You Got Nothing Coming

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  I retreat to my still private suite in cellblock 4. If the Morlocks want me, they will have to come for me. I'm ready for a long lockdown— plenty of store and a stack of novels.

  For the next five days my good and great companions are Joyce, Hemingway, and Irwin Shaw. At 5 P.M. I turn on my thirteen-inch TV to watch whatever prison movie is being shown from the central VCR.

  Tonight they are showing Chained Heat— Penitentiary Girls III.

  I like it— not too much plot getting in the way of the action. The kind of movie my wife and girls would never have let me rent at home.

  In prison it's a good mental health habit to focus on the positive. Because the Morlocks can come for you at any time.

  And it ain't nothin' nice.

  * * *

  I take advantage of the lockdown to do some interior cell decoration, relying on the Kansas approach, as opposed to, say, Martha Stewart. I even fashion a monthly calendar, drawing the little squares and pasting it to the cell wall with state toothpaste. Christmas is rapidly approaching and I still haven't shopped.

  I study the calendar on the wall and count the days till my Parole Board hearing and then my release. I come up with 520 days. Not so bad. I can do this, I think. My first hearing is in five months; the next, and final one, a year after that.

  I wonder how to populate the little blank days on the calendar. At home, before the wife elected to become the former wife, we had a "daily organizer" posted on the refrigerator. I would fill it up with items like "Pick up Alana from soccer practice." "Drive Rachel to Girl Scout meeting." "Chinese food?" "Recital— 7 P.M."

  Another life— pre-O.G. Too much time to think in these cells. Avoid self-pity at all costs. That is the dubious luxury of freemen. I stare at the calendar.

  Sorry I missed your soccer finals, Alana.

  Sorry I missed your choir recital, Rachel.

  I turn my face to the cell wall and, not for the first time, sob quietly against the cinder blocks.

  Not unlike some punk-ass bitch.

  * * *

  The law library is a madhouse of ancient, chattering typewriters and lifers researching "post-conviction relief." The typewriters are the latest in 1950s high tech— electric, but before someone added value with the lift-off correction-tape feature. Welcome to Wite-Out. Fortunately I am of an age when carbon paper was regarded as a major advance toward the office of the future. It was the spearhead of what we would now call a "paradigm shift."

  Legal books are crammed floor-to-ceiling, some of them on shelves, most of them piled on the floor. Convicts wander in and out yelling questions, answers, insults, and wolf tickets.

  "Who's Bogarting the fucking Wite-Out?"

  My old Fish Tank chess partner, Big Bird, is guilty. He also has— as they like to say around here— "priors." Big Bird lifts his nappy white head up from a volume of Shepard's U.S. Citations to confront his accuser, a lifer wood.

  "If you could type, you wouldn't be trippin' behind no Wite-Out shit, you ignorant muthafucka!"

  "Big Fucking Bird, how 'bout I type some 'post-conviction' respect into your goat-smelling old ass?"

  The Bird adjusts his state-issue black horn-rimmed glasses to assess the viability of this latest wolf ticket.

  "Whatchu fittin' to do, Mighty Whitey Lifer Boy? You fittin' to raise up like you about something? I'll hit you so hard make yo toenail flip like a muthafuckin' poe-tater chip!" Wolf ticket receipted for and resold! Everyone laughs— lifer typists, jailhouse lawyers looking for business, my fellow Lawdogs, and our Freeman supervisor, Mr. Arbuster.

  Arbuster, a long-suffering civil servant for the Department of Prisons, favors generous quantities of Brylcreem on his thinning gray hair and Hawaiian shirts over an enormous beer gut. He, like us, is just doing his time.

  I was not his pick for this job. He motions me to take a seat in the steel folding chair at the side of his desk. My three fellow Lawdogs— law clerks— momentarily stop pawing at their electrics to better sniff the scent of every word.

  "Sergeant Stanger tells me you chumped him off in front of the assistant warden. Says you were way up on the leg! So tell me, O.G.— how did you get this job? Did you suck Noble's dick like Stanger says?" The Lawdogs titter appreciatively from behind their typewriters.

  "Just the tip," I answer.

  "Say what?"

  "Just the tip— I tried, but I couldn't get the entire cock down my throat, which was still sore from sucking Stanger's dick the night before."

  Arbuster's eyes bug out before he bursts into a violent giggling attack, his face turning purple.

  "Oh, that's off the hook! You really are one sideways-talking twisted dawg!" Arbuster dabs at the tears running down his cheeks, unconscious of his own convict-flavored language. Like the C.O.'s, most Freemen, over time, start talking like the asylum inmates instead of the keepers.

  Arbuster's delighted response is the cue for my fellow Lawdogs to howl in approval. On-the-leg sycophants is my perhaps uncharitable judgment. Mighty Whitey Bogart and Big Bird, having made up, laughingly replay it.

  "Just the tip," they repeat. " 'Cause his throat be sore— from the night before!" cries the Bird.

  Arbuster, whom we all call the Bluster behind his back, tells me to memorize a copy of The Nevada Code of Penal Discipline— it will be my sole job aid. As the new "fish" in the law library, I am assigned the most distasteful tasks— attending disciplinary hearings in the lockdown units.

  "You'll work the Fish Tank, the Hole, the P.C. punks, and the fucking Moo."

  "The Moo?" I used to know this one, but the acronyms here are worse than in the army, or even the phone company.

  "The MHU— Medical Housing Unit, the fucking retards and J-Cats too fucked-up to even wipe themselves. You got a problem with that?"

  "No sir, no problem."

  "Good, 'cause if you got a problem, the kitchen has an opening for Jell-O scoopers, you understand what I'm saying?" More titters from the Lawdog Gallery.

  A former business associate, good friend, and occasional mentor once gave me this piece of advice: "Never underestimate the power of ass-kissing." Mr. Mentor— let's call him Mr. Brown (since that's his name)— rose through the mid-corporate ranks largely on the consistent, massive, and creative application of this principle. In all fairness, he was also brilliant and conversationally adept at any topic of interest to his superiors— fly-fishing, the 49ers ("Hey, how about those Niners!"), metaphysics, duck hunting, nonlinear correlation and regression techniques, you name it. He knew how to Build Rapport— instantly!

  I decide that now would be a good time to apply Brown's Axiom. Don't want the Bluster sweating me every day. You Lawdogs think you know On The Leg? I'll show you some pure, unabashed, unrestrained Corporate Obsequiousness!

  "Mr. Arbuster, I sure appreciate this overview." I smile— appreciatively. "You're not a lawyer by any chance? I guess you'd have to be one to do your job, having to know all those case histories and all." Brown's Ass-Kissing Corollary to Ass-Kissing Axiom 1 is "Transparency doesn't matter."

  Of course it works. The Bluster is puffing up self-importantly, his chest inflating like a hot-air balloon. His face shineth upon me. Finally— a Lawdog who appreciates him, a rare simpatico soul refreshingly attuned to the unjust burdens he single-handedly, heroically carries every day.

  "Well, O.G…. er, actually I do have a bit of a legal background— also some sociology and psychology. You need it if you're going to deal with cons all day."

  "I can tell." I nod admiringly, nodding to the Great Gods of Unction, cementing our rapport, as the Lawdogs howl and moan in sickened disbelief.

  Mr. Brown, wherever in the corporate crevices you are now, thank you.

  * * *

  The store here is not one where you can walk inside and look at the merchandise. It is a warehouse with a "service" window. You enter an opened gate on the yard and hand your order slip to the convict clerk, who, depending on how much store you kick back to him, will fill your orde
r in minutes, days, or never.

  Skell likes snuff. We agree on six cans of Skoal Wintergreen in exchange for his continuing to falsify the "housing roster" to indicate my cell has two guests. After bickering like an Arab rug merchant, he also agrees to throw in two pairs of boxer shorts, which he swears on his skin are not from Saint Mary's Hospice.

  "Ain't no pecker tracks on these, dawg!" he assures me before disappearing behind his mattress fortress where he can inject himself with his daily dose of crank— while safely supervising the helicopter evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon.

  Every morning I report to the law library, read the kites from the "lockdowns," and load up my handcart with the requested lawbooks. Then I'm ready to roll the wheels of justice to a convict population that prison surveys reveal to be 70 percent "functionally illiterate." Which means they cannot read or understand the disciplinary write-ups that they collect faster than Skell collects stamps and snuff.

  Most of the kites reveal some confusion.

  "To: Law Liberyen— How they got a warent for me back in Tennessee? I never messed with no incense! Ken you pleese help me before they exerdite me to Memfus."

  Having once paid my dues in the Market Research, Assessment and Customer-Driven Analytics Divison, I am especially qualified to add value here. I remove Black's Law Dictionary from a shelf, flip to the definition of "incest," copy it on the kite for delivery under the cell door. Then a quick exit.

  "To: Law Clerk— Kansas says you can help me. The judge recamendit me to a house rest program but my PO says I got nothin coming. Is there any legal remorse avalebul to me?"

  This time, because it's one of Kansas's dawgs, I attach a copy of the house arrest criteria to the kite. I also enlist Mr. Webster's help in providing definitions for both "remorse" and "recourse." The phone company, which loved to talk about our "unparalleled record of customer responsiveness," would have been proud.

  When necessary I would read the kites to the Bluster, who really did know a thing or two about the law. He would listen to the question and then refer me to the appropriate reference.

  "Shepard's U.S. Citations, volume 3," Bluster yells. "Pacific Reporter… Corpus Juris Secundum… Federal Supplement, volume 27… Nevada Revised Statutes 209 point 17 paragraph B… Supreme Court Reporter… Ineffective counsel? Let's see— get Hill versus Lockhart."

  With my vision and his track record we made a hell of a team. Definitely consultative and collaborative, as we used to say in the phone company.

  * * *

  I hate visiting clients in the Moo. The Moo C.O. strip-searches me, then checks the contents of my box, holding each lawbook up by one flap and shaking it. He's always disappointed when no contraband falls out— no nail files, no plastic packets of crank, no decomposed body of Jimmy Hoffa.

  The J-Cats are all in solitary confinement cells, and the ones not too sedated leap to their feet the moment they hear the squeal of the handcart's rubber wheels on the floor— Pavlov's Dawgs: The Next Generation. These are the J-Cats deemed too dangerous to be in general population and too numerous to try to send back to the state nuthouse prison, which is at full capacity.

  I am supposed to "counsel" them about their disciplinary charges before they appear before the Disciplinary Committee, which now consists of one caseworker, Mr. Ringer. My client is on the upper tier in cell 63. The Bubblecop, just a few feet above us, cracks open the cell door. I wait, penal code in hand, until the J-Cat slides it open.

  Most of the J-Cats here are black and my client is no exception. After sliding the door he does the Thorazine shuffle back to his tray, sits. His face is crisscrossed with old razor scars, his eyes blank, unseeing. He wears the standard J-Cat Moo uniform, a white paper coverall. The J-Cat's crotch area is soaked with urine. Give a guy enough psychotropics and he'll easily confuse paper pants with a toilet bowl. The smell ain't nothin' nice.

  "What's your write-up for, bro?" I ask this slowly to match his movements. I keep my voice soft and low. A string of saliva is descending from the J-Cat's mouth.

  I consult my new clipboard, a welcome-on-board gift from the Bluster and, I'm convinced, an object of yard envy. Or possibly contempt.

  "Demetrius," I try again. "Do you know why you're here?"

  Maybe it was the use of his name that did it, but something stirs and spins inside his defective hard drive, his head jerking side to side in little spasms while his mouth gasps open and closed soundlessly. I can practically feel the heat of a billion neurons misfiring in his brain.

  My first J-Cat "case," and my client is not just a sandwich short of a picnic, he's a picnic short of a picnic.

  "What medications do they have you on, Demetrius?"

  His lips convulse and produce some garbled words. "…icks nin… zeen… nay nay nay… quan." But hey, at least we're communicating.

  I'm guessing he's on— or has been on— Prolixin, Thorazine, and Sinequan. The Physician's Desk Reference in the law library lists them all as having a "sedative" effect. I'm wondering why they didn't sedate his bladder along with his brain.

  I start reading from the Notice of Charges, hoping this might jar his two or three still functioning synapses into action. I stand between the open cell door and the closed door of Demetrius's dome. The Bubblecop is at his open slot, shotgun ready. The write-up is in pure Copspeak:

  "…that on December 3 at approximately 7:04 A.M. I, Sergeant Stanger, while making routine rounds in the chow hall, did observe inmate Demetrius Johnson, back number 31458, stuffing an unidentified round object down the front of his pants in a manner suggesting concealment or an attempt to conceal."

  The faintest glimmer of recognition comes to the J-Cat's glazed eyes. He is even managing to wipe the dribble off his mouth. Encouraged, I continue with the Copspeak:

  "…thereupon said inmate did attempt to exit the chow hall in a hurried and stealthy manner… when I confronted inmate Johnson and ordered him to drop his pants, inmate Johnson became irate, waving his arms in a threatening manner and yelling obscenities. Inmate Johnson demanded to know why he couldn't get himself a 'motherfucking apple.' "

  Just the tiniest hint of an insane smile is starting to spread across Demetrius's slack face. Half a sandwich, or at least a pickle, has just arrived at the Thorazine picnic.

  "…loud and abusive language combined with the threatening arm movements led me to conclude the inmate was attempting to incite a riot in the chow hall to cover up the smuggling of contraband…"

  Another page or two of Copspeak and finally the bottom line: "After subduing and placing inmate Johnson in hand and ankle restraints I was then able to confiscate and secure the contraband in question— one partially eaten apple, probably McIntosh in manner, which I immediately sealed in a plastic evidence bag. The Dirt investigation is still ongoing at this time. Inmate Demetrius Johnson, back number 31458, is hereby charged with the following violations of the Nevada Code of Penal Discipline: MJ-27, a major violation, rioting or inciting others to riot; MJ-21, a major violation, theft or possession of contraband; MJ-25, a major violation, issuing a threat, either verbally or by gesture, to a correctional officer; and G-9, a general violation, using profane or abusive language to a correctional officer. In addition we are charging inmate Johnson with a violation of M-7, a minor violation, unauthorized use of institutional equipment, machinery, tools, or food."

  The Bubblecop a few feet above us snorts in derision. "Felonious fucking apple smuggling— what a crock!" The cop suddenly remembers he's wearing a prison uniform and decides to try to clean it up. "Of course, you was outta line, Demetrius— can't have convicts running around with apples beneath their johnsons!" And Bubblecop is cackling crazily over his bad pun, which I find pretty funny as well.