The blocks were released half at a time. It was a pretty low-impact protest, yet by the time I picked up my tray, I was nervous. Where generally chow was a hundred men or more sitting four to a table eating, there were maybe a dozen in the entire room. I walked past my usual seat and set the tray on the shelf for the porter to dump it all into the trash. It was a small act but I felt a rush of adrenaline all the same.
There was a space between us all, a chasm separating the men who had eaten their tacos and beans and those of us who hadn’t. They had their excuses: They were getting paroled soon. They were too hungry. They couldn’t get another misconduct ticket. There are always excuses, but what it really came down to was fear. I did it. Mo did it. Slim and Pete did not, and if the nonprotesters fit any sort of common profile, it was this: the biggest talkers, the ones who could go on and on about who was full of shit, how crappy the food was, how inhumane the cells were—they were the ones who were afraid. It was hard for me to feel too superior though, knowing that my future included skipping out on my debt with a trip to the hole.
The next day everyone ate lunch and dinner as usual. There were twice as many COs in the chow hall, all packing Tasers, and many looked disappointed that we were behaved. They were no doubt jacked up from the powwow with the warden they had at the start of their shift. The Tasers, bright yellow and black striped like a bumblebee, fit snugly in plastic holders attached to their belts. All of them kept a hand at their hip, ready for action that, at least that day, never came.
Mo and I walked outside the chow hall. A man named Tony caught up with me on the sidewalk. I had never said more than two words to Tony before, so I knew what it was about. “You owe a lot,” he said. “Some people want to know, the fuck you plan to do?” He was from Sweden or Norway—someplace cold like that, had been down for over thirty years. He had an accent and could hardly say a sentence without a few fucks thrown in.
“I’m good,” I said. “Next store. Plus I just got a new motor and a lot of tattoos lined up.”
“How about you give them something right now, so you won’t fucking lock up? Your TV, maybe.”
We walked slowly toward the cellblocks. It was December—cold, but the sun was out, bright and crisp. “No,” I said. Mo was walking to my left, his hand on the bandage on his head as if it was suddenly hurting. I could feel him moving away from us. “I don’t owe you anything, Tony. I don’t even know why you’re involved.”
“I’m like a fucking bank,” he said. “Sometimes a bank will, you know, consolidate loans and make some fucking money on the payment.” He twisted a Velcro-banded watch around his wrist, then smiled slightly. “I know you’re good. Next store, huh?” He spit on the sidewalk, as if it was the official end to what he had to say, then caught up with a group of guys—nonsmoking thugs, no doubt.
“What’s his deal?” Mo asked.
“You’re just lucky you don’t smoke,” I said. “I should have fucking punched him. I’d be out of this whole deal, on my way to the hole.”
“It’s that easy, huh?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’d be in the hole for a while, but they’d probably put me right back here.”
“You got the money to pay them?”
“No.”
“That’s all right, man. We’ve all got secrets. I don’t really have seizures either. I just like the Depakote. They give me Tegretol, too, but I sell those. Some guys like to snort them. Soon as I heard they give out meds, I got the idea to fall down and shake like a poisoned rat. I do that every now and then and nobody asks any questions. Sometimes I’ll slip half an Alka-Seltzer in my mouth and spit foam everywhere.”
We walked up the stairs in I-Block, up to the third floor, then down the hall to the cells. I asked him how badly he had been burned.
“I need a couple more skin grafts. It basically burned off half of my head. We were using naphtha on a Coleman stove and when it went up, it was like the inside of that Lincoln was napalmed. It burned for a long time. You think time in prison is slow, try setting yourself on fire, then see how slow time passes.”
Everyone was back in their cells, but Mo and I stood talking through the bars. He said he couldn’t explain what it was like in that Lincoln when it all went to hell and his friend was in the back, screaming, and all he could do was flop out onto the parking lot and try to put himself out. Worse than his friend screaming was when the firemen pulled the body out while the paramedics went about stabilizing Mo. What was left was steaming, shrunken, and charred like a log from a doused bonfire.
He had been charged with negligent homicide and about a dozen drug charges and danger to society felonies. He denied responsibility for the death, though. His friend had been aware of the risk. This may have been true, but in the end, it was only an excuse. I didn’t try to argue with him, get him to see how he may have been just a little responsible for the trouble he found himself in. Just like everyone else in here, he had a right to be wrong. He would change, or he wouldn’t. Some men never do. They spend the rest of their lives denying the truth, protecting the illusions that protect them from their past.
The two of us just stood there awhile. It is hard to explain what standing near Mo felt like to me. He had a kind of knowledge no one really wants to come by honestly, because it involves unimaginable loss. He had literally been to hell and back, and part of him knew it. Someone like that—someone who has had layers burned away to reveal something essential—is worth knowing.
The laundry porters began handing back our clean clothes in our laundry bags. They were whispering to everyone that tomorrow afternoon’s yard was going to be a silent protest. We were going to walk around and around the track in a group very slowly. I didn’t really understand the point, but we would at least let them know we could push back. We hadn’t done anything wrong, yet were being punished as if we had. And all this time, the idiot who had done something wrong wasn’t even here any longer.
Word got around that about half of the men—Slim and Pete included—weren’t going to do anything but stay in their cells during the afternoon yard. I was going, of course. I didn’t know how it would play out, but I figured I could be on my way out of here somehow. I picked up my little stack of business cards, reached around the cell, and set them on the flat, horizontal slats outside Mo’s door. “Mo,” I said. “Keep these. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“I’m sure you will,” he said. Though he seemed to know tomorrow would be it for me, he didn’t seem to understand that we probably would never see each other again. I’d been around long enough to know better—when someone was gone, they were gone for good.
It hadn’t snowed at all in Michigan that winter, except for a few flurries around Thanksgiving. But it snowed that night, all night, as I sat by the window rolling the last of my tobacco. When I thought about it, I would miss rolling cigarettes most of all. Maybe more than the actual smoking. There was something in the ritual of it, the shredding of the long strands into smaller pieces, and that smell—the damp grass and the freshly plowed field—it was soothing and slow, a throwback to a simpler time, with simpler pleasures.
I smoked in relative silence. Slim talked a little bit in his sleep, and I could hear Mo snoring in the next cell. I watched the fat snowflakes fall through the brightness of the lights outside. I smoked the cigarettes as far down as I could, often singeing the ends of my fingers, an easier pain, I thought, than the pain of quitting. I wanted it to hurt, that way it would be easier to remember.
* * *
Only a hundred of us went out to the yard that day. Usually there were three times that. We all just gathered in a loose group—like those strange flocks of birds that come together and become one—and we walked very slowly around the quarter-mile asphalt track. There was much whispering going on above the soft rustle of our state-issued shoes on the blacktop.
The large yard is an acre of flat ground set outward from the two five-story cellblocks. There were a dozen or so concrete benches on the edge of t
he track and five chin-up bars, two basketball courts, and opposite those, two dozen phones. There were tables, too, where men played cards and dominoes and were warned via stenciled messages on the tabletops not to sit on the actual table or to stand anywhere around them.
After we’d been walking for ten minutes, two more men with guns appeared on the roof of the blocks. A tall captain in a black, knee-length MDOC coat came out and walked beside the group. “Look,” he said, “I know we’ve got things we need to talk about, and we will, but you guys need to disperse. We’ll work something out.” No one said anything, though, because no one knew anything. We didn’t have a spokesman or a list of demands.
The captain went back into the building and four more men with guns appeared on the roof, one of them with a large-bore shotgun. A new guard on the ground had a bolt of zip-tie handcuffs strapped across his chest like a bandolier. Mo walked next to me silently. All of the guns made me nervous. A long line of COs began spacing themselves on the ground about twenty feet outside the bordering fence, the bright yellow of their Tasers glowing against the drab gray of their uniforms.
And then she was there. The warden, who someone had said was on vacation, had apparently been called in. She was a fifty-something black woman dressed more for spring than winter in an aqua-colored sundress and matching blue pumps. She was a classy lady I’d seen around a few times. Today, though, she had her left arm in a sling. Her fingers stuck out of the end and looked swollen the closer she got to us—like large, spoiling sausages.
Just outside the yard, there was a brick, octagonal chapel with a tall, nondenominational, steeple-like structure on top, and past that, a long, fading white brick wall. Five armed guards now stood on top of that wall.
The warden walked briskly to the group as we passed through the shadow of J-Block. She stood, flanked by four COs, to the side of us. “I’m giving you one warning,” she said. “Break up.” We kept walking, and when we made it back around to the shadowed area ten minutes later, she began demanding men’s prison IDs, and the guys in front reached into their pockets to comply.
Mo elbowed me. “Showtime,” he whispered, then popped something white into his mouth. He stepped out of the crowd and fell to the ground, shaking violently on his stomach. Everyone backed away and a CO kneeled down and shifted him onto his back, and I could see the sizzling foam around Mo’s lips. Before anyone knew what was happening, before I even knew what I was doing, I took two steps and reached down to the yellow and black stripes at the CO’s belt, ripping the Taser right out of his holster.
I leveled it at the warden and squeezed. There was a kick, like that of a handgun, as the tiny explosive launched the sharp probes. I saw the warden freeze, eyes skyward, and drop like a dead tree to the cold ground just before I did the same, stuck by several of those same electric fires in my back. It was like lightning passing throughout my body. It seemed to last forever the way it traveled down my hands, reaching through my fingertips, the current running through me, trying to find its way out.
BROTHER GOOSE
* * *
A kid told me, as we walked the small yard of Level 4, that he saw a bird land on razor wire once, causing its feet to bleed. The stuff is that sharp, he said. It isn’t true, of course. I see sparrows land on the sharp edges often, though I can’t see them do it now without imagining their tiny claws with surgically precise injuries, the width of paper cuts.
Razor wire is like Slinkys for masochistic giants that sit atop every fence, doubled up on buildings and the ground. It’s sometimes called “concertina.” I don’t know why. That sounds like a twenty-dollar cocktail at Lincoln Center before the Prokofiev premiere—the opposite of what we are supposed to believe this stuff will do to flesh.
I have seen plastic bottles and empty coffee bags impaled permanently on the regularly spaced spikes that are meant to snag the clothing of anyone intent on slinking through. The containers remain there, empty—warning flags fading and flapping over the years.
At a prison in Muskegon, a man decided to slink out. It was the middle of the day, and even if he had gotten through, he was nowhere near an actual exit, though to the law there wouldn’t be any difference. Attempted escape to nowhere will still get you five more years. There was new snow on the ground. I didn’t see the actual attempt, but I saw his handcuffed hands as they brought him past some of us gathered, smoking, and they dripped a constant red trail across the white sidewalk, as if marking the way back home in some dark fairy tale. The trail disappeared in minutes under new snow.
At a neighboring prison, two men hijacked a garbage truck using homemade pepper spray and tried driving through the fence, but the wire got ahold of one man’s clothes, shredding his arm like red cabbage for coleslaw. The longer some are here, the more they believe that there are ways around that ribbony razorness. If the person is thin enough and lithe enough, can he not slip through the football-shape space of the extended wire—which, incidentally, is more like the thin ribbons trailing the handlebars of childhood bicycles than wire? Or wrap himself in cardboard and layers of clothing as a shield. The wire is only sharp if you touch it, and the longer some study it, the more they believe it won’t touch them.
But what is the goose’s excuse? He came from the outside in. One minute he was grazing casually with his southward-traveling gaggle on the grassy hill across the road, and the next lying partially shaved on the yard, flapping, spraying goose blood.
I was on top of my bunk, after dinner. I thought that maybe one of the greyhounds in the prison dog program—as fast as horses—had broken free of her handler with the leash and run the goose down. Then I saw an inmate in the cautious circle around the injured bird point to a downy remnant snagged like an old pillow on the wire. The goose would flap, turning in a tight circle, then quit, the circle of men widening and then closing in again. In a few minutes, he lay still. A CO brought a large gray Inedible barrel from the kitchen, and an inmate picked the bird up by his feet, dropping him in. Then he wiped his hands on a nearby patch of grass.
For days afterward, the passing dogs were drawn to the bloody grass like metal to a magnet, until a good cold rain washed it all away.
The geese on the hill are gone now, down south where it’s warm. They talk quietly to one another about the gander they lost, who thought he could make it through, who didn’t believe what everyone had told him about the razor wire. There’s always one, they probably say, shaking their heads in sympathetic disbelief. There is always one. And then they shiver slightly—though it’s warm out—remembering the sound their brother made as he bled to death in that other world.
ENGULFED
* * *
When fucked-up people end up inside they can be whoever they want. A crackhead becomes a former high-class pimp. A tax evader was a master forger and poker champ. There are PGA golfers and NASCAR drivers, CEOs, billiards pros, and drug kingpins who were probably only street-level pushers. There was a pedophile who said he used to be a porn star named Double Deuce Domino. A lot of them were rich—some from old family money, some won the lottery. And not just a few thousand from the scratch-offs, but Powerball millions. One man swore Perry Mason was his old attorney, and it was his case that made him famous enough to land the TV show. It goes on and on: war heroes, doctors, authors, rock stars, a lot of jet-setting playboys, a man who said he wrote several episodes of Seinfeld though he was barely smart enough to tie his own shoes.
* * *
This is who I was. On the outside, I’d focus on a neighborhood for a month, breaking into a few houses, causing a localized panic, then I’d go around selling phony home security contracts. This is how I learned to lie, how I learned to live in a world made by the mind—not a life of the mind, but by the mind. The way God did it.
A lie is in the details. It’s in the American-made midsize rental car with the magnetic “Max Steele Security” sign stuck to the door. It’s in the khaki slacks, the knit polo shirts with the embroidered “MSS” above the heart, an
d the ostrich-skin Dunhill briefcase I stole from a home outside of Philly. It was in the three levels of security systems I offered, and in the white granite Montblanc pen I put in each quivering, homeowning hand to sign the check for the deposit and the first month’s fees.
Most people on the outside are liars too. They slept with umpteen women before they were eighteen, they were homecoming queen, they were accepted to the Ivy League but decided against it. They say things were better way back when. They say they’ll love you forever. They go to a bank and buy whole lives they can’t afford. The entire economy is part of a world of lies, and prison is just a city in that world. A city of lies.
* * *
Our cells were two-man and I’d had the same bunkie for a year. His name was Tim and he liked to gamble. But when he got too far in, when he owed too much to the wrong people, he “locked up,” which means he wrote a letter to a CO saying he was in fear for his life. If you write it, they have to believe it. So they put him in protective custody, eventually moving him to another joint. I still miss Tim.
Then there was Richard, who shaved his head every day. He’d been here just forty-eight hours and we were in the lunch line awaiting fish. The chow hall smelled like high tide. He turned around and said, “The air tastes funny,” then dropped dead right there. What could we do? We all went ahead and ate.
Malcolm was next. A dead ringer for a young Charles Manson. Somebody split his head open with a sock full of batteries because he tried to steal someone’s boyfriend.
Jo July lasted a week before he made an assaultive comment to a large, female staffer. He cornered her outside the staff restroom, asked if he could go in and take a deep whiff of the toilet seat she’d just sat on.
Brian moved in an hour after Jo left. For a week he said absolutely nothing, then one day he sat calmly at the desk and began eating envelopes until the inside of his mouth was pasty and bloody. So they shipped him to Huron Valley, where the bugs go.
The Graybar Hotel Page 12