by Scott Pratt
“You’re as tough as they come. I’ve always known that. I want you to know I e-mailed every representative and senator in the United States Congress and told them about what happened to you. I’ve been absolutely raising hell.”
“Every member of the US Congress? How many is that?”
“Four hundred and thirty-five in the House and a hundred in the Senate. Took me a long time.”
“You’re a nut, Mom.”
“Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned,” she said.
We talked for a short time about how things were going at her beauty salon and about the progress of my appeal. I knew I couldn’t keep the phone for long, though, because there were guys behind me waiting, and staying on the phone too long was considered a serious breach of prison inmate etiquette. Talking an extra ten minutes could get you shanked.
“Listen, Mom,” I said, “there’s a line behind me so I can’t talk long, but Grace told me you got some visitation with Sean a couple of times a month on Saturday. Is he there?”
“He is,” she said, and I felt a lump in my throat. “He’s up in his room building something with Legos.”
“Does he know where I am?”
“He doesn’t know you’re in Atlanta, but Katie told him you killed somebody and are in prison. She told him you’re never coming home.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said. “How did he take it?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there when she told him, but he was pretty matter-of-fact about it when he told me. You know how kids are.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him his mother was entitled to her opinion.”
“Did you tell him I’m coming home?”
“I let it go, Darren. We just don’t talk about it. He’s only here for a day every two weeks. I just try to make sure he has fun. I’m walking into his room now. Sean? There’s someone on the phone who would like to talk to you.”
I heard Sean say, “Who is it?” I heard some rattling, and then I heard breathing.
“Hello?” his little high-pitched voice said.
I bit my lip as tears burned my eyes.
“Hello?” he said again.
“Hey, little man. Do you know who this is?”
“Dad? Dad?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. It’s so good to hear your voice.”
I could no longer see the phone in front of me because my eyes were filled with tears. They started pouring down my cheeks, and my nose started running. I was telling myself to keep my composure, but the sound of his sweet voice triggered a longing in me that went to my core.
“Mom said you killed a man and got in a lot of trouble and they put you in jail and that you’re never coming back, but Grandma says they put you in jail by mistake and that pretty soon they’re going to let you out and you can come home. I told Mom you were going to come home, but she just laughed and said Grandma isn’t telling me the truth, but I think I’m going to believe Grandma because I want you to come home because I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, buddy.”
“Are you crying, Dad?”
“I’m just really glad to hear your voice. It’s been a long time since we got to talk.”
“I know. Are you going to come home soon?”
“I’m going to try. Listen, Sean, the people here won’t let me talk on the phone very long, but now that you’re getting to see your grandma again and now that they’re letting me use the phone a little, I’m going to call you every time you come to Grandma’s house, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“We’ll talk again soon, and I promise you I’m going to get home just as soon as I can.”
“Bye, Dad.”
“Bye.”
I hung up the phone and my legs failed me. I was sobbing as I dropped straight to my knees. Two inmates helped me up and gave up their place in line to help me to a chair in the dayroom.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I eventually made my way to the United States Penitentiary at Rosewood, California, via Con Air, also known as the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System. Typical fed name—long and nonsensical. If I hadn’t seen a jet in front of me when I first read the name on a shoulder patch one of the marshals was wearing, I would have thought I was about to be loaded onto a rocket and hauled off to an outer space penal colony.
When I walked onto the tarmac in Atlanta after having been given virtually no notice that I was leaving, eight US Marshals armed with assault rifles surrounded a Boeing 747. Every prisoner—there were about sixty of us—was cuffed and shackled. I, of course, was also fitted with the black box between my wrists that I’d grown to hate so much during diesel therapy. Other guys had black boxes, too, guys who, like me, were ultimately headed to a maximum security prison. I even saw a couple of guys who were wearing some kind of mesh mittens and others who had thin bags over their heads. The bags meant that at some point, those inmates had spit on a guard or a marshal. One guy—and I don’t know who he was—had what looked like a hockey mask over his face. The rumor later floated on the plane was that he was headed to the super max in Florence, Colorado.
There were another fifty or sixty inmates already on the plane when I boarded. We took off, and two and a half hours later landed at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, which was unique in that it had its very own runway. A Jetway came out of the prison straight to the plane; our feet never touched the ground. The transfer center was a place where nearly every inmate in the federal system passes through for processing. I thought it and Atlanta were redundant, but I was quickly learning that redundancy was one of the things the feds did best. We were herded into holding cells and eventually called out, strip-searched, and processed into one of the housing units. I spent two weeks there on the third floor. It was relatively clean and the food was surprisingly good. Compared to Atlanta and most of the county jails I’d been in, the place was a paradise.
From Oklahoma City, I took another Con Air flight to San Francisco and then a bus to Rosewood, where they strip-searched me, of course, and then processed me. I went through medical and social screening, set up a commissary account, established a phone list and visitor’s list, met the bureaucrats who worked in the unit—unit manager, case manager, counselor, education adviser. Finally, after a few days in holding, I was assigned a cell in one of the four housing units on the compound. It was early afternoon when I was escorted onto the block, which consisted of eighty cells on two levels, was shaped like a trapezoid, and was supposed to be my home for the next twenty years or more. My cell, number seventy-six in A block of the Jefferson unit, was on the upper level. The block, which was clean and shiny and smelled like antiseptic, was almost empty because most of the inmates were either at their jobs or out on the recreation yard. I dropped my bedroll and extra clothing (the feds outfit inmates in khakis) off at the cell, which was spotless and orderly, and went in search of Mike “Big Pappy” Donovan.
I’d been told by the unit manager that Big Pappy would be waiting for me in his cell, which was number thirty-five, almost directly below mine. I walked up to the open cell door and knocked.
“Come on in,” a baritone voice with a Midwestern accent said.
Pappy was sitting at a small shelf attached to his wall that served as a desk. He stood when I walked into the cell, and I immediately understood why they called him Big Pappy. The man was massive: my guess was six feet seven inches and maybe 275 pounds of bone and muscle. He was younger than I thought he’d be, maybe thirty-eight. His khaki shirt was short-sleeved, but his tattoos ran all the way down both arms to his hands. His neck was also covered in tattoos, and I had no doubt his back and chest would look the same. His hair was shoulder-length and black, pulled into a ponytail. His eyes were a chocolate brown and, at the moment, lo
oked genuinely friendly.
“You must be Darren Street,” he said as he stuck out his hand, which I took.
“And you must be Big Pappy.”
“Welcome to Rosewood.”
“Thank you, I guess.”
He motioned toward the chair he had vacated.
“Take a seat,” he said, and he moved over and sat on the bottom bunk. “So I’m the shot caller for the Independent White Boy car here at Rosewood. I’m told you don’t want to gang bang, so that puts you in my car since you’re white. You cool with that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Everybody’s got a choice. You could refuse to get in my car, but then you’re out there on the street all alone surrounded by some of the most dangerous predators you’re ever going to run across. You won’t last long.”
“So what are my responsibilities to the . . . to the group?”
“All you really have to do is be loyal to your brothers,” he said. “And when I say brothers, I mean other white guys in this prison who, like you, want to do their time with as little trouble as possible. What does loyalty include? A lot of simple things, but the most important thing is that you have to be willing to fight if it comes down to it. Our car is the biggest in this prison. About sixty percent of the inmates here are white, and most of the white guys who come here don’t want to bang because the bangers are crazy. They get in little skirmishes over turf all the time, and the next thing you know the skirmish turns into a war and there’s blood on the yard. If you have a beef with a banger—whether he’s white, black, or Mexican—you come to me. I’ll work it out. If I can’t work it out, then something’s going to go down and you have to be willing to be in the middle of it. If you’re not willing, if we can’t count on you and you pussy out, you’ll answer to me personally. The bangers know we outnumber them and they know we’ll spill blood if we absolutely have to. That’s what keeps things peaceful most of the time. Being willing to shed blood makes us safe.”
“Sounds like war propaganda to me,” I said. “You should be a recruiter for the marines.”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “It is what it is, man,” he said. “They tell me you’re a lawyer.”
“Yeah, well, I used to be a lawyer,” I said. “What else did they tell you?”
“That you got a life sentence for murdering a dude who deserved to be murdered, but you say you didn’t do it. That you got dieseled for three months because some fed doesn’t like you or because you put in some work on the guards in Tennessee. How am I doing so far?”
“Pretty good, actually.”
“Remember this. There are no secrets in prison. You know my background?”
“I heard you were the shot caller here when I was still in Atlanta. And my understanding of shot caller is that you represent your group in the political structure of the prison. You’re the leader. You deal with shot callers from other cars, from gangs, and you negotiate with the guards and the bureaucrats occasionally. Is that basically what you do?”
“I kick some ass once in a while.”
“Is that how you became a shot caller in the first place?”
He nodded. “You know that work you put in on the guards in county? I did the same thing when I first came into the federal system. It cost me two years in the hole. Two entire years, locked down twenty-three hours a day. Then I did a little work on a couple more guards about a year after they let me out of the hole. Wound up at Marion in the super max for three years.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Nah, I didn’t even stab them. But I hurt them all pretty bad. Broke one guy’s jaw and nose and broke another guy’s leg. Assholes deserved it, too. The super max was bad, though. I don’t plan to mess with the guards anymore, but they don’t know that. They keep their distance.”
“So you’re the shot caller because of what you’ve done in the past.”
“It’s a respect thing,” Big Pappy said. “Respect is the most important commodity in prison, and I’m not talking about respect from the guards. Respect from other inmates is what will keep you alive.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I keep hearing. How long have you been in?”
“I’m in my eleventh year of a thirty-five-year sentence.”
“I was told drugs?”
“Coke.”
“Were you guilty?”
“Absolutely not. Set up by a crooked cop, hired an idiot for a lawyer, and here I am. I’ve pretty much exhausted the appeals process, which is something I want to talk to you about as soon as you get settled in. Are you planning to set up shop in the law library?”
“If they’ll let me.”
“They’ll let you,” he said, “and so will I. I won’t even ask for a cut, on one condition.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Your first client has to be me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
My new cellmate was a short, skinny, acne-scarred white guy named Dino Long. All I knew about him before I walked into the cell was what I’d been told by the unit manager and the unit counselor. The feds tried to match people up as best they could so they didn’t have serious problems in the cells, but they never knew for sure. They told me Dino Long was a little strange but was considered to be an “okay guy.” Like more than half of the inmates at the prison, he had been convicted of a nonviolent drug offense, but he was in max because he was on the front end of a thirty-year sentence. He worked in the kitchen and had been at Rosewood for only six months. They told me his previous cellmate had suffered a massive stroke and had been transferred to another prison with a better rehab facility. Dino hadn’t been in the cell when I went downstairs to talk to Big Pappy, but when I came back, he was sitting at the little desk, writing on a piece of notebook paper with a pencil. He didn’t look up or acknowledge that I’d walked into the cell, so I started unrolling my bedroll.
“Don’t ever touch my stuff,” he said a few minutes later.
I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him. I thought I’d probably have to fight him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was still writing.
“I’m not planning to touch your stuff,” I said.
“I’m a firm believer in the power of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.”
“Good for you.”
“Are you religious?”
“No.”
“Your loss,” Dino said. “Are you tough? I’ve heard you’re a tough guy.”
“Yeah? Who told you that?”
“A fairy.”
“I’m not a tough guy, and I’m not looking for trouble. I just want to get the hell out of here as soon as I can.”
“I thought you had a life sentence.”
“Good God,” I said, “this place is like a sewing circle. You guys know more about me than I know about myself.”
“And you’re a lawyer, right? They told me you’re a lawyer. Should I call you counselor?”
“You should call me Darren. And I should call you?”
“Dino.”
“Dino. Good. Okay. Yes, I was a lawyer on the outside, which seems to be the first thing everybody wants to talk about, but I—”
“The psychologist here thinks I’m mentally ill,” he said. “Not bad enough to be institutionalized or anything, not bad enough to be dangerous to other people, but he thinks I’m bipolar and I might be a danger to myself. He says that’s why I snorted so much cocaine, to self-medicate, you know? And that’s why I started selling it the way I did. It wasn’t really my fault that I lived in a big city and had some friends in Miami who could get kilos for me and that I knew a bunch of people who could distribute for me because I went to college and liked to party. Do you think something like that would be my fault?”
“Something like what?” I said.
“Like being born rich in
Pittsburgh and going to Carnegie-Mellon and knowing people in Miami who could get kilos for me. Is that my fault?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about choices and responsibilities with him. He was talking fast and his voice sounded like it was cracking. Lecturing or judging him just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do at the time.
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“My parents are extremely disappointed in me,” he said. “The feds seized every dime I had as soon as they arrested me, so my parents wound up paying a lawyer a hundred thousand dollars for my defense. Can you believe that? A hundred thousand dollars. And I was guilty as sin and I knew it, but I lied and told them I hadn’t done anything and that I was being framed, and they paid this lawyer and we went to trial, and after the jury found me guilty the judge hammered me.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, hoping he would stop.
He spun around on the concrete stool that served as a chair and looked at me. His hair was light brown and his eyes light green and forlorn. He looked at me intensely for what seemed like forever, as though he was studying me.
“What kind of person are you?” he finally said.
I shook my head. “That’s a strange question,” I said. “I guess I don’t really know for sure. I think I’m a good person. I try to be a good person.”
“Are you hateful? Are you judgmental?”
“I don’t think so. It’d be pretty difficult to be hateful and judgmental and practice criminal defense law, which is what I did for a living before I wound up here.”
“My last cell mate was disgusting,” he said. “He was old and bigoted and narrow-minded and I’m glad he stroked out like he did. He deserved it.”
“No offense,” I said. “But for somebody who’s concerned about me being judgmental, you sound like a—”
“Do you know what pushed him over the edge?” Dino said. “The thing that made him have a stroke?”
“No idea.”
“We were right here, talking just the way you and I are talking right now. He was standing where you’re standing and I was sitting just like I am now. He was ranting and raving about his faggot son, and I said, ‘Do you know that bisexual men and women are far more likely to have gay sons or lesbian daughters than straight people? Is there a chance you might be bisexual?’ I have no idea whether what I said to him is true, but it absolutely freaked him out. He turned pink and took a step toward me and raised his fist. And then I said, ‘And guess what, big boy? You’ve been rooming with a fag for the past five months.’ Next thing I knew he was jerking on the floor like a chicken with its head cut off.”