Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  ‘Still think he’s a good guy, eh?’ said Gareth, feeling vindicated.

  ‘He just attacked me for no reason.’

  ‘So now you know what his wife had to put up with.’

  ‘Don’t trust him,’ chimed in the Germans, ‘this guy is an evil little bastard.’

  Larry wrote a rather over-dramatic report to the guards about how Mr Yin had tried to strangle me, and asked me to do the same. I declined, saying it was no big deal and I’d wait and see how things turned out, but it was my first experience of how strained the relations between the foreigners and Chinese could get, and of the mutual hatred between Larry and anyone with authority.

  ‘What’s the point of writing reports?’ I asked Ludwig later.

  ‘There’s no point whatsoever.’

  ‘So why bother?’

  ‘Fun?’ He grinned before adding, ‘And at least you’ve got it on record if it happens again.’

  I still didn’t write the report, but the experience had unnerved me, and while I thought Larry was being over-protective, I could see the logic in ensuring that any negative interaction with the Chinese was worth logging.

  ‘If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen,’ said Larry later.

  For one of my first exercise periods, I was invited to take part in a football game with inmates from another wing. Within minutes I knew I was out of my league, as burly Chinese convicts steamrolled into me every time I got near the ball, leaving me on the tarmac with grazed knees and elbows. Determined not to let them get the better of me in a game that had more in common with rugby than football, I decided to play by their rules. A lanky Chinese had the ball in his possession with his back to me, and I recognised him as the most aggressive player on the other team. Unable to reach the ball, I wrapped my arms round him, put my foot out and hurled him onto the ground. The game stopped instantly, and one of his team members put out his hand and helped him up. Gareth, barely able to contain his amusement at this, sidled up to me.

  ‘You know who that is? It’s Captain Ming, who’s a top screw on the punishment wing.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ I started to imagine myself being moved to the punishment wing under the care of this much-feared officer.

  ‘Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. Anyway, nice one! He’s a total cunt and everyone hates him.’

  Larry was particularly happy to hear about my minor debacle with Ming, whom he knew better than any other foreigner, having spent some months in the punishment wing for refusing to acknowledge his sentence. His face lit up for the first time in ages on hearing the news, and he recalled various run-ins he’d had with the hated officer.

  Larry was three years into his third hash-smuggling sentence in the Far East. The first had been in Hong Kong, where he’d got two years for a kilo of weed at the airport. He’d kept his head down, living in a dormitory with Triad gangs, and served most of the two years. He hadn’t been out long before a second dope bust landed him in an American military jail in South Korea. He got a two-year sentence, which he did in relatively cushy surroundings that he seemed to have pleasant memories of. Two years later, he’d been found in Shanghai’s famous Peace Hotel with ten kilos of hash and a kilo of hashish oil (a Class A substance)in the roof space of his room. True to form, he’d invented an elaborate excuse for the crime, claiming that a shady syndicate of international drug smugglers had kidnapped his girlfriend and was holding her to ransom, and unless he delivered the dope she would be killed. Needless to say, the Chinese didn’t believe a word of the story and the judge sent him down for 15 years.

  He was from Colorado and had got into the dope business in the late ’60s, running weed from Mexico to Canada. A dyed-in-the-wool liberal and anti-war campaigner, he’d organised draft-dodging scams during the Vietnam War. In the ’70s, he jumped bail in Vancouver when a 23-kilo Afghan hash bust was about to earn him his first real jail time, and by the ’80s he’d fallen in love with Asia, where he’d got into Nepalese gold-smuggling rackets before realising the profits you could make shifting hash between Nepal, Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong.

  He was a sports writer with a legitimate part-time career as a freelance journalist and was an avid basketball fan. He was also an amusing raconteur, and I spent much of my first few weeks in Ti Lan Qiao hearing about his many adventures and prison stories. He had a deep loathing for the guards in the jail, and policemen generally, having been badly beaten up by highway-patrol cops in California some years earlier. Now he looked at every policeman, jailer or judge like something he’d just scraped off the bottom of his shoe.

  During his interrogation by the Chinese, he’d taken his wet washing to the interviews to hang up and dry while the police droned on about his case. Had anyone else told me this story I would not have believed them, but I didn’t doubt Larry’s word: it was typical of his utter contempt for any kind of authority figures. At times, the foreigners thought his relentlessly stubborn attitudes self-defeating – after all, he’d ended up with a 15-year stretch – but he was respected, too. A highly principled man, he never gave up fighting the system, putting himself through endless discomfort and hardship to defend his, or anyone else’s, rights. Before my arrival, Larry had attempted to go on hunger strike and had been moved to the punishment wing known as the Young Men’s Experimental Brigade. There he’d written reports about the mistreatment of prisoners, resulting in an official inspection from the prosecutor’s office.

  Whether his efforts had earned him the respect of the Chinese was hard to say, since ‘going with the flow’ has been the default behaviour of the people of the Middle Kingdom for thousands of years.

  If relations with the Chinese could get out of hand at times, disputes between the foreigners were often worse. Nobody chooses whom they’re in jail with, but in a ‘normal’ prison environment there are plenty of people to choose whom to be friends with and whom to avoid. Ti Lan Qiao, with its six foreigners, five thousand Chinese and virtually no exercise time, was a pressure cooker: always simmering, occasionally exploding and often spilling over in a torrent of abusive animosity. People who’d ordinarily keep out of each other’s way were thrown in together to get on with it. You could ignore each other most of the time, but sooner or later something would give and a fight would start. At the centre of most of these disputes was Thomas McLoughlin, a friendly but hotheaded Scotsman from Glasgow and, along with Larry, the recipient of a mind-bendingly depressing 15-year sentence.

  Thomas’s criminal career started early, with successive visits to various borstals and young offenders’ institutions. He was destined to follow in the footsteps of his father, a career criminal and regular jailbird. After a tour of British jails, he’d discovered the adrenalin rush of dope smuggling while on a trip to Morocco in the early ’80s. Unlike most people, he had no particular fear of incarceration and was unfazed about carrying suitcases full of hash across international borders, and by the mid-’80s he’d moved his operations to the fleshpots of Bangkok and Manila. There, he’d channelled his earnings from the dope scams into various legitimate enterprises, and become a yoga teacher and diving instructor. Along the way, he’d made more than a few enemies and acquired a heroin addiction.

  Tommy (as he liked to be called) had greeted me warmly on my arrival at the jail, and over the first few days had been very generous, giving me jars of Nescafé, powdered milk and so on, to be returned when I was ‘on my feet’. I was very grateful, but quickly noticed he was segregated from the rest of the foreigners. When I asked anyone, they shrugged and muttered something about it being a ‘long story’ or ‘you’ll soon find out’. Nobody really wanted to talk about it, though everyone warned me not to get too close to the Scotsman. For his part, Tommy dismissed the other foreigners without elaborating and said he felt more at home with the Chinese. It was clear he had a good relationship with most Chinese and was always larking around with them, making them laugh. He often liked to impersonate the guards and various prisoners, which they found hilarious, and his cel
l was at the opposite end of the corridor to ours, so he slept and ate amongst the Chinese.

  After a few weeks at the jail we were called out for an exercise period, and Tommy was first in line at our end of the corridor wearing his Scotland football strip. He was a good player and was often invited by the Chinese to play in their six-a-side tournament with other brigades. On this occasion, the prisoners had been held up waiting for a guard to escort us down to the exercise yard and, seeing his precious football time running out, Tommy was getting pissed off. I don’t recall what set him off – it was usually something fairly trivial – but in a split second he’d turned into a raving lunatic, screaming and lashing out at anyone close by. His voice changed in tone and the blood vessels on his bald head stood out like pulsating blue worms wriggling under his skin. The foreigners took a step back and tried to look calm as a group of Chinese piled in to restrain him. The number one, Mr Gao, yelled at everyone to get back to their cells as Tommy was frogmarched down the block to his. Sweat oozed from every pore of his head and streams of it flowed down his neck into his football shirt.

  I stood dumbstruck as the other foreigners looked at me one by one, saying:

  ‘Now you know why he’s down there.’

  ‘He’s a nutter.’

  ‘He tried to kill me.’

  ‘He should be in a fucking asylum, not a prison.’

  From that moment onwards, the reticence that the other foreigners had shown with regard to talking about McLoughlin’s antics had gone. The floodgates opened and everyone had a tale to tell. Gareth said he’d nearly lost both eyes in their first week at the jail as Tommy had attempted to plunge a pair of chopsticks into them after a dispute over a jar of marmalade. Mark had pulled him off and got punched in the face for his trouble. The Germans, Ludwig and Jürgen, had both been spat at and hit during his occasional rages, and various Chinese had found themselves on the wrong end of his fist.

  Through mutual friends and dope contacts, Tommy and Larry had known each other for years, and Larry was convinced Tommy had grassed him up with a phone call to the Hong Kong customs. According to Larry, Tommy had seen him packing a bag in his hotel room before flying to the island, where he was busted and given his first two-year stretch. Larry had a long list of former associates he claimed had been violently assaulted by Tommy: one had been repeatedly stabbed after a falling-out over a dope deal, while another guy had been hospitalised after being head-butted by Tommy, who was wearing a crash helmet. Tommy never admitted any of these offences and said Larry was a fantasist who made it up as he went along. I wasn’t so sure; I was confused and my loyalties were divided. Tommy had been good to me and I had no personal grudge against him. I also liked Larry but questioned whether he was a reliable witness, given his longstanding dislike of McLoughlin. It wasn’t fair to take sides as long as that remained the case. I decided to withhold judgement and try to make peace with everyone until I had enough information to make up my own mind.

  Ten minutes after the football debacle, I went down the cell block to get some hot water and Tommy called me over. I approached him warily, as if he were a caged tiger who might pounce any moment, but he acted as if nothing had happened, as if he’d slipped back from Mr Hyde to Dr Jekyll, unaware of what all the fuss was about. We made small talk for a minute, and as I turned to walk away he said, ‘Sometimes this place gets to me.’

  From that day, I remained cautious of Tommy, although I got along fine with the other foreigners. Gareth’s and the Germans’ misfortunes were closely linked, though they managed to patch up their differences most of the time. Gareth had been living in Xinjiang Province, in the far-western reaches of China, running a restaurant with his Muslim wife and dealing a bit of hash on the side. The Germans had got busted getting on the same boat I’d intended to get from Shanghai to Japan 18 months or so earlier, and during interrogation the police had figured out Gareth was their supplier. Ludwig and Gareth despised each other and were engaged in an ongoing psychological war that rarely erupted but was never far from the surface. On the other hand, Gareth and Jürgen were good friends and spent a lot of time together, despite Jürgen being partly responsible for Gareth’s arrest. I sympathised with Gareth, as his entirely innocent wife had been imprisoned for a year in far worse conditions than any of us in a prison in Kashgar. The Germans had ended up with eight years each, and Gareth had got eight and a half as the ‘ringleader’. The case had been covered by the Hong Kong media, which, with typical hyperbole, described Gareth as a ‘Drug Kingpin’.

  Jürgen was around 40 and had served time in German prisons for dope offences. He was short and turning grey and understandably depressed about the length of his sentence, but he’d made a decision to become an excellent guitar player to compensate. He had the tiniest stubs for fingers I’d ever seen on a guitarist, yet he managed to stretch them to play complex jazz chords through sheer bloody-minded determination. Ludwig was a few years younger, a keen bodybuilder and a Chinese-language student. His head was always immaculately shaven, and his desk and cell spotlessly tidy. He spent much of his time on his noisy typewriter, which infuriated Gareth. All three had been blown away by the length of their sentences, and their trial had been farcical in that the prosecution had claimed they were all part of a conspiracy. It was a classic propaganda exercise to show that China was doing its bit in the international War on Drugs. By making examples of a handful of foreign dope smugglers, China hoped to deflect criticism of its porous borders with the Golden Triangle, through which much of the world’s heroin passed. By the time my dope bust came along, they were no longer looking for a scapegoat so I was able to pass through the system as a relatively minor monkey figure. Had I been busted 18 months earlier, I might well have got the rooster treatment, too.

  Mark had been derided by all the foreigners for refusing to share the details of his indictment. I couldn’t blame him for his discretion as he was frightened that rather than reduce the others’ sentences, they’d extend his – not unheard of in China. When I showed them my indictment, they became obsessed with the difference in wording between the description of dama (marijuana) on my paperwork and dama zhi (marijuana oil) on theirs, assuming they’d been charged with a higher-classified substance. Of course it made little difference what was written on the indictment, because the sentence was the same either way. In the West, such an anomaly might be seized upon by a clever lawyer and used as a loophole to demand a retrial or appeal, but in China it was irrelevant because the legal system could never be seen to have made a mistake in the first place. They were all still pursuing the issue (unsuccessfully) when I left the prison two years later.

  After the novelty of having a new foreigner to talk to began to wane, I was left to my own devices. I immediately struck up a friendship with Jürgen, who invited me to join the prison band, the Reformers, and let me have a go on his Yamaha acoustic while my guitar was being processed by the guards. It was a cheap Indonesian-built copy and was difficult to play, particularly since I hadn’t touched a fretboard for eight months and the calluses on the tips of my fingers had softened, making every note sting. But the thought that I would be able to play in the jail at all made the news that I was unlikely to get any time off for good behaviour easier to bear. Also, meeting the other foreigners made me realise how lucky I’d been to get off with two and a half years, even though I’d only been charged with smuggling while most of the others had been charged with both smuggling and intent to supply, which carried a heavier penalty. Either way, I had a lot to be grateful for and felt slightly guilty for my relative good fortune, though Gareth made me feel better by pointing out that in many countries I could have walked away with a slapped wrist and a fine.

  My arrival at Ti Lan Qiao had been well timed. The previous number one prisoner had been a sadistic bastard Gareth had nicknamed Doctor Death. He’d been a nightmare for the foreigners, whom he loathed, and had made everyone’s life a misery. Eventually McLoughlin had got into a fracas with him and spat in his face.
When Death fought back, Tommy landed a punch right between his eyes and broke his nose. It was the only time I ever heard the foreigners speak well of the Scotsman.

  While waiting for my guitar to turn up, I discovered the blues. Perhaps discovered is the wrong word, since I’d owned Muddy Waters’s greatest hits for at least a decade and seen many blues acts, from Buddy Guy in Tipperary to Ray Charles in Osaka. I’m not a diehard blues aficionado, though I can appreciate the artistry in the monotony of its simple structures. I’d rather listen to country music, whose lyrical metaphors are often sad and funny. The best thing about blues is that musicians can play along without having to know the song, since the chord progressions are almost always the same. Jürgen, on the other hand, considered the blues the ultimate musical expression and devoted endless hours every day to perfecting his technique in the form. I admired his stamina, being far too lazy myself to bother playing any song more than a couple of times in a row. When my own instrument eventually turned up, Jürgen would get frustrated that I was reluctant to play whatever song we were learning over and over, but for me it’s about catching the essence of a song, and the more it’s played the more remote that becomes. Besides, Jürgen hated most of the folk and country songs that I loved. Like most people, he thought that country was redneck music and would only play Johnny Cash songs, which even country-haters admit to liking. More adventurous stuff, like the Louvin Brothers and Merle Haggard, left him cold, while Bob Dylan was one of his pet hates. Fortunately, I was happy to play just about anything and would agree to accompany him on a B.B. King tune if he’d help out with a Gram Parsons cover.

  Tommy, who rarely listened to music, had a good collection of tapes his brother had sent him, the vast majority being blues compilations. The greatest-hits mixes featured a roll call of greats from the chain-gang ballads of the Mississippi Delta to the Chicago electric blues scene of the ’50s. He also lent me a Walkman and I got to listen to my first Western music for eight months. There was Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Sonny Boy Williamson, but the song that really hit me between the eyes, knocked me out and allowed me to hear the blues in a way I’d never heard before, was the long, live-in-London version of ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ by Howlin’ Wolf. Its hypnotic voodoo beat seemed to pulsate with the rhythm of the jail, while the wolf man’s demonic voice howled through the bars and cell blocks like a demented preacher. This one particular song was such a revelation to me that I spent hours pacing the wing, listening to it over and over again. In a sense it was the first blues song I’d ever heard, and I made the most of my new discovery, wandering around in a trance, pressing the rewind button every five minutes until the batteries ran out. ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ was the new soundtrack to my life, and I never tired of listening to it.