Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  Unless it was from the inmates. I still didn’t give a shit about that.

  We had another new class of officers coming in, as with the high turnover rate there were new classes of trainees every few months. I never minded having them in my cell house for OJT, or On the Job Training. They had to learn sometime, and I knew a lot of officers didn’t have the patience. The thinking was that they didn’t know if these people were going to stay, so why invest in them?

  At the fed, you’re lower than dog shit until you’ve done your first year. No matter where you came from, whom you’re related to, the other officers don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth until you’ve done your year. I could see the logic in that. At the state level, there was no particular time limit. Some people were never trusted, and others were trusted immediately.

  But I was determined that incoming classes would learn more on OJT than I did. For a lot of the officers, especially the old-timers, training consisted of handing them the keys and showing them where the lockbox was with a quick, “Don’t get shanked and I’ll see you in eight hours.”

  My first bout of employment with the prison when I was nineteen was like that. They took us to a cell house and posted each of us at different points, then left us alone with no radio, no panic button, and no officer to oversee what we did.

  That sucked.

  So I made sure to treat all my OJTs like they were part of the team and make myself available to offer guidance where I could.

  A lot of the things they were told in training were not applicable in real life. It was one thing to act out little scenarios and read about what it was like behind the walls; it was quite another to actually experience it.

  The OJT I had that day took forever to lock the guys up on her tier. Usually, when they first start, it takes a while to get a feel for the job. Plus every cell house is different because the people are different—inmates and staff.

  But watching her, I realized what her problem was. It wasn’t because she was petite or young. I’d seen women smaller than her with presence like a linebacker. No, she treated the inmates as if they had the right-of-way on the tier and they were walking all over her—almost literally.

  I climbed the stairs to the tier and pulled her aside. “No, that’s not how you do it.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be rude, I want to build a rapport,” she said eagerly.

  I was heartened by how obvious she was about wanting to do a good job, wanting to be a good officer. “You know what kind of rapport you’re building now? The bend-me-over-a-barrel-because-I’m-soft rapport. They don’t respect you and they won’t until you demand it.”

  “I understand I have to earn it.”

  “No, you don’t. If you want to keep it, you have to earn it, but you’re the officer. You’re the one with the keys. You control movement, they don’t. You control the tier, they don’t. There is nowhere that they have to be that takes precedence over security. Security being you.”

  “They won’t move,” she said, hanging her head.

  “It’s your first day. It’s okay. Listen to me, though; hold your head up. No matter what. Always meet their eyes. Looking away is an act of submission.”

  “God, like they’re a pack of wolves of something.”

  “Yeah, just like that.” I laughed.

  “So, what if they won’t move?”

  “They’ll move,” I promised her. “C’mon. Walk the run with me.”

  I walked down the run with her behind me and without saying a word, every single inmate who was out for movement moved aside when he saw me coming. There were a couple catcalls and instructions for me to train the newbie right, and a few telling her not to listen to me at all because I was too much of a hard-ass, but it was all light and the cell house ran smoothly.

  When we walked back to the lockbox, she said, “That was awesome. I want to be an officer just like you.”

  Just like me? My first instinct had been to tell her, no, you don’t want to be anything like me. But I couldn’t help but feel proud that no matter what else I screwed up, this was something I could get right. This was something I was good at.

  The inmates all knew I wasn’t ripe for the plucking, but that didn’t stop some of them from trying. I guess everyone loves a challenge.

  There were some guys for whom telling them no didn’t work, but they never crossed any lines where I could write them up. Being an annoying pain in my ass wasn’t actually covered in the inmate rulebook.

  In one cell house, this one guy would always find a reason to talk to me when I was posted there. He was never outright disrespectful, but he was like a fungus. Every time I turned around, he was there.

  If he’d never done more than that, I probably wouldn’t have been so irritated, but I could hear in his voice and infer it from some of the things he said that he thought if he could just put in enough time with me, he’d wear me down.

  First, I tried laying it out for him. I told him that even if I wasn’t married to another officer, I would never endanger my career or my coworkers that way. And all that aside, there was the fact that my father was a retired federal corrections officer, and he’d bury me in the basement with a ton of lime if he thought for one second I’d taken up with an inmate. He was also warned that if he pushed the issue he’d go to Seg. Well, he was one of those who liked to “winter” in Seg. As if it was some kind of vacation destination. He didn’t mind it down there and he still had a lot of time left to do. So the usual motivators didn’t apply.

  I finally realized that I had to make him not like me.

  But that was tricky too because I’d worked hard for my reputation. If I treated him badly, or any different than any other inmate, I wouldn’t be a good officer.

  I was talking to my second officer one day when he approached. She had brought me a root beer. He slid up to us, neat as a pin, and inserted himself right into the middle of the conversation as if we were at the food court at the mall instead of in a prison.

  She looked at me and I looked at her—and some unspoken knowledge passed between us. She smiled and took a long gulp of root beer. Probably half the can. I did the same thing. He was still talking, the look on his face confident and his posture tall. He really thought he was getting somewhere.

  He turned to say something else to me, and I burped. The biggest, loudest, lumberjackiest burp I could manage. If I’d been down in Seg, they would have given me a cookie and a that-a-girl slap on the back.

  I think it may have actually deactivated the relaxer on his hair. He blinked against the onslaught and swallowed hard, obviously struggling. I had to give him credit, though, for not giving up. He turned to say something to my second officer as if my burp had never happened. I didn’t offer an excuse me, a pardon me, nothing.

  Then she responded in kind.

  And hers was louder. In fact, I was pretty sure I could tell she’d had Chinese for lunch. Sweet and sour chicken and crab rangoon.

  Not be daunted, he turned back to me and I took another long pull off my root beer. Upended the can.

  “You might wanna take that a little bit slow, Sarge.”

  I smiled and burped again. I almost hurled because I had to dig deep for it.

  “Aww, now you got somethin’ somethin’ too?” He turned back to my second officer.

  She smiled again and lifted her leg. The eruption from her hind parts was so loud, I was sure that she’d shit her pants.

  “You bitches is nasty,” he said, shaking his head and stalking back down the run to his cell.

  I laughed again, but then I was sure she’d had crab rangoon. We couldn’t go back into the office for two hours.

  It was worth it, though, because he never bothered me again.

  There was another guy who I knew was jacking off every time I was in his cell house. That
in itself isn’t a big deal. It’s prison. They’re men. They’re going to jack off, jerk the monkey, choke the chicken, burp the nephew, walk the purple-headed womb ferret, whatever. But this one would do it where he could watch me. He was a porter, and if he didn’t watch me from his cell, he’d hide in supply closets. He’d stop when I’d walked by, so I had no reason to write him a disciplinary report. In prison, there are even rules about self-love and where and when it can occur. They have to be in their cells with a sheet over their bodies and no expectation of being viewed. So if he wasn’t doing it when I was in front of his cell, he could argue that he had no expectation of being viewed.

  If his constant onanism hadn’t been aimed in my general direction, I wouldn’t have fucked with him about it, but he was compulsive with it. I could tell just by the way he looked at me and every other female officer that he was a sex offender.

  Yep. Three counts of rape.

  So I decided I was going to break him of this habit.

  What years of therapy couldn’t do, humiliation would.

  I put my plan in motion when I was in his cell house up on the second tier, helping the OJT officer lock up her inmates. They were running all over her like a parking lot. It was ridiculous.

  I saw that the door to the supply/laundry room had been left open just a crack, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see this inmate inside. He was watching me.

  And beating his meat.

  So, when one inmate stopped to ask me something, I kept him there talking for a minute. Asked him about his day. I did that to get a feel for what was going on in the cell house. Other inmates saw this and wanted to talk too. So I waited until I had about ten inmates there waiting to ask me questions and then I flung the door open wide.

  The offending inmate was standing there with his dick in his hand and about half a jar of Blue Magic hair pomade on his dick.

  They all started laughing and pointing while he scrambled to pull up his boxers, slinging Blue Magic everywhere. A couple made comments about Smurfs jacking off and the laughter reached heights of hysterical.

  “You’re fucked up, Sarge,” one of the inmates said to me.

  “Why is that?”

  “You knew what he was doing.”

  “I’m fucked up? I’m not the one with my dick in my hand,” I snorted.

  “If you don’t want to see a man taking care of his business, you shouldn’t work in a prison,” he admonished.

  “You don’t want to be told when and where to take care of your business, you shouldn’t come to prison.”

  “You got me there, Sarge. Yes, you do.”

  The inmate never bothered me again, and neither did any of the guys who were there for his humiliation.

  I talked to my kids today. I asked them to forgive me and I promised them that from now on, no matter what happened, it would be better. That things would never be as they had been and I’d do everything in my power to make them happy.

  They both fell into my arms and hugged me tight. I almost can’t describe how I felt with their thin, little arms around me. It was warm like sunshine, bright with hope, and unconditional love.

  I took them to the indoor pool at the community center and we saw an ex-inmate there. He wasn’t one of the ones who just wanted to be validated. No, this one wanted to scare me.

  We were the only ones there, swimming and splashing in the shallow end, when I decided to get out and relax on a lounger, just as if we’d been at an outdoor pool.

  “Hey, Lunsford.”

  I looked up to see a big guy towering over me. He was inked from wrist to shoulder with gang tattoos, and his head had been shaved since last I’d seen him. But I recognized him from Seg.

  “Hey, how are you?” I asked him, being cordial. As I said before, I usually wished them well when I saw them on the street. Or in this case, the pool.

  I felt his stare on me, on my breasts in particular, like a ray gun. It was like he couldn’t stare anywhere but there. Then I remembered he was a sex offender. I resisted the urge to pull my towel around me like armor. He’d see it as a sign of weakness, that his attention made me uncomfortable.

  “You’re looking really good,” he said.

  “Thank you.” I made sure to look at his face and stare at him until he made eye contact and looked away. This tactic has worked for me with the majority of sex offenders I’ve worked with. Extreme scrutiny tends to make them almost bashful, but there are some, like this one, who remained unaffected.

  He made the sound like sucking on his lips. “Damn, woman. Yes, you are.”

  “That’s just as inappropriate here as it would have been behind the walls,” I corrected him firmly but politely.

  “I can’t tell a bitch she’s looking fine?”

  “No, not when the bitch is married and has her kids. That’s disrespectful. Especially in that tone, like I’m some ghetto rat ho. It would be the same as if I approached you while you were with your family and asked if you’d paid off your debt to the Latin Kings.”

  He laughed. “Still the same Lunsford, I see.” Then he was quiet for a second. I really just wanted him to go away. “What about if it was in private? What about if I came to your house?”

  “You aren’t invited to my house. That would be inappropriate as well.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about inappropriate.”

  “I do. So it was nice catching up. Good luck,” I said, ending the conversation the same as I did with all of them.

  Skeevy McSkeeverson didn’t take the hint. Instead, he grabbed my wrist, hard. “I think I’m gonna come to your house anyway. Fuck you and those pretty girls of yours.”

  My children were still splashing and playing, oblivious to what was happening. I could scream, but no one would hear me—there was no one else in the pool area. But I’m not the screaming sort anyway. I’m the rip-your-balls-off-and-shove-them-up-your-ass sort.

  He squeezed my wrist harder, obviously trying to frighten me, and it hurt. It was my right wrist, I’ve broken it before. But I’ve also had two children without epidurals. This had nothing on that. Plus, it’s always been my philosophy that pain is temporary and pride is forever.

  Fuck him. He could snap my wrist and break my whole fucking hand off before he’d get a whimper out of me.

  “Come to my house.” I nodded. I even smiled. “I have two friends who would love to meet you.”

  He leaned down close in my face, still squatted down beside the lounger. “Oh yeah? What are their names, do I know them?” He leered at me.

  I reached between his legs with my left hand and grabbed his balls as hard as I could and yanked him forward until I was right up in his face. “Yeah, motherfucker. You do. Smith and fucking Wesson. Come to my house, you sack of shit, and I’ll feed this sad little lump of flesh to you one fucking bite at a time with a 12-gauge up your bitch ass.”

  “I could break your wrist,” he said lightly, his voice a much higher pitch than it had been seconds before, refusing to acknowledge what I’d said. “I could choke you with my other hand and…”

  I smiled again and he stopped speaking, obviously unsure of what to do with that big shit-eating grin on my face. “I don’t give a fuck. Break it. It’s been broken before.” I twisted his balls a little harder, kept twisting until he yelped. “You stay away from my children, do you understand me? Threaten them again, so much as breathe in their general direction, and I will be your own personal hell on earth either until they find you in my basement or you die.”

  “I’m gonna call the cops,” he whimpered.

  “Call them. I don’t give a fuck about that either. You just threatened my life and the lives of my children. You grabbed me. You just assaulted and battered a law enforcement officer. So go ahead and call whoever the fuck you think you want to call, and remember next time, if I pu
ll a little harder, you’ll be missing your balls. Now get the fuck out of here,” I hissed when I let him go.

  He stumbled backward and tripped over one of the other loungers.

  “Momma, is that a friend?” my oldest called from the pool, having noticed the scuffle.

  “No, that’s not. If you see him again, yell Stranger Danger and run away as fast as you can.”

  “Is he a shit bag?” she asked.

  One of our more colorful words for problem inmates. I sometimes forgot how sensitive their little ears could be. It seems they don’t pay attention to anything you say until it’s something you don’t want them to hear.

  But in this case, it was accurate.

  “Yes, punkin. He is.” I got out my phone and called the police to report the threat.

  The responding officer laughed when he read my statement. I was honest about what I said to the inmate. I wasn’t going to lie and say that I hadn’t responded to his threats with some of my own. And as corny as it sounded, mine were promises. That piece of shit got anywhere near my kids, and I would have done every last thing I said I would do.

  After all, I’m all about the follow-through.

  When I got to work, they were searching employees on the way in.

  We were searched every day before entering the facility, but this was more in depth. They had the drug dog out making the rounds.

  This always made me nervous.

  The apartment building where I lived was home to a bunch of degenerate fucks doing God knows what, and tracking it all over the place. Especially in the common areas.