By Thomas Bartlett Whitaker
Look here, kid. Check
the scene: you´ve got guards at your door, and boy, are they ever
impatient. Under normal conditions, your
average screw never has enough hours in the day in which to do nothing. These two are full of piss and vinegar,
though, and that means they´ve got very specific orders about having to deal
with your ass. It´s a latent thing, but once their institutional
something-must-be-donery gene activates, there´s no point in talking, dig? You
obey, you fight or you deceive. That´s it.
Shakedown, they´ll say. Strip out.
Right now. They´ve got gas and batons and shields with electric current running
through them. You´ve got no time to
prepare, but see, that doesn´t really matter because you´ve been trained to
always stay prepared. You cower
appropriately – no, no, like this: see me cowering, pig? Aren´t I
affect-appropriate? – and begin removing your clothes. You do something, something small and
innocuous; you see this? You hand them your clothes, do your little
dignity-obliterating fingers-to-tongue-to-balls-to-ass dance, then do something
else. You say something, and they
laugh. You say something else, just one
of several options you´ve stored away for moments like this, and now they´re
really rolling. The bruiser on the left
can´t resist – just like you knew he wouldn´t be able to – and turns to add his
own insult to the heavy on the right.
You are laughing, but your eyes are really laser focused on the timing,
and as soon as left goon´s face reaches a certain critical angle, you do a
third thing, something that is only important because it´s all a part of a
sequence. You get your clothes back, the
cuffs go on behind you, and then you are led to the showers. Your house is being torn apart by Typhoon
Thug but it doesn´t matter because you´ve got your ark on you, and they,
they´ve got fuck all. They can shake you
down again in the shower, but it´s even easier to beat them there. Same process, see? Only now you´ve got solid metal blocking the
view from here to your waist, and you can
take it
as axiomatic that inside-time can only be understood from within its
boundaries. Somewhere between booking
and the long descent into a barred eternity, it stops being chronological,
choppy, and begins its presencing as flat, perfectly and impassively immobile. Weeks pass – months? Years? By Zeus, how they
blur so softly casual into one another! – and nothing happens. Then more nothing happens. You begin to doubt that you will happen. You swear
you would sell your soul for something kairotic to come to pass, then
weeks-months later, you´d trade it happily for something merely pedestrian – so
long as it was a kinetic
pedestrian. Your attention snaps towards
anything that so much as twitches.
You´ve become a kitten, willing to chase after any ball of yarn that
gets tossed your direction. Others know
this, and learn to use it for their benefit.
You try to tamp down on your instincts, but you can´t really help it. All day you exist in a tense bundle of
expectation: desperate, angry, ashamed, yearning for some transcendental
guarantee of meaning or value, for some contact with a responsive Super Thou
not wearing a uniform. But God is dead
here, replaced by the pack. Everything
is permitted, but everyone is watching, waiting, ready to pounce.
Which is
why everyone hears the chirps as if they had been pumped out of a set of
massive speakers. Twenty-four brains
instantly calculate their way across the hire-wire chasm of the “did I hear
that?/ do I want to acknowledge that I heard that?” paradox. On some level, you have to hear everything, because you never know when the accidental
fall of a pair of handcuffs echoing from down the hall might give you the
thirty seconds you need to prepare for a shakedown, or how a sudden cessation
of chatter on the rec yard could signal a coming riot. Of course, the other side of the equation is
that you´d really rather not hear any of it: the mindless posturing of mindless
hoodlums, the inevitable liturgy of banalities that comes oozing out every time
heavy rank bothers to open their collectively poxy mouths, the preaching of
incarcerated prophets who manage to find God each and every time they get
locked up: the lies, superseded by bigger, stupider lies, immediately eclipsed
by even bigger, far stupider ones. You´d carve out your eardrums if it weren´t
for the fact that the pack would turn on you instantly. And because of the birds. One mustn´t forget the birds.
Those
were Bones´s actual words: Mustn´t forget the birds, son. Considering what was at stake, those of us
who had a call didn´t.
All day
long, Bones pushed the same sediment-laden puddle of sludge from one end of the
hall to the other, all the while crooning old blues tunes that I initially
thought were meant to be ironic. Shows
you what I knew, then. Even if you´ve
never been down before, you´ve seen Bones in every prison movie or book ever
made. He´s Red from Shawshank Redemption, Danil from Conquered City, Shukov from One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: he´s the guy that pours fuel into the
engine of the black market. In the real
world, more often than not, Bones is usually a tired-looking old black guy,
apparently slow in the head, worthless for any job but pushing his old mop
around. The very job that,
coincidentally, happens to give him access to nearly every square inch of the
building. The very job that always –
always – seems to allow the apex predator of the 6th floor to fly
beneath the heavy redneck-band radar that covers the rest of us. I have no idea
how this shtick words for some people. Maybe there is still enough casual
racism left in the system to allow Bones space to fit into everyone else´s
misconceptions. Or maybe the cops see everything clearly and realize that the
micro-physics of disciplinary power they beam out on the rest of us is just a
macro-politics of spectacle to Bones, that he´d just as soon cut their throats
as talk to them. Whatever the root of
his power, Bones had the sort of induced invisibility that most of us covet
beyond all else.
Three
short trills followed by a warbling sort of croak managed to slip out between
the verses of Bones´s latest dirge, and my neighbor Chuco sat up in his bed.
“Es nuestra señal, no?”
I nodded
placing my bookmark in its place.
“You´re up.”
“I went
the last time,” he complained.
“If by
´last time´ you mean the time before the time before, you´re right.”
“Damnit,”
he grumbled, slipping on his shoes. He stretched
in a way that was very obviously feigned, and then moved as if at random
towards the front of the tank. There he
rested his arms on the bars and gazed longingly down the drab expanse of the
east hallway. I nearly snorted at the
obviousness of it all, but instead contented myself by pulling my crate out
from under my bed. I began to remove my
bowls and utensils, and started prepping for our nightly ritual. Hearing this, Cantú ducked his head over the
lip of the bunk above me and then quickly dropped down to the floor. “May I?” he asked, pointing to my bunk. “Bring your container,” I answered.
Setting
our two crates up as a makeshift table, he sat down next to me and helped me
divide up all the ingredients we would need.
Most of them were his. I never
asked where he got his money, but he had gatillero
stamped all over him. Once he´d found
out my connection to Monterrey, he started treating me like a lost little
brother.
“Unless
my memory is failing me at my advanced age, today was your turn,” he remarked,
nodding towards where Chuco was still posted up.
“Yep.”
He
laughed. “You´re learning. Still green
as Michoacán, but it´s a duller shade.”
He´d spent the majority of his 54 years incarcerated in one prison
system or another, so I took this as a compliment. An acid-coated, Pyrrhic victory sort of
compliment, to be sure, but in this place you take whatever genuine praise as
what comes your way.
“Here
comes el maestro,” he muttered, sotto
voce.
This
wasn´t news, as I could clearly hear the volume of Bones´s monody
increasing. I didn´t look towards the
gate because I didn´t need to: this was
an old play, something we´d done using a myriad of variations on a nearly daily
basis for several months. As the weary
old trustee made the turn in the hallway, his bucket tipped over and splashed a
nearly black pool of muck all over the area next to the guard picket. Everyone glanced his way as Bones kicked the
melodrama quotient up a few notches, bemoaning his fate, his clumsy old hands,
and his thrice-damned cataracts. The
screw stared at him hard for a long moment, his annoyance clear all the way
through the inch-thick security glass.
He then turned and walked towards 6C, not wanting to deal with the old
con and his even older con. He was just
beginning his first step when it happened.
If you blinked, you missed it.
Bones was just that fast. In one
fluid movement, he brought the bag out from the compartment he´d had built into
the underside of his bucket and lobbed it to Chuco. Almost instantly, our comrade tossed him a
small packet wrapped in paper.
“Oh easy
rider, what make you so mean,” Bones wailed as he righted his bucket. “You sho not the meanest man in the world, but
the meanest I done seen.”
Chuco
slipped in next to us, plopping the loot down on our makeshift table. “Lessee,”
he muttered, combing through the contents.
“We got us
to understand that the biggest part of all of that is classifying
the cop in question, see? You´ve got to
learn what motivates each CO, because if he is just trying to work a job and
get home to the kiddies, he´s got a totally different level of situational
awareness than those fucks on the Extraction Team. With them, you´ve pretty much got to go to condition
black from jump street, but you can work that to your favor, too. So make a typological system for these
people. Be scientific about it. Watch them as they work, what they look for
specifically when they paw through your clothes, how their vision moves when
they come through the crash-gate into the section, how long it takes them to
locate a specific inmate on the shower sheet, how they hand you the trays. All of those are clues about
a dozen fresh
jalapeños, two white onions, three limes, two tomatoes…all that other jale.
Here,” he said, passing things around.
I palmed the tomatoes; they were so red that they made my eyes hurt a
little. I then searched through several
small packages wrapped in wax paper. The
spices I kept. The tobacco, weed, and
yeast I tossed to Cantú. Those alone
would cover the cost of the produce for a week.
In jail, it´s about as sure a bet as you will ever find that one of your
neighbors will be willing to pay ridiculous prices for a smoke and a few
bottles of old habits. Cantú excused
himself to go market the dope, as one of his maxims was never to hold onto
anything “hot” longer than you needed to.
I always thought this was the sort of sound advice he should have paid
attention to while he was still free, but kept such sentiments to myself.
“Say, oh,
easy rider, what make you so mean? I
yells for water, padnah, you gives me gasoline,” moaned Bones from the
hallway. Chuco looked at him, annoyed,
but I always thought his spiel was amusing.
Dinner and Grand Guignol: what more could a convict ask for?
Cantú
soon returned, having procured from our hiding spot my most treasured
possession: a homemade stinger. I had
fabbed it out of an old radio cord and some razor blades the night I was first
released from 5.5 months in the dungeon.
It´s always kept frigid down in the hole, and I had been fantasizing
about hot food to a degree that bordered on the psychotic. Immersion heaters are simple things, but sort
of a big deal in our county jail because of something the guards called “plug
justice.” In each of the several dozen
tanks in the building, the wall socket that powered both the television and the
microwave was controlled by a switch inside the picket. Anytime one of the 24 men in the dorm did
something that angered an officer – and this could include an infraction as
minor as looking at a CO for a second too long – the electricity could be cut
almost instantly. It took me a while to
understand the motive behind this serial cluster-bombing punishment strategy;
the practical results, on the other hand, were just a wee bit more
visible. With no television, it only
took a few hours before the continental shelf supporting various alliances of
convenience cracked open, and, depending on a multitude of variables, a victim
would be selected for assault. Sometimes
this would be the actual inmate that precipitated the situation in the first
place, but more often this explosion took people against whom animosity had
been building for weeks. Bottom
line: someone was going to be converted
into a pulsing, sobbing puddle of fractured bones and blood in a matter of
seconds, a sacrifice to the uniformed minor gods of the building. Several things happened after this, without
fail. First off, the victim was dragged
– literally, on occasion – down to seg for his “protection”. Second, Lt. H – got to write up an official
incident report. I saw several of these
during my trial. On every last one of
these forms, those of us in the tank were listed under “victim” or “participant” in the assault. There wasn´t even a space for listing
“witnesses” because in jail, there are no innocent bystanders. As soon as the incident report was complete,
the electricity to the television and microwave was turned back on. At first, I was aghast at this. Couldn´t they see that they were creating
this violence? That they were the
catalysts in this reaction? One of the COs explained it to me later: federal funding is proportional to a
facility´s classification as low-, medium-, or high-risk; the rate of violence
is the primary metric within this calculus.
The more violence, in other words, the more money from Uncle Sam. You will come to understand how this makes a
certain sense eventually. It´s
inevitable, but once you start to see the world like this, you effectively
become unparolable. Even in their
failures, the system finds a way to win.
The
stinger gave us a sort of end run around the plug control as I had built it to
run via the electricity powering the desk lamps. People were always begging us to use the
thing, and it gave our little association a great deal of leverage in the tank.
“Oh, I
hates to see the rider, when he comes so near.
He so cruel and cold-hearted, boy, lo these twenty year.”
It wasn´t
long before the roaches showed up.
They´re always there, circling, their sad, hungry eyes following every
morsel of food and breaking my heart in ways I thought I had outgrown long
ago. There´s never enough food in
prison, so unless you have someone taking care of you with commissary money,
you have three options: hustle, steal,
or starve. Cantú surveyed the group,
watching as each one of them tried to edge out the others, all without looking
like they were doing anything tactical – they knew Cantú´s ways as well as
anyone, after all. He finally nodded to
a skinny dude in his 40’s named Harrison that had been picked up with sixty
pounds of weed three weeks before. The
word on the block was that he hadn´t talked – our kind of people. As soon as he saw the man acknowledge him, he
bounded over and sat down on Chuco´s bunk, our fourth for the meal. At first, I thought this tendency towards
generosity spoke highly of Cantú´s character.
Later, I realized it was all calculated.
Loyalty can be expensive in the free-world, but some version of it can
be had in jail for the cost of a good meal.
I didn´t feel it was my place to speak on this as I, too, was indigent,
surviving off of my little hustles and inventions. Most of the food I was eating daily came from
Cantú in one form or another.
“Tell me
another one, Cantú,” begged Chuco as he marinated the chorizo.
“Can´t
you see I am busy, fool? Ask Tomas.”
“I don´t
know any jokes. Sorry,” I responded
truthfully. He was a big fan of jokes,
was Chuco.
“How about
you, güero?” he asked, nodding at Harrison.
“Um,
sorry. I guess I know some riddles, though.”
“I fuck
up yo riddles, homes,” Chuco laughed.
“I was
just reading about this one. It´s not so much a riddle as something just to make
you think,” he paused, trying to remember how the story went.
“So, you
are on this overpass. Down below you
there´s like two train tracks. Looking
one way, you see six workers. One dude´s
over to the left, working on one track by himself. The five others are all working on the
other. They´ve got the radio up real
loud, some kind of mariachi stuff.”
“It
wasn´t mariachi,” Chuco laughed.
“Norteño, maybe. How come they
got to be Mexicanos, homes?”
“Let the
man tell his story, pendejo,” Cantú
swatted him. “And of course they were
Mexicanos. He said they were working, recuerdas?”
Harrison
followed this exchange, a small, worried smile plastered on his face as he
gauged whether he might be losing his chance at a meal. Seeing that Cantú had cleared his way for
him, he continued. “So, there´s these workers.
When you look the other way, you see a trolley coming right at
them. It´s on the track with the five
guys, and since they got the mar…uh…that norteño music on, they can´t hear
it. Right in front of you is a switch
that diverts the trolley. So, like, the
question is, what do you do?”
“How come
there´s a switch right there on the bridge?”
Chuco asked. “Shit don´t work
like that, does it?”
Cantú
sighed and looked up towards the ceiling.
“Ayúdame, Jesús,” he
muttered. “It´s an ethics thing. Like, do you get involved, no?”
Harrison
nodded. “Yeah, if you do nothing, five
people get killed. If you do something,
only one does, but you are responsible for it.”
“Gotta
flip the switch,” I said. “Simple
math. One is better than five.”
“Maybe
the five are all putos,” Chuco
said. “Maybe the one is a cool
mothafucker. Maybe he´s got a hot sister
that would be like really appreciative for saving him.”
I
laughed. “Touché.”
“I´d
shoot the radio,” Chuco continued. “Wake
they stupid ass up.”
“No,
that´s not a part of the rid-“ Harrison tried to interject.
“Fuck you
mean, homes? I´m always strapped. And
killing a radio is better than letting some raza
die from a damn choo-choo.”
The two
argued for a few minutes, while Cantú and I continued to make dinner. When they had finally settled down, I found
Cantú´s eyes. “What would you do?”
He
considered the question, nodding as he came to a conclusion. “Get some popcorn.”
Chuco
laughed, a sort of nervous response thing.
I just stared at Cantú for a moment, processing this, trying to figure
out if this was posturing or the true gauge of the man. He was cutting up the tomatoes with his
shank, this evil nine inch piece of steel, just as calm as could be. I decided he was serious about the time his
eyes flicked up to scan the front of the dayroom. I followed his gaze and saw Bones and an
older black man from our tank in a huddled conversation. I turned back around and continued to work on
the enchiladas, then raised an eyebrow at Cantú.
He leaned
in close and switched to Spanish. “Old
School there bought what he thought was a bag of Bugler from Highside Jones.
Turned out to be a bag of pencil shavings.
“Pendejo,” chortled Chuco. “Le impuso una multa de estúpidos.” Highside
Jones was one of the other trustees on the 6th floor, trading mostly in
narcotics. He was universally known to
be dirty, only dealing square with men from his set. The old guy at the bars clearly wasn´t a part
of that family, so a big bag of useless is what he got. He looked calm when he walked back to his
bunk, so I figured he´d come to better terms with Bones. Boy, was I wrong.
We had
just finished heating up our dinner when Old School knocked politely on the
frame of my bunk. “Look here,
youngster. May I borrow yonder
contrivance for a spell?”
“Uh,
sure. You know how to hook it up?” I asked, rolling the cord up before handing
it to him.
“Yessir,
I´s peeped how it done.”
I
returned to my meal as he retired to his mattress. Bones had finally cleaned up his mess and was
slowly moving down the hall.
“I asks
him for mercy, he don´t give me none. He
asks me my trouble, and I saids I ain´t got none” he rasped, before whistling
seven high chitters, two low as he neared 6E.
I shook my head, laughing inside.
Walking cliché though he may have been, I´ve still never met anyone
quite like old Bones.
We had
just completed our supper when Cantú placed his hand over my forearm. I followed his gaze to see the old man
carefully mixing some sort of cream into a large cup. He had my stinger laying inside of his bowl
and the water inside was boiling at a fast clip. I watched as he opened a Milky Way candy bar
and then scooped the caramel out with his spoon. He dumped this into his cup with the cream.
“Lotion?”
I asked. Cantú shook his head.
“Magic
Shave. They put that on their face and the hair just falls off. No razor required.”
“Oh,” I
said, before things slid into place. “Oh.”
“ ´Oh´ is
right, Cantú said, standing up. “Hay que estar sobre aviso, mis jóvenes. Ya ha llegado la hora de mostrarse a la altura
de las circunstancias.”
We all
quickly cleaned up our mess and then began hiding our contraband. I didn´t see it, but Chuco later told us that
the last thing the old man added to his concoction were the pulverized shards
of a small light bulb. He spent a few
minutes bringing the brew to a boil and then returned to us, stinger in hand. The cup in his other hand was bubbling and
smoking angrily.
“Thank
you, sir,” he said, handing the heater back to me.
“Sure…uh…what´ve
you got there, School?”
“This?
Oh, this here is a cup of get-right, son.”
He turned towards the gate before pausing. “You might want to hides that real good now,”
he said, nodding to the stinger.
“You sure
you know what you´re doing, homes?” Chuco asked him.
The old
man turned narrowing his eyes. “Don´t
get it twisted, young man. I know what I´s about.”
Cantú
surveyed his small kingdom before calling
on how analytical they are, how afraid of inmates they are
beneath all of the bluster. You can use
that, you have to use that if you want to protect your ark. You see what they give us? Humans can´t live on this, so we´ve got two
choices: act like mangy dogs and beg for
bones underneath the Master´s table or become something other than human. Me, I´m too old to learn to do tricks for
Snausages, you feel me? And so we keep
these. See how I did that? I had it with me the whole time and you never
knew it. They could take me to the
dungeon right now, and I´d still have it with me. These are my tools, all the things that I
used to live a life. None of it is
dangerous, none of it designed to wound, but they won´t see it that way. They understand – okay, maybe not on a
philosophical level, but they get it instinctively – that the things inside my
ark give me freedom of a sort, and these totalitarian fucks detest that, want
to see
a young
white kid named Ben over. More than
anyone else, Ben was constantly begging us for our stinger, our magazines, or
pretty much anything else we had that would simultaneously occupy his
extroverted mind and confer upon him some desperately needed status. He looked like he was about fourteen.
“Ben,
today is your lucky day,” Cantú told him with a stern voice. “My associates and I have consulted on the
issue, and we think you can be trusted to hang on to this stinger for the
night. This is a test, a probation of
sorts. Try to do better for us than you
did when the county put you on probation.”
The poor
kid giggled and smiled nervously. “Oh,
cool. Um, thanks. You guys are all right. You want to hang out? I got a new book from
my mom and –“
“No Ben,
I do not wish to hang out. Run along,
now,” Cantú ordered.
“Okay, sure. I won´t let you guys down, I promise.”
“Ben,”
Cantú added, ratcheting up the ominous factor by an order of magnitude. “You know that will cost you fifty flags if
you lose it.”
“Yeah,
yeah, I know the game. I got you,
man. I got you!” he responded, starting
to plan out how he was going to manage his newfound prestige as the keeper of
the Holy Stinger.
I frowned
at Cantú after Ben had departed.
“That´s…pretty messed up. He
won´t even have the thing for an hour, unless I´ve badly misjudged his capabilities.”
His face
went expressionless and I felt the temperature in the room drop through the basement. I´ve seen defcon 1 stares before, and I had
to admit his was pretty first rate. “I
take it back,” he said finally. “You´re
still green as fuck. You better get
this, considering where you´re going, hombre. You still have one foot in a world of
suburban white people acting all civilized like their mommies and daddies
taught them, a world of morals and codes and church and the PTO. A world of utilitarian ´one is better than five´ mierda.
Haven´t you figured it out yet?
This is the jungle. You got
tigers, and you got meat. That´s
all. That stinger, it´s gone. It was toast the minute aquel abuelito decided to
get his respect back. ´He won´t have it
for an hour?´ He won´t have it for fifteen fucking minutes. So what?
Now I got you the fifty flags you will need to get another cord. So shut the fuck up with all of that feeling
bad, ´pretty messed up´ shit. Those are
human concerns.”
Throughout
this entire onslaught he never raised his voice above a whisper. Still, I felt scoured by the time he had
finished, contrite and confused and contrarian and immensely sad all at once,
though I had at least learned enough from my time in Mexico to keep all of this
from rising to the level of facial features.
I wanted to tell Cantú he was wrong, that life wasn´t a jungle, not even
along the frontera, that the waters
went deeper than that but my words failed me.
He dismissed me with a glance and swiftly climbed into his bunk and
picked up a book. I did the same, my
face turned toward the gate, where I saw Old School pretend to sip from his
scalding cup of revenge lava.
It didn´t
take long. Bones had apparently told
Highside that someone had some business for him in 6D, because I saw him moving
furtively down the hall, pretending to push his broom. When he saw who had summoned him, he scowled
and puffed out his chest. He didn´t even
try to mask either his disdain or his words.
“Fool, I
done told you – “ he started.
“Peace,
playa, peace. I´ma old hustlah my own
self. I just wanted to tell you we´s
okay, and that there ain´t no hard feelings.
Ya feel me?”
I could
see Highside´s face clearly, the very last time that anyone could say such a
thing, ever. As he listened to the old
man, he transitioned from “I´m going to have to check this fool” to “listen to
this sucker, trying to curry favor from me even after I fleeced him.” His pride got the better of him, made him see
weakness where he should have detected artifice, and he took one more step
towards the bars. That´s when the old
man splashed him with the solution in his cup.
It wasn´t a perfect hit. Highside
was a physical monstrosity, six-months deep into an almost insane workout
regimen. He was huge and mean and as
fast as blazes. That speed is the only
thing that saved his right eye, or, for that matter, the whole right side of
his face. The left side didn´t fare as
well. I can only theorize about what
that concoction did, in practical terms.
The combination of the temperature and the highly acidic pH of the magic
shave instantly tenderized his epidermis, while simultaneously obliterating the
soft protein of his left eye. Highside
instinctively reached up to paw at the pain, and the caramel ensured that the
molten mass was at least partially transferred to the skin of his hand. The thousands of tiny shards from the light
bulb gouged into both the skin of his face and his hand, so when he ripped his
now pain-infused hand away, nearly half of the skin on his face simply tore
away with it. That part isn´t
theoretical: I saw it happen, and while
I´m pretty sure that the wet slapping sound that my memory keeps insistently
inserting into scene is a fabrication, I´m only pretty sure of this.
All of
these events took place in a flash, and then Highside screamed. This wasn´t the howl of the warrior, not the
scream of someone enraged. No, this was
closer to what Anselm thought he would enjoy about contemplating Hell in the
afterlife, like something out of nightmares or horror movies. He tore off down the hall, wailing all the
way, bumping into the wall and stumbling from the pain. Only an expanding pool of blood was left of
him in a matter of seconds.
Everyone
was instantly talking, arguing, high-fiving.
A couple of Crips eyed Old School with evil intent, but made no
moves. I turned and lay back on my
pillow, numb. I should have felt sick,
wanted to feel anything other than that all of this was perfectly normal,
everything exactly as one could expect.
Mexico had done this to me, partially trained me for this life I was
going to have to face. I just wished
that it had left me enough of my humanity to have felt sick. I would have felt salvageable if I had felt
that. I suspected that once such things
left you, they were gone forever, and the years would confirm this. I finally forced my eyes open once I began to
hear the stomping boots of the goon squad approaching. I looked over to see Cantú´s head peering
over the edge of the bed, his eyes locked on mine. He must have seen something in my topography
that indicated the course of my thoughts, because he shook his head. “Kill those, and you´ll be invincible.”
“Kill what?”
I asked, my voice sounding hollow to my ears.
“Human
concerns,” he muttered, returning to his book.
I closed my eyes and thought that I
shouldn´t
get it twisted, youngster: just because the things I´ve shown you so far have
all had material substance, that doesn´t mean they must. Ideas and techniques go in the ark, too, and
are usually your most valuable possessions.
Maybe it will be a new stash spot, a really prime one that nobody else
has figured out yet – and kid, trust me
when I tell you that I am not talking about inside the binding of a book or
underneath the cushions of your trainers.
I hear such insanity all of the time and just shake my head. You think they don´t know about that shit,
don´t teach them all about it at the Academy?
You´ve got to engage in k-step logic here. Putting contraband inside of something is
only thinking one step ahead of them – and there are a few of these screws that
can´t figure out how to take a single step, no matter how lazy or indifferent
they may be. Any spot that is so easily
rousted by fat piggy fingers is not a true ark and a disgrace to the convicts
that came before you that knew this
ain´t
gone explode on me, is it?” Jamal asked, eyeing the somewhat dubious looking
contraption in his hands.
“No, no,
no,” I laughed, inserting a pregnant pause before continuing. “I´m virtually certain of it. Like ninety-nine point ninenineninennine
percent.”
“Virtually
certain, he says,” he grumbled, still turning the thing over in his hands. “Fuck it.
I never much liked my face no kind of way.” Shielding his eyes, he
turned to look through the security glass towards the guard picket. Once he had finally located the rover team on
the other side of the pod, he produced an anemic looking joint from inside his
shorts. “You wanna hit this?”
“That
thing looks too pathetic to share,” I responded, not wanting to have to explain
why I´d vowed never to ingest intoxicants again in this life. “Just put the tip between those wires and
press them together.” He eyed the pair
of linked double-A batteries skeptically for a moment before placing the joint
between his lips. Bending over the
lighter – my newest death row invention, heretofore untested – he muttered
something that sounded an awful lot like “virtually certain” before connecting
the leads. I could see the wires begin
to glow even through the steel mesh and bars that separated our recreation
cages. A few seconds later I heard him
inhale deeply. “I´ll be damned,” he
remarked as he exhaled. “You have
outdone yourself, sir. I shall have you
knighted for this, anon.”
“Okay,” I
grinned. “Sure, so long as it´s ´anon´
and all.”
I turned
to walk small circles in my cage while Jamal blazed away. Once he had reduced his spliff down to a
scattering pile of ash, he slumped over to the small triangle of sunlight that
penetrated the grating above and laid his long body down. He sighed contentedly. “I´m yo niggah, right?”
“…sure…”
I responded, never exactly certain how a Caucasian person is supposed to
respond in the presence of that most loaded of words.
“I was listening
to NPR the other night, on some ´Science Friday´ shit. They said all humans come out of Africa. That true?”
I laughed
again. “That´s what the evidence seems
to indicate, yes, in successive waves.
So, you are one of those.”
“One of
what?”
“One of
those people that gets all into science and talking like the 17th
Earl of Grantham when they are faded. I´ve never seen you in the dayroom
suddenly wanting to discuss the Pleistocene or grouse shooting at Balmoral
before.”
“Sheeit. I got an image to maintain, is all. I´m already gonna have to eat some shit for coming
out here to use the white man´s lighter.”
“Get out
of here.”
“Nah, I´m
kidding. Stay with me though on this
Africa thing. I´ve got a point to
make. So we all come up out of there
somewhen like seventy thousand years ago.
Sometimes after that, you people made the terrible decision to give up
yo melanin and yo rhythm. Still, for all
that, don´t that kind of mean that you my niggah, too?”
“I guess
so” I admitted. “Low blow on the rhythm
thing, though.”
“Yeah…”
he trailed off, editing out whatever comeback I expected to follow. I glanced at him and was surprised to see him
staring straight up towards the sky, deep sadness writ in the lines of his
face. I leaned back against the wall,
not wanting to intrude on whatever process he was
Working through here.
See how I did that? It works for
objects as large as, say, a deck of cards.
Remember to practice this over and over until you can do it without
looking at your hands; you are going to
need your eyes elsewhere. It´s a lie
that people “rise to the challenge.” The
reality is that you sink to the level of your training, so practice up. You´ve got to be able to make shit wink out
of existence while you are naked, while half a football team of yokels is
poking through your stuff. I once beat
the assistant warden and an entire OJT class in a visitation booth with this
trick. See this? Now you don´t. Don´t give me that goofy-ass grin. Jesus, how old are you? Look, it´s all angles and occlusions,
dig? That and distraction. Stop looking at the hand that is moving all
over the place. And stop being so damned
loud. They keep saying you are supposed
to be intelligent; I wish you´d prove it to me sometime. Information is some of the most difficult of
things to
work through.
“If they
killed you tomorrow, would you miss any of this?” he asked finally.
That
wasn´t what I was expecting, but these are old themes for the condemned and I
didn´t really need to think about it much.
“Not, really, no. No disrespect
intended. These moments are nice, but
they don´t make up a meaningful life.”
He
nodded. “I won´t miss a bit´ve it,” he
said, feigning certainty.
“You
should get your stamps back. That joint
was clearly defective.”
“Yeah.
Fool sold me some depressing ass shit.” He stood up and slouched his way around
the yard for a few laps before suddenly yelping and dropping to his knees. I watched as he tried to grab something off
the ground. Missing it, he scurried
across a few feet of concrete and tried again, finally snatching something with
his left hand. He stared hard at it for
a few minutes before turning to walk towards the lattice that separated us. I tried to focus on what he was holding, but
for some reason it wouldn´t resolve until it was nearly held right up to the
grate. A brief flash of panic-envy
seized me, and I forced my face to go flat, lest I reveal the depths of my
instantaneous despair. In all of my
years of haunting the outside rec yards, in thousands upon thousands of hours
spent scouring this tiny patch of crumbling concrete for whatever uber-rare
castoffs the wind and fortune might have deposited for my finding, I had never
once encountered what Jamal was presenting to me. For a brief tortured second, I didn´t think
he was going to let me hold it, but then I realized how crazy my thoughts had
become and I tried to re-center myself.
Until
that moment, I would have sworn that the seven oak leaves I had collected over
the years were the contraband equivalent of a rare earth metal. I mean, the things had to float on the wind
at least 500 yards at a minimum, drop down right through this tiny fissure into
our yard, right at the exact moment that I was out there to seize them before
someone else did. Each one felt like a
gift from the universe, some proof of life for
life outside of a world entirely composed of steel, rust, and concrete. I used to keep them pressed between sheets of
plastic that I kept hidden deep within my legal work. Every once in a while, when I felt the weight
of all of this hate and shame weigh heavier than usual upon me, I would take
one of them out and run the tips of my fingers over a material that I was never
supposed to be able to feel again. I´m
not even going to try to explain what that was like for me, because I´m not
that good and even if I managed to find the appropriate idiom, you still
wouldn´t understand. Experience is a
language and you don´t have mine, don’t understand that I´m not at all kidding
when I say that the color green very nearly kills me whenever I am in its
presence. Those leaves were precious to
me, so much so that when the officer who eventually took them during a
shakedown got arrested for beating an inmate, all I could do was laugh and
laugh, this cold, empty thing that should have worried or disgusted me but
didn´t. Now, staring at the light gray,
one-inch bird feather that Jamal was holding, those leaves suddenly seemed
silly and cheap. One side of me realized
that I was acting like a (psychotic) child, but that didn´t really alter the
overwhelming possession – lust that was consuming the other half. I had to walk away in order to regain my
composure. I´d never really felt envy
before I came to this place, never realized that
the fewer the number of people that know the same tricks,
the longer they will be useful - but don´t ever hang onto something for
years. None of these things has a shelf
life like that. You´ve got to constantly
evolve, because they´re constantly chasing you, you know? Everything you have access to, kid, every
last bloody thing, has been approved by a committee of Ivory Tower pigs and
then submitted to the drones to evaluate.
Only then is it passed onto you, assuming you have the cash to pay for any
of it. That means you are going to have
to be smarter than the collective intelligence of about fifty security
professionals in Huntsville. And you
know what? We pull it off. We are the
masters of conquering necessity. Drop a
dude in the middle of the savannah and he´ll get eaten by a lion or a crocodile
in a day or two. Drop a convict in the
same place, he´ll eat both of them and ride a wildebeest to safety. Yeah, I´m kidding, but only by a little. Those fools can´t imagine half of what some
of us can do back here. They couldn´t
believe you could make a hacksaw blade out of a razor capable of cutting
through bars. Nah, that´s old game, shit
they figured out in the 70s. They´ve got
examples of them in the Prison Museum, for god´s sake. No, I´m talking about stuff that is twenty
generations down the path, something
seized by
these sorts of emotions.
“You ever
seen that before?” he asked quietly, still rubbing the accursed thing across
his palm.
“Not in a
long time,” I answered, still walking in circles around my section of the
yard. “It´s just a feather, man,” I
added cruelly, instantly regretting it.
“Yeah,”
he said sadly, before looking up towards the sky. “What´s it come from, you
think?”
“I have
no idea. Mockingbird, maybe?”
“I think
it came from above,” he said at last.
“Yes, a dove from God.”
“He could
have sent the whole bird,” I quipped. He
turned to give me a mournful glare, before studying the feather again.
“I know
what you believe. What you don´t
believe, I mean. But tell me this don´t
have power in it. Tell me it ain´t
driving you fucking nuts how bad you want to feel this.”
“That´s
got nothing to do with God or anything supernatural,” I answered. We´re deprived of everything is all, crazy
from decades of living in a world with almost no decency or kindness. Not to mention how we´re evolutionarily
programmed for apophenia, for not automatically rejecting null hypothesis in
spite of obvious falsehoods. The cost of
believing a false pattern might be real is less than the cost of not believing
a real pattern, so we see meaning everywhere, even though what we´re really
seeing is mere wish-fulfillment run amok.”
“That
sounds real pretty and all, but don´t tell me you don´t want to feel this.”
“I
couldn´t care less,” I lied.
“Sucka,
stop being stupid and come get you some of this. Sheeit.”
I laughed
and just barely made sure I didn´t hop on my way to the bars. As soon as I accepted the feather into the palm
of my hand I was filled with the overwhelming certainty that I was going to
destroy it somehow, that I had to let it go in order to preserve it. I´ve been having these thoughts for years,
ever since I came to this place, that nothing good can come from my touch, my
presence. It was a pretty little thing,
though, this impossibly ephemeral wisp of a world beyond rust and scum and
self-righteous redneckery.
“I think
I shall see the whole bird before
long. Anon, even,” Jamal continued. I
looked up, struck by the resolve I heard in his voice. He was looking upward again, a small smile on
his lips. In all the years I had known
him, I had apparently never seen him in a truly relaxed state before, because
everything about the muscles in his face was different now, softer, not so
angular. It was obvious he was looking
for more than a bird.
“You
think you could be released?” I asked.
“I mean…not, what are the logistics of that, but could any of us make it
out there after all this? Look what a
damned feather did to us. A smoothie
might make my heart explode. A hug… forget
about it.”
“I´m
about to find out,” he answered quickly, and for a brief second I began to hope
that he had received some good news from his attorney. But then I connected his words to the sadness
that had been hovering about him all day and I knew.
“When?”
“Fools
was nice this time. It´s my second date
so´s all they had to give me was 30 days.
I got 60. Real gents, them boys
in the AG´s office.”
I leaned
my head forward until it made contact with the steel. I remember it was warm from the sun.
“I figure
this was my last joint before they put me under the cameras. Now I see God had something else planned.”
I kept my
mouth shut, all desire to retrace steps over old debate terrain totally absent.
“A dove
to guide me home. To peace. Finally,” he chuckled a little. “You know, I was gonna fight them today. Right here on the yard, make them suit up and
bring it. I already took a dozen Cold
Busters, got my nose so dry right now they gas´d be irrelevant. I guess He wants me to let them honkies make
it. Dove is peace, right?”
“I´m
sorry, Jamal,” I finally managed. “If it makes you feel any better, I don´t
have that many years left myself. Here,
take this back,” I muttered holding the feather out for him. Whatever meaning I might have imbued it with
was gone now.
“No, it´s
time for me to lighten my load, not add to it.
Take this device back. First, I
want to show you something, some CIA type shit that Soldier done showed me
years ago. Watch.” I looked up to see Jamal lightly gripping the
batteries in his left hand. He slowly
moved his right across it, and when the two parted, the lighter was gone. I blinked.
“That´s
crazy good. Much better than my game,” I
admitted.
“Watch
again.” He did the maneuver a second time, only now I was watching his right
hand, not the left. I saw enough to know
how it must work. I laid the feather
softly on the grate and started the process of having him pass me the
lighter. This was another thing that the
pigs in Huntsville wouldn´t have believed was possible, considering the rec
cages were separated by enough metal to construct a small office building. I practiced the move a few times while he
watched.
“Left
thumb up just a little – no, no, not the tip, the meaty part. If you can, do some talking, make the pig
look around or up at your face. You ever flash them real good? No? Look, most of these fools is real
conservative, they don´t wanna see no man´s junk. Watch they eyes when you strip in front of
them. They always be looking around at
that moment, and that is something you can use.
Just thrust yourself all out there like you proud of what God done gave
you, and you will see most of them blanch.
Do that part again with you right hand…good. You see how you can do it in reverse, too?”
“Yeah,
you have to flip the hand over, with this thumb on the bottom.”
“Word.”
I thanked
him, placing both the lighter and the legerdemain into my ark.
“Listen,
you mind if I go back to the house?” he asked.
“All of a sudden, I feel like there´s a few things I need to do before
they move me to A-pod.”
“Sure. If there´s anything I can…fuck, you know.”
“I know,
homie, I know. We´s from the same place
dig?” I laughed again as he walked over
to the windows and began to pound on them.
A short time later the rovers showed up to see what all of the noise was
about, and Jamal explained what he wanted.
They initially didn´t want to bother with the extra work, but most of us
learn how to make it look like doing what we want is the easier of the options,
and they moved him once reality had been properly explained. Two days later they shipped him off to Death
Watch. Less than two months after that,
he was dead, off chasing his placebo gods.
I
remained on the yard, walking in circles.
Every time I reached the 3 o´clock point on my little circuit, my eyes
were drawn to the feather, still caught in the cage where I left it. A precious thing reduced to the merely sacred
in the span of a few words. A salve to
allow death to slide over territory that should be fought over. A grasping at God in a place He had so
clearly forgotten about. A thing I could
no longer understand.
Lost in
these thoughts, I allowed the rover team to walk right up to the bars before I
saw them.
“Offender,
recreation time is over. Submit to
restraints and a strip search or chemical agents will be utilized.” I shot them my best drop-dead stare and
instead walked over the feather. I still
hadn´t gotten to really experience it, but now that it was infused with so much
nonsense it couldn´t just be what it
was. Taking it between my fingers I
approached the officers. “What´s this?”
I asked, letting all of the cold I knew how to summon seep into my words. They must have noticed, because they shot
alarmed looks at each other before turning back to face me.
“It´s…a
feather,” one finally said.
“You see
nothing odd about it? Nothing beyond the ordinary?” They shared a look again.
“No, it´s
just a feather.”
“Thought
so,” I acknowledged, then tore it to pieces.
“Offender…are
you…feeling well?”
“Oh,
yes,” I lied, stripping naked. “We´re
all going to be fine.” None of us will
ever be fine, you fools, I wanted to yell to him. We are all damned, because it´s just a
feather and it needed to be so much more than that in order to make any of this
something other than absurd. Because we
continue to destroy the people and the things we do not understand, because we
are even able to convince ourselves that we know what we are doing as we are
doing the destroying. Because we have
the audacity to actually
act like we´re the deviants, like anyone pays attention to
that old Foucauldian shit anymore. They
read three sentences of Pierre Bourdieu about how to use terror and symbolic
violence to mold the individual into the structural and formal demands of the
prescribed order, and they think, hey, I like that, but they´ve never noticed that such works
borrow their terminology from a deeper and more powerful situation. That´s the problem with these so-called
conservative “intellectuals”, kid, their knowledge sounds deep until you jam a
stick in it and see that water only goes down about six inches. They´ve never bothered with Arendt or
Merleau-Ponty, so they have no idea why their methods have failed them. The best they can do is to fall back on old
favorites, to terrify the public with tales of the rise of the “sociopath” or
the “superpredator” as if they wouldn´t act in exactly the same way if they
were locked in a box the size of a small closet and given practically nothing
to sustain their sanity. It´s human
nature to want to improve your lot a little, to have the tiniest taste of real
life from time to time. I´m not giving
you license to act like a damned idiot, though.
If I catch you masturbating on some guard we´re done here. I´m just saying that you can´t expect to
remain completely static behind these walls.
You can´t expect to pick up on
the first
thing I noticed when I stepped back into my cage. That strikes me as odd, now that I think
about it, considering what a disaster area my cell was at the time. It had been roughly two months since a
certain jackass inmate had called a certain influential state Senator on his
smuggled cell phone, and we were still stumbling about in the dark days of the
shakedown fallout. I had made the
mistake of going to rec that morning, and the newly invented and forcefully
energized shakedown team had blitzkrieged the pod just as soon as we were
safely locked into the dayroom cages.
Thus the disarray upon my return.
Someone had opened up my only bag of coffee and dumped the contents out
on my desk in a nice imitation of an ant hill.
My paperwork was everywhere but inside the folders where it
belonged. Even my typewriter was out of
place, on its back in the center of my cell, as if it were a gigantic beetle
that had gone belly-up and died right there on top of my copy of Philippe
Aries´s L´Homme Devant la Mort.
Despite
all of the mess, it was the black walkie-talkie on the floor next to my bunk
that seized my eyes, even as I was bending down to have the handcuffs removed
from my wrists. I stood there staring at
it for a moment, thinking that if I did so, maybe it would vanish like a
mirage. No such luck, I though, as I
reached down to pick it up. I had been
seeing these for several years on the belts of the screws. Their indiscernible squawking had woken me up
countless times during the middle of the night, especially when it was a newbie
who bore them, as if they were some sort of status symbol where power was
proportional to the volume setting. I
flipped the device on and listened for a time.
I could only make out roughly half of each conversation, same as
always. I think maybe they teach these
people a new language when they attend the Academy, some sort of grunting,
indignant Hickenese that my citified, Volvo-and-vino-set-raised ears just
cannot penetrate. Still, for all that, I
was pretty sure they would understand me if
I decided to say something over the air.
Oh yes, they would no doubt all hear what I had to say now.
The smile
on my face was so wide that I actually noticed it, actually thought about how
goofy I must have looked in that moment.
I very clearly remember sitting down on the metal of my bunk and
thinking about how long it had been since I had smiled like that. I honestly couldn´t recall. It had almost
certainly been many years, maybe as much as a decade. Something about that realization made me feel
very weird inside, my hands absent-mindedly turning the radio over and over
again. Since when had mischief become my
primary source of joy? I didn´t start
out my life feeling like this. Up until
halfway through my high school years, I was the good kid, the one always trying
to get people around me to get along, to behave, to be kinder to each
other. When Matt C. had built his first
Roman Candle bazooka and started shooting it at the police cruiser that
patrolled our neighborhood, I was the one trying to get him to stop, and, once
I´d failed at that mission, to get him to run, for God´s sake. When David threw Matt´s new Air Jordans into
the traffic on Highway 59, I was the only one of the group who wasn´t laughing
as he dodged traffic to get them back, the only one to have been so distressed
that I vomited. Even later on, after
things had started slipping down the spiral at a faster rate, I was the guy
that collected the car keys at parties and handled the needles, so none of them
mistook dirty for clean or overdosed because they had lost perspective on how
much they had already rammed into their veins.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, something had shifted. I got tired of looking for acceptance for the
real me, exhausted with always being on the outside looking in. People had gone from something to be
protected to something worthy of scorn, of contempt. What dark alchemy was this?
It wasn’t
that simple, though, was it? I recall
thinking. It was always a gradual
process, a slow peeling back of layer after layer of the things I wanted to
believe about the world, of seeing only this bog of bullshit that lay
underneath everything else. Of how we
are a people that claim to believe in divinely granted free will and the
personal responsibility inherent to that concept, yet who simultaneously
worship a God that punishes all
humans for the sins of Adam and Eve, who committed genocide and ecocide in
Noah´s day and again in that of Moses, who killed the children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren and great great-grandchildren of those who worshipped other
gods, who murdered twenty-four thousand Jews in Numbers because a few of them
had sex with the Baal-worshiping Medianites, who dumped a three year famine on David´s people because of something done
by Saul, and who then killed seventy
thousand of His own chosen people because David had the temerity to complete a
census that God commanded him to undertake in the first place, who killed 42
children because they made fun of Elisha´s bald head, and who condemned future generations of Samarians to
having their children dashed to the ground and their pregnant women ripped open
for something done by the current
one. These things were always there,
waiting for me to notice. One day, I
just couldn´t ignore them anymore. I
couldn´t ignore that we are a people who will always stand foursquare and
permanently against any sort of perceived foreign tyranny and yet never even
begin to consider that in most of the hundred-plus countries where we have
military bases, nearly all of the people there feel we are the tyrants, or how on our own shores we regularly allow a
majority to tyrannize a minority in deep, systematic ways, of how the only
difference between an ochlocracy and a democracy is spin based on how much of
one´s personal identity and economic well-being is wrapped up in the latter, or
how we take pride in our rule of law, yet will seldom, if ever, think about how
these laws are devised and passed by elected representatives and not by a direct
vote of the people, or how we are a people only mildly annoyed by the fact that
those same representatives are skillfully cultivated for years by well-funded
lobbyists who have not the interests of the people at heart but rather wealthy
special interest groups, of how we are a people whose civic ignorance can be
guaranteed to mystify the reality that before our vaunted laws can even be
voted on in the first place, they have to be reported out of specially arranged
committees composed of small numbers of powerful party leaders re-elected over
and over again by small numbers of voters in artfully gerrymandered districts
where the candidate seldom faces any significant political opposition, or the
fact that we live in a land where the cost of campaigning for high national
office has ballooned to the point where only wealthy individuals or the whores
of wealthy individuals can afford to run or that there’s
one thing you shouldn´t ever try to put in your ark and one
thing you simply can´t, no matter how hard you try. The first is other people. I know, I know, but you can´t seal up your
connections like that, and there are many who seem to be on your side that you
will come to see are anything but, and you wouldn´t want them infecting your
ark in any case. You will be tempted to
want to secure away certain relationships, to keep them safe from the
atmosphere here, but it won´t work and, eventually, it won´t really matter
anyway. The only thing more guaranteed
than your death is that nearly all the people you currently love will disappear
on you. You don´t believe me, I can see
it. Unfortunately this is one of those
things that have ontological existence whether you believe in them or not,
kiddo. Ask any of these old cats around
here, and they´ll tell you the same thing.
People just aren´t wired to handle the pressures of this place, all the
distance they carve out between you and the people in the free-world that care
about you. Love really doesn´t conquer
all, not even close. Letters will vanish
in the
first place, of how ours is a country where people are constitutionally deemed
to be too stupid or untrustworthy to directly vote on the Presidency so electors
are substituted, even if this means that a candidate can seize the office after
losing the popular vote, a vote wherein not even a majority of eligible voters
actually participated, and where, given the laziness of the general public, the
primary process will have been hijacked by the most radical, ensuring that the
candidates in the general election are likely not to represent the median
interests of the country but rather only the extremes, of how we are a people
who are actually proud enough of all
of this and a million other stupidities to have convinced ourselves of our own
exceptionalism to the point that we completely ignore the existence of better
practices emerging abroad, of how we have created the impression globally that
there is nothing more American than standing firm and resolute in the face of
rational thought.
This is
what I am supposed to respect, cherish value?
Wouldn´t that be to enable these evils, to put my stamp of approval upon
them? It was so easy for me to feel that
we deserve every bit of whatever awful consequences these actions brought upon
us. I couldn´t see a way to fix
anything, to help anyone that would rescue them from the real poison coursing
through their veins, so instead I abandoned them to this theater of the absurd,
to ridicule and disdain. And these
guards, I thought, these witnesses, participants, and instigators of daily
cruelties that would shock virtually anyone randomly selected off the street:
do they not also deserve every iota of the fear I would engender when my voice
began screeching over the wavelengths about an officer down, F-pod, oh god,
officer in distress, oh, the blood! They
would come spilling out of the woodworks, falling all over themselves in
terror, and, oh, how we would have our cells torn to pieces once they realized what had happened. And we, too, we in the white jumpsuits, we
would deserve all of this reaction, every bit of it, every last one of us but
none more than myself, because my existence is just as idiotic as anyone
else´s, my absurd life powered by the same absurd lies as that of the officer
who would undoubtedly lose his job for leaving the radio in my house in the
first place. Oh, how I would laugh and
laugh, and laugh, even as they kicked my teeth down the back of my throat,
because it´s the funniest event in all of theater when the Fool doesn´t realize
he´s the Fool and actually thinks he´s the star of the show.
All of
this and more passed through my mind as I contemplated my move. It was so easy, I reflected, to hate, so easy
to give them a little of the same treatment they gave me every day. And yet… wouldn´t that make me the same as
them? Wouldn´t that prove that positive
change was impossible? I knew what I
wanted to do, and I knew what I ought to do.
There was a time when just knowing these things – just seeing the gap
between the two – would have shown me the path, but they had done their work a
little too well for all that. I felt all
of us here
lost, others stolen others still intentionally
destroyed. As this place poisons you,
they won´t understand what is happening and will come to feel that you are no
longer the person they once knew. They
will actually feel that you betrayed them somehow. Once this happens, it becomes very easy for
them to let go. And you, you will
actually twist yourself into ten-dimensional knots figuring out how to see
their departure as a good thing. Fuck
´em, you will think: I´m better off without all of that baggage. For a while
yet you will feel the lie there, then even that will fade. If I have to live with it, you will think,
couldn´t they at the very least have had the strength to have heard about
it? Wrong on both counts, kid. You aren´t “living” this, you are dying
within it. And nobody is strong to
experience this place even at one remove without taking some damage. Eventually you will simply come to accept
that you are now a dispensable creature, and had better enjoy whatever contact
you have with those in the free-world, no matter how ephemeral. That all lasts until you feel your
emotions
drain through the floor as I recognized the damage done, and that´s when I
heard the section gate pop open. I set
the walkie-talkie next to the toilet and moved to the door. Sgt. A- quickly entered and proceeded to move upstairs. I watched as he then came down to one-row and
moved from cell to cell, peering inside each intently for a few seconds. I let him look in mine and move on to my neighbor´s
before I spoke.
“What´s
going on, Sarge?” He ignored me
completely, so I figured I´d play with him a little before I gave him the radio
back. “You have the look of a man who
has lost something important. The sort
of thing that, I don´t know, might catalyze a rapid employment transfer to the
local Walmart unless located.” This
stopped him, and I smiled at him in a friendly way as he stepped up to my cell.
“Offender,
give it to me now,” he ordered, his voice cracking a little. “Or I swear to God I´m going to fuck you over
so bad.”
The
muscle under my right eye suddenly started jumping, a sure sign of an impending
headache. I took a slight step back and
hung my head. I had never disrespected
this man, had always had civil discussions with him. Never once had I given him a problem, and
this thought slipped into words without my noticing.
“Never.
Not once. And that´s how you come at me?”
Bad move, I thought, real bad move.
I might have caved to pity, to a good joke, but he pulled the bully card
and I detest a bully. Taking a deep
breath I stepped back to the door.
“Why,
whatever are you talking about Sarge?” He blanched, taking a deep breath before
he continued.
“Please
give it to me. I´ll…I´ll owe you one.”
Too late,
bastard, I thought. “Man, I´d sure like
to help you, Sarge, you know that.” I lied, not even trying to make it sound
good. “This is a real cold world,
though, full of people searching in vain for their deepest desires. I, for instance, would like to live to see my
fortieth birthday, but there´s zero chance of that happening. I really would have liked to have been able
to drink that coffee, too,” I said, waving towards my table. “For that matter,” I added raising an
eyebrow, “I´d also really like to have a cup of ice from the kitchen. Yesiree, with a nice, big cup of ice, I´d
feel very…open…to the needs of others.”
He opened
his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. I could see the battle raging behind the
red-rimmed windshields of his eyes.
Finally, he turned on his heels and marched off. Well, I thought, either he´s back in fifteen
with a cup of ice, or back in thirty with the goon squad. Given the likelihood
of the latter, I didn´t see any point in cleaning up the mess in my cell, as
they would just trash it a second time anyways.
I tried not to notice when the clock passed fifteen minutes, or when it
reached thirty. It was nearing the 45
minute mark when I heard the section gate pop open again. I decided not to put
my book down, come what may. A few seconds later Sgt. A- appeared at my
door. He was by himself. He quickly
opened my tray slot and slammed down a huge Styrofoam cup. I stood up slowly and walked to the door, his
radio clipped onto the front of my shorts.
I reached down to pull the cup in, and then popped the plastic cup. Inside, I beheld a small mountain of
glistening white shaved ice, the first time I had seen such a thing since my
arrest. I slowly drew the cup to my
nostrils, searching for the odor of urine or feces or the gods knew what else. Detecting nothing, I let a wave of cold air
flow over my face. The pig at the door
banged in impatience but I held a finger up to him. “I would have given this to you for nothing
less than a kind word. You chose to be
an asshole. So do not mess this up for
me.” I slowly tipped the rim of the cup
up, and let a few pieces fall onto my tongue.
Cold, so cold. Something that had
once been so commonplace to me, so unnoticed, now somehow morphed into one of a
million other items that I could spend 90 days on level 3 for. I felt like I might start tearing up, so I
distracted myself by looking towards the door.
The sergeant was trying to glare, but his body language radiated more
anxiety than anger. We stared at each
other for a longer moment.
“You know
I could fuck you up right now,” he finally whispered. “I could gas your ass for failing to obey a
direct order, drop a team on you so fast that you wouldn´t heal before
Christmas.”
I nodded,
finding a point about fifteen feet behind the center of his head to stare at,
the secret of my best deadeye stare. I walked right up to the door, summoning
up the words of a ghost. I shrugged at him before setting the radio down on the
slot. “Those are human concerns.”
He nearly
ran off the section. He thought I had
won that day, and hated me until they fired him 18 months later for providing a
dirty urine analysis. I knew better,
though. There are no winners here, just
like the Holocaust had no survivors.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is a mere voyeur, nothing more than
those who think they understand your context, your “plight”
might even be worse, though you may come to respect them for their attempts to
bridge the unbridgeable. You will have
to weed out the rubbernecks, though, the ones that are in it for a cheap thrill
and who think they can understand your existence on an intellectual level
because they´ve read Thoreau or Solzhenitsyn.
They´ll quote Mandel to you, kid, trying to justify the pain of Genet
and Wilde as being necessary to the development of their craft, that there
would have been no Vita of Benvenuto Cellini, no drama or poetry of Torquata
Tasso, without the crucible of the gaol.
I always want to dump a truckload of Jack Henry Abbott or Chester Himes
on them, watch them struggle to crawl out from under all of that weight, all of
that void. You smarmy fucks, I´d love to
shout. You think because you´ve read
some words on a page you
know if
you send me back, they are going to kill me,” I told the AFI agent sitting
behind his huge desk.
“I have
assurances that the death penalty is not to be considered in your case,” he
replied, his Spanish crisp and clear, evidence of a first rate education. He picked up a fax from his desk and waved it
to me. I couldn´t read it, but could see some sort of seal with a star affixed
to the top-center of the page. Below
this was a small paragraph of text.
“I still
invoke my human right to appeal for amnesty and demand that I be allowed to
speak with my consular off-“
His
laughter interrupted me.
“You
really learned nothing about my country during your time down here,” he said, standing. “In Mexico, only the powerful have rights. Do
you not think that they
have any right to talk to me about justice? What about the law? Do you know what it´s like to have to
concentrate on deflecting blows away from your face and onto your body, just
because your family is coming to visit you this week and you´d rather be
covered in bruises underneath your clothes and lose than to actually win the
fight but have them fretting over a black eye?
Do you know what it is like to be hungry and cold and hated for years at
a stretch? To remake yourself completely
and to have all of this effort noticed by no one? So fucking what if you´ve come to the
conclusion that Wilde guessed and Coleridge knew that most murderers either
kill the objects of their affection or, by killing, displace the only home they
know? Does any of that intellectual
bullshit matter to those of us being gassed daily? To those of us who can´t get a fair interview
to save our necks? But I
I saw the
fax,” I protested.
“They
keep telling me that you´re supposed to be intelligent. I wish you´d prove it to me some time,” my
attorney snapped at me. “The state never
took the death penalty off the table.
Period. I´m not here to listen to
your fantasies about-“
“There´s
a treaty, man! Mexico won´t send anyone
back to the States unless they have a guarantee that-“
“I guess
we´re done here,” he said, standing up to leave. I tried to think that
the weirdest part is that none of those people even try to
justify your confinement as somehow serving the regulatory capacity of modern
society a la Adorno and Horkheimer.
There was something to that back in the day when Philadelphia elites
were terrified that the revolutionary fires might blaze towards anarchy if left
unstructured, but those days are dead, dead, dead. No more republican machines, no more
pedagogic regimes, just millions of broken and broken-hearted fools who failed
to understand their place in all of this mess and who now get to pay for all of
the social evils we regularly ignore.
You´d think this reality would demand they question whether
They get
Little D?”
“Yeah,” I
sighed. “They got him.”
“Fourth
this month.”
“Yeah,
this was my 42nd execution and I wonder if this
would foster some real solidarity between all of us, some
sort of cross-cultural identification or compassion, but this seldom
happens. War breaks and scatters us,
transforms us into something we can´t even recognize, kid, something we
wouldn´t want to be able to recognize in the mirror even if we had the
option. They sentenced us to civil and
then bodily death, but they kill us all a dozen times over again in a much more
complete way before it´s all over. I
mean, look around you, son, don’t you think about how
many is
this for you?”
“This was
number 97 for me.” I responded
“Damn,
you keep that kind of track?”
“I
remember every one, bro. Every single
one. And try
as hard as you might, you can´t fit yourself into your ark.
It doesn´t work like that; it only preserves that which can be saved, not that
which is destined for annihilation. You
think I haven´t tried to fit a part of me in there? I used to…god, how much I used to feel
things. I was so stupid, so young, that
I actually thought that all of that pain was the worst thing there was, that I
would do anything to make it stop, even the worst thing that I could think
of. Now I know that this pain connected
me to the rest of humanity, that so long as I felt it I could understand and
reach out to others, that we could meet on an even field backgrounded by that
pain and work to change things for the better.
Once that´s gone, once these people burn it out to you, you are likely
to
say something
on the news?” I asked hopefully
“They
killed him. Sometime after 9 p.m.,” he answered. “Don´t know what the three hour delay was
for.”
I closed
my eyes. “He was my163rd.”
“Newbie. I´ve been here for more than 400.”
“Jesus.
How do you…deal with all of that?”
“What
difference does it make? he answered angrily.
“Another day, another body. You
get used to it. If you can’t, you are
gone, done for. You
think I´m telling you all of this because I´m “nice”? Because I “love” you? Open your fucking eyes, kiddo. I was nice once. You wouldn´t believe this, but I used to be
funny, used to laugh my eyes closed. I
used to love so deeply sometimes it scared me, used to quote Shakespeare and
Hume and get carried away by Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi, used to say
things in foreign languages just to see the strange looks on the faces of the
Other. Si vous êtes
pris dans le rêve de l´autre, vous êtez foutu. It doesn´t do anything for me anymore. Those days are gone, and I´m not taking you
through the anti-Academy because I like you.
I want you to know these things because every time someone uses one of
my tricks, I remain alive. Every fool
pig you beat is a testament to my resistance, to my will, to the idea that
though they may have killed me a thousand times before they killed me, they
never beat me. I´m not telling you all
of this because I care about you. I´m
doing it so that I will haunt you. In
this world, the only thing that is eternal is revenge. That´s the biggest lesson they teach you in
this place, and by god, I am nothing if not a diligent pupil.
 |
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker 999522
Polunsky Unit
3872 FM 350 South
Livingston, TX 77351 |
Click here to make a donation to Thomas's education fund.
If you'd like to correspond with Thomas, you can view his pen pal profile on Write A Prisoner