Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  The inmates had absolutely no respect for him, and he is a cautionary tale for why it’s never safe to eat food you’ve left unattended. He’s lucky he’s only a cautionary tale and not a name on a plaque of officers who died in service. Inmates will kill over their food just like any other animal in the wild.

  Front Butt was working a dorm in the Medium. They called the floor plan an “honor dorm” because everything was open with no cells and even a microwave for general use.

  It had long been known among the inmates that if they left their own food unattended for more than a minute in the microwave when he was working, it would disappear. So they made a special burrito just for him. They opened a soft tortilla and used it like a cracker in a circle jerk—filled it with semen. Then they added some cheese and some canned meat.

  He did as predicted and stole the burrito out of the microwave and ate it. All of it.

  Then later that night when he was doing count, random inmates asked him how he liked his burrito, and they all started laughing. He didn’t recognize any of their voices because he never got out in the dorm and did checks, never had the initiative to identify names with voices and faces.

  The story spread through the prison like wildfire, and by the time shift was over, every officer in the prison knew what had happened to Front Butt and the burrito.

  He is a prime example of why those of us who dedicate ourselves to The Job despise guards like him. I already mentioned he’s lucky they didn’t kill him, but if they’d taken any other measures besides what they did, that would have put good officers in jeopardy. There would have been an alarm, with responders and fights—it could have escalated into a riot that could have put even more people in danger. All because one guy couldn’t do his job.

  There are those who don’t belong, and that’s why we push them out, cull them from the herd.

  It’s not cruelty; it’s survival.

  Sunshine called to tell me she was getting married.

  Joy welled up in me for her. Her mate sounded like an amazing man who was totally and completely in love with everything about her. She’d started a new job she loved and they’d just had a baby. The way she spoke, her life seemed picture perfect—amazing. Not only the specifics, but the generalities too. She’d decided to be happy and she made me wish it was that easy.

  Sunshine told me it simply was that easy, but we didn’t talk about that long. She invited me to the wedding. I was elated.

  After we hung up, I remembered how I felt when my husband and I decided to get married, and it made me laugh a little bit, but it was a laugh that was almost crying because it was a badge for what our whole marriage had been. My eyes watered, but I refused to let the tears fall.

  My husband proposed to me after a heated argument. With us, everything had included arguing.

  We’d fought viciously and I’d kicked him out of the apartment. He’d moved all of his stuff to a friend’s house except for his TV. When he came back for the TV, he said it was a shame we were splitting up because he’d had plans for me. Forever plans. I said I had too. He said it wasn’t too late and we could still have forever because he didn’t want to go. I told him I didn’t want him to go. Then he asked me to give him forever.

  So much for forever.

  I hoped it would be different for Sunshine than it had been for me.

  I was working Visiting. I’d been told that the First Sergeant specifically asked for me. That meant he’d try to get me to take the open post in Visiting. It was a specialty post like Segregation, with the same flaming hoops to jump through to get assigned there.

  But I wanted Segregation. I didn’t want Visiting. I hated it.

  I didn’t much care for the First Sergeant either.

  The prison had gone nonsmoking. No one, not staff, inmates, or visitors, could smoke on prison property. Tobacco became contraband, so being caught with it was the same as being caught with any other substance. It all carried the same charge should the facility decide to prosecute: introducing contraband.

  But this guy thought he was a special snowflake. He bragged that he got a note from his doctor that said he had to smoke to relieve stress or it would be dangerous for his heart. He’d already had one heart attack and he acted like the whole world came and went at the leisure of his cardiac health.

  Officers had heart attacks all the time. In fact, there was one we called Heart Attack Smith because he’d had four while actually at work and six or seven during the course of his employment. No one was babying him or holding his hand. He still got up and came to work with no expectation of special treatment.

  Something about the Visiting OIC always struck me as slimy. I didn’t want to work anywhere near him. I have something my friends and I had come to call a Dirty Bitch Detector. Staff who have been turned by inmates—who bring things in for them or who engage in inappropriate relationships with them—are called dirty bitches, and it seemed I developed an extra sense about those people. I haven’t been wrong yet. The OIC didn’t quite set off my Dirty Bitch Detector, but he made it twitch.

  First off, he was crap about enforcing the rules. If a visitor got too upset about anything, he would always cave, as if he thought Visiting was the prison’s customer service department. They aren’t customers. They can’t take their business elsewhere. When I told him my thoughts, he said that was exactly it. To treat them like customers.

  What?

  Yet another reason why Visiting was not the right slot for me.

  I understand treating the visitors with respect. Of course, they’re human beings. I can only imagine how hard it would be to have to come and see your loved one behind bars. To see all of their freedoms taken away and know that there was no chance any of that was going to change in the near future. No matter what their crime, that person is still someone’s family. Sure, I get that.

  It’s all too easy to forget too. That both officers and inmates were someone’s child. Someone’s father, someone’s brother…someone’s whole reason for breathing.

  But that doesn’t mean the rules don’t apply to them.

  There was a strict dress code for visitors and guidelines for what things they can have on their person when entering the Visiting area. Everyone always had a reason why the rules were for everyone else but them. I have no patience with that kind of behavior.

  But there were others who were more than happy to operate within the rules set down as long as that meant they got to see their loved ones.

  One inmate’s mother, a frail little old woman of about ninety, asked me if I ever worked inside the walls. When I told her I had, she asked me if I knew her son and if he was behaving. I knew her son and it amazed me that he could have sprung from her loins. She was this delicate, bitty creature and he was huge, like a grizzly bear, six-foot-eight with biceps bigger than my head. She told me if he didn’t behave or acted disrespectfully toward any of the officers to call her and she’d straighten him out.

  That would have been against policy, and I never would have followed through on that threat, but the next time that inmate gave me grief I threatened to tell his mother. The look of horror that bloomed on his face was priceless. He was more afraid of that than a write-up, Seg time, or anything else I could possibly entertain.

  Someone hated me.

  Or really liked me. It was torturous either way.

  I was stuck in Visiting again.

  My face hurt from all the fake smiling I’d had to do. Even my teeth ached.

  One of the other Visiting officers came back to Max Visiting from the Minimum, and any time a staff member or visitor leaves the facility, even just to go out to their car, they have to be searched again in order to reenter. I despised working the entry point because this seemed like I was treating staff like inmates. It felt dirty to me. Wrong. But I did it anyway because it was my job.

 
The other officer wandered through the metal detector and it beeped, but she didn’t stop.

  “Hey, I need you to empty out your pockets and go through again.” I assumed that she’d just forgotten to take her keys out of her pocket or a pen, or some other minutia that would have set off the detector.

  Until she said, “Excuse me? Are you serious?” Her nose wrinkled up and twitched like a rabbit’s.

  No, I’m talking for my health. “Yes, I’m serious. The detector beeped, indicating you have metal somewhere on your person. Put it in the bowl and go through again.” I shouldn’t have had to explain that to her. In fact, it never should have been an issue. Yeah, it was a hassle, but it was also state law.

  “You’re fucking serious?”

  “I just said as much. Go back through the detector or leave the premises. Your choice.”

  “I’m calling the boss.”

  “That’s fine. Call him. And I’ll call the Lieutenant. Or Captain. I’ll tell them that neither you nor the OIC want to follow procedure and be searched.”

  She walked over to the door into the facility, waiting for me to push the button to buzz her in. I refused.

  “Fucking bitch.”

  “Cunt,” I replied in a cheerful tone.

  “I’m going to get you fired,” she said.

  “For what? Calling you a cunt? Do you feel harassed? I don’t give a shit. This all comes back down to the part where you don’t want to be searched. I’m not the one who’s going to be fired.”

  She still didn’t move, and just as I was dialing the Captain’s office, the First Sergeant came out. He held the door open for her.

  I shook my head. “Don’t do that. She set off the metal detector and refused to empty her pockets and go back through.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” he said.

  The hell it was. She obviously had something she was trying to take in to the institution that didn’t belong. Something that could hurt someone I cared about or me. So when the Captain answered, I told him what had happened. I even included the part where I called her a cunt.

  The Captain called the First Sergeant on the radio and demanded he not enter the institution with the officer and came over personally to observe the search. The detector didn’t beep the second time around. I’m sure that she had something in her pocket that she passed off somehow.

  There were rumors after I left my employment with the state that she was dirty, that she’d been caught inmate fucking, but I never found out for sure one way or another.

  But that had never been a boat I wanted to sail on, and after that, they didn’t want me back in Visiting.

  That was fine with me.

  My first night in Seg.

  Officially.

  My OIC flipped me the bird with both hands as soon as I walked in. Supposedly, that meant he liked me. He was a skinny guy with close-cropped gray hair, glasses, and a pacemaker. He was a tough old son of a bitch, as they say. Tough like hundred-year-old jerky. He may have looked skinny and bent, but he’d fuck some shit up. Some of the crew called him The Old Man.

  I flipped him back with the pocket creeper. Made like I was looking in my pocket for something, but instead of pulling out anything, I flew my middle finger high with a grin on my face.

  As soon as I accepted my equipment for the shift—keys, radio, body alarm, and handcuffs—The Old Man shot me in the ass with a rubber band. Cute. Real fucking cute. I rolled my eyes. Then one of the other guys aimed for my breast. I’m not a small woman, and neither is my rack.

  “Listen, that shit fucking hurts. Not the rack, okay?” I’d put up with all the hijinks, the bitch work, most anything but abuse of the boobs.

  Yeah, he didn’t listen. With the biggest grin on his face, he shot me in the tit. Then laughed like a maniac. So I took after him. We got into a scuffle right there in the office, me punching him and slamming him into the wall and him laughing and letting me—the rest of the crew watching. Until I broke a coat hook off the wall with his back. That thing clattered to the floor as loud as a gunshot and we froze in place. I was half terrified that when he turned around, part of it would still be hanging out of his back and he’d have a punctured lung. He was fine, but we were both a little in awe.

  We’d become friends after I first started on shift, but me kicking his ass seemed to make us family.

  After that, he made me my own little rubber band weapon so I could fight with the rest of them. I have to say, I liked the rubber band game better than the fart game. That one was terrible. Especially when I’d have my mouth open to say something, and King Fart would walk behind me and bake one off at just the most opportune moment. Well, I hated it until I figured out I could use the fart game like a gun on the inmates who pissed me off. I could just call one of the guys up the tier, and if I made them stand there with me long enough, they’d gas the whole tier, a practice known as “crop dusting.”

  My first day, they worked me like a five-dollar whore on a no-limit credit card. An incident had popped off in the chow hall and they’d had to kick people out to make room for the participants. That made us ears deep in property that should have been handled by the shift before. We had six going out and six coming in and all their property had to be searched, documented, and packed up.

  When I say searched, I mean we had to look in the spines of books, take apart any electronics, check clothes, make sure items in containers matched the label, physically handle and inspect every item belonging to the inmate. Now, officers are supposed to do this before the property comes to Seg, but while searching incoming property on various occasions, I found hooch (homemade alcohol) made from oranges and Kool-Aid in a shampoo bottle, tobacco, tattoo needles in lamps, and shanks hidden in legal material.

  Then before new inmates could be admitted, we have to search the cells, under the door, on top of lights, vents, drawers, every surface or space that could possibly hold contraband. While doing all of that, we still had to keep the cell house running efficiently by taking guys three at a time to the shower—one officer per inmate—and handing out and picking up trays for chow, then monitoring the porters while they cleaned the cell house.

  And of course, since I was new meat, the inmates all tucked their heads straight up their asses. They knew I couldn’t tell exactly whose voice was whose, so I was serenaded with every filthy thing anyone could think of to say to me, from talking about how when they caught me alone they’d fuck me bloody, cut new holes in me to fuck, or alternately how I was too disgusting to fuck even for a guy who’d been in prison, etc., and so forth. One said something about what a good lay my mother was and asked me how much dick I could take.

  They told us in training not to engage them with this sort of behavior and eventually they’d stop. Eventually? Fuck that. I lobbed that last one back. “Probably not as much dick as you.”

  The whole cell house erupted in laughter and catcalls.

  So of course the insults went back to my weight. One asked how much lunch I’d brought and if I had time to be out there on the tier when I had my food waiting for me in the office.

  I told them no, I didn’t bring a good lunch, and one said, “Girl, don’t tell me you don’t eat. Not with an ass like that.”

  “Oh no, punkin. I eat. I eat good. In fact, when I get off work tonight, I’m going to the buffet, and I’m going to eat crab legs.”

  “Ha, I knew it.”

  I don’t even like crab legs. You couldn’t pay me enough to put sea spider in my mouth. Or lobster. They look like big water roaches. But when was the last time any of these turds had any crab legs?

  “Then I’m going to have some shrimp and steak. Maybe some lobster. A couple glasses of wine. And hell, just because I’m so fucking fat, I’m going to have some pizza too. All cheesy and juicy and…”

  By this point the whole cell house had gone q
uiet. They were listening to me describe food they hadn’t had in years, some that a few of them would never have again.

  “Fine, we get it. We get it,” an inmate whimpered from his cell.

  “Oh, do you? I mean, you wanted to talk about what I eat so I thought I’d share. I think I’ll be bringing leftovers in my lunch tomorrow. I’ll be sure to set the fan at the office door so you can all smell my rib eye, loaded baked potato, and honey-glazed carrots.”

  They quieted down somewhat, but there were still a few jeers as I walked past. I didn’t let it get to me though. I listened. I listened so I could learn the inmates’ voices and identify which cells they were coming from, a skill that would serve me well later.

  Especially when inmates would scream obscenities at me and then later ask me to fix their cable. “Hmm, I don’t see either ‘Cunt’ or ‘Time Warner Cable’ on my shirt, so I guess you’re shit out of luck.”

  “Oh no, this can’t be right, Lunsford.” The Captain’s mustache twitched as he looked through his roster, flipped the pages several times to make sure what he was seeing on the paper wasn’t a lie, or to make sure it wasn’t going to change the longer he looked at it. “There can’t be three women down in Seg. Women don’t belong in Seg anyway.”

  What? Are you kidding me?

  The other two women who would be down there with me looked at him as if he’d grown another head.

  One day a week, there were three women on shift in Segregation. This was not a new thing. All three of us were hard-asses. We’d all been baptized by fire and come through the other side whole and hearty. None of us took any shit, or were mealymouthed about our expectations or treated any one inmate different than another. We were good officers.

  But there was our Captain, crying about how unfair it was to the one guy who’d be down there, who would have to stand showers and do any stripouts that came in. Five minutes of nuts and butts while we had to do all of the cell searches and everything else? Cry me a river. Somebody’s vag was sandy, but it didn’t belong to any one of the three of us.