by J. L. Abramo
The disadvantage is...It undoubtedly hurts when you stop, at least for a nanosecond.
The reason I mention James-something or other, Inmate # 36693, is that he didn’t make his swan dive because he was depressed over facing the rest of his life in prison. He didn’t take an early out because he was being molested. Or because he’d been threatened.
He didn’t even take it because he couldn’t face one more meal of beans.
He took the flight to nowhere because of Thomas R. Melon.
Yeah. You read that right. Thomas R. Melon, the guy who writes those bestselling crime novels. Whose last novel was the sixth one of his twenty-two novels to be made into a movie, starring Mickey D’Angelo. Melon’s the guy People Magazine does a feature on at least twice a year, the usual accompanying photo a shot of him staring soulfully out to sea, digging his toes into the sand, crinkly Photoshopped eyes. Who is regularly interviewed on PBS and MSNBC and even legitimate news organizations.
Ha! Got your attention now, don’t I!
Thomas R. Melon who was known as a “franchise” to both the publishing and film worlds.
I’m sure you already have lots of questions at this point. “Story questions” as Thomas R. Melon referred to them in the few workshops he taught here at Pendleton Reformatory. One question answered, eh? Leading to even more questions. The biggest, of course, is how we came to partner up and create the justice system of human roach removal which you’ll observe at the end of this.
I’ll do my best to answer all of them. It’s what Melon taught us in our workshops. To develop a tight plot, one that answers all the major story questions at the resolution. To avoid those “godawful amateur epilogues” (as he referred to them).
Let’s begin...
I was Melon’s star pupil in those classes back in the joint. His “discovery.” Like he was Columbus and I was the New World of writers. A Grandma Moses of convict writers. A thing like that plays great in People Magazine and on The View and other mindless venues.
We met a couple of years ago. He’d pulled some strings and got permission to spend the night inside our walls for some “research” he was doing for a prison novel he was planning to write. He thought if he spent a night in a cell in Pendleton he’d soak up the atmosphere and would have an inkling about what it was like to do time.
Yeah...
I’ll give you a minute to get your head around that...
Anyway, he spent the night in the cell next to mine and kept me up all night yakking, asking dumb-ass questions. Guess he figured everybody was like him. In the morning, he’d leave, stop at a diner and have him a cup of coffee and a big breakfast, go over his notes, get him a motel room to catch some sleep-eye. Me, I’d drag myself over to the chow hall, try to keep my eyes open while I stuffed down some cold powdered eggs and a liquid that didn’t resemble coffee in any form that a Starbucks barista would recognize, and then hoof it over to my job, where I’d stand on my feet all day, cutting other inmate’s hair.
About six months later, his fucking book came out, where his main character was the warden in this prison and some kind of amateur detective on the side. He got just about everything wrong with the prison scenes and the story was lousy to boot. It was worse than any James Patterson written-by-the-numbers crock-of-shit, if that tells you anything. I figured out who the bad guy was by page twenty-three and I don’t think I’d ever encountered as many clichés in one single book as I had in that one. But, he mentioned me in the acknowledgments and I have to admit, that hit my ego bone. I mean, he was like a semi-big name and people on the bricks didn’t know he was a complete phony, so it kind of made me a big deal for a while. I even got letters from those weirdos who like to write prisoners. I did what all of us do who get those letters—bled ’em for every blessed nickel I could, even tried to get one wasn’t too awful fat to marry me so I could cop one of those conjugal visits. They all seemed to fall into one of two camps—either as big as a house and wearing a dress looked like a floral-patterned couch covering or a meth addict who was partial to tattoos and tooth decay. No bites on my proposals...Guess they were choosier than they looked.
As it happened, Melon got this idea he wanted to teach writing in the joint and got that arranged and that worked out well for me as he asked for me to be his assistant and that got me out of the barber shop once a month for all afternoon.
And that’s where it began.
It got me out on early release and that’s when the fun started. With Melon’s help and connections, I got me a book published. Picture of me on the back, looking hard like the suckers expected and wanted. Did some TV interviews, stuff like that.
Whole bunch of phony hooraw. All the book was just some shit I’d done in the past. Burglarizing bars, holding up liquor stores, fucking a bunch of women. Stuff like that. Stuff I went to outlawing for that lots of guys wished they had the balls to do, but hadn’t. So, instead of doing what I’d done, they got some tattoos, hung out down at some strip club once a month, got a subscription to Netflix. Lived the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the wild life. The sanitized, safe version.
Like that.
But, that was my audience. Them and the bad girls. The bad girls recognized me. I was the guy they’d known when they were young. The guy their husbands didn’t know about. That was some funny shit, all right. I seen ’em when I walked off whatever TV interview I was doing. Or, in the bookstore when they had me signing books. I seemed to almost always end up in the parking lot getting my weenie waxed with one of them old gals in the back seats of their Suburbans. I found out one thing. Fans of writers were nice, but most weren’t lookers. Whole different crowd than rock star or athlete’s groupies.
The one good thing Melon did for me was getting me to read other writers. And, not just the usual suspects. Melon really knew what good writing was, even if he didn’t do much of it himself. I found there were some fucking fantastic writers out there. Harry Crews, Ken Bruen, Ray Banks, Tony Black, Paul D. Brazill, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Joe Lansdale, William Gay, Neil Smith, guys like that. Mostly Southern—although Banks, Bruen, Brazill and Black aren’t Southern, but could be.
Even a blind hog can find acorns now and then.
Hi. It’s me, your intrepid author, Thomas R. Melon. You can call me “Tom” or even “Tommy.” All my friends do. I know I’m breaking all the rules by addressing my reader directly, but I do shit like that all the time—break the rules—and it hasn’t seemed to hurt my sales much. Last time I checked—about two minutes before I sat down to write this, I had three books on different Amazon bestselling lists. Top ten for two of them and #19 for Breaking Bad on the Thriller/Heist/Novella/Noir/Experimental Fiction list. That ain’t bad for a country boy! The meter just keeps goin’ round and round!
All that crap about breaking rules is just that—crap. I use a million clichés, pretty much the same plot each time, and have a bunch of characters with names real parents never give their baby boys...and the readers eat it up. Hell, I’d even talk about my johnson like Elroy did and get away with it, except it maybe ain’t that big. Ha-ha. Then, maybe it is...You’ll never know...Unless you want to, that is. Only if you’re a good-lookin’ mama. Text me if you are and I’ll sext you back...
Anyway, I’ve got this guy I’m teaching to write and got him hooked up with my agent and all, and Jim Twigs, our agent, told us he thinks a book we cowrote could be a big seller. So, here we are. My cowriter is a guy named Jake Mayes. I know you don’t know his name yet, but you will. His first book is just out and I hear it’s doing okay. It’s not #1 or anything like that, but Twigs says it’s holding its own and even got a mention in the Times. And, I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have even written a book if it wasn’t for me and for sure even if he had, it wouldn’t have gotten published! So, there’s that...
The book you’re reading—which hasn’t been written yet at this point in time—ha-ha—that’s what I’m doing now—was laid out by our mutual agent (who
I hooked Jake up with). There’s two main characters—me and Jake—and it’s kind of a memoir-kind of thing. Jim told us to just write our part of our time together—when and how we met, what happened in the last couple of years—stuff like that. Neither of us will see what the other is writing until Jim edits it and puts our two parts together. Which, since you’re reading it, has been done. Obviously.
Anyway, that’s how this thing came to be. I’m pretty sure Jake’s going to be going on and on about how much I helped him and all that, but it might not show up in the final version you have in your mitts as I instructed Jim to tone down what I anticipate Jake is going to be saying. I want this book to help him, not me! I mean, like I need more publicity, right?!
Okay. Enough of the intro stuff. Let’s get down to it.
I met Jake inside the walls of Pendleton Reformatory almost exactly two years ago. How that came about was I was planning my next novel—Criminal Minds and Intents was the original title, but if you bought it you know it as Snake Farm—it was #5 on the bestseller’s list after all, so chances are pretty good you’ve read it, right? And, if you haven’t, now would be a good time to glom onto a copy. Just sayin’...
Anyway, I’d written a bunch of really good crime novels, but I wanted to write one from the criminal’s point of view. I know a whole bunch of criminals from over the years from down at the Dirty Vixen, but for this one I wanted to do some really deep—some “down and dirty”—research. I wanted the experience a criminal has. So, I called my dad. Dad is a big-time contractor (as you know if you’ve read my bio), and knows all kinds of people in the state and even region. Lots of folks owe him favors, if you get my drift.
“Dad,” I said. “I want to spend the night in a prison. Can you make that happen?”
Turns out he could. He just happened to know the governor of Indiana and half an hour after we talked, he was back on the phone to me to tell me it was all arranged. I would be spending the next Thursday night inside the gray, concrete walls of one of Indiana’s two maximum security prisons. Pendleton.
Just like that.
The day began when I took the superintendent, H.W. (Henry) Clinton, out to lunch. He gave me the real low-down on what to expect.
“I’m going to put you in a regular cell, Tommy. Just like the prisoners have. I have to warn you—it’s small. But, you’ll have it to yourself. No cellmate.”
Doesn’t bother me a bit. I’ve spent many a night in a small space. After all, I regularly travel to Europe and if you think a prison cell is small, you obviously haven’t spent a night in an Italian hotel! Bring it on!
“And,” he said. “You’ll eat the evening meal in the chow hall. Don’t expect sirloin steak! Ha-ha!” (Which was what we were both having at that moment.) Again, that didn’t bother me in the least. If it was really bad, well, I just wouldn’t eat it. I can afford to miss a meal now and again! Least that’s what my girlfriend says. She’s a hoot.
All in all, nothing he warned me about was concerning. Yes, I said, I understand that sometimes it’s difficult to sleep with inmates yelling and cursing all night. Again, I’d spent more than one night in Rome!
When we arrived at the prison, Henry took me into his office where he had a pair of dungarees, a blue denim shirt with a number stenciled above the left pocket—#90666—tidy whitey underpants and T-shirt and white socks, and a pair of black brogans. After I changed, he handed me a large soup spoon.
“What’s this for?” I said.
“It’s your eating utensil,” he said.
“Then I just pick up a knife and fork in the chow line?” I said.
“Uh, no. It’s your only eating utensil. You keep it with you all the time.”
Well, that sucked! I wasn’t expecting sirloin, but even if it was a poorer cut, how was I supposed to cut it? I asked him that and he laughed.
“You won’t need anything to cut beans,” he said.
“Thursday is Bean Night?”
Again, he snorted. “Pretty much every night is bean night,” he said. “There might be some pork fat in it but you won’t have to cut it.”
I had been packing on a few pounds lately. As good a time as any to do a bit of fasting...
I entered the inside of the prison at five in the afternoon. Just in time for chow. First, Henry turned me over to a guard—one of the “bulls”—and he escorted me through at least four different sets of steel doors and then we were...inside! A truly exciting moment. I confess my heart was beating at a furious rate. I’d been allowed to take with me a ballpoint pen and tablet, and I tried to walk and scribble furiously as we went on our way to Cellhouse J. We kept passing various inmates and each time I looked ’em squarely in the eye and smiled.
Kind of a surly bunch. Not a single one smiled back. In fact, some of the looks I got were downright scary. I faked it well, though. I put on my “jailhouse swagger” and strode right along with the bull, a guy named Edwin Jones. A black guy. He looked like he could handle himself if we got into a tough spot. I stuck as close to him as I could without it looking...you know...gay.
And...just as we reached the steps of J, a big burly inmate walked by us and from barely two feet away...blew me a kiss. I almost wet my pants but I acted as if I hadn’t seen him.
The cell they’d assigned me was on the ground floor. Directly across from the desk of the officer on duty. I guessed that was so he could keep an eye on me in case trouble went down. I truly wanted the “real” experience, but was secretly glad they’d put me there. After all, if I wasn’t going to be in that cell, a real convict would have been, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, right?
Mr. Jones saw me into my cell, shook my hand, wished me luck—luck?—smiled, and exited. Almost immediately, the door slid shut and locked with an evil thunk!
Shit.
Before I’d entered the cell, I saw that the cell on the left was unoccupied, but there was a guy in the cell on the other side. I’d smiled at him and nodded before I went into my cell, but he didn’t return my greeting. Just stared at me.
I looked around. Two racks that were hooked to the wall by chains. A small shelf and a metal mirror, and a small sink. That was it. The lower bunk was already made up so I figured that’s where I’d sleep. No chair or anything to sit on, so I sat on the bunk.
Besides my spoon, the superintendent had also given me a small cloth bag he called a “ditty bag.” I meant to ask him where that name came from, but had forgotten. I opened it and dumped the contents out on my bunk. A pair of headphones, a washcloth and small towel, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a small bar of soap, and a small white gauze bag and a packet of cigarette rolling papers. A pack of matches. In the gauze bag was something weird. It was full of tiny brown flakes. It smelled like tobacco when I sniffed it, but it didn’t look like any tobacco I’d ever seen. It was stamped with the word “Hoosier.”
I knocked on the wall where the bunks were attached. “Hey,” I said. “My name’s Thomas Melon. What’s yours?”
At first, there was just silence. Then: “Mayes. My name’s Mayes.”
The bull who was sitting just across my cell at his desk, shook his head at something that seemed to disgust him, picked up a bunch of keys, and walked away down toward the other end of the cellblock.
I got up and moved down to the end of my bunk, close to the bars. “Mayes what? What’s your last name?”
He must have been up toward the front of his cell too, as I heard him clearly. “That’s my last name. Jake.”
It took me a second to realize he was telling me his first name.
“Glad t’meetcha, Jake. What’re you in for?”
“Motherfucker!” I jumped at the sudden vehemence in his voice.
“Hey—what’s the—”
“Asshole, this your first time in the joint?”
My plan originally had been to act like I was an old con, but that story seemed to have collapsed. “Well, yeah. How’d you know?”
I could hear him sigh. “You never ask a guy w
hat he’s in for, punk-ass.”
You don’t? I didn’t know that. Why on earth not? “Sorry,” I said. “Why not?”
“You must be the writer,” is what he said. Then: “Welcome to the snake farm.”
“Yes,” I answered. “Thomas Melon. You’ve probably read my books.”
I heard a low chuckle. “Yeah, right. You seen the library in here?” He paused. “I guess not,” he said. “They probably didn’t give you the nickel tour, did they.”
We continued talking and he gave me bits of advice. I asked him what the “Hoosier” was and learned it was free tobacco the state gave the inmates in case they couldn’t afford store-bought, or, as he called them, “tightrolls.”
“Cigarettes are money in here,” he said. “Why the state gives you all the free tobacco you want. Fewer fights that way. It’s crap, but at least it smokes.”
I tried to roll one. Three times the paper burst apart from too much spit. The fourth time, I didn’t use enough, and that didn’t work either. Finally, on the fifth try, I got one together, although it didn’t look that hot. I got about three draws out of it before it too, fell apart. Fuck it.
“What’s that about a snake farm?” I said.
“Just my name for here,” he said. “It’s pretty much like that. Boring, except when someone gets bit. Then it livens up some. You’ll see.”
A whistle blew.
“What’s that,” I asked my new friend. “A riot going down?”
He laughed. And laughed and laughed. Finally: “Naw, man. It’s the chow whistle. They’ll be rollin’ the doors soon.”
Sure enough, almost as soon as he’d told me that, I could hear doors sliding open all over the place, on all three tiers. Except mine. It stayed closed.
Jake walked over to the front of my cell. “Uh-oh,” he said.
Uh-oh?