Bobbie, who arrived from Champaign, Illinois, when I had been at Pekin about six months, quickly became a good friend, thanks to basketball and a shared temperament. Bobbie looked the inmate part. He walked with an attitude that said “Don’t even try it.” On his arm was a tattoo memorializing a friend who had been killed, and years later, another tattoo would be added, remembering his mother, who died of brain cancer a few years before he got out. He had a big square head, which I ridiculed daily, just to push his buttons. It wasn’t really that big or that square, but you look for things to employ as petty taunts.
Bobbie was a freak like me: a white kid who could actually play basketball. We played ball and lifted weights daily.
Bobbie was one of the few white guys I had ever heard of being sentenced for selling crack cocaine. He had grown up in the black area of town, and while he was comfortable around black guys and chummy with everyone at Pekin, he rarely let anyone get too close to him. He was the champion of throwing the mean-mug look. He’d puff his chest out, cock his head, squint, and pull his eyebrows down. It didn’t scare me, though; I laughed at it.
“Don’t start mean-mugging me. I know you’re a coward.”
“If we weren’t friends, Shon, I would honest to God kill you. Seriously.”
“You’re not my friend, you wrecked my headphones. And your name is spelled like a girl,” I said.
I had saved enough money to buy my first set of decent headphones, and he borrowed them the first day I had them. When guards rushed our unit due to a fight between gang members, Bobbie gave a lieutenant the mean mug. The lieutenant took three guards to Bobbie’s cell and they roughed him up and cuffed him. Then they dragged him down the steps. In the process, my brand-new headphones were trampled by the boots of the officers.
They charged him with disobeying a direct order to return to his cell. In other words, he lost good time and had to spend extra days in prison for looking at someone the wrong way. That’s prison.
We had a few good-natured fights, but nothing too serious. He was stronger than I was, but I could sometimes get the better of him and toss him on his back. I once did that, sending him into the corner edge of a locker. They had to put a staple in his head. After that I called him staple whenever he got under my skin.
Bobbie would often join Ryan and me for a smoke in Ryan’s cell. I had no secrets from Bobbie, except the one. The longer I kept it from him, the worse I felt about it. But I just couldn’t risk it, because you never know if your friend today is going to be your friend tomorrow. Unlike in the outside world, an inmate doesn’t go away when he stops being your friend.
Prison is danger in a box, but it is also, at bottom, a grinding routine of boredom. You wouldn’t think those two things go together, but they do. The most dangerous moments often come because someone is so bored they finally have to start trouble just to break the torture of monotony. I was feeling that boredom, and I needed some challenge, some competition, something to push back against. And for my own safety, I also needed a long-haul way to establish respect. So I had an idea.
The black, white, and brown inmates mingle across color lines except at the dining tables and on the sports teams. The lower-ranked teams were often racially mixed, but the top leagues were all black. There were three basketball leagues: the A League was four teams with the best players from the four main housing units; the B League had the lesser players; the C League consisted of men over forty-five and a few of their younger friends playing by invitation. I was told that no white boy had ever played on the A League at Pekin. That struck me as a worthy challenge. I decided I wanted to force my way in.
“I would not recommend that,” Bee Dog warned. “You could ask them if they’ll let you play, but I don’t think that’s going to come out good for you. If you play bad, they will be talking smack to you every day. If you play good, then someone will get pissed. I mean, to get beat at basketball by a whiteboy would be hard to live down, know what I’m saying? And they’ll take it out on you when they can.”
I understood. I saw the downside, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to play. Basketball had been my first love when I was a kid.
Some people remember the first girl they kissed in junior high, or the first teacher they had a crush on. I remember what it felt like after I scored eighteen points in a freshman basketball game.
In junior high I was short, so I played point and shooting guard. But between the end of basketball season in eighth grade and the start of my freshman year of high school, I grew six inches and became one of the taller players on our team, but with the skills of a guard.
Jump shots were great, but my talent was driving to the basket. While I wasn’t fast, I had a quick first step. There was nothing better than making older players look bad in practice and having the coach yell at them. They, of course, hated me for it, and some days I would cool it just so they wouldn’t want to beat me up after practice.
By junior year I was a starter on the varsity team. I had worked all summer practicing against guys older than me.
I would see Ann Marie at our games because she was dating a classmate of mine. So I met her a few times back then. That’s why she knew to wave at me when I passed her on the roads, though she was the kind of girl who would have waved a few fingers and smiled anyway.
The first time I really noticed her seriously was at a holiday tournament when our team, David City High, was playing Aquinas, the Catholic high school Ann Marie attended. During the pre-game I was supposed to be warming up, practicing my shot for the game.
“Wake up, Shon,” the coach said to me, knocking me several times in the arm. Annie was dressed in her black and gold cheerleader outfit and was doing a cheer: A.W.E.—S.O.M.E … Awe-some! Awe-some! Awesome are we! I was distracted all night. We lost.
We did make it to state that year—the first time in a long time that my school had played in the state basketball tournament.
But I couldn’t tell Pekin’s A League players that they should let me play on account of how my junior-year team had made state—in Nebraska no less. So while they were watching a game on TV, I told them I had played college ball on scholarship.
“Was it Duke?” Coop said, to everyone’s laughter.
“Not exactly.”
“Well then, we watching a game, here. Come back when you been to Duke.”
They didn’t look away from the screen. After a few plays Coop said, “I seen you shoot. You can shoot. But what you saying? You saying you want to play with us, whiteboy?” Everyone chuckled again.
“So when are we playing next?” I said.
“Oh, it’s like that, huh? You just decided we letting you play?”
“I could be your token.”
“Token, what?” Coop asked.
“Token whiteboy, aren’t you equal opp?”
They were laughing.
Later their coach, an inmate called Old Man George, invited me to practice.
I told Bee Dog about the practice. It didn’t change his opinion of what would happen down the road. He changed the subject.
“Why’d you drop out of college, man? You could be in the NBA by now if you’re all that good.”
I wasn’t, but at least I could have graduated by that time. Every year since high school had been wasted. Parts of the Navy years had been good because I was confronted with lots of challenges and life-and-death responsibilities. And if I hadn’t started drinking or if I had re-enlisted before I came home, that might have all worked out. The only thing I took from any of it was the certain knowledge that in order for me to be engaged in life in a healthy way, I needed big challenges.
I showed up at A Team practice and held my own. I could take anyone off the dribble, but I encountered a lot of, shall we say, resistance at the hoop. I was knocked to the ground nearly every time, but I bounced back up and never called my own foul.
That night Bee Dog wouldn’t say a word. He did, however, point generously to his own well-ordered locker when he
saw me searching and cursing through mine for my small box of bandages.
I practiced with the team for a week before they reluctantly agreed to let me play in a real game. I did all right. I made an impressive layup with my left hand through traffic, even though I’m a righty.
I was soon playing every game. It seemed like everyone was on a mission to knock me to the ground. I started finding my old shooting range, and I kept driving to the hole, knowing the punishment waiting there. Finally they became used to me as a fact of life. “The whiteboy can play” was something I started to hear, though it came off as a half joke. The fact that I cared more about the game than about getting hurt earned me some respect around the yard, which was the long-term point of it—along with the instant gratification of dominating big guys on the court.
Doing something well was, for me, the next best thing to freedom. Basketball was my first love, but it had been my downfall, too, making me think I was more special than I was. I didn’t feel that old glow around me at Pekin, and there sure were no cheerleaders and pompoms at prison games—unless you count the several inmates who tied their shirts into bows and took female names like Ashley and Pocahontas.
I was now working in the law library, checking in books, shelving books, checking them out again. Guys coming in would recognize me from the games. The white guys wanted to know if I was crazy for playing in a black league. Some of the black guys in the library said I had game, which I appreciated.
The library wasn’t as boring as I had expected. I was finding my way around the thousands of books packed in numerical order on the shelves. The books were intimidating, but I became adept at searching for the correct rules and cases when guys asked. Sometimes I didn’t know exactly how I knew, I just did.
Members of the Crips gang, most of them from California, would come around and call Ryan out to talk.
“If one of them goes into those back shelves, don’t bother them,” Ryan told me. “They like to do their research in private.” He winked. I didn’t know what all that meant, but I stayed clear.
I did get curious, so one day when nobody else was around I asked Ryan to spell it out. He told me that large plastic bags full of weed were taped underneath the rolling bookshelves.
“Keep your mouth shut about it. The weed that I smoke and share with you guys is what they give me as a storage fee.”
In his cell on a regular basis, Ryan would roll a joint as fat as a Swisher Sweet Cigarillo. You don’t see that in prison. You see weed smoked in joints you might mistake for toothpicks. That’s because weed costs a fortune in there, and because you want to finish the thing in a few hits before a guard comes around. Even so, guys get the small escape they are seeking from that little bit, so Ryan’s fat joints looked as obscene as a Rolls-Royce at a homeless shelter.
An ounce of weed is worth a pound of cash in prison—about a thousand dollars. Most of what Ryan had was going up in smoke, but he must have been selling some, too. You don’t actually sell things for cash in prison. Arrangements are made by your friends on the outside: they send money to an inmate’s prison account. For the small stuff, you use postage stamps as cash.
Postage stamps were sold at the commissary for thirty-two cents. Once they left the commissary their value was reduced to twenty-five cents for trading convenience; few could count in increments of thirty-two.
If you’re lucky, you have people on the outside sending a little money each month into your account. You have your job inside, which pays money into that account, too. A good job at the prison metal factory might pay a few dollars an hour. Otherwise, menial jobs pay from twelve to forty cents an hour. I was getting about thirty cents an hour at the law library. That money, plus any money sent from the outside, would go into my account, and I would use it for my once-a-week visit to the overpriced commissary, where a tiny box of laundry soap, for example, cost six bucks.
I would buy a few snacks, ramen noodles in various flavors; pens, paper, and envelopes for correspondence; an occasional can of pop; and stamps for mailing letters and for use as cash. I might throw a few extra stamps on a televised football game and buy snacks from guys who set up little stores in their lockers. They restocked weekly when it was their commissary turn.
If you made a profit from gambling or selling drugs, that profit would usually be in the form of stamps, and you needed to spend them somewhere. So the inmate stores did all right.
Whenever the commissary or U.S. Post Office raises prices, it throws the prison economy into uncertainty, like the Fed had just raised the interest rate by a whole point. Inmates who run stores have to raise prices or accept reduced profits, and the guys who run the gambling tickets have to decide when old stamps can no longer be used. When rates went up, as they did six times while I was at Pekin, subtle adjustments had to be made.
Prison cafeteria food is predictable. The staff must have a committee of misinformation that devises different names for the same thing. It was always a slightly different sauce on the same shriveled-up piece of chicken. As a result, a lot of cooking is performed in the units. I made a home-cooked meal myself now and then, just to invigorate my taste buds. I could cook a fine pot of spaghetti or heat up my cup of coffee using a homemade heating coil plugged into a socket. The devices were called stingers, and they were surreptitiously made in the metal factory. Yes, you could use the microwave oven in the dayroom most of the time, but sometimes your cell was locked, and sometimes you just didn’t want to be around anyone. Pasta and sauces could be purchased from the commissary, or from guys who worked kitchen jobs and had big pockets.
A few Chicago Italians managed to prepare real pasta meals, complete with vegetables and cheese stolen from the kitchen. I made a point of having Italian friends.
Friday night nachos were the most popular meal. Here’s the recipe: Buy tortilla chips at the commissary. Place them in a cardboard box top lined with a plastic trash bag. Purchase a can or two of refried beans; slices of summer sausage; canned chicken; a tub of nacho cheese; and freshly stolen bell peppers and onions from the kitchen. Place the vegetables on the chips, along with the summer sausage and chicken. Heat the cheese and refried beans separately in the dayroom microwave, then pour them over the entire concoction. Eat immediately, usually during a long-anticipated TV movie or game.
On Friday nights the prison ran a systemwide movie. For some strange reason I never did understand, they played mostly romantic comedies—like we needed to be teased with that.
If some of the cooking was against the rules, the wiser cops understood that people need to live. When the aromas snaked down the corridors, the better guards generally looked the other way, just as they did when homemade incense and cigar smoke were used to cover the perfume of a little weed. Even so, the right times for doing certain things were selected according to the personal temperaments of the guards on duty.
Every Friday night Ryan bought a large, expensive box of nachos with everything. Plus he was smoking weed with everyone, me included. I wondered what sort of game he was up to—living large like that.
The months passed and it was summer. I was settling deeper into the law library and into basketball, too. It was time for the big summer league games, and I had trained into shape with long daily runs around the track and lifting. The summer league games were unlike winter league. You picked your own teams. A few white guys I knew wanted to form a team. In retrospect, it was not one of my wisest moves, as the summer games were played on concrete instead of on the indoor court, and because these games were pitting black versus white.
My teammates were better than I expected. We had Pistol Pete, whose real name was Chris. He was from Nap Town—Indianapolis—sported some gold teeth, and could shoot threes from almost anywhere. On the other side of the court was Bobbie. He also could shoot threes. Together they opened up the court for me to drive whenever and wherever I wanted.
On the inside we had Joe, a six foot four slender Latin Disciple who was half crazy. One wrong move and Joe w
ould go ballistic. Then he would apologize profusely the next day for losing his temper. Actually, that describes about 80 percent of the guys in the joint. Our other post players were Milan and an Iowa boy named Shane.
We also had a black guy named Myron. He played with us because he was good friends with Bobbie and me, and because he was a lockdown defender—one of those guys who pesters good offensive players into frustration. I am sure Myron received his fair share of ribbing over his decision to play with the “whiteboys.”
The worst thing that could happen to a black team, of course, would be to lose to a team of whiteboys. The several black teams that we beat early on were the subjects of general derision that stopped only when we had beaten another team.
We made it into the playoffs, but no one believed we would win after that. The referees, the scorekeepers, and the league commissioner were all black, and it was widely assumed, even by the black guys, that they would not let us win the league title. It was all fairly moot, as the team we were selected to play next had a six foot six player named Ford who was a remarkable athlete.
Things were not going well in the first quarter. Ford shoved everyone around and scored basically when he chose to. But we erased a large deficit, mainly because Pistol and Bobbie started heating up from three-point range. I drove to the basket a few times and gave Ford a series of head fakes to keep him off balance. I had scored fifteen points when early in the fourth Ford decided I had played enough. I figured he would be looking for the head fake, so I went straight at him in the air. He never tried to block the shot. Instead his arm went straight out like a tollgate—more like a steel girder. It’s called clotheslining for a reason. My head hit that steel girder and my body flipped back like a bike rider meeting a low branch. I landed flat on my back, and my head slammed on the concrete. I got to my feet with the help of teammates and continued playing but was off my game. My guess is I had a concussion. We lost.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 6