Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing

by Gary Mulgrew

  ‘Is that what you did with the money, Mulgrew, all that money?’ Money sounded more like ‘muuh . . . ney’ – a loving, intimate pronunciation. He was looking at me, expecting an answer.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured, deferentially.

  The officer raised his eyebrows and, scooting back across the floor, jabbed at my tattoo.

  ‘The poppy,’ he said.

  I glanced from my green and purple tattoo to him and back again. ‘It’s a thistle, sir,’ I exclaimed a bit too enthusiastically. His eyes narrowed. ‘Because I’m from Scotland,’ I added hastily.

  Without another word, he examined the tattoo again, in closer detail, like a diamond dealer with a suspect stone. Eventually he spoke, pulling back in his chair, clearly satisfied with his work. ‘Thistle . . . My . . . . Ass! I’m marking that mother down as a poppy, ’cos that’s what it is!’

  With that he chuckled to himself, gathered his papers and his scope and disappeared. Then, before I could gather my thoughts, Malone handed me first one card, then some papers. ‘That’s your prison number – carry it around with you at all times and especially when you go for chow. And this here is the rules for Big Spring – it’ll tell you all you need to know about survivin’ in Big Spring. If you can!’ he added with relish that I didn’t enjoy.

  For a moment I thought my legs would give way on me, but I mentally got a grip of myself, determined that Malone wouldn’t see my nervousness.

  They weren’t seriously going to put me straight in with all these people, were they? The moment of truth had arrived and the thought simply terrified me. I wasn’t ready. I needed more time. We walked down the corridor towards a door I guessed would lead to the outside and into the prison yard. As we approached it, Malone stopped then turned to me and double-checked my handcuffs.

  ‘Now, Mulgrew?’ he asked, suddenly assuming a considerate tone – which alarmed me even more. ‘Probably best if you don’t mention that Enron thing whilst you’re in here.’ Malone seemed oblivious to the irony of this piece of advice. ‘Some people lost a lot of money in that thing,’ he went on, earnestly, ‘and they’ll be pissed once they heard that you got it.’

  No longer surprised by what else this day would hold, I hesitated as he reached for the door. ‘“My tattoo’s a Scottish thistle.” That’s some cool shit you tried to pull there, Mulgrew. Cool shit!’ Before I could reply, he had opened it, pushing me gently out into the blinding heat and sunlight.

  5

  INTO THE LIGHT

  BLINDED BY THE INTENSITY OF THE light, I hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Come on, Mulgrew. Ain’t nothing to be afraid of,’ goaded Malone, as he tugged me forward, clearly enjoying my panic. I was trying to get my eyes to adjust – to make out the Yard, the buildings, the people moving around, just the sheer scale of things – but I still couldn’t see properly. Covering my eyes with my arm, I shuffled forward, trying not to give Malone any further scope for torment.

  That’s when I heard the first call: ‘Hey Beckham! Beckham! Dav-id Beckham!’ I tried to see where the shout was coming from. ‘Hey look over here, man! Hey! What’s up wid choo?’ I saw him out of the corner of my eye. A tall, angular African-American wearing a scarf tied round his head, like a female factory worker in the forties. ‘BECK-HAM!! BECK-HAM!!’

  ‘Oh, just ignore him,’ said Malone, seeming a bit more nervous than I wanted him to be and suddenly moving me along faster.

  ‘Hey, ho, Beckham! I am talkin’ to you. I’m talking to you, motherfucker.’ He now moved along parallel to us, but still keeping his distance. I was shocked by his language and his seeming disregard for the fact that Malone was with me. By now I could focus and I realised we were in a tunnel-like enclosure, a funnel into the main yard, surrounded by high wire fencing in a section 150 to 200 feet long and maybe 30 feet wide. There were possibly ten to twenty inmates just hanging around here in the relentless heat, and beyond this little area was a much bigger compound, filled with what looked like hundreds, if not thousands, more inmates milling around. Although my eyes still hadn’t fully adjusted to the light, I felt they were all looking at me. Either side of the crowd were two huge brown buildings – austere and plain. These were the accommodation blocks, I later learned, and christened, by some ironic poet, with the names Sunrise and Sunset.

  Without realising it, I had been hesitant in my steps and had allowed Malone to get in front of me, signalling my reticence and fear. I was trying to process so much information at once, to take in the totality of what was all around me. I told myself to get a grip, and consciously tried to stand more upright and to walk slightly in front of Malone so it didn’t seem as if he was leading me in there or I was cowering behind him. I tried to breathe, but I felt the panic come in waves. Still the catcalls were coming out. Something about ‘having a fresh one’ and ‘Que haces, cabrone?’ (How goes it, asshole?), and various others I couldn’t properly make out, and possibly didn’t want to. So many people were whistling and shouting at me. I was concentrating on how I moved and how I held myself. Still looking straight ahead, I allowed a little of the anger in me percolate to the surface. That bit was easy.

  ‘Stand tall,’ I chided myself. ‘C’mon Gary, stand tall!’ I remembered the advice Sergei had given me back in Houston – that everyone was afraid. Perhaps they were. Perhaps anyone doing this walk would be scared, and all I needed to do was to be strong and act with dignity. I told myself once more that I could do this.

  ‘Will. You. Look. At. Me. Mother. Fucker?’ my stalker implored, this time coming much closer to my face.

  What was up with this guy? The heat was getting to me and the handcuffs were suddenly beginning to irritate my skin. We walked towards an opening where a couple of Hispanic inmates were sitting on the steps leading into a small, plain-looking building. They were eyeing me carefully, confidence oozing from them as they lazed out like cats on the steps in front of us. They were blocking the way, but seemed to have no intention of moving for either me or Malone.

  ‘Where you come from, man?’ a short one, crouched at the front, asked me very calmly, with a friendly nod.

  Disarmed by his gesture, I turned slightly as we moved to the side of the steps to pass them. ‘Pollok,’ I answered, as if my Glasgow home would mean anything to him.

  What was I thinking? Why didn’t I just give him my address?

  I knew this; I had read that when you enter prison the first thing they always ask you is where you came from – as in ‘what prison?’ not where you were born, how’s your mum and what’s your star sign! What a fool. Schoolboy error number one; first of the many I would be making no doubt.

  ‘Cool,’ said the guy, to general nodding from his other three cabrones, all of whom seemed impressed. That was a surprise. Had news of the 50 Krew scaled the prison walls of Big Spring? ‘How long you done there?’

  Slightly bemused by his interest, I answered, ‘Fifteen years,’ at which point he whistled and nodded approvingly to his buddies. This confused me even more.

  ‘Oi Beckham, Beck-ham!’ screamed the black washerwoman again, sounding more exasperated than ever and now standing just behind me to one side. ‘Why’d do you talk to him and not to me, you English faggot!?’

  ‘English!? English!? Did he say English – cheeky bastard?’ I thought as I swung round and looked at him.

  But before I could speak, he held his hands up with as perfect a beaming smile as you are ever likely to see and said, ‘Oh, OK, OK!’ much more calmly now. ‘No one’s hurt, no one got dead. I didn’t mean nuthin’ . . . you’re good to go. You’re good to go Mister Beck-ham.’ He sashayed past me towards the main Yard. Malone continued to stand beside me, lightly holding my arm as this all unfolded.

  Thinking I had entered the funny farm, I turned back around just as the Hispanic guy spoke again. ‘Hey man, respect,’ he said nodding his head as he lifted a clenched fist towards me from his seated position with the others nodding in unison beside him. I looked at it for a seco
nd, confused. Obviously I wasn’t supposed to shake it, so I made the same shape and somewhat awkwardly, given the cuffs, ‘bumped’ it back, bemused as to why I was getting this type of ‘respect’.

  As we eased past my new Hispanic buddies, I tried to listen to what they were saying but I was unable to make out anything from their rapid dialogue in strong Mexican accents. They spoke so fast and used words I’m sure I hadn’t read in any of my textbooks or covered with my Spanish teacher.

  We moved up the steps and walked into a small room that reminded me of a post office, complete with four counter bays. Nothing much seemed to be happening; just a few African-Americans getting respite from the heat, a huge mountain of various khaki-coloured kit piled ceiling high behind them.

  ‘Got a new one for you!’ announced Malone with glee as he started to de-cuff me for the last time.

  ‘Shit, Malone!’ answered a thin-looking young guy suddenly leaping up and eyeing me suspiciously. ‘We said to you to stop bringing no more white boys in here! We don’t need no new redneck motherfucka helping a re-di-stribution of the pop-u-lace in this prison.’ He started walking around me and eyeing me suspiciously, uncomfortably close.

  Malone was smiling as I rubbed my wrists, glad to be free of the cuffs. ‘This one’s different. He’s from Europe!’ he announced with some pride, as if he’d brought me across the Atlantic himself.

  This aroused my new tailor’s attention, and he looked me up and down for a while. ‘OK, I’m seeing XXL on the pants, a me-di-um on the Ts and size 12 in the shoes,’ he shouted out to no one in particular.

  These being roughly the dimensions of Coco the Clown’s work-gear, I thought I ought to speak up. ‘I’m a large in the pants, XL in the T-shirt and a size 10 shoe.’ I spoke quietly and carefully, conscious not to seem rude, or to baffle anyone with my Scottish accent.

  ‘Make that an XXXL in the pants,’ my tailor immediately shouted, moving back towards the counter. ‘This white boy’s got an ass that could cause a partial eclipse over the whole of Europe!’

  ‘Best not to say anything,’ said Malone, leaning conspiratorially close to me. ‘Just let them have their fun. You only need to wear these clothes for one day, like all the new inmates, then you get your proper khakis tomorrow.’

  As I shuffled up to the first booth, a vast black man handed me one pair of khakis (XXXL); one white T-shirt (M); and a size 12 pair of blue boating shoes that had seen both better days and bigger feet. These were followed by one pair of thinned-out grey socks (had seen action) and a one pair of blue prison boxers (had seen far too much action). All of these little things I had prepared myself for, so I tried to tell myself none of it bothered me or mattered. I just wanted to get through this day and get into the relative comfort of my cell, wherever that was.

  I moved over to a small alcove to get changed. Malone ambled over with me and stood right beside me inside the cubicle as I started to change into my new fatigues. I immediately felt crowded and put upon, but again I told myself it meant nothing and I had to get used to the fact that privacy was a luxury I would no longer be afforded.

  Malone was explaining why for the first day only you wear different fatigues from the rest of the population, because that way if you make a mistake or stray ‘somewheres you oughtnta’ they won’t ‘necessarily shoot you’. This made him laugh and momentarily took my attention away from the track marks I saw in my boxers as I reluctantly pulled them on. Of course this garb also advertised you to everyone in the prison as ‘fresh fish’ and would be like walking around with a neon sign saying, ‘Hello, come and get me!’ I made a mental note to spend the whole day in my cell if I could, until I could get the ‘normal’ clothing that would let me blend in as much as a Scotsman ever could in this place.

  ‘Hey Mulgrew?’ Malone asked, moving even closer towards me as I was pulling on my tent-like trousers. ‘Why d’you tell Rodriguez you’d gone done time in Pollock?’ His good eye was roaming up and down as I tried to squeeze into a medium-sized T-shirt that would barely have fitted Calum.

  ‘Because I’m from there,’ I answered, wondering what he was on about.

  ‘From there?’ Malone echoed. ‘You haven’t done any time there, boy. You don’t have a jacket!’

  ‘Jacket?’ I echoed. Dimly, I remembered from my Internet research that a jacket was a prison record. A thin shaft of understanding began to break through. ‘There’s a prison . . . somewhere . . . called Pollock?’ I asked warily.

  ‘Hell, yeah!’ said Malone. ‘One mean-assed USP in the South. Right smack bang in the centre of Louisiana. Toughest in the South,’ he continued. ‘They’ll all think you’re a player, Mildew!’

  As mistakes went, I figured it perhaps wasn’t a bad one – until the truth emerged, which it surely would.

  Resplendent now in my enormous ballooning khaki trousers, I rolled up the trouser legs then twisted them around at the waist before I reappeared from the alcove to be greeted by my grinning tailor. ‘Perfect, I would say. Perfecto, don’t you think?’

  ‘Aye, perfect,’ I responded, emotionless. My T-shirt felt spray-painted on and unconsciously I found myself puffing my chest out as I stood there, being surveyed by all. The shoes were barely staying on, but I again told myself not to bother about it. I wanted to get on with this.

  The large black man who had tossed the clothes at me now spoke up.

  ‘Hey, where in Europe you from, man?’ he asked – more gently than I would have imagined.

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland, Scotland? That where they got that motherfucka Braveheart!?’

  My tailor interjected with some glee. ‘Man, that was some serious shit, all them big motherfuckin’ swords and shit! You see shit like that there, Scotland?’ I gathered Scotland had become my new name.

  ‘Well, not so much the swords now . . .’ I offered hesitantly.

  ‘Listen to you, McKenzie!’ piped up another guy emerging from a pile of disused clothing, directing his comments at my tailor. He was smaller, but very well built, and also African-American – they clearly all were in the clothing store. He was dressed in the same khaki uniform, but had a mess of Afro hair like he’d just plugged himself into a socket and got fried. He also had a large plastic comb stuck at the top of it, but despite this he had an air of authority about him, like he was the guy in charge, something which seemed to be confirmed by the way the others responded to him. ‘They don’t use swords and shit over there. That’s just in the movies. Man, have you got shit for brains? They got Uzis and Kalashnikovs and serious shit like that. Ain’t that the truth, Scotland? Ain’t that the truth!?’ he asked, looking right at me, and talking to me as if he knew me. ‘Tell him, Scotland; tell this dumb-assed motherfucka. What you carryin’ over there, Scotland? Tell him!’

  They all looked at me expectantly. Even Malone. The word had always been that Finn, the leader of the 50 Krew, used to carry an open razor, but I’d never had the pleasure of seeing it. My only real involvement with weaponry was whenever I wore my kilt (reasonably often for banking functions in New York or London) on which occasions I’d have a skean dhu (a small ceremonial dagger) down my sock, but that was the extent of what I’d ever been ‘carryin’’.

  ‘Well,’ I began tentatively, conscious of my accent and its initial impact on people, as well as of Malone craning forward to listen in. ‘I always liked to carry a skean dhu down my sock.’

  ‘A what!?’ three men asked at the same time, all craning towards me.

  ‘A skean dhu,’ I repeated with more emphasis, amazed at the direction the conversation had taken.

  There was silence for a moment as everyone looked confused. ‘A “skin do”? A “skin do”?’ erupted McKenzie, my tailor, excitedly moving around again as if life was a permanent dance. ‘That sounds like some serious shit! That sounds like some special shit, like you’re gonna skin some motherfucka; like your gonna peel his motherfuckin’ skin off!!’ By now, he was dancing around like a dervish. ‘Is it like a semi-automati
c or something, this skin do? Or a flame-thrower, takin’ their skin straight off, or . . . or . . .?’ He could scarcely get the words out for excitement.

  ‘Shit man,’ said the leader, moving forward. ‘Scotland done said he carried it in his sock. How’s a motherfucka gonna carry a fuckin’ flame-thrower in his motherfuckin’ sock!? Are you stupid or something?’ McKenzie withered under the leader’s rebuke and fell silent. I felt sorry for him – almost.

  ‘Scotland,’ the top man went on, all eyes turning back to me. ‘What does a skin do, do?’ he asked awkwardly.

  ‘Er, well,’ I began, feeling the hole beneath my feet getting deeper. ‘It’s a . . . a dagger,’ I said, rousing some authority to my voice.

  ‘A da-gguurrrr!!’ repeated the leader, with a passable imitation of a Scottish accent. ‘Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ he mused. ‘A skin do is a da . . . gguurrr,’ he said again, sounding like he was licking the words as he spoke. ‘That is some serious shit,’ he concluded appreciatively. ‘Like they use to skin some motherfucka up quicker than he can use a motherfuckin’ gun! Yeah!’ All around me, faces were nodding and smiling in agreement and appreciation. Even Malone seemed to have joined in.

  ‘You a’ight Scotland, you a’ight,’ said the boss, looking at me closely in my Coco the Clown outfit. ‘Just don’t go running with those white boy motherfuckin’ ABs and you be quoted, man.’ With that, he started to pull out some blankets and sheets for me, rejecting some which looked too old or dirty.

  The ‘ABs’ was the second reference I’d heard to the Aryan Brotherhood, the prevalent white supremacist gang that operated in many of the prisons in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. Although they were mainly driven by the demands and rewards of organised crime, the Brotherhood still had strong racial overtones and many of the Southern Whites joined them for protection, particularly when they found themselves in the minority in places like Big Spring. I hoped I’d never have anything to do with them.

  Malone moved me forward to the next counter window and I picked up a laundry bag, two thin blankets (which I thought was at least one too many in this heat), two washcloths, four small thin towels (clean), four Bic razors – I was glad I’d prepared for them – one tube of toothpaste, one small toothbrush and one bar of soap.