Shakedown

If coming events truly cast their shadows before them, then the 2000+ inmates of _______ State Prison should have sensed a looming air of oppression upon awakening this fateful morning. Over on H-B Block, located at the extreme eastern side of the northern Pennsylvania medium-security prison, Miquel “Mikey” Alou has overslept – his cellie Ferdando “Freddy” Suarez, too – and both are rudely jolted awake by the rap-a-tat-tat pecking of the morning shift C.O.’s clipboard upon the window of their cell door.

“Bueno diaz, dipshits! On your fucking feet for count!” C.O. Schiefley shouts, moving along to the next cell before the men can unmummify themselves from their bedding.

“Arriba, bunkie!” Freddy urges, leaping down from his upper bunk. ”We better be on our feet before the sarge comes by. The prick’s liable to write us up.”

But Sergeant Pyle must have woken up with his shorts in a bind, because even though both of the Puerto Rican cellies are standing by the door when he passes by, he hammers on their door anyway, as he pounds his way around the block, cursing and insulting ”random” inmates, all of whom just ”happen” to be black or Hispanic, like Afro-American cellies Jamal and Luther, two lifers with nothing to lose but their tempers, which go missing long before the count concludes. Eager to remedy all insults – past, present, and future – they burst from their cell as soon as it opens for morning chow, drag officers Schiefley and Pyle from behind the control desk, and proceed to whale the living shit out of both.

After the cavalry thunders to the rescue, and Jamal and Luther are manhandled away to their dismal fate, a prison-wide lockdown is imposed. Then, forty-eight hours later, just after the lockdown is lifted, lifer Raul Sanchez, who has woken up on the wrong side of his life, decides to beat the stuffing out of the first C.O. he encounters on his long outside walk to med line. Afterwards, as the bloodied man lies semi-conscious in the grass, just for the “what’s justice for the goose, is revenge for the gander” sheer hell of it, Raul sprays his helpless victim with his own canister of bear repellant.

A hundred yards away, from his second-floor, corner cell window, lifer Sean O’Neal watches the fallout of the attack, repelled by the senselessness of it all. Unsurprisingly, after the C.O. is taken to the infirmary and the breached beehive excitement has simmered down to a low boil, yet another lockdown is announced.

We’re in for it now, Sean thinks. The last time that multiple inmate-upon-staff assaults occurred, the honchos-that-are summoned the “shock troops” to teach everyone – the innocent as well as the guilty – a lesson in civility and unquestioned obedience.

Sean turns from the window, picks up a novel, and settles in for the duration, a tedious interval that won’t end until every cell has been thoroughly ransacked, its unruly inhabitants put to the ”question,” and may God have mercy on those without an acceptable reply.

The ”shock troops,” aka ”The Special Search Team,” is a select group of mostly white volunteer correctional officers who are summoned during times of institutional unrest to reinstall order, drum into the inmates’ minds the need of, and respect for, authority, while conscientiously searching each individual’s ”haystack” for forbidden needles, jugs of home brew, extra bedding, and other dangerous items. Accompanied by drug-sniffing dogs, the gung-ho team members swagger noisily from block to block, cell to cell, determined to uproot any incipient shoots of sedition, utilizing the occasion to deliver arbitrary doses of “off the record” vigilante “justice.” Peeved that a bunch of ivory tower liberal judges have proscribed whipping posts and sweat boxes, a few of the more rigorous men welcome these searches as an opportunity to rectify what they consider overly lenient, wet-noodle slaps of punishment. Men who routinely call in sick when suffering bad hangovers, if permitted, would cheerfully cane any miscreant caught with a pint of rotgut. Given that each of the three recent assailants were either black or Hispanic, an observer hardly needed the wisdom of Minerva to predict which prisoners were most likely to receive a crash course in interracial rapport.

The morning after the second assault, just after breakfast, Sean sees through his cell window a throng of at least thirty black-clad, white-skinned, hot-to­trot Special Search Team members strutting down the outside walk. They are followed by a few dozen regular C.O.s, a sizeable contingent of maintenance workers, all overseen by a sprinkling of “white-shirt” lieutenants, captains, and one pompous major. Prancing down the walk, fairly dancing with vengeful anticipation under the unclouded sun of a perfect summer morning, came this motley crew, some bearing the tools of their trade: extra handcuffs, a portable x-ray scanner, video cameras, discretely concealed first-aid kits, and last, but not unleashed, a half-dozen tail-wagging, tongue-panting, drug-detecting dogs. Plainly enough, a major search is imminent. Fifteen years of “down” time has taught Sean the routine, and he begins to take down from the wall above his desk the family photographs, a hand-drawn calendar, a football schedule, and a list of his three daughters and seven grandchildren’s birthdays. Then he hides two baggies half-filled with extra salt and pepper packets inside a footlocker jam-packed with typed manuscripts of his literary work, plus reams upon reams of legal papers. He glances up at the checkerboard-holed heating vent grille, whose either too­hot or too-cold airflow has been blocked off by 2×2″ cardboard squares, realizes that he ought to remove them. But after consulting his cranky knees, which say, ”to hell with it,” he decides to let the young lions rip ’em out, if so disposed. Actually, it’s a moot issue, for both Sean and his tormentors know that busy beaver he will just re-dam the flow at shakedown’s end.

In anticipation of the requisite body search, Sean strips to just his jockey shorts, tee shirt, and shower shoes. Then he sits at his desk and opens his 500-puzzle Sunday New York Times crossword omnibus. 20 ACROSS: What one does during a hurricane. ANSWER: Hunker down. (And kiss your ass goodbye, Sean sardonically notes, thinking of the approaching storm.)

Although he has never ridden out even a lightweight Category 1 hurricane, so far he has survived plenty of prison shit storms by depending upon his ethnicity and his non-threatening, white-haired benignity to shield him from most acts of petty retribution.

Sean has grown up with the same sort of blue-collar men who, lured by good pay, extravagant benefits, and the promise of an early retirement with a generous pension, became prison guards. Most are decent men, fair and honest and loyal to their friends, but even the best of them, through constant interaction with society’s worst, sometimes lapse into cynicism. A few devolve into haters, or gradually mutate into $25-an-hour tyrants. These disaffected, self-appointed instruments of off-the-record retribution remind Sean of the high school bullies he had always loathed, and occasionally dethroned with a few righteous punches. And now, within the hour, their State-sanctioned, grown-up brethren were about to descend, vengeance in mind, upon a hundred-and-thirty-odd shackled prisoners, a high percentage of whom are black or Hispanic.

Downstairs in Cell 19, Mikey and Freddy have just snuggled under their blankets, only to be jolted erect by the clamorous entrance of the Special Search Team. “Oh, madre!” Mikey exclaims. ”We’re in for it now, my friend!”

Throughout the block, panicked inmates try to hide the technically forbidden, but usually ignored “luxuries” that mitigate their bleak existence: extra “modesty” sheets to screen toilet use; the one-too-many throw rugs over the two-per-man limit; the makeshift clotheslines made from dissected rugs instead of the more expensive, but legally acquired shoelaces; and any pin-up photos that reveal a wee crescent of nipple or wisp of pubic hair. Although it is impossible to successfully hide anything in a concrete floored and walled, 7½x14′ cell, few guards are willing to dirty their knees in order to peer into the dust bunny realm beneath the bottom bunks. Besides, every fiber of their authoritative being prevents them from kneeling before their subjects. And, really, who the hell could guess what sort of mutant lifeform may lurk in that shadowy, spider-infested void?

As Freddy folded up their verboten modesty sheet, and stashed it in his underwear box, Mikey coiled up their two extra clotheslines and stuffed them inside the toes of his never-worn, dust-encrusted, State-issued work boots, which he then shoved into the nethermost corner beneath his bunk. No guard had ever found them before, but they hadn’t been members of the super-zealous Special Search Team, who would burn down a barn to rid it of mice.

The first-shift C.O. passes by, lacing plastic trash bags in every other cell door handle. In the far corner of the dayroom, two unfamiliar C.O.s are setting up and testing the x-ray machine. All about the dayroom, the Special Search Team members pace to and fro, smacking fists into palms and trying on threatening sneers. The drug-detecting dogs strain against their leashes, whining with Pavlovian anticipation; the sound of their clicking toenails heightens the mounting tension. An order to strip to one’s underwear and shower shoes thunders from a loudspeaker, and just that quickly, the roust is on!

Half the officers rush upstairs; the remainder work the bottom. Five cells on each tier are searched at once; two officers search each cell. After the inmates lug their mattresses through the x-ray scanner, they strip – one at a time – for the bare-ass inspection. While one cellie waits outside the cell, the other undergoes the demeaning ritual: “Off with your clothes! Hand them over, quick! Mouth open, lift your tongue! Raise your arms! Bow your head and run your fingers through your hair! Okay, lift your dick and balls! Turn around, show me your soles! Bend over, spread those cheeks! All right, put your clothes back on! Time for the cuffs!”

Each brusque order is the verbal equivalent of a karate chop to the neck of one’s self-esteem, a redundant reminder of just who the fuck is in charge. Finally, reclothed and handcuffed, the man is shooed from his cell and stood face against the wall, while his cellie endures the same routine. After he is processed, lined-up next to his bunkie, a dog is unleashed into the cell, while another leashed dog sniffs the crotch and rear of each man. These humiliations are not rendered in private; dozens of guards, maintenance workers – male and female – and their white-shirted superiors mill here and there, trying to look as busily businesslike as possible, without, of course, noticing the indignities and worse being perpetuated by the Special Search Team goons, who are delivering selective retaliation for the trio of inmate-upon-staff assaults that initiated this whole affair.

Mikey and Freddy wait stoically for their cell door to open; try to guess which duo will do the “honors,” upend their world. With mounting anxiety, they listen to the random curses, the occasional scream, the frantic barking, worry that a trace of drug residue left behind by a former tenant will send them to the hole.

Having scoured the cell ceiling to floor, walls to toilet upon moving in, Mikey doesn’t sweat the dogs so much, but worries that his and Freddy’s surnames will earn them a dose of ethnic payback. Although Hispanics are considered Caucasians, he doubts if the Special Search Team will appreciate that fact. All that they know or care about, is that three of their “own” were stomped, sprayed, and shamed by a pair of wise-ass coon muthafuckers and a wetback spic son-of-a-puta, and it is now their duty to see that every dusky-skinned hombre and dreadlocked black bro pays the goddamned piper with the only currency they possess: the skin of their collective asses, with a dash of blood and destroyed pride thrown in.

Surprisingly, the first casualty is a skinny, gangsta-wannabe, white boy, who foolishly answers a question with a wisecrack. His faux pas is repaid with a bloody snout and a blackened eye. And, WHAM!, just that quickly, the leitmotif of the shakedown is introduced.

Watching from across the room, Mikey is aghast. “Oh, madre,” he moans. “If they just hammered one of their own, what’s in store for us?”

Freddy is silent. He knows, and knows that Mikey knows, but doesn’t want to out and out say that they can expect the worst. And when their time under the microscope finally comes, they are not disappointed.

The shakedown enters its second hour; less than half of the cells have been searched. Even so, the dayroom floor is strewn with contraband extra sheets and blankets, hoarded rolls of toilet paper, overdue library books, snowdrifts of crumpled paper, the odds and ends of someone’s ruined possessions, the contents of trash cans overturned by overly suspicious guards looking for something, anything, that might earn them a few brownie points with their superiors. Ragged lines of frightened men slouch along the walls, each praying that their family photos and letters will survive the holocaust intact. An excited dog begins to bark madly, the sound of its fury signifies nothing, merely agitates its fellows, and is finally led outside by its keeper.

The two men who draw Mikey and Freddy’s cell outweigh both by at least fifty pounds, and are almost a foot taller than either. After the usual preliminaries, and the two cellies are ordered before the wall, the lead searcher expresses his disdain of Mikey’s halfway-down-his-back black hair.

“Why do you want to look like a ten-year-old girl, pussy? You a maricon, asshole?” he taunts.

Mikey spurns the bait, has his forehead slammed into the wall in reprisal. 

“You hard of hearing, dick wipe? Answer the question, muchacho!”

Mikey cannot speak; his head is buzzing and his legs are rubbery. Freddy notes Mikey’s unsteadiness, and answers for him: “No, he’s no faggot. Are you?” 

Just as the outraged man grasps Freddy’s throat, a lieutenant tells him to cool it, pointing to the overhead security camera. “Take it down a notch, pal,” he advises. “The eye-in-the-sky might be open.”

The frustrated man releases his grip with a curse. “Aw, you fuckin’ hard­headed Mexies ain’t worth dirtyin’ my hands. Besides, my twelve-year-old daughter could whip both your skinny asses with one hand.” Upon delivery of the insult, he storms into the cell, hell-bent on revenge. When he spots the contents of both wall lockers dumped in the center of the floor, he stomps into crumbs the bags of Ramen noodles, potato chips, pretzels, and nachos, chuckling evilly.

“These Antifa bastards should’ve drowned in the Rio Grande,” his partner observes, as he spills a folder of Freddy’s legal papers across the floor.

Mikey is the naturalized son of a legal immigrant, doesn’t know squat about the Antifa movement, whose members are mostly white anarcho-Communist agitators anyway. He isn’t interested in politics, only wants the chance to make a decent life for himself and his girlfriend when he goes home. But now, he’s seeing double – maybe triple – who can tell? – and is about to collapse.

“I gotta sit down, man, see a doctor,” he whispers to Freddy. “I think that asshole scrambled up my brains.”

Just as he’s ready to drop, he’s ordered into his cell and uncuffed. Immediately, he flops onto his bare mattress, moaning softly.

”What’s wrong, little girl? Your fuckin’ noggin hurtin’ you? That’ll teach you dirty beaners to keep your hands off your betters. Spread the word, pecker breath – if we gotta come back, you’ll learn the meanin’ of pain,” his tormentor threatens. Then he’s gone, off to harass another pair of victims in another cell.

It takes fifteen minutes of shouting – the cell’s emergency buzzer is ignored – to catch a white-shirt’s attention. As he listens without expression to Freddy’s account of Mikey’s assault, and considers Mikey’s need to see a doctor, Mikey manages to sit up to plead for prompt assistance, citing his piercing headache and severe dizziness. The lieutenant jots a few words in a notebook, promises relief once the search is over, then strides away, stepping nimbly over the jettisoned contraband strewn across the dayroom floor, the harmless little things that make inmates’ difficult lives a tiny bit better.

An hour later, the dogs are led away; the tumult ends. Once again, the buzzer is ignored, forcing Freddy to kick on his cell door until the visibly perturbed day-shift C.O. ambles over.

“Look, man,” Freddy pleads, “we ain’t looking to cause trouble, but my cellie needs a doctor. He thinks he has a concussion.”

The C.O. gives him the hairy eyeball, advises Mikey to “take a few Advils, take a nap. If you still feel bad tomorrow morning, I’ll send you up to Medical.”

But four ibuprofens prove useless, and Mikey can’t sleep, lies inertly on his bunk, while Freddy sorts out their intermingled belongings.

”Wait till the second-shift C.O. comes on,” Freddy says. “Maybe he’ll take pity on you.”

But pity isn’t in the C.O.’s vocabulary, and he isn’t interested in Mikey’s woes. Neither will he give Mikey a grievance form, claims that they were all used up, which upon reflection on the recent event, might just be true. Finally, after two days of suffering, a rookie C.O. sends Mikey to the medical ward, where a concussion is diagnosed, and photographs of his facial bruising are taken. Medication is prescribed, although time proves to be the surest healer, and over the course of a few weeks, as Mikey lies eyes closed on his bunk, the headaches and aversion to sound and excess light gradually diminish.

The same considerate C.O. also gives Mikey a grievance form, but before he fills it out, Mikey decides to consult his upstairs occasional chess opponent, Sean “The Chess Fox” McMullen.

“Maybe he’ll help me write it,” he tells Freddy. “I hear he’s good at shit like that.”

The search of Sean’s cell goes about as smoothly as could be hoped. After a cursory body search by a young man who seems embarrassed to be ordering a man old enough to be his grandpa to bend over and spread his ass cheeks, Sean discloses that he’s a writer, and would appreciate very much if his various writings and legal work were not overly disturbed.

The men say nothing, but appear amenable to his request, so he extends his wrists in front of his body, pleading the time-tested arthritis ploy, which in his case, happens to be true.

“Where’s your cellie?” one asks, loosely fastening the cuffs. 

“I haven’t had one for a few months, thank God!”

”Hard to get along with, are you?” the man asks, motioning Sean into the hall. 

“I guess I’m just not the sociable type,” Sean replies, into the wall.

“Well, pal,” the man notes, “you should of thought of that before you moved into a dump like this.”

Sean offers no response, stands quietly next to his two next-door neighbors, whose first names elude him, despite living side-by-side with them for nearly a year. “Mind your own business” has been Sean’s survival strategy for the duration of his fifteen-year imprisonment, and it has served him well. Despite his solitary habits and his taciturnity, Sean gets along with nearly everyone, be they white, black, Hispanic, or “other,” as the ever-changing racial tally sheet taped to the C.O.’s door control panel designates anyone with an unpronounceable name or suspicious eyes and cheekbones. In order to forestall cultural conflicts, or worse, cellies are paired by race. When absolutely necessary, a black and a Hispanic might be housed together, but almost never a black and a white. Courts have ruled this practice regrettable, but legal, solely on inmate safety grounds, but to Sean’s knowledge, not an imprisoned soul has ever complained.

To avoid trouble, Sean has never participated in the endless wheeling and dealing, has shunned involvement with any specific clique, and has never been a bull or a bear in the prison economy. By flying beneath the radar, he has remained write-up-free; has in fact never gotten so much as a tsk-tsk reproval from a chastening finger. If his fellows think him a touch “grouchy,” sometimes find his replies a bit too curt, his “old head” status shields him from reproach. Then too, his willingness to type-up and edit, for just a “soup” per page, his coeval’s grievances, short legal briefs, and plagiarized love poems, has won Sean a certain degree of respect.

As a half-ass Buddhist who eats meat, cusses, and doesn’t intend to waste his ever-shortening lifespan staring at his navel while muttering “Om,” Sean hopes to reduce his karmic debts through “typewriter dharma.” As the pandemonium thunders on, he guesses that his two typing fingers will soon enough earn their keep.

Five minutes go by… ten… fifteen. Shifting his weight from foot to foot, he leans his forehead against the wall, wonders what the hell is taking so long. He owns no contraband – not even a “stinger” to heat water – has no porn, nary a weapon, just a shitload of 9×12″ envelopes stuffed with short stories, essays, memoirs, and a few stray poems. And, of course, reams upon reams of legal work he hopes to someday ceremoniously burn.

A woman C.O. notes Sean’s discomfort, kindly asks if he’s all right. 

”Well, my knees are pretty well shot, so I hope this business will soon be finished.”

She pops into his cell, speaks to one of the searchers, pops back out. “Can you hold on for a bit longer?” she asks. “They’re almost done.”

Sean nods his assent, thinks, Age has its perks, all right, and being white doesn’t hurt either.

At last, he is allowed back into his cell. As he is uncuffed, he’s told that he “passed.” Looking around at his strewn possessions, his disordered envelopes and books, he wonders what fiendish mess would’ve been left had he “flunked.” But, aside from his collection of salt and pepper packets, and the 2×2″ cardboard squares blocking off the cold air-emitting ”heat vent,” nothing important was taken or destroyed. Once again, Sean’s age, race, and harmless old grandpa demeanor has spared him grief.

After restoring a tenuous order, Sean watches the ongoing search through his cell door window, all the while thanking his genes and karma for shielding him from excessive harassment, wondering if he would have been beaten and belittled had the three guards been attacked by Caucasian inmates. He thinks not, wishes for the umpteenth time that all of the never-ending racial shit would just go away, cease, disap-fucking-pear! For most of his adult life it has been one damn thing after another: Selma, Little Rock, inner-city riots, the murders of JFK/RFK/MLK, sit-ins and protests, lynchings and drive-by shootings, and most recently, a spate of white-on-black police violence captured on phones.

Sean recalls his grudging relief when Obama was elected President. Even though Sean voted against him, he now hoped that America’s old racist bugbear had been finally cowed into submission, only to see it revitiated by the “progressives” for political reasons. He understands and loathes their cynical motive behind its revival, but is too damn old and tired and disheartened to rejoin the endless debate.

Hoping to blot out the undiminished racket, Sean turns up his radio and seeks refuge in a Sunday New York Timescrossword puzzle. 34 ACROSS: A five-letter word for “peace.” Death?, thinks he. Wrong! The answer is “Truce.” Apparently, the puzzle-maker is an optimist.

All of Sean’s life, ever since he was tormented in grade school by an older bully, he has despised their brethren, be they fellow citizens or figures of authority. So, when Mikey asks him for help preparing his grievance, offering several “soups” as payment, Sean declines the fee. Mikey writes an account of the assault, which he hands to Sean, asking him to rephrase it onto the grievance form. Sean tidies up the spelling and grammar, adds a few pertinent observations, and gives it back to his friend. “I threw in a few big words, and one or two hints of possible litigation. We want to scare them.”

To appeal to the likely “political correctness” sensibility of the grievance adjudicator, Sean emphasizes the underlying racial component of not only Mikey’s assault, but the retaliatory aspect of the shakedown itself. If the “system” uses the “race card” for revenge, he figures, then why shouldn’t I trump it, in order to strengthen Mikey’s argument?

Mikey agrees with Sean’s strategy, submits the grievance, and waits. Nearly a month later, just before the response time expires, Mikey is informed that the deadline has been extended for “further review,” an indication that the grievance has arrowed a chink in the State’s armor, necessitating the adjudicator to stall for time until someone, most probably a lawyer, can fabricate a protective patch of plausible deniability.

Two weeks later, Mikey is interviewed by an “impartial” investigator from an unfamiliar, acronymic “independent board of inquiry.” During his off-the-cuff account, Mikey takes pains not to contradict any claims in the initial grievance, and to the best of his post-concussed memory, answers every question. Later, back in his cell, he admits to himself that he was treated respectfully, and his statement taken seriously. But his hopes are shot down a few weeks later when the investigative board dismisses his petition as “frivolous.”

Hopeful of financial compensation, Mikey writes to a law firm that specializes in personal injury litigation, sending them a detailed account of not only his assault, but an explanation of the preceding events that led to the shakedown.

A month later, one of the firm’s lawyers sends Mikey an apologetic letter dismissing his injuries as “not substantial enough to warrant litigation.”

Sean is not surprised about the law firm’s disinterest. This is all too sadly typical, just another example of how the downtrodden are kept down: Deny and delay; confuse and confound; hope that the victim’s outrage will wane along with the pain of their wounds. These are the time-proven tactics of all oppressors, who know that an inmate’s chance of winning a pro se lawsuit is about as likely as a self-published author earning a Pulitzer Prize. Some still believe in miracles, but they have never served time, have never witnessed the gruesome residue left behind after one’s dreams and hopes hit reality’s fan.

Lifer Sean knows that somewhere in every prison – maybe in the cell next door – someone lacks the will to reassemble his diced-up hopes, has lost the urge to chase the false carrot of redemption. Eventually – maybe tomorrow – that beaten-down, staff-bullied, despondent man will wake up ANGRY AT THE GODDAMNED WORLD!, and woe betide the first unfortunate C.O. who crosses his path. Then, just as inexorably as morning count, the whole pain-for-pain, blood-for-blood, violent cycle will repeat. Shakedowns will ensue, innocent heads will be broken, and maybe another poor old man serving life for an act of self-defense will observe with resignation the turning of his karmic wheel yet another merciless notch, while knowing in his secret heart that neither a torrent of his or Mikey’s tears can retard its spinning, nor soften the stony breast of the bureaucracy.

About all we can do to clean the tarnished hearts of humanity, Sean muses, is to grab that old rag of compassion and start polishing.

The end.