Transitionish Episode Two

Episode Two: Of Cellies, Hacked Toilets, and the Quest for the Elusive Third Option

To read Episode One click here

 “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”  — Robert Howard, “The Tower of the Elephant”

You know how you test the strength of an alloy? You put pressure on it until it breaks. That’s the Cognitive Intervention Training Program (CITP) in an analogical nutshell: you want to see whether an administrative segregation (aka ad-seg) inmate can handle the multiaxial stresses of population? Drop them into a room full of convicts, max out the values for every category of stress you can think of, and twist. It’s a simple concept when viewed from well above the fray. It doesn’t feel quite that simple down in the trenches.

I had always suspected that the most important variable for successful living in general population was the quality and character of one’s cellmate. This was the person with whom one would spend the most time with — indeed, during lockdowns, they would be unavoidable for weeks on end, absolutely, fundamentally, never out of touching (or punching) distance. If prison is a continuous lesson on the genuine extent of one’s non-extent, one’s cellie is a reminder that even within the bounds of one’s ultimate meaninglessness to the universe, human beings can still be massively annoying. After spending so many years of being exiled from the community of man, that sort of personal space incursion was always going to be challenging, even if the invader was a fundamentally decent sort. What, I wondered on that first day, were the chances of the universe showing me just a bit of kindness on that front and sending a principled, honorable con my way? Hadn’t I earned this tiniest of breaks, all things considered?

Haha, I know, right? Hope makes morons of us all.

I spend some time coming up with the nicknames for the people in these articles, especially when said characters are worthy of a measure of poetic justice. For instance, “Big Enoch” in “Cancer for the Cure” was so named because he was a reactionary, xenophobic bastard of a man, whose views on immigration reminded me of Enoch Powell. Also, Enoch in the bible was supposedly so perfect he never died, instead getting magicked up to Space Disneyland when his time was up. I thought it a fitting way to make a sardonic comment on his holier-than-thou ways.

Similarly, in part one of this series I called my first cellie Orlop. Back in the days when ocean travel required large expanses of canvas, the deck immediately above the ballast was the orlop. It was a dank, cramped, smelly place. It was also dark: whatever light you found on the orlop, you brought with you. Did I paint that picture in clear enough strokes for you?

I actually had a chance to observe the man for a while before I introduced myself to him. He was in the afternoon CITP class, which let out at 3:30pm. I was still sitting with Maya and his friend Pancho when the students began to filter back from school. The turnkey boss responsible for B3 apparently didn’t feel like going to the trouble of opening the cell doors, so he merely unlocked the day room and made everyone parade into what was already a pretty crowded space. I watched as some apparently smaller fish got displaced at the tables by their bigger, toothier conspecifics, and I braced myself for the inevitable unpleasantness that would come about if someone ordered me to get up. Fortunately, aside from a few curious glances sent my direction, no one approached our particular table. Instead, Maya tapped me on the forearm nodded towards one of the benches in the corner nearest to the windows.

“Aquel guey es tu cellaco,” he murmured. I glanced over and saw a man of wiry build clap the hand of several guys seated there and then plop down on the far edge of the bench. He had the angular face of a man who didn’t eat regularly, much ofwhich was covered in tattoos of more than the usual poor taste. The one covering the majority of the real estate of his left cheek was the logo of a particular city gang well known to me. I had noticed several other men similarly marked during my frequent scanning of the dayroom, and I traced back over the crowd, trying to locate them again. Within moments of the guard’s departure, Orlop had procured a joint from one of his compatriots and was part of a small coterie smoking next to one of the windows. He then slumped in the corner where he remained until a guard shouted from the hallway to get ready for dinner. None of Orlop’s homeboys had said a single word to him since he’d arrived, nor were they apparently concerned that he was lying on the floor completely defenseless, a state referred to by toonheads as being “stuck.” This seemed curious to me, but I didn’t know what to do with this datum other than to file it away for future analysis.

This was my first ever trip to a prison chow hall of any type. Every last meal in seg was brought directly to my door. In every facility in which I was incarcerated during my time in county jail, the meals were delivered to the pods in large, rattling carts. My expectations were thus constructed entirely by what I had seen in movies or read about in books. These accounts had, on occasion, proven to be useful, but which were seldom entirely reliable when t translated into Texanese. (I would give a great deal to hear what Solzhenitsyn would have to say about life in this particular gulag archipelago, and if he would still be thanking his chains after the concept of nobility through suffering had died a grisly death and been replaced by mere warehousing.)

This was also my first experience with a phenomenon which dominates life in population at any of the older, redbrick units: waiting for the hallway officers to open the wing doors. The process for going to chow operates in this manner: first, a screw (officer) in the picket will open all of the doors on the first floor. There is supposed to be an officer on the run supervising, but this was sporadic, depending on staffing levels. Unlike at the newer units where doors are controlled electronically, the entire system at Ellis was pneumatic. Before a corrections officer (CO) could open anything, they would have to press a few large brass pins, which injected air into the system. Then they would turn a metal wheel of roughly 18 inches in diameter, which began the process of moving the door. What this meant in practical terms was that the doors opened in fits and starts, but with great force. Over the course of my time in the program, I saw several men break bones because they were slumped against the doors after smoking a joint. I also saw someone leave their tablet resting on the bars, and the door snapped it in half like it was made of wood. They were massively secure; I’ll give them that. They were the only doors in my prison experience that my peers couldn’t figure out how to defeat if the urge took them.

After the first row, the officer in the picket would move to the second, then the third. These are called “in and outs” in the vernacular, and they used to happen every hour in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Or so I was told. These days, we were lucky if they happened every three hours. Once the door was opened, you had maybe sixty seconds to get yourself and whatever you were going to need for class, chow, or the dayroom for the next howevermany hours on the desired side, or you were going to be stuck for a while. I wrote “maybe” there because my peers were masters at creating delays. Most — but not all, lamentably — of the COs didn’t want to squish anyone in the doors, so on every run of twenty cells you would have at least a few people who would place themselves immediately in the door’s pathway and scream for the picket boss to hold on. This usually bought some extra time. Usually.

Once everyone had shifted to their desired positions relative to the door, those of us who were going to chow would stack up behind the wing gate on the first floor. Roughly halfway down the long central hallway that dominated the structure of the Ellis Unit sat the warden’s office and the administrative wing. Positioned directly in front of these offices was the duty captain’s desk, a sort of raised platform from which hallway traffic was controlled. These captains didn’t want too many wings parading about the hallway at the same time, thus the consistently long waits. I don’t know how many hours I spent waiting, mashed up behind these wing doors. Every time we went somewhere, this delay happened for at least fifteen minutes and often for as long as an hour. Going to the showers? Factor in a long wait to hit the hallway, and then another after you return for the cell doors to be opened again. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: same. Cognitive class? Ditto. Some of those events were not daily occurrences for every prisoner, but on average we would spend well over an hour every day waiting on one of these two-bars down at the desk to give B3 the green light. You do the math and calculate how this type of experience would impact you. The desired lesson to be learned here is one of patience, but you can probably imagine that other, less positive ones were learned by many of the program participants. 

The procession to the chow hall — or anywhere else, for that matter — takes place in groups of fifteen or twenty, depending on the officers in question. As you leave the wing, you will hear the COs counting under their breath. (Also, inevitably, one of my lot loudly proclaiming random numbers. There is a high degree of correlation between these clowns and those that regularly pretend to have various appendages squashed in the cell doors.) At various points along the hallway sit metal gates, widely labeled as “crash gates” for no other reason I can discern beyond the fact that they make a ton of racket when slammed shut. Our little groupings might be halted at each of these, depending upon the whims of the duty captain. There are two chow halls on the south side of the prison, and we were almost always directed to the smaller of the two. Even still, this was easily the largest room I have inhabited since well before my incarceration. The space was rectangular, its dimensions perhaps 70 meters by 25. The sign over the doors claimed the fire code occupancy limit to be 201 people, a number I could never quite work out, considering the tables all sat precisely four people. This is a very strange place, so maybe the rules of division don’t quite work back here the way they do out there. 

At the far end of the rectangle from the hallway sat the tray line. This began on the left with an officer scanning our ID cards or checking our numbers off a printed list, depending on if the computers were working or not. They seemed to fail at Ellis with a truly alarming regularity, so one presumes a widespread series of PEBKAC errors, that most common of bugs. The only other feature in the hall was a small scullery, which was positioned on the same wall leading to the hallway. Why they had it separated from the kitchen is beyond me, as this required officers to regularly walk the length of the space and use a set of keys to ferry the now-cleaned trays. 

I had heard for years a rumor that prisoners in Huntsville ate better than anywhere else, that the further you were removed from the center of things the worse the food got. I don’t mean to give you the impression that such fortunate inmates were regularly snacking on Michelin-starred cuisine or anything even remotely close, but there does seem to be some truth to the tale: we had fried eggs every third day, if not every other day. The hated wet-cardboard-tasting pancakes which dominated every other prison I’ve ever lived at only had to be endured or avoided a maximum of twice a week. They actually served us chicken or chicken patties nearly every week. The menu did seem to be more limited when compared to most of the other facilities I have survived in, but what they did serve often had some measure of salt or other seasonings, which was a nice surprise. The kicker here is the amount. I had long suspected that the portions given to us in seg were smaller than those handed out in gen pop. Every time I was sent to the disciplinary wing and had my commissary privileges temporarily revoked, I lost pounds, usually to the tune of eight to ten percent of my body weight. That is not an exaggeration: in ninety days, I would always lose a bit more than fifteen pounds and trust me when I tell you we were all scraping every last calorie off of those trays. I know that some of you — somehow, inexplicably — are under the illusion that prisoners sit around all day living a life of ease and enjoyment on your dollar. Maybe there exist some prison systems where everyone does actually live a comfortable existence, but they aren’t found down here in the South. The officers in seg would always swear to me that the portions on the trays were the same across the unit, but it was obvious to me on that first day that they had either never worked in population or were lying. The tray I carried to my table on my first trip (some kind of beef and rice dish, maybe a pilaf if one wanted to attempt some level of gastro-pedantry) was noticeably heavier than what I had been carrying from my cell door to my table for seventeen years, maybe to the tune of around thirty percent. It may not have been all that exciting, but it filled me up. In other words, nobody was going to end up looking like a stick figure if they weren’t making commissary regularly. 

I didn’t really know if there was a politics behind the seating arrangements on that first afternoon. I felt like I had spent enough time around Maya and his friends, and that it might be a good idea if I ate alone. I chose a table along the edge of the south wall where I could watch the social dance of seat selection without perhaps being completely obvious about it. Several people glanced my way in a casual manner, but none said anything to me or sat at my table. By the time I was finished eating I was confident of one of two conclusions: either there was very little racial or tribal politics going on in the CITP, or I was so exhausted that I had lost my ability to detect patterns. Given that I had been up since before three AM and had been chained up in the backseat of a van for five hours, this latter possibility was very possible. Despite that, I was confident that the former was correct: people sat where they wanted, with whom they wanted. This may seem a simple thing to you, but it is a massive difference from when I last lived in a population style environment, where a person could and would get their face rearranged for having made the mistake of sitting in someone else’s chair. Capital-P progress is supposedly a damaged and discredited idea, I know. And yet — there is evidence of it everywhere, if you are open to using that particular filter through which to view the world. Some of that progress is delicate, but beautiful things often are. 

I paid careful attention to my cellie during chow. Once again, he didn’t sit with his homeboys — or, at least, he didn’t sit with anyone bearing visible tattoos of his gang. The three people he joined had the same wasted bearing, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out who his true circle was. This, I thought at the time, might be important: if I ended up having issues with him over his drug use, it might indicate I wouldn’t end up having them with everyone else from his city, too. Of course, it also meant I might have them with the smokers but given their physical size I liked those odds better. 

I thought about introducing myself to Orlop there in the chow hall. It was somewhat less noisy than the dayroom, the feeling of being an amoeba on a microscope’s slide a little less pervasive, and I thought it might be easier to talk there. The COs didn’t give me a chance, though, and ordered everyone to line up near the exit door. I had heard a bit about this over the years, that one didn’t have very long to eat, how this often produced a phenomenon where parolees were somewhat embarrassed during their first meals back in the free world when everyone else at the table becomes alarmed or amused at the speed with which their loved one dispatches their plates. After years of eating at my own pace, I, too, am becoming similarly trained. (I’ve noticed it a bit at visits, when I have to remind myself that I have the time to eat at my own leisure, rather than scarfing everything down in three minutes. It’s an embarrassingly easy thing to forget.) It might have been for the best that I didn’t talk to Orlop during dinner, as he still had the glassy-eyed look of the inebriate. I have unfortunately come to know quite well the timing of toon smokers, when they are finally capable of having a rational conversation after imbibing, and when they are going to feel the need to return to the hunt for more dope. In any case, I felt like I had complied with my obligation to show myself in the dayroom, and it was time to return to the cell and unpack my belongings. If my cellie decided to return to the house as well, we could perform the whole how’s-yer-father routine in relative privacy. 

Cellmates in the TDCJ aren’t selected completely at random. Policy requires that both be within ten years of age and within fifty pounds. This is supposed to help minimize predation of smaller, older, weaker inmates by larger, younger, more aggressive ones. (Here one might suggest the simple idea of allowing offenders in the TDCJ to select their own cellies, friends being less likely to, say, murder each other than those randomly selected. The system is somehow against this concept, however, despite the body count. I have no real idea why, save for a prevailing culture of being opposed to anything desired by those incarcerated.) This fifty-pound thing has always seemed to me to be a bit loose: someone near the far extreme of that spectrum has a massive advantage in a cell where there is almost zero room to move. Even twenty pounds is probably too much. In this I seemed to have an advantage over Orlop. He probably weighed in at 150 pounds, so I had him by 25 or so. I would learn that this was entirely due to the fact that he spent every penny of the hundred dollars his mother sent him every month on drugs, as well as because he sold at least half of his trays to cover what those funds were insufficient for. I presumed he had more experience fighting than I did, being a gang member and all, but this difference in weight class — featherweight to middleweight, say — gave me some confidence in the conversation I knew we were going to have to have about his drug use in our cell. If this went poorly, if I wasn’t able to be assertive without making him feel like I was being controlling, we’d end up in a brawl. I know that seems ridiculous to you, because it is. 

Try to place yourself in my shoes, and let me lay out the options before you. You just got to a new cell. You are going to be living stacked on top of this other person for the immediate future. Let’s say he has vices that could easily get you in trouble. If an officer were to walk by and smell smoke, they could write you both a case, and there isn’t anything you could do about it. In a more perfect world, maybe you could demand a drug test, but in this one the authorities are under no obligation to do so. Say you did ask for a urine analysis, and they actually granted the request. That would mean your cellie would have to be tested, too, which would mean that they would end up getting busted empirically, whereas youwould be let off. Even if your cellie was a standup convict and claimed the drugs were his, they officers are under no obligation to drop the case against you. But let’s say that happened: your cellie took the fall, and you managed to avoid the disciplinary court process. What other people believe to be real is real in its consequences, however, and the whisperstream is going to be spreading some version of these events, not all of them favorable to your cause. Some people may believe you, some others won’t. There will always be a percentage of people that will believe you snitched on your cellie, and this will lead to a second (or third, or cascading) set of problems, which could very well lead to you having to fight someone — which creates yet another opportunity for some CO to write you a case. And may the gods help you if he happens to overdose in the cell. You are going to be under investigation by policy. Even if you get cleared, you are going to seg for a while. These are not infrequent happenings. Nothing I’m writing here is even remotely fantastic. All roads seem to lead to the disciplinary wing, in other words, when your cellie is a drug addict. 

So, what can you do? If you tell a smoker he can’t use at all, you are imposing a level of control over him that almost certainly will result in fisticuffery. That leads to a case. (It’s also a completely hopeless request. If all it took to get an addict off of drugs was to tell them to stop, they’d have quit ages ago.) Okay, just change cells, you might suggest. Sure, that sounds good. How does one do that, in practice? A regular CO can’t perform a cell move on their own at most units, so you are going to have to eventually talk to some type of ranking officer. They are going to want to know the nature of the problem, because you are asking them to do actual work, and their preference is not to do that sort of thing unless they have to. You can’t tell them anything — that would be snitching, right? They might make an educated guess if your cellie’s proclivities are well-known and send in the goon squad with the urine analysis kits. That leads to him getting locked up, which once again leads to his homeboys waiting on you inside the chow hall to beat you senseless, not to mention all the future victimization that would inevitably come to pass once you have the snitch label applied to you. Another option is to tell the fool that he has to get out, find somewhere else to live. That’s convict. You are going to fight, and the loser has to pack up. But that once again exposes you to the whims of screws. Maybe they, too, will keep it convict and just quietly make the move, but more often than not you are going to get written up, win or lose. And then of course you still have to deal with the aforementioned homeboys, who are probably not pleased that one of theirs got their ass handed to them from a white dude from the suburbs. It seemed to me at the time that the best option was to sit Orlop down and try to have an honest conversation about where I came from, what my goals were, and how his choices could negatively impact the latter. I intended to be civil, understanding even, but also firm enough to let him know that incivility remained an available option. This strategy ultimately depended upon him having a sense of honor and the ability to empathize — or at least the ability to recognize that he regularly placed himself in a defenseless position that anyone was capable of taking advantage of, if they were ruthless enough. As in so many occurrences in prison, the entire conversation really boiled down to one’s capability of broadcasting a certain level of viciousness. Yes, yes: that is horrible, and I know some of you will insist on it implying a certain moral weakness on my behalf. You can only think that because you’ve never had to survive in places like this. In any case, it is you people that pay for all of this. My world and all of its attendant ugliness continues to exist because a majority of you have collectively decided (or at least acquiesced to the idea, or, worse, are too apathetic to be moved by the sufferings of millions of your fellow citizens) that the proper response to criminal trespass is the development of an environment where violent behavior is overwhelmingly adaptive. Like elsewhere in nature deprived of human civilization, you survive here by having sharper fangs and claws than the competition. In any case, I had no idea if this was a good plan or not, but it seemed the best available option in a rather sorry bin full of them. If things went poorly, I could at least tell myself I tried to act ethically in a place where such behavior seems to be in short supply. 

I formally met Orlop in front of our cell after dinner. We were waiting on the wing officer to open the doors for everyone returning from chow. He looked a little bleary-eyed but apparently was sufficiently aware enough of his surroundings to make it up three flights of stairs without hurting himself. I stared at him as he approached, but he didn’t make the connection until he arrived in front of 309 and tried to move around the mattress and red chain bag stacked up against the handrail. He gave each of these a slow inspection and then looked up at me. I could see his mind spinning like a bald tire in search of traction: do I know this dude? Do I owe him money? Why is he looking at me like that? “You my cellie?” he asked, finally coming to the right conclusion. “Looks like it,” I responded, offering him my hand to shake, as I tried to imagine what he was seeing in me, if I was transmitting the right signal for “hey, I’m cool, but don’t cross my lines”, which was really a cover for “please, dude, please don’t be an inconsiderate asshole that drops a bomb on this thing I’ve waited so long for; please, if you really insist on going down in flames, do so in the privacy of your own life, and leave my house alone.” 

I don’t know what he picked up on that first day. Or for much of the other 94 (long, oh so very, very long) days we celled together, as the two of us never really had any deep, meaningful conversations. Sometimes the very best you can hope for with a cellie is peace. We mostly had that between us, though this was largely due to an apparently mutually arrived at suspicion that the best thing for us was to spend as little time around each other as possible. I don’t think I was ever completely capable of relaxing around him. Addicts keep a couple of wild cards secreted up their sleeves at all times, and these get dropped on the felt at surprising intervals. I will give Orlop one thing, which I did appreciate: he knew he was a mess, at least on a practical level. He preempted all my conversational planning by coming right out and introducing me to the pack of elephants in the room. “You are going to hear this, so I want you to know I’m a smoker,” he said, almost immediately after the cell door slammed into place behind us. It was the first time I’d been enclosed in a small space with another human being since I was free, two decades ago, and I admit I had to center myself for a moment and resist the urge to push him away. I concentrated instead on Orlop’s almost wistful smile and so was able to note the sadness hidden behind it, as well as the anger behind the sadness. I plopped my mattress down on the iron bunk while I considered my words. I decided to sit and turned to find that Orlop had also found a chair, namely the seat of the toilet. In his defense, given the smallness of the cell, there wasn’t really room for him to go anywhere else. “I noticed already,” I responded, nodding towards his fingertips. Smokers of K2 develop a brownish stain on their digits from the 5F-MDMB-Pinaca, one of the psychoactive ingredients in the drug. “You guys are pretty open about it all. The camera broken?” “It works. Nobody watching, though. Do you smoke?” he asked, hopefully. “No. Look, I’m not your priest, parent, or employer. I’m not telling you how to live, what choices to make. But we both have agendas here, and we need to figure out how to ensure that yours doesn’t impact mine.” I went on to explain a little about my history, and how hard I and many other people had had to work in order to place me in that cell with him. In a pattern that I would find to be regularly repeating itself, I found him receptive, especially to the death row stuff. In our morally dyslexic world, capital murderers get some kind of automatic respect afforded to them, the survivors of the row more than most. He seemed to understand my main concerns and swore that he would only smoke in the house when I wasn’t there, and that he would clean up his mess. I admit to not knowing what he meant by that last, but he soon cured me of my naivete. 

I wasn’t sure what he actually intended to do, but I felt the conversation had gone about as well as I could have hoped. From there we moved on to matters practical, and he filled me in on how the program worked. He repeated Maya’s claim that I probably wouldn’t be enrolled in classes for several months. As he talked, I found myself visually roaming our tiny little cave and then thought about the dayroom. I was already beginning to see the problem that would dominate life in the CITP, which was the utter pointlessness of the activities in the dayroom. I wasn’t disappointed, exactly. Even months later as I write these words, I have never felt disappointment. Having lived so long in the gray nothingness of solitary confinement, I have learned to feel a great deal of gratitude over the small privileges afforded to me in population. At the same time, the Thomas of April 2024 was on to something about life in that program: it really was ridiculously overcrowded in the dayroom, and the administration really was particularly tone-deaf to our basic needs. I had moved from a world of one option for existence — my cell — to one of two — my cell and the dayroom. I am learning that the trick in prison is always, always to find the third option, whether that means a good job, classes, a visit, a trip to the library, whatever. That third option is going to be the thing that gets you away from the confines of the cell and the swirling vortex of drama that exists in the dayroom, and it just might be the thing that gives you some sense of meaning and purpose. 

It was harder to locate this third option in the CITP than in many other contexts because the administration didn’t view us as general population inmates, not quite. In the TDCJ classification grades exist on a spectrum of G1 to G5. G1s are pretty rare in my experience. These are so-called “outside trustees”, men who live in compounds usually outside of the prison’s walls. The only thing separating them from an admittedly very temporary freedom is a bad choice. G2s are the majority of prisoners, and when people say “general population” in the TDCJ, they almost always mean G2. G3s are inmates with long sentences. All prisoners with more than 50 years must serve ten years as a G3 before being upgraded to G2 status, though those of us with LWOP are never capable of such a promotion. G3s do many of the same things as G2s — they sit in the same chow halls, for instance, and often live in the same sections — but are heavily restricted in what types of jobs they are allowed to work, and only very rarely are allowed to attend any kind of classes. G4s are considered “close custody”, which means they have only limited options for movement. You become a G4 by committing a major disciplinary infraction. You are limited in how much you can spend at commissary and have only a few hours of time daily in the dayroom. You will not work a job at all. G5s are even more limited. Both G4s and G5s have cellies. The only class worse than G5 is administrative segregation. 

The wardens at Ellis Unit basically viewed participants in the CITP as being G4 inmates. This is a major departure from how such enrollees are treated at the same program at the Ramsey Unit, where the administration views everyone as G2s in process. Whereas we continued to wear the one-piece jumpsuits used exclusively in admin-seg, at Ramsey they wear the same shirts and pants as the guys in gen pop. Whereas they are given access to the media store on the tablet (i.e., they have access to music, movies, games, expanded telephone privileges, etc.), we were only given the same minimal applications already available to us in seg. Participants at Ramsey have the same recreation, commissary, and late-night dayroom privileges as population, while we were restricted to the same norms found in G4 wings. I can’t help but to wonder if this pessimistic view of our potential and the complete lack of incentives for positive growth had something to do with the high washout rate of my peers that I was soon to witness. 

These differences became apparent to me over time, but it probably should have been obvious to me that all was not well in the CITP simply by noticing that the program was housed in one of the B wings in the first place. B1 was where the GRAD (Gang Renunciation and Divestment) program was located, and those guys are definitely considered close custody until graduation. B2 and B4 were both the designated G4 halls for the unit, so officers assigned to the B sections pretty much came to view us all as troublemakers. Unfortunately, many lived up to that label. The overall feeling of the program was one of liminality, a halfway state between those being punished and those escaping punishment, those on a downward trajectory and those climbing their way back up. 

Orlop was a pretty good example of this. On one level, he had (somehow, miraculously, suspiciously) managed to avoid having a major case written on him for two years. On the other, he was a walking billboard for the concept of acedia, sloth in the pursuit of virtue. Like many of the men in the TDCJ who were betrayed by the social contract — bad schools, broken parental relationships, underfunded neighborhoods, and so forth — Orlop wasn’t even completely aware that he was supposed to be aiming for virtue, that this was what he owed both to the people he had harmed as well as to the best version of himself. Rules were a pack of wolves. He watched them warily, and kept his distance, because he knew they had teeth. But what he really wanted was for them to go far, far away. Even if he graduated the program, he wasn’t going to have been changed by it. The view from a cell at a redbrick unit is completely distinct from those in seg. Instead of a massive steel door, only bars interrupted my ability to see outside the cell. Instead of a concrete cave, I looked out upon a three-story set of windows, which gave me a view of the grass on the rec yard. There isn’t much of the color green in solitary, and my fingers itched to dig into the dirt and feel something living. There was something about the presence of life growing amidst all that concrete that gave me hope. They had buried me, too, in concrete, but it turned out that against all expectations I was a sort of seed, and I had sprouted. That is rather low-hanging fruit in the land of metaphors, I know. It isn’t wrong, for all of that. The view so captivated me that I spent the majority of the afternoon hours sitting on my bunk, watching the birds hunt and peck their way through the greenery as the sky faded from lilac to indigo. 

It was easy to notice the advent of evening because Orlop had sold the cell’s lightbulb for drugs, and I hadn’t been allowed to bring my lamp. Ever since a prisoner escaped from a transfer bus a few years ago, prisoners on transport are very limited in what we can take with us when we are moved; everything else gets shipped to you later, months down the road. On another day I might have found that to be annoying, but outside of a big-ass asteroid playing bumper cars with the Earth, there wasn’t much that life could have done to anger me on that particular day. “At least I got the toilet fixed,” Orlop said in response to the long look I had given the empty socket. I didn’t know what he meant, so he had to explain himself. Apparently, the administration had installed devices on the toilets a few months prior which would limit them to two flushes per hour. These contraptions weren’t cheap, as they possessed electrostatic plates for buttons, and a ring of LED lights which would activate green when flushing and red when denying a flush. So, naturally, given that two flushes per hour were clearly insufficient for two large mammals and because some people like to connect LED lights to the audio circuits of their radios, so they light up to the beat, a novel industry was born for the guys working in maintenance. For a few bucks, two flushes per hour could become two per minute, and for a few more they’d give you the lights to boot. Orlop didn’t have a radio (yep, he’d sold that, too), so our toilet still had the light show, but the timer was happily rigged. This was, unfortunately, about the only positive thing he ever managed to bring to the cell. 

It had been a very long, emotionally complicated day for me. I expected to be able to fall asleep fairly easily, but in this I was to find my first real difficulty of the day. Orlop wasn’t a particularly noisy individual, but after two decades of sleeping about as alone as it is possible to be in the modern world, I found myself hyper-aware of every shift in the mattress above me, every change in breathing. I inspected myself on this. I didn’t feel threatened by Orlop. Our conversation had been fine. He even seemed to like me. He’d gone to the dayroom for the last in and out and had stumbled back mostly obliterated, so even if he had detested me, he wasn’t in any state to harm anyone. It was just the newness of the thing, I decided, something to be gotten through. In my notes from that first week, I find this in re: the sleep problem: “[Name omitted] used to laugh about how delusional he would get when he’d been up for days on ice [crystal methamphetamine], how he’d see SWAT teams hiding in the bushes and hear people whispering about him. If this goes on for much longer, maybe I’ll be so nuts I actually start to fit in here.” The fitting in bit never really happened, but eventually — four months later and with a different cellie — I was able to find a more or less normal sleeping schedule. Sometimes progress is difficult to measure. Sometimes it definitely is not.

edits: Part 2: “translated in Texanese” changes to “translated into Texanese” Part 5: “that he spend every penny” to ” that he spent every penny” Part 6: Replace the sentence “So, what are the options?” with “So, what can you do?” Part 8: “utterly pointlessness” to “utter pointlessness” Part 9: “One on level” to “On one level” 

To be continued…