You Got Nothing Coming

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  In Kansas's absence the Snake forges strategic alliances with the Toads, Eses, and the Tribe. The overarching goal is market stability and equilibrium. And that's something I'm down with. What former monopolist wouldn't be? Kansas has even worked out a generous revenue-sharing plan to preempt any emerging or presumptive competitors.

  The laundry here is an Ese-run subsidiary of the Car. Want your nasty underwear and socks machine-washed? No problema. Just haul your shit down to Luis at the window counter. Kick down some stamps, a few full decks of tailors, or even a store can of jalapeño peppers. You can buy yourself a month's worth of laundry services, including sewing and repairs.

  For a negligible charge, the eses will even throw some bleach in with your whites. Need your blue state shirt pressed and ironed? Por supuesto you do! Luis will hook you up, dawg, Luis will handle everything 'cause he knows his customers, he knows that your girlfriend, your novia, your esposa, is coming to visit and you need to be stylin' in a starched and pressed state shirt.

  Say what? You got… nothing? No estampillas? No tailors? No tienes jalapeños? Then you're burnt— whatchu got, amigo, is exactamente nada! Nothin' coming! Whatchu got is lost laundry, shredded laundry, wet laundry returned to you because your hand don't call for no dry cycle. Whatchu got is some quality time with your state soap and sink— hand-scrubbing your shit.

  " 'Cause," proclaims Luis, "ju ga notheen comin'— motherfooka!"

  Luis and his ilk may even be responsible for all these middle-class white kids kickin' it in the malls with their pants fashionably falling down below their underwear. When new fish are marched down to exchange their orange coveralls for blue jeans and shirts, Luis likes to flash a serious clipboard and make an elaborate pretense of recording requested sizes.

  He'll let the fish wait fifteen minutes at the window while he disappears back into the supply room. He invariably returns with a stack of triple-X-wide waists and shirts that could dwarf a circus tent.

  Since the state doesn't provide belts, the convicts do the best they can with pieces of laundry string that Luis will sell to them. Unless, of course, you can kick something down or pledge something from a future store. Then Luis will see to it that you're stylin'.

  The end fashion statement is called "jailing it"— a five-to-eight-inch revelation of white boxer tops precariously embraced by the string-tightened pants below. So who says convicts don't contribute to popular culture?

  I'm inordinately proud of the fact that I have a belt. I purchased it for twenty-five bucks' worth of stamps from a lifer with a precious "hobby-craft card." The prison issues only a handful of these cards each year and only to lifers who are permitted to purchase leather supplies and use the tools in the cramped hobby-craft office in the gym.

  My belt is my personalized stapler. It's hand-tooled leather. Just try to find a fish with a belt like this!

  Sometimes it is good to feel like you're about something.

  * * *

  My immediate supervisor in the chow hall is a convict, and fellow Inferno resident, named Scud. His official title is "Food Server Leadman."

  There are leadman cooks, leadman bakers, and leadman moppers. It's a seniority thing. The leadmen in the kitchen report to the Freemen— civilian supervisors, most of them aging free woods. Correctional officers are also posted in the kitchen, where they are nominally in charge. They rarely leave the comfort of their cluttered little staff office, located— out of sight— behind the bakery.

  The cops also know better than to interfere with the lucrative trade between the leadmen and Freemen. The only reason Kansas would bother to have drugs smuggled in through visiting is that he loves the drama of it all. Most of the contraband on the yard floods in through the Freemen, facilitated by a few entrepreneurial guards. Outside gangs provide the cash and occasional motivation.

  Scud is another template wood in his late twenties— full sleeves, empty mouth, and a filthy ponytail secured by an even filthier black rubber band.

  "O.G.— all you gotta do is scoop the motherfucking Jell-O into the left slot on the tray." This completes my orientation and training from Scud.

  "Is that it?" I ask, eyeing the giant metal vat quivering with green Jell-O, an ice cream scooper buried deep in the undulating mass. Sort of erotic, I'm thinking.

  "No, that ain't it," Scud sighs, clearly overburdened by the prospect of having to "train" yet another fish in the art of Jell-O dispensing. All this responsibility thrust upon his bony, amphetamine-attrited shoulders for the princely prison sum of ten dollars a month.

  My job as food server pays nothing. I do it for love.

  "Ya gotta wear gloves and a hair net when you're working near food," Scud says, yanking these items out of a large cardboard box labeled CHICKEN BREASTS— UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

  "It's a sanitation thing," Scud explains, turning his head in a well-practiced maneuver to blow his nose. His nose-blowing technique is crude but effective. It involves placing one nicotine-stained thumb over his left nostril while vigorously expelling a tsunami of snot out the right nostril.

  It ain't nothin' nice.

  Splat! A green projectile explodes against the wall and hovers indecisively above a steaming vat of vegetable soup. Scud then completes the process, thumbing his right nostril and turning his head away from us and toward the salad, which rests limply in a metal canister the size of Cuba.

  Ping! The missile impacts the side of the metal container. My fellow servers, woods and toads alike, blaze hotly with righteous indignation.

  "That's outta line, dawg!"

  "Way the fuck outta line!"

  And it's pandemonium in the serving area! Moral outrage! Righteous fucking resentment!

  "Muthafuckin' nasty-ass white boy!" screams our salad server, a chubby black teenager called Tooshay. Tooshay tells anyone who cares that "you best be pronouncing it Two-Shay!" It must be a Francophile thing.

  "That's some fucked-up shit, Scud!" contributes C-Note, whose role on the team is to put two pats of butter on each tray— when he's not busy fussing with the tight cornrows under the hair net.

  Snake and the other dawgs down the serving line are also howling in rage at Scud, who just looks confused.

  T-Bone, who is on the cleanup crew out in the chow hall, pokes his shower cap through the small opening in the window. To our relief, we are sealed off from the chow hall and our customers by a railroad car metal partition. When we see hands through the window, we push out the trays. The back of the serving area is open to the grills, ovens, and bakery of the main kitchen.

  "Cain't a muthafucka get nothin' but a rollie?" The Bone wants a real cigarette, a tailor. C-Note taps a long ash off his half-smoked tailor— into a vat of mashed potatoes— offers it to the Bone.

  "Here be a short, bro."

  The Bone studies the "short" with clinical interest. He has the melancholy suspicion of a man who senses disease and disaster everywhere. The Bone declines the short.

  "I ain't lookin' to catch nothin' but pa-role!" And the shower cap disappears back into the chow hall.

  All eyes are again on the moist green creature pulsing ominously above the vegetable soup. The freeman boss walks into the serving area.

  "What the fuck are you convicts doing?" Freeman Marshall is a beer-gutted, fiftyish wood with faded sleeves. He's been working in the prison system, in the kitchen, for twenty-seven years. The years have not been kind to him, but in an alternate universe he could have been an unemployed short-order cook in here, with us. Everybody likes Marshall because he wears a "house arrest" electronic bracelet around his ankle, courtesy of his second domestic battery offense. He's sort of a wood role model.

  "What the fuck are you dickwads looking at! We got three hundred cocksucking cons to feed tonight!"

  Tooshay, who's doing a dime behind a crack sale gone bad, extends a chubby black finger, pointing to a spot on the wall above the vat of soup.

  Where, like some hideous extraterrestrial spider, the green body of Scud's
booger is slowly detaching itself, one slick strand at a time, from the wall. Next stop— Vegetable Soup World.

  We all just stand there— frozen. A group of hardened cons, one cubicle refugee, and a serial wife-batterer paralyzed by the spectacle of a Living, Moving, Sentient Booger from Beyond as it slides inexorably down the wall.

  And into the soup. It says plop!

  Outside the metal partition, starving convicts beat their fists against the railroad car walls. The Bone sticks his head through the slot.

  "Cain't a muthafucka get some nasty-ass chow trays out here? People's be trippin'!"

  And it's on! A classic assembly-line process (with none of the efficiencies) unfolds, each server adding his small increment of value as we slide, spin, and spill trays along the long metal counter. The trays come at me so fast that half the time I end up scooping the Jell-O on top of the mashed potatoes, which in turn have been hastily scooped on top of the peas and carrots instead of the soybean patties. A few Jell-O slabs find their way into the bowls of vegetable soup, perhaps seeking a union with their lone, green extraterrestrial brother.

  Scud and Freeman Marshall take turns shoving the trays through the slot, where they disappear instantly. All I can see are grasping hands. We can all hear the shouts, the wolf tickets being sold outside.

  "Fucking fish servers be puttin' Jell-O on the muthafuckin' mashed!"

  "C-Note! I know that's you back there— you best not be giving us no melted-ass butter!"

  "Who the fuck be slammin' Jell-O upside the bowl!"

  To drown out the shouts and threats, Tooshay leads us in a group sing-along. We warm up with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," hit a solid harmonious stride with Little Anthony and the Imperials' "Tears on My Pillow," and as the last tray is snatched away, an absolutely rousing rendition of that old prison standard "Working on the Chain Gang."

  "Servers fucking rule!" yells Scud, politely averting his head as he violently dispels yet another alien from his nose.

  "Break it down!" screams the Freeman, the signal to start cleaning up. We all grab an assortment of soiled black rags and swipe energetically and ineffectually at the mess on the counter, basically just pushing the detritus around until we have sculpted one huge soggy mountain of gravy, Jell-O, and mashed potatoes.

  Scud puts on his plastic gloves and shoves the monstrosity, or most of it, onto the cement floor, turns on a spigot, and floods most of the mess down a metal drainage grate in the cement. Some of it even goes down. The rest will harden nicely overnight so T-Bone and the cleanup crew can sweep it away in the morning.

  Freeman Marshall leads us out back through the bakery area. The bakery smells like a brewery. That's because it is a brewery. In addition to making bread, rolls, and cakes, the bakers also mass-produce "pruno," a potent alcoholic brew available in such fruity flavors as orange, apple, and peach.

  The bakers simply appropriate some spare fifty-gallon soup drums, fill them with the fruit of the day, add water, sugar, and yeast, and voilà! In a few days the concoction has fermented sufficiently to permit pruno product launch and associated marketing activities to ensue.

  The pruno is surreptitiously bottled under the brand name Pert Plus (available at the local store), since the green plastic bottles hold a convenient 15.2 ounces and retail on the yard for the equivalent of eight dollars a bottle.

  Of course, the thrifty (read "indigent"), self-sufficient inmate simply brews his own, using a Ziploc bag and oranges, adding sugar and substituting bread for yeast.

  Freeman Marshall herds us to the locked exit doors in the back of the kitchen where an elderly C.O. waits with the keys. The C.O.'s white hair smells like it has just been shampooed in pruno. He fishes a key off the ring attached to his webbed belt and tells us to line up for the pat-down.

  C.O. Pert ignores the small bulges in our pants pockets. Stealing food is practically a built-in job perk. Stealing butcher knives or metal objects is a no-no.

  The servers never steal knives. They don't have to. They design and make their own shanks with metal obtained from the cons in the auto and welding shops.

  Outside, the sun is setting behind the vast desert wasteland. With winter not long off, temperatures drop sharply in the evenings and the air is brisk and cool. A strong breeze brushes my face as I look up, past the fences, over the razor wire and the guntowers.

  I am glad— no, I am enormously grateful at this moment to be alive. The Bone stands beside me, fretting over the wind and the possibility of another sandstorm.

  "Cain't a muthafucka get nothin' but a dirt storm? Shit!" The Bone clutches the shower cap tighter over his head.

  The Bone knows you can never be too prepared in prison for a shitstorm.

  * * *

  We all take turns sweeping and mopping the Inferno. T-Bone, generally acknowledged to be the mop master (and rumored candidate for cleanup crew leadman), gives me some one-on-one tutoring.

  "White boys cain't do nothin' but push a muthafuckin' mop! The blap man, he be glidin' wiff da mop, blap man be styling!" So I adjust my awkward task-oriented focus to incorporate the Bone's suggestions about rhythm, fluidity, and grace. Under the Bone's tutelage I gradually surrender to the process until one evening the Bone confers the ultimate accolade on my sorry white ass.

  "The O.G. be stylin' now!" the Bone announces proudly to anyone in the barracks who cares.

  No one does. "Bone, why don't y'all style that muthafuckin' mop up yo ignorant nigger ass!" says C-Note. C-Note is sitting on his end bunk by the bathroom where Tooshay is styling C's cornrows into Rastafarian dreadlocks.

  I continue happily mopping while the Bone and C-Note begin their nightly jab, dance, jab, duck, and jab ritual without ever actually hitting each other. I glide with the mop between the beds recalling a Future Leaders Management Team-Building workshop. Our five-hundred-dollar-an-hour training consultant stressed the importance of focusing on the moment, on the task right in front of us. We were to clear our minds of aberrant thoughts about lunch and learn to just "be in the moment." To learn to be effective communicators, effective leaders, we had to first learn how to "be here now."

  We called it Be Here Now training. And now I finally have some use for it, melding with the mop, giving myself over to the awe and mystery of living in the moment. I finally lay the mop down and face the room. I am transformed, like an est novitiate who finally "gets it."

  "Bone… I be the mop!" I exult to anyone who cares.

  No one does. Except the Bone.

  "You be somethin', O.G., but I doan be knowin' zackly what."

  * * *

  The Inferno is the only "housing unit" in the prison where a parochial convict can experience the rich benefits of ethnically diverse living. The C.O.'s assign cellies to the two-man cells strictly on the basis of race, with a total disregard for any subtle geographic distinctions. This can lead to convict carping.

  "Yo, See-Oh! I'm Filipino— why the fuck you celling me up with some motherfucking punk-ass Micronesian that don't even know what fucking island he's from?"

  The C.O. tells him to shut the fuck up. "We got a shortage of flip cases this year," he explains.

  In the Inferno the woods and skinheads hang together, the toads "kick it with mines," Loco, our sole Hispanic, keeps to himself, and I usually isolate on my bunk with my headphones and radio, pen and writing tablet.

  After the 6 P.M. standing count, it is "mail call" in front of the C.O.'s office in the rotunda. The cop yells out a back number and tosses letters, magazines, and newspapers into the air. It reminds me of the time I took my then little girls to Marine World to watch the porpoises leap for those little doomed fish.

  The Bone is perched on his bunk, trying to read Lucindreth's latest letter. Some convicts view letter reading as a communal activity, so C-Note and Tooshay look over the Bone's shoulder.