The Art of War

I.

The knuckles of the index and middle fingers are called the ram’s head, Bobby Lee had said. Those are the knuckles that plaster Shawn’s nose to the side of his face. 

“Damnit,” Bobby Lee spat. “The number one rule is not to get hit. When ya see my first comin’, get the hell outta the way.”

This was not Shawn’s first boxing lesson. Nor was it his first time to be at the receiving end of a ram’s head. Prior experience had taught him to make a beeline to the sink before the red streaming from his nostrils painted the floor.

“When ya get done bleeding, we’re gonna practice footwork. Ya gotta learn to move.” 

Indeed, he did. Knowing how to fight, to defend himself, had never been a priority in his former life. Tech support wasn’t a field that required such skill with your hands — and certainly not with your fists. But that life was gone now. 

“This ain’t complicated. When I start to swing, you step.” 

In Shawn’s new life, priorities had changed. He was no longer concerned about his mortgage, health insurance, a 401K. No more debates with his girl over where their relationship was going. No stress whether his dealer was holding. Things were much simpler now. 

His sole concern was getting through it. 

Dear Reader, you may have certain ideas about prison, ideas that may reflect a distorted view of reality, like looking into a fun-house mirror. This is because you probably have been blessed to have never set foot inside an actual prison. You may imagine such places are full of violent reprobates named Tyrone and Bubba, all eager to rape the first guy who bends over in the shower. Even after months of incarceration, Shawn was so paranoid about dropping his soap. 

The truth, as Shawn had learned, was that an occasional Tyrone or Bubba did lurk in the showers, though not as often as you might think. Recent laws that provided stiff penalties for prison rape had produced a kinder, gentler penitentiary, one where inmates’ asses were much safer than in decades past.

Violence in general had declined, or so Shawn had been told, though it was far from being eliminated. For someone who had spent most of his life sheltered in the suburbs, going to prison was still akin to entering the Thunderdome.

II. 

“Whatcha gonna do, white boy?” 

Seemed like a simple question, yet Shawn knew how he responded would define his status, his rep, for as long as he was behind these walls. To avoid being collared with the status of “ho” or “punk,” there was only one way he could answer.

He had to fight. 

No matter who came at him at however many times, he would fight. No matter how broken or disfigured he became, however hopeless the situation seemed, he’d fight. It made little difference if he won or lost — they expected him to lose — what mattered was that he would “get out there.” When they beat him down, he’d stand back up. 

He would show heart. 

“I’m gonna break you.”

The punch came faster than Shawn anticipated, but he managed to step. The fist grazed his jaw, knuckles scraping across his cheek. It would leave a mark, but no real damage. Already the training was paying off. 

His opponent’s next punch was less calculated than the first, a roundhouse that Shawn ducked under and delivered a counterstrike to the ribs. The grunt the guy emitted with the forced expulsion of air from his lungs assured Shawn he’d hit the mark. 

Things were going better than he’d dared hope.

It was then that a blow connected with the back of Shawn’s neck, rattling his brain, chastising him for the audacity of thinking he might triumph. A second assailant, someone he never saw coming, jumped him from behind. Another shot, this one driven into Shawn’s kidneys, landed before he could turn around. His training had barely prepared him to handle a one-on-one match, let alone multiple attackers. 

When another blow connected, and another, Shawn found some solace in the fact that he wasn’t meant to win. As long as he was in this place, the odds would never be in his favor. 

From that point on he did his best to protect the more vulnerable areas of his anatomy, sacrificing his body to keep his face covered, occasionally flailing out at his opponents but not making solid contact. Before long he was balled up on the floor waiting for them to tire from the onslaught. The whole altercation lasted little more than a minute, maybe two, but they had been the longest minutes of Shawn’s life.

“Had enough, punk?” 

The voice in his head pleaded yes, stop the madness. Throw in the towel, you idiot. You aren’t cut out for this. Shawn trembled from the adrenaline spike to his brain, his body bloodied and bruised, but not broken. Yet. Common sense would dictate he quit before suffering anything permanent. 

“You gonna be my white bitch.”

A time came in everyone’s life, Shawn believed, to ignore common sense. To tell that little whimper in your head to shut the fuck up. Whatever the outcome might be, this was his time. He had another feeling — a twinge deep down in his gut — that whispered the easy way out wasn’t the right way, that dying on his feet was better than living on his knees. It was the voice of lunacy, he knew, but also that of honor. Of pride. It demanded he stand up and fight. 

He may be an idiot, but he was nobody’s bitch.

Dear Reader, if you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the atmosphere of state prison, perhaps the biggest culture shock you might encounter on the inside would be the inversion of values, like crossing over into a Bizarro world, all that you thought was right becomes wrong, good perverse, desirable disdained. Everything’s backwards, upside down. This holds especially true when it comes to matters of race. 

Where Shawn grew up, for the most part, kids were taught not to see color, or if they did notice it, not to make a big deal out of it. People were people, regardless of what shade their skin might be. We’re all in this crazy, mixed-up world together, his teachers told him, just doing the best we can to get along. And that’s what he had believed. 

Prison spat in the face of all that. Everything behind bars centered around race. Penitentiaries had remained segregated for decades after the rest of American society, and forced integration, when it came, did little to promote racial harmony. Skin color was the first detail a person noticed about anyone else. Inmate or employee, race stood as the essential mark by which one was classified, and nobody made any attempt to hide that fact. Along with that came an expectation to associate with the other whites, sitting on their bench in the day room, hanging with them on the rec yard. Not that he had much in common with his Caucasian brethren beyond a lack of melanin, but here in Bizarro Universe the one similarity that mattered only went skin deep. 

III. 

“I see how it is, honky.” 

In the spirit of full disclosure, we would be wrong not to mention that, just because someone’s “down” with his own kind, doesn’t mean he can’t socialize with individuals of other races. Due to living arrangements, educational programs, and job assignments, some degree of intermixing was unavoidable. Nor was it entirely unwanted. Conducting business inside prison — whatever that business might be — required working with individuals of other races, and a level of camaraderie often developed. 

“You too good to talk to a nigga when you ‘round a bunch of peckerwoods, huh?”

The paradox of having associates — one might even say friends — of another color in a racially-charged atmosphere also meant that racial humor sat at the pinnacle of prison comedy. It was an unwitting nod to the fact that, since all inmates had to be a little racist, they might as well laugh about it. So when Shawn responded to Andre’s query with a terse, “Boy, don’t you know better than to interrupt white men having a conversation?” you, Dear Reader, may be shocked by such blatantly racist rhetoric; however, we kindly ask you to recall that the residents of these institutions are not encumbered by political correctness, and our protagonist was merely trying to adapt to the tone of his surroundings. 

It worked both ways, of course. When Shawn saw Andre on the yard later and offered a “What’s up?” he received a talk-to-the-hand gesture followed by Andre announcing, “You know what that racist cracker told me?” At which point every African American in a 50-yard radius turned and eyed Shawn with a bitch-I’m-gonna-kill-you glare. The situation was only alleviated by Andre’s inability to keep a straight face for more than a few seconds, his laughter cuing the others in to the ruse. The point, naturally, was to make the object of the joke as uncomfortable as possible, and the longer one could maintain the facade the more amusing it became. It would also be funnier, we assume, if we didn’t have to explain it.

Dealing with race in this country has proven a delicate task that we approach with the apprehensive discomfort of handling a newborn for the first time. Although hopes were high that we had entered a post-racial era after the 2008 presidential election, the ensuing years have shown that, if anything, the lines are more divided than ever before. If he was honest about it, Shawn would admit that for most folks where he grew up the issue of race only existed in the abstract. Maybe they had a black co-worker or enjoyed dining at an authentic Mexican restaurant and believed that through those interactions they had really confronted the issue. 

As Shawn had discovered, they had not. Middle-class concepts of race tended to be based on anecdotal evidence, brief interactions that offered little insight. Only in the lower classes, where people were crammed together in government-subsidized housing without regard to color or creed, did the issue become reified. The farther down the economic ladder you fell, the more real race became. And nowhere did it create more of a concrete presence than at the bottom of the barrel — the state correctional system. The reason inmates embraced racial humor was that it was true to their experience in a way that politics and economics were not. From working, eating, and most significantly, sharing a living space smaller than a walk-in closet, you came to understand people of other races — the good, the bad, and the ugly — at a depth unknowable to those financially insulated from real diversity. 

What Shawn had learned from living on such intimate terms with other races was that, although they shared a common humanity, striking material and cultural differences existed. It may not have been P.C. for him to admit it, but that didn’t make it any less true. Coming from a middle-class background, the clash between what he had been taught against his actual experiences in prison created no small amount of dissonance.

Dear Reader, the gap between the way we think people should be and the way they really are can be tricky to bridge when that space is small; when it’s a yawning abyss our ability to reconcile them gets stretched rather thin. 

IV. 

“Damn, she fine.” 

Even though ogling women reigned as the unofficial pastime in any male prison, it was not one Shawn often indulged in. On the one hand, enough of the free world remained in him that the practice struck him as distasteful at best. On the other, the kind of ladies employed by the prison industrial complex seldom piqued his interest. That wasn’t to suggest Shawn felt he was too good for the women he encountered, only that he had a type, and they were not it. 

Which wasn’t to say that when someone made an exclamatory remark regarding a particular female form he didn’t occasionally sneak a peek to see what the fuss was all about. 

“You wouldn’t hit dat?” 

The young lady in question was more than a tad overweight, her brightly colored weave, neon nails, and gold grill (teeth, that is) were perhaps meant to distract from this fact. Yet Shawn somehow doubted any of these accoutrements were what had drawn the attention of his cellmate. Rather, he guessed that her generous rear end that was taxing the stitching of her pants and/or her heaving bosom that hung almost to the top of her belt had inspired the admiration. 

Either way, Shawn didn’t get it. 

“You trippin’. She thick-fine.”

Shawn was willing to cede the fact that one of them had a slightly skewed perception of what “fine” meant. 

“Fool, in any ghetto in the world, ‘fine’ means big butt.”

And there you have it, Shawn thought. You learn something new every day.

V. 

While Shawn knew it was wise to stay alert at all times in prison, a few places demanded a heightened degree of awareness. The shower fell in this category for the obvious reason that he was stripped and vulnerable, as was everyone else, and in that cramped area no one appreciated being bumped into by another naked man. Violence could also easily erupt in the chow hall. Apart from guys hustling, jostling, and trying to cut in line, Shawn had to be aware of where he sat and with whom he was sharing a table. He always had an exit strategy in mind before setting down his tray. 

Still there were situations for which he could not plan.

“Freakin’ pork noodle casserole again?”

A collective groan passed down the line as the word spread. In their heads, guys were straining to remember if they had any beans and Ramen left in their lockers because they’d all be leaving the chow hall unsatisfied. This was not an unusual occurrence; though, to be fair, the food since Shawn had been here was at least relatively safe for human consumption. The old convicts talked about the stretch in the 1990s when meat got swapped out for Vita-Pro, a mysterious substance that functioned as a weight-loss drug by making people violently ill. As in, projectile vom–

Bam!

Shawn only saw what happened because he was looking in that direction when it went down. An elderly black man sitting at the first row of tables — those reserved for individuals with health problems — passed out and fell backward, striking his head on the metal seat behind him as he collapsed. 

Thud.

His body sprawled motionless on the concrete floor, a trickle of blood seeping from the gash on his head. 

Everyone in the vicinity stood in stunned silence. It took a moment before anyone came to their senses and hollered at a guard to call for medical help. In that brief interval, a dozen thoughts flashed through Shawn’s mind: is the guy dying? Should I try to help? I don’t know CPR. What’s wrong with him? Is it contagious? I might be endangering myself. Even if I knew a way to help, how would the other whites react to me rendering aid to a black man? What would the blacks think? None of them are making a move to help either. Do they know something about this guy that I don’t? What’s the protocol? Somebody should do something.

Finally, someone did. A white guy about Shawn’s age jumped the railing separating the chow line from the tables and began pumping the comatose man’s chest. Getting no response, he proceeded to mouth-to-mouth, then returned to chest compressions. By then, three guards had been drawn to the scene, watching idly like the rest of the herd, unwilling to touch the unconscious inmate, waiting for an infirmary crew to arrive. 

Dear Reader, if we have successfully painted this scene in your mind, you are doubtless wondering, as was Shawn, about the fate of the man on the floor. You may also feel a twinge of disappointment that Shawn was not the one to answer when the situation called for action. If it’s any consolation, rest assured that you’re coming down no harder on Shawn than he was on himself. 

Eventually a pair of orderlies strolled in with a stretcher and wheeled the man away. The guy who’d been working so diligently to save his life got back in line, and chow rolled on as ever. In the penitentiary, as in nature, life and death were a matter of course. The show must go on.

VI. 

“Sumthin’ wrong with you?” 

This was an unusually insightful question coming from another convict. Granted, Bobby Lee wasn’t asking if Shawn was struggling with a personal issue. He wanted to know why, after all the practice they had put in, his fist just smashed into Shawn’s ear. 

It wasn’t that Shawn wanted to get hit. He didn’t. Not consciously. 

“Get your head on straight.” 

Shawn started stepping. He moved, he blocked, but his heart wasn’t in it. Scarcely a minute went by before Bobby Lee connected with his jaw and dropped him to a knee. 

“Did ya wake up retarded today?” This was Bobby Lee’s idea of a motivational speech. “Your dumb ass acts like it forgot everything.” 

Most days Shawn wished he could. Like one morning he’d wake up and the nightmare wouldn’t just be over — it never would have happened. Deep inside, that had been his secret prayer to a nameless deity that had yet to answer. 

“All right, princess. We’re stopping before you end up with a black eye and them folks wanna know how you got it.” 

“Them folks” were the authorities, the prison administration. It was never smart to get them involved in your business.

Still a bit rattled, Shawn flopped down on the nearest chair. Although he had yet to have a “good” day in prison by free-world standards, he’d had many better than this. 

What was a man’s life worth? Did that value change based on the color of his skin? Shawn hated to admit he may have been less hesitant to have helped the old man if he had been white, yet even if he had been Shawn was still unsure he would’ve tried. This place had gotten under his skin. 

When he had first met Bobby Lee and come to grips with the idea that he should learn to defend himself, he had naively inquired about the rules governing prison fights. 

“Rules?” Bobby Lee had scoffed. “Ain’t no damn rules. Whoever swings first and fights dirtiest usually wins.”

Spoken like a true trailer-park Sun-Tzu, Shawn had thought. In a war waged without laws, the side unhindered by ethics gained the advantage. 

He hadn’t ruminated on it much at the time, just filed it away with all the other nuggets of penitentiary wisdom that had been laid on him: mind your own business, keep your boots laced, do your time, don’t let your time do you. Reflecting on Bobby Lee’s words now though, Shawn at last reached the conclusion he had been anxious to avoid. 

If this was the kind of battle he was fighting, he had already lost.