By Eduardo Ramirez
In the seventh grade, I had the biggest crush on Brenda Castillo. Her nickname was Bunny – on account of her chubby cheeks, and not because she had sideburns made up of soft, down-like baby hair. I figured she was sweet on me too, as her friends would tease her when I’d come around and call me her boyfriend in that sing-songy kind of way that was meant to embarrass her. Thinking about it now, maybe it was mockery but I was the butt of the joke. Maybe if I didn’t have little cartoon hearts swirling about I would have noticed. Who knows? In the end, it didn’t matter ’cause as soon as I found out that Brenda’s dad was the school janitor, she might as well have been a wet mop for all I cared. In my mind, tiny and uninformed as it was, being a janitor was the worst; somewhere between garbage man and lunch lady. A man was supposed to have a real job, like a mechanic or a construction worker. Even a factory floor grunt, standing at an assembly line and inserting prong A into slot B, was more deserving of respect than a janitor, whose job it was to sweep away someone else’s mess or to unclog someone else’s toilet. Ending up as a janitor was the result of being uneducated, and being uneducated meant poor. And who wants to be with a poor person? So I brushed Brenda off. I put aside the dank hallways of Roberto Clemente Middle School and wandered onward blissfully through a life of ignorance. It’s not like I was so high and mighty. I doubt anyone in my family has ever seen a silver spoon, let alone been born with one. The peak of my family’s financial success is that my godfather briefly owned a beer distributor – which ultimately went bust. My father logged a single semester at St Joe’s before finding work as an investigator. My mother – who never graduated high school – never made more than twenty grand a year. If I ever thought I was hot shit, it was based on nothing but bullshit. The past quarter century, though, has cooled me off with one reality check after another.
Reality: that’s sort of the hallmark of prison. At first I didn’t understand why men, who had been stripped of so much, would voluntarily give up their dignity and walk around with a rag, wiping away this smudge and dabbing at that stain. Who the f@#! were they keeping the place clean for!?! There was a Major, a statuesque blonde with the look and build of Bridget Nielsen in Rocky IV, who kept impeccably sharp pleats in her trousers and her boots polished to a high gloss. She expected all housing units to reflect the same shine. When she came around, grown men, killers and hardcore gunslingers, lowered their voices and watched with bated breath as she ran a gloved finger over the railings. If her fingertip came away with the slightest discoloration, sure as a standing headcount, a demoralized block worker would appear, rags in tow. This was only an indicator of what was to come.
My first job when I arrived at SCI Huntingdon was on a sanitation crew. Immediately, the word “sanitation” had me scrambling to figure a way out of that detail. An oldhead told me that it wasn’t so bad, as we had to be at the site three times a day, generally after meals, to scrub the main corridor. I thought he was broken and I couldn’t imagine myself so defeated. I pushed a deck brush down the tiled hall while the guy behind me followed with a squeegee. Moving too slowly meant getting splashed with dirty water and walking around damp and grimy. Given that laundry was done once a week, and we could only take a shower once a day, it wasn’t long before my trousers started to smell like mildew… as did I. I was paid nineteen cents an hour over a twenty hour workweek. At the end of the month I had about $19.00 credited to my account, which was enough to buy a tube of toothpaste, four bars of soap, thirty packs of ramen, and some smokes. It was a thankless existence. But what could I expect: is the hand that throws the stone ever thankful for the sinner at whom the stone is cast?
What I learned quickly was that there was very little thanks to be earned from the screws that turned the prison gates; and very few jobs paid much more than sanitation. In reality, every job felt like slave labor; since the Thirteenth Amendment okayed involuntary servitude. So most money was made in an off-the-book sort of way – and not all of it criminal. There are plenty of legit ways to earn a couple extra boxes of Little Debbie’s every week. I’ve known guys who will wash clothes – but not underwear; it’s disrespectful. A few t-shirts, some socks, a pair of sweat shorts, a towel – at five dollars a load. The Maytag can be one of the best paying side hustles that won’t end up in an indictment. Same goes for the guys who clean rooms – as long as they’re not the site of a natural disaster. These guys are earning a buck, and at the same time keeping themselves busy with something other than the gossipy birds that squawk around the yard all day long. If an artist’s prices are fair, he can have a steady clientele of guys paying a commission for a portrait of the wife and kids. Handmade crafts – using found materials – get turned into greeting cards, picture frames, and sculptures, which could easily be sold on eBay. I met a guy named Menace, a sweetheart, who, despite the off-putting moniker, printed out love letters, “best” awards, and inspirational quotes found on a Precious Moments plaque. He’d decorate the paper with glitter made from shaving off the foil from the back of a plastic mirror, and he’d make paste from watered down cream of wheat. A lot of what he did was tradecraft, secrets passed down from one generation of cons to another; innovations borne out of necessity. If he could rig a pop-up card using the inmate handbook and some popsicle sticks, imagine what the guy could do with a gift card at Hobby Lobby. This, of course, applies if money is the goal. And in prison, money is often the goal – without any real limitations applying.
However, sometimes the cause is a simple and modest one; which might explain the relative lack of familiarity with the more noble work of the oft considered ignoble. A self-taught tailor will never go out of business, because for good reason the old timers like for their clothes to serve the sentence with them. Some dinosaurs are walking around with pants that were issued during the Nixon administration. They might be threadbare in some places and patched up in others, but I guess they figure if a pair of pants can be kept in working condition for so long, then so can they. Some prisoners think of themselves as survivors in survivor’s garb. Gained a few pounds? The tailor can add a few inches of the polycotton blend along the inseam, let out the waist and then sew in elastic, so that the pants can grow over time. Multipurpose pockets can be sewn in. Deep-V neck tees – for the musclebound to flex in – are hand cut. A zip-up spring jacket can be modeled after the latest fashion magazine. Even fitted caps can be made from scratch. And the difference between factory and painstakingly done with a needle and thread can be so subtle that the clothing room supervisor will struggle to tell which is which. These guys thought of themselves as being in the service industry: a necessary function of labor – not just to put money on their books, but striving to put a smile on someone’s face. There’s a sense of pride, although not always consciously felt or outwardly expressed, in knowing that what they do paints a different picture of themselves – often regardless of what brought them to prison in the first place; and they imagine what visitors will say when they see their people not so shabbily dressed. A stylist may go out of style, but they always have the ability to get back in. Across the miles and over the distance, many find the purpose they’ve been looking for. I guess it’s true what they say: if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
I met Augusto “Junior” Gonzalez in the shoe shop. The State-issue was a bland soft leather saddle shoe. Junior pulled me to the side and offered to hook me up with some alterations: a padded collar, a cleated outer-sole. At first I was hesitant ’cause, in prison, you ain’t supposed to accept gifts from someone you don’t know. Everyone knows that! But as I got to know him, I found out he had a simple philosophy: pay it forward. Kindness is like the ocean’s tide: going out to sea to carry ships afar; before returning home again. My tide would carry me to Pittsburgh, where I found a level of self-awareness that was surprising. There’s something true to the ethic of works by hand having a value that the worker is alienated from in mass production. A builder wants to build – shelter, for himself and perhaps others; an electrician wants to brave the zap and buzz of closed circuits in order to harness power; the welder is a modern day Hephaestus – minus the anvil and hammer. So, while the trades were in high demand, admission was low; reserved for the crafticians who would tune out the noise on the block just to turn a few more pages in a text book; they had to measure twice so as to only cut once, scheme the most efficient route for a current, or weld a seam that will hold long after they are gone. For them, they were making an investment in the bluest chip of all: themselves. Once in a blue moon they might come out to play a game of chess, or to take a few laps around the track – but that’s just to burn off steam, or to recharge after month-long marathons of waking up at the crack of dawn to rip and cut lumber; test, insulate, and install miles of wiring; sanding and soldering. But their minds stayed focused, so, that when the sawdust cleared and the lights went on, they would be receiving the full benefits of employment: a retirement plan, vacation time, and to be seen by a legit doctor rather than visit the overbooked urgent care at a neighborhood clinic.
One guy, Gary Rowlett, told me he wanted a job as an underwater welder on an oil rig at sea. He was a funny looking guy, with a big Buddha belly. He kept a wispy Fu Manchu mustache and he constantly sucked his teeth, as if he was always in need of a toothpick. Some thought he was an oddball. I mean, he wore brown boots with white laces – showing them off by rolling up the cuffs of his pants. I found out he did it for comical effect. For over two decades, he endured the sparks and singed flesh so that his scars would be like a roadmap, away from this place and in the direction of a freedom that he was sure was his destiny. Not everyone wants to be a doctor or a lawyer… And that’s okay. As in the freeworld, in prison there is also a maturing process that happens throughout the years. I believe most social scientists would agree that a lot depends on socialization. It’s not so much birds of a similar feather flocking together, but the influence guiding them. When the young guys come into prison and all they see are their peers smoking and joking, that looks like the least stress. The very word “work” evokes tiredness. It’s hard work being an adult. It was at my next stop – the storied Graterford State Prison – that my worldview – from a very limited perch – would expand. It was there that I found a world of would-be politicos reading The Prince and The Art Of War; walking the halls with a textbook under their arm; meeting in the library, or the auditorium, or at a table in the chowhall to discuss the latest legislative bill proposed. They created committees: The End Violence Project, The Public Safety Initiative, The Education Over Incarceration Scholarship – crowd-sourced and funded by the only Latinx prison-resident organization in the state and dedicated to providing supplies to underfunded schools, as well as paying toward tuition for first-time college students. Who did these guys think they were? What convinced them to be so? I would soon find out.
As long as you believe you are doing the right thing, no one can make you feel wrong. This is the engine of empowerment. Carl Cooper could have played in the Majors – if not for the pull of gravity coming from the black hole of poverty and panic. But, as with most people in prison trying to distance themselves from the past, the present is built on the ruins of history. His jaw was permanently set off kilter due to too many right hooks in the boxing ring. But his mind was still sharp. He told me that we never had to sell drugs, that the real hustle was right before our eyes the whole time: community organizing. All we ever wanted was a place of our own, he said; and the community takes care of those who fight on their behalf. He made it sound so simple. As if showing love earned it in return. I picked up a few books myself: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Book of Five Rings; I read the poetry of Espada and Agüeros. Thanks to a joke told by Greg Giraldo (RIP), in which he compares shoddy, modern-day letter writing to the style of the often undereducated Civil War soldier writing from the battlefield, I became hyper-conscious of my output. Who would read this in fifty, a hundred years, and what would they think of me and my era? I took on the agenda of others – bringing in cultural and cognitive therapy workshops. I developed a few passion projects of my own: broadening the student body and assisting in facilitator training. I even adopted my own philosophy: as I hope others will help me be successful, I should help others to succeed. It’s tiresome work and sometimes disheartening when dealing with all the red tape. Sometimes it feels like there’s a counter-agenda to hinder progress. There are still hardheaded hard rocks on the block, who haven’t yet had their come-to-Jesus-moment. There are still forces employed by the DOC that don’t believe in change. Most recently, Mother Nature offered her own challenge to the will of the people.
On March 13, 2020, the DOC suspended normal operations and went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Visitors were prohibited from entering the facilities and all work details were indefinitely shutdown. All facilities underwent a deep clean – but only a handful of staff did the grunt work. The great majority of the maintenance work fell to the very people whose health was at risk: the residents. Day and night, guys had plastic bags wrapped around their boots as they mopped and re-mopped and trice-mopped. Cloth masks were made in the correctional industries plant and passed out among the population; in a puddle of their own sweat and breathing hard through the restrictive masks, guys scrubbed shower stalls, wiped down telephones and email stations, and passed out antibacterial soap. Most would be surprised at the level of solidarity as the chatter spread from one end of the block to the other: check on so and so, make sure he alright; I’ll call his peoples if he needs. There was a genuine health concern, so it came down to whoever could should take care of whatever he could. When things got tense after a week-long total lockdown without showers or access to the phones, some guys wanted to refuse the temperature checks as a protest – which could have resulted in security coming in and interfering with the medical staff’s attempts to check on the more vulnerable guys. But wiser heads prevailed, as the agreement was settled that for the sake of our older brothers we would resist the panic and do what was right for them. Even the resident organizations were quick to step in and say: for the time being, we’ll donate what we can. And we did: ice cream to keep guys calm; hoagies for Super Bowl; a host of volunteers coordinating with our families. In the end, we did what we could. We wish we could’ve done more, but we lost too many men whose stories will largely remain behind these walls.
As the decades pass, I watch people grow old. Not many have resigned into feeble, drooling vegetables, but I register an undertone of resignation in their speech; a pause in their step. It creeps up on them. Now, I find myself wondering how long before I take their place. One oldhead, Bruce Norris, spent more than forty years here. After all that time, not a bad word could be said about the man. Zero misconducts, college graduate, peer leader – more accomplished than most on the street. In a state where mercy is in short supply, Mr. Bruce was among a small group of lifers under consideration for a commuted sentence from a lifetime in prison, to spending their remaining years under state supervision (pending they meet all requirements for parole). For Mr Bruce, all he had to do was provide an acceptable home plan. While in the process, the cloud of a worldwide pandemic descended and all processes were slowed down to a grinding halt. It’s okay, Mr Bruce thought, I’m on my way. Even after a year of waiting, Bruce didn’t lose hope. Then, one day, Mr Bruce started to experience symptoms consistent with the Coronavirus and he was escorted to the hospital. A week after, he passed away; the remaining group of commuttees were released. I think Alanis Morissette would’ve called this “ironic”; although, technically, it’s not. It is, however, tragic.
It has taken me a lifetime to recognize that all contributions matter; even for those who work the most thankless jobs. In a time of global healing, when we honor the good names of so many, there is a hidden American injury in which we forget the names of too many. The honor belonging to men such as Roy Staten, Felix Feliverty, and Rudolph Sutton, goes quietly unacknowledged – the Coronavirus might’ve maxed their sentences out, but their lives’ works were punctuated by all the good that a person can hope to achieve… Even if it’s only to atone for the work from a previous life. Rest in peace, brothers; where it matters, you will be honored.
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