For the most part, the inmates in medium-security were all within a few years of parole, so it wasn't as dangerous as a close-custody or maximumsecurity prison. But just because there was less violence, didn't mean there was none at all.
When I first arrived, I was assigned to G-unit, which was a converted shop class that resembled an army barracks. It had a high ceiling with long double rows of bunk beds and lockers. Fish had to wait up to three or four weeks until a room opened up in one of the six main housing units.
From the outside, the main housing units looked like student housing. Two-story tan brick buildings with faded turquoise trim. But inside, there were open-tiered cellblocks, with single-man rooms in place of the cells. In the newer buildings, the windows opened onto lawns and were large enough to crawl in and out of. Inmates also had the privacy of rooms with doors that locked, and each of us was given a key to his room. The central chow hall once a week served cheeseburgers and pizza. Were it not for the double barbed-wire fences and gun towers that surrounded the compound, it could have passed for a college campus.
But it wasn't just my surroundings that were different: the inmates' behavior and attitudes were different, especially when it came to queers. Perhaps it was because many of them had just come from the outside world and they didn't have long to go before they got out. Or maybe it was because everyone was so young. I heard a guard say that younger inmates were more difficult to control because they were quick tempered and got into fights easily. I had hoped to keep secret all that happened to me earlier, but the inmates had already heard about me.
"He's laying that way," I heard a guy whisper. "He was fucking at Riverside."
I was up on my bunk reading, when someone said, "Uh-oh, Don't squeeze the Charmin." That's when one of them grabbed my ass. I spun and swung at whoever it was, jumping down from my bunk all in the same motion. It electrified the barracks, where hostilities were already tense. The inmates started yelling and cheering.
He was a black man, about my size, and we exchanged a few slugs before wrestling to the floor. "Kill that peckerwood," a black inmate shouted. "Don't take that shit from a nigger," a white hollered, and another fight broke out on the sidelines.
The racial make up was almost evenly split, so tensions were higher than I'd seen earlier at the other prisons. The guards handcuffed us quickly and took us to A-unit, where we were placed in isolation. Three days later I would go to "court."
Since major misconducts could result in the forfeiture of good time (time off your sentence for good behavior), inmates were granted due process and given a hearing. The Hearing Officer was a thin, dark-skinned black man who wore a navy blue suit and tie. The inmate advocate was also present. She was a young white woman who dressed plainly.
The Hearing Officer read from the incident report. "At approximately 1600 hours, C.O. Miller observed an altercation between inmate Parsell #153052 and inmate Williams. . ." There was more to the report, but he stopped reading and looked directly at me. "So what happened?"
"The guy squeezed my ass." I shrugged. "So I hit him."
The Hearing Officer nodded then glanced at the advocate. She said nothing, tucking her long brown hair behind her ear.
He placed the report on the table and checked the box marked, Not Guilty.
"OK, then," he said, without looking up.
We were sitting at a small conference table, and I watched as he wrote something in the Findings section of the report. His handwriting, like his hair and suit, was neat and orderly and his gold wedding band looked new.
"You'll get out of segregation this afternoon," the advocate said with a quick smile.
"I'll call Housing," the Hearing Officer said, "and get you moved to a regular unit."
"Today?" I asked, sounding surprised. I was told it took up to six weeks.
"Well, every now and then, when we see someone who's being pressured, we try to move 'em out of the barracks sooner. You did the right thing, by fighting back. It's the quiet ones that get themselves into trouble over there."
"Thanks." I smiled.
He didn't smile back. "Now, don't let me see you over here again."
"No sir, you won't."
As I bounced out of the Hearing Room, Inmate Williams was waiting in one of the chairs in the hall. A guard stood next to him. "Don't think this shit is over," he said. "You're still gonna need a man, bitch."
"I got your bitch," I said, walking up the hall.
Neither of us had actually won the fight, though it might have been enough to have defended my manhood. Surely they had heard that I'd been turned out at another prison.
I wondered how different my incarceration might have been, had I been sent to MTU originally. Or how differently my situation might have turned out, had I fought Chet in the showers at Riverside; but what chance did I have against the Thorazine? What chance did a seventeen-year-old boy have against any of them?
When I got back to A-unit, the guard was yelling "chow," and so I started toward the door. Suddenly a white inmate grabbed my arm.
"Let the crows go," he said.
The blacks filed out of the building first, followed a few minutes later by the whites. When I turned back to the inmate who had stopped me, he was gone.
Like everything else inside, the racial balance was controlled by Warden Handlon. The staff denied it, saying the mix had more to do with the youthful population than it did anything else. At any rate, it seemed to make matters worse, since at most other prisons the tensions didn't seem as high when one side grossly outnumbered the other. And though large-scale violence never broke out, there was frequent grumbling between the groups about rioting.
The oldest inmate there was Little John. He was forty-five and worked as a waiter in the Officer's Dining Room. He had worked for Warden Handlon for years while he was over at the Michigan Reformatory. Little John still wore his pant legs rolled-up like knickers, the way he did when he had first come to prison in the 1950s.
I heard someone call him the warden's house nigger, but no one had the nerve to say that to his face-not even the blacks. Everyone knew not to fuck with an older inmate.
I remembered Manley telling me that older convicts didn't like games. "Most of them have been down too long, so they don't have the patience for a lot of bullshit. They ain't gonna get up in your face like these young silly jitterbugs and talk a lot of smack. They'll just sneak up behind you, and quietly kill you."
Manley had also said that older convicts are more levelheaded. You're always better off with an older inmate than with someone younger. "These youngsters got no sense," he said. "They're too young, dumb, and full of cum, so they'd just as soon cut your head off and fuck you-and then ask if that pussy is any good; whereas the older cons are a lot smoother. They're just as dangerous, mind you-but they'd rather coax or trick that pussy out of your ass than just up and take it from you."
Perhaps I was being naive to think that since I was at a new prison, that I might be able to leave my past behind. I thought about the advice Black Diamond had given me: as long as I kept walking around like a lost sheep, people were going to keep dogging me. I was hoping to put an end to the question of whether I was gay or not, but as I turned the corner on the yard, I ran into Josh from Riverside. Josh was the chubby white guy that Slide Step had set me up with in the shower. It made sense to me now-how the guys in the Barracks knew my story.
"Hey, Tim. How you doing?"
I kept walking. "All right," I said.
"Wait up! I hear you're moving to C-unit."
Hoiv did he know that?
"One of my homeboys is a clerk in Housing." He said it like it gave him some kind of clout. "Anyway, it's a rough unit, so you're going to need protection."
I didn't say anything.
"It's one of the worst units in here," he said, sounding sincere. "So I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine."
"I'm not interested," I said, but just then his friend, Rock, walked up to us.
Josh said, "I know you'd rather be with a white guy."
Rock was so big he dwarfed me. He was a twenty-year-old bodybuilder, who was serving the last of a three-year sentence for selling drugs. His short wavy hair was a reddish blond, which matched his mustache and small goatee. He stood about six foot five, and his chest was so large I would have practically had to climb up on it, just to touch his chin. Rock was very sexy. In spite of myself, I started to grin.
"OK," I said. "But only if I have to."
When I moved to C-unit, it didn't seen like a rough unit, but I wouldn't really know for sure because by the time I got there, everyone knew that I belonged to Rock.
If MTU had a football team, Rock would have been captain, although he lacked the discipline to follow orders, and he took pride in the way lie skirted authority. Since lie was about to be discharged on the maximum of his sentence, lie didn't have to worry about pleasing the parole board. He had a way of carrying himself that, combined with his size, allowed him to hold court on the section of the yard where the bodybuilders hung out.
Rock's friends, all of whom were white, seemed to know each other from the streets or time served together in juvenile hall. Rock wasn't the best looking among his friends, though he was the largest-and lie carried himself like he knew it. He was the kind of guy the girls back home would have been crazy about-except that lie liked to brag about mistreating them. "I used to dog them bitches," lie once said, sitting back on the grass with a pint of ice cream.
"Man," Josh looked on admiringly, "he used to buke those hitches. He'd say to them, `Shut up bitch, and get your ass in there and clean them dishes.' And they would too!" Josh laughed. "They were only too happy to do it." Rock leaned back and smiled.
Buke was a word I remembered Slide Step using, when his team had beaten another team badly. Perhaps it was a bastardization of the word rebuke, yet I doubt anyone even knew. Rock's bragging about his abuse of women should have been a sign of things to come. But I was lost in staring at the curves of his shoulders, chest, and arms. I hardly noticed when he handed me the rest of his ice cream.
If Slide Step had two sides to him-a public and private side-Rock had only one: asshole. He never spent any time with me, and whenever I was forced to have sex with him-I would pretend lie was somebody else. Anyone, it didn't matter who. I'd come to despise him that much. Afterward, he would talk about girls and pussy and anything else lie could think of to emphasize his masculinity. And then he'd say something stupid like, "Why don't you go off and swing on a dick somewhere."
The only time Rock ever looked me in the eyes was when he was probing for something he could fuck with me about later. Once he found something, he'd get a smirk on his face like he couldn't wait to go back and tell his friends. I tried not to give him the satisfaction, so I'd laugh it off, like I thought it was funny, but he always seemed to see right through me. Right before he was released, he traded me to a black guy for a carton of cigarettes.
The school and the library became my sanctuaries. The Department of Corrections announced that at the end of the year, they were phasing out regular high school, so starting in January; inmates could take only a GED (General Equivalency Diploma). I kicked into gear and completed all the modules I needed to graduate and finished my senior year with As in all subjects. I graduated first in my class (of one).
I'm sure the program was watered down for inmates, but I took advantage of classes and finished high school the same year I would have back home. Hill Top High School, Class of '78. It was named for the school at the Michigan Reformatory, which sat on top of a hill.
I gave up thinking about family and home and memories of happier times. It wasn't working any more, so instead I thought more and more about what it would be like when I got out. In the library, I read magazines and dreamed about my future. Time magazine ran an article about the discotheques in New York City, where I'd never been. There was a picture of a gay bar that had hundreds of men, and I got excited. It seems hard to believe now, but that was the first glimpse I had of the possibilities for gay men outside of a prison.
By and large, the men at MTU were young and sexy. All the good-looking bad boys in the state of Michigan had ended up there it seemed. But however sexy they may have been, I wasn't enjoying any of it. Sex was an unpleasant task, and I would have to slip outside of myself whenever I was forced to have it. After a while, it was a constant struggle to stay present at all. Yet I needed to stay alert to the constant threats. In my mind, I was always racing aheadcalculating the possibility for danger-looking for an out or an exit. Or I was going backward-replaying conversations and scenarios, scanning for something I might have missed that could come back and hurt me.
It was ironic that while I was at Riverside, I wished I could be among younger men. Now that I was, I wanted to get back to the other side. I didn't have many friends to begin with, so when Rock traded me to a black guy, it made matters worse. Now none of the white guys would have anything to do with me. But I got good at pretending I didn't notice their hostility toward me. Though there were one or two guys with whom I'd occasionally share a prolonged stare-and then we'd slip off and meet in an empty bathroom. The sex helped bring me into the present, but it was never a mutual transaction, and it rarely lasted long. Then I'd retreat back inside myself to hide in that place where no one in there would ever see my true feelings-all the fear and insecurities that I always carried with me.
The black guy that Rock had sold me to was named Moseley. He was the inmate from the bullpen at the county jail, who had been annoyed that I'd never seen a cockroach before. The first time I saw him at MTU, I was horrified. He was standing back from the urinal, with his hand on his hip, staring at me coldly, as he took a piss. His dick, which was soft at that moment, was larger than any I had ever seen. It looked like a small elephant trunk-and he wasn't shy about showing it off. I walked out of the bathroom thinking, he'll never get that barrel near me.
Moseley met Rock in the weight pit, where he and others spent their time bulking up. When Moseley had first appeared at my room, to tell me that he was now my man, he nearly filled the frame of the doorway. He had broad shoulders and a thick neck, but his legs and waist were smaller, and out of proportion with the rest of his body. He once showed me his ID, which included a photo taken when he first came to prison; he looked almost as thin as me. "No one is as skinny as your bony ass," he said. And he was probably right. Far from bulking up, I'd lost weight since coming there. When my street clothes arrived, they hung loosely on me.
Sharon had finally sent my clothes-at least the ones that were left after her sons raided my closets. I felt self-conscious when an inmate commented on how "cocky" I was acting now that I was wearing street clothes. There was something depressing about wearing state blues-and I wasn't the only one whose spirits lifted a little after putting on his street clothes.
Moseley was heartless when it came to sex. He didn't care the slightest that his dick was agony for me. And the only saving grace I had was that he was leaving in a few weeks to go to the Corrections Center.
In a strange twist of irony, the way Moseley had ripped open nay rectum, may have saved my life from contracting AIDS a few years later when HIV infection became so prevalent in the early 1980s-especially considering the self-destructive ways I was acting out then with drugs and booze.
Had it not been for those times I shared with Slide Step at Riverside, I don't think I could have survived those first few months at MTU. I searched for what it was that I got from him, but I couldn't put it into words. Yet I knew it was a lot more than what I was getting from Moseley. I couldn't show Moseley what I was feeling inside. To show that, would have invited more attacks-if for nothing more than his passing entertainment. So I pretended nothing bothered me, and in time I got so good at it, I could fool even myself.
Each time I went to the bathroom following sex, I would start bleeding. The doctor at MTU sent me over to the infirmary at Riverside, to see the visiting proctologist. When they
brought me over in the van, and we made our way up the winding landscaped drive, past the small watermill and a sunken garden-I thought about asking the hospital staff if they could keep me there. I had filed several grievances, requesting a transfer hack to Riverside, but the response was always the same: Without a disciplinary reason or compelling need for protection, your request is denied. If I were to complain of being raped, I would have to tell them who it was that were raping me.
"I'd kill a fucking snitch," I'd heard said many times. It was one of the few sentiments that crossed all racial lines.
When I got there, someone quickly sent word to Slide Step, who ran right over.
"Arc you all right?" He yelled up from the courtyard, to me at the window. I could see his breath in the winter air.
"Uh-huh," I nodded. Seeing him made me miss the place more. "MTU sucks," I shouted to him, "They won't let me come back."
"That's what I hear, Squeeze."
"I miss it here," I said. And I missed hearing him call me Squeeze, but I couldn't say that out loud. It would have taken too much for me to go there, and I think Slide Step knew this. He felt the same way. And though we were now each in separate prisons, we both still lived in a world that prohibited the expression of feelings.
He looked up and nodded at me. "You just don't know, Squeeze."
We stood there another moment, until the nurse came out and called me into the office. A guard walked up to Slide Step threatening him with a ticket for being out of place. He waved at me and backed away.
Loneliness, which had long been my boyhood friend, was starting to suffocate me.
The proctologist placed a long, metal tube-like instrument on the tray next to the examining table. I asked what he intended to do with it. It looked like a telescope, with an eyepiece on one end and a small light built-in to the tip at the other end.
Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison Page 25