I was the youngest on the team and the only homosexual, which is why (I believe) the others hassled me about working on the newspaper.
"She's going to fuck it up for the rest of us," O. J. said.
O. J. was one of the reporters. He looked like the then-famous football player who appeared in rental car ads on TV, but that isn't how this O. J. got his name; he'd tell us many times. He was Otis Junior, the fifth or sixth junior in a row.
"My daddy was Junior, and my granddaddy they called June Bug, so they named me O. J. -long before that other nigger won the Heisman trophy."
I stared at him in confusion.
"See!" he said. "She probably doesn't even know what I'm talking about."
"I'm not a she," I said. "I've got a dick."
He and the others shot me a dirty look.
"Watch your language, bitch. Can't you see there's a lady here?"
I looked up and saw Miss Bain standing in the doorway.
"Sorry, Miss Bain. I don't like being called a girl."
She nodded at me and glanced disapprovingly at the others.
"Whatever you are," Rodney said, "None of us want you messing it up for us."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
By being on the newspaper, we were granted free access throughout the prison, to follow up on news stories, but the other guys were worried that I would ruin that by getting caught having sex in one of the units.
"If you get caught," O. J. said, "they'll take that privilege from all of us."
"I'm not looking to do anything!" I wanted to ask, "What about you guys?" Who's to say they wouldn't be out raping a fish or forcing some gay guy to blow them?
"All right," Miss Bain said. "You can knock all that off right now."
"I'll knock it off," Lee said, his eyes trying to check out my ass.
The others laughed, and Lee winked at me.
I was angered by how they'd pick on me one minute and then the next, turn nice and ask if I'd go off and have sex. But of course that only meant my servicing them.
"Now we can let go of stereotypes while your working with me," Miss Bain said. She walked in and sat on the edge of a desk. "I've hired Tim because he can type, better than anyone in here, and because he has shown some other talent ..."
"Yeah, we know about that," O. J. said.
"I said that's enough!" Miss Bain sounded annoyed, but she didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. These guys wanted to stay in her good graces.
"I can't believe how you all are treating him!"
O. J. and the others shifted in their seats.
"I would expect some of you, at least, to have some sensitivity to prejudice and discrimination."
"It's not the same thing," 0. J. started to say, but Miss Bain cut him oft.
"Yes it is. It's not black and white, or even a gay/straight thing, it's...'
"It's in the Bible," 0. J. said.
"And we all know how closely you live your lives by that."
0. J. smiled.
"The Bible also condones slavery. Did you know that?"
"Hey Miss Bain?" Lee said. "Why are you sticking up for fags?"
She stood up and closed the door. "Open your journals, gentlemen, and write down these words: Hate and Ignorance. As reporters, you're going to need to know the precise meaning of words."
She sat on the edge of her desk. "This is not about homosexuality, Lee, its about hate and ignorance, and though you may think you know what those things mean, I want you to look them up anyway. As long as we keep focusing on where something is landing, instead of what it is that's being tossed about, we're going to keep missing the point."
A couple guys nodded.
"Whatever Tim's lifestyle is, is of no concern to me." She looked around the room. "Now this isn't just another job assignment, and if you came here because you wanted a free pass throughout the prison, tell me right now. I'm sure we can find something else for you to do-in the kitchen."
Spaulding started to say something, but Sherry Bain held up her hand.
"Now listen to me, because I only want to have this talk once. While you're working with me, I expect you to behave like gentlemen, which means I expect you to treat each other respect and with some degree of dignity." She glanced over at me.
"Words can be a powerful weapon, but as gentlemen, I'll expect you to leave some of that out there on the yard. Because I don't really need to be hearing about your bitches and ho's and fags and ... some of those other things." She looked at 0. J.
Everyone laughed, at the way she pivoted her head back and forth as she said it. She was acting very "street" all of a sudden, and it seemed out of place coming from her.
Spaulding said, "You being a woman, in the field of male corrections, you must be especially aware of these kinds of issues."
Miss Bain stifled a grin. "It probably has more to do with my upbringing, but, yes, wading through some of these back waters has been an interesting challenge. Though not as difficult and you might think."
"Since Spaulding is your editor, he is going to question your words and check your facts. We need to be as accurate as we can be, so we'll teach you how to do this," she said, "with everything."
"To validate our stories we'll look for contradictions and challenge our assumptions. When following up on something, always keep an open mind, because you never know where it where it might land you."
"What do mean by that?" Rodney asked.
"Well, let's start with a simple question," she said. "How many of you thought you were given a square deal by the system?"
No one raised their hand.
"None of you?" She looked around the room. "0. J. What was your school like?"
"It was pretty messed up," he said.
"Any sports programs?"
"We used to, until they cut them out."
Lee said, "That shit is for white folks-out in the burbs."
"Do you think it's an accident that most inmates are black?" Miss Bain asked.
"Shit. Tell us something we don't know," O. J. said.
"All right. How about the movies you're all watching in the auditorium. What was last Saturday's movie?"
"Trick Baby," Lee answered.
"Trick Baby?" she said. She dropped her head is disbelief. "Trick Baby?"
The guys laughed because her eyes said it all.
"Hey! Now that's my boy," Lee said. "That's Iceberg Slim."
"I don't care if it's Romaine Lettuce," she laughed. "That crap is doing nothing but poisoning your young minds."
O. J. looked over at Lee with an exasperated expression.
"You can roll your eyes all you'd like, Mr. O. J., but let me just say that as long as we keep pandering to this never-ending stream of negative imagesones that show young black men as nothing more than pimps and pushers, con men and racketeers-instead of stepping up and showing off young, bright talented men such as each one of you is capable of being, then the general public is not going to care two nickels about you, me, or any other minority."
0. J. looked at her, his mouth slightly ajar.
"There will just be a neverending stream of young 0. J.s and June Bugs and Juju Beans that keep showing up in prison each year."
"I'm not telling you what you should watch, but I do think we can challenge what others think about us by questioning who it is they say we are."
We sat in a kind of stunned silence. No one had ever had that kind of analytical conversation with me, and I'm sure none of the others guys had ever had one either.
"I'll tell you what," Lee said. "That shit is DEEP."
The loudspeaker blared, "Attention All Inmates: Return from your assignments."
"Question your assumptions," Miss Bain said in closing, "and look for the contradictions. I'll see you all this afternoon."
As she got up to leave, she glanced over and smiled at me.
Miss Bain was a bad motherfucker!
When we arrived for chow, I let Paul go ahead of me in the line.
It was pizza day, the highlight of the week's menu. As I inched toward the serving trays, I felt someone squeeze my ass. I spun around and saw a large black guy, Reese, pull his hand away. He stared at me like it wasn't him, and as soon as we sat down, I told Paul about it.
"Who?" He shouted.
"Shhh," I said. "He'll hear you."
"Fuck that! You can't let these ho's play you like that."
My heart sank, because I didn't want to get into a fight. And I wasn't sure it was him anyway. "It was Reese," I said, after Paul insisted I tell him.
Paul got up immediately and went over to him. A few minutes later, he returned. "It's take care of," he said. "I told him I didn't want a fight, but that you were with me."
"What'd he say?"
"He said that was cool."
Paul took a bite of his pizza.
"Do you want mine?" I said. "I'm not really hungry."
"You need to gain some weight, Squeeze. Those pants are falling off you."
It was scrawny piece of pizza, and it was nearly cold. I didn't want it.
"Listen, you can't let shit like that go," Paul said, "because it's never about what it looks like on the surface. He wasn't just copping a feel. He was testing-to see how you would react."
"I think he was also testing me," Paul said.
I hit into my thin slice of pizza.
Outside the chow hall, two inmates walked past.
"That bitch is so ugly," one of them said, "that when she was born-the doctor slapped her momma."
Inmates loved to snap on one another, but I didn't know who they were joking about until I turned the corner and saw Black Diamond standing with another queen.
"Well stir my pudding," she said. "If it ain't Mr. Blue Eyes. How the hell are you, girl?"
In the daylight, the poor thing was even more ugly than I had remembered. Her hairline was at the top of her head and her eyebrows were arched so high that she looked like Oopsy the Clown.
"I'm fine," I said, smiling, "but I'm still not a girl, Miss Thing."
"Well all right," she said. "You can be anything you want to be, honey, with your fine self."
It had been a few months since I left the county jail, and though I heard she had arrived in Quarantine, I didn't get a chance to see her before I left.
"When did you get here?" I asked.
"Today. I guess they don't want me startin' no scandals over in the barracks-so they're moving me into A-unit before we hit the Eyewitness News hour, if you know what I'm sayin'. Girrrl! There are some fine lookin' men up in this place, honey."
"How's Ginger doing?" I asked, remembering her cellmate from the jail.
"Girl got herself a dime," Black Diamond said, meaning she had received a ten-year sentence. "She's over in Gladiator School. But she'll be all right, already got herself a man picked out, so won't nobody fuck with her."
"And You?" I asked.
"Well, I'm just gonna have to wait and see what time it is before I pick me out a timepiece. But I'm sure enough gonna get one a Roladex or at least a Long Jean's Wittnauer, if you know what I'm sayin'."
She mispronounced both names, but I didn't have the heart to mention it. We both laughed. I remembered how judgmental I was when I first came to prison, and how horrified I was when I saw those queens on the tier- gigglin' and wigglin' their butts.
Paul tugged my jacket. "This is Paul," I said.
Paul nodded, but he seemed distant. "C'mon, Tim, we've got business."
"Well all right," Black Diamond said. "Y'all go on and make that thing happen."
As soon as we got out of earshot, Paul said I needed to be careful about who I associated with, because that had much to do with everything.
"But she's been nice to me!" I said.
"I hear what you're saying, but these fuckers will judge you by who you're hanging with, who you talk to, by as much as how you carry yourself. And don't kid yourself, Tim, they're always watching." He stopped to look at me. "Listen, we can talk about this later, but neither of us has chosen a man so we need to keep a low profile."
When inmates arrived at a new prison, if they were gay or had been turned-out before, they had limited time to choose a man before one got chosen for him.
"But I want you to be my man," I said. "Can't we keep doing what we're doing?"
"Of course," he said, "but it's only a matter of time before they start turning up the pressure on us."
Under the convict code, regardless of how we may have acted, we weren't thought of as "men" because inmates believed that gays were fundamentally lacking in what they considered manhood. "It's pretty fucked up," Paul said, "because I know some stone cold killers who are also gay, but that's just how these simple-minded fuck heads view things."
"Attention all inmates," the loudspeaker blared, "Report to your assignments."
"And besides," Paul said. "Neither of us has any money, so we need to get one or two of these knuckleheads to start taking care of us."
Paul's family didn't visit, nor did they write or send any money. His job paid 33 cents a day, which came to less than $10 a month. I'd been there close to a year, but I'd only had one visit. Though now that my stepbrother Bobby was going over to Gladiator School, I suspected I'd see more of my family. I received a letter from Sharon, who said the judge gave Bobby ten years.
I told Paul I didn't care about money, or anything else these guys had to offer, but he said, "Don't worry about it. I'm going to show you how to work it-so we can use them like they've used us."
He said that first, we had to sit back and study our options-to find which guys were ideal for playing on. "You watch them carefully," he said, "and see what makes them tick. Is it love or attention? Then we pretend to give it to them. Do they have an ego? Then we stroke it. Whatever it is, once you find their weakness, we use it to gain control."
Paul showed me a letter that an inmate sent him from Gladiator School. "He was in love with me," Paul said.
I nodded.
"No! He was really in love with me. Read the letter."
I did, and the guy had signed it, with all my heart ...
"That's when you control him," he said. "Once you get 'em to care about you, they'll do whatever you want."
"Sounds like a lot of work," I said.
"This is just practice," he said, smiling. "For when we get out. Trust me on this."
I was beginning to trust him, which was hard for me to do after all that had happened beginning with Riverside. I wasn't sure I could trust anyone again, but Paul made nee willing to try. He had freed me from Moseley, and he really seemed to like me. And I liked how he looked at me with that green sparkle in his eyes-first straight in the eye, down at my lips, and then back up again.
"My skin is breaking out," I said, self-consciously.
"That's OK. I hadn't noticed."
I knew he was lying, but I appreciated his kindness.
"I'm getting allergic hives," I told him.
"I don't mind, it's just more for me to look at."
"Oh brother," I said, smiling at such a tired cliche.
"I'm serious."
"No you're not."
The loudspeaker blared: "Attention all inmates: Report to your assignments." They always made announcements twice, since no one listened the first time.
I avoided Black Diamond from that point on, which turned out to he good advice. A few days later, I saw her and another queen fooling around in the bushes next to the infirmary. Black Diamond's friend called herself Ruby, and the two of them used to argue over who gave a better head. One time, I saw them swapping a couple of guys back and forth, so they could help them decide, but the two guys who were getting blown kept coming back the next day saying they weren't quite sure.
That afternoon, I was called to Miss Bain's office. Another inmate was speaking with her when I arrived, so I waited in a chair outside her door.
"I don't know where you got this, Little John, but I think you better put it away."
Little Jo
hn responded in a low voice, so I couldn't hear what he had said. Then Miss Bain said, "Listen, I'm always willing to talk to inmates, but I think you and I should take a break for a while. And I think it's time for you to leave."
I stood in her door. "Hi, Miss Bain, you wanted to see me?"
"Yes, we were just finishing." She handed Little John a pass.
I caught a glimpse of a red necklace before he closed the lid of the small box. He glared at me as he walked past.
"Thank you," Miss Bain said. "I heard you when you came in, so I appreciate your timing."
There wasn't a lot I could have done to defend her if Little John had turned violent, but my presence might have prevented him from trying something.
"Listen," she said. "I want to talk to you about what went on earlier today."
"Thanks for sticking up for me," I said.
"Well, they do have a point. And they're not the only ones who are concerned about you being on the paper."
"You're worried?"
"No, I'm not, but I did get a call from Warden Handlon today."
"That's bullshit!" I fumed, afraid I was about to be pulled off the paper.
She dropped her head and looked at me.
"Sorry, Miss Bain."
"Now you can't get any ticket while you're on the paper, or I'll have to reassign you."
"Does this rule apply to everyone?"
"Look, Tim, when Warden Handlon asked me to take this assignment, I told him I would-but only if I could do it without interference. You need to work with me on this. I have to pick my battles."
"I understand," I said. Though I didn't really-but I desperately wanted her to like me. She made me feel special, and I wanted to be around her as much as I could. I needed that attention from her. Of all the people to help me, I never expected a black woman. I don't think I knew any black women before.
Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison Page 28