Repression, contradictorily, favoured the spread of hepatitis and AIDS, since it encouraged the communal use of syringes and needles, which were rented or sold already full of the drug to users who injected it in fractions proportional to how much they had paid, without any precautions whatsoever, with the needle passing directly from one arm to the next.
With a used Bic pen and an old flip-flop, Chico Ladeira – a softly spoken burglar married to a beautiful woman of whom he was extremely jealous, who had been caught by armed security guards while robbing a Universal Church temple – made good money manufacturing syringes. ‘I get the Bic and take out the inside tube. I heat up a hypodermic needle, which I get by my own personal means, and slot it into the tip of the pen. Then I heat it to melt the plastic around it. I make the plunger with a little piece of round rubber that I cut out of a flip-flop strap, attached to a section of hard wire. I guarantee its sturdiness. If it leaks you can bring it back and I’ll give you a new one.’
Many bore on their arms the stigma of addiction: hardened veins and scars from abscesses. In addition to casual users, there were the IVers, enslaved to their addiction, looking forever startled in the galleries, glancing over their shoulders, from side to side and even at the ceiling, as if something was about to fall on their heads, victims of the persecution complex that dogs chronic cocaine users.
Scratchy – who earned his nickname because a friend had seen him in the red light district asking a prostitute to scratch his back – described this delirium:
I used to slam coke at a friend’s place. He was shacked up with a woman who was ugly as sin. When we was both straight, everything was cool. But the minute we shot up he’d get all paranoid that we had to get out of there, or I’d fuck his girl. We’d run ‘til we was out of breath, then we’d come down and think straight: what’s all this about, man? Then we’d head back to his place, normal, best of friends, and shoot up again. The paranoia would all come back and we’d have to run again. When the snow was really good, we’d get back so tired that we’d drop to the ground like idiots, knackered.
The situation was serious. There was an epidemic of cocaine slamming in the prison, a reflection of the epidemic spreading through the poorer districts of São Paulo and other Brazilian cities.
Once, while filming an educational video, I watched a group slamming cocaine, sitting around a table in an abandoned warehouse. There were four participants: a black Jamaican, recently released from prison, who said he had been unfairly arrested when visiting some Columbian friends from Medellin in a small hotel on Rua Aurora; a second-generation Arab who looked older than his years; a thin Brazilian with rotting teeth, father of two, who used to hold up metro ticket booths; and a Japanese-Brazilian who was a member of the mafia involved in white slavery in the nightclubs of Liberdade, São Paulo’s Asian neighbourhood.
Each one arrived holding a little package of cocaine rolled up in wax paper and a small syringe with a fine needle, the ones diabetics use to inject insulin, essential to avoid leaving marks on one’s arms. They placed three glasses in the centre of the table: one empty, another full of tap water and a third with boiled water; in the middle of these was a thoroughly washed soup spoon.
The Jamaican filled a third of the syringe from the glass of boiled water, while the sex-slave trader poured a dose of cocaine onto the dry spoon. The Jamaican emptied the syringe into the spoon and used the syringe cap to mix the powder and liquid, praising the quality of the cocaine, which was dissolving easily. On his right, the sex-slave trader silently squeezed the muscles of his arm, staring at the veins that were beginning to pop out.
The Jamaican used the syringe to draw up the cocaine diluted on the spoon and slowly pressed the needle into the sex-slave trader’s arm, until his blood flowed back red. In a part of the ritual with which I was unfamiliar, he injected only a quarter of the contents of the syringe and used the plunger to draw back an amount of blood equal to that of the liquid injected. He repeated this operation of injecting and drawing back several times. The sex-slave trader kept his bulging eyes trained on the syringe, fascinated by the blood flowing into and out of his arm. The whole episode lasted two or three minutes, after which the sex-slave trader got up and started talking non-stop, while the second-generation Arab made the veins of his forearm pop out.
The procedure was repeated in silence with the other two participants: the dilution of the powder on the spoon, the slow introduction of the needle, the blood flowing in and out, eyes staring at the syringe, and the concomitant agitation and monologues.
To my surprise, however, the effect of the injection was ephemeral. The Jamaican was still holding the needle in the vein of the father of two, the third in the circle, and the anxious sex-slave trader was already tapping his arm again. While he was taking his second dose, it was the second-generation Arab’s turn to get agitated, after the father of two and so on, in a growing frenzy that only ended when the last speck of powder had been consumed.
After the first round, before starting the second, the Jamaican washed the bloody syringe in the glass with tap water and squirted it into the empty glass. After repeating this cleaning operation twice, he filled the syringe again from the glass of boiled water to dilute the new dose of powder on the spoon. In the end, the glass of tap water was almost dry and the one that had been empty contained a solution tinged with blood.
It was a field day for the HIV virus. Although each one had brought his own syringe, all it would take was for someone in the group to be infected with the virus for it to spread through the water used to wash the syringes and also contaminate the spoon that everyone was using. This may explain why I later found so many former users with AIDS who swore they’d never shared needles.
When it was over, the group continued talking without stopping or listening, their mouths dry from the effect of the alkaloid injected so many times. In the end, as we packed up the equipment, I saw the father of two pick up the glass with the bloody solution and raise it to his lips, without anyone around him paying the slightest attention.
‘Don’t drink that!’ I shouted.
He didn’t understand and started drinking the liquid thick with blood. He drank at least half the glass before I could grab his arm.
‘Look what you’re drinking! That’s pure blood!’
‘Ah! I didn’t notice, I thought it was water.’
In the Cinema
Then came the talks in the cinema. The Casa de Detenção had an enormous hall with a cement floor on the second floor of Pavilion Six, with a seating capacity of over a thousand, where a cinema had operated before it was destroyed in a rebellion. We took three or four hundred men there, set up a screen with sound equipment, showed educational videos about AIDS and I answered questions from the audience.
Moving so many men from their pavilion to the cinema and getting them back unscathed wasn’t simple. The operation, led by Waldemar Gonçalves, the head of the sports department, started at eight o’clock in the morning. The cells on the floors whose occupants were going to hear the talk were unlocked before the others and the inmates headed for Pavilion Six. Afterwards, at about eleven, they walked back in an orderly fashion.
Week after week, for years, hundreds of prisoners came and went, often crossing paths with mortal enemies, and there wasn’t a single incident. Among the inmates, there was a pact of respect for the Friday cinema.
Hernani – a forger, or ‘171’1, as the inmates liked to call him, who bragged that he was more dangerous with a pen than his mates with a revolver – explained this calm: ‘You, Luís and Ricardo come to do somethin’ good for us. If some fool causes trouble, tries to settle a score with someone, or does somethin’ silly, he’ll be affectin’ the general wellbein’. And that’ll be a problem! He’d have to really hate being alive.’
The men came in groups. Most, as a matter of principle, would go straight to the back and sit on the floor, even if there was plenty of space on the benches up front. On the screen, as they were
entering, we showed videos of popular singers. They listened attentively, keeping time by discreetly swinging their feet. They would never dance or move their bodies: ‘When have you ever seen convicts dancin’ in front of each other?’
At around nine, we’d stop the music, turn on the lights and I would get up on the stage to say: ‘Attention, inmates, there’s an AIDS epidemic in the house. Your mates grow thin and weak, then they go to the infirmary in Four and never return. We’re going to show a video and then answer questions about the disease. Save any comments for later. Nothing is sadder in a man’s life than ending his days in jail.’
During the first few talks, Florisval, the director of correctional services, would stand on the stage, with his back to me, and glare at the audience. One day, I told him not to worry and I was left alone with the inmates. It worked; I began to relate to them better.
While the AIDS video was showing, chatting could sometimes be heard from the back of the room. One morning, during the screening, in the dark, I decided to cross the cinema and sit among them at the back, just to see if the talking would stop.
I went, driven by a rational feeling of confidence, but I was afraid. I slowly walked across the cinema. When I got to the back rows, the talking stopped. I sat on the ground, in the middle of the inmates, and watched the video. My hands were cold and my heart was beating fast. I felt as if someone might jump at me from behind and strangle me. I controlled my fear and stuck it out to the end. Then I got up and returned to the stage with no hurry. On my way there, I noticed that the walk wasn’t exactly mine: it had a touch of swagger from the streets of Brás, where I had grown up. The following week, I repeated the experiment. The fear came back much less intense. The third time, it was gone.
Once the video was over, I would answer the questions asked on a microphone taken to the inmates by Santista – a thief who claimed to have enjoyed life: he’d be the last one to leave a nightclub, he’d buy drinks for everyone, then he’d go snort cocaine in a motel with the strippers and, being the generous sort, would cover their bodies with stolen money.
The questions the inmates raised were concrete. AIDS for them wasn’t a theoretical concern, it was a practical problem. They wanted to know what to do if they came into contact with the bodily secretions of someone who was sick, the risk of transmission to family members, the first symptoms and the time the disease took to develop.
After answering the last question, I would summarise three essential ideas in two minutes at the most. First: solidarity with a sick cellmate didn’t present a risk because AIDS wasn’t transmitted through casual contact. Second: without a condom, the virus could pass from a man to a woman and from a woman to a man, and in homosexual relations the active partner was also at risk. Third: everyone who shot up cocaine was going to catch the virus; it was just a matter of time.
At the end, I would add in an evangelical tone of voice: if you can’t escape the hell of cocaine addiction, swallow it, use it in a suppository form, smoke it, but don’t shoot it up, for God’s sake!
My recommendation that they substitute injectable cocaine was left until last because, at the end, when I insisted that they smoke it rather than inject it, they would break into a round of applause permeated by long whistles, which created a dramatic atmosphere for my exit from the hall.
At the time, this last message about injectable cocaine was given like that because I felt it was ridiculous, in that place, to repeat naïve slogans such as ‘say no to drugs’. The reason for so much applause, however, I would only fully understand much later, when it became clear that crack was going to sweep cocaine out of the prison.
The task of getting hundreds of prisoners out of bed by eight o’clock in the morning to watch an educational video followed by medical recommendations, considered unrealistic by more experienced staff members, was decisively facilitated by Hernani – a grey-haired gentleman who had specialised in a scam in which he would open bogus firms to then bankrupt them and skip out on debts: ‘Doctor, waking up these louts is a problematic problem. Why don’t you show an erotic video at the end of the programme? In their current state of deprivation, they’ll pack out the cinema.’
We did a test. At the end, after I left the hall, an explicit sex video was shown. The strategy of combining music, preventive medicine and sex was a box office success. It could work in other prisons, as long as certain precautions are taken: no one should be allowed to only watch the last video, because the programme is an indivisible package, and, most importantly, the erotic film should only start when the doctor has left the room.
As early as the first few talks, I was surprised by the respect that the men showed me. In their questions they used terms and expressions such as ‘anal sex’, ‘penetration’, ‘prostitution’, ‘homosexuals’ and ‘prison wives’ – never slang, much less four-letter words. On one occasion, when I interrupted a video of the singer Daniela Mercury to put on the AIDS video, three or four men at the back of the hall whistled like high-school students messing around. It took Waldemar Gonçalves a great deal of work to convince the men who helped set up the equipment not to stab the whistlers for their antics. Santão, a muscular mulatto doing eighteen years for bank robbery, who helped set up the sound equipment, was one of the angriest: ‘What’s with those guys? Do they want to make fun of the doctor who comes to raise awareness about the dangers of this evil and give us all a bit of recreation? They’re not disrespecting the doctor, they’re disrespecting us!’
The following week, before the talk started, Benê – the son of an alcoholic who hated drunks and had shot two of them in a bakery because they were bothering a young lady he didn’t even know; respected enough among the inmates to referee the last game of the internal football tournament that year – approached me accompanied by three young men:
‘Doctor, the boys here want to have a chat with you.’
The oldest of the three, who had lost his left eye as the result of a stray bullet when he was a teenager, spoke with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back:
‘Speaking on behalf of myself and my mates here, we came to say we’re very sorry for the whistling. We didn’t mean no harm, but if it upset our comrades, we’re not gonna cause trouble.’
This atmosphere of sincere respect towards the doctor who had brought them a little help heightened my sense of responsibility towards them. After over twenty years of clinical experience, it was among those considered the dregs of society that I fully realised the importance of the figure of the doctor in the collective consciousness, one of the mysteries of my profession.
Rita Cadillac
We held an AIDS-prevention poster contest sponsored by the Paulista University, with a prize of $1000-worth of cigarette packets, the local currency, shared among the five winners. Sports department head Waldemar Gonçalves and a group of inmates from the pavilions’ cultural centres handed out white poster paper and black marker pens. Copies of the best posters were later displayed throughout the prison.
The winning artist drew a condom with a syringe dripping with blood inside it. At the bottom, it said: ‘You can avoid AIDS.’
I had seen numerous AIDS posters before, but never had I seen anyone so skilfully bring together the idea of condoms and syringes in a single message. Our winner was a thin fellow with awful teeth who had stopped studying in primary school and was doing five years for small robberies, which he had committed with an older cousin.
The prizes were presented on a hot afternoon in the cinema in Six. Over one thousand inmates were present. To brighten up the ceremony, Waldemar had invited Rita Cadillac, the former singer-dancer who had mesmerised the men on TV on Saturday nights. The inmates’ band Reunidos por Acaso played.
After the fifth song, the master of ceremonies, Demétrio – an elderly man with a bald head and a ring on his pinky, addicted to the horse races – announced:
‘Dear inmates of this penal establishment, your humble presenter here is honoured to introduce a great te
levision artist, unparalleled in the art of dance, who danced and sang on the programme of the great Chacrinha, may he rest in peace. On this festive occasion, I would like to invite up to the stage the muse of the Casa de Detenção: Rita Cadillac!’
He drew out the last syllables of the artist’s first and last names interminably.
In a short skirt, Rita climbed the stairs to the stage, breasts swaying in her half-open blouse. There was howling and whistling in the audience. She looked at them with a naughty smile, signalled to the musicians and began to dance samba with incredible sensuality and rhythm.
The excited crowd shouted. ‘Turn around! Turn around, Rita, for the love of God!’ She pretended not to understand and continued her provocative dance facing the begging men, at the most turning slightly to the side. ‘Turn around, the way we like it! Turn around, Rita, just once!’ When the shouting reached a crescendo, Rita, with her black skirt and schoolgirl way, pressed her index finger to her lips and with the other made an imaginary circle in the air, as if confirming the inmates’ request. ‘That’s it, turn around! C’mon, Rita, kill us!’ Perspiring, with two buttons undone, she finally did her fans’ bidding.
The clamouring stopped immediately. There was total silence.
With her back to the enraptured audience, to the rhythm of the song by the Reunidos por Acaso, she began sinuously moving her hips in growing circles. When the movement couldn’t get any bigger, Rita Cadillac, with one hand behind her head and the other beneath her navel, gradually bent her knees without letting up the movement, until her thighs were parallel to the stage. She stayed swaying in this position for a long time, in high heels and with a straight back. Then she began her ascent. Halfway up, when her thighs were at a forty-five-degree angle to the stage, her backside suddenly stopped mid-air for a few seconds. With her face in profile, chin on her shoulder, left hand lifting her hair off her moist neck, she finally jerked her hips backwards and upwards and, with great poise, danced off towards the pandeiro player, to the delirium of the inmates, who almost brought the old cinema down. With all due respect.
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