Our block had seen an ever-increasing list of casualties and vanishings due to the rationing. Maurice replaced a thin, white man named Doo-Wop, a lifelong smoker who by November found himself deep in debt. By then we could buy just a single two-ounce pouch of Bugler a week. But Doo-Wop hadn’t cut back his smoking at all, buying pouches inflated at ten times the normal $2.50. The nonsmokers had banded together to form a brutal black market. Debt-laden addicts were regularly beaten up by clean-lunged thugs.
The nonsmokers let Doo-Wop run up his bill because they knew he was good for it. He’d been in the same cell, at the same kitchen job for a decade. You could ask anybody and they’d tell you, Doo-Wop is an old-school convict—a stand-up guy, his word gold. But two nights ago he locked up, which means he walked up to a CO and said, I owe a bunch of money and I’m afraid. After that they have to protect you. They put you in the hole until a bed is found at another prison. Slim said, “At least he’s stopped smoking now.” It was true, but inside I shuddered to think about quitting cold turkey down in segregation.
As for me, I owed $150, but I was paying it down steady with my hustle: tattoos and hand-painted cards. This was the boom time of year too—Christmas cards. My most popular card this year sold for $2. It was Snoopy wearing a glittery Santa suit with an armful of gifts and Woodstock perched on his shoulder. I’d been drawing Peanuts characters since grade school.
I’d invested twenty dollars in supplies from a mail-order catalog: card stock, glitter, paint, and glue. I figured I could triple that easily over the season, then buy some more Badger calligraphy ink for tattoos and be out of debt by spring. Badger was the only ink we could get, and it was decent but expensive. I’d tried other options on myself—ink from a Bic, a needle through typewriter ribbon, and acrylic paint that my skin rejected in painful, itchy welts. I had been out of Badger for a month, and the best thing I’d come up with since was burning bergamot hair grease inside my locker, letting the threads of black smoke rise and collect into a thick, oily soot that I mixed with spit until it was the consistency of used motor oil.
I had made enough of this for Homer’s tattoo when Slim—my bunkie and lookout—said someone was coming down the hall with his duffel bag. “And his head’s wrapped in something,” he said.
“Like a turban?” Homer asked. He’d just told me he wanted a “131/2” on his left arm. 131/2 is code for an inmate who had twelve fuckhead jurors, one shithead judge, and a half-assed defense attorney, adding up to a life sentence. I know for a fact Homer never had a trial—he’d taken a plea deal for operating a meth lab. But I’m not in a position to do background checks for tattoos. I owed Homer twenty-five dollars for one pouch of Bugler and the “131/2” was going to wipe my slate clean. With him, anyway.
Slim didn’t answer. He just told us to be quiet and I shut off the cassette motor that powered my needle. The man who passed looked like just another inmate to me. I noticed his head, though. It was wrapped in white gauze with a few inches of afro sticking out of the gaps. “Hey,” Slim said. “What happened to your head?”
“Burned.” His cell door opened electronically.
“How do you burn your own head?”
I had seen a lot of men come to prison wrapped in gauze, but it was usually the hands wrapped up in thick white mittens, a mistake in a meth lab.
The new neighbor walked into his cell and didn’t say anything. “Chatty guy, ain’t he?” said Slim, before he walked next door. Our cells were open from 7:00 a.m. until 10:00 at night, a sort of pseudofreedom to make up for our lack of access to the yard outside.
The thing about homemade tattoo ink was that it kept clogging the Bic barrel. I had the standard setup: a motor stripped from a Walkman, cradled in a bent-up chow spork, connected to a guitar string threaded through the empty Bic. Just as good as anything on the outside. It only takes more time. We may not have much in here, but we’ve got plenty of time.
I had to blow out the clogged Bic barrel four times before I’d even finished the outline of Homer’s bogus number. Slim had come back by then and we all smoked. He told me the new guy’s name. Ten months ago Maurice and a friend had been in a ’78 Lincoln Continental transformed into a mobile drug lab cooking small batches of some new shit Slim could barely pronounce. It was flammable, of course, and between that and the propane stove they used, soon enough that Lincoln turned into an inferno. Mo had been taking a piss outside the door. His friend was in the backseat, dead.
“Burned while pissing,” I said, watching smoke rise from the end of my cigarette. Every time I smoked now I felt a pang of sadness. I tried to memorize every part of the experience, like a loved one I knew was going away. I focused on those thin, silky gray curves I’d never see again.
“Yeah. His forehead nearly melted off. And now he has seizures.” Slim took a deep drag then blew the smoke toward the exhaust vent above the stainless-steel toilet. “He said the blast cooked part of his brain.”
“What?”
“He takes some drug.” Slim yelled out into the hall, “Yo, Maurice, what’s that stuff you take?”
“Depakote,” came the answer.
The world of prison is upside down. Someone who had blown up his car while cooking drugs would probably be an outcast even in today’s shallow, do-nothing-and-become-famous culture, but in prison that guy will be someone of stature. Especially a high-profile case like Maurice’s. If your case makes the news, you’re a minor celebrity in here, an Arsenio Hall or Jon Lovitz.
It was nearly dinner and I had already smoked the ten cigarettes I allowed myself. I rolled two more for the night along with the ten for the next day. Maybe tomorrow I’d do better.
* * *
I’d been sleeping in later and later—mostly because it was a good way to keep from smoking. I woke from a dream where I was in the backseat of an old car, and in the front two men kept cooking something, filling bag after bag of tobacco, handing them back to me, where I hid them in my pants. I was only half awake when our cell door suddenly rolled shut, then all forty-four down the rock clanged shut too. Slim got up and held his mirror outside the bars to see what happened. “Something’s going on,” he said. “A fight or something.”
It was an art, the way he used that mirror. An average person couldn’t possibly do it—the slightest flick of the wrist moved the view out of the frame. You have to have a very steady hand, and even then it’s still tricky, like bringing in a distant TV station with the old rabbit ears antenna; it never came in perfectly, except by accident.
It was more than a fight, though, more than some smoker’s debt catching up to him. We didn’t know it until Pete, Maurice’s bunkie, was sent back early from his maintenance job. A gray-haired white man named Butch had apparently “beaten the brakes off” a CO named Lodge. It seemed strange to me—Lodge was smart and quiet, unlike the typical COs, who tended to be loud rednecks, unemployable anywhere else. When I thought of Lodge I thought only of the dry skin condition he had—flakes of dandruff coated the shoulders of his uniform like light dust. Butch had not only beaten him up, but was in the process of cracking his skull on the concrete floor like a hard-boiled egg when he was Tasered. “The whole place is locked down,” said Pete. “There’s blood all over the telephone room floor.”
The doors didn’t open again for two days. No one went anywhere, except kitchen workers who brought us our food in paper bags. Lodge didn’t die, but Channel 8 out of Grand Rapids said he had head injuries and would remain in the hospital under observation for at least another day. As further punishment, we all knew what was coming: our cells would be tossed, we just didn’t know when. I took apart my tattoo gun and stuck the motor back in the shell of the cassette player. I flushed the guitar-string needles and the ink-stained barrel of the Bic. And then we waited.
I expected the television to be turned off next. Though we pay for luxuries like cable through the Prisoner Benefit Fund, in the end it’s all controlled by the warden. Sure enough, that afternoon during a Sanford and Son
marathon, the screen went blank. I turned it off and leafed through a tattoo magazine. On the bunk below me, I heard Slim unscrew the cable on his television to maybe pick up a local station via his antenna made from a headphone wire. “PBS,” he said after a few minutes. “That’s something, anyway.”
Slim liked to talk about which era he would live in if given the choice. It was his go-to subject when he thought something needed to be said. Some people see silence as a space they’re responsible for filling, and Slim was one of those people. He had a salesman’s gift for talking, probably could have been a hell of a car salesman, had he not trained his talent on selling heroin.
His favorite era, I think, the one he talked about most anyway, was the prehistoric era, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. He wasn’t bothered by any logic in these daydreams—it made no difference that humans didn’t actually walk the planet back then, but he talked a lot about training the dinosaurs like horses and oxen, making the planet into his personal Eden, where he would grow crops and work on populating the world with a vast stable of Cro-Magnon wives.
This time he was talking about Bonnie and Clyde. “You know anything about them?” he said.
“A little,” I said. “I’ve seen the movie.”
“It was on last night,” he said. “I’d like to live when they lived, but not for the reason you’d think—not robbing banks and road trips and not getting caught or nothing. You know why?”
I didn’t.
“Because bras hadn’t been invented yet. All those women back then, they just flopped around. You think back then the women were all straitlaced, you know? But they were braless. And that Bonnie, she was a hot little number. Crazy.”
I knew he was thinking of Faye Dunaway. I couldn’t remember seeing a picture of the real Bonnie Parker, but I was certain she was no braless Faye Dunaway. It was a waste of breath to point out the problems in his fantasies, so I mostly tuned him out, went to my own dreams of the time I’d like to live in: the future. It was the only era that made sense to me. I knew all too much about the past. The past was the past, and all of it, as far as I was concerned, was a nightmare, nothing worth thinking about. But the future—there was hope in the future, there was the chance that things could be new and different.
A whole platoon of COs walked to the end of our hall, walkie-talkies squawking and chirping like robot birds. They emptied the last ten cells, led the inmates off somewhere, and began searching. They carried portable metal detectors and long sticks with mirrors on the end to look under and above everything. After fifteen minutes the first inmates were brought back, and the next ten, us, were led to B-Ward—an indoor gym area with tables and weight-lifting equipment.
It was my first real look at Maurice. The four of us sat around a table. He’d had a previous year most people couldn’t even imagine, thinking he was probably dead, hearing his friend burn to death, finding himself in prison for forty to sixty, essentially the rest of his life. I thought I could feel sedate pain permeating his every movement. He didn’t shift a hand from one spot of the table to another without thinking about it, as if he was afraid any move he made might lead to tragedy. He listened and smiled at Slim, holding forth on the braless women of the 1920s. Pete, Maurice’s bunkie, said Slim was full of shit. He said women had been wearing bras since the time of Columbus. “Isn’t that right, Mo?”
“I never gave it much thought,” he said.
“He’s no expert on the history of bras—and you sure as hell ain’t either,” said Slim. “I doubt you’ve even seen a bra.”
A couple of COs came through the door and one of them said, “Jenkins.” Mo stood up and walked over to them, showed them his ID, and then they put the cuffs on behind his back, leading him off.
“What the hell?” Pete asked us. “He never did anything but write some letters.”
I figured that was the last time I would ever see Mo. In my twenty years I had seen men, here one minute and gone an instant later, moved to one of Michigan’s forty different prisons. Some of those men I was happy never to see again, but not Mo. I had felt something around him—he was so fresh out of the oven of tragedy that he had something indefinable about him, some knowledge of another world. He was led out, and I silently wished him well.
When we returned to our cells, our thin blue-green mattresses were on the floor and there were papers everywhere. The Walkman where I kept my tattoo motor was gone. I had left it in plain sight on the table next to the door. There was no sense trying to hide it—I thought if I left it out in the open it wouldn’t look suspicious. But it was gone. I had bought it years ago for a bag of coffee.
I started picking up the scattered little squares of card stock that I’d turned into business cards:
PRISON INK
by Ollie Peacock
slinging ink and painting cards
since 1990
Slim was carrying on about some colored pencils that he couldn’t find. I had bigger problems. Without tattoos, there was no way to come up with the money I owed. My sight went dark for a second. I felt dizzy. I wanted to beat the shit out of that stupid bastard Butch for starting all of this. I wanted to beat the shit out of the COs that had taken my Walkman. I wanted to strangle the prick who had come up with the idea of removing tobacco from the prisons. Mostly though, I just wanted my motor back. I was on my hands and knees collecting these cards with my name on them, wishing I could just as easily put my life back together.
* * *
“I would like to live during Prohibition,” Slim said.
“That doesn’t make any damn sense,” I said. “Why would you want to live without alcohol?”
“That’s why—I’d make my own and be a gangster.”
“Do you even know how?”
The rock was quiet. It was nearly dinner and the cell searches had been over for hours. I explained to Slim what little I knew about fermentation and distillation. He listened quietly, asking questions now and then. I felt guilty—which happened every time I got tired of his dreams and interjected some reality. He would get quiet, almost submissive, and I would feel as if I had scolded a child or a shy puppy.
We were brought brown-bag dinners of bologna and cheese sandwiches, carrot sticks, and an oatmeal cookie. Someone yelled that the TVs were back on. It was a relief. As I switched channels I saw Mo pass, his bandaged head a white streak out the corner of my eye. “What happened?” I said.
“I was dumb,” he said. “I’d drawn a map to a friend, letting her know where I was. I didn’t even think.”
Mo had a friend from Kalamazoo, he said, a woman named Lorna who wrote him once a month. He had drawn a detailed map of the Michigan Reformatory—the yard, with its concrete benches, the line of phones and the basketball courts, the chapel and the chow hall, the gym and the gun towers, the ribbons of razor wire atop the fences, the octagonal rotunda, even the abandoned backstop from the baseball diamond that hadn’t seen action in twenty years—all culminating in a little x on the top bunk in 29.
He had stuck the map in a file folder until he could get some envelopes. The way he described the map, the time and details he’d invested in it, he wanted Lorna to know exactly where he was—literally, of course, but also in a deeper, unspoken way. His map, whether he realized it or not, was a love letter in code. He had spent hours on the details, and the long odds of the two of them ever getting together didn’t matter. It was just the idea of her knowing where he was. A sliver of hope in that knowing. The COs, of course, thought of it as escape plans.
“What’d you plead?” Slim asked.
“Stupidity,” he said. “I told them the truth.”
Slim looked at him with disgust, as if Mo had just said he was a pedophile. He couldn’t even consider that the truth was something a person might consider telling. Mo’s door opened. “They found me not guilty,” he said.
* * *
After a week of bag lunches, they let us walk down to the chow hall. The hallways were ankle-deep with trash, the windows
spotted with wads of wet toilet paper that had dried to a gray plaster. It was the standard result of a prolonged lockdown. When the porters had tried to clean the mess they had been pelted with insults and AA batteries, until the staff stopped sending them into the line of fire.
Other than chow, we weren’t allowed to go outside for yard until the second week of December. Besides being opened briefly to let us out for chow, the doors were closed at all times. Some legal-beagle inmates, who spent their time in the law library trying to convince themselves the answers were there, were all in an uproar about the prison taking away our constitutional rights without due process. Others said that we had no rights to open cell doors at all, so they hadn’t taken anything away. No one was happy, that was for sure.
I was drawing out possible tattoos for Mo, even though he knew I didn’t have a motor anymore. “Well, when you get one,” he’d said, “I want a flower or heart, something for the friends and family I’ve lost.” It was the day of the last commissary when we could still buy tobacco, and Mo gave me his pouch of Bugler. He didn’t smoke.
“I don’t know, Mo,” I said, as I had already planned on not paying my tobacco bill and was considering doing exactly what Doo-Wop had done. I couldn’t tell anyone, of course, but I couldn’t refuse Mo’s pouch of Bugler either. I figured I’d smoke like a king until the last and after that, I didn’t know.
The next day, via messages passed up and down the blocks, the inmates had agreed to protest our lockdown by picking up our chow trays like usual, then walking directly to the window near the exit and handing the untouched food to the dishwasher. It was a civilly disobedient act, but anything out of the norm could be considered inciting a riot, and then all bets were off. We’d enter a different dimension of prison life from there. This was no college campus sit-in. This was the real deal. And in a society where the warden was tasked with not losing control, that came with a nearly unlimited amount of power, including deadly force.
The Graybar Hotel Page 11