When I saw Toi seated at the table, I couldn’t help but smile because I hadn’t seen her in four and a half months. She still looked as fine as ever. That was the weak part of me. That part of me that loved and lusted after my woman. The other part of me was curious as hell as to what was going on, why no one could get in contact with her. Why another man answered the phone at her house.
As I pulled the chair out, I demanded, “Baby, what the fuck is going on?”
She pursed her lips, but remained silent.
“My mama said you ain’t returned her calls. She went to your apartment and they said you moved. You didn’t take the money to the lawyer and when I tried to call you a—”
My words trailed off when a man I had never seen before sat down next to her.
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was tall and lanky, brown skin with a long ponytail, a long white T-shirt and some jeans. He looked like a thug. I didn’t know why he sat down next to Toi.
I looked from him to her. “Who the fuck is this?”
Toi didn’t respond.
“What’s happening, blood, my name is—”
My eyes stayed on Toi but to him I said, “Muthafucka, I’m talking to my woman.”
“I told you to wait for me outside!” she snapped at him.
I was losing control but I tried to stay calm.
“Toi. Listen to me. You talking to a man that has lost everything but my mama and you. I’m fighting for my life, baby. A life I know I’m going to get back. I don’t care how long it takes me. Don’t do this shit to me. Tell this muthafucka to get on so we can talk about this. I’ll get over look the fact that you brought his ass here. Whoever he is. I’ll even overlook the fact that he was most likely the one in your crib answering your phone the other day. Just tell him.”
My eyes pleaded with her.
I felt like I only had an inch to hold on to but I was trying. She was my baby and she was carrying my baby. That’s all that mattered. If she was scared and ran to another man I could understand that and I could forgive her for it. But I couldn’t lose her. Not now. I needed her love. I needed her help.
She wouldn’t talk.
So he did.
“Since she ain’t opening her muthafucking mouth, I guess I will. You been in here for a few months now and a woman has needs. I been taking care of those needs and I didn’t come here to hear this crybaby shit, feel me? I’m just gonna tell you once and for all. My name is Keon and Toi is my woman now. She ain’t your girl no more. She ain’t gonna help you with no bullshit case that you ain’t gonna beat anyway. Nigga, you guilty. Do your time. And you can’t call the crib no more. She ain’t going to see you so forget about that too. I got her on lock.”
He wrapped his arms around her on that part, when he said he had her “on lock.”
My expression was murderous as I took all of this in. What this nigga was telling me. What Toi wouldn’t say.
I glared at him. “What about my baby?”
He laughed.
“I had an abortion, Chance,” Toi finally said.
That was a tough blow to recover from.
I blinked to stop my eyes from watering.
“Bitch. You killed my baby?” I whispered
Keon chuckled. “Watch ya mouth, nephew. Only nigga that gets to call her a bitch is me.”
I ignored him.
“Where’s my money?”
“What money?” That was him.
Toi offered no explanation.
“So you just gonna keep my shit, Toi?”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
I took a deep breath and shouted, “Toi!”
“She ain’t—”
“Shut the fuck up! Toi, baby, listen to me. You killed my baby and you don’t wanna be with me and you wanna be with this muthafucka. Fine. It hurts ’cause I love you, baby, and probably always will. But if you take that money you are killing any chance I have of getting out of here. Don’t do that to me, baby. Give me my money,” I pleaded.
“She ain’t got shit.”
“Toi?”
“Nigga.” His teeth were clinched. “She gave it to me. I’m head of household now. And I bought some bricks with it.”
Without thinking, I lunged over the table, toward the dude. Toi leaped from her chair and scurried away in fear.
The muthafucka had the nerve to laugh at me. Laugh at my anger, laugh at my pain.
I managed to get my arms around his neck and started choking the life out of him. I was then grabbed by two guards, who attempted to restrain me.
“You punk-ass muthafucka!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
They pulled my hands from around his neck but not without a struggle.
As they tried to pull me away, I struggled against them and kicked at the table.
So this became my life.
Toi had done me so dirty. I thought for sure I was going to wake up to that being a bad dream. But I didn’t. This was the reality of my situation. She didn’t want me anymore and she didn’t want my baby. Why she had to go further and take my money, I will never know. I just knew the shit hurt. All of it. She crushed me. I always thought that we had been together so long that I could trust her with my life. Despite myself, despite the pain and anger I felt, I still loved her. Even after what she did, part of me wanted to call or write her and beg her back, forgive her for seeing someone else and killing my baby. But I didn’t. I simply attempted to let it go. Calhoun was pissed and said she never came back to the Springdales and that he had no clue where she had ran off to. My mother was lost when it came to her as well. I had to accept the fact that she fucked off my money. All of it.
Months sped by, adding a year to the four and a half months I had already done. In that time frame I had got down with so many dudes to prove myself that the shit was ridiculous. I learned new ways to fuck a nigga up, that’s for sure. And I was dirty with my shit because I just didn’t care. I was gonna fight you until I knocked your ass out and I was gonna leave some type of memory of my ass-whipping even if I had to rake your face with my nails or bite a piece of your skin. I didn’t give a fuck. This was my way of surviving, becoming a monster, and that’s what the fuck I was. It was hard for me even to face my mother. Other changes were the way I looked. I felt like I had aged some years. I had also gotten bigger, not for any type of look or attraction but because if I lost too much weight and got too skinny
niggas would think they could take my asshole. So far that hadn’t happened. That shit you see in the movies about niggas getting raped was true and I didn’t want it to be me.
Racial tension was constant. The segregation and racial shit wasn’t just reserved for the inmates. You saw the guards doing the shit too. The white guards looked out for the white inmates, you saw the Mexican guards looking out for the Mexican inmates, and you saw the black guards turning their back on the blacks. It was crazy. In here, race always mattered. Being in here, I learned that my life depended on who I congregated with ’cause niggas were always watching. Shanks were made here and drugs were being brought in here as well. They could take pretty much anything from the top of canned goods from the kitchen, the razors we used to shave, a paper clip, a fucking toothbrush, and make a shank. As far as the drugs, sometimes family and an inmate’s women brought them in. We on the outside tend to think that the powers that be were smarter than the criminals. Being in prison, I saw that the criminals were always smarter and way more sophisticated. The game was always about watching which guards were smashers, which meant the staff was no-bullshit and would fuck your shit and your world up, the guards who were new booty, which meant they didn’t know shit about shit when it came to prison, and the staff who were weak or just plain out didn’t care. Half the time, guards brought the dope in. I knew for a fact that Roscoe had blacks, Mexicans, and whites slinging his dope for him in prison. Another crazy part of prison were the punks, which is what we called the openly gays that looked like actual women! What I thought was strange about th
em was their preference when it came to the inmates. They did not fuck each other; they went after the straight-looking men. Some of the female guards also carried on relationships with some of the inmates that went as far as letting the inmates fuck them.
Every time I turned around somebody was fighting. They even had those skinhead, Aryan Nation dudes in there and every time I passed one of them, they gave me a look like they wanted to shank me on sight. I gave their evil, hateful ass the same look.
In the time I had been there, I watched Tyson get into it with one of them and he fucked his ass up. The crazy part was that dude was way bigger than Tyson. Dude was so fucked-up from the hits Tyson was giving to him that he laid on down in the shower, knocked out. After the fight, whenever he saw Tyson he gave him a murderous look and called him a nigger. Guards always acted like they didn’t hear it. Tyson did too. He never responded. He didn’t want any trouble in there. Hell, he didn’t want that fight that day, but it was more self-defense than anything. Tyson always tried to stay clear of prison bullshit. So did I.
After the fight, Tyson was stressing hard because any month he would have his appointment with the committee to determine if he would get released. He was scared that the fight would hurt those chances. He warned me not to ever let anyone know when you’re getting released or they would “smoke your date.” I didn’t know what that meant so he told me. “They will start shit with you to get you to fight or they plant some shit on you so you don’t go home. Sometimes they go as far as trying to force you to murk someone. Haters. So if I do get released I’m going to play that shit off like ain’t nothing happened. And you gotta play along.”
Tyson tried to get me to do stuff there to get my mind off my situation but I always said no. Much of my day was spent sleeping and working out; that was pretty much it. Working out had to be creative too ’cause prisons no longer had weights. I sometimes worked out with Tyson. We used our sheets and towels, rolled up our mats to work out. Those items worked like any good pair of weights. Jail taught you how to improvise damn near on your whole life.
Tyson did everything from working in the laundry room to going to church services, Bible study, and playing sports on the yard. When he wasn’t doing these things he was in the library reading up on different legal stuff and bringing books back to our cell for us to read. I never did. But he was really pressing the issue of getting out of there. I didn’t think I’d ever see light of day again. My pessimistic attitude didn’t stop him from trying to get me involved in the stuff he did, like pushing me to file an appeal. With the fact that I no longer had money for a lawyer, I thought maybe that was a shot for me. But when my public pretender—whom I eventually begin to understand why so many inmates called their public defenders “public pretender”—finally answered my calls, he broke it down to me how appeals worked. According to him, you have to have some type of evidence that you are innocent that was not included into the first trial. I had none of that. He also warned me that it could take up to two years before an appeals lawyer even responded to me. He also said that the majority of appeals that are filed are denied. Still, I was going to push and try anyway. I wrote a four-page letter detailing my whole life, how I had never been in trouble with the law, how I was innocent and would be willing to take a lie-detector test. I even let Tyson read it. He tweaked some things and I submitted the letter. I told Tyson I had fears that it wouldn’t be approved. He encouraged me to stay positive and not to listen to my public pretender: He worked for the system, not really for me. I listened to Tyson and disregarded the negative words of my public pretender.
One day Tyson even dragged me to Bible study.
“Today is your lucky day, nigga,” he said.
“Why?” I asked him.
“The pastor brought his wife and she’s doing her pen pal service again.”
“What’s that for?” I asked as we walked.
“Every year they pick about fifteen inmates. And members of her women’s group at her church write us back and forth.”
He was all excited, like that was such a big deal.
“Yeah, you making that face, but niggas in here would kill to know they had a person who was guaranteed to write them. And that ain’t all!” He lowered his voice. “If you get one of them old bitches, they like to put money on your books. What I always tell you? Let that thug in you out!”
I laughed.
“Man. Last year I couldn’t get on the list! I was pissed because that nigga Dey Dey had just got out the SHU and he happened to go to Bible study on the right day and the pastor’s wife was there. Man, he had this lady writing his ass and putting two hundred dollars at a time on his books!”
Tyson imitated a lady’s face with no teeth. “Here’s some money to help you out, baby. The lord told me you needed some zus-zus and wham-whams.”
I laughed again. Zus-zus and wham-whams was a term for different kinds of snacks.
“Chance, don’t tell me you couldn’t use a package in this bitch. I get tired of eating the same nasty shit. All I do is sit and think about all the times I wasted food and wished I could get that shit back now.”
He was right. My mother was able to put a few dollars on my books, but not often. I used that money to buy myself stamps, paper, and envelopes. There was often very little for much else. Calhoun had been promising to put some money on my books, but I knew he was always broke so I didn’t expect it. I just appreciated the fact that he was still coming to visit me and he would even write me.
“But you got juice with the guards,” I told him. Juice meant that you had gotten on the prison guards’ good side and they liked you as well as looked out for you.
“I don’t fuck with them like that. I’ll be respectful but that about it. I don’t want them thinking I’m gonna tell them shit or do shit for them. Man, you know snitches get stitches!” He swung and softly connected with my chin.
I jabbed him in his stomach.
“Plus, it don’t look good to the inmates when you chummy with the staff.”
I nodded and followed behind him.
“Man, I want a fucking TV, some Pepperidge Farm cookies. And one of them hams!”
I cracked up laughing.
He went on. “I need some better shower shoes, nigga, some shea butter lotion, some books and CDs! We can get all that stuff.”
I shook my head at him, skeptical. “They can’t send that stuff to us.”
“Chance, there’s a website for all that shit! All the little old ladies have to do is order it for us and they ship it straight to the prison.”
When we got to the room for Bible study, Tyson quickly sat down. I sat next to him.
The pastor, an older man tall in stature, stood next to this petite woman. She reminded me of Pam Grier. I may be young, but I watched old Pam Grier movies as a kid and even jacked off to them.
He looked good next to his wife. He was the same height and stature as me, with brown skin and a long beard. They were both graying, but I guess it didn’t bother either of them.
“Now, gentlemen, I’m going to leave Bible studies over to my wife.” He rubbed her back as he talked.
She smiled up at him.
They were in tune with each other.
It made me swallow and try to get the lump in my throat down. Seeing them together as the happy couple reminded me of Toi and what I wanted for us: To get married, have kids, and grow old together.
That wasn’t going to happen anymore. Not with her, and from the looks of it not with anyone.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
“Evening, ma’am,” we all repeated in unison.
“Shit, I’ll take her,” Tyson whispered. “She finer than a mufucka.”
I jabbed him in his stomach with my elbow, lightly.
Once the prayer started he stopped messing around.
He even grabbed my hand in his. I could tell that even though he played around a lot, his faith wasn’t a joke to him.
Once the prayer was done, th
e lady clasped her hands together and said, “Well, today is your lucky day, gentlemen. I have about fifteen spots open for my pen pal group.” She went to a table and grabbed some pieces of paper and pencils.
“Now I’m going to give you paper and a pencil, so go ahead and write something about yourself. Please refrain from cursing or talking about sex, drugs or violence. I will review them and submit to the ladies of my charity group and you should be hearing from them shortly.”
When she passed the paper to me I didn’t know what to write. I sat and thought for a moment. Under normal circumstances, I would be proud to write about who I was. But now things were very different.
So I kept it brief. Tyson had a hell of a lot to write. I watch his pencil brush over the lines on the paper. He ended up with a whole page to my four lines. I simply put my name, age, and what I did before I was incarcerated. I figured there was no need for me to put what I was in jail for because it wasn’t like we planned on meeting face-to-face or anything. And plus, whoever this lady was, she knew I was in jail and that I had broken a crime, supposedly. To tell the truth, I didn’t really care about doing the shit, anyway.
“Okay, gentlemen. Time’s up,” she announced, clasping her hands together.
She went around collecting the papers. When she got to Tyson, she patted him on his back.
“And how are you this week, young man?” she asked, giving him a soft smile and taking his paper.
“I’m good, ma’am. Just hanging in there, reading the good word every chance I get.”
He did read the Bible sometimes, but he was laying it on pretty thick.
Her smile got wider. “Well, it’s good that you are always in such good spirits and that you study the Bible in your free time. A lot of men in here could learn from you.”
She turned her attention to me and collected my paper. “You must be new to our study group.”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I hope you come back. You might get something helpful out of it.”
I nodded, although I didn’t plan on coming back.
She counted all the papers and then counted the inmates.
Thug in Me Page 7