Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  She said she was too afraid.

  But that’s the point of the alarm. If you’re ever in fear for your life, hit that button. Any situation you can’t handle alone, hit that button. If she’d hit that button, the fury of all hell would have been unleashed on those poor bastards, with ten to fifteen officers responding, trained like Pavlov’s fucking dogs to fight when they hear that alarm.

  That training was a part of what made watching my husband car shopping such a treat. At most dealerships, they have a tone that plays over the intercom to let a salesman know there is a phone call or a customer on the floor. These tones they use sound exactly like the tones that sounded over the radio at the prison when an alarm was called. Every time they went off, he launched himself from the chair and looked a bit like a rabid dog. I wouldn’t want fifteen of him ready to knock me on my ass.

  Anyway, because she didn’t call the alarm, she lost credibility with both officers and inmates. Inmates had no respect for dirty officers even though they tried constantly to turn them. They knew as a dirty officer she wouldn’t be fair, firm, or consistent. The officers had already been wary of her because she wore such heavy makeup, but this was the last nail in her coffin. The only officers who would talk to her after that were others who were suspected of being dirty.

  It was generally believed that she didn’t call the alarm because she invited the contact. That she changed her mind later after she realized how much shit she could be in.

  This belief was only solidified when she got caught having a relationship with an inmate. I wasn’t surprised. I just knew she wouldn’t last. She set off my Dirty Bitch Detector and I knew it was only a matter of time before they turned her.

  She had low self-esteem. The inmates look for that, a chink in the armor—somewhere they can burrow in and get inside your head.

  I have a copy of an inmate instruction guide called “How to Have an Inappropriate Relationship with Staff,” which they’ve passed amongst themselves. The title in itself is funny because that’s what they call it in the staff training: inappropriate relationships with staff.

  Someone has written special instructions for what to look for in an officer who’s prime to be turned and how to prime them if they aren’t.

  The first thing on the list is someone who obviously has low self-esteem. Someone who doesn’t often make eye contact, who doesn’t hold their head up. It’s like culling the sick gazelle from the rest of the herd.

  The next step is to talk to the officer, and while it happens with men too, it’s usually women who are targeted. Talk to her every day, ask her how she is and be sympathetic. Listen to everything she says. Be aware of her moods and react accordingly. Offer her something she doesn’t get at home.

  Then do something so she knows she’s special to you. Make yourself stand out. Be patient. Promise her you can keep a secret. Establish that your relationship is different than what she has with anyone else, staff or inmate.

  It goes on from there, step by step, and those tactics have worked countless times. Officers have sacrificed careers and family, even endangered lives in the community.

  One woman, not an officer but a volunteer with a program inside the prison, was turned by a convicted murderer who was twenty-one years younger than she was. She had a family, a husband and children, and she walked away from them to be with this man. She gave him a gun and helped him escape, smuggling him out in one of the program’s vehicles. When she was interviewed by a local paper after her trial, the first thing they quoted was that she said this inmate was someone she could really talk to.

  The preliminary tests after my mother’s surgery showed that they got the entire tumor and that she was cancer free. That was good news, but we began to suspect that she had a stroke on the table or some other catastrophic event. She was having auditory and visual hallucinations. She was convinced that things were happening around her that weren’t. And she’d get very angry when told that she was mistaken.

  She kept having episodes in which it was like she’d short-circuit and get stuck in a certain position, or she’d fall. She went back to the doctor who’d performed her surgery and when she did fall, the doctor sneered at her and told her she was fine and to get up. The doctor didn’t offer my mother any assistance, or even any compassion. The doctor saw a woman fall—a woman who had come to her about post-surgical issues involving this very thing—and the doctor insisted she was fine without even examining her.

  What a cunt. I don’t use that word very often; it’s an icky word and, for most women, a fighting word. I say it here with relish. If I ever see this woman again, this word will sit on my tongue like the finest artisan chocolate and will taste even sweeter when I spit it at her.

  I wish I’d have been there because I would have taken a bite out of this bitch so large, she’d still be looking for the rest of her ass with both hands. When people are sick, they are more easily managed, especially by someone they see as an authority figure who knows more than they do. They just want to know that someone is going to make them feel better. When you go to a caregiver, the treatment my mother got is not the kind of treatment one would, or should, expect. The doctor thought she could treat my mother that way because she was sick and aging.

  And my mother thinks the sun rises and sets on those initials after the doctor’s name, so she’d never argue with one, even to defend herself against a wrong as obvious as this one. She hasn’t learned to be an advocate for her own health yet.

  I’ve learned to let go of a lot of things now, but this wasn’t one of them. I hope someday this doctor is sick and terrified. That her body betrays her and someone treats her the same way she treated my mother.

  She also double billed for several visits. Now that, I could do something about. I have a certificate in medical billing and coding, so I called the office and got that handled right away. I also turned the incident in to the insurance commissioner so she’d most likely get an audit. After all, if the bitch had done that to my mother for more than one visit, how many other sick people was she double billing and taking advantage of?

  I also finally took the opportunity to tell my mother that I was sorry. I got emotional and choked up, so it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say. How much I still needed her to be my mom. How I was sorry that when she first got sick, I didn’t notice. I didn’t help her. How I was too caught up in my own shit to think about her. All I said was that I was sorry about everything and that I loved her.

  I know now I’m really lucky that I got a chance to say that. I’d let so many things go unsaid. Unrecognized. It was another bright, burning banner for all that I didn’t like about my life.

  And myself.

  I’d been directing all of my disgust outward for so long that when I finally looked inside, it was a mess of nuclear proportions. The light was too bright, and while I’d managed to own up to what I’d done wrong with my mother, I wasn’t ready to look at the rest of it. That sort of introspection required a bottle of bourbon so I could forget it all in the morning.

  I worked a First Sergeant post again, one step above my current rank. That was an awesome feeling.

  I was still in the Max, which also made me happy. Until I saw who one of my officers was going to be. This guy was nice to me, but he was dumber than a box of hair. He also stuffed his pants with a sock.

  When asked about it, he swore it was some kind of tumor or gigantism of the balls, but on intense observation, a sock was all it could be. I’ve never known a man who could lean his junk against a table and have the table move said junk down to his knee and he not make some sort of high-pitched sound. Or stop breathing.

  He didn’t know how to talk to people, or really how to do his job at all. He would have been tolerable had he been open to learning or hearing what another more experienced officer had to say, but he wasn’t. He was convin
ced he was smarter than everyone else.

  I’d worked with him before, one time in Seg. It wasn’t a good experience. You know when you’re coming up the stairs and you hear an inmate say, “Don’t do it, it’s Sarge,” that someone is in for a world of shit. Literally. That time I had peeked up over the railing in Seg and the inmate who’d been speaking smiled at me. “You’re good,” he’d said.

  I asked him what had them wound up enough to throw things. When this officer had passed out chow, he’d refused to pass the other things that went around with chow. Grievance forms, toilet paper, other request forms, etc. Chow times were the only times these inmates had to get these things. But regardless of that, they had them coming. You give them what they have coming. No more. No less. And they were entitled to these things.

  I told them I would take care of it.

  That was something else. Do what you say you’re going to. Period. I told them I would handle it and they believed me. I also told them as fun as I’m sure it would be to tag him in the face with a shit bomb, he was still an officer and I couldn’t let them treat an officer that way.

  I talked to this officer and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Fuck ’em.” No. Not fuck ’em. Do your fucking job. Outside of that, sure. Then he said he couldn’t go back up on the tier because he was afraid of getting hit with whatever they were going to throw.

  Too bad.

  He made his bed and whether it was shit or roses, I wasn’t cleaning it up.

  Although I did watch him from the bottom tier as he made his rounds, and the inmates noticed this. I’m sure if I hadn’t been there, he would have gotten a shit gun to the face.

  So needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to working with him again. He’d cost me three hours of my night in Seg when all the inmates were locked up. I could only imagine the night I was going to have with them out and running around and him shooting his mouth off.

  I wasn’t disappointed.

  First of all, he caught an inmate—a kitchen worker—trying to sneak produce back to his cell. So he confiscated it. Okay, he did something right. No, that was too much to hope for. He ate the pepper he took after I told him not to, and then mid-bite the Lieutenant came in for a post check. Looked bad for him and for me. I got my ass reamed because I didn’t stop him. What was I supposed to do, jerk it out of his mouth and get into a scuffle with another officer in full view of the inmates over food? Yeah, I’d never live that down.

  Then, after the Lieutenant had left and I was already butt sore, an inmate walked by the officer’s station, and this officer made a snide remark to the inmate. It was obvious from the look on the inmate’s face that they didn’t have the kind of rapport that engendered that sort of thing, so I waited for the inmate to pass and then I corrected him. I would never correct a fellow officer in front of an inmate.

  The officer laughed, grabbed the mic, and made an announcement to the entire cell house, calling the inmate by name and telling him to go straight to his cell and not to stop and suck his boyfriend’s cock on the way.

  I kind of want to bang my head on my desk just remembering this fuckery. Like so many other acts of wanton stupidity, you have to remember where you are. This is prison, not the eighth grade party where you kissed the girl who sat in front of you in math and then tied her bra to the ceiling fan.

  Everyone has cred to maintain in prison. Yes, this inmate was gay. Yes, his boyfriend lived in the same cell house. Everyone knew it, but to call it out like that over the intercom was disrespectful. This officer should have been prepared to take whatever consequences he had coming. Dishing out crap and then hiding behind the uniform was a sure way to get yourself shanked.

  Five minutes later, almost time for Count, and this officer was up on his tier. Suddenly I heard an alarm come over the radio. An alarm from my cell house.

  Motherfucker.

  There was one other officer up on the third tier, but I knew it wasn’t him. It was dumbass on tier two. I charged up the stairs as fast as I could, adrenaline racing, running through a thousand scenarios in my head and what I would do—only to find him standing there with his thumb up his ass and the inmate he’d been harassing standing in front of his cell, refusing to go inside.

  Before I had the chance to handle the situation, first responders filled the tier, headed up by the same Captain I’d had to explain my womanly needs to. He was ready to kill someone. He filled the width of the tier, his legs were braced apart, and he reminded me of a bull getting ready to charge. For one horrible moment, I really thought I’d see smoke come out of his nostrils and he’d leave me as a sad little ink stain on the floor.

  But I found my balls and asked what was going on.

  “He refused to lock up,” the officer said.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No.”

  This shit did not require an alarm. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “He refused a direct order.”

  The Captain deflated slowly but was still obviously pissed.

  “Go to the office. Right now.”

  “But—”

  “Go!” I turned to the inmate. “Are you going to lock up?”

  “No problem, Sarge.” He went into his cell.

  As we were walking back down to the office, the Captain took me aside and asked me what I knew of the situation. I told him about the events leading up to what had happened. All he said was, “Counsel your corporal.”

  I so desperately wanted to say he wasn’t my corporal. But that’s not a team mentality. I was supposed to be in charge of shit and I couldn’t handle the corporal in my cell house. “Most definitely.”

  “Then send him to me for further counseling and write something to put in his file about the counseling and the incident.”

  Same cell house the next day.

  And they sent me another dipshit.

  I started to understand why corrections officers have such a bad reputation. This guy looked just like Milton from Office Space. Dead ringer. He stared at me blankly for the first few minutes of the shift. My mouth moved, words were coming out, but he didn’t assimilate any of it.

  I told him to get out on the tier and start locking up for first Count. Instead, he sat down at the desk right next to me.

  First of all, I like my personal space. I don’t have a personal bubble; I have a personal brick. All the better to smack people who invade said personal area. But that wasn’t the most horrific part. The part that had me almost ripping off my own skin was that his arms were covered in sores. Not just little mosquito-like bites he might have scratched, but full-on oozing, leprosy-looking, ulcerated, open-wound sores. Like infected spider bites.

  The hallmarks of MRSA.

  MRSA is a dirty bastard of an infection. Its technical name is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Which means it’s resistant to antibiotics. It can also live on surfaces for months at a time.

  And he’d rubbed his arm on mine.

  “So, what’s that on your arm?” I asked, trying not scream and light him on fire.

  “Spider bites.”

  “Wow, you must have a lot of spiders.”

  “I guess so. I think they were in the barn I cleaned out yesterday.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, I just woke up and had it.”

  Oh, the fuck you did.

  “You know,” I said as I drenched my arm in hand sanitizer, “prison is dirty. There’s all sorts of things living on the surfaces here. It’s not a good place to have open wounds. If that’s not MRSA, you could get it. Or anything else that could infect you through an open wound. Hepatitis, HIV, if someone who is infected gets hurt. You need to have that looked at.”

  “Yeah, I will tomorrow,” he said and went to the staff bathroom before I could say anything else.

>   Tomorrow? The fuck you say.

  An inmate knocked on the office door. “Uh, I don’t mean any disrespect, but you have to get that man out of here. Is that MRSA on his arm?” His voice hit a note higher than anything I could hit. He was bordering on the edge of freaking out too.

  “I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got a handle on it.”

  I did have to get him out of there. That shit on his arm wasn’t healthy for anyone. Especially not me because I was going to freak right the fuck out. Yeah, I could handle a man’s brains on me, but this guy’s creeping crud twisted my guts.

  When he came back, I sent him to the Captain’s office and they sent him to the clinic. He returned to the cell house with his arms bandaged from the wrist to the elbow.

  A few days later he called me to thank me for making him get it looked at. It was MRSA.

  This man did not belong in a corrections environment. This incident was a banner for every reason why. He wasn’t aware of his surroundings and couldn’t think farther ahead than his next meal.

  The next time I had to work with him, an alarm called in another cell house, and his position in our cell house meant he was a first responder. Officers were running out of their cell houses as if the hounds of hell slavered at their heels and “Milton” wandered up to me casually and told me he couldn’t respond to the alarm because he had a heart condition and that I needed to go.

  Lives depend on first responders. He was not someone I would trust to guard my back. I was more than happy to call the Captain and get him the hell out of my cell house.

  It’s amazing how one person can have a certain rapport with someone and another person’s interactions can be completely the opposite.