The dungeon was a dark subterranean sewer under CB3, the highest level of security detention, with warring gang soldiers and death row on the east side and rival gangs on the west side. Running down the middle behind the cells was a narrow section with electrical and plumbing pipes. Convicts in the dungeon were almost never let out.
At the first security checkpoint, a huge guard with one arm opened a gate and we advanced deeper. The light grew weaker. Nerves made my stomach tight as banded steel. We kept going, farther down, all the way to the back, through four more gates, passing still more tiers of administrative segregation prisoners. Some gang soldiers yelled, recognizing me from when I’d portered the temporary lockdowns. It was almost dark now and lightbulbs encased in iron brackets burned to illuminate the short tier beyond the last gate. The usual cacophony that stunned the sensibilities in general-population blocks was absent.
Mad Dog Madril uncuffed me in the landing off to the side. I stripped down. Another guard stood behind me. I handed him my clothing and brogans and, wearing only my boxers, I went through the gate barefoot. I felt scared.
The air was humid with stagnant human odors. The short run of cells to my left, ten of them, were ancient relics, quite different from the cells in other cell blocks. The cells were smaller units, constructed of black angle iron and green-painted concrete. The dark, the sweat stink, the quietness, and the furtive glances of the cons reminded me of zoo animals that lived mostly at the back of their cages in the shadows. A dim haze from outside glowed from barred windows to the right. The last gate’s hinges creaked. I stood in a small box cage and the guard told me to pull my boxers down. I turned around, bent over, and then pulled my boxers up. The guard checked my armpits, the bottoms of my feet, under my testicles, and my mouth. My body felt drained of blood, and I felt weak and limp. Mad Dog Madril led me through into the small landing, locked the gate behind me, and left.
A tall thin Chicano/Indio con with long black hair raking across his face stood at the first cell to my left in his boxers and shower thongs, silently staring at me from behind the bars. It was eerily quiet as hands and mirrors came out of the bars to see who I was.
“Psst! Pssst! What cell you going to?” the man to my left asked. I met his eyes. He had been down here for so long that his skin pallor was a sickly yellow, and his eyes had a paranoid frenzy in them.
“C-Four,” I answered.
“You got your own cell.” He gave me a clenched fist sign, meaning that Chicanos watch out for each other and having my own cell was good.
“Stand in front of your cell!” An old wrinkled guard at the manual control cage at the end of the tier cranked a handle that opened my cell gate. As I went in, I noticed a stocky black dude celling to the right and, to the left, a huge red-haired white guy, a mountain of a man with tattoos over his entire body. I felt more distant from the world than ever.
There was an uneasiness about the forced calmness that lay heavily over the block. The rusty scrap-iron cell was drab green. When I positioned myself in the center, I could touch both walls with my arms. The toilet and sink were ancient salvage-yard steel, operated by pushing a button embedded in the wall. I unrolled the rancid mattress over the welded sheet-metal cot with its angle-iron legs buried in concrete.
Beyond my cell in the ceiling corridor, lightbulbs that burned day and night in thick chicken-wire mesh cases were caked with dirt lint and gave off a weak glow. Against the wall ran a row of windows facing the yard, where, several feet above our heads, silhouettes of cons in long dark columns marched to the dining room or to the fields. I stood in my boxers at the bars, looking out at the walking shadows in the yard.
After a while, I lay down, listening to whispers about whether they knew me or which gang I was in. They worried that maybe I had been sent down here to kill one of them.
My neighbor, the black dude to the right, asked from the corner where our cell wall met the bars, “Whatcha down for?”
“Refusing to work,” I said.
“What?” he asked incredulously.
“Refusing to work,” I repeated.
My neighbor to the left, the big giant, asked with a gruff voice, “Did I hear right, Bonafide, not wanting to work?”
Someone else added, “He’s bullshitting you, Texas Red.”
Another con grumbled, “Muthafucker lying!”
I kept quiet.
A voice came from the end of the tier to the left by the guard cage. “Yeah, man, who are you? Who you click with?”
Another voice asked, “What the fuck you down here for?”
Again, I answered. “Not working.”
Bonafide stuck his mirror into view from the side in front of my bars. I could see his eyes and he could see me sitting on my bunk, staring at the wall.
“What they really slam you down for?” he asked.
“Refusing to work,” I answered.
Bonafide laughed. “Thought you made that shit up.”
“Gotta be more than that,” one guy snorted.
“What’s your number?” another asked, to determine when I had come into the joint. His voice hissed like a rattler’s tail.
Their questions were interrupted by the supper cart rumbling down the tier, taking a long time to get to us. I could hear gates open and close, echoing, and keys clashing closer, guard boots on the concrete louder until it arrived. Our trays were slid under the bars into our cells, and while we ate the cons talked back and forth about betting on games, appealing criminal cases to higher courts, and writing chicks on the streets. I took my time savoring the corn and peas, mashed potatoes and pork chops, bread and butter. I chewed each spoonful until the food almost dissolved in my mouth. Later, a porter came and swept and mopped the tier where the guys had kicked trays out, crashing them against the wall and spilling leftovers all over the floor and wall.
After supper, they still wanted to know the “real” reason I was down here. The guessing stopped when the tier guard’s craggy voice rasped, “Piss and shit before water’s off.” Everyone brushed their teeth, urinated, and defecated. After a while the lights flickered, signaling bedtime, and went off a few minutes later.
I lay back on my bunk. It was a rule to keep one’s head exposed and every thirty minutes when the count guards approached my cell I closed my eyes as the flashlight swept my face. I stayed awake late, listening to the guards bullshit with the cons every time they came through on count time. I stared at the ground-level windows, illuminated by spotlights. I kept thinking about the kind of person I was back in the streets, how my life had been, and how in a million years I could’ve never imagined myself in here. I thought that although my actions alienated and infuriated others, my reasons for not working had become stronger as a result of my revelation in the isolation cell.
We were awakened at 6 A.M. by the guards and porters handing out our breakfast trays. No one talked. They spit, pissed, and coughed. I made my bunk, grabbed my breakfast tray from the floor, and, after eating my Cream of Wheat, toast, and coffee, I paced, watching the faint dawn haze the windows. Now and then a shadow from the waist down would pass. The guard let us out one at a time for showers. As each con passed my cell he glanced at me. I paced back and forth. I put my face against the bars, feeling the iron digging in my cheekbones. I studied the mesh screen over the windows, caked with spattered blood and bits of dried grime, dead insects, and matter that had hardened to rock-hard dirt. I’d never felt so hopeless.
I could hear Texas Red moving around, punching the water button, making heavy noises on the toilet, bumping into the bunk, sitting down and sighing deeply. When he came out for a shower, I saw he was a giant of a man, his tattooed arms like mountainsides with rock pictographs. He was so wide that standing up at the bars his shoulders almost went the width of the cell. Bonafide’s movements were more hushed, and I felt a disquieting menace about him. When he heard me ask the guard for State Issue paper and pencil, toothpaste, and shaver, his hand shot around the bars with a small pen and a few
sheets of brown paper, the kind kindergartners draw on. I was going to draw the way I remembered Theresa looking, thinking it might help me get rid of my fear and loneliness.
Life was stripped down to essentials in the dungeon. I lived naked except for my boxer shorts. No head games went on down here—no threatening or cutting each other down, no selling wolf tickets, no running off at the mouth, no prying into personal stuff about childhood or families. Anytime any of the cons were taken out of the dungeon for visits or security status reviews, they towed chains on their legs, wrists, neck, and waist and were escorted by two armed guards.
It was an event whenever we heard tier gates racking in the distance, because it meant maybe one of us was getting out, going to the yard, and like the rest I came to my cell bars each time and looked down the tier with a mirror to see who it was. Life in the dungeon never hurried or slowed. Its routine tread was the same every day: wake up, have breakfast, take a nap, listen to music, write or read; then lunch and rap to others on the tier. In the afternoon we’d stand at the bars staring at the windows ten feet beyond, tracking the day’s hours through the movements of shadows and light. At times each day an odd boredom fell over the dungeon, as if we were feeling what a waste our lives were and realizing in unison how long away we were from getting out. The silence was dismal.
Most of the cons in the dungeon were big-time shot-callers. They had a lot of soldiers under their power, and they could set up a hit anywhere in the country simply by sending out a kite or a word to the porter or guard. JJ was the godfather of La eMe in this prison, but second in command to the main godfather in California. Snake, his celly, was his bodyguard. JJ and Snake were on the list for Marion, a prison in Illinois, where officials supposedly experimented with brain surgery to modify prisoners’ behavior. JJ and Snake were considered future candidates for lobotomies because they had recently killed a guard. JJ was short and Snake was tall; both had pale skin from being in the dungeon too long. Their eyes gleamed furtively and bristled with deception. Their blade-lean bodies, arctic stares, and, gaunt faces made them a lethal threat to anyone they looked at. Warlock was one of the leaders of the Aryan skinheads and Bubba was the head of the blacks. Indio and Bonafide were lone wolves, not belonging to any group but extremely dangerous and never allowed in general population.
We were let out for an hour, twice a week, in two separate groups, in the enclosed exercise cage out back. We looked forward to getting together under the hot sun, pacing, lifting weights, and shadow-sparring. Mondays and Wednesdays were my exercise days. We ignored the guard sitting on a steel folding chair outside the cage, clutching his high-powered rifle, and the other guards on the yard wall catwalk. We exercised and talked until our hour was up, then a guard patted us down and we went back in to shower and eat.
During our gatherings, I learned that Indio, the Chicano who’d spoken to me first when I came in, was doing four lives because he’d killed that many rednecks. I’d spot Texas Red as he bench-pressed over three hundred pounds. Because he didn’t think he’d had enough visiting time with his wife, he once took the visiting-room guards hostage and initiated his own visiting hours. Bonafide, five foot seven, stocky and muscled, was feared and respected. He had arms and legs the size of telephone poles, a ballerina’s waist, and a leopard’s litheness. Bonafide huddled in the corner with Indio telling funny crime stories. Bubba and Bones practiced a form of karate, in slow motion only, against each other. Their bitches, Black Beauty and Jelly Roll, giggled girlishly as they watched and did each other’s hair in cornrows. Luis and Benito celled with each other, their tattooed bodies mural tapestries of Chicano history, La Virgen de Guadalupe and Christ’s Head with Crown of Thorns. In the other group there was Warlock, JJ and Snake, and Lucas, a white dude from Florida and Oklahoma, an ex-recon man from Vietnam who was still at war in his head.
Letters made a big difference by breaking up the day’s monotonous tedium, and the guys waited anxiously at the bars when mail call came. Though I knew she’d never write, hearing them talking on the tier about people writing them made me think of Theresa. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to receive a love letter from her? With her perfume and lipstick kisses on the envelope, photos inside of her smiling in a pretty dress that showed her shapely figure, news on what she was doing, her classes at the university, what kind of job she had, how she missed me and was staying true to me? I secretly longed for such a letter and was positively thrilled one afternoon when the guard called out my number and placed a letter on my bars.
Aside from my sister, or maybe Lonnie, I hadn’t a clue as to who would be writing me. It was a one-page letter written on a church notepad sheet, and I spent days trying to decipher the cursive writing, tracing words to understand which alphabets they were, figuring slowly by sounds what the sentence was. It was in English but the writing was shaky, which made it even harder to read.
The last time I had anything to do with words was reading a little out of that girl’s stolen book in the county jail in Albuquerque. Before that was when I was seventeen and locked up in Albuquerque on suspicion of murder; I had punched out my windshield when Theresa broke up with me. To pass the time while awaiting arraignment, the guys there read books aloud to those of us who couldn’t read for ourselves. The stories had affected me deeply. I couldn’t tell you what a noun or verb was, or a subject and an object, or anything about punctuation, but that didn’t take away from the magic of the stories. I could have shared in the hero’s courageous achievements and felt the villain’s remorse for his actions.
Sitting in prison years later, unable to read my letter, I regretted not having learned to read. After hours of frustration, I finally understood that the man’s name was Harry, he was from Phoenix, and he had picked my name during a Christmas mass from a church list of inmates who had no family and no one writing them. I was eager to communicate with someone to alleviate the boredom of the dungeon. The state paid for stamps, envelopes, and paper; I borrowed a pencil. I started writing in the morning, and almost all my attempts ended in crumpled paper wads on the floor. But by dinnertime I’d managed to put together a page.
(11-14-75).
Dear Harry
Hello Mr. Harry, my name is Jimmy Santiago Baca I’m in prison. Well your probably thinking who thise person is. Well everything started like thise. See I been here for two year or more. I didn’t gravateted from high school. I am triendy to get my [GED] but I cuudent. I like it a lot. That’s why I’m asking for some advies how can I get good at it. Study a lot or keep reeding book’s. See write now I have a lot of time in prison. Some day I hope I cuuld write. Im twenty-three year’s old and I hoping if you give me some addvices.
Thank you,
sincerlly yours
Jimmy Santiago Baca.
It saddened me to realize that I had been in prison a little over two years. But I was hopeful too. I only had two and a half years left, and I felt I could make it. One of the guys showed me how to address my letter and where to put the stamp. Then, feeling flushed with achievement, I set it on the bars for the guard to pick up.
I pictured myself as a man in those black-and-white movies, an important man writing letters with business to do, plans to fulfill. Writing letters added an exciting dimension to my lackluster days and gave me a sense of self-esteem. My grammar was so deplorable that when a reply came, a few days later, accompanying Harry’s letter was a new paperback dictionary. He mentioned that I really needed to use it. His second letter was longer, and filled with missionary zeal.
Using the dictionary, I figured out that Harry was confined to a wheelchair from a World War II PT boat explosion. He was now a volunteer at a Samaritan house in Phoenix, ladling out soup to the homeless in the morning and sandwiches in the afternoon. His letter, friendly but polite, was expansive in its faith and religious fervor, exhorting me to welcome God’s love in my life. It took tremendous concentration to get through his letters. I’d study a word in connection to another word, and the longer I studied the
more meanings it took on and the more subtle variations I could take from it.
I would set my dictionary next to me, prop my paper on my knees, sharpen my pencil with my teeth, and begin my reply. I would try to write the thoughts going through my mind, but they didn’t come out right. They lacked reality. A stream of ideas flowed through me, but they lost their strength as soon as I put them down. I erased so often and so hard I made holes in the paper. After hours of plodding word by word to write a clear sentence, I would read it and it didn’t even come close to what I’d meant to say. After a day of looking up words and writing, I’d be exhausted, as if I had run ten miles. I can’t describe how words electrified me. I could smell and taste and see their images vividly. I found myself waking up at 4 A.M. to reread a word or copy a definition.
One day the guard placed a package on the bars along with a letter. I tore it open, eager as a child for a Christmas present. It contained some spiral notebooks and several bilingual pamphlets by Mary Baker Eddy, each chapter headed with a devotional sketch of a family in prayer. One page was in Spanish and the facing page in English. I now read a little in English, and if I didn’t get it I could remember enough Spanish from when my Grandpa used to read the Spanish Bible to me each evening. Harry sent more religious pamphlets, and over time I slowly learned to read with more comprehension.
I found myself copying the pamphlet’s religious dogma in the spiral notebooks to practice writing sentences. Then I did the same with words and definitions. Sometimes I’d pick a word and string nonsense words after it to see what kind of meaning came from the random arrangement. Then a particular word would catch my attention and ignite memories. I would try to recall the memory vividly in language, spending hours crossing out and rewriting until I got so overwhelmed by all the word choices that I had to confine myself to describing the dungeon windows embedded with chicken wire.
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