When I enter the cell, I’m enraged. I’m feeling unstable and am scared by the violent thoughts I’m having toward Aracelio. But I also know he genuinely slept through the mini-riot. He sleeps with earplugs. This whole mess isn’t his fault. It’s just one more time when, to my self-pitying way of seeing things, the shitstorm that follows me has covered me in shit.
Aracelio immediately starts tearing up a bedsheet into strips for clotheslines, and hanging my pictures and papers on them to try to salvage something. As he does that, I lay down on my rack. I feel like something’s breaking apart inside of me. In the eighteen months since my arrest, I’ve never cried. Now I come very close.
Last night, I lay here in a spiritual frame of mind, meditating on the mundane and appealing to some higher power, almost talking to God. Now I say to myself: That’s the last time I’m reaching out to anyone or anything to ask for help.
28
2012: One of the Bad Guys
While I wait to be designated to my next prison, I spend another Christmas behind bars. The BOP hands out big bags of candy. Inmates try to stave off depression and forget that they’re not with their families by getting together to cook meals and conjure some version of merriment.
I kill the time by reading Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which is partly about the fallout from a man’s eighteen-year prison sentence. With books, the fatter the better. I have nothing but time on my hands, and when I’m enjoying what I’m reading, I want it to go on and on.
MDC is so poorly heated that I’m cold even on relatively warm days. On New Year’s Eve, the cell is so freezing that my hands are shades of white and blue. I think about my family, together and celebrating. Mom is with Hawk and Hudson and Imara. Dad and Catherine are spending Christmas in Panama, celebrating Johnny Pigozzi’s sixtieth birthday on his private island. Erin and our dogs are in Connecticut, visiting her sister’s family. Picturing them all lifts my spirits. At least the people I love are happy.
Aracelio and I jam sheets under our cell door. In the box, on New Year’s, there are always inmates “popping bottles”—setting off sprinklers for shits and giggles—and the rise of cell phones in prison has only encouraged this trend. Inmates like to text pictures to their friends on the street, showing that they’re doing big things inside.
I’m in a foul mood, preoccupied with the doubling of my sentence and the harsh BOP sanctions, and not thinking straight. There’s a cop here, a short, fat, Hispanic woman in her thirties, who’s always flirting with the black inmates. Every time she comes on the unit, someone yells, “Movie’s on!” and she bends over suggestively, like she’s picking something up. Now I tell Aracelio that I’m just going to ask her if she wants to have sex.
When she makes her rounds, and is walking past our cell, I call out to her through the cell-door window, a vertical slit of shatterproof plastic. “Listen, I don’t know you that well, but it’s New Year’s Eve. Why don’t you just pop this door before you leave, take me in back, and let me fuck you.”
“What?”
I repeat myself.
“First of all, you’re not the right color. Second of all, you’re way out of line. Go to sleep.”
In the morning, I’m mortified. I think I just wanted a story to tell, or something to remember this New Year’s by. I’m pretty sure I didn’t offend the cop, but I make a resolution for 2012: The stunt I pulled last night will be the last stupid and reckless thing I do.
I doubt I’ll get a shot, and as the day turns to dusk, it looks like I’m right—guards have twenty-four hours to write you up—but then a lieutenant comes down to the unit. He walks past my cell, then doubles back and reads out my violation. “Is this right? Is this yours?” Even he is shocked that I’d be getting this shot. I make up an excuse: I’d made a bet with another inmate on the range that I’d do it, and I’m a man of my word. “All right,” he says, shaking his head, and walks away. It’s a 200-series shot. Medium serious. Better than a 100-series shot, like killing; worse than a 300-series shot, like insolence toward a staff member.
* * *
—
A few days later, I’m bussed back to Lewisburg, but this time to the Big House—the supermax penitentiary behind the ominous wall—which, during my months in the minimum-security camp beside it, I’d looked up at, thankful not to be there. When the bus turns onto the familiar prison grounds, I think back to the day when I was in the Lewisburg administration building, on sanitation detail, and a bus like the one I’m on now arrived transporting convicts. I remember the cop saying to me, “You guys are all right. Those are the bad guys.” Now, one and a half years later, I’m one of those guys. I know I’m not a bad guy. But I know that’s how people must be starting to see me now. As a bad guy, one of the dangerous ones. When the bus pulls up outside the wall, my name is called.
* * *
—
I’ll only be here for a few days this time, and I’m in the SHU, so I don’t interact with the general population. A week later, I’m moved to FCC Allenwood, which is nearby. It’s a complex on 640 acres, with a low-security prison, a medium-security prison, and a maximum-security penitentiary. The SHU at Allenwood draws from all the security levels and is in its own building. The budget’s bigger here than at MCC and MDC, and the food is better, but otherwise Allenwood is a grimly efficient place.
My shot from New Year’s has followed me. The guards are leery, expecting me to be aggressive with female staff. I get no sunlight. It’s winter, and most mornings, during my allotted time for the rec cage outside, I pass up the opportunity to freeze while surrounded by high concrete walls, in favor of sleep. The water in the shower has no temperature control, so it’s either freezing or scalding. I have to jump in and out of the water to wash. It still burns my scalp. I obsess that my hair may be falling out. I have a series of dreams in which something’s wrong with me—I can’t move my body freely, as if I’m in a straitjacket, or I can’t speak properly because my mouth is too dry, or I’m wearing ill-fitting, ridiculous-looking clothes—and I feel embarrassed that the people around me can see me struggling. One of them is Pop. He doesn’t say anything about my condition, and he is loving toward me, but I feel ashamed.
The cops must be really bored, because they start playing games, forcing me into situations likely to entertain them. The best way to do SHU time is by yourself, but the cops here cell me with a black Muslim kid from Philly, a flagrant break from standard practice. The way the prison system has evolved, racial segregation is a fact of life behind bars. It has less to do with any deep racial animus than it has to do with gang affiliation, which breaks down along race lines. As a result, it’s unwritten Bureau of Prisons policy not to mix races in cells, purely as a pragmatic way of curbing needless violence.
Other black guys in the SHU call my new cellmate Supermax Sam. He’s tall, with a Bic-smoothed head and a small chin beard, and in his late thirties. He tells me right away that he’s Nation of Islam, in a tone that suggests he wants nothing to do with me. I’m friendly by nature, and at first I try to be cordial and polite. “Good morning.” Crickets. “Hey, you want the rest of these fries?” He gives me a menacing look, then ignores me. He’s not particularly friendly with anyone, but my whiteness is clearly a problem for him.
Over the first two weeks, I don’t think we say more than two words a day, and they’re “Excuse me,” as we pass each other in the narrow cell. I start thinking of him as Angry Man. Other than when Angry Man prays to Mecca, he spends all day, every day, lying in his bottom bunk under the covers, with his head under his blanket or else peering out and staring at the bottom of the upper rack. One day, we exchange a few more words. The only ones I remember are his final sentence: “I could kill you in this cell, and I might.”
The situation was acutely awkward to begin with, and now I’m scared. He’s clearly trying to muscle me out of the cell. Partly out of fear, and partly out of an imperative to leave the cell of my own volition, rather than getting pushed out, I f
eel I need to take Angry Man out of the equation, to get myself moved by hurting him. You don’t want to let yourself get bullied out of a cell; that will follow you and shape your reputation.
He’s working out one day, doing push-ups on the ground. I’m wearing the commissary slippers we call Jackie Chans. Angry Man has a long scar, running the length of his stomach, from a gunshot wound, and I consider kicking him there, but think better of it, deciding that a scar isn’t the same thing as a weak spot.
Instead, I kick him in the throat. I learned about doing this when I was a kid and Leo, whom I’d later employ, taught me and his son to spar. I need for Angry Man not to be able to get up after the kick, but I also know it’s easy to overdo it. My adrenaline is going crazy, and the kick is harder than I intend. Suddenly, he can’t breathe. He’s looking at me, eyes blank and wide, and I start worrying that I’ve killed him, that I caved in his throat and he’s going to die.
I hit the duress alarm button. When the cops come, Angry Man, to my relief, is just starting to get his breath back.
“Back away!” a cop says. “Come to the door and cuff up!”
“No!” I don’t want to be cuffed if Angry Man suddenly comes to.
“Direct order!” the guard says. “Come here and cuff up.”
“No!” I repeat.
The cop tells me to go to the corner of the cell and face it. Then a couple of them come into the cell, cuff Angry Man, and take him out.
I don’t try to defend my actions. I just say, “You guys put me in a cell with that dude, when you know he doesn’t want me in the cell with him.” The next day they move me.
* * *
—
The guards have only just begun fucking with me. My new cellmate, named Bobby Tanner, is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white prison gang known for committing lots of murders and torturing people. He’s well-built and inked up with ABT badges and SS lightning bolts, and he talks about the Brotherhood all the time.
I take little solace from the fact that he’s not a gang member in good standing. The ABT has said he can’t “walk the yard” in Texas, which is why he got kicked up to Pennsylvania. But the reason his gang ostracized him is his volatility, which is also the reason he’s in solitary and why he doesn’t already have a cellmate: the BOP hasn’t been able to find anyone who can cohabitate peaceably with him.
For a few days, we get along. But Bobby has recently been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He exudes aggression, constantly shadowboxing in our small cell and talking about fights and fighting. And this is when he’s taking his lithium. One day, he is suddenly possessed by the belief that the nurse who delivers his meds has been pausing, while making her way to our cell, to administer hand jobs to black prisoners. Bobby immediately stops taking his lithium, and I witness a drastic decline in his mental health.
He begins having regular conversations with Jesus, talking about “hotdogs” and “donkey dicks” and reciting disturbed mantras: “I hope all of them, their children turn to faggots and die in the deepest darkest hells, in Jesus Christ’s name, amen.”
He also becomes increasingly rude toward me, stomping around loudly during his morning workouts in the cell, when I’m still sleeping. One morning, I’m asleep when the rack suddenly shakes really hard. What the fuck? I look over. Bobby is kicking the side of the rack. He tells me he’s stretching. For him to do something that disrespectful lets me know that he thinks I’m a chump, which means I could be in real danger. The rest of the day is almost unbearably tense. The true solitude of prison is less about the number of people around you than the knowledge that anyone could be an adversary and nobody’s coming to save you. I’m on high alert, and I know the only option is to try to hurt him before he hurts me.
That night, I’m on the top bunk, meditating as I do every night, and Bobby starts going on and on about “the faggots” and “dying” and “kill all the babies.”
“Hey, Bobby.”
“What?”
“Can you keep that to yourself, ’cause I’m trying to pray up here?”
He jumps up.
“You’re trying to pray? Well, you better pray harder.”
He begins pacing. He spits on the glass the officers look through. He’s completely out of his mind.
Bobby has a lot of time left in his sentence, and if he gets hold of me, I’m thinking he may kill me. This is not paranoia. It’s not uncommon to be stabbed or smashed with something in your sleep, and that night I lie awake, fighting sleep until dawn.
At 5 a.m., a guard comes by to let prisoners out for their allotted daily hour in the cage outside. This morning, Bobby goes out.
After he leaves, I tell a guard that he has to get me out of this cell. I say, “If you don’t get me out of here, I’m going to get me out of here.” The guard ignores me and lumbers off. The cops here have the same mentality as people who like to fight dogs. They know this kid has problems, but they’re happy to wait and see what happens between us.
The rest of the day, there’s a nerve-wracking tension between me and Bobby. I start my workout around 5 p.m., thinking about what I know I need to do to him. I do a bodyweight circuit of four sets of three exercises: diamond push-ups, squats, lunges. Then I do another four sets of a different group of three exercises. Then another. Then I run in place to let my muscles regenerate. Then I start over at the beginning. The idea is to go nonstop.
What should I do? I have my answer, but I’m hesitant, and I put the question to the universe, which I vocalize silently as God. I ask Him to show me a sign, to tell me I need to pull the trigger, right now. I’m doing push-ups when I notice a speck of green glitter on the concrete floor. There is no good explanation, as far as my prison-crazed mind is concerned, for how green glitter ended up in my cell. This can’t be an accident, and green means GO to me. I’m carrying on an inner dialogue: What kind of man are you, Cameron? You asked for a sign, you got one. Now what? I decide that the next time I have an opportunity to attack Bobby, I will.
When the moment arrives, around 7 p.m., the timing is unfortunate, because I’ve just finished a solid two-hour workout and my muscles are fatigued, but I know what an influx of adrenaline can overcome. Cell 222 is tiny, with room for a bunk bed, sink, toilet, and not much else. There’s a dull sheet of metal instead of a mirror above the sink, which has those buttons that only stay pressed for a second. To make coffee, you have to keep pressing the hot-water button until it gets hot. But with the tension in the cell now excruciating, and me at a diagonal behind Bobby when he approaches the sink, he keeps pressing the button and then walking away. I make my plan of attack. When he has to stand at the sink for a few seconds to fill his Styrofoam cup, that’s when I’ll get him. I know I can’t let him get the upper hand, or it could all be over for me.
As soon as he puts his cup under the tap and presses the button, I throw a good right hook from behind him, making solid contact with his jaw. My plan is next to take his head and smash it on the corner where the sink comes out and the toilet is. And that’s about as far as I’ve thought this through, because if it works, that should be the end of the fight. Unfortunately, when I go to grab his hair, I’m so pumped up on adrenaline that I pull a clump of it out. I quickly improvise a plan B, grabbing him in a headlock and teeing off on his face with a series of uppercuts.
Bobby starts screaming and hollering in a high-pitched voice.
“Stop! Stop!”
He probably thinks this is the end of him, and he’s trying to get the attention of the police, but this is not what you’re supposed to do when you’re a tough guy like him. Meanwhile, someone has hit a duress alarm button.
It’s lucky for me, because I’m almost out of gas, and if I continue I might just end up doing something that would add years to my sentence. I loosen the headlock, as if I’m showing mercy, just as the cops arrive, yelling at us to separate. The whole thing has taken maybe two minutes. I still have Bobby’s head in my armpit, and am not yet ready to let
him go completely, when suddenly I can’t breathe. The cops have fired pepper-spray bullets into the room. I scramble to get as far away from the door as I can.
* * *
—
Bobby tells investigators that he believes the fight was “set up by the FBI” and that “I feel I was hypnotized.” But my plan works. I’m moved to my own cell. More importantly, to me, I’ve passed a crucial threshold. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been testing myself, often in self-destructive ways. But now, I know exactly what I’m capable of. I know that I have what it takes—a certain freedom from restraint, even a kind of craziness—not only to survive in prison but to thrive. I’m not a victim. I’m mostly in control. I’m not going to be taken advantage of. Maybe I can finally accept that, and stop being obsessed with proving it.
I get a shot for the Angry Man fight and another one for the Bobby Tanner fight. Every infraction adds points to your “jacket,” or prison file, and between those two incidents and my propositioning of the guard back at MDC, I’ve turned my eleven months in solitary into twenty-four months and gotten my security level raised to just below medium.
29
2012: Hole Time
The hike in my security level gets me transferred to FCI Loretto, another prison in Central Pennsylvania. Loretto is old and crowded and is what’s called a “disciplinary” Low. It’s where they put prisoners who are troublemakers but don’t qualify for higher-security places, as well as people who do qualify for higher-security places but for some reason, such as a gang conflict, can’t be placed there.
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