The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  My plan to fake a stroke after falling unconscious with an overdose of sleeping tablets turned out the same. Nada. I couldn’t get hold of any. In Los Teques you could get crack, cocaine, hash, guns, weapons and hookers. Anything under the sun, really, if you had the cash. For some reason, though, no one could get me half a dozen sleeping tablets. I figured that’d be enough to knock me out for a few hours and get carted off to hospital. In there I’d come through and disappear out a window on my way to Colombia with a new passport.

  It looked like I could scratch off getting out of Los Teques with a stroke. I got a bit down about it all, but there was nothing I could do.

  * * *

  A cop walked into the yard with la lista. The lags huddled around, wondering if they were going to the courts or, better, getting out. The agua then said something about Silvio I couldn’t make out.

  ‘Silvio, he will go free,’ said Vito, smiling, sitting on his bucket next to me wearing an Italian football top.

  ‘Wow.’ I stood up, went over and clapped Silvio on the back. ‘Great news.’

  ‘Yes, fantastic I tell you,’ he said.

  ‘When do you get out?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘That quick?’ I said, my voice raised a notch.

  ‘Yes, I get my things and go.’ In his eyes I could see the sparkle of a free man. We embraced and shook hands. ‘Paul, I’ll see you, see you in London,’ he said, our hands still locked.

  ‘Yes, Silvio,’ I said, ‘and I want free tickets to the best movies in town.’

  Billy shouted over. ‘Good luck, mama huevo,’ he said, laughing. Silvio then did the rounds, saying goodbye to all his compañeros. It was a strange feeling, saying goodbye to Silvio. He’d been a big part of my life in jail. Over the months we’d faced death twice in two shoot-outs, wondering whether we would get out alive to see our friends and family. Now he was leaving. I watched him walk off, then run to the wing door through a gauntlet of inmates lashing out with their legs, cheering and clapping. Even Carlos, Fidel and the other bosses came out to give him a boot. But it was all in good spirits. That was how they gave you a send-off in Los Teques – with a friendly kick up the arse.

  Silvio stooped down to fit out the wing door and disappeared into the passageway. I watched the door close behind him, wanting to be in his shoes. But my thoughts became clearer. Watching Silvio go free was proof you could get out. Liberty wasn’t some far-flung hope – it was real. I was more resolved to get out of Los Teques as soon as I could. I had my eye on getting out in just two years, not four or five.

  * * *

  I shuffled the deck and dealt out a hand to Henrik and another South African, suitably named Capetown. The cards skimmed along the top of the stone bench over crumbs and bits of rice. It was Sunday morning, just a couple of hours after breakfast in the canteen.

  Capetown suddenly opened his mouth like he was about to scream. Nothing came out. He just pointed behind me, his face frozen. I turned around and went to stand up. I put my arm up to defend myself. I could feel something was coming and felt a wallop on my head. The room started spinning. An inmate was standing over me with a big rusty knife like something used on a trawler to gut a fish. I touched the top of my head and felt wetness, then put my fingers in front of my face and saw the tips were red.

  Henrik was around by my side in a flash with the other South African and they pushed the guy away. The boss of the kitchen jumped over the counter with a machete he used for chopping meat and ran over. The two of them dragged the inmate with the knife off and out into the passageway. A woman sitting at another bench with a Veno inmate put her hands over her daughter’s face and pulled her into her side.

  I sat there dazed. ‘Paul, you’re OK, you’re OK, it’s only a scratch,’ said Henrik, standing over me and looking at my head. ‘He only broke the skin.’

  ‘Did you see the size of that knife? Tried to crack my head open like a melon.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ he said. ‘Get that cleaned in the wing and you’ll be fine. But you’re one lucky man. If you hadn’t turned around when you did we’d be picking up your brains with our fingers.’

  The boss of the kitchen was roaring and shouting, waving his machete. The guy who tried to knife me was gone now. Where, I didn’t know.

  Henrik walked with me back to the wing. I was weak from the shock. We fished out the first-aid box under Mariano’s bed. He saw a trickle of blood on my forehead. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t know. Some bastard, I think from the Special, tried to cut my head open.’ Henrik started dabbing my head with some cotton swabs.

  The word came back later that Fyodor the Russian had paid a lucero from the Special wing to do a hit on me. The Russky was trying to send out a message to me, and others, over the 20,000 bolos he believed I owed him: don’t fuck with me. The lucero got boozed up to give him Dutch courage, knowing anyone who started a fight in front of the visitors was a marked man. He was never seen again. We heard he was shot in both legs and transferred to another prison. I didn’t see Fyodor for weeks. When I did, I was up on the roof doing my laps around the wall. He started walking with me and chatting as if nothing had happened. He had his comeuppance, though: his face was all puffed up like the Elephant Man’s and he was cradling his right arm, and this was weeks after his botched ‘hit’. I could only imagine what he looked like straight after the beating.

  The boss of his wing sent him a message: our country, our rules. An eye for an eye. Fyodor was actually lucky: the number of killings was going down in the jail and disputes were sorted with baseball bats and boots rather than bullets. Otherwise Fyodor would have been on his way back to Russia in a box, a message to his family: ‘From Venezuela with love.’ As for me, I’d survived my second attack. Like a cat with nine lives, I was hoping I’d seven left. A prison riot was looming. I’d need them.

  Chapter 20

  DEATH AND DISEASE

  THE LETTERS PAINTED IN BLOOD WERE STREAKED ACROSS THE WALL IN the passageway. Jaggedy and scrawled, a bit like the way ‘Red Rum’ was written in the movie The Shining. On the ground outside the infirmary office there was a small pool of dark blood, like burgundy. It was a ghoulish sight to take in as we walked past on our way to breakfast in the canteen, slowing down our pace to look while the chitchat between us faded. When I got closer I saw the writing spelled out ‘Antonio’, probably the name of a prisoner.

  Earlier, lying in bed, I had heard a lucero do the wake-up call then shouting ‘mira, mira’ (‘look, look’) and running over to the jefe. I got up a few minutes later, not sure what the commotion was all about. I saw a few spots of blood on the floor next to one of the colchonetas near the toilet at the back of the cell.

  It turned out Antonio was an inmate. He had cut his throat during the night and slowly bled to death lying on the ground on his colchoneta. If they’d written his name on the wall in the passageway as a joke or out of respect in a ritual way I didn’t know.

  It wasn’t hard to see why someone would take their life in Los Teques, so it wasn’t much talked about. But if cutting your own throat was one way to end your life, there were also the perils of getting hit by a stray bullet or being knifed out in the passageways. Falling ill was another way you might go out in a box. And many did.

  Another morning an inmate looked like he was being stubborn and not getting up off his colchoneta while the rest of us got to our feet. A few of the lags went over to look. His body lay there lifeless. One of the luceros felt the veins in his wrist. ‘Nada.’ Four of us lifted him up, each grabbing an arm and a leg, and carried him out to the hallway. We left him there for the cops to collect like he was a bag of rubbish. When the troops marched in for the número the headcount was down by one. ‘Muerto,’ (‘Dead’) the cop shouted. The National Guard scribbled onto a paper on his clipboard, and the cop went on with the count. There was no minute’s silence. We felt sorry for him. A few said he was a ‘nice guy’ and ‘what a pity’, but afte
r five minutes I’d forgotten about it. I wasn’t shedding any tears. Nobody was. To me, he’d just escaped – but in a box.

  He’d been withering away in front of our eyes for weeks, so we weren’t surprised he had died in his sleep in the middle of the night. But what rattled me was that when the Venezuelan guy had arrived in Maxima a couple of months back he was a tall, fit guy in his early 30s – a good ten to fifteen years younger than me.

  A few months later he started having spasms. He’d fall down and his body would start shaking violently, like he was possessed by a demon. His face and eyes then started puffing up. Then the weight started falling off him, making him gaunt, with a skeletal frame. He was in and out of hospital over a period of about two months. Eventually he couldn’t walk and was put in a wheelchair. He ended up back sleeping on the floor. It turned out he had some infection of the nervous system. He was gay and often chatted with the kiddy fiddlers – one of the few who did. The rumour was he’d had Aids, but I never knew for sure.

  There were rounds of jabs given out against serious infections, doled out by a team of nurses and doctors armed with needles the length of bicycle spokes. From time to time the army of white coats came in, cops in tow. On the first morning I went there was a nurse at the front holding a long, thin needle like a small javelin. ‘Good Jesus,’ I thought. Some of the lags were trying to get out of the queue at the sight of it, the luceros shoving them back into line. We stood with our sleeves pulled up above one shoulder. One lad, Porto (from Portugal, naturally), was panicking. He had a bit of English. ‘Needles, I don’t like, not for me.’ Some of the inmates started laughing. He got more jittery as he moved up the queue, getting closer to where the three nurses were standing and his turn.

  I watched the nurse slam the needle into his shoulder like she was jabbing an ice pick into a bag of cubes. Porto turned his head away, grinning and bearing it. On the fourth jab, he crumpled to the floor. The nurses carried him over to a bench and he came through with the lags laughing and hollering maricón at him.

  I got my jabs and walked away. Four pinpricks soon swelled up into a mound on my arm. I was given a little card that showed what I’d been immunised against – all in Spanish. I thought it was for malaria or some other tropical disease; I didn’t understand or care and threw it in the bin. If I died in here it’d be from a bullet or a knife, not the plague.

  Ruut, a Dutch inmate, was another prisoner whose health had declined. He was in his late 50s and had a bald head the shape of a melon, a big belly and man boobs. I called him ‘the Buddha’. His right shin had become infected with some flesh-eating disorder. His leg looked like someone had ripped the skin off his right shin – and not with any precision. The mad thing was that the colour of the flesh and skin was a charcoal grey and black. The shin had swollen, too, and looked like an elephant’s leg.

  What started out as a small mark like a scrape spread out across his shin in a matter of weeks and looked like a mushroom cloud after a nuclear-bomb explosion. He was treated in the infirmary in the jail for a while and given daily bandages, after it got so bad he could only walk with the help of a crutch. After a while it got worse and he was shipped off to the military hospital next to Los Teques jail. I was sure he’d be sorted there and we wouldn’t see him again. He’d served a good four years and was due to be sent back to Holland to serve the rest of his time at home, like most Dutch prisoners. It was a deal their officials had drawn up with the local government, like many embassies in Venezuela did for their nationals locked up there.

  In weeks Ruut was back. ‘Great there, nice nurses, nice food,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Thought you’d be in Holland. So what are you doing back here?’

  ‘They can only treat you for a short time, then you have to leave.’ He went back to the infirmary for daily treatment on his leg, but they were tired of him and weren’t bothered. They seemed to have it in their heads that they would help you for a while and then that was that, you were on your own. So Ruut asked me to take over and do his nursing.

  ‘Please, Paul, I’d be very grateful. Those morons in there just brush me off.’

  ‘Sure. Course I will.’ He was a nice guy – I would have felt bad saying no.

  Myself and Ruut got on well. We spoke a lot. It was great to talk to someone older and wiser, and not just the usual bunch of gringo kids decades younger than me.

  The first day nursing him I put his leg up on mine and slowly peeled off the rotten, septic bandages. I nearly got sick. The smell was putrid, like rotten meat left in a butcher’s bin. How his leg got infected we didn’t know. He was a diabetic, which was probably part of the reason. Or he’d probably got a small cut and dirt got into it.

  Twice a day I put fresh bandages on and he was beaming because of the help. I went to the infirmary to get the materials every day. Some days there was none. Medical supplies used to come in once a month, so if you were ill around that time they might be able to help you, but towards the end of the month you were screwed. I reckoned a medic was selling the drugs and materials, probably one of the lags who helped out in there. All I could do was roll off the bandages and turn them around, so the side soiled with blood was on the outside. Some of the gays also gave me cotton swabs they used for their make-up, which I used to clean Ruut’s wound. The gays were good like that.

  But Ruut also needed antibiotics and there was rarely much in that line in the infirmary. I had to go to the shop in the wing and buy an antibiotic they sold there. They were little white tablets that I crumbled between my fingers into powder and then tapped out across Ruut’s shin before wrapping up the bandages over it. It wasn’t pretty work, but I didn’t mind doing it. Penance for my sins and all that.

  His leg didn’t seem to get any worse over the weeks, but it wasn’t getting any better. One morning I took pictures of it on my mobile phone and emailed them off to his son back in Holland. The photos were like something you’d see in a medical journal: a hideous lump of damaged flesh that reminded me a bit of a slab of meat in a kebab shop, the lower end tapering where the chefs had sliced it off. The plan was that Ruut’s son would send the pictures to the Dutch Embassy in Caracas and get them to put pressure on the authorities in Venezuela. All going well, Ruut would get released to serve his time in Holland. We heard they only did a week there before being freed.

  I woke up one morning not long after and noticed a large spot on my thigh. Jesus, I thought. Maybe I had Ruut’s flesh-eating bug? I’d be bound to Maxima for years with a gammy leg, my plans to flee Venezuela through the jungles to Colombia up in smoke. I started scratching the spot, digging my nails into it in the hope it would go away. ‘Don’t, don’t do that,’ said Mariano. ‘It’s from a spider. It lays the egg inside. It’ll only get worse if you scratch. Leave it till it’s big enough to cut out.’ So a spider had laid its eggs inside me. Great, I was going to be a daddy spider. At least it didn’t look like flesh would start to roll off my legs like Ruut.

  A couple of weeks passed and the bite grew into the size of a small egg, by which time I could hardly walk. It was time to get it cut out. I went down to the infirmary. In the past they had treated you in a basic dedicated clinic, but it had been turned into a wing when prisoner numbers hit the roof and space started running out. So I went into the office next to it. In my head it wasn’t a place you’d get better in. Any time I saw it I thought about the prisoners whose bodies were carried in after they had been shot, stabbed, beaten to death or having cut their own throats or even blown themselves up with grenades. There was rarely a doctor in it, anyway. Only a nurse, sometimes – usually one of the prisoners who had first-aid experience.

  Mariano came with me to the infirmary to interpret, his lanky legs swaggering up the passageway. ‘The problem is getting a doctor, Paul. If he comes it’s on Tuesday.’

  ‘Today’s Monday.’

  ‘I know, so that’s the problem. But I said if he comes – often he doesn’t.’

  ‘There’s no point in going then.
’

  ‘Yes, there’s a point. If you wait you may have spiderwebs in your leg by the time you get to see him. There are prisoners who are nurses there; they do all the work.’

  ‘Are they qualified?’ I was starting to have second thoughts.

  ‘Probably not, but they have experience. The only guy to avoid is the Butcher from Amsterdam.’

  ‘The what?’ I was really getting nervous now.

  ‘A Dutch guy. He walks around with a white coat and a stethoscope. He’s not a doctor at all. He pretends. He’s a crackhead and sells all the medicine in the infirmary to prisoners so he can buy a few stones.’ I didn’t want to hear any more.

  In the infirmary it was a nurse inmate all right, but he seemed OK. I’d take my chances. He sat me on the side of a bed and started squeezing pus out of the bite, then sterilised and swabbed it. ‘Jesus,’ I shouted, nearly hitting the roof. I looked at him making an incision the shape of a cross in it with a scalpel. ‘Agh,’ I cried out. ‘Have you not got an anaesthetic or painkillers or something?’

  ‘No, nada,’ he said, with a look that said he was wondering why I would even ask such a thing.

  I sat there while he poked around in my thigh with a blade. John Wayne might have had a stick to bite on when a fellow cowboy cut a bullet out of him and a shot of whiskey to drown the pain. I got nothing. I just sat there clenching my teeth. I had to go back three days in a row before it had all been cut out.

  But after a while the wound cleared up, the scar all but disappeared and there was no sign of any baby spiders practising their web-spinning inside my thigh. The only other health problem I’d had till then was that half the time I couldn’t eat. I was suffering with mouth ulcers. Bumps like little white pinheads were popping up inside my mouth and on my tongue. I could barely take in food. When it was really bad, I could only eat the odd ice-pop I got out of the shop, sucking on it, the coolness giving a bit of relief.