Things That Bear Mentioning, 2019
A February snowstorm exceeds all expectations, dropping more than two feet over a couple days, breaking records and the hearts of the population here. The yard is closed for fear of body-sledding and the sculpting of anatomically correct snowwomen, so prisoners cannot go outside. But I can. As lead operator of the wastewater treatment plant, I have to work regardless of the weather. Not only does it run downhill, as they say, but it also never stops. Since the van I usually drive around the complex is useless in the snow, I am issued a 4WD Ford Ranger, which claws through the powder like a grumpy badger. This is the first time in seventeen years that snow has given me anything but grief. We have a blast, Reno (my friend and coworker) and I, drifting along the compound’s roads. So much so that we decide to make sleds out of brand-new plastic dumpster lids. There is a steep, one hundred yard slope at the back of the plant, where the gun tower cannot see. No one else has access to it. We sled for two hours, until our faces are bright red, our feet cold and our hearts pounding with the sheer triumph of smuggling a tiny bit of joy into prison. Our boss is excitable and flatly suspicious. He sees one of our poorly hidden “sleds” and then notices the run and flips out, accusing me of going rogue, being incorrigibly irresponsible and cetera. I won’t apologize because it would be a lie and he doesn’t speak to me for four days. Already I am planning on earning four more days of silent treatment next year as a whipsaw winter works its way down the foothills.
A wave of spice (a highly psychoactive chemical sprayed on innocuous herbs and smoked) hits the camp. I watch the mellow black kid who works in property fall out on the grass alongside the sidewalk. Guards respond, standing over him and bending down. He jumps to his feet, throwing rapid-fire punches, some of which land in their surprised faces. He knocks two to the ground before sprinting in a lunatic circle around the rotunda. A guard built like a cornerback spear-tackles him in the grass. The following day a prisoner in the adjacent dorm goes into a spice seizure at 2 AM and swan-dives off the top bunk, landing on his forehead and fracturing his skull. His cellies are left to clean up an enormous bloodslick.
The barber collapses on the sidewalk right outside my room, about twenty feet from where the property kid fell. It is 2:35 in the afternoon. Guards show up and clap their hands in front of his face, accusing him of being on spice. He has been complaining of chest pains for four days. Prisoners are yelling out their windows that he is having a heart attack. Some offer to carry him to medical. Others yell, Call 911 you bitches. After 23 minutes, two nurses saunter up. They send a guard for a gurney and lean down, asking him questions he cannot answer. He is making a keening sound, wordless and strident. After 36 minutes the EMTs arrive and quickly strap him onto their gurney. The barber dies on the way to the hospital. He was 48. The coroner says he had an 80% blockage, a condition easily remedied had he gotten to the hospital sooner. His release date was in 84 days.
A baby rabbit–alone and visibly frightened–appears in the grass beside the recycle shop up the road from the wastewater plant. He is brown with a white lightning bolt on his forehead, so I name him Harry Potter. He is a gift from the universe. I bring him back to the lab, hold him in my palm and nurse him with an eyedropper until he feels up to nibbling carrots. Reno and I keep him safe for a few days in a cage we made out of a recycle bin, then let him go. In the weeks since we catch Harry Potter in the act of terrorizing our garden a few times. Reno says he wants to beat Harry’s little ass for killing our snap peas, but still leaves carrots and celery in a dish for him every night
When your teenage son insists on answering the phone so he can tell you about what he and his friends have been doing while out on the town, that stirs your soul. Even more stirring is how mild his adventures are when contrasted with your own teenage skullduggery.
While proofing an essay by another Minutes Before Six writer, I am struck by the severity of his circumstance and the openness with which he shares it. I am suddenly grateful, not only for my own creature comforts and comparatively mild-mannered living conditions, but also for the gift of perspective he offers all of us.
A cellphone is found in a tier restroom, a common area. The sergeant takes the phone into his office for a few minutes, then enters the dorm, directing everyone to stand at the front of their cubicles, hands at their sides. He saunters down the center of the walkway, casually looking each prisoner up and down. He stops. You, he says to a prisoner named Gizmo. I found your phone. That ain’t mine, Sarge, Gizmo says. The sergeant looks down at the distinctive clown face tattoo on the back of Gizmo’s hand. Well, then, he says, holding up the phone, either it’s your phone or this here’s a closeup of you holding someone else’s dick. Gizmo lowers his head and cuffs up.
You run every other day for years, eating up the track, lapping prisoners half your age. Then one day your foot feels like someone stabbed up into it with a red-hot hammer. The doc says it’s plantar fasciitis, a term that sounds appropriately similar to fascism. Otherwise sidling up to 50 is not so bad.
You’d be wise to expect less from your fellow prisoners here than at other joints, in terms of integrity. An unfortunate phenomenon correlated with minimum custody and short time structures. And yet, some still manage to exceed the low limits even of your estimations. One prisoner in particular decides to align himself solely with staff, to the exclusion of everyone else, even his one friend from the streets, a little person named Shorty. We call him 5Jobs, because he is seen working no less than five jobs, four of them as a volunteer simply to ingratiate himself further with guards. 5Jobs is a shameless rat, informing on whatever he observes for no apparent gain. A tobacco stash, someone’s pruno batch. Four prisoners with fresh ink, along with the artist. And on it goes. Shorty warns him repeatedly that although this is camp, something could still happen to him. One guard, Crider, openly refers to him as his “information porter,” and leaves one of 5Jobs’s snitch kites laying on his desk for all to see, in case there remain doubts. At 12:15 AM, 5Jobs is awoken by a sharp slap. He sits upright in his bunk, startled. The masked prisoner who’d just slapped him throws a mugful of boiling baby oil and urine in 5Jobs’s face. He screams and runs to the duty station, where he cries and tries to hold his deep fried cheek and forehead in place. Someone yells from a doorway, “You can thank Crider for that, punk.” 5Jobs is released from prison two months later with only one eye, much of his face reconstructed with skin from his butt cheeks.
My friend and I quietly celebrate two years here, most of which we’ve been cellies. An unlikely fact in this world, given that he happens to be a black kid from Detroit who’s the same age as my oldest son. Even more unlikely is that he is the best celly I’ve ever had. You think you know at a glance who’s who after all these years, and then you realize that sometimes you can be very wrong, and that makes you happy.
One of our favorite guards is arrested and charged with aggravated assault of a child. He is accused of shaking his two-month-old foster son until he fractured both the baby’s femurs and gave him a brain bleed. A few months later, one of our least favorite guards is arrested in the admin building toward the end of his shift. The mother of a 15-year-old girl has discovered on her daughter’s phone a digital trail of sexual abuse allegedly committed by this guard that began when the girl was 13. He is the father of the girl’s friend, president of the PTA with his own office in the middle school, and involved in the Girl Scouts. (Finding this hard to believe? Google “Monroe prison guard rape charge.”) Bulletins are emailed to the community, and more kids come forward. Two weeks later the custody unit supervisor (plainclothes equivalent to a lieutenant) is walked off the compound for groping a female staff member. We have no idea who watches the watchers.
Prison investigators get word that a prisoner who works on the grounds outside the gate has a hidey hole hollowed out of a dense patch of blackberry bushes. His girlfriend has been meeting him there once a week, says the informant. Sergeant Glaston gathers a couple guards for backup and stakes out the love nest on the appointed day. Glaston is old school–with thirty years in he’s seen it all, and this skinny kid’s weekly rendezvous is not deserving of a CERT team response. He watches through binoculars as the ragamuffin girlfriend negotiate the thicket of thorny bushes while carrying a McDonald’s bag. A while later the kid saunters up, looks around before laying down his weed-eater and climbing in. Glaston waits about ten minutes, then descends on the little hollow, the two guards in tow. The kid is sitting on a milk crate, finishing his third cheeseburger. His girlfriend freezes, pulling her pants off. Sorry, sweetheart, Glaston says. I gave you guys plenty of time, but it looks like this kid’s gotta get his priorities straight.
The seasons flutter past, each with its charms and challenges, each one bringing closer the end of this heroless saga and the beginning of something else: a life. It is possible that 2019 could turn out to be the last calendar year I spend in prison. How this will affect my writing for Minutes Before Six in the future is hard to say. Rest assured I will remain involved behind the scenes, but I doubt you’ll want to read about how I manage to accidentally block myself from my own phone or finally master the self-checkout line at the grocery store. For seven years I have shared my inner and outer worlds with you, inviting you in, walking beside you down paths of meaning we’ve forged together through this, the ellipsis of humanity. My hope is that I’ve given far more than I’ve asked for. In the past I’ve reached out to you for feedback, not just for me but for all our writers and the project in general, and the outpouring was heart-lifting. I would renew that invitation with this new year. Your comments are our fuel.
The days shuffle by, the weeks walk, and the months sprint. Most of the few friends I have here depart, releasing or transitioning toward some better place. One after another they leave this world behind in favor of the outer one, rarely looking back. such is the transient nature of this place. I keep in touch with a small handful of guys I’ve come to know well over the years we walked off together. They inspire me by how smooth, for the most part, their landings have been. They encourage me, offering their support now, and more importantly, when my time comes. That it’s only a year and a half away is no small thing. That I have a network of successful former prisoners bears mentioning.
Steve Bartholomew #978300
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3 Comments
tenzintenzin
January 30, 2020 at 4:56 pmIn the U.K. twenty or so years ago lifers or long sentenced people would have a staggered release. A weekend here a week there then out for good, They thought it helped acclimated a person to society change.
Know this… the America you are being released into isn’t the America you left. Internet changed everything every nuance of culture and human physical behaviour. A lot of staring into Black Mirrors, (phones and devices). Relationships play out on them. Crime gets committed on them, people live and die online.
Adapt,quickly and use what you know to stop these jails filling up. Jails are a lucrative business in the USA I’m surprised they don’t float them on the stock exchange.
I like your wordsmithery. Jail broke open the poet and prose in you. Perhaps it may even prolonged your life. Perhaps the life you led before would have been curtailed before now. Perhaps you gained some years with your tears.
It seems very pertinent that 2020 is the year you get released, 2020 being the best eyesight and all.
As a person of faith, not the abrahamic religions though I would say this to you. Life does not happen between the paragraphs or sentences in a book, it is the choices we make between heartbeats. Ever notice how when stuff is going down, something scarey or wrong it’s like time slows right down to slow motion, and you become the point of observation with a clear view of everything that is actually happening rapidly around you? Stop, breathe think, do nothing but observe. Clear your path and polish your legacy. Good luck out here Outmate.
tenzintenzin
Ida
January 25, 2020 at 11:00 pmI would sure love to know how you get along with self-checkout lines, they are the worst (at least in Eastern Europe). But on a more serious note: it would be immensely interesting to read how you are doing in the "outside world", partly because you surely do have a talent for writing.
All the best wishes
Ida
urban ranger
January 25, 2020 at 1:54 amSitting on a bus today, I was thinking about another thing you will have to get used to .
And that is people appearing to be talking to themselves.
Mind you, there are still people out there actually talking to themselves.
But the ones I'm referring to only appear to be doing so. They are hooked
up (in wireless ways) to whomever they are conversing with who could be anywhere in the world.
Not a phone in sight.
Just a small part of the new world which you will soon be experiencing.
All the best to you, Steve.