Journal Entry – Day 206 – 11 February 2010
At the moment everything here is OK. Weng and Dimitris speak English and Georgios is a chilled-out guy. They are all relatively new inmates. We have a TV and no one comes into our cell during the day, unlike in Gamma forty-nine where Thoma and methadone man would play tavli all day and sit on my bed. I started to feel like I had nowhere to go. I’m a lot happier here, I need to be thankful that it’s all working out and I am OK. I just have to hope that it stays this way. I’m going to have down days, but once I know my court date hopefully that will happen less.
I don’t know why, but the majority of the Chinese inmates in Korydallos loved to make things and sell them. Weng didn’t build backgammon boards and lighter cases out of wooden skewers like the inmates in Gamma wing; he would plait together strands of thin nylon thread and tiny plastic beads to make ornaments, Christian crosses and little bracelets. When Weng was out of the cell, Georgios would take one of Weng’s unfinished pieces and floss his teeth with the nylon thread that Weng was yet to plait. Weng had no idea what Georgios was up to. Granted it was a little disrespectful and immature, but I found it kind of funny at the same time. The way Georgios just didn’t give a crap made me laugh a bit. I wasn’t going to open my mouth and tell Weng – it was nothing to do with me. My eyes and ears were always closed in prison, and that code of silence had always served me well.
A chilly winter gradually phased into a sunny spring and Dimitris was eventually released. Over the previous two months, he and I had had a series of arguments over my snoring, which was loud and deep because of the Xanax I was taking. He couldn’t sleep, so he demanded that I make a request to be moved to a different cell. It was he who had a problem with living in cell four, so it was fair for me to suggest that he request to move to another cell instead. Plus, I’d been in prison for eight months and he’d been in prison for eight weeks. Everyone knew that inmates who’d been in prison the longest always had priority; it was an unwritten rule. I wasn’t prepared to leave cell four, especially upon the request of a relatively new inmate who had no other friends in prison. Dimitris refused; I refused; so every time I fell asleep he would shout ‘Xypna malaka! – Wake up, wanker!’ I’d wake up, and start to purposely snore even louder to piss him off. Neither of us slept; we were both too stubborn for our own good. It caused tension in the cell for almost a week and one day I sarcastically asked him, ‘Did you have a good sleep, mate?’ He squared up to me and pushed me. I lost my temper and pushed him back. He clenched his fist – Georgios stopped him before anything happened. Dimitris was a good guy; we usually got along quite well and I’d enticed him to become angry on this occasion. We were under a lot of stress and it was unbearable to live in a cramped cell with no sleep. In the end, he gave up and decided to live with my snoring. When he was eventually released we shook hands and he wished me all the luck in the world. I’d watched him come and go, but I was still there – rotting.
There were silly disagreements between Weng and Georgios too. Weng had made dumbbells out of coffee cans filled with sand from the courtyard and other items that he’d found lying around. Georgios lent them to his friend in another cell and Weng kept on asking him where they were. ‘Could you ask Georgios where my dumbbells are?’ Weng asked of me.
I acted as the translator. ‘Reh Georgio, pou einai ta pragmata tou – Georgios, man, where are his things?’ I lifted invisible dumbbells with my right arm because I didn’t know the Greek word for them.
‘Pes tou, oti porei na roufa ta archidia mou – Tell him, he can suck my balls,’ Georgios replied while walking out of the cell door.
‘I think you’re gonna have to wait a while for them, mate,’ I said. Weng never saw the dumbbells again and had requested to be moved to a different cell.
With two spare bunks in our cell, Georgios asked the guards if they could move his friends into our cell; Zafeiris from Lesbos and Costas from Athens – probably the biggest, heroin-addicted, thieving fiends on earth. Suddenly, the ‘safe’ cell that I’d been put into was no longer safe. On a positive note, the dumbbells were back.
Zafeiris was thin and bald, but he always had a bit of unshaven facial hair. If I had to compare him to an animal – it would be a meerkat. He had a little mouth and a pointy nose, which made him look harmless at times, but possibly conniving. Zafeiris claimed that he’d ‘done many big’ criminal jobs before, but was only in prison for armed robbery. He held up a shop with a gun and forced the girl behind the counter to fill up a bag with money and the boxes of cigarettes on display. He was forty-four years old and had spent six years in Patras Prison before Korydallos. He had no kids, no girlfriend and was addicted to heroin. He told me that he loved to go clubbing and take ecstasy, even at the age of forty-four. As for Costas (who just looked like your average forty-year-old Greek guy), I still have no idea why he was there. I didn’t even ask, but he was getting into fights over drugs on almost a weekly basis.
Journal Entry – Day 239 – 15 March 2010
My lawyer went to Patras and finally found out my court date. 4 June. About two and a half more months before I get my life back. I feel relieved that I know now, so that’s good. It is quite a long time but I was expecting a lot longer to be honest. So now I have a date to focus on and don’t need to keep stressing about being here for another year. I think they will transfer me to another prison in Patras. Zafeiris was there for six years, so I will ask him how that was…
Zafeiris told me that Patras Prison is a lot more relaxed than Korydallos, but when it kicks off … it kicks off. He advised me that I should tell the guards that I’m Greek and to put me in their Alpha wing. ‘You don’t wanna live in Gamma there; it’s very bad, like Gamma in Korydallos,’ he said. It made me think of the riots and cockroaches that I’d had to put up with for so long. I’d survived it, but I didn’t want to ever have to experience anything like it again. I wasn’t looking forward to the transfer, but I knew that it was something that I had to do to fight for my life back. At least knowing the court date was a massive lift. It was like I’d been running a marathon for months and I could suddenly see the finish line – just another stretch.
Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, and days turned into weeks. Months passed slowly and our cell had become a hangout for heroin addicts. I knew that I had to deal with it for only a little while longer. I’d watched Georgios, an ex-heroin addict who was clean for three years, get sucked back into the downward spiral of snorting the stuff on a daily basis. His personality had noticeably changed; he was no longer a quiet, cool guy. He’d even begun to hold himself in a manner that was more sluggish, like he’d stopped caring about anything other than drugs. He was easily aggravated and was often getting into fights and arguments with other inmates. It was exactly as my friend Vasilis in Gamma forty-nine had said: it starts off as a little thing with your friends, then it starts to be every week … then every few days … then every day. It made me think about how dangerous it could have been if my mistake in Gamma (with Apollo) had turned into a habit, and then an addiction. I’m happy that I was mentally strong enough for that not to have happened.
The four of us got along quite well sometimes, regardless of their drug habits. We would sit in the cell, smoking, drinking frappes and chatting some days. My Greek had really improved and I remember one day I told them a joke in Greek that my auntie Georgina had told me years before: Two doctors watched a fat man running for a bus. His right arm was sticking out and curved downwards, like a teapot handle. The doctors looked at his deformed arm; one of them argued that the man was born with the abnormality – the other argued that it was the result of an accident. They followed the man onto the bus and asked him why his arm was deformed; was it the result of an accident or was it something that he was born with? The fat man stretched out his perfectly functioning arm and responded, ‘Oh shit! Epese to karpouzi mou! – My watermelon fell!’ My cellmates all seemed to find it hilarious. Maybe it was a ‘had to be there�
� kind of moment, which needs actions and facial expressions to make the joke funny.
‘Who told you this joke? Was it from Gougli?’ Zafeiris asked, chuckling.
‘Who’s Gougli?’
‘Xerete ti einai gougli reh – You know what gougli is, man,’ he said.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You know: youtubes, facebooks – and gougli!’
‘Google! Not gougli.’
Zafeiris chuckled and put his arm around me. ‘Gougli … Gougle … whatever. You know, Mesa sti fylaki eimai o pateras sou – Inside prison, I’m your father.’
Zafeiris wasn’t my ‘father’ in prison. My dad was a good man who would do absolutely anything for his family. Zafeiris was a piece of shit; he used to steal from me for drugs. If he was my real dad I’d probably never see him, or even want to see him. A typical day would consist of my cellmates and their friends using my books to snort heroin off – one day I’d even caught them snorting off my copy of the Bible that my auntie Teresa had bought me. It offended me, but I didn’t make a deal of it because I didn’t need the stress.
The guy who they would buy the drugs from would knock on our cell door and enter. ‘Ti egine manges? – What’s happening lads?’ He was Albanian and I knew him from Avlona’s Parartima – short, skinny and bald with a big head. He told me that he was on remand for drugs, but Georgios from Crete in Avlona told me that he was lying and that his real crime was very different. I can’t say that it was 100 per cent true, but Georgios told me that the guy’s girlfriend had been cheating on him; she’d become pregnant and there was a possibility that another man was the father. Apparently, he pretended not to know about the other man, and during an intimate moment with his girlfriend, he went down to perform oral sex on her. According to Georgios, he grabbed a gun that he had planted under the bed, forced the barrel into her vagina and shot her internally.
He was twenty-one years old and had been transferred to Korydallos not long after me. Within a week of his transfer he was involved in the drug-dealing scene in Alpha with the ‘king’ of the Albanians. He would come into our cell. ‘Koita – look.’ He would unravel a pile of heroin wrapped in a piece of newspaper. My three cellmates’ eyes would gleam at the sight and they were probably salivating like hungry dogs. They would start to bombard the young drug dealer with propositions like ‘If you give me the drugs now, I’ll give you a card and a big can of coffee’ or ‘If you give me the drugs now, I’ll give you two cards next week AND a packet of cigarettes.’ The drug-dealing kid would smile and refuse – knowing that he had them all wrapped around his little finger. My cellmates would roam the wing looking for people to pickpocket and would come back hours later with bruises. The Albanian kid would return. My cellmates would offer him less than what his ‘king’ had instructed. The drug dealer would accept the offer and wait a few days for the rest of the payment. Other inmates would enter our cell throughout the day and ask for the phone cards or cigarettes that they were already owed from the previous week. ‘Deftera – Monday,’ ‘Triti – Tuesday,’ ‘Tetarti! – Wednesday!’ The answers my cellmates would give were merely random, meaningless days of the week. They were in heaps of debt to drug dealers with links to Albanian mafia – they were morons because it was how riots would start. I didn’t feel the need to warn them; it was something that they already knew. It didn’t stop them – they were addicts and they just couldn’t help themselves.
I went for a walk in the courtyard one day and the Albanian drug-dealing kid approached me. We walked up and down for a bit; I tried to forget about what he may have been in prison for and just treated him like any other person. His English was very broken, but he ended up explaining a few things to me. What he couldn’t say in English I could understand in Greek: heroin addicts that had money caused no trouble; it was simply a way for them to medicate themselves. They would have a friend on the outside who would transfer money to the drug supplier through Western Union. The drug supplier would phone their friends on the outside, who would let him know whether the money had been transferred or not. Customers like this would receive heroin after a very small cut with paracetamol. Inmates like my cellmates were junkies who couldn’t afford to take drugs. They would resort to thieving and get into debt. It was junkies like these who would get themselves into trouble – and you really wouldn’t want to be in trouble with these guys. Some junkies would even prostitute themselves for phone cards or a hit of heroin – one man even offered me a blowjob for a telephone card. I declined the offer and couldn’t believe my ears.
The Albanian kid trusted me for some reason; I don’t know why, maybe it was because he knew me as the barber in Avlona – or maybe it was because he was young and had yet to learn to keep his mouth shut. He told me that the junkies are sold heavily cut drugs because they are less likely to make money from them. Costas, Zafeiris and Georgios were snorting paracetamol with heroin scraps in it.
One morning I lost my temper because two telephone cards that I’d hidden under my mattress were gone – €20 worth. I used to lie on my bunk and daydream about speaking to Riya or my sister Sophie on the phone – or calling up my mum and dad to find out what was happening on the outside. At the beginning of the week I would strategically plan the days and times that I would call them. It would break up the day and I would feel like my life had some sort of structure – something that I may have taken for granted in my youth, but now craved. If I’d finished reading a book, or felt that my Greek had improved, I would reward myself with a spontaneous phone call to anyone of my choice because my mum had given me a list of all of my friends’ phone numbers back at home. I would replay the conversations in my head and do absolutely anything psychologically possible to escape from the four walls around me. It is far too easy in prison to completely forget that the world is still spinning on the outside of the prison walls. My telephone calls were a huge escape, and on this particular day, my only escape was about to go up my cellmates’ noses. ‘Where are my cards?’ I asked them.
They all responded one by one. ‘Den xero – I don’t know.’
‘Are you all thick? We’re in a fucking cell. The door’s locked.’ I could feel myself losing my temper and started calling them a bunch of thieving pricks. I called them all gyftous – gypsies and junkies. Although I appreciate that addiction is an illness, I was filled with anger and frustration. Costas went crazy; he stood up and pushed me. I grabbed his fist and smashed it against my face. ‘Go on you little cunt, do it!’ Zafeiris jumped down from his bunk and stood between us – he was my ‘dad’ after all. ‘Gami sou! – Fuck you!’ I roared to Costas.
‘I mana sou – Your mum,’ he blurted back.
Zafeiris pushed him. ‘Ohi manes, entaxi? – No mums, okay?’
Costas fell backward onto his bottom bunk. ‘Gamo ton! Dolofonos einai! – Fuck him! He’s a murderer!’ he cried.
‘Look at the state of you Costa, you’re a fucking junkie. You’re covered in bruises – with your black eyes. Why’re you covered in bruises? Why do you think you have black eyes Costa!?’
An ypallilos unlocked the cell door and we became silent – he must have been walking past and heard the shouting. He strolled in and stared us all up and down. ‘Kalimera kyries – Morning ladies,’ he said. I sat down and filled a cigarette paper with tobacco, then rolled it and licked the sticky edge while allowing my pounding heart to return to a normal pace.
‘Kalimera.’
‘Kalimera…’ I mumbled.
‘Ehoume ena provlima? – Do we have a problem?’
Costas stayed silent. Georgios tutted. ‘Ohi – No.’
‘Teliosata na paizete malakia o enas ston allon? – So you’ve finished wanking each other off then?’ he asked sarcastically with a subtle snigger.
Costas tutted. Zafeiris smirked and Georgios half smiled.
The guard grinned. ‘Nai kalo, etsi nomiza – Yeah good, that’s what I thought.’
He walked back outside and locked
us in. I lay down and took a deep drag of the roll-up cigarette, reminding myself that I had to stay cool. In control. I’d come so far; I couldn’t ruin it now.
33
* * *
FED UP
* * *
Alpha wing was meant to be quieter than Gamma but it was just as loud. Whenever there was a football match on TV, hundreds of prisoners would bang on the cell doors screaming with joy. If the cell doors happened to be unlocked, football fans would run into the hallway celebrating. I met a number of inmates who told me that they were in prison for football hooliganism – especially Panathinaikos fans. Fights would start and it would inevitably result in an early lock-in for the evening.
Every few nights at around 10 p.m. an ypallilos would unlock the cell door and walk into our cell with a large mallet. He would step onto my bottom bunk, lean over Zafeiris’s top bunk and repeatedly strike the iron prison bars that were mounted in the outside wall. The prison staff would check all of the cells in the wing, and all we could hear were loud bangs for hours when we were trying to sleep. Ever since the Korydallos inmate Vassilis Paleokostas had escaped with a rented helicopter a year earlier, the guards would be extra careful for potential prison break attempts. Apparently, he’d rented a helicopter to come and pick him up from the courtyard. They’d dangled a rope ladder, which he’d grabbed onto and then was flown away into the distance. In prison, Paleokostas was a god! It seemed that almost every inmate idolised him. But what is the point of life if you’re constantly on the run? My ex-cellmate Vasilis told me that when it happened, almost every inmate was chanting out their cell windows and watching in amazement. Apparently, some had even set fire to their bed sheets and dangled them out of their windows out of excitement because someone was rebelling against the system. That must have been quite an eventful day in Korydallos Prison.
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