say to those people, “come on, man. You’re just NOT a bad guy.”
And what is a “bad guy” anyway? I don’t know why we continue to live with these TV show categories that are primitive, with ideas that should have died decades ago. But everybody here copes in a different way, I guess. Everybody has a different mental ‘escape’ plan. Guards adopt some kind of righteous paramilitary nonsense. Some inmates become religious and attend weekly services and bible readings. Others do art projects or leathercraft or music. Others study law, write motions; of those, a few actually become professional lawyers after prison. And because their energy is focused and they have nothing else to distract them, inmates do exceedingly well at whatever it is they’ve put their minds to.
Some have odd reactions to prison. There’s a guy, Kevin. They call him Master Class. He was an academic on the outside and a music educator. Here he devotes himself to intellectual pursuits, and I mean devotes. He fills every waking moment between teaching and prison activities with reading and studying. He actually devours entire textbooks on a host of subjects, and is learning various languages and disciplines. When not flipping pages of a book he’s perusing language flash cards. And though as a music teacher he seems approachable he really isn’t. When his polite front slips away he comes off as arrogant and standoffish and the few that get to know him a little better see a lot of repressed anger and a kind of hateful misanthropic viciousness. But who can blame him? The system can also bring out the worst in people. Greed. Self-centeredness. Kevin’s mental escape plan is intellectual, to bury his head in books, to sing to himself, to pretend everything is honky-dory. He’s not harming anyone, maybe just deluding himself. Not much different from the zombie guys that spend their days in front of a TV screen. He’s on a twenty year bid so he’s entitled to behave any way he likes. I envy him. I don’t have any passions for learning or ‘expanding’ my horizons. My intellect, unlike Kevin’s, does not represent any sort of salvation.
Though not quite a zombie, I’m at a dead end like many others here. Our daily lives are regimented. We move on the compound only on the hour with prompts shouted or barked on a PA system telling us that it’s time to move. Ten minute move. Five minute move. Or sometimes administration closes the compound so that no one can move, that’s a ‘secure move’. Otherwise, not moving, we remain in our units or in our cells for daily counts. Some inmates move about full of purpose and direction, as if something here actually mattered. Or perhaps they believe their time will go by faster if they fill time with some kind of motion. Time here, regardless, is empty time. We are counted several times a day, over five thousand times a year. We are counted at given hours and sometimes unexpectedly with ‘census counts’ performed randomly and forcing inmates to remain ‘still’ wherever they are so they can be counted like so many coffee cans in a warehouse. The worst times are when we are locked down and there’s no TV and the lights are off. That’s when prison here really feels like prison.
So now I’m on a ten minute move heading toward chow hall on a beautiful September morning. After a hot summer the air today is cool. It’s quiet out here. No inmates chattering nearby, behind me or ahead of me on the old brickstone walkway. That’s why I prefer going to chow hall alone. I walk alone. I do have to deal with my cellie. But he’s mostly at work with compound services and we’ve learned to steer past each other with little interaction. Alone is the way I like to do my time and finish my time. I don’t engage in any of the proposed and pointless activities. I read. Books and magazines. Watch an occasional movie. Sleep ten hours when I can. I have no mental ‘escape’ behavior. Sometimes my routine is interrupted by the occasional shakedowns, a goon squad of corrections officers crashing into the unit to run us out to the rec yard while they tear through every cell for contraband: porn, hootch, cell phones. I don’t do contraband. But still my locker gets searched; personal items belonging to my cellie and me are scattered all over the floor when we’re sent back inside. This happens on this compound maybe once or twice a year. Sometimes dumpsters full of contraband are carted away. The goon squad leaves with the booty. Triumphant. A good job well done.
The only other truly annoying thing is commissary, where we have to stand outside one of the small brick buildings waiting for our names to be called. There are no benches. You stand out there in good or bad weather, hot sun or pouring rain, sometimes for hours before you ‘shop’, which means your list, handed in a day before, gets filled by other inmate workers, most of the time incompletely. And you can’t complain. Whatever they give you when your name is called and you go in with your laundry bag to pick up your stuff is what you get, like it or not. Chow hall lies ahead. Breakfast today will be toast, grits and milk. But I’m happy to be outside, alone, on this beautiful morning. Times like these in prison are rare and must be appreciated. I am in a neutral state of mind. I am here. I am alive to the present. I’m not sure many of the other guys here can say that. Present time in prison is hard. There’s guilt. There’s memory. There’s loss. I’m lucky in many ways. Some guys have to live in those old cracked building with no AC. The summers for them are hell. I’m in an air conditioned unit in one of the newer buildings. We get to freeze instead because AC in prison is usually run at max, perhaps to keep inmates too cold to think about being angry or violent. We get AC even in the middle of winter. We use blankets and wear jackets and sweatshirts in the unit even in summer.
On my way into the chow hall I see Wacky Tranny Amy rushing out. She has her hair in cornrows. She’s talking and laughing to herself. She speeds off. Talk about motion through time! Maybe her mental escape plan is just being him/herself, whatever that is.
In the chow hall, as I eat surrounded by strangers, I ponder what lessons prison has taught me. After all, most judges and prosecutors believe that sending people to prison is supposed to teach them some kind of “lesson.” What I’ve learned is that life is ultimately absurd. That laws are purely arbitrary. That justice is a mirage. Society will find some way to punish people for various reasons. It’s in the human DNA. Punish or be punished. Rule or submit. We are nothing but apes ultimately, intelligent apes evolved slightly beyond our hominid cousins and simian ancestors. One day in the not too distant future I will leave here and return to a world where almost everything will be made nearly impossible for me. I have nothing to look forward to and less to look back at. Once an inmate always an inmate. That’s the primary lesson we, those of us locked up here, come away with. It’s a lesson impossible to forget. Even on this beautiful September morning.
To be continued…
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