Jerry G was not a saint. But if you met him in the last years of his life, you wouldn’t be able to help but like him. He was big, bald, gregarious, and mostly toothless from nearly half-a-century in prison that made him occasionally difficult to understand (and he would cuss you out when you didn’t . . . “HEY! You not understand English or something?!”). He wasn’t always particularly friendly . . . no, he could be an ornery late-middle-aged man, but it was in that endearing way which makes you like the person more in a way that only someone as colorful a character as he could do. When I met him, he ran “skins,” or sports gambling tickets, in the unit and he saw in me a young guy who could be persuaded to be a runner and a stock-guy. A runner is someone who distributes the tickets and picks up the money from the bets; a stock-guy holds the money in form of commissary items in case someone wins and so that he, the ticket-man, didn’t have to keep a thousand dollars’ worth of ramen noodles himself in his cell, which attracts attention and can be confiscated in some cases.
I declined because I didn’t want the headache, but what he was trying to offer was an opportunity for someone who needed help. He was a “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” guy, but he created the chances–sometimes at a cost to him–to give others that. Managing a prison store, he gave away food to people who he liked (which is the opposite of the concept of a store, which loans out items at 50% markup). If, over time, he trusted you, he would give out relatively large loans (something never done in prison) to guys trying to procure the means to build themselves up, like the materials for cards (a common prison-hustle).
Maybe it was because he was dying. A lifetime in prison, and he wanted to leave something behind. He had acquired Hepatitis C at some point, and it was shutting down his liver. Oddly colored spots regularly broke out on his face. More of his teeth fell out. For him, a lifer with two homicides from a hippie drug-deal-gone-bad, the prison healthcare system did nothing. It didn’t help him that he worked as a sorter in the prison factory, where he handled soiled hospital clothing and linens, and his health seemed to dip down following his stories of some horrendous finds. He was amazing at telling stories of all kinds and had become something of a resident prison-historian, the collected knowledge of the entire modern era of Michigan prison culture in his mind. Legends of daring escapes, the smuggling of pounds of marijuana into prison, the real story behind his friend who had been caught with a revolver while in prison armed-robbing other inmates for their commissary items, the anarchy of past prison riots. He had seen it all.
Or almost all. The one thing he hadn’t seen was his loved ones. He spoke of a daughter whom he held as an infant just months before his incarceration. Other family members were long gone. He had gone from a young man to an old man. The men and women from his youth had passed into the ages. His daughter a memory. And then . . . he received a letter from her. Having learned of him, she after decades decided to seek him out. At first, she wanted to learn more about a father she never knew, who had held her before she knew it and then wasn’t there. She visited him, and then she kept visiting him. I saw them once, and he had his arm around her, her smiling and leaning into him. It was a beautiful sight.
Then, with the advent of DNA family-searches, two older gentlemen, successful businessmen, found her and got in contact. Their DNA was twice removed from hers, and she filled them in on her entire family, including the father she had been getting to know in prison . . . and who was their nephew. Soon these two men flew halfway across the country on a nearly monthly basis to meet their newly discovered nephew who was in his late-60s. After decades and decades in prison, they offered financial help to get him out of prison and keep him comfortable while in.
And then . . . the courts mandated that prison healthcare must provide the newest and most effective therapy for ALL inmates with Hepatitis C. Jerry G started the course. He stopped breaking out in spots. His pallor looked healthier. He walked better, though his head was higher and his gait straighter than when he first met his family.
I had moved to another unit from him some time ago, and ever since the coronavirus made its way into the prison we had been on quarantine. One day after a few months, I was able to sit across from him at the dining room table and we talked for nearly a half-hour until we were kicked out. He had been able to see his daughter and uncles just a day or two before the prison-quarantine went into effect, and he kept in communication with them constantly. He smiled his big, mostly toothless smile and slapped me on the back as we walked away.
COVID-19 tore through the prison in May. Hundreds of inmates came down with it. Coughing filled the hallways, complaints of not being able to taste anything (though this, in a slightly more joking fashion, was a common complaint of the food in general), ambulances down the main walkway of the prison as men struggled to breathe. I had it, the worst illness I ever had, at one point believing I might die from it. I lay perfectly flat on my back in my bed, the only position I could stay in, and thought about how I was 30 and in great shape and this affected me this bad. I thought about the older people I knew, my father, grandmothers, aunts and uncles. I thought about my older friends. And ol’ Jerry G crossed my mind.
And a week later he passed away. COVID-19 along with his weakened immune system had stopped a heart that had survived so many years in some of the worst prisons in the country, and yet still had feelings for others until his last breath.
I was sad at the loss of my friend. And I was saddened by the thought that he had just found his family again after all this time just to lose them. But then I thought about the toothless smile on his face, and about the fact that for the first time in his life, knowing he was going to die at some point, he passed on knowing that he was loved.
I couldn’t have wished anything greater for my friend.
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