We had to make more moves in the cell house because the inmate in possession of the hooch had to be moved to a slam cell too. All he would get was a paper dress for the first twenty-four hours and he’d be behind a slam door—what Segregation should actually be like.
It’s called Segregation for a reason—the inmates are segregated from the rest of the population and from each other. Seg is supposed to be solitary and isolated, but our Segregation unit was more like a regular cell house, with the restriction that the inmates never got to come out of their cells unless it was for their hour of rec time or their shower. They weren’t really solitary and isolated unless they’d earned time in one of the slam door cells, but we only had a few of those.
It wasn’t until much later in the evening that I finally was able to sit down and write the disciplinary report. I came out of the office to get another officer to sign as witness and it looked like a tornado of picture bits had exploded outside a cell, the one with the inmate whom I’d told to mail out his pictures. And they smelled like piss. So rather than mail out his pictures and keep fifty, he’d torn them all up and pissed all over them. His pictures. That another inmate would have to clean up.
How did this punish me exactly? I’d already had a hard day, and if he wanted his cell to smell like piss, it was no skin off my ass. In fact, if he stunk up the whole cell house, it was possible the next time he was in general population, he’d get his ass kicked. So again, what did that have to do with me?
Sometimes I was scheduled to listen to inmate phone calls. Every single call inmates made were recorded and had to be reviewed. It didn’t always suck, but most days an anal yeast infection was more fun. Although, sometimes, it was better than General Hospital.
First on the docket was the same serial killer whose cell I’d searched the day before. I didn’t want to know that his wife could fit the cordless phone all the way into her vagina. Or the sound it made into the phone as she did so, like stirring macaroni. I didn’t want to know that it hurt her, but she did it because he got off on the control he had over her. She obviously didn’t understand he was getting off on her pain too. He wanted to be told everything she was wearing, but he wanted to hear about the brands. Ralph Lauren sheets. DKNY nightshirt. Some Italian underwear. Her voice was so high-pitched and vacuous. It gave me a headache just to hear her speak. She so obviously had no clue if this guy ever got out he’d kill her. Probably with phones in her vagina.
It was also interesting to note that she’d married him and not told her parents. She was going to a friend’s house later because they’d be home, so he should call her there. Nothing really interesting to write down and report.
The first half of the next phone call was in Spanish, so I made a note to get a translator to listen to the call. Sometimes, they’d speak in another language if they were talking about things they didn’t want us to understand. About halfway through this call, though, they switched back to English and it was more sex. That was all these fuckers talked about. Sex. Drugs. How the man is keeping them down.
I almost felt bad for this guy. He was talking to his girlfriend about what their first time was going to be like when he got out, and he was telling her how much he missed her, how much he wanted her. She got down and dirty and asked him for details. She wanted him to measure his dick. So he did, and when he told her it was six inches hard, there was dead silence on the line. He asked her if it made her hot, if it’s a good length. More silence and then she scrambled to reassure him it was a good length, but he wouldn’t be soothed.
The next call was an inmate who I know had at least three women putting money on his account so he could buy things through the prison store. The woman he was calling didn’t answer right away, so the first thing he wanted to know was what she was doing that she was too busy to accept his call. They fought, on her dime, for an hour. He accused her of fucking everyone from the bum on the corner to his brother. The kicker came when she admitted that she had, in fact, been banging his brother blue and she was sucking him off when this guy called.
I spit out my coffee and half snorted it out my nose. The inmate lost his shit like some rabid baboon. He said he’d kill her when he got out, that he was going to find a way to get out before his release date and she wouldn’t know when or where it’d happen, only that he would. He talked about lighting her on fire and doing obscene things to her dead body.
I had to give this woman credit. Rather than be afraid, she told him if he lit her on fire, he wouldn’t have a dead body left to do obscene things to and he should really rethink his strategy. And that if he’d been a man and had a real job to begin with, he’d be taking care of her instead of sitting in prison, letting other women take care of him. While he was still trying to understand what was happening, she drove it home and called him a pussy and said that’s why she was with a real man, and then hung up the phone.
So I guess she’d found out about the other women. He’d be a real peach the next few days.
He was also an escape risk. He’d made criminal threats against this woman. I had to document it and turn it in, which meant he’d probably be coming to Seg. It was going to be hard not to point and laugh at him because he got told, as they say.
My mom finally went in for her tests and they scheduled her surgery. We discovered later that Dilly, my parents’ dog, had developed ovarian cancer around the same time. We lost Dilly.
It’s kind of crazy and makes no sense, but sometimes I wondered if Dilly did that for my mother, if she went through it so my mother could survive it. It’s stupid, but I wanted to believe it then and I still want to now, I guess to give shape and form to the chaos. To have proof of some higher power even if it’s just the love of an animal for her human.
The treatment plan for my mother was a full hysterectomy and then more tests to see if they needed to do chemotherapy. My mother had been expecting worse. Her mother had fought breast cancer for a long time, beginning with lump removal all the way to a double mastectomy.
My mom was still afraid, we all were, but there was strength in knowing a fix for her pain loomed on the horizon.
And I felt like an asshole all over again for leaving her alone. I wanted to apologize, but I still didn’t know how. I mean, I could open my mouth, I could say the words, but would they mean anything to her?
I’d stopped arguing with her about every little thing, even when I knew I was right. She didn’t have to agree with me for me to be right. I didn’t have to shove my thoughts down her throat and I didn’t have to let her shove hers down mine. It wasn’t worth the shouting matches and the upset it caused both of us.
If she said something I didn’t like, I’d ask her to let it go, and if she wouldn’t, I just got up and left. Disengaged.
I knew she’d never change her mind on anything, and neither would I. So what was the point in arguing? I didn’t have enough energy to keep banging my head against a brick wall.
There was another incident at work, but still no big blowup like we’d been expecting. It goes like that sometimes, always in a state of flux. It waxes and wanes like the moon, but unlike the moon, it can’t be marked on any regular schedule.
This time it was inmate on officer.
It happened in the chow hall, with all the makings of a riot. Some of the officers on scene didn’t respond as they should have. You would have thought they’d be spoiling for a fight. But one of the fucking yard officers just stood there, frozen. Worthless. While an inmate assaulted one of the guys in black. A blacksuit. The blacksuits were supposed to be our elite crew, almost like a SWAT team.
And he knocked him smooth the fuck out.
The prison went on lockdown.
Which is what one would expect, right? But it wasn’t a true lockdown. No, it was only lockdown for guys who didn’t have jobs. The inmates who worked private industry jobs, the jobs in which the prison could make mon
ey on their labor and the jobs for which certain parties got paid bonuses, they got to still go to work. Which was about half of the Max. So it wasn’t really lockdown. And they wondered why morale was low, why there was such a high turnover of staff. Why officers gave up and got lazy, not bothering to do more than maintain the status quo. Yeah, there’s a clue. It was obvious what’s important to them.
At the fed, if staff is assaulted, they go on lockdown for a minimum of two weeks. No visitors for any inmates, no religious callouts, no activities, nothing. They mean what they say. Is it any wonder they look at the state officers and snicker behind their hands or just outright pity them?
Not only was it an insult to staff, it sent the message to the inmates that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted and they’d get away with it. Great way to stand behind your team, to build a strong herd where no one feels like maybe the inmates really do care more about you than your fellow staff.
Shitass repercussions aside, I’d decided this was going to be my career. So I bitched about it along with everyone else, but I kept going to work. That’s what you do in corrections, you go to work. We’d talked about protesting and staging a walkout, but we all knew no one would do that.
You’re sick. Go to work.
You’re dying. Go to work.
You’re dead. Get your bitch ass up and go to fucking work.
All of the pressure we’re under, the body adjusts. It’s when the body realizes it doesn’t have to function under that kind of stress that it says “fuck you” and promptly starts shutting down.
My father had two years of sick leave and vacation built up when he retired from the fed. He woke up one day and just couldn’t do it anymore. He’d been there for twenty-three years and he’d had enough. So he rode out his sick leave and he retired. They don’t let you accrue that much anymore, but that’s the general idea. You save up your leave and you use it when you just can’t stomach to look at the place.
A year into his sick leave, he promptly had a heart attack. That’s why a lot of guys just don’t retire. Or they retire, take a couple weeks off, and then they come back to work to start over. Some of the guys from the fed who had mandatory retirement didn’t even wait until the ink dried on their last check before starting at the state prison. They didn’t know anything else.
It was the same for my father. When my father had his heart attack, he drove himself to the hospital. That’s the kind of man my father is. When he nailed his thumb to a board with a nail gun, he calmly inspected it, pulled the nail out, wrapped it with duct tape, and worked another eight hours. After his heart attack, what did he do? He got another job. My father is getting close to seventy now. He is blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and still works full time. He still takes my kids running around hell’s half acre for whatever hijinks they can talk him into. He takes my daughter to all of her riding lessons and shows. Half of the reason he still works is so that my daughter can take riding lessons, so she can participate in the shows, so she can do what she loves and build a foundation for the career she dreams of. And he’s still got that thousand-yard stare that makes boys think twice about talking to my daughter. He taught me to drive; that alone is worth a medal of honor. This is the bar by which I measure all other men and why I find most of them lacking.
It is also the bar by which I measure myself, and I was not measuring up at all.
At this point in my life, I didn’t think I ever could and it was a waste of time to try. I wanted him to be proud of me, but there was very little to admire in me then. I had a job and my kids had insurance. They didn’t go to bed hungry, and that was the best I could say for myself. And even then, my parents were helping me by keeping my kids while I was at work.
I’d made a mess of things, but it was easier to think I had no other choice than to look at what I was doing.
They called him Cocoa Puff.
He was one of the biggest men I’d ever seen in my life. He was six foot something insane, had shoulders like pillars that could hold up a skyscraper, and he was round. I think he said once that he weighed something like four hundred pounds. He was also a queen, and I was very jealous of how well-groomed his eyebrows were. Still, it never got in the way of his job. Not his eyebrows, but his queen status. He wasn’t too much of a lady to knock the shit out of some of these guys if they were froggy enough to jump.
He came down to hear some of the disciplinary cases in Segregation, and it was always a good time when he was in the office. We always cut up in Seg, but it was even more of a good time when he came down.
Although on this particular day, my arsenal of witty remarks was empty. I was fighting a losing battle with my bra, which wasn’t really that unusual, but the underwire had broken through the seam and stabbed me in the armpit.
It was hard to be the mistress of snark when I had a metal bar trying to work its way into my lung by way of my armpit. I had to do something. I waited until the whole crew was out on the tier, and then I reached into my shirt and I pulled that god-awful metal crescent of doom out of my bra. But just as I tugged it out of my shirt, Cocoa Puff came back in through the office door. I’d expected them to be out on the tier for a good long while, so the sight of him startled me and I pinched the ends too vigorously.
Said metal bit spun out of my hand and toward Cocoa Puff. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open as the thing barreled straight for him and pegged him squarely between the eyes.
I was already laughing so hard, I could have cried. And then he picked it up and examined it from all angles like it was some UFO dropped to earth.
“What is this?” he asked and then he put it on his head. Like a tiara.
If that wasn’t enough, the First Sergeant came back through the door and snatched it off his head and put it on his own. They both did little dances around the office with my underwire on their heads.
Finally, the First Sergeant asked again what it was, but I was engaged in laughter that was really more of a choking. I was finally able to wheeze out that it was part of my underwire for my bra.
Cocoa Puff blushed and said, “But it fit on my head.”
The First Sergeant grinned and took it off his head and made a big show of measuring it against me from a distance and then putting it back on his head again. The thing achieved some kind of cult following, and as far as I know, it’s still hidden somewhere in the Seg office.
See, it wasn’t all brains and blood and death. There were times when we laughed, pranked, and built a cadre of moments that on the outside were nothing more complex than silliness. But it was those moments that bonded us together the same as the darkness. They were like little glass globes we could pull out and look at with just a glance or a word between those who were there—frozen in time and a shining beacon that no matter how dark things got, those moments would come again.
Another Seg day, bra meltdown resolved.
We were tearing shit up and taking names today. We got a tip from the investigations unit that someone had smuggled plugs of weed into Seg. Sure enough, we found them.
Plugs are exactly what they sound like. They’re shaped about the length and breadth of three tampons if they’d been wrapped together, and they’re transported in the prison wallet—anus. Or mangina, as it’s sometimes called.
I was excited and called the Lieutenant to tell him we’d found them. He asked if I’d verified what was inside.
Uh oh.
I told him I hadn’t and he told me I had to cut it open. So I got my multitool, I changed my gloves, and I sliced it open. I almost puked all over the table. It hadn’t had a smell until I sliced it open. The stench that immediately filled the room was like we’d just crawled inside this guy’s asshole—he’d had bad Mexican food for lunch.
Yes, and these guys roll this stuff up in porous rolling papers that smell just like ass and put it in their mouths. Inhale this
smoke that has absorbed this man’s ass like Vader and the dark side. That thought made me want to vomit all over again.
I wrapped it back up, documented my findings and sent it to evidence, and wrote the disciplinary report. It took two days to get the office air back to tolerable.
It was one of those dreaded “three women in Seg” days. At least, dreaded for the rest of the institution. We liked our jobs.
That is, except for today. We’d gotten a guy in from the hospital who had gone out the week before in the care of EMS because he’d been shanked—sliced open like gutting the sickly white belly of a fish. He was running his mouth on us, and after dealing with him for five minutes, we all understood why he’d been shanked because we were ready to do it too.
The day he’d gotten shanked, he’d been a resident of the Medium and he’d been on his way back to his bunk for something, and this older convict had gotten in his way.
This older convict was the laundry porter. Well, the Medium didn’t technically have a laundry porter, but it gave him something to do and made him feel useful. He was an old man doing the last of his hard forty, but he was respected, even by the young gangbangers, and the officers didn’t mind that he wanted to work. He never got into any trouble; he was a convict, not an inmate.
The young, white inmate told him to hurry the fuck up and the old man didn’t listen. He’d been doing time since before this guy was born, so he didn’t pay him any mind. The cockbag pushed him and said, “I said get the fuck out of my way, nigger.”
So the old man pulled himself to his feet and went on to the unit where he’d been headed to get the laundry carts. Instead of a laundry cart, though, he got a shank. He calmly found the guy who’d insulted him and ripped him open from belly to sternum.
Sweet Hell on Fire Page 10