“Home ain’t always about a place….Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it heats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived….it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”
Richie, an inmate, talking about what home is and isn’t; From Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Three latino, four black, and six white men wearing bright yellow oversized jumpsuits sat shackled and cuffed inside a giant cell on wheels, aka the Bluebird Special, as it pulled into a nondescript concrete complex in a forgotten corner of Illinois. I smelled my own fear, tasted my own desperation. The black officer stood up at the front of the bus. His muscles had muscles and his tortoise shell eye glasses were hanging on to his face for dear life. His voice boomed and echoed across the silent bus, “Welcome Home.”
Home? I thought and shook my head. Could this place ever be “home,” I wondered, as a single bead of frozen fear sweat trickled down the side of my chest? No, I decided, this would never be my home. When I thought of home I didn’t think about a specific place, instead I considered home the place where the people I loved and who loved me lived, a safe place; and looking out the barred window of my bus to the double fences, barbed wire, and towers with officers holding shotguns out of a gun ports was the opposite of safe (even as I’m sure the prison administration told themselves our safety was their first priority). Sitting on that bus entering my new life I had never felt less safe. Less loved. This cold dark place is where love goes to die, but I was naïve and spoiled by my soft American upbringing. I had yet to learn about the power of the dark magic that lived within these walls; magic capable of bending even the strongest minds.
To be fair, I hadn’t always been this picky about my home. I’d called plenty of places home: a three flat on the Southside of Chicago, modern ranch in the burbs, Army barracks in dusty deserts, college dorms down state, beer littered fraternity houses, studios and one bedrooms from NYC to LA, and even an ’86 beige Nissan Sentra wagon for an Orlando summer. But nothing can prepare one for living in a nine by twelve concrete and iron crypt with a steel toilet/sink combo in the corner and rusted brown bunk bed against one wall. A place where the screams wake you every night only to realize they were your own. But, what did I expect, right?
Prison is supposed to suck. Prison cells aren’t built to be nice or comfortable. No cell I have ever lived in has been what could objectively be called good. Comfortable bed? You wish. Clean? Stop it. Functional plumbing? Never. Decent sized for two grown men to occupy? Well, let me tell you, my last cell was so small I had to step out into the hallway just to change my mind. But, most of life in prison isn’t about the place (our brains find a way to adapt to even the most extreme circumstances), it’s about the people. But I digress.
Back on the bus.
This mixed security compound could easily be mistaken for a small community college and in a past life it was or so my seatmate, P-nut (cause he’s little, I suppose), told me. P-nut had a clean shaven head, greying goatee, and teardrop tattoos under both eyes—signs he had both lost and taken lives. He knew Dixon Correctional Center. He’d done a nickel here back in the aughts.
“Yeah, this place is sweet.” He explained, “They got everything, basketball courts, baseball, soccer, and football fields. They even got volleyball, tennis, and bocce!” He was way too excited about prison for my taste. You would think we were entering a resort or something, but I played along.
“Okay, but how often do we get to go out there?” I asked. See, in County (Jail, that is) they had a concrete slab for a Yard, but we were only allowed out once a month, if that.
“We get Yard and Gym for an hour every day. In the Summer, we get an extra Night Yard. In the Gym, they have ping pong and foosball. They even used to have a pool here, but some asshole drowned so that was it for the pool.” He pointed out buildings as we passed them. “That’s the gym. Healthcare. Industry.”
“Is that the laundry building?” I asked.
“Where? What the…Are you for real? What is this your first bit? That’s the Commissary building. Those laundry bags are full of food and other stuff we can buy once a month.” He explained.
“In County they told me I could get a TV.”
“Sure, but they cost almost three hundo and are no-brand pieces of shit. Dixon’s cable is decent, if it’s still the same.” He said with a look on his face like he had traveled back in time and was seeing something beyond time and space. “Listen, don’t ask anybody else any stupid ass questions like that. If you need something ask me.” The look on my face must have spoken volumes because he continued, “Don’t worry man, not everyone in here is a piece of shit. You gotta trust someone.”
It seemed to me then and now that for P-nut prison could be home. For him, it was about small conveniences. Feeling content. Maybe he didn’t need a place of love to feel at home. And if he didn’t, maybe I didn’t.
P-nut pulled a few moves, the man knew how to finesse, and we ended up as cellmates. He was originally from El Salvador,2 but came to the US when he was in his teens after six months in jail for a bad tattoo.3 He loved to remind me how good I had it compared to what he’d endured both in El Salvador and here. He’d given the state twenty years on the “installment plan.” Five here, three there until he couldn’t remember a time he’d been able to string more than a couple years on the outside. It was late summer and the heat was pushing on us from all sides when our toilet went on the fritz yet again.
“God damn, our toilet won’t flush again.” I complained.
“In El Salvador,” he began, I rolled my eyes and thought, aw shit, here we go again, “we don’t have toilets in prison we have buckets. One bucket for every six guys. We don’t have beds either we have hammocks stacked six high. You know how much it sucks to be the guy on the top hammock and you have to take a piss or shit in the middle of the night? You’re sitting on your bucket hoping it’s not so full you can feel other turds touching your ass. You’re so close to the hammocks you can feel them breathing.”
“Yeah, I know, El Salvador sucks, but this is America.” I retorted on my high horse.
“Man, this ain’t that America. This is the shadows.” He got silent for a second before continuing, “You know what you need? You need to learn to be happy like that dog you always talk about and be happy in the moment.” He smiled and continued, “You know, woof, woof.”
Did he say be a dog? Okay, yes, my old mutt Buddy would have been content here. He definitely would have loved the giant Yard—plenty of room to run, squirrels to chase. But I’m not a dog and no amount of thinking I’m a dog is going to make me one. All I’m thinking about is the sight of this gnarly abnormally long piece of crap floating in the toilet and wondering how long before the heat transforms the stench into more El Salvador prison4 stories.
P-nut didn’t talk about growing up in El Salvador much, but I could tell from the edges of his stories that it was a tough life. So tough in fact he and all eight members of his family including a newborn sister and elderly grandmother made the dangerous exhausting trek to America rather than spend one more day in their home. Maybe their alternative was far worse than hot cells and cold meals. Maybe some have never known the safety and security of the kind of home I talked about. I hate to admit it, but P-nut made me realize how much I took for granted my secure shelter, running clean water, indoor plumbing, heat, three square-ish meals a day—luxuries almost a quarter of the world does not share. I’m sure those folks aren’t wrestling with my mundane concerns when they’re fighting just to stay alive. Still…freedom is no small thing or is even that relative?
Would I trade my incarcerated life for a free life of certain destitution? Depends on the season if I’m being honest. See, with all my bitching, a part of me still knew I had it pretty good. I wasn’t in one of those El Salvador prisons P-nut was always going on about with rats as big as Chihuahuas. The Shawshank Sisters weren’t waiting to take my ass in the shower. And somewhere along the way I had made a few friends. I digressed again.
Fake it till you make it, I told myself. An old trick I used from my Army days. I acted as I imagined an inmate would. I pretended to be on a movie set. I was performing, maintaining a persona. The scenes like script. My surroundings the set. My fellow inmates and guards my fellow actors. The director and cameras hidden, but I performed as if my life depended on it—it many ways it did. That’s how I started playing Scrabble with Liam, Lucky, and Smitty every afternoon in the Dayroom—hours-long shit-talking fests that were less about winning and more about getting someone to challenge a word. Corners and I strutted the Yard as the two man beach volleyball champions. Gambino, Deadpool, and I made huge Nacho meals every Sunday for the Bears games. I worked eight hours a day as a clerk at the prison eye lab with Sham, Polock, Bolo, and Briscoe, equal parts hard work and hard laughter. And, of course, I had my celly, P-nut, who proved more than once how deep his loyalty ran. He literally gave me the shirt off his own back and when I hit a low so deep I thought I might not be able to pull myself out he organized a rotating group of guys to keep an eye on me. Smitty told me bad dad jokes from some book he found until I laughed—not from the jokes so much as his overacting. Bolo covered for me at work. Deadpool still brought me Nachos even when I didn’t have the money for my share. And like that the years slipped by.
Prison life sucks. Yes, duh. But there’s also tiny moments, shared laughs and meals and unexpected kindness. Anyone who tells you prison is all bad one hundred percent of the time is lying to you or worse, lying to themselves. The human spirit finds the light in others even in the darkest deepest wells. We make our home where we can because we must. I did it again, it’s official, I’m a digresser.
P-nut and I sate at the Chow Hall finishing our lunch school pizza alongside a couple on-the-new guys still wearing their yellow jumpsuits. P-nut turned to me and asked, “You ready to go celly?”
“Naw, go ahead, I gotta go on a pass. I’ll see you back at home.” I told him.
One of the fresh fish jumped in, “That’s NOT your home. That’s the State’s cell. You’re institutionalized.”
I calmly got up, picked up my lunch tray, and looked him squarely in the eyes, “Woof, woof!” P-nut quickly joined in, “Yeah, woof, woof!” He was cracking up. I’m certain these new guys thought we had cracked, but see they hadn’t learned: you can be home even while waiting to get home.
- Nuevo Cuscatlan, a sleepy town of 8K people on the outskirts of the capital.
- P-nut had a tattoo that resembled one worn by the gang Barrio 18. (Interestingly, Barrio 18 and MS-13 are American imports. They formed in LA by civil war refugees in the 80s that were deported back to El Salvador.) He was caught up during a raid in his town where anyone suspected of gang affiliation was arrested. The raids were part of a government crackdown called “Mano Dura” where due process was suspended and mass prisons were built. Now, 1 in 57 men in El Salvador have been incarcerated—the highest in the world—3x higher than the US.
- El Salvador’s largest prison hold 40K inmates (think about that, Fast Mo’ can hold a max of 1,452). Due to the violence, inmates are allowed only to wear boxers when they leave their cells and are frog walked wherever they go (frog-walking is exactly what it sounds like.) No wonder P-nut didn’t mind Dixon prison.
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