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The Professor's Practicum Chapter 11
The initial overwhelming shock of the almost constant yelling that seemed to be going on did wear off as we were herded beside a structure of think glass windows and concrete that jutted into the bottom floor of this building of cages. I figured out that again this fortress inside the fortress that was our prison allowed for officers to observe the animals without the animals having any chance of access to the officers.
There was a small desk at the front of this structure and there was an officer in a uniform which looked more important than the other co's (correction officers) we had seen so far.
Beside the officer there were five brown clad, bald, inmates. These five were sitting on the floor by the officer's desk, and rested their backs against the wall of the officer's bunker.
"PORTER!" the officer shouted to be heard above then den of noise.
"Boss yes Boss" the inmate closest to the desk said as he rose, and with hands grasping opposite elbows, he moved to stand directly in front of the officer.
"Grab the poop sheets on these fish, and bring them here." he was ordered.
With that each of us had the thick plastic envelope that had been hung around our necks as we had gone through the induction process from being stripped, almost all hair removed, and then offered an impressive five minute mental and physical health evaluation. As we had moved from station to station after losing all our hair, paper after paper had been added to this envelope which was returned to hang around our necks as we were processed.
When the porter had removed all our envelopes the porter gave them to the officer, and immediately returned to his place sitting beside the desk.
The officer then spent some time looking at each of our information packets which were in the plastic envelopes. I almost blushed to know that he now had pictures of me naked from almost every angle that could be imagined.
After reading all the packets, the officer wrote something on a form and affixed the new page to the pages already in our official packet.
Looking over at the porter, the officer ordered, not even bothering to look at me. "Take 213 up to B22."
I did not react as I had not yet become accustomed to being a number.
" I guess our new guest is not yet aware of his new name yet. I guess he'll need a little reminder."
The porter had by this time looked at my folder and its porno pictures of me, and grabbed my arm and started to lead me away.
"Just hold dumb shit 213 for a moment. I seem to need to school him on his name here."
The porter made me bend over the desk. The officer gave my butt three strong swats with the little strap and I involuntarily yipped.
"Keep yippin' and I'll just keep swatting. You need to take your correction quietly, and concentrate on following orders, and in the presence of your betters pay attention."
I involuntarily yipped as the pain of the strap well laid on three times across my butt registered to my nerve endings, but which I knew I needed to apologize
"Boss sorry Boss. I'll stay alert from now on."
"Offender I was easy on you as you're new, but I expect you to get with the program fast."
I paused, and then decided another abject apology was in order. "Boss thank you for helping this offender learn."
Now holding my little packet of state supplied hygiene items the porter began leading me to a stairway to the second of the four levels of cells.
As we were walking up the stairs the porter said into my ear, because all this conversation was accomplished with the constant cacophony going on as background. "You got a great assignment. The upper tiers are really hot, and the bottom is really cold, The second tier is the best tier for comfort."
:Thanks." I replied. "I have never been in prison before."
"No shit!" was his reply. "Boi you look so green you almost smell like a new fish that you are."
By this time we had arrived on the walkway down the row of bars. Hands came out of the bars to try to grab me, but there was no way to reach us since we were too far away from the bars, and even the guy with the longest reach could not get more than a foot outside his cage's bared outer wall.
I watched the cell numbers stenciled on the cell doors which were outside the stationary part of the barred outer wall of the cell. Finally we got to B22. My guide who had been holding on to me stopped, looked back down toward the control room, and the door to B-22 opened.
"Inside!" was the porter's order and I walked inside my new home. It was probably 6 foot by 10 foot. It was clearly smaller than my solitary punishment cell in the jail. Right by the bars was the familiar stainless steel sink, toilet combination.
Inside at the back of the cell was a six foot plus black inmate. His bald head was beginning to show some hair growth, and so I guessed he had been here a while.
"WHAT YOU DOING BRINGING WHITEY IN HERE!" he snarled at the porter.
"Don't give me any shit!" the porter snarled back. "You don't like the captain's choice of you cellie, take it up with him."
"SURE AS SHIT I WILL!" he snarled back "Well since whitey is here move his dumb ass in so I can start educating him on proper cell etiquette."
I was given a not too gentle push and now I was inside the cell a good two feet. This was no easy task as the stainless steel toilet sink drinking fountain combination was not only just inside the bars, but there was only inches between it and the bunk. I heard the cell door slide close and lock behind me. I just kept looking at the black man in front of me who look of anger and snarling attack on my intrusion were uppermost in my mind.
I immediately thought of myself as being raped by this black man. He was thinner than I am, but I suspect he had prisoner honed skills in how to control a naïve, white fish like me.
Instead, when the door was closed and the porter had disappeared from the front of the cell, my cell mate looked at me and smiled...yes smiled.
"Look asshole, that dialog is necessary for me to preserve my rep. This is my second trip through this fine hotel, and I am going up for the rest of my life in the caring custody of this great state. I will do what I can to help you adjust to this hell, but whenever any other cons are around I will verbally be after your ass." With that he held out his hand, and we shook hands just like free persons who were meeting for the first time.
"You get the top bunk. You will put your pillow at the back furthest from the bars. That is to save you from being right over the shitter, and also from getting spit at from other cons as they go by the bars. When the porter comes up with your mattress, blanket, and pillow, be sure to thank him.
Porters can make a difference in your life here. Sometimes we are not released for meals, and if a porter wants to let you know you are on his shit list your meal will arrive with his spit on it...and it will be clear that he has spit on it. Sometimes you will also not get anything. You might get a meal that they had already eaten, and there is really no way to protest. You do not report another con to the man. That rep as a snitch will follow you all through the system, and you will always be on everyone's shit list. All the cons will get you whenever they have a chance. You might never be safe in the shower."
I nodded vigorously to show I was paying attention "Thanks
I realized I did not have a name for my cell mate, who had already shown himself to be a valuable resource for my survival. I decided to take the initiative. "My name is Jim Cox." I said as I held out my hand.
My cellie looked at me with a sort of sad expression. SHIT man. You are a green a fish as I have ever seen. This place is not some place where we are neighbors meeting each other for the first time. Here's how you `shake' hands prison style. He grabbed on to my hands, made them into fists, and then we went through a ritual of banging knuckles, He made me practice a couple of times more. After my third attempt, he said at least I would mark me and him by association as a dumb fish, and ready to be scammed and used by the prison wise of this warehouse of prisoners who await being shipped to their places of punishment for the next period of years.
As my prison guide stood looking at me, with a look included both sadness, and laughter. "My birth name is Charles Wilson, but no one who has known me since third grade has ever called me that. The only times I have heard that name since then was when the judge was giving me a sentence. You can call me Stretch, and my homies will use another name, but you as a whitie will never use that name. It is for brothers, and you aint a brother.
I could see why he could be called Stretch, because he was both tall and thin.
"The other cons will give you a name when they get to know you. Just wait. When they ask you what to call you, you can try for a street name, but it would be probably to say Jim. They will already have figured you're a fish, and you'll probably get a name before you leave here. After you are born into prison, which begins here, you might almost forget you previous name, as everyone will call you by your prison name. Boi you are now a totally new person, an offender, and not to be confused with a free person in any way."
By this time our porter had returned carrying a rolled up maybe one inch thick blue plastic "mattress" (the name "mattress" is in quotes here only because it had almost no relationship to a free world mattress), In fact, the mattress was so think, that the cell was not opened, but he unrolled it fed it through the bars to me. Then he pushed my pillow...also a thin imitation of a real one... and a blanket in to me.
"Thanks" I said.
"New York's the name." he informed me.
"Thanks New York" I said.
"Enjoy your stay in this five star hotel." he replied smiling.
Stretch and New York chatted for a minute and during that time I was able to spread out the mattress and the blanket, and place my pillow at the back away from the bars.
Finally, I felt a little tension come away from me. New York seemed a good mentor for me in this strange new world I now had to learn to live in. There was only one little stool by the desk (just like my cell in the jail) and I assumed that it would belong to the senior cell inhabitant, and so I chose to sit on the floor at the back of the cell.
When New York turned around and saw that I had both finished dressing my bunk, and also acknowledged his superior position in the cell. He gave me a smile.
"You know I am a little surprised you got assigned to this tier. Tier B is the best tier in this place because most of the year the top tier is too hot. In the winter and fall it is where the heat goes, and just stays. In the summer, the cool air stays at the bottom, and the floor cells can get cold, and the top stays really hot, Normally the screws put new meat in the top because they do not knew what will happen to them up there. Any con whose been through this part of hell knows the score and will give the captain the look to let him know that he expects to be respected for his experience in the system.
He paused. Then he came out with what my assignment might mean. You got any juice on the other side? You got some great lawyer? You got connections? Everybody's goin' to be after you to figure out how you got this. If you don't want to tell the truth, you better come up with a great excuse because otherwise you will be labeled as a possible snitch or plant, or something else and you will be watched, and will be expected to give a truthful answer in the shower room. If you don't come up with an answer they can buy, you will slip in the shower, and come out bruised, and possibly fucked up."
I realized that the closest to the truth I came in with the more likely that the inmates who had outside connections would be able to find any absolute lies.
"I knew this guy who is a high up in the city police when I was in a class at the university. I figured my speech and vocabulary would show me to be a person who had a college background, and I did remember that the real Jim Cox was indeed a college graduate.
New York looked at me carefully. His answer showed me that New York was a keen observer of body language. He smiled just a little smile. "I need you to shuck open that jumpsuit."
I froze. He seemed like a godsend for me – giving me more about how to really live in prison than I had even heard or learned from the offenders I had helped.
"What?" was my lame reply.
"I need to see you to see if you got the full treatment on intake. You smell a little like some sort of plant... with this favored cell assignment, and you don't sound like the right background for most guests in this lovely place. I need to check out for looks and any wires. Get out of that jumpsuit now."
I looked at him, and saw a cold hardness that I had not seen before.
I shucked the jumpsuit.
"Drop the shorts." was the next order – clear and commanding.
I shucked.
"Turn around." He saw both the fact that I was indeed totally denuded of hair, but when he saw the black and blue bruises from my introductory strapping, he gave a small whistle, and came up and felt my ass where I had gotten my strapping in processing.
"Well if you are a plant, you did get a good butt strapping in process. Those look like Officer Wilson's work. He loves to make an example of one inmate in every group, and that butt shows his style. I guess someone he knew was a plant of any kind would never have gotten his special welcome to prison beating. Turn around, and let me see all of you."
I turned around, and without touching me he looked at my body's used and abused appearance from the processing.
"That sounds like a good story. Where you from?"
"I lived in Indianapolis" I replied.
"Well we'll call you `Indy Smooth.'" cause boy you got a smoothness about you. You got more than you're showing, but I don't need to know much more. For sure as shit, you got the whole treatment on intake.
I said "Thanks. I am just here to do my time. I got six months to five years."
"SHIIIIIT" was New York's reply. "You will just have a little vacation in here. But I bet in six months the system will make an impression on you."
I did not know how to take that remark, and my look of confusion caused New York to smile. "You'll learn a lot in just six months. Odds on that we may meet again. You'll be surprised that even though the state has a lot of prisons, you'll find other cons you know after just a little time when you come back."
He looked at me again, and smiled and then laughed.
"Of course your be back. Once that state decides it owns your ass, it decides that you'll be the patsy when they have to have a victim to convict to clear some crime off the books. Ex-con are a valuable resource for the police department to find someone to get to plead to some crime.
"I am here for a crime I did not commit." New York paused and looked at me, "Don't get me wrong I was committing crimes, but not the one I am back here on. I got picked up, and the cops said, `You're going down. We need someone to cop to this, and you're it.' I have been around the block a few times, and so I negotiated a plea deal with the cops to sell to the prosecutor, and here I am for a dime."
I knew enough prison slang to know that a dine was a ten year sentence.
I nodded. I did not doubt the truth of his statement. Once again, thinking of Officer Jim, I wondered if Jim ever framed a person to cop to a crime.
"Shit." I said to myself. Of course he did. He got to clear a crime off his record, and he removed an embarrassing arrest that resulted in the man's being found innocent – or in police record keeping a failure. I was his replacement of a failure with another success.
At this point, I just sat there thinking. New York let me alone. I had no idea of how long I was there. I became more aware of the increasing amount of yelling and just continual barrage of sound that bounced around the block walls of the inside of the prison house. I finally went past New York working on some crossword puzzle at the desk, and went to the bars. Almost by instinct I grasped the bars, just like in all the prison movies. It was so natural. You grasp the bars that hold you inside. You test them to just be sure that there is no chance that somehow some weakness might exist in that cage which holds you helpless to the will and whim of others.
As I was standing there unconsciously playing out my thoughts that even working with inmates and talking about their experiences, I realized how little anyone can know of the humiliation, the debasement, and feeling of anger, the feeling of helplessness without experiencing it in person. I have heard it said that prison changes a person. A few days in jail, but absolutely one day in the tender custody and care of the state had changed me forever. Never would I look at a police person without a sense of fear. I now knew more clearly how the police can start a person on this experience that so makes a citizen into a sub citizen object with no privacy, no rights, and no dignity. How easy and how ignorant are those who work with prisoners to say "I understand what you are experiencing." In the new base level of discourse which I now found came to me so naturally I would now say, "Asshole you don't know shit."
The Professor's Practicum Chapter 12
I do not know how long I held onto those bars, lost in my thoughts. I was brought out of my self-absorption by Stretch.
"They ain't goin' any place, and neither are you."
I realized that somehow I had been drawn to those bars, and I was looking out, not really thinking. It must be something from the deepest and most basic self that makes you react to being caged. Suddenly I thought: "Just like an animal!" I remembered seeing on television a documentary about wild animals being caught and caged. I remembered how the animals paced, and the tigers and the big cats attacked the bars themselves.
I realized that the human animal still has a kinship to all the other intelligent, 0 thinking animals of the world. When caged you test the cage. Animals instinctively hate cages, and this was clearly a cage.
I wondered why I didn't have this reaction in the jail, when I had those walls around me. Perhaps because walls are familiar--walls often surround us. But bars and the bars of a cage--that returns the human animal to the instinctual beginning of humanity's ascent into civilization and the mastery of others, the mastery of beasts we have caged.
These thoughts went through my mind in just a moment of time. Then I was in the real world, where I had to turn and offer a lame reply to cover what my real thoughts were. "Just checking," I said. "You never know when some shoddy work has been done by some lazy worker."
Stretch again gave me the pained look, the look that said, "What did I do to the MAN to get saddled with this dumb piece of shit!"
What he said was, "I wouldn't say that too often and too loud. Those bar panels there - those are made at the state prison by inmates like you. And if they send you there, you might just get your turn on the assembly line. Big joke, huh? You can get a chance to make your own cage. And trust me, the screws check out every one of those bars. They rap em and smack em, and they do all kind of electronic stuff. Any inmate crew that sends out a . . . whadid you call it? a SHODDY panel, their asses pay for that mistake. Their asses get the SWAT. And if the screws think they meant to fuck up, first they get their asses burned and then they get the HOLE. Yeah, you can trust those bars. This cage is one thing you can definitely trust."
He was standing with a hand resting on one of the side walls. Then he stretched out his other arm and touched the other wall, easy. I gulped. The cell was just that narrow. His knuckles tapped the wall. It was steel, and it made that cold, hard sound, like the side of a big truck that doesn't even echo. The wall was that thick. "If the screws forgot and left us here, you could yell all you wanted to. But we'd stay right here, dying behind those bars. Yeah, it's pretty funny, when you think about it."
I'd wanted to ask him what "the hole" was really like because I knew that the convicts I had helped with their cases had sometimes brought up the Hole, and I knew it was a punishment they truly disliked or perhaps feared, but what "THE HOLE" really was like I did not know. I decided not to move the conversation from information I needed to survive here.
"Do we eat in the cells," I asked, "or do we go someplace else?" I realized I hadn't had either breakfast or lunch at this point.
"We dine out!" Stretch said, imitating what he thought would be some elegant free person's remark. "I guess you didn't see the restaurant on your way in here. Just down the block. They open the bars, tier by tier, and we stroll down the steps. UNescorted."
"WOW," I thought. "We are actually allowed to walk down one level without being cuffed and manhandled."
I must have looked pleased, because he continued, "Just keep your hands on your elbows, the way you saw New York do it. Any time you're outta the cell, walkin' or standin', if you ain't got nothin' in your hands—that you're SUPPOSED to be carryin'--you do the hands on the elbows thang."
I could hardly think of anything more immobilizing, more humiliating. "Why?" I said. "Who knows why they do anything? But this routine is just to keep your hands locked up. Keep em from passin' a note. Keep em from pointin' a shiv." A shiv. He meant a knife. I knew that much from watching movies.
"Anyway, you just follow the crowd. Grab a tray, and the kitchen cons will throw you some chow. Then you will find a seat. Normally you would eat with your cellie; however, you will NOT eat with me. No whitey sits at a table with the bruthas. Only exception is, if the whitey has been punked; so, he belongs to a brutha that is sittin' there. You can tell, cuz the whitey will sit with his hands to his sides. When all the bruthas have taken whatever they might want from the whitey's tray, the whitey's owner will give his white boy permission to eat whatever is left. His owner also will let the whitey know whether he can use his fork or he can go ahead and use his fingers.
"Right now, ain't no white punks in here. So you whiteys can go to your white tables and the bruthas will go to our tables. Sit at your white table, and they will ask you `bout how Stretch is treatin' you. You will tell them honkies that Stretch is treatin' you like shit. He has required you to stand at the bars, then stand at the back of the cell. He has given you duties like cleaning the toilet every day, and otherwise, he's ignored your ass. And then you will dummy up. And the reason why you will be doin' all this is cuz I have really gone out of my WAY for you, cuz I seen you was so PATHETIC that I was overwhelmed with PITY for your ass."
He was laughing and sneering at me, but I realized he was the most human person I had met since the judge pronounced sentence. I would follow his lead and say what he told me, and then I would dummy up. I might get in trouble with the whites, but I wouldn't repay Stretch's kindness with disobedience.
"Yes sir," I said. "Thank you. I won't say anything more than you told me today."
"You won't enjoy the meal. Not with the other cons grilling you. They'll grill you about your family, if you got any, and whether you got commissary funds more than the state's ten bucks, and what connections you got on the outside----meaning gang connections. Since you ain't got no gang tats, they know you ain't organized. But you might be told to ask for a transfer to a white cell. If that happens, you should be seen doing that. However don't say, I've been instructed by a gang to ask for a transfer,' which you're just stupid enough to say. Some a these guards, they got gang connections themselves. What you say is, Sir I need a transfer--I been put in a cell with an n-word.' Then you'll be told that you will not be here long enough to worry about it, and that the DOC will decide where you are celled and who you are celled with, and offenders will do as they're told, and shut the fuck up.
"Mostly, though, you'll just be told to `Fuck off!' when you try to sit with them crackers. The good thing is, you have only a few minutes to eat. If you're lucky, the other cons won't have time to really interrogate you."
I nodded my understanding. Without my saying it I tried to let Stretch know that again I was hugely in his debt. It was not too long after Stretch had educated me about what to expect that the loudspeakers shrieked into life. It was like trying to hear one of those announcements in an airport. Your life might depend on it, but at first all you can hear is random syllables.
The second time around, I made out, `Tier B, Cells 1 through 25! Prepare for cell opening!'" Stretch told me to stand behind him, and when the cell door opened to follow him out, then do a turn toward the left, and follow the inmates from 1 to 21 down the tier, down the stairs, and directly to the end of the cell block and through the mess room doors.
With a convenient clang of steel against steel, the bars slid open. I would have been relieved to see that happen, but there was no blue sky on the other side of them—just a river of brown-colored men, trudging along the catwalk with their hands on their elbows. I put my hands there too, and the river swept me along, down the stairs, and through an aperture in the far wall that opened into the mess room. "Mess" reminded me of Air Force guys in a movie. They always smoke a last cigarette in the officers' mess, before climbing into their planes and doing heroic things up in the big blue sky. But this "mess" wasn't the home of heroes. It was a concrete box with slick white tiles, like you see in a latrine, going halfway up the walls; a line of windows, fenced with bars, running along the top; and a steel counter blocking off one end. Behind the counter were three young men in browns, each with the familiar hands-on- opposite-elbows stance. Convicts. But these cons were special; they were wearing those little white paper caps that workers wear in cheap cafeterias. I could barely remember going into one of those places; the only cafeteria I went to was the one in the faculty club, where nice ladies smiled and asked what I wanted today. In this place, you grabbed a plastic tray out of a tall steel stack, and as you passed in front of the surly, bored young men with their little white caps sliding forward on their bald white skulls, they dropped things onto your tray. They didn't need to ask what you wanted; everybody got the same. As I finished going through the line I noticed that after about six other walking bald inmates, there was a break in the line. Immediately all the servers put down their spoons and assumed the hands grasping arms stance. If you were outside the cage, apparently a bald inmate better be hands on elbows,
Everything went as Stretch had prepared me to expect. I immediately walked toward a series of tables where only whites were sitting. Every table had four seats—steel stools, no backs--and both the table and the stools were bolted to the floor. It looked like everybody else knew where to head. I hunted anxiously for an open seat. Then I spotted one. I went for it.
"Next table fish! This one's taken." Another guy slid into the seat. A few feet away, I discovered an empty table and sat down, momentarily thankful. I looked down at my tray. There was no knife or fork—only a plastic spoon. Automatically, I rose to go back and ask for the silverware. Then I realized—convicts don't get silverware. They don't get knives or forks. They don't even get metal spoons. They get plastic spoons. I grabbed my plastic spoon and tried to cut into the unidentifiable meat on my tray. The meat resisted my efforts. I resorted to sticking the stiff little slab into my mouth, in an attempt to tear it apart. I was marginally successful. A tasteless glob of something headed down my throat. If it had been meat at one time, whatever had been done in its preparation had turned it into a good approximation of a hockey puck.
As I was doing my best to eat my first prison meal, I thought that now that I knew the difference between jail and prison— I liked the jail meals more. After I had managed to consume part of the meat, I tried other parts of my rations. There were some things like peaches, which were long on syrup and short on fruit. Finally there was a blob of something I guessed was supposed to be mashed potatoes. They were almost as hard as the meat.
That was the meal. As I struggled to get it down, three other whiteys joined me. They also began eating the meal, but, in between chewing, I was asked, "What's your name, fish?"
I answered, "Jim Cox."
"Time?" I figured this was referring to my sentence. "Six months to five years." "SHIT, a damn part timer. How'd you get such a fuckin' sweetheart deal?"
"It was my first conviction, and my lawyer made a deal with the prosecutor."
"Public defender?"
I was not prepared for this question. I knew I'd better have a quick answer. I didn't know any public defenders, but I did know some defense attorneys, and so I said, "My own lawyer."
"SHIT! I shoulda seen you were some rich fart that can afford a private lawyer, and git you a pud sentence." There was a general discussion of lawyers and of rich people.
"Yeah, but what about this Extended Sentence shit? This dude just come in. He must be . . . eligible."
"That's right, man. I sneaked in under the wire—thing don't apply to me. You neither--I know you been here a while. But I guess this dude's got enough cash, his lawyer can buy him out of it."
I wasn't sure whether they actually thought I was rich, or if this was just what they'd say to anybody who got a shorter sentence than they did. Eventually, though, they came closer to a point, and I started hearing things like, "I think you need to realize that a lot can happen to a guy in prison," and "With all that money, you might wanta be generous to the rest of us guys," and "Hate to see some accident happen to you that would land you in the infirmary," and "Weird things can happen in the showers, even to an old piece of ass."
I was not prepared for this gambit, but I had read and talked to enough stand up offenders to know that if did not stand up for myself, I would be labeled a punk and accept being used by every other con.
"Well, I don't have any money," I said, "at least Not any more. And other guys can have accidents around the cells and in the showers, just as easy as I can." It was partly a bluff. I had taken judo classes years ago. I remembered some of the moves. I decided that if I had to, I would try to use them on whoever decided to attack me. I would hope to make enough noise that guards would come in. I thought to myself, "This plan sucks, and I might not live through it, but I have to establish myself or lose all self-respect—as well as mark myself as the weakling everyone else can victimize."
I forced myself to look down, confident about my threat, and go on plowing through my "food." It was a good thing I didn't have to think of more things to say. I'd only been sitting there for about 10 minutes when a bell rang, and I heard an officer yell, "RETURN TRAYS! LINE UP--CELL ORDER! DO IT NOW!"
Everybody stood up, grousing like they must have done every time it happened, and jammed their trays back into the racks. Their trays all looked empty. Mine was more than half full.
I picked Stretch out of the crowd and moved into line behind him. He was standing hands-to-elbows. I stood that way too—one more robot on the assembly line. But apparently our trip down to our dinner had been too ambling and unorganized for someone in charge. The trip back would be more disciplined. "MARCHING IN PLACE—BEGIN! RIGHT. LEFT. RIGHT. LEFT. RIGHT LEFT." We stomped right to left foot as ordered, and finally we seemed to get it sort of in order. The officer could now throw the switch and start us in motion. "FOREWARD! BACK TO THE BLOCK! UP THE STAIRS!" In much less than military precision, we began the ordered journey.
Up the stairs we went, and down the tier. Up ahead, you could see sets of two offenders turning off into each cell. Stretch was in front of me, and I turned when he did. Now we were back "home." And when we had all been returned to our home address, they made sure we were there, and there we would stay. The doors clanked shut; we were locked inside; then an officer came down the line. I heard him shouting at each cell: "SOUND OFF!", and as he got closer I heard two sets of numbers shouted back from inside every cell. The officer came to the front of our cell. Stretch shouted "100914," and I followed with "117213." The officer walked on. 100914 and 117213 were safe for the night in cell B22.
Clearly, Stretch had been here a while before, and now in returning he had received his old number. My number was new. But it wouldn't always be that way. If what they said was true, it could be with me for a long time, a long, long . . . "Hey! What's the matter with you, whitey? You gonna stand there, starin' at your bunk?" Stretch was already lying down, filling the space between the steel wall of the cell and the steel posts of the bunk stack.
The truth was, now that I was locked back in my cage, I didn't know what to do. There was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to think except wonder whether I should try to get up in that top bunk - my bunk. I hadn't actually been on my bunk. I had spread the mattress (an honorary term...that thin piece of plastic with some lumpy filling didn't deserve its name, and neither did that hard plastic pillow), but I was wondering how I could launch myself up there. I'd never had a bunk before.
Stretch shot me an amused look. "If you're wondering about whether to step on my rack, honky, I'd advise you against it. Put one foot on the rim of the toilet, and swing up from there. But first, get outta them shoes and put em next to mine, at the back of the cell - sox inside the shoes. Then strip down to your boxers, and fold your tee and your browns and stow them at the foot of the bunk, next to the bars—and don't get em on mine, boy. If they aren't there, the screws will fuckin' open the cell, give you a good swat with the strap or maybe the baton, and tell you how to deal with clothes that belong to the state."
I stood on one foot, then on the other, and got out of my shoes. Man, what a relief! Those things must have been made for a steelworker or something worse—except that a steelworker would never put his feet inside anything as heavy and misshapen as those black blocks of cement-grade leather. Then I started stripping out of my browns. When you watch those square hard clothes with INMATE stenciled across them leaving your body, you get the illusion that you're no longer a convict. Then you look up and see that you're still in that steel cage.
"You gotta shit or piss?" Stretch said.
I suddenly realized that I had not done either all day. Of course I'd had little to eat or drink. I'd also been too busy with other things—like being terminally scared and confused. So I decided to try to piss before I climbed up. I managed to do it, standing in front of the bars, where anyone that passed could stand and watch the monkey in his cage. There was no escape. Thinking about that, I no longer had a need to shit. My bowels were like iron. "I'm done," I said. "You better try to shit," Stretch said. "At night, they shut off the water supply to the toilets. You can shit after lights out, but you can't flush. And I don't want to wake up at night smelling your crap."
I squatted down on the cold steel rim—there was no "seat" on these toilets-- and as he watched I strained to expel something. I finally got out a few pebbles of shit. I reached around to the little round hole into which a roll of toilet paper fitted . . . just like jail. I wiped my butt and put the toilet paper in the bowl, like always--but this time I had an audience. For the first time since I was a child, I had to perform excretion in public and under evaluation for my performance.
Stretch then got up and sat on the steel rim. He pissed and shat right away. I turned my head to the wall to give him some privacy, but I couldn't help inhaling his smell. When you're locked in with it, in a place the size of a closet, there's no place to hide from that stench.
Stretch took his time getting up. "I guess you didn't know about this. In here, even your pissing and shitting are subject to . . . inspection and observation. If you think this is bad, wait till the days when they have female screws walking the tier. The cells next to the stairs try to warn everybody when a female is coming, but some of these bitches get off on walking down the line and catching some guy sitting on the can. You learn to accept it. You're an offender--no part of you is private. Guards watch you piss and shit, and they can even shut down the toilets so you can't flush your shit out of your house. Anyhow, like I said, there's a certain whistle, and when that comes from one or the other end of the tier you'll know that one of these bitches is on the prowl for an inmate to humiliate. Unless you don't think it's humiliating to have to do your toilet functions while some bitch is watching you want to get done and off the shitter as soon as possible. That's why these bitches wanta be guards—they finally got the power. They got the ultimate power."
I'll bet my friend Jim used to laugh when he heard some guard telling how she caught some inmate wiping his ass, and how she came up with some witticism to show that the inmate had no privacy, now that he was under the absolute power of the state and its designated officer to watch, control, humiliate, and degrade--to be certain that the inmate understood that the state might talk reformation, but it really wanted humiliation and subjugation. And Jim must have done it himself—laughed while he looked through the bars at an inmate sitting on that steel rim, straining to shit while an officer grinned back at him. Stretch slid into his bunk, and I put my foot back on the toilet rim, to get up to my own bunk. I had to be careful as I did not want to literally "step in it." I know both Stretch and I had flushed, but the thought of having my foot get a shitter bath was scary to me. I made it without a slip, and now I was in the little box that is all a convict gets for his bedroom—bars at his feet, steel by his side, steel under his ass, and another sheet of steel on top of him like a coffin lid, right above his nose.
You can't really sit up in the top bunk, but I finally got my legs squirmed in underneath my blanket. No sheets—just that thick, scratchy horse blanket, and that little plastic mattress between me and the steel shelf I was supposed to sleep on. I leaned my head on my puny plastic pillow and tried to comprehend just how awful my life was. "If I hadn't allowed my penis to do my thinking, I would be at home right now, lying on super silky sheets, watching late-night comedy, and free to piss and shit any time I wanted to, in complete privacy." Then I realized how far I'd gone. I'd come to the place where I'd be ecstatic just to piss and shit by myself. "Damn I'm dumb," I thought. "Damn I'm dumb."
About that time, the loudspeakers woke up again. "TOILETS SHUT OFF IN ONE MINUTE" it barked. After what I assumed to be a minute, a bell started echoing around the walls. Then there was a sort of loud thud, and immediately almost all the lights went out. I would guess the time was no later than 10:00 p.m. I was used to staying up until 1:00 a.m. or even 3:00 a.m., reading, writing, watching movies, then catching a comedy show before I dozed off. Now I would go to bed, and I would sleep on a schedule not my own, a schedule that had no relation to my entertainment. But this day had been so terrible, physically and emotionally, that I went to sleep almost as soon I got myself wrapped up in my blanket and my head had found my mini-pillow. I was asleep.
CHAPTER 13
Suddenly there was this loud, irritating bell. I wondered, "What the hell! I don't have a bell like that. Who's come to my house to make this outrageous racket?" Then I really did wake up. Above me was a sheet of steel. Under my back was a slick, hard piece of plastic. My chest and legs were buried under something harsh and heavy. I looked down past my feet, and I saw a wall of bars. Around me, I heard piss splashing, shit dropping, toilets flushing. It was like I'd been locked in a restroom for the night. Then I remembered--I was in prison. I could hear Stretch moving in the bunk below. "You need to piss bad, fish?" "No sir," I replied, acknowledging Stretch's superiority and seniority in my new home. "Good. I'm pretty regular. I piss and shit first thing. Senior man in the cell," he sighed with satisfaction, "gets first use of the toilet. You keep in the rack until you hear this toilet flush. Then you turn over and climb down and do whatever you need to do." When it was my turn, I just needed to piss. I realized that yesterday I had survived on only one so-called meal. I had missed breakfast in the jail, as we left before it was served. During what should have been lunch time, I had gone through the hell of processing, and far from being fed, I had experienced just the opposite. My alimentary canal had been thoroughly cleaned out, and I had had to experience without protection having fingers and thermometers and other probes stuck up my ass. Finally I had had dinner here, but I had been able to eat very little. My stomach was growling, but remembering yesterday's meal, I was not looking forward too much to breakfast. When I snapped out of my mental review of yesterday, I saw that Stretch was staring at me. Which wasn't a surprise, since I was just standing at the toilet, my dick in my hand, looking down at it and the liquids stinking in the can. Right then, I was thinking about how weird my dick looked, sticking out that way, without any hair to protect it. "Well," he said, "I seen fish do a lotta strange things while they're learning to be a prisoner, but that pose is a new one. I guess you're in some other world over there, looking into the toilet and holding your own dick." Snapping back into this hellish new world, all I could do was hurriedly stuff my cock back in my boxers, and reach for my stack of browns. Until you put on your browns, you can pretend to yourself, for a minute, that you just stopped in to use the can, or that you are one of those nice, well- meaning visitors like I used to be, just getting to know an offender or two, or that you are on your way to the showers in some primitive kind of gym. But when you put on your browns, you know that this is a prison, and you are a prisoner, and this is your prison uniform. Now you are one of the offenders that you are getting to know, and this is one of your ways of doing that. Pulling the brown shirt that says INMATE down over your chest . . . sticking your legs into those brown inmate trousers—which is easy, since there's no belt to worry about, just elastic . . . pulling them up over your cock . . . then looking down at your body, the way it is now . . . Yeah, you think, this is a convict. I am a convict. If I were back at my own house, the house I owned, I'd be looking through my wardrobe for a shirt and slacks that would complement each other and project a quiet dignity. I would never dream of wearing a shirt of exactly the same color as my slacks. Or wearing thick, clodhopper shoes. Or being shaved bald. This morning, however, I didn't have to choose my clothing. It had all been done for me. And the color scheme was simple—it was completely the same, top and bottom. It projected insignificance. It projected a dumb subservience. It projected an ability to line up and be caged with all the other offenders who were wearing the same color of dirt. "Yeah," I said. "I guess yesterday was almost too much for me. What comes next in this entrance to the inferno?" That was my oblique reference to Dante, which I didn't expect Stretch to recognize. "Well," he said, with that same quizzical look, "this is about as close to hell as anybody would like to get." There was something about the way he said it that made me feel again that there was much more to Stretch than he ever let show. "What comes next?" I said. "The Count." "Really? They really think one of us did a Star Trek and beamed out of here last night?" Stretch gave me his half smile again. "Must be. I never figured any reason for it myself, and that reason is as good as any." He was right. Now the loudspeakers were on again. "INMATES WILL STAND AT THE BARS AND RESPOND TO THE COUNT!" Stretch took the more open space next to the toilet. I moved to the narrow space between the end of the bunk and the bars. I heard the cadence as it approached us. "B15, SOUND OFF!" "B16, SOUND OFF!" I wondered why it had to be shouted. The officer could only be four, maybe five feet from the bars of the cage, even if he were standing by the guard rails at the edge of the walkway. However, I was coming to understand that if some action was the rational and reasonable one, that would be the one that would be totally rejected by prison authorities. "116198 SIR!" a convict shouted back. "116198 present for count," an officer repeated, bored and surly, as if any time he spent saying it was so much time he couldn't spend smoking and texting. But inmates were not permitted to be bored or surly. They had to respond with alacrity. "117156 SIR!" "117156 present for count." Once I got the idea of the count, I fell back in my world of thoughts. How would I be using my own time right now, if I wasn't stuck to the bars, waiting to shout my number? I'd be eating my cereal and pouring myself a second glass of orange juice. I'd be going over my schedule for the day, planning my appointments. Seminar, office hours, student advisees, maybe an interview with the newspaper . . . "B22! SOUND OFF!" Suddenly an officer's uniform appeared on the other side of the bars, blocking the light in front of me. The face on top of it did not look happy. Another officer stood in front of Stretch. That face didn't look happy either. "B22 !" bellowed the first officer, reminding me of my address. "Report for count!" "100914 SIR!" Stretch dutifully replied. "100914 present for count," the second officer intoned as he marked something on his clipboard. "117213 . . . SIR!" I shouted, trying to sound as loud and confident as the others I had heard respond. I wondered whether making his response as loud as he could was the one way a prisoner could make himself feel almost a citizen. For that moment, anyway. "117213 present for count." The officer noted my indication that this piece of state property was stored where required by the inventory list. We had performed to specifications, although we had to stand by the bars until the count was complete. Stretch smiled at me and said in a carefully low voice, "Nice job kid. Thought you were gonna lose it there for a second." "Yeah, almost," I said. But I felt pride that I had not brought dishonor to our cell. "A11! Sound off!" "C28! Sound off!" I became more aware that the scene going on down our range was being repeated above and below us. I looked to see if we were dismissed, but Stretch wasn't moving and so neither did I. We remained facing the bars. I soon noticed that I'd gone back instinctively to the caged man's behavior—I was gripping the bars with both hands and peering out between them, as if there were anything on the other side that I wanted to see. What I saw was a lead- pipe railing, then an empty space-- the drop-off to the floor below--then a concrete wall with a line of thin windows, too thin and too full of bars to make out anything except the greenish color of a field at some indeterminate distance from the bars that were pressing against my chest. If a camera man came by, he would have a perfect picture of a Locked Down Convict. Finally I heard the shout: "TIER A COUNT CLEAR." Then another: "TIER B COUNT CLEAR." THEN ANOTHER: "TIER C COUNT CLEAR." "Inmates prepare for mess!" was the order that boomed from the speaker system. I looked at Stretch for some idea of what that order meant. "We have fifteen minutes to shave and if you ain't pissed and shit before Count, you gotta that done. I shave first." I sat on my second floor bunk and watched while Stretch used the cold water to shave. I noticed he had shaving cream. He finished his preparations by making sure his brown trousers were straight and his white tee was straight and showed correctly underneath his brown pullover shirt. I'd noticed that his number was inked in, small but visible, on his shirt tale. Now I noticed it on the inside of the waistband on his trousers. "Oh yeah," he said. "Today New York will come by with a clothing marker. He'll tell you to have all clothing marked by the next time you're out on tier. It's so your clothes don't get lost in the wash." He paused. "I'll help," he added. Once again, I was thankful for one decent person in my new world. The more I thought about Stretch, the more I decided he was actually one of the better people I had known in my life. Even though I had worked with many inmates, I had to admit to myself that I did feel superior to all of them, both as a person and as somebody who was "giving of himself" to others "in need." In need of what I had. By this I smugly meant my superior position in society and in intellectual prowess. I told myself that these convicts had shown themselves unable to resist base impulses, whereas I was built of sterner stuff. Now I realized that Stretch was superior to me in almost every way possible. I told myself that in six months, when I escaped from this hell, I would devote myself to helping him. I couldn't do so personally, not without giving myself away, but I could certainly spend the funds and call in favors to be sure he had superior legal representation, would receive every chance for parole as soon as possible, and would have job opportunities after release. I owed him, and I resolved that I would repay. As I was thinking of the nobility of Stretch, New York came to our cage with a paper bag. "Commissary for 117213," he said, glancing briefly at me. "Yo Stretch," he said, and smiled. "Whazzup," Stretch acknowledged. We were three men in brown, but one of us was still on the outside, and that was me. "I haven't ordered any commissary," I said, reminding the porter of my existence. "You didn't have to," he replied. "This order was placed by the state. It's your shower shoes, your shave cream, your soap. All stuff like that." I looked in the bag. Yeah, there was a bar of soap, a little can of shaving cream, an extra pair of boxers, and a pair of rubber flip flops. "I have no money on my books to pay for this" was my irritated reply. The last thing I needed was to get caught stealing something. I didn't mind not shaving for a few days, if that was allowed—although looking at New York's beardless face implied that it probably wasn't. This is when Stretch chimed in. "You remember that ten bucks the state put into your commissary fund?" "Yeah," I replied. Stretch smiled broadly. "Well lemme tell you the state scam. Some dude in the legislature, probly white"—this caught a laugh from New York, who was standing with his hands on his elbows, turning from time to time to see if the officer at the desk could see him hanging out with his buddy— "some dude in the legislature somehow got to wondering about us inmates." "Yeah?" New York sneered. "Yeah. Don't know why. Maybe one a these . . . humanitarians. So he thought, maybe, just maybe, you get some new fish in here, and he's comin' through all bald and naked and shit, and this fish ain't got no cash. No cash, no relatives or shit like that, no commissary." "Yeah, that could happen," New York joked. "So, this dude thinks that possibly, just possibly, this might lead to the fish buyin' all his . . . shaving cream by selling `sexual favors.'" "No shit! That couldn't never happen here!" He leaned in toward the bars, cracking up and trying to keep the officers below from noticing. "No, it couldn't," Stretch continued. "But anyway, that's what these ignorant honkies think. So what he does, he gets the state to give every fish a brand new $10 credit in the commissary. Which is cool, right? We should all be on our knees, thankin' this honky. So then what happens? The DOC just reduces what they give us in those little bitty tiny little Induction Packages, which is what they call your toothbrush, fish. And they use the $10 to pay for your shower shoes. And so, like always, the con gets screwed, and the screws get all the money." I was mad; but Stretch and New York were laughing like crazy over the state scam. That was it, all right. For that minute, I thought I was still on the outside. I was the outraged citizen, preparing to write a firm letter to his state representative. But they were on the inside, knowing what all that meant. "Oh man! He seen me! I'm fucked!" New York said, turning back from another glance at the desk below. "I'm outta here!" With his hands still holding his elbows, he strode on down the tier. Right away, the loudspeaker started ordering the tiers to march to breakfast. The day in this warehouse of offenders awaiting assignment to their long term place of punishment went pretty much as I had already experienced. We went to mess three times—"breakfast," "lunch," and "dinner." I was grilled on each of these occasions, and got myself identified as an arrogant son of a bitch. But I didn't need to take Stretch's advice about complaining to an officer about my mixed-race cell assignment. That afternoon, New York came by with a marking pen, and Stretch showed me where to write my numbers on my uniform. The trick was to write them large enough so some laundry geek would see them but small enough so you might not notice them yourself. "Next shower day, they'll hand you your change of browns, and you can have the pleasure of doing it all over again." Yeah, pleasure. Every time I wrote my new name, no matter how small I wrote it, I was writing it deeper and deeper into myself. On my third full day as an RDC con, everything began as usual. We got through breakfast and finally I found a "white" table where my fellow diners just asked the normal stuff...who are you...where are you from...when are you getting out. That's about all that can be done in 10 minutes, besides shoveling prison "food" into your mouth. Breakfast was some mysterious round meat wad, with yellow something that might at some time been a part of an egg, and a piece of bread that could have been used as a component of a building project. This was "toast." Thus my official breakfast was sausage round, scrambled eggs, toast and coffee or orange juice... I forgot to include the orange juice. It was in a little, and I mean maybe two inches high, plastic cuff with some sort of metal top, which I could only get off by putting it in my teeth and pulling. This action amused my table companions. After breakfast we returned to our cage and got ready for inspection. I was with the program now, and knew that my duty in our apartment was to be sure the toilet and sink would pass inspection. I had no idea what would happen if we did not pass inspection, but I knew that officers would have found some way to make this awful place even worse as a consequence. My chief motivation was not to cause Stretch to be disappointed or dissatisfied with me. He clearly saved me from having an even worse time than I was having now. After inspection, I was sitting at the back of the cell, writing more of my observations on some sheets of paper that Stretch had given me. Suddenly there was an officer at the front of our cage. "Offender 100914," he shouted, as if Stretch was on the far end of a football field. "Pack up your shit. You are being transferred to your place of incarceration. Here's your bag. You got five minutes." He pushed in a white plastic sack. It was like the white plastic sacks I used to line my kitchen garbage pail. I was devastated. I relied on Stretch for everything--companionship, safety, and just as much of a feeling of security as I thought I could have in here. Stretch looked down at me, I think with a bit of sadness. "Sorry boy. I guess you're on your own now. Be careful." He didn't say anything more; he just went around the cell and collected his "personals." His bag was still practically empty when the guard came back. This time he was joined by two other guards and a little parade of three other offenders. These were linked together onto one chain, a chain that had a set of handcuffs every two feet or so. It was just like the chain and cuffs I had worn on my trip to the RDC. Stretch knew the drill and as soon as the order to "Cuff up" was given he held the plastic bag in one hand and backed up to the open door to our cell. Very efficiently his wrists were inserted in one of those sets of cuffs, and his hands were locked behind his back. Now he was part of the chain of convicts which, as soon as he cleared the door, began its journey to his permanent home. Wherever that was—nobody said. I watched as long as I could as Stretch and the others were marched along B Tier. They stopped at two other cells, and two other cons were attached to the chain. Then with all six cuffs secured around the wrists of all six convicts, the group shuffled away, on the first stage of their journey out of the Reception and Diagnostic Center to their final place of imprisonment. Stretch sort of looked back once; then they were gone. I repeated in my mind that when my six months were over, Charles Wilson, 100914, would be the object of my generous support of his canteen--I would review his case, his trial, and every aspect of the investigation. I would use my own knowledge and the knowledge of the best criminal and appeal lawyers I knew, people I would pay to find a way to reduce or overturn his sentence, and if there was no possibility...I did know there was a possibility that Stretch had done the crime... then I would be sure that his records would be examined for any clemency and early parole he could be given. AND once Charles was out, he WOULD have a job, a place to live, and as much support as I could give him to stay out of prison in the future. I made this vow with as much emotion...no, perhaps more emotion...than I had ever brought to any resolution before this. At lunch I was so depressed that I ate even less than usual. When I sat down at a white table with only one other inmate there, he looked over at me and to my surprise said, "Saw you lost Stretch this morning." "Yeah. I am really bummed." I realized my reply was not inmate quality. It had no profanity, vulgarity, or macho bravado. The guy then amazed me with, "Stretch was a good guy. Not many in here have any honor. He did." That was it. Stretch was recognized by other experienced inmates as an extraordinary man. After trying to eat something, I just sat there. The others who came after the inmate who made the original comment all nodded at me, but said nothing. I began to think that maybe there was some "honor among thieves"...or at least some imprisoned men. The bell rang. I stood up and stuffed my tray into the rack. Then I went over to the line that was forming to march us back to our cells, where we would be caged for another six hours. We trudged up the stairs, stomping with our right foot first, as for some reason we were required to do. I marched in line, hands on my elbows, stomping along with the others. Back at B22, I stood inside and waited until I heard the door of bars slide shut, locking me inside my cage again, but this time alone. I stood there, and then for the first time sat on the steel seat by the wall. I sat there and felt sorry for myself all over again. I alternated moping and looking through the bars, as if looking would suddenly bring Stretch back. I knew that would never happen. Then I heard the cat calls and shouted comments announcing that a new batch of fresh made state prisoners had arrived. I went to the bars and looked down the tier. I heard all the yelling and banging on the bars. I realized that all that noise was present at some level almost all the time, but by this time I almost ignored it. I sat down to mope some more. Then I heard the pounding of inmate shoes on steel stairs, and I realized that the new batch of convicts was now being distributed. I heard stomping coming toward my cage. I suddenly I had this awful unacceptable thought. One of these new born prisoners was coming into my cell, but I did not want someone else. No one could take Stretch's place, and I wanted to be left alone in my self- pity. But while I was formulating a protest against some new convict coming into my house, the parade stopped at my door. "Back of the cell, 213!" That was the order. I knew I couldn't disobey. My induction experience had convinced me that the free persons who were running this entrance to hell could and would do anything they wanted with me. "SIR yes SIR" was my response. Gone were the brave thoughts of protest. I knew that somewhere in this warehouse of misery there could be a someone who would make my cage seem like a place of pleasure. There was a clanking of chains. One suit of brown was being removed from the other suits of brown. Detached from the group came a bald teenager. He looked at me with the same look of contempt that I am sure covered my own face. "Harris 117236--IN!" Harris 117236 walked in with the sort of swagger I had seen on campus and found particularly irritating. As far as I could tell, teen males who had the least in brains and abilities showed the most attitude. The door closed behind him, and we two were unhappily in the cage together. I realized again how small a prison cell can be. Small, and made of steel. "Yo gramps. What you in for—drivin' your wheelchair without a license?" He laughed, easily amused by his own puerile humor. "No," I said.
The Professor's Practicum Chapter 12
I do not know how long I held onto those bars, lost in my thoughts. I was brought out of my self-absorption by Stretch.
"They ain't goin' any place, and neither are you."
I realized that somehow I had been drawn to those bars, and I was looking out, not really thinking. It must be something from the deepest and most basic self that makes you react to being caged. Suddenly I thought: "Just like an animal!" I remembered seeing on television a documentary about wild animals being caught and caged. I remembered how the animals paced, and the tigers and the big cats attacked the bars themselves.
I realized that the human animal still has a kinship to all the other intelligent, 0 thinking animals of the world. When caged you test the cage. Animals instinctively hate cages, and this was clearly a cage.
I wondered why I didn't have this reaction in the jail, when I had those walls around me. Perhaps because walls are familiar--walls often surround us. But bars and the bars of a cage--that returns the human animal to the instinctual beginning of humanity's ascent into civilization and the mastery of others, the mastery of beasts we have caged.
These thoughts went through my mind in just a moment of time. Then I was in the real world, where I had to turn and offer a lame reply to cover what my real thoughts were. "Just checking," I said. "You never know when some shoddy work has been done by some lazy worker."
Stretch again gave me the pained look, the look that said, "What did I do to the MAN to get saddled with this dumb piece of shit!"
What he said was, "I wouldn't say that too often and too loud. Those bar panels there - those are made at the state prison by inmates like you. And if they send you there, you might just get your turn on the assembly line. Big joke, huh? You can get a chance to make your own cage. And trust me, the screws check out every one of those bars. They rap em and smack em, and they do all kind of electronic stuff. Any inmate crew that sends out a . . . whadid you call it? a SHODDY panel, their asses pay for that mistake. Their asses get the SWAT. And if the screws think they meant to fuck up, first they get their asses burned and then they get the HOLE. Yeah, you can trust those bars. This cage is one thing you can definitely trust."
He was standing with a hand resting on one of the side walls. Then he stretched out his other arm and touched the other wall, easy. I gulped. The cell was just that narrow. His knuckles tapped the wall. It was steel, and it made that cold, hard sound, like the side of a big truck that doesn't even echo. The wall was that thick. "If the screws forgot and left us here, you could yell all you wanted to. But we'd stay right here, dying behind those bars. Yeah, it's pretty funny, when you think about it."
I'd wanted to ask him what "the hole" was really like because I knew that the convicts I had helped with their cases had sometimes brought up the Hole, and I knew it was a punishment they truly disliked or perhaps feared, but what "THE HOLE" really was like I did not know. I decided not to move the conversation from information I needed to survive here.
"Do we eat in the cells," I asked, "or do we go someplace else?" I realized I hadn't had either breakfast or lunch at this point.
"We dine out!" Stretch said, imitating what he thought would be some elegant free person's remark. "I guess you didn't see the restaurant on your way in here. Just down the block. They open the bars, tier by tier, and we stroll down the steps. UNescorted."
"WOW," I thought. "We are actually allowed to walk down one level without being cuffed and manhandled."
I must have looked pleased, because he continued, "Just keep your hands on your elbows, the way you saw New York do it. Any time you're outta the cell, walkin' or standin', if you ain't got nothin' in your hands—that you're SUPPOSED to be carryin'--you do the hands on the elbows thang."
I could hardly think of anything more immobilizing, more humiliating. "Why?" I said. "Who knows why they do anything? But this routine is just to keep your hands locked up. Keep em from passin' a note. Keep em from pointin' a shiv." A shiv. He meant a knife. I knew that much from watching movies.
"Anyway, you just follow the crowd. Grab a tray, and the kitchen cons will throw you some chow. Then you will find a seat. Normally you would eat with your cellie; however, you will NOT eat with me. No whitey sits at a table with the bruthas. Only exception is, if the whitey has been punked; so, he belongs to a brutha that is sittin' there. You can tell, cuz the whitey will sit with his hands to his sides. When all the bruthas have taken whatever they might want from the whitey's tray, the whitey's owner will give his white boy permission to eat whatever is left. His owner also will let the whitey know whether he can use his fork or he can go ahead and use his fingers.
"Right now, ain't no white punks in here. So you whiteys can go to your white tables and the bruthas will go to our tables. Sit at your white table, and they will ask you `bout how Stretch is treatin' you. You will tell them honkies that Stretch is treatin' you like shit. He has required you to stand at the bars, then stand at the back of the cell. He has given you duties like cleaning the toilet every day, and otherwise, he's ignored your ass. And then you will dummy up. And the reason why you will be doin' all this is cuz I have really gone out of my WAY for you, cuz I seen you was so PATHETIC that I was overwhelmed with PITY for your ass."
He was laughing and sneering at me, but I realized he was the most human person I had met since the judge pronounced sentence. I would follow his lead and say what he told me, and then I would dummy up. I might get in trouble with the whites, but I wouldn't repay Stretch's kindness with disobedience.
"Yes sir," I said. "Thank you. I won't say anything more than you told me today."
"You won't enjoy the meal. Not with the other cons grilling you. They'll grill you about your family, if you got any, and whether you got commissary funds more than the state's ten bucks, and what connections you got on the outside----meaning gang connections. Since you ain't got no gang tats, they know you ain't organized. But you might be told to ask for a transfer to a white cell. If that happens, you should be seen doing that. However don't say, I've been instructed by a gang to ask for a transfer,' which you're just stupid enough to say. Some a these guards, they got gang connections themselves. What you say is, Sir I need a transfer--I been put in a cell with an n-word.' Then you'll be told that you will not be here long enough to worry about it, and that the DOC will decide where you are celled and who you are celled with, and offenders will do as they're told, and shut the fuck up.
"Mostly, though, you'll just be told to `Fuck off!' when you try to sit with them crackers. The good thing is, you have only a few minutes to eat. If you're lucky, the other cons won't have time to really interrogate you."
I nodded my understanding. Without my saying it I tried to let Stretch know that again I was hugely in his debt. It was not too long after Stretch had educated me about what to expect that the loudspeakers shrieked into life. It was like trying to hear one of those announcements in an airport. Your life might depend on it, but at first all you can hear is random syllables.
The second time around, I made out, `Tier B, Cells 1 through 25! Prepare for cell opening!'" Stretch told me to stand behind him, and when the cell door opened to follow him out, then do a turn toward the left, and follow the inmates from 1 to 21 down the tier, down the stairs, and directly to the end of the cell block and through the mess room doors.
With a convenient clang of steel against steel, the bars slid open. I would have been relieved to see that happen, but there was no blue sky on the other side of them—just a river of brown-colored men, trudging along the catwalk with their hands on their elbows. I put my hands there too, and the river swept me along, down the stairs, and through an aperture in the far wall that opened into the mess room. "Mess" reminded me of Air Force guys in a movie. They always smoke a last cigarette in the officers' mess, before climbing into their planes and doing heroic things up in the big blue sky. But this "mess" wasn't the home of heroes. It was a concrete box with slick white tiles, like you see in a latrine, going halfway up the walls; a line of windows, fenced with bars, running along the top; and a steel counter blocking off one end. Behind the counter were three young men in browns, each with the familiar hands-on- opposite-elbows stance. Convicts. But these cons were special; they were wearing those little white paper caps that workers wear in cheap cafeterias. I could barely remember going into one of those places; the only cafeteria I went to was the one in the faculty club, where nice ladies smiled and asked what I wanted today. In this place, you grabbed a plastic tray out of a tall steel stack, and as you passed in front of the surly, bored young men with their little white caps sliding forward on their bald white skulls, they dropped things onto your tray. They didn't need to ask what you wanted; everybody got the same. As I finished going through the line I noticed that after about six other walking bald inmates, there was a break in the line. Immediately all the servers put down their spoons and assumed the hands grasping arms stance. If you were outside the cage, apparently a bald inmate better be hands on elbows,
Everything went as Stretch had prepared me to expect. I immediately walked toward a series of tables where only whites were sitting. Every table had four seats—steel stools, no backs--and both the table and the stools were bolted to the floor. It looked like everybody else knew where to head. I hunted anxiously for an open seat. Then I spotted one. I went for it.
"Next table fish! This one's taken." Another guy slid into the seat. A few feet away, I discovered an empty table and sat down, momentarily thankful. I looked down at my tray. There was no knife or fork—only a plastic spoon. Automatically, I rose to go back and ask for the silverware. Then I realized—convicts don't get silverware. They don't get knives or forks. They don't even get metal spoons. They get plastic spoons. I grabbed my plastic spoon and tried to cut into the unidentifiable meat on my tray. The meat resisted my efforts. I resorted to sticking the stiff little slab into my mouth, in an attempt to tear it apart. I was marginally successful. A tasteless glob of something headed down my throat. If it had been meat at one time, whatever had been done in its preparation had turned it into a good approximation of a hockey puck.
As I was doing my best to eat my first prison meal, I thought that now that I knew the difference between jail and prison— I liked the jail meals more. After I had managed to consume part of the meat, I tried other parts of my rations. There were some things like peaches, which were long on syrup and short on fruit. Finally there was a blob of something I guessed was supposed to be mashed potatoes. They were almost as hard as the meat.
That was the meal. As I struggled to get it down, three other whiteys joined me. They also began eating the meal, but, in between chewing, I was asked, "What's your name, fish?"
I answered, "Jim Cox."
"Time?" I figured this was referring to my sentence. "Six months to five years." "SHIT, a damn part timer. How'd you get such a fuckin' sweetheart deal?"
"It was my first conviction, and my lawyer made a deal with the prosecutor."
"Public defender?"
I was not prepared for this question. I knew I'd better have a quick answer. I didn't know any public defenders, but I did know some defense attorneys, and so I said, "My own lawyer."
"SHIT! I shoulda seen you were some rich fart that can afford a private lawyer, and git you a pud sentence." There was a general discussion of lawyers and of rich people.
"Yeah, but what about this Extended Sentence shit? This dude just come in. He must be . . . eligible."
"That's right, man. I sneaked in under the wire—thing don't apply to me. You neither--I know you been here a while. But I guess this dude's got enough cash, his lawyer can buy him out of it."
I wasn't sure whether they actually thought I was rich, or if this was just what they'd say to anybody who got a shorter sentence than they did. Eventually, though, they came closer to a point, and I started hearing things like, "I think you need to realize that a lot can happen to a guy in prison," and "With all that money, you might wanta be generous to the rest of us guys," and "Hate to see some accident happen to you that would land you in the infirmary," and "Weird things can happen in the showers, even to an old piece of ass."
I was not prepared for this gambit, but I had read and talked to enough stand up offenders to know that if did not stand up for myself, I would be labeled a punk and accept being used by every other con.
"Well, I don't have any money," I said, "at least Not any more. And other guys can have accidents around the cells and in the showers, just as easy as I can." It was partly a bluff. I had taken judo classes years ago. I remembered some of the moves. I decided that if I had to, I would try to use them on whoever decided to attack me. I would hope to make enough noise that guards would come in. I thought to myself, "This plan sucks, and I might not live through it, but I have to establish myself or lose all self-respect—as well as mark myself as the weakling everyone else can victimize."
I forced myself to look down, confident about my threat, and go on plowing through my "food." It was a good thing I didn't have to think of more things to say. I'd only been sitting there for about 10 minutes when a bell rang, and I heard an officer yell, "RETURN TRAYS! LINE UP--CELL ORDER! DO IT NOW!"
Everybody stood up, grousing like they must have done every time it happened, and jammed their trays back into the racks. Their trays all looked empty. Mine was more than half full.
I picked Stretch out of the crowd and moved into line behind him. He was standing hands-to-elbows. I stood that way too—one more robot on the assembly line. But apparently our trip down to our dinner had been too ambling and unorganized for someone in charge. The trip back would be more disciplined. "MARCHING IN PLACE—BEGIN! RIGHT. LEFT. RIGHT. LEFT. RIGHT LEFT." We stomped right to left foot as ordered, and finally we seemed to get it sort of in order. The officer could now throw the switch and start us in motion. "FOREWARD! BACK TO THE BLOCK! UP THE STAIRS!" In much less than military precision, we began the ordered journey.
Up the stairs we went, and down the tier. Up ahead, you could see sets of two offenders turning off into each cell. Stretch was in front of me, and I turned when he did. Now we were back "home." And when we had all been returned to our home address, they made sure we were there, and there we would stay. The doors clanked shut; we were locked inside; then an officer came down the line. I heard him shouting at each cell: "SOUND OFF!", and as he got closer I heard two sets of numbers shouted back from inside every cell. The officer came to the front of our cell. Stretch shouted "100914," and I followed with "117213." The officer walked on. 100914 and 117213 were safe for the night in cell B22.
Clearly, Stretch had been here a while before, and now in returning he had received his old number. My number was new. But it wouldn't always be that way. If what they said was true, it could be with me for a long time, a long, long . . . "Hey! What's the matter with you, whitey? You gonna stand there, starin' at your bunk?" Stretch was already lying down, filling the space between the steel wall of the cell and the steel posts of the bunk stack.
The truth was, now that I was locked back in my cage, I didn't know what to do. There was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to think except wonder whether I should try to get up in that top bunk - my bunk. I hadn't actually been on my bunk. I had spread the mattress (an honorary term...that thin piece of plastic with some lumpy filling didn't deserve its name, and neither did that hard plastic pillow), but I was wondering how I could launch myself up there. I'd never had a bunk before.
Stretch shot me an amused look. "If you're wondering about whether to step on my rack, honky, I'd advise you against it. Put one foot on the rim of the toilet, and swing up from there. But first, get outta them shoes and put em next to mine, at the back of the cell - sox inside the shoes. Then strip down to your boxers, and fold your tee and your browns and stow them at the foot of the bunk, next to the bars—and don't get em on mine, boy. If they aren't there, the screws will fuckin' open the cell, give you a good swat with the strap or maybe the baton, and tell you how to deal with clothes that belong to the state."
I stood on one foot, then on the other, and got out of my shoes. Man, what a relief! Those things must have been made for a steelworker or something worse—except that a steelworker would never put his feet inside anything as heavy and misshapen as those black blocks of cement-grade leather. Then I started stripping out of my browns. When you watch those square hard clothes with INMATE stenciled across them leaving your body, you get the illusion that you're no longer a convict. Then you look up and see that you're still in that steel cage.
"You gotta shit or piss?" Stretch said.
I suddenly realized that I had not done either all day. Of course I'd had little to eat or drink. I'd also been too busy with other things—like being terminally scared and confused. So I decided to try to piss before I climbed up. I managed to do it, standing in front of the bars, where anyone that passed could stand and watch the monkey in his cage. There was no escape. Thinking about that, I no longer had a need to shit. My bowels were like iron. "I'm done," I said. "You better try to shit," Stretch said. "At night, they shut off the water supply to the toilets. You can shit after lights out, but you can't flush. And I don't want to wake up at night smelling your crap."
I squatted down on the cold steel rim—there was no "seat" on these toilets-- and as he watched I strained to expel something. I finally got out a few pebbles of shit. I reached around to the little round hole into which a roll of toilet paper fitted . . . just like jail. I wiped my butt and put the toilet paper in the bowl, like always--but this time I had an audience. For the first time since I was a child, I had to perform excretion in public and under evaluation for my performance.
Stretch then got up and sat on the steel rim. He pissed and shat right away. I turned my head to the wall to give him some privacy, but I couldn't help inhaling his smell. When you're locked in with it, in a place the size of a closet, there's no place to hide from that stench.
Stretch took his time getting up. "I guess you didn't know about this. In here, even your pissing and shitting are subject to . . . inspection and observation. If you think this is bad, wait till the days when they have female screws walking the tier. The cells next to the stairs try to warn everybody when a female is coming, but some of these bitches get off on walking down the line and catching some guy sitting on the can. You learn to accept it. You're an offender--no part of you is private. Guards watch you piss and shit, and they can even shut down the toilets so you can't flush your shit out of your house. Anyhow, like I said, there's a certain whistle, and when that comes from one or the other end of the tier you'll know that one of these bitches is on the prowl for an inmate to humiliate. Unless you don't think it's humiliating to have to do your toilet functions while some bitch is watching you want to get done and off the shitter as soon as possible. That's why these bitches wanta be guards—they finally got the power. They got the ultimate power."
I'll bet my friend Jim used to laugh when he heard some guard telling how she caught some inmate wiping his ass, and how she came up with some witticism to show that the inmate had no privacy, now that he was under the absolute power of the state and its designated officer to watch, control, humiliate, and degrade--to be certain that the inmate understood that the state might talk reformation, but it really wanted humiliation and subjugation. And Jim must have done it himself—laughed while he looked through the bars at an inmate sitting on that steel rim, straining to shit while an officer grinned back at him. Stretch slid into his bunk, and I put my foot back on the toilet rim, to get up to my own bunk. I had to be careful as I did not want to literally "step in it." I know both Stretch and I had flushed, but the thought of having my foot get a shitter bath was scary to me. I made it without a slip, and now I was in the little box that is all a convict gets for his bedroom—bars at his feet, steel by his side, steel under his ass, and another sheet of steel on top of him like a coffin lid, right above his nose.
You can't really sit up in the top bunk, but I finally got my legs squirmed in underneath my blanket. No sheets—just that thick, scratchy horse blanket, and that little plastic mattress between me and the steel shelf I was supposed to sleep on. I leaned my head on my puny plastic pillow and tried to comprehend just how awful my life was. "If I hadn't allowed my penis to do my thinking, I would be at home right now, lying on super silky sheets, watching late-night comedy, and free to piss and shit any time I wanted to, in complete privacy." Then I realized how far I'd gone. I'd come to the place where I'd be ecstatic just to piss and shit by myself. "Damn I'm dumb," I thought. "Damn I'm dumb."
About that time, the loudspeakers woke up again. "TOILETS SHUT OFF IN ONE MINUTE" it barked. After what I assumed to be a minute, a bell started echoing around the walls. Then there was a sort of loud thud, and immediately almost all the lights went out. I would guess the time was no later than 10:00 p.m. I was used to staying up until 1:00 a.m. or even 3:00 a.m., reading, writing, watching movies, then catching a comedy show before I dozed off. Now I would go to bed, and I would sleep on a schedule not my own, a schedule that had no relation to my entertainment. But this day had been so terrible, physically and emotionally, that I went to sleep almost as soon I got myself wrapped up in my blanket and my head had found my mini-pillow. I was asleep.