A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Whistles. A gunshot from the catwalk crackled the air. Someone was pulling me back up from the avalanche of fire that had blinded me. I slowly emerged back into a conscious place and time and dropped the knife.

  I heard Bonafide. “They’re going to shoot you!”

  I followed his eyes up to the two catwalk guards—their rifles were aimed at me.

  “Move and you’re dead!” one yelled.

  Meanwhile, Boxer had gotten up woozy and pulled another shank, from his jockstrap. He lunged, saying with a startled voice, “Why did you hit me, why did you hit me!” Dazed, he kept trying to get at me, sweeping the knife, missing, stabbing the air, stumbling forward and coming at me again.

  I backed off, kicked his wrist, and the shank flew out of his hand. I moved away, dancing sideways, keeping away from his lurches. I slipped and almost fell in his blood, trying to keep away from him. Two more shots stung the air.

  The guard by the gate yelled, “Back off!”

  I looked up. Two other guards on the wall had me in their sights.

  Across the main yard, a security alarm sounded its siren. Led by Mad Dog Madril and Five Hundred, a half dozen visor-helmeted, shield-wielding riot goons dashed in swinging lead-filled batons. They drove me against the back of the cage with their batons. I balled up on the concrete floor with Mad Dog Madril choking me, Five Hundred shoving his weight on me with his knees.

  Boxer was rushed away to Maricopa County Hospital, still screaming, “Why did you hit me? Why did you hit me?”

  I was let up, drenched in blood. One of the goons asked, “Where are you stabbed?”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  I was ordered to strip. The other cons stripped down too, and then we were marched naked into the dungeon. When I passed Snake and JJ’s cell, Snake was trying to retrieve a pistol from a hole in the wall behind his locker.

  “Bring it,” I said, still angry. More than angry, I was feeling powerful and fearless. I had felt something in me, standing over Boxer, something that took my fear away and moved me closer to not caring about anything.

  JJ was saying, “You’re dead—you’re fucking dead!”

  Before Snake could get the pistol out, just as the expression on his face told me he had touched it, I moved on. The guard racked my cell. I jammed the gate with the guy’s mattress to keep it from closing and gave Bonafide and Texas Red the guy’s watch, cologne, anything of value that belonged to him; then I threw his mattress on the tier and announced for everyone to hear, “I don’t want anyone in my cell!” Shivering from nerves, my legs feeling like I might crumple any moment, I splashed water all over me to wash the guy’s blood off and then lay down.

  In another section of the block, members of La Familia, another heavy-duty gang from Califas, were shaking the bars violently. Because of the goons marching down the tier, they believed a riot had started and wanted out. The cell block was vibrating. The atmosphere was volatile, dangerously unpredictable. About an hour later, JJ and Snake sent Texas Red a vial of Napa, a flammable liquid chemical, that guards sold to the gangs. When it was tossed into a cell and a match thrown in, the liquid exploded, charring the flesh instantly.

  Texas Red called out, “JJ, Snake, I can’t do it. He’s straight up. He took the dude toe-to-toe. And he ain’t no snitch.” Texas Red passed it back, hand to hand, down the cells.

  A while later JJ yelled to Bonafide, “Bony, here comes a package.” Bonafide extended his cell broom out the bars and as the package came sliding down the tier, he stopped it. I saw it go by, a small towel-wrapped item.

  A minute later he whispered me to the bars, “Cyclone, check it out.”

  I positioned my mirror and saw a .22-caliber pistol in his hand. I stared into his dark eyes, which were almost laughing at me.

  “I’m not,” he said, “but they’re going to. Take as many with you as you can.” Then he called JJ. “I can’t play the hand. He’s square up. I’m chilling.”

  As my hands trembled it seemed that the only thing that made sense anymore was poetry. I sat down and reread the poem I was sending Norman. I found myself wishing I still had time to change some words.

  23 APRIL 1977

  It seems

  prison confines and destroys—

  it does, I know, no need to argue

  the point, just look at these

  infamous edifices thrashing out,

  consuming

  human beings like bait sardines,

  but I cannot stand on this.

  Yes, the great iron hand of prison

  crushes all in its grasp,

  the mind and soul become

  feeble sacks

  filled with rotten fruits,

  a gunnysack crumpled in a dark cell.

  But to control your mind and soul

  is to become a stronger hand,

  embanking gently the loose clods

  of a ravaged and confused past

  so the river of your heart

  and clear streams of your soul

  may pass,

  full and freely, into rich fallow beds

  of freedom, waiting for you

  even in prison,

  even in prison; many will not understand this,

  but I will say that we can

  overcome,

  not today, tomorrow, or next month,

  but at the very moment

  one decides upon it.

  I kept reading the poem until I heard the faint rumble coming. I stuffed the poem in an envelope, and as the goons marched down the tier, gate after gate, to the dungeon, I handed the letter to Texas Red to mail for me and then I sat and waited.

  Mad Dog Madril stood before my cell and yelled at the tier guard, “Rack it!” He ordered me to pack my stuff and follow him. “Everything to the property room,” Madril instructed one of the guards.

  As Mad Dog Madril marched me out of the dungeon, I kept thinking about the fight. He was down and I towered over him like an animal with a survival instinct to kill. In that one jeweled moment I felt I was God, deciding whether he would live or die. That feeling of power nearly compensated for everything that had gone wrong in my life. But as intoxicating as it was, something stopped my hand, poised above his heart, prepared to drive the shank in his chest. In that instant of indecision, standing over him and staring into his bloody face, I saw a man with a mother and father, siblings, a human being with dreams and feelings and loves. Thankful that I had not killed him, shocked I had even considered it for one shining moment, I was relieved to be leaving. If I had stayed longer in the dungeon, who knows what kind of person I might have become.

  I wasn’t taken to isolation, as expected, but to DC, where I was locked up on Nut Run, which was reserved for severely medicated cases—cons that had flipped out or were there for presentencing court observation. Maybe the warden thought I was going crazy and moved me for security reasons. Still, to my mind, these reasons didn’t justify assigning me to Nut Run. It seemed obvious to me that the warden was classifying me as a mental case just for harassment.

  The two tiers below Nut Run were reserved for cons who had committed minor infractions and were on lockdown for a short period, from a day to a week. It wasn’t as dark as the dungeon, nor did it reek, like places that hadn’t had fresh air or sunshine in a long time. Nut Run was quiet, except when the zombies occasionally freaked. Intermittent shrieks crackled throughout the night, trailing off into the throbbing silence. My first night there I tossed and turned and couldn’t sleep. About one in the morning, I overheard two cons talking on the first tier below about the contract on my head. Contrary to my expectations, they both stated it had been a stand-up fight and admitted that no one was going to collect on it. Besides, one said to the other, the guy’s a nut.

  The next morning, let out for a shower, I walked past the cells of disheveled cons staring at me with blank expressions. Some wore white pajamas and paced in their cells, and the hems of their pajama bottoms were caked black with dirt from draggin
g on the concrete. Others sat on their bunks and stared at the wall. They had an air of decrepit infancy, a benign, paranoid frailty. They glanced at me with terrified eyes. They required little attention. When the meds cart rolled through three times a day, they stood at the cell bars, seeming to achieve serenity only when the medic handed each one a small manila packet of pills. All day, every day, they waited for the meds cart and, hearing it, became excited, picking at their flesh, scratching their faces, biting their lips, and clasping and unclasping their hands. I could almost hear them give a collective sigh as they swallowed their pills and reclined on bunks or shuffled back and forth in bare feet in a forlorn daze, in another world far away from prison.

  Those guys didn’t know what day it was or how much time they had served. They had forgotten the streets; their minds blurred and detached, they floated freely and had little if any association with their previous selves. The tier smelled like a hospital ward full of patients who haven’t washed for months. The zombies only stirred when the meds cart was coming or when a white-coated intern would show up to recruit subjects for some new drug or shock therapy. All of them were blank-eyed, seldom out of their cells, and they never combed or washed unless told to do it.

  The prison psychologist wore Bermuda shorts and a Bahama shirt, brown polished penny loafers, and wire-rim eyeglasses. He had bird-thin legs, wide hips, and a big butt; he was balding on top but had enough hair at the sides for a graying ponytail. Obviously believing his patients were monsters deserving of punishment, he put his career ahead of treating them, even if this contradicted the healing goals of psychology.

  “Uh—how are you? Uh—my name’s Dr. Reese. Uh—how would you like to come in and talk to me?”

  He had an irritating habit of pausing when he talked, as if preoccupied with other matters. I knew that the warden used his diagnoses to assess our security status. I also knew he’d be out of a job if he found me sane. To keep his job he would label me psychotic, manic-depressive, violent malcontent, or schizophrenic.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “You know nothing about me.”

  “Uh—I’ll leave this here for the medic to pick up. It’s a prescription. You’d like some Valiums, uh?” He smiled.

  I approached the bars and took the paper and crumpled it and threw it at him. “I’m not playing your bullshit game.”

  He appraised me with an impatience that had more mockery than medical concern. “You—uh—need a psychological exam. Uh—your refusal will go on record, in your jacket, and you’ll get a write-up. It won’t look good to the Parole Board.”

  “I don’t go before the Parole Board. I’m doing day for day. Flat time.”

  “Yes, I know. Uh—of course, but medication can help,” he said, and rubbed his chin and left.

  During the day, in the rest of the main block, the clamor was sustained at a steady buzzing level, and above the din were the always incessant guards, crackling out numbers on the intercom and slamming gates. Rack A-Five, shower! Four-five-six-two-one, visit Let’s go, Jack, up and center! Now!

  Mad Dog Madril patrolled the tier every morning, and behind him, always, scurried his goons. They had enough hardware dangling from them—Mace cans, keys, billy clubs, handcuffs—that they resembled Western chuckwagons hung with pots and pans jangling over prairie potholes. Mad Dog Madril enjoyed scaring the paranoid cons, threatening them, telling them someone was coming to get them, and creating a state of terror in the zombies, who sometimes begged for him to stop. He had a face like a jowled pit bull, snapping, banging bars with his billy club as he picked out a cell and shook it down. He knew they had no contraband; they were conditioned to submit and would do anything asked of them, including what Mad Dog Madril made them do—drink toilet water, kiss his hands, sometimes even suck his dick through the bars. He ran Nut Run with impunity, a tyrant accountable to no one.

  There were the slashers who cut their arms and wrists; a black dude in a waking coma, who didn’t know his name; Hilda, who thought she was living an upscale hooker’s life in the French Quarter in New Orleans; PeeWee, a redheaded Puerto Rican, who fancied himself a fisherman in Puerto Rico. Then there were Max and Wilbur, brooding darkly with sullen shoulders drooped and arms hanging between their knees, always looking down at the concrete floor in their cells. Meanwhile, my neighbor in the next cell, Richie, was Elvis, and all day he combed his black duck-tailed greased hair into a wave, singing and humming the King’s songs.

  As I watched these Nut Run cons over the course of three months, neither their sullen expressions nor their disturbed silence changed much. Every day they shuffled back and forth in their cells and took their pills and existed in disarming tranquillity.

  One morning, however, after Elvis repeatedly complained about a toothache, his cheek and jaw swollen, Mad Dog Madril came by flanked by two of his flunkies.

  “You got a toothache, Elvis?” Mad Dog Madril leered.

  “Sure feels like it.”

  “Sing us a song, and I’ll help you,” Mad Dog Madril mocked.

  “‘Oh, baby, don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’” Elvis raised his eyes and put his mouth close to the mike and swiveled his hips and sang.

  “All right, all right,” Mad Dog Madril said, “come here . . . closer to the bars, put your head here, gotta see what the problem is.”

  I was sitting on my bunk, and I could see Mad Dog Madril standing at the bars. He pulled pliers from his back pocket. Then I heard a crack. And while Elvis moaned in excruciating pain, Mad Dog howled with laughter and stepped to my cell.

  “Here’s the crazy one,” he said.

  I cursed him beneath my breath.

  “Oh, the psycho’s upset—in time, in time,” he scoffed, the threat lingering palpably in his words.

  Reading books became my line of defense against the madness. I began writing poems for cons in exchange for books; one of those books was Anne Sexton’s poetry. She too had gone to an asylum, but her poetry was inaccessible to me—too staged with academic technique and not spontaneous and from the heart. I started reading Ezra Pound and working with metaphors. The common language employed by William Carlos Williams also appealed to me, and Whitman’s long adventurous lines fit my sense of what a poem could be—strong and large like life.

  I would get up every morning and write for a few hours after breakfast. Then I would read for an hour, take a nap, have lunch, and read some more. For no apparent reason, I started getting very tired. I attributed my fatigue to the July heat. I increased my exercise routine in my cell to build up strength and stamina, but my fatigue worsened. I was having difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. After making my bunk, I lay back and covered my face with my arms. I stayed in my bunk with my eyes closed for a long time. My thinking had become cloudy and feeble, and stationary objects wavered as if they were being shaken. I heard myself talking to Elvis but seconds later couldn’t recall what I had said. I stuck my mirror through the bars and looked into his cell. He’d be combing his hair back, cuffing his blue denim sleeves above the wrists, arching his collar, saying he was going to marry Priscilla and live in Memphis with her. My mirror crashed on the tier. I’d lie back down on my bunk in a mental swirl; my hands felt like they were slipping away from me. I had trouble controlling my body. When my meal tray was slid under the bars, I had trouble controlling my arms. They seemed to be moving on their own, leaving a trail of other arms in their movements. I barely had the strength to lift the tray, to get my throat muscles to cooperate and swallow the tasteless stuff.

  A lull came over me as days followed days, and I felt an unfamiliar kind of peace as I grew weaker and weaker. I started to hallucinate. The walls moved, the ceiling wavered, disembodied faces of strange ascetics of Asian descent appeared in the ceiling corner of my cell, smiling. Days and nights came and went, with an opaque thickness, as if I were standing behind warped mirrors, and the cons on the tier looked as if they were moving behind milky panes. I ate my food with my fingers because I couldn’t hold th
e spoon. I felt food crud on my chin and cheeks. I would find myself at the bars, standing in my pajamas. I didn’t know what day it was or what I was doing or what was going on. I lay on my bunk and slept; from time to time I’d wake, stare at the ceiling, and go back to sleep again.

  One day my cell gate drew back and two guards entered. One of them said, “Come on, fleabag, time to get fresh air and sunshine.”

  Obediently, I went outside with the rest, shuffling like an invalid old man to the main exercise field. It had been so long. I sat on the bleachers in the sunshine, my saliva dripping down my chin, my mouth feeling filled with lead as if I had just returned from the dentist and he had given me a mouth-numbing shot. It was bright; the sun was far away. Was I in my cell, imagining all this? Guys were running around the field. Others played handball or baseball or were boxing. It was hard to focus. A few cons came up to me. I saw their mouths moving but I couldn’t hear or understand what they were saying. One was Macaron, my old buddy from years ago, who seemed like he was hollering. He looked worried. I felt myself trying to talk, thinking I needed to talk. Talk, I told myself, but I couldn’t say the words. He motioned me no, no with his hands but I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was trying to speak to him.

  He was yelling, “Take care of yourself, brother, carnal, take care of yourself!”

  A small voice the size of a necklace bead of light radiated through my body with its own disembodied voice, struggling to get words out of my mouth.

  “I am fine, brother; they are not breaking me; they can’t, they won’t, I am okay, I’m fine.”

  But I couldn’t hear my words. Why couldn’t I hear my words? I tried harder and harder to get the words out. I didn’t know what was wrong, something . . . something . . . a con was pointing to his tongue, shaking his head no-no-no.