Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  Which was so noted by my commanding officer.

  It was more disgusting than anything I’d come into contact with in the prison thus far. It was a horror far beyond swarms of roaches, rats the size of cats, and brain juice splattered all over me.

  A knobby-kneed, buck-toothed, meth-faced, cock-sucking, illiterate motherfucker had accused me of approaching him for sex.

  I didn’t even know how to respond. I wondered if I could just puke on the page, scrape it into that little box where I was supposed to compose my answer, and send it back to him—hot and steamy with my disgust. Yes, this is my response to that. Have a nice day.

  “Sara, you know they just did it to get under your skin and piss you off. Take some time before you respond. Then copy your response to all the brass so you’re completely transparent on all of this.”

  I knew this guy belonged to the one who was angry with me over the book; he was one of his bitches. Literally. So I turned it off. I flipped the switch and detached myself from the situation and I reread the complaint. After I punched my fist into the wall a few times.

  First, in his complaint he claimed I stopped by his cell multiple times the day previous. And I had gone by his cell, walked right past it, and I never stopped. Lucky for me it had been on camera. We’d been recording for the Force Cell Move with the guy who’d threatened to shank me, and never once did I stop at this inmate’s cell.

  Secondly, the things he claimed I said would never come out of my mouth in a million years. He said I asked to “conversate” with him. I hate that word more than explosive diarrhea. It’s thug slang. You may converse. You may have a conversation, but you can’t conversate because it’s not a goddamn word. Thug is not my native language, although I will admit to using enough profanity to strip the hide off a trucker. Yet, even in my use of the profane, I do it correctly.

  So I sat down to compose my response using as many fifty-dollar words as could be considered reasonable. I pointed out that I was on camera, his depictions of what was said, and how completely unlike my speech patterns they were, the incident about the book, and that I would never invite anyone into my body who didn’t know the difference between “they’re, their, and there.”

  A week later, I received a copy of the grievance back with all of my fifty-dollar words highlighted as well as a few others with the inmate’s request to define them because he didn’t understand my response.

  Which was exactly what I intended. I made it clear the things he claimed I said were obviously not my words and I embarrassed him the way he embarrassed me. All of his buddies knew he’d filed the grievance and they would all want to see the response. So, not only was his grievance dismissed, but I made him look stupid to his friends as well.

  He admitted later that he’d made it up, but in corrections, reputation is everything. Luckily, mine was solid enough with both inmates and staff to withstand this.

  I loved my job in Seg, but I wanted more. I needed more money and I was ready for more responsibility. At work, anyway. A Sergeant position had come open and I’d filled out the sheet in human resources to interview for the promotion.

  It consisted of a panel interview, so there were three people asking me questions, but I wasn’t nervous because I knew all of the answers.

  I knew I’d aced it when I got a call on shift right after my interview to ask me which of the Sergeant posts I wanted. Sometimes promotions involved a move to another shift, depending on how many slots were available. The applicant who scored the highest got first choice.

  That was me!

  I was elated that I’d been doing something right.

  I chose a five-day open position rather than one where I knew I’d be assigned to a specific post every day. On the one hand, it sucked never knowing where I was going to be assigned from day to day, but also, if a post sucked, most likely I wouldn’t be there again the next day. And being open would mean I’d get experience all over the institution and be available for more training and extra responsibilities so I could keep promoting.

  Although, the higher up the ladder I promoted, the harder it would be to go to day shift. Day was a coveted shift because those people managed a semblance of a regular life. The waiting list to go to days could be long. It wouldn’t necessarily be a schedule I count on either because every time I promoted, it was likely I’d get knocked back to second or third shift and back on a waiting list again.

  But I didn’t necessarily even want to go to days. Getting up at 4:00 a.m. does not a happy Amazon make. Day shift would mean more time with my kids, but I’d lose my shift differential, the extra pay I got for being on what was considered an “off shift.”

  Still, it was something to think about.

  My husband took me out to lunch at a new restaurant in the city. He was proud of me and wanted to celebrate.

  But this was not one of the good days. Things devolved into an ugly mess within minutes. I ended up throwing my plate at him, the waitress got in my face, and I told her she was going to get hers if she didn’t get the fuck out of our business. Yeah, I was a real class act. I am now and forever banned from every location of this restaurant on the planet. I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t go to jail.

  The hard part for me was after stomping out of there, I still had to ride home with him. I wanted to disappear with my rage and chew on it for a while, but that would have meant walking home. Twenty-five miles.

  Which, stubborn as I am, I seriously considered. In boots with three-inch heels.

  I didn’t actually hit him with the plate, by the way. He ducked.

  Once we were in the car, he made me laugh, but that pissed me off even more because it didn’t solve anything. Sure, I’d laughed, but I was still angry with him. Once I’d laughed, he always thought it was okay.

  I told him I was still pissed and he said that I was always pissed.

  And he was right.

  It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. Now that I thought about it, I’d been pissed off for eight years. The whole time we’d been together. Why was I so angry?

  Then he looked at me and said, “I know. When it hits you, it’s really a surprise, but you keep thinking it shouldn’t be.” I just gaped at him and he continued. “Remember when you kicked me out of the house? You told me that I treated the inmates better than I did my own family. That stayed with me, you know. It sucked to realize it was true.” Then he dropped another bomb on me.

  “Anger is tied to expectation,” he said.

  Such a simple sentence, but it rang like a gong of truth. No, not pretty little bells, or some angelic choir of epiphany—a freaking gong. Loud, obnoxious, startling.

  I realized that everything that had ever made me angry had been because I expected something different and maybe, just maybe, my expectations weren’t reasonable. That was a nasty slap in the face. I had my first inkling that I expected more from everyone else than I did from myself—that I had a huge chip on my shoulder thinking the world owed me something.

  It did owe me something, didn’t it? After all the pain I’d already been through, all the sadness and heartbreak, why didn’t it owe me some joy? It came back to me then, clear as the blue sky, what my friend had said about choosing to be happy.

  We rode in silence the rest of the way home and we stopped at 7-Eleven for hot dogs since I’d spread our dinner all over the wall.

  It was something to think about and I did think about it. A lot.

  I didn’t want to be angry anymore.

  I used to be able to hold a grudge like no one else. I had no problem doing the proverbial slicing off my nose to spite my face. If crossed, I was something to fear. There was no amount of energy or resources I was unwilling to dedicate to the utter destruction of someone who’d crossed me.

  But I realized something. I didn’t want to be who I was.

 
; But I hadn’t quite gotten to the part where I realized I wanted to be happy. It seems like such a small step from realizing that you don’t want to be unhappy to realizing that you want happiness. You’d think it would be a given, but it wasn’t.

  Happiness and unhappiness are active choices. We can choose to be happy. Things happen, we can’t control everything, but we can control how we react to them. On a logical level, I knew that. But it hadn’t clicked yet that I was choosing to be miserable.

  I worked in the Medium as a Corporal because we were overstaffed on Sergeants, and the body alarms started malfunctioning. Body alarms, the buttons we carried and pushed when there was an emergency and we needed the cavalry, demand no small amount of exertion. Ten alarms sounded before five o’clock that evening, and we had to respond to each alarm and treat it as an emergency regardless of whether we thought it was false. Our legs felt like mint jelly from all the running.

  The communications guy tried to fix the malfunction, and we thought he had it locked and cocked, finally. That’s why everyone hauled ass with both hands when the emergency tones for another alarm came over the radio during open yard time after chow. The Control officer announced that the alarm was in the clinic.

  The yard officer I was running with dropped her radio.

  We couldn’t leave it lying there because we didn’t want an inmate to get hold of it, making him privy to private operational communications, nor did we want to make an officer wait if someone was really in trouble. I mistakenly thought I could bend over and scoop it up as I ran.

  I bent over, but instead of rising up out of the bend, I skidded across the cement of the track on the yard in front of more than three hundred inmates. I think they heard the laughter on Mars.

  Hurt like a motherfucker, I skinned the palms of my hands, my knees, and my cheek. I flipped them all the bird and got up and continued responding to the alarm. It was called false just as I went flying through the clinic door.

  The Lieutenant thought I’d been fighting on the way. I had to tell her it was just a battle with my fat ass not wanting to do what I told it. We had a laugh and I was headed back to my post when the nurse on duty took one look at my face and hauled me back into the business part of the clinic by my ear. She insisted on cleaning up all my cuts and slathering them in Bactine. I didn’t complain. I didn’t fancy walking around that festering hole with open sores on my body.

  Later, the Lieutenant offered to put a note of commendation in my file because I’d fallen and hurt myself but continued responding. I declined, but thanked her for the offer. I didn’t consider a skinned knee hurting myself. Stabbed in the face maybe. I just did my job. It wasn’t above or beyond the call of duty.

  The call of duty was to get to the officer who may be in trouble and render whatever aid necessary. I did that. Period. I did just what I would want someone to do if they were responding to my alarm.

  I’d been a Sergeant for exactly three days and I’d yet to run my own cell house, meaning I’d yet to be in charge of other staff and oversee the operations. One hour into the shift on this night, a First Sergeant had to go home for a family emergency. The Captain called me to ask if I thought I could run his house.

  I’d be working out of class, working a position that was a rank above mine, in what they called the animal house. Three tiers of assholes known for starting fires, throwing flaming rolls of toilet paper, and, most recently, pegging an officer in the back of the head with a soup because they didn’t like the way she enforced policy.

  Hell yeah, I could do it.

  As soon as I took over for the OIC, there were a flood of inmates trying to talk to me, following me around as I went about my duties, or spilling into the office either to see what kind of Sergeant I was or trying to get me to approve something the regular OIC wouldn’t have.

  It was impossible for me to get an accountability count done, so I locked them down. No rec time, no phone, no library, no nothing until I had accurate and verified numbers of where all my inmates were.

  They didn’t like this much, but there were no flaming rolls of toilet paper, no mattress fires. No one threw anything at me as I passed each cell or when I was walking on the tiers.

  Why? I’d made use of the porters—inmate workers who saw to the upkeep of the cell house, oversaw the distribution and accounting of cleaning supplies, linens, etc.

  Back in the old days of corrections, porters ran the prisons. They were in charge of the tiers and when shit needed to be handled, they handled it. It wasn’t so much like that anymore, but they were still a useful tool when you wanted to distribute information.

  They would come into the office and try to look over your shoulder, spreading whatever business you were doing all around the cell house. If you were writing a disciplinary report, if you were about to search someone’s cell, whatever bit of information they could gather.

  I talked to the head porter first thing. He came up and introduced himself, asked me if I needed anything, and asked me questions about myself. All things he would carry back to the tier. As well as whatever he thought they’d be able to get past me.

  So, I obliged him. I told him things I wanted all the inmates to know. Like what would happen to them if they started fires and “sparked” while I was running the house. Sparking is when they would use things like paperclips to get a spark from their electrical outlets. They’d use that to start fires if they didn’t have any lighters or matches hidden somewhere. It would also short out the breaker and send the whole cell house into darkness.

  I figured if they had enough toilet paper to light on fire, they didn’t need more. They knew that sparking shorted out the circuits, so obviously they must want to sit in the dark. So, if they wanted to be stuck in their cells wiping their asses with their hands in the dark, that was no skin off my ass. And if they hit me with something they’d thrown? God help them because no one else would be able to.

  The porter was laughing so hard by this point, he almost couldn’t speak to ask me what exactly it was I would do if I got hit with whatever they were throwing, be it urine, feces, or spunk. They were known to throw all three.

  I told him that as a woman, I had ammunition more horrible than anything they could ever dream up. And whoever hit me may not feel my vengeance today, tomorrow, or even in a year. But it would happen and if I got fired, I didn’t care. I could go get another job, but the guy who hit me with something would forever be the guy who got slapped in the face with a used tampon. No matter where he went, no matter how much time he did, no matter what else he ever did with his life, that story would live on forever.

  He was horrified.

  And so were all the other inmates in the house.

  Granted, they still tried to get away with shit, but when I caught them or called them on it, no one had anything nasty to say and there were no projectiles, flaming or otherwise, in the cell house that night.

  I was assigned to that same cell house the next day.

  The schedule of movement for inmates was crazy, but I managed. On my shift, inmates might be out of their cells for many different reasons, ranging from religious services, going to chow, library privileges, recreation time on the yard, showering—and all of that had to be monitored and checked, to ensure that everyone was going where they were supposed to be.

  It’s hard for any officer working in a new cell house to monitor everyone, since you don’t know faces yet, and it’s imperative that inmates who aren’t engaging in sanctioned activities be locked back in their cells. Otherwise, contraband can be passed, and other possibly dangerous activities can occur. The two regular officers who were assigned there were fantastic. It was a great team effort.

  But it would have been too easy for the night to go off without something happening.

  Around six p.m., my phone rang and it was one of the new officers on shift—straight out of tr
aining. She was crying, sobbing like someone had run over her dog. I told her to call the Captain’s office and get someone to relieve her and tell the Captain she needed to come to my cell house.

  I’d told all the new officers out of training to call me if they ever had any problems and they were unsure about what to do. I didn’t claim to know everything, but I knew I could point them in the right direction. Even if it was just going with them to talk to the Captain. In training they told us that when we excluded new officers from the pack and made them feel they had more in common with the inmates than other officers, that’s when they were prime prey for the inmates to turn dirty. So making myself available to rookies for questions or whatever they needed was me doing my part to try to make the institution a safer place.

  On her first day of OJT, I told this officer who had called me that she needed to wear less makeup. Yes, if you like makeup, you should wear it. And in an ideal world, you wouldn’t be treated differently because you wear makeup. But this wasn’t an ideal world. It’s fucking prison. If you come in painted like a French whore, that’s a signal to them you’re looking for a man and you will be targeted. Period.

  Personal rights are all well and good, but be aware of your environment. Inmates don’t care about other’s rights. Obviously.

  Anyway, she came in to my office still bawling. I locked the office door and just hugged her and let her cry for a little bit. Then I got her to tell me what had her so upset. She’d been running the chapel—overseeing the religious gatherings—and three inmates had cornered her, telling her they knew where they could go where the camera wouldn’t see them. They’d put their hands on her ass, her breasts, between her legs.

  My first question was why she hadn’t called an alarm. With three against one, even I would have hit the button that signaled my body alarm and brought the cavalry running, and I’d been known to follow an inmate down the tier in a rage after he’d grabbed me and demand “what the fuck” rather than push my body alarm.