Doing Time

  Their process is succored by an important rule: Never believe what an inmate says except when he’s snitching. In the old days telling was an abomination. Sooner or later the snitch would be found out and have to face the music. Today, telling is something of a sport and the facing up usually doesn’t happen, as the snitch may conveniently check his cowardly ass into protective custody.

  Underlying this apparent confusion is a beautiful symmetry. In the street, where self-defense is a legitimate act and telling is the bread of concerned citizens, crises tend to ripple off toward agreement. Behind the mirror’s face, the littlest disturbance bears the seed of chaos.

  After mopping the gallery catwalk that stretches like a giant steel blade past forty cells, I ease into my slippers and robe. On my way to the shower I pass Captain Lafane, whose harrowed look makes me wonder if it’s me who is doing the time. He knows that my transition from systems analyst to prison porter has not been easy, but that is not the reason for his grief. His oldest son has AIDS.

  I awaken to the chirping of birds. “With all the nooks on the outside, they had to nest in here. There are dozens of them, lodged in the stone bowers high above the uppermost gallery. Jailbirds. Now it happens that prison is also a state of mind.

  Will there be any stabbings today? Any rapes? Who cares? No one will ever know the half of it. Just as I rake the stubble off my chin two guards rush past my window into the deep of the gallery. A minute later, two more guards go by with a wire mesh stretcher. Here we go.

  Except for the crackle of radios, the gallery is dead-still. No one has been out yet. “We must have an overnighter. The portable mirrors go into peeking mode.

  The guards are slow on the catwalk. Two are old and overweight; one just looks sick and tired. Their walk is like a funeral march without an entourage. As they approach my cell 1 pull my mirror in and look down at the stretcher. It’s Jimmy G. I better hurry up and finish shaving before they yell for chow.

  Questions are being raised about the night guard’s rounds, which should go on every two hours. The coroner has established that Jimmy took his life sometime after two. Even after this leak, we know that nothing will be done beyond tightening up the rounds for a while. No jobs will be in jeopardy, even when Jimmy had been talking suicide a few weeks in advance. Even after he was taken twice for observation to a psychiatric center, and advised that there was nothing wrong with him. Even after he flashed his suicide card to his pastor.

  In her letter of thanks to his church for having run a fund collection, his mother stated that Jimmy had a chemical imbalance, foreclosing any possibility of a negligence action. Anyway, thank you, Mrs. G. Now all of us who did nothing to prevent your son from giving up will feel better. It was all in his genes as luck is in the stars, we will say.

  Jimmy was four-fifths of the way through a sentence for murder. If the truth be told, I can think of one thousand better candidates for Hades just on the basis of their bearing. Jimmy had found religion. Jimmy had found a good church girl to elope with.

  We all knew that he had been distressed over his failed marriage, but in here a man is pretty much left alone with the affairs of his heart. It was a union blessed by God, not to be set asunder by another. Why did she have to have “a male friend” at her house almost every time he called…

  It couldn’t have been you instead of Jimmy, could it, King Punk, you rappin’ tappin’ slappin’ wind-up moppet-faced big bad mouth cybernaut stooge. Even you, farther down, who would have your voice heard by the prison machine. How much are you willing to renounce? A noun-slice here, a verb-tuck there, perhaps a sentence-graft or two? Why don’t you just sing praises to the Beast? Something might click. A new trend. Charlie, it might just make a difference!

  Jimmy, perhaps you should have come to me. I would have told you their names:

  I saw your humbled heart filling your mouth with hardened bread, and I kept silent. You should have known her, too, the one holding the wineskin, that fine hostess of spoils. Plethora will give you of her sac of ambrosia, and you will be made new. I will not risk offending, else I would bring her to you.

  When I heard you smite your chest in penitence, I thought, Jimmy, that ain’t no way of doin’ time. Hedone will give you relish, comfort, a new zest. Frolic between the happy slopes and valleys of her Eden, for no one needs saving from love. Rest, Jimmy, rest now, and pound your chest no more.

  But of the three, Cacoethes is the crown. She’s the baddest, the goodest, the sweetest, the tartest, the hostess of play. She’s the lifeline, the night life, hops, cheers, saturnalia again. Fandago, tango, fling, and boogaloo.

  They say that she’s full of bad habits. Not true. She’s sport, gala, picnic, and game all the same. Overall, she’s a labor of love. In a cinch she’s Ways and Means, my man. For you, she would have plucked the hand that held the knife of infidelity, before it ripped your heart. When Mars directs the rouge over her lips, and paints her eyes for the battle cry, you know there’s no staying and no praying for more. All in all, she’ll save you from a two-timer wife. Cacoethes is the blood of my pen, liberation without the prison writing.

  You won’t be needing religion in the bowels of Earth. Neither do I in the belly of Baal. You may judge me unwise, but at least there is no falling from grace in this bed. One day I might tell you the meaning of their names, if you should resurrect.

  But tonight I’m riding with the wind.

  1994, Eastern New York Correctional Facility Napanoch, New York

  Black Flag to the Rescue

  Michael E. Saucier

  It’s a race between the roaches and me to see which of us is going to win final and total control of this typewriter

  Will I finish my Great American Novel with all its inherent, time-consuming rewrites before these filthy things that huddle in the dark recesses of my battery-powered machine, scurrying in twenty different directions when I remove the case that swarm all over the printing head as it zings back along its track, sometimes jamming it that impudently crawl up and down a sheet of prose right in the middle of a tender love scene… I mean I’m trying to write some literature here, you repulsive !#@¥+**&! bugs

  … before they eventually chew through the electronic ribbon —the lifeline of my machine? Will I be able to complete my hook before they do all this? In past days I’ve noticed they’ve gathered in greater numbers on this critical ribbon as if planning a final campaign; it’s worrying me sick

  Pve noticed too during this unseasonably warm and humid

  winter at the Louisiana Correctional Center from where I write that a whole new generation has hatched —now there are tiny tot roaches inside my typewriter growing toward full roachhood What do they think this is, a brooder?

  The plastic coated ribbon must be emitting some hdlaciously appetizing radon odors or something else equally as sensual that drives these vile creatures into a breeding frenzy because every time I snap the case shut —they’re at it!

  How do I work with all this gross activity occurring just inches from my fingertips— ? With much grimacing and teeth grinding.

  What we writers have to endure sometimes ain’t nothing nice

  I wonder how many other roaches, older, wiser, and warier are crouched in the farthest most inaccessible spaces of my Canon feeding on these nutritiously addictive command wires, disemboweling the computer circuitry byte by byte? Inexorably they’re forcing me to condense my long, languorous tender love scenes into cheap, artless quickies forget foreplay — there’s no time a bunch of stupid roaches are pushing me perilously close to writing pornography Is there no hope? No remedy? Is my art to be sacrificed to these wanton, concupiscent creatures?

  If only I had some bug spray — I’d douse those mothers good and proper! Black Flag would do the job but lethal stuff like that is absolutely prohibited to us inmates

  A pest control man does come around occasionally, spraying the baseboards, which only drives the little vermins deeper into the sanctuary of my locker and typewriter;
they love it here — and why not? They’ve got everything they need for a happy life: darkness, dampness, and lots of hard juicy plastic to munch on I tell you, it’s a battle. I’ve got to hurry and finish this novel before they completely overrun my machine I swear I’d forfeit a month’s Good Time — really! maybe more for just one smalt can of that deadly stuff

  1993, Avoyelles Correctional Center Cottonport, Louisiana

  Players, Games

  Big shots on both sides of the razor wire are often called “players,” and their games are legion. Prisoners favor the street jingle: “X is my name and Y is my game.” Games in prison can be rap, routine, or hustle. The two worlds of hustling, inside and out, overlap, especially where gangs are concentrated. New inmates must learn how to recognize and respond to prison games if they are to navigate a course among treacherous allies or protectors and outright predators. This means adopting, or simulating, an appropriate role. In one way or another, all prisoners become players. For some, “doing time” and playing games are one.

  In “I See Your Work,” the protagonist “Willis — prison greenhorn, political activist, and coming computer-game entrepreneur — tells his story in the overheated and telegraphic patois he is trying to master: “Jammin’. My cool still chillin’? Do I know what time it is?” Mentored by a supreme gamesmaster — the law librarian and jail-house lawyer — “Willis prowls the multicultural maze of prison hustles while practicing his own. At the same time, he is plotting out a computer game about prison life. The story peels back the title’s layers of meaning, from I-see-what-you’ve-done to I’ve got your number.

  As in other “total” institutions like the army or boarding school, solidarity among peers is an option in prison, but conditions militate against it. Prisoners’ desire to curry favor with the staff and — among men — commitments to macho image intensify disunity. In “solidarity with cataracts,” Vera Montgomery (whose use of “k” to spell “camp” betokens her allegiance to the black power movement), laments her sisters’ deafness to one another’s cries for help, their collaboration in wantonly destructive cell searches, and their readiness to snitch for privileges. Fourteen years later, Marilyn Buck spins out a fantasy of a rebellious solidarity built on woman-love.

  Convict culture in men’s prisons appears to be dominated by ornate systems of games — ranging from handball, poker, and business deals to scams and deadly gambles — which are often interlinked. The byzantine plots of the stories by Jackie Ruzas, David Wood and Dax Xenos seem dictated by the very atmosphere of scheming and calculation that pervades the cellblock. Yet unexpected moral complexity blossoms in each tale. In “Ryan’s Ruse” both the handball game and interethnic rivalry are manipulated to heat up the betting, which in turn serves the friendship of Irish Ryan and black Hap. Having AIDS locks the inmates in “Feathers on the Solar Wind” into a prison within the prison until a gamble with death confers a wild kind of liberty on some and propels others to seek forgiveness. The narrator of “Death of a Duke” has mastered the rules of the doing-time game: the joint “is like quicksand,” he says, “like one of those Chinese finger stretchers. The more you struggle, the deeper you go or the tighter it gets. But you can be cool and make your way through it and get out.” But the passion of the bigtime player, the Duke of Earl, makes him strain against such rules. Like “Lee’s Time” (Race), this story inquires whether morality can be reconciled with doing time coolly in prison.

  I See Your Work

  Joseph E. Sissler

  The C.O. at the front gate was idly watching Willis with government issue long-barreled Nikon binoculars. He had noticed Willis up close on the compound, noticed how he was different from the rest, immune it seemed, with a distinctive kind of observer’s calm, as if he were here for the waters. He seemed more purposeful if a bit clumsy and inexperienced. And in fact Willis was on an expedition of sorts, both killing time for a moral stance and conducting research for a project long on his mind.

  He was down for taking a hammer in a destructive unpatriotic manner to the tail of an Air Force jet. Going to jail was the purple heart of Willis’s activist group led by the well known Fathers. Willis’s companions were not with him, having distanced themselves at a critical time and receiving only a trespassing charge and the symbolic one night in jail. Willis, though not awash in remorse had, admittedly, been unsettled at his sentence, which was quite a bit longer than the group legal theorist had predicted. His sentence of a year and a day translated in federal computation to ten months.

  Educated fringe dweller Willis had, in his work with a Catholic relief agency, run a soup kitchen and rubbed scabbed elbows with enough alley dwellers to grow boldly curious about their street life. The fruit of this curiosity had emerged as his first independent software production, a simulation game called Homeless. For his field work he had immersed himself in the cold city of Washington, D.C., scavenging the alleys of late autumn until almost Christmas. Except for the regular postings of his notes he remained isolated and unfunded. He utilized what he learned: the picking of a pizza dump-ster lock with a pop-top from a soda can, panhandling stolen morning papers, the heating grate territories, choice outdoor places to shit, and he packed these details into software that explored this world in an engaging and moving manner, one simpatico with his activist roots. The game became a cult favorite and now he was prospecting for details to pack into a followup that would make a serious name in the industry and fund some serious kitchens for those urban outdoors people. He owed it to them; he owed it to himself. Only Fulton, his software distributor, knew of the plans.

  Willis stepped into the prison law library. Russ, the legal librarian on duty, stood behind the interior dutch door taking delivery of a half-filled mesh commissary bag, payoff for a legal brief. The bag jutted angles of coffee jars and oranges, a plastic bottle of hot sauce, and many packets of rice and beans. On the top was a clump of green bananas. Facing Russ across the door-shelf was a jockey-size man smiling broadly and shaking a sheaf of legal papers over his head as if he held a Bible.

  “I seen your work with Shorty Bighead,” the man said. “Now got my own. Be like throwing a dead dog in the backyard of that car company. And better, that worthless bitch will piss all over herself. Gonna rock her little world.”

  Russ nodded his head in time to his customer’s praise. It was good to get paid. It didn’t always happen. “Make your copies first,” he said. “Remember, Hollis, you owe me two bucks for the postage. Envelope all set up and good to go.” Russ winked at Willis. “And next time your old lady sells a car, you can’t owe on it.”

  “Not no next time with her. She smoked the damn money up less’n a week. D’int send a dime. Cabs to the dope corner, sometime on the hour, was how my cousin said. Then them fuckin’ letters from the car people. Tapping into my paycheck. Gonna ruin my good credit.”

  “We can start that divorce any time,” said Russ.

  Hollis rubbed his bristly chin. ‘‘After my furlough we do ir. (Jetting twelve hours this weekend. My ex—old lady got a tiny sister name Dee-dee. She gonna check me out, pick me up. Still counts as family on the paperwork. Gonna knock over some ol that. We been eying each other for years, see, and Dee dee don’t like her sisrer neither, She gonna take hack a Polaroid of my Johnson, see if rbe birch still know it.”

  Russ shook his head. “Hollis, you gonna need me plenty more, that’s my prediction. Just keep rollirf with that commissary” — he shook the hag— “I’ll keep the typewriter hot. I ley, and jump on one time tor me.”

  “Yeah,” Hollis said, tilting back his head. “Saturday I’m gonna be lying in the crib and you be thumbing them thick books wishing,”

  They laughed, slapped hands. “On time about that,” said Russ. Hollis was out the door smiling.

  While he waited, Willis gazed around the walls at the musty paper inventory ot LAW. This room was i repository heart-deep in the iron beast, a pool of magical chants which sometimes, when strung in perfect order, went poof and everything
changed, all the bureaucratic locks snapped open, legal cancer cured like from above. But mostly these arcane and blunt instruments were used against the researcher, the petitioner, the ever hopeful.

  “Next,” Russ said, pointing a pinkie at Willis.

  “Just a little off the top,” joked Willis.

  “What up?” asked Russ, slumping in a stylized manner. He made a street-gang signal with his right hand, forefinger, pinkie, thumb extended, hand inverted. The Conquistadors from Chicago. He’d shown Willis a dozen times and still Willis couldn’t duplicate it.

  “Jammin’,” said Willis. “My cool still chillin’? Do I know what time it is?”

  “Not exactly, you’re still runnin’ slow. Sound a bit like Zippy the Pinhead, but on the other hand there’s been progress of a serious nature, I wouldn’t kid you about that. You got potential. For now how about a shift to another gear? A practical task out in the wide world.”

  Russ reached behind some federal law supplements and extracted a bag. “What we have here is genuine sliced cheap cheese of the chow hall variety.” He grabbed another bag and slightly shook it. “Here we got chicken breasts of the boneless persuasion nicely marinated; a rare and precious item. Take the cheese, walk through rec. A quarter a packet, a buck for the chicken breast, which we leave here for now. You get one packet of cheese just for strolling around, putting the product out there.”

  Willis was skeptical. “You sound like my distributor.”