“Keep whatever you do in the ring,” he admonished us as we glared at each other angrily. “Don’t take it outta the ring.”
We took his warning seriously; none of us ever fought outside the ring, because we knew Bob Jackson would throw us off the team, and if that happened, we’d most likely get transferred out of Sing Sing.
MY LIFE IN THE POPULATION WAS CHANGING around the same time I joined the boxing team. I’d taken my GED test just to have something to do right after I’d started my bid, and I’d passed it straightaway. But there were no social workers or counselors to talk to you about continuing your education, so for my first two years in Sing Sing, I did nothing with my life except hang out with Jose and get high.
Maybe it was the reefer or just the loneliness, but I stupidly ended up telling Jose my story, breaking the most basic prison survival rule. There’s always somebody looking to make use of your misery. You gotta be real cool with a guy to talk about your crime. You never know who’s going to try to get out of jail by twisting your story to their advantage. I knew that better than anyone; I was there in the first place because some punk-ass teenager bought his freedom by telling a fat lie about me. Anyway, I was ashamed to be in prison on a murder charge. But I shared my story, and before I knew it, some dude came back and let on that some rapist was busy running his mouth about how I had murdered a ninety-two-year-old woman, trying to justify his crime by saying I’d done way worse. I angrily confronted Jose.
“Yo, from now on, this friendship is done. If my name comes out of your mouth again, I’ll whip your ass.”
I eventually forgave him, but it was years before I trusted anyone again.
There was one group at Sing Sing whose crimes we knew because of the sentences they served: the lifers. I had noticed a tight clique of them out in the yard. They were Muslims who kept to themselves, holding themselves somehow apart and above the day-to-day drama and nonsense that swirled around in the prison’s general population. One day, when we were coming back in from the yard, a lifer named Shariff stopped me.
“Can I talk to you?” he asked politely.
“Sure,” I said. Shariff was an older guy, quiet and contemplative. He seemed to be an anchor among the devout Muslims from what I could tell—the type of convict who earned his respect through wisdom instead of intimidation.
“You’re fronting,” he told me simply.
“What you mean, man?” I demanded.
“It’s a façade you’re putting out there,” Shariff went on. “It’s not you.”
I shook my head. “Man, I ain’t trying to hear that,” I scoffed. Shariff pressed ahead.
“Listen, man, I’m seeing a different man than the one you’re showing,” he insisted. “What’re you going to do with your time? What’re you going to do with your life? Are you going to spend it just playing basketball with nothing to show in the end? You know what you’re around here? You’re around doctors, lawyers, businessmen, people who were involved in real estate. You can make this place a university of learning!”
Shariff was sensing in me a hunger whose pangs I was barely beginning to feel. I had tuned out so completely that things I used to be passionate about didn’t even register anymore. I didn’t even notice when the World Series was on TV in the rec area. Shariff caught me at the right time; he could tell I had flattened out. I had reached a turning point, without realizing at the time that the changes I was ready to make weren’t just incremental, but monumental. If I had been a religious man then, I suppose I would have recognized that God put Shariff in my path that day for a reason.
It took a stint in keep-lock to seal the deal. Keep-lock is just what it sounds like: you’re kept locked in your cell twenty-three hours a day as punishment for breaking a rule. I had disobeyed a direct order from a CO who had ordered me to return to my cell when I was busy socializing with my buddies out on the gallery.
Other folks may talk about having a big epiphany when an angel appears before them or they have some terrifying brush with death, but mine? My big transformation came because of a freakin’ cigarette. It’s never, ever, ever the big thing that makes you explode in the joint.
A guy who was supposed to be cool with me was walking past my cell while I was in keep-lock, and I called out to him to ask for a cigarette. In keep-lock, I couldn’t get to the commissary, or do any of my usual bartering out on the galleries.
“I ain’t got any,” said this guy who was supposed to have my back.
“What you mean?” I couldn’t believe he was denying me this small favor that I would’ve done for him straightaway, no questions asked. A pack of cigarettes was worth all of a dollar.
“Yo, you got a pack right there in your pocket, man. I can see it! You know when I get out, I’ll get mine and pay you back.”
He shook his head. Maybe he’d got an attitude because it was a new pack and man, you hafta make it last, and no one ever gives him shit so why should he give me a cigarette? I wouldn’t let it go, though.
“That’s how you going to do me? It’s right there in your damn pocket! C’mon, bro!”
Dude shot me shade like I was some beggar on the street, that pathetic, and grudgingly reached for his pack, shaking out a smoke. “Man,” he muttered in a way that cut me down even lower.
The way he handed over that single cigarette made me feel ashamed. Right then and there I had my epiphany. Silently, I cursed myself.
Man, you got prune wine underneath your bed, reefer on top of your cabinet, you’re acting like you’re on the streets, like you don’t even care. What’s wrong with you? You’ve become an animal. Nothing more than an animal. Who’s the master? You or the damn cigarette? Cigarettes don’t control me; I control the cigarettes. Enough is enough, man.
All these negative thoughts started crashing down on me then, all the hurt there’d been in my life—my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, my ex-girlfriend Stephanie. I let it all soak in, and I realized with some surprise that I’d had my fill of feeling sorry for myself.
Right then and there, I took that cigarette and crushed it and threw it in the toilet bowl.
“That’s it,” I said aloud. “I’m done.”
And the funny thing is, from that day on, I was. I stopped drinking, stopped smoking, stopped getting high, and stopped hanging out with Jose, who got so mad that he wanted to fight me over abandoning him. “You full of baloney, man, just like the rest of them,” he told me. “You’ll be back. You’ll come back.”
But I didn’t.
I started spending time with Shariff and his crew, and they introduced me to the world of academic and self-improvement programs that religious groups, nonprofits, and the state offered to inmates. The chapel, it turned out, was a schoolhouse when services weren’t being held. For the first time in my life, I started feeding my mind instead of numbing it. I studied economics, business, theater, speech, theology, peer counseling, food services. When a new opportunity came up, I signed up. I began devouring any motivational and self-help books I could lay my hands on. I copied page after page, longhand, into composition books so I would have the words of wisdom to keep in case the book itself ever got confiscated or lost or loaned to someone who got transferred out of Sing Sing before he could return it. Flip through my stacks of notebooks, and you would have found investment advice from Donald Trump crammed up against the writings of Malcolm X. I knew in my heart that I would be exonerated someday, that I had to be, but I no longer wanted freedom alone. I wanted a future. I knew that education was the key, and that Shariff was right: Sing Sing could open my mind.
It was the boxing, I know, that gave me the ability to concentrate with an intensity I had never known before. Prison wasn’t going to confine me; it was going to be my liberation.
One of the first courses I enrolled in was the year-long program to become certified as a paralegal. Mickey Steiman had been so worried by my breakdown in court when I heard the guilty verdict that he had gotten the jail doc to prescribe me Thorazin
e and put me on suicide watch. My despair had gradually hardened into determination, and even though I trusted Mickey to keep working on my case, I was keen to learn as much about the law as I could on my own, too. I began spending time in the prison’s small law library, studying the different grounds for appeal and poring over case histories. The library was a small room with a few tables and old manual typewriters. It was run by a lawyer named Steve who was doing time for embezzling more than a million dollars. Steve was nothing but patient and kind to the barely literate criminals who struggled to decipher Ivy League textbooks with their dense citations, opinions, and case studies. It was never simple or straightforward. You would have to wade across the sucking mudhole of fifty pages or more to get the answer to what you thought was a quick question. All that legal jargon could deflate even an avid reader like me, but over time, it became my second language. Steve showed me how to file a motion, and I filed them all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Every single one was denied. Each time, I would hit the law library again. Books commanded my attention now, and I gorged like the starving man I was. I set my sights on earning a college degree. I had always been street-smart, but my intellect had been left unfed. Discovering a capacity to learn, when you’re already a grown man, is a gift straight from God: you spend a lifetime shuffling around and then find out you can run like Jesse Owens.
WITH NO FAMILY OR FRIENDS ON THE OUTSIDE with the means or the inclination to send me packages or put money in my canteen account, I got myself on the inmate payroll. My preferred job was being a porter, even though the five or six dollars I earned a week was chump change compared to something like working the mess hall, where you started at fourteen dollars and could go up to twenty-five a week. If you completed training and got certified, you could make as much as thirty-five, forty dollars a week as an assistant cook. As a porter, I just had to clean the gallery floor. The COs got to know me better, and once they saw I wasn’t a troublemaker, they’d cut me a little slack now and then, like giving me permission to take a shower when my cellblock was out in the yard or when I came back from boxing. Some of the officers would let me hang out on the gallery when we were supposed to be in our cells, as long as I locked back in if the lookouts on the next gallery sent word that a supervisor was on his way. There was an unspoken code of honor not just among inmates, but between inmates and COs, as well: you protected your officer out of respect; you had his back like he had yours. Both sides looked the other way when it was mutually beneficial—if you were violating a stack of rules by running a carryout chicken joint from your cell, for example, you would be well advised to regularly feed the COs assigned to your gallery for free. The hard-core drug dealers still orchestrating their businesses on the outside knew which officers to pay off on the inside; a few COs, including a lieutenant, ended up getting busted for trafficking. It played the other way, too: if a CO showed a cruel streak, or went out of his or her way to jam up somebody, payback was going to happen sooner or later. The lucky ones just got a bucket of warm piss sloshed at them when they walked past a certain cell; the seriously unlucky ones ended up on disability. All it took was a smashed lightbulb in a dark corridor and a few guys waiting with a blanket to throw over your head so you couldn’t testify later about who had jumped you and stomped on your rib cage till it snapped like balsa wood.
My prison hustle was fairly common, and harmless enough that COs were willing to let it ride as long as I was cool about it. I expanded my little store to include chicken and hamburgers. You could buy the raw protein from a middleman with mess hall connections. I could even get frozen french fries and cooking oil. It wasn’t that hard then to rig a little hot plate by dismembering and crossing some wires on one of those cheap plastic electric kettles that were supposed to boil water for coffee or tea but barely made it past lukewarm. After all those years of being denied food by my foster parents, I took comfort in knowing that I had more than enough to eat in prison, that I wouldn’t have to feel hunger pangs ever again. I kept my sodas cold in a cooler I made out of an old box, some styrofoam, and plastic bags. I would pay a guy who worked in the mess hall two or three packs of cigarettes a week to deliver stolen ice. Just pop it in my cooler, slide it under my bed, and it’d last for a few days. As luck would have it, my cell was in what you could call a prime retail location—right around the corner from the block where most of the reefer was sold. I did a lot of business with stoners who had the munchies.
Every so often, the COs would yell “Lock down!” for a surprise inspection of cells. There was always the risk that I would lose my shop and have to start from scratch again.
“Bozella, you know you’re not supposed to have this shit,” the CO would say.
“Man, I got a store, man, what’m I gonna do? Here, take a candy bar. I’ll get you a meal later.”
Some officers were easy and would leave you be. Someone like me was hardly worth the trouble of writing up. What I had in my cell was nothing compared to the stockpiles of illegal or dangerous or just plain crazy shit other inmates hustled. One guy even had a working police scanner under his bunk.
The only way Sing Sing’s underground microeconomy could thrive the way it did back then was through a gentlemen’s agreement among more than a thousand convicted felons: be respectful. Like I’ve said before, respect is everything in prison, and it is constantly being scrutinized, quantified, and, above all, enforced.
Disrespecting a CO might rate a Tier One, or low-level, infraction according to Sing Sing’s official disciplinary guidelines, but dissing a fellow inmate could get you the death penalty according to the unofficial code of conduct among the prisoners. The bottom line is this: one guy can fuck it up for everyone. Say the CO in charge hears that his lieutenant is on his way to the gallery, which is supposed to be clear, but everybody’s been behaving today so the CO hasn’t hassled us to stay in our cells. But now his ass is on the line, so he calls out for everyone to lock in, but you ignore his order. When he sees you disrespecting him that way, he gets fired up and charges through the gallery slamming all the cell doors shut. And maybe six guys who were getting high in a cell at the opposite end of the block didn’t hear all this commotion, and now they get caught by surprise when the CO appears. Now the CO is so pissed, he calls for backup and tosses every single cell. All kinds of contraband ends up getting seized. At the end of the day, the homies are pissed because six of their guys are locked in the box in the Special Housing Unit, known as SHU, on solitary and facing new charges, and everyone else is pissed because they don’t have their drugs or knives anymore. And all this happened because you wouldn’t lock in, because you had to grandstand. So the word from the box is “get him.” What do you think is going to happen to you when you go out to the yard? You think anyone is going to back you up now? Look what your stupid mistake cost you and everybody else. All you had to do was step inside your cell and mind your own damn business for five minutes. You made the worst mistake you can make in here. You forgot where you are. What you do has consequences for everyone. You’re just one stupid fuck of a domino.
I ADJUSTED TO PRISON LIFE and the deadly society I found myself in, but I never accepted it. Boxing gave me something to dedicate myself to, and the better I got, the more I allowed myself to dream about winning the ultimate fight, for my freedom. When Bob Jackson brought Golden Gloves light heavyweight champ Lou “Honey Boy” Del Valle in for a fight against me, the feral energy usually crackling through the prison turned almost buoyant. I was just one of twelve inmates scheduled to fight that afternoon at the prison gym, but I had the most at stake. If I won this bout, Sing Sing would have its own Golden Gloves champion. Goodwill greeted me wherever I turned from the minute I sat down for my light fight-day breakfast of cereal and eggs. Good luck, yo, man, good luck, good luck! Go whup his ass, man! Inmates and COs alike were excited about the fights, and I was one of the main-event guys. I spent the hours I had to kill until the match reading a book on boxing and looking at the ring, envisioning how I wou
ld fight, what I would do. Honey Boy, I knew, was a southpaw, and that was going to affect my usual strategy. Finally, it was time, and as I stood next to my opponent, waiting to be announced, I quickly sized him up. He was a little shorter than me. I’m going to knock this dude out, I mentally assured myself. I’d played it all nonchalant when Bob Jackson had first told me I was going up against a Golden Glove (“Hey, I don’t care”), but the truth was I was anxious to prove how good I was. When the bell rang, we both fought very hard, and I was able to get him with a couple of good jabs. It felt like we were on equal ground. But then the first round tipped in my favor and I went into the second round overconfident. I knew I was tough and could take a punch, but he hadn’t gotten me yet. He came at me, but I hit him with a body shot and knew I hurt him when I heard him let out a surprised “oooh.” I got him, I got him now, I silently crowed. I was coming off a jab near the end of the second round when he came at me with his head instead of his hand, catching me off guard enough to connect with a three-punch combo that turned my head gear. I could feel it scrape the right side of my skull, but I felt fine. It wasn’t until the third round that the blood suddenly came pouring down my face. The ref blew the whistle and stopped the fight.
“Yo, man, please just give me thirty more seconds,” I begged. “Let me go out there for thirty more seconds.” I was sure I could triumph if I just had half a minute more.
“Sorry, ABA rules,” the ref said. He stopped the fight, and that’s how Del Valle won. We shook hands and agreed it was a good fight. I was still determined to get in a final jab, though.
“Yo, man, you got away with that one,” I told him. Del Valle let me have that and gave me his phone number, inviting me to call him from the inside if I wanted to talk sometime. I kept in sporadic touch for a year or so, calling him collect at his grandma’s house. I eventually stopped calling, though; I didn’t want his reputation to get tarnished in any way by befriending a convict, for one thing. But it also hurt like hell to press up against that window of what my life could have been. Both Bob Jackson and I realized after that bout that I had the genuine potential to go pro if I ever got the chance. It seemed unlikely I ever would.
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