Bean was discovered by another inmate fairly quickly because he was still alive and was making noises—moaning and stuff. Of course, someone told on me. Whether it was Bean or one of his homeys, I will never know. But I was sent to the hole and reclassified as a maximum-security inmate. I wish I could go back to being that naïve kid who didn’t know what to expect in the hole. Knowing just makes the dread of going back there so much greater. Shit, they’ll probably be here any minute.
Anyway, back then I was just a kid. I remember being walked to the H-unit, cuffed and shackled, and actually feeling impressed by the site. H-unit was underground, built into the side of a hill. All that was visible was the front of the building, set into the hill, and a skylight, about six inches wide, running all the way around the hill. The cells in H-unit were arranged in a circle and in two tiers. The bottom tier held cells A–L. The upper tier consisted of cells AA–LL. The cells at the ends of both the upper and lower tiers were supermax cells. I was placed in the supermax cell on the lower tier. Cell L. The supermax cell has one door which you step through, and then another which opens to the interior of the cell. There, an inmate is kept behind two locked doors, whereas all the other cells have one locking door. The doors are heavy, solid. The bars on H block were as big as my wrist. They were all over the entire pod, and they covered the skylight. I would soon learn that on H block, there is zero inmate-to-officer contact. There’s always a slider with those huge bars or a heavy solid door between inmates and officers. The solid doors have a “beanhole” near the bottom—a steel flap that opens with a key where a food tray can be passed into the cell. The officers also cuff and shackle the inmates through the beanhole before taking them out for rec or shower. H block is twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown. Ha. Some days it’s twenty-four hours straight. Sometimes it’s a week at a time. The unit gets locked down for all kinds of reasons.
I spent my nineteenth and twentieth birthdays in that cell. I realized during that time that prison is the place where a man’s dignity goes to die. If you wanted to recreate it, to feel what it might be like, you could move into your broom closet. Give the key to the guy who was the biggest bully at your school. Have him feed you only cheap, starchy, flavorless food. Only take a shit in full view of strangers. Never mind. There’s no way to recreate it. You can’t. You would never be able to fully account for all of the factors that make it miserable. Once you’re on H block, there are no more contact visits. You can’t hug or be hugged by any of the few people in the world who give a shit about you.
I remember during those two years that things grew steadily worse every day. It was as if the staff of the unit had regular meetings to brainstorm about more ways to fuck over the inmates. Calling to order our monthly meeting. It has been noted in the minutes from our last meeting that prison isn’t quite awful enough, terrifying enough. Anyone have any motions to present? Any ideas how we can make this prison worse?
It used to be that rec time (irregularly given, no guarantee) was multiple cells on the ball court at once. We could play a good game. It was during those times that I almost felt human, real. I would chop it up with some of the other guys. We still had our conflicts, but damn. It was all right, ya know? We would play ball for a while and grab a quick shower. Maybe use the phone. Eventually, this officer named De Soto came through and flattened all the basketballs. Even then, we would get together and play cards or dominoes. Then another guard—Hudson was his name—took a bunch of the dominoes out of the set and tore up some of the cards. We didn’t even have a full deck to play with, so we made up our own games.
Eventually they started running single-cell rec time. That meant that you could go with your cellie, if you had one. I was now supermax and single-celled, so I went to rec time alone. I started exercising during those times. At least I could stretch out a bit and move around. Isolation is a creeping kind of torture. At first I thought I would be okay. I read. I listened to music. After a while, I realized that I would probably rather die. Not sure though. Never been dead before. I can tell you, however, that it’s no vacation getaway like people make it out to be on the TV.
So I guess someone must have brought up how having rec at a reasonable time was not a good way to make prison worse. So they started taking me to rec time at one o’clock in the morning. During the winter it was so damn cold and dark that I often declined to go. I began to smell bad from not showering so much. I lived in an underground prison with no natural light. I was kept in a dark cell for most of the day. The tiny bit of natural light I could feel on my skin during daytime rec had now been taken away. Worse, indeed.
During the summer months, they were always working on the air-conditioning unit. It was hot. Sweltering. Sweat would run all down my face and down my back to the crack of my ass. Too hot to sleep. I’d have to wet my sheet at my little metal sink at night and hope that I would fall asleep before it dried. If it did, I would have to get up and wet it again. The cooling unit never really seemed to be up and running except, as if by some magic, on days when a tour came through or on days when the facility was having an execution.
Oh yeah. I forgot to mention: I was on H block West. H block South was death row. On days that they planned to kill one of them dudes, you could hear the men on H-South singing some kind of song all the way over on H-West. I could never make out the words, but it was the most mournful sound my ears have ever heard. In the days preceding an execution, they would clean the facility up real nice. Buff the floors. Get the AC running. The floors in the place were painted a dull battleship gray with some kind of real shiny clear coat on top. Buffed to a high gloss. Like a polished turd. I felt I was being squeezed ever tighter and tighter and that before long I would cease to breathe.
I’m still breathing, I guess. After those two years on H block, though, I never really bounced back. Once I got out of there, I was moved to a regular unit. I got contact visits, so I started up selling drugs around again. I figured out that if I ate a can of chili and drank a bunch of water before my visits in which I would swallow drug-filled balloons, it would be easier to puke ’em up later. I guess the grease from the chili made a kind of barrier over which the rest of my stomach contents would sort of float. I started bringing in meth too. That was what the people wanted, really. There was money to be made.
I carried on like that for several years, like a zombie or a dude on inmate autopilot. My wife divorced me when I was on H block. I guess she found a better deal. I started writing letters to a pretty girl named Jewel—a cousin of an old friend—a few months ago. And she wrote me back. She even came to visit me a few times. I’m sure I won’t meet her again, seeing as how I am about to go back to the hole. Seems like everything there is waste and death. I don’t think she could save me from all that anyway. My skin has become so pale, ain’t nobody able to tell I’m a Native. Somewhere along the line, my hair turned silver. And now I get to go back to the hole, seeing as how I’ve killed a man. Once my case gets through the courts, you’ll probably be able to find me on H block. By that time, I’ll be on the other side of it. Worse. Someday, they’ll be singing for me.
THERE WILL BE SEEDS FOR NEXT YEAR
BY ZEKE CALIGIURI
Minnesota Correctional Facility, Stillwater (Bayport, Minnesota)
Things were different after I came back from the hospital. It wasn’t just me, though; it felt like the whole joint was tilting. The night I got back, Little Bug lit a garbage can on fire. Everyone was yelling about a memo, what was being taken, what we should do about it. It was hard to process. I had already been here almost eighteen years and I thought I’d finally escaped all of what this place was.
A few years into my life sentence, an old-school crook told me that buildings are moody the way people are moody. “They have a history they can’t escape, until they crumble. Sometimes these walls are depressed, sometimes they’re happy and warm, and sometimes they’re wicked and spiteful.” I didn’t understand it then. But after so many years, I think I have it sort of f
igured out.
I came back to familiar faces that didn’t know me anymore. I was a different person with bandages on my wrists and a softened face that scared me enough to turn my mirror backward. I didn’t do it for attention. I really did want to die. I didn’t want to fail and come back to my life sentence and curious expressions from everyone else in the unit. Even Slick, who I went back to ninth grade with, took a few days to come holler at me. “That’s pretty nuts, Clyde.”
“Yeah, well, I’m no longer coming of age like when I got here. I am of age. Of the age to be able to decide if this is what I want for the rest of my life.”
He walked away after that.
The rest of the people who came to talk to me were not my friends. They were from the fringe—would-be predators who probably smelled something. It didn’t scare me or anything, the pure predator seems a dying breed. Now they are mostly watered-down hybrids of punks and snitches, mixed with the classic features of blood and lust. When I got my property, I could smell it. Blood has a certain scent, something visceral and distinct, especially your own because it has a story you know. It was all over everything, even the notebook I’m writing this in.
I don’t remember much past preparation. Standing over the sink. The razor. The first cut and the dig, the saw, the tangle of wires just under the skin, the mush of my wrist. The pink aura and the cool over my face. The other wrist, trying to gnaw just as deep, not deep enough. I remember the pain, fright that made me want to go back to before—so great as to want someone to come and undo this. My hands convulsed as though detached from me. The red mineral spouting from me might as well have been from the center of the earth. Smudges of red on my cheek—I looked at the mirror to see if it said I was ready. Instead I saw someone I would probably never see again, a face being erased, with a name and a story that didn’t matter anymore. It was a mess, the last mess I would ever make of myself. I chased images of my life. My mom and dad, the alleyways in Minneapolis, from shooting basketballs to bullets. A hug from my best friend Sonny with tubes connected everywhere in her body. But the images ran from me, the backs of their heads retreating. I wanted to know why, but I couldn’t get their attention.
The looks are what I remember—the pink hue wrapped around those wide, strangled, and brooding stares, uniform and collective along the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody, I only saw doom in those eyes, like they weren’t really people, just images. It wasn’t until afterward that my therapist told me people rarely succeed when they cut their wrists. The body goes into a protection mode to save its vital organs. It mostly just looks dramatic, and I got these bracelets of scar tissue to say I tried, to say I was a little nuts, to say I was on fire.
Spring
They were strange times at Stillwater, the walled-in fortress of buildings sitting on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix River. We never saw the water, though, except for chance glances from the top floor of one of the old twine factories. They say the whole joint is haunted by all the souls that have gotten trapped here after they died. For almost a hundred years it has been a depository for souls trapped under the wheel. From all of our unanswered echoes, sometimes it feels like we are already ghosts, or on our way to becoming. Every once in a while there are people here from the historical society, taking pictures of the old Georgian colonial-style buildings, whose limestone has been decaying for decades. They don’t visit to take pictures of us.
May came, but with a bite hiding under a deceptively blue sky. It wanted to be spring, but winter had been particularly stubborn this year. Another garbage can got lit on fire in one of the blocks. It annoyed most of us. Youngsters did it to amuse themselves. It wasn’t just garbage cans, it was their drawers, their sheets, T-shirts, bundles of paper. The alarms went off and we’d get escorted to the hallway, or the yard, while it only took thirty seconds to extinguish the flames. They would take a couple of guys to the hole, never older than twenty-one or twenty-two, and that would be it. The administration never made a big deal out of it; they said they were just childish acts and no real threat. The old-timers just thought it was stupid.
We got locked down during a visit from the commissioner, the governor, and some kind of federal prison auditor. The visit was coupled with another memo listing a series of new policies. It made a lot of guys tense up, believing the prison could never go back to the way it used to be. I usually liked lockdowns, but this one gave me food poisoning and a throb over my right eye for three days. I was getting my sense of smell back after the incident, and I was particularly stung by the stench of rotten milk and the sweat and ass of unwashed bodies. There was an old man underneath me who ranted to himself, shouting, “The end of the world is coming!” Guys yelled at him to shut the fuck up, but he couldn’t hear them over the voices in his own head.
I had to view the first really nice days of spring through a checkerboard of glass and fiberglass windows put in when the convicts broke nine hundred out in ’83. I worked on the yard crew and we were supposed to be planting. Instead, we were locked in our boxes collecting the stink from bags of garbage. Men who were kids when I came here, laughing and playing grown-up, dumped my drawers into garbage bags. I was over my book limit, so I had to make a choice between The Brothers Karamazov and The Count of Monte Cristo. It was like giving away members of my family.
* * *
My only relief was going back to work. We basically lived in a hallway that attached to everything: cellblocks, chapel, gym, yard, school, chow. When they built this place they called it a “telephone pole” prison, because it connected everything through that single corridor. It was supposed to be innovative a hundred years ago. Now it was just the hallway where I followed the parade of sleepwalking zombies in boots and blue shirts, blue coats and orange caps, on their way to the factories. I was revived by fresh, cool air. For most of the year we lived under indecisive clouds—unsure of rain, unsure whether to stay or leave. I had been without sun for so long, my grill was pasty white and nasty. I’m usually pale, though, except for a couple months in summer, but I wear raccoon eyes all year round. I used to tell people the dark circles are from the pain, now I don’t bother.
Our crew planted thousands of flowers and shrubs in landscaped plots against backdrops of dark old buildings with rows of squawking black crows lined up along the gutters. Every day I could look around at what this place had become—more fences, more rows of razor wire. There used to be flowers everywhere, the old infirmary building on the hill was covered with ivy and trees towering overhead. There even used to be a greenhouse within the walls, where they planted seeds for the next spring.
There used to be a lot of things, but now we had to fight to hold onto the few spaces we had left. I did most of the planting. One of the guys I worked with was an enormous black man from Mississippi who said if it was up to him, he would just lay concrete over the top of the gardens so he wouldn’t have to water them every day. The other guy I worked with was a seventy-year-old, mostly unknown serial killer who didn’t like to plant because of a bad back he got from his days dressing up like a woman and murdering people. I was just trying to slow the coming of an inevitable concrete wasteland. I came to understand that once things left, they didn’t come back.
I dragged my untied boots through the gravel, kicking up pebbles and dust. The blisters on my heels had mostly healed in my time off. The flock of pigeons that lived here scattered toward the old, unused coal chutes they’d made their home. I always wondered how pigeons found prisons. I see pictures of prison yards everywhere with flocks of roof rats covering the ground. Beds of red and white roses blossomed right next to the large slab of concrete abstractly painted by their feces. I wondered if they knew they were in prison, or if they were just hiding from the hawk perched on the electrical lines outside the wall.
The shop was already alive when I got there, but the wall blocked the morning sun, so it still felt like winter inside. Sawdust from the table saw danced pirouettes in the air; the welder was at work, blue flame h
issing. I tried to see everything. I tried because everything has edges and people are never ready for the poke or the slice that might change their minds. I’m not even talking about from other people, I mean the edges of everything here: the dirty corners, the heavy steel tables, the slag on unsanded metal, the black mold I knew hid on the other side of the old sheetrock. In an area full of edges and blunt corners, everything was either hard or sharp. I had nicks that turned to scars all over my body from missing something I should have seen coming.
The serial killer and the enormous black man from Mississippi were talking about something in the office when I came in. Eyes turned to me for a second and they went silent. I didn’t say anything to either of them, just dug around in my locker for gloves. My legs were still a bit wobbly, not used to walking on earth. And I was a little awkward starting to talk again. I was tired of explaining myself to people, and didn’t feel like starting in on the recurring dream I was having before I woke up, of the serial killer coming up behind me as a shadow and clubbing me in the head with a shovel.
They were already sipping coffee that usually tasted like hot water and stale cigarette butts. The serial killer had an unusually wry smile on his face. Normally this early it was all disgust and malice in his grill. It felt like he was smiling because he knew he had just been the shadow with the shovel in my dream. He wasn’t physically frightening in any way, just an older white-haired man with a hump on his back who should be someone’s grandpa, still slinging dirt and holding grudges. He was excited about a show he saw on combustible engines, which made sense because his secondary vocation (after killing people) was as an engineer.
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