I continue to exist in two temporal dimensions: the here and now of day-to-day life in a confined world; and the imagined life of freedom in the greater world, a life I endeavor to rediscover through my study of the letter of the law. I can go for days and even weeks on end with only partial acceptance of where I am physically, as in my mind I wander through the complex dialectic of legal argument. I explore the lands of precedent looking to discover some solid grounds upon which to found my challenge to the mighty forces of the federal judiciary.
I rarely get visits. Mailer did come to see me once. He read the draft of my novel, which I am calling Smack Goddess, and pronounced it “promising.” It is all in the rewrites, he told me, and he said of himself, “I’m not a good writer; I’m a good rewriter.” He advised me to put the manuscript aside for a month or two, and then return to work on it with a fresh perspective. It’s not easy writing in prison. There is the noise and the lack of solitude, the constant presence of other men or guards fucking with you for whatever reason. But of all the joints I’ve been in, here at Petersburg I have the most privacy and quiet. I have access to a typewriter in the law library and can work on my fiction or my legal case as I choose. I recently submitted a short story I wrote to the PEN Prison Writing Contest. That gives me something else to hope for.
Virginia is too far for my parents to travel to from Massachusetts. Truthfully, I prefer not to have visits, not to be tantalized with the proximity of loved ones or friends, then to go through the bittersweet moment of parting, and we are back in the prison, made to strip, have our assholes inspected, which spoils the mood of the visit.
My health is good, maybe never better. No booze. I eat a strict vegetarian diet. Plenty of exercise and rest. I love the weather. Yes, I do still traffic in the holy weed, and I inhale it whenever I can though always alert to the possibility of piss tests. Drug use is rampant in these institutions. You lock up a bunch of professional drug smugglers and confine them with an avid clientele of drug-users, people are going to figure out how to stay high. Many of the guards are in on the traffic, or they look the other way. If you are careless or unlucky enough to get caught, it’s no big deal—thirty days in the Hole and loss of good-time.
I have a few good friends. There are a couple of guys here from Boston, one a famous armored-car robber from Charlestown who has become a close pal. And as always in the system, there are my Italian friends from New York and New Jersey whom I met and got to know during my long stays at the MCC. There is a Greek junk dealer with whom I play tennis, and an old-timer named Joe Stassi, who goes all the way back to the days of Luciano and Lansky. Joe has been locked up since the mid-sixties. He lives in the cell next to mine, and we have become close. He has crippling arthritis in his hands and writes with pain and difficulty. In the evenings I go to his cell and transcribe his letters and cards. He always begins with the same salutation: “Dear so-and-so, I hope this letter finds you well. As for me, I am fine….” and so on. He never bitches, never asks for anything. The only comment I have ever heard Joe make about the prison staff is, “They treat us better than we would treat them.”
And there are other diversions to break the monotony of prison life. Last Christmas, Val, my former lover, sent me a Christmas card. I called her, collect, from one of the pay phones in the unit a few days after I received her card, to wish her a merry Christmas.
“Did you get my card?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“How did you like it?”
“I liked it. Merry Christmas to you, too.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t think you really liked my card. You should go back and look at it again. You might discover you like it more.”
I did. Turned out the Santa in the card was made up of sixty-seven tabs of pure West Coast Brotherhood of Eternal Love Hippie Mafia approved blotter acid. For weeks after that I played tennis on LSD. The guards looked at us with curiosity and envy as we trooped in from the rec yard for the 4:00 p.m. count, tennis rackets tucked under our arms, drenched in sweat in our shorts and sneakers after yet another grueling day on the courts, and they wondered: Why are these guys having so much fun?
My only really tense moment here came one afternoon when a friend from Boston stopped by my cell and told me that a new prisoner had just arrived who was also from Boston. “His name is John Grillo,” my friend said.
Oh, shit, no, I thought. Of all the miserable, fucked-up federal joints in this vast Bureau of Punishment gulag, and that skanky bastard, that murderous little prick has to end up here, with me.
I must have gone blank. “What’s wrong?” my friend asked. “You know him?”
“Where is he?”
Do I know him? The cocksucker had a contract on me. He was hired by a wiseguy named Michael Capuana to kill me after I refused to allow him to shake me down. Grillo threatened to—and I’ll never forget his words—he said, “I’m gonna cut your balls off and shove them up your mother’s cunt. And then I’m gonna kill you.” And now here he was in the same prison.
There was only one thing for me to do: I had to confront Grillo immediately. That’s the thing about prison—there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. If I were to show even the least bit of fear, Grillo would take that as weakness and act on it. I had to go to him right away and see where we stood. If I were a real convict, I would take a weapon and kill him for the insult all those years ago. I would not let him get by. I would take a shank or a club and stab him or beat him to death on the spot.
But I am not a real convict. No, I am a man caught in this world within the World, and one who is determined to beat this sentence, to beat the system, to get out and to reclaim what is left to my life. I can’t do that and murder John Grillo.
I found Grillo in the yard. He was sitting on the ground leaning against an inner fence and smoking a cigarette. He looked exactly as I remembered him: skinny, ferret-like; but utterly dangerous in that you could just read the man is a killer. Sneaky. Treacherous. Homicidal. I stood over him, looked down and said, “You recognize me?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Richie Stratton. I heard you was here.”
“Do we have a problem?” I asked.
Grillo laughed. He stubbed out his cigarette and said, “What problem? You mean Capuana? Fuck that guy. He fucked me. He fucked everybody. Listen, let me tell you what Capuana did.”
He went on to tell me a horrendous story about Mike Capuana, rhymes with marijuana. Capuana was a budding wiseguy who would be the prince of pot. He tried to shake me down for a million bucks for protection, and he wanted half of every load of hashish I brought in through Logan Airport. I defied him, told him thanks but no thanks, and then I spirited a load of hash out of the airport without paying Capuana. Capuana was going to pay John Grillo to kill me. Whitey Bulger, the reigning boss of the Boston Irish mob, was receiving kickback payments from the freight handlers at the airport who cleared my loads. When I appealed to Whitey, he stepped in and told Capuana to back off. The contract was lifted. Mike Capuana, Grillo tells me, bought a horse farm down on the Massachusetts South Shore somewhere, and when he ran short of money he failed to pay the guy who was taking care of the animals. The horses starved. Capuana killed the guy who was looking after the place—or he had John Grillo kill him, I wasn’t sure which. But Grillo claimed he hated Capuana for it.
That passed. I never felt remotely comfortable around John Grillo. I could never forget his threats, and I believe he still would have killed me if someone paid him to do it. But we made peace. He got out a year or so later. I heard through the ever-reliable prison grapevine that Grillo was shot to death while sitting in his car outside a diner in Revere, Massachusetts. Capuana too disappeared and was presumed dead.
RIP John Grillo. Adios Capuana. Good riddance to you both.
Speaking of murder, some time ago—again, I lose track of time—must be about six months ago, I got called to the lieutenant’s office. The lieutenant informed me that there were two FBI agents at the prison
who wanted to speak to me. I could have refused and asked to speak to a lawyer, but I was curious. What, I wondered, could they possibly want with me after all the time I had been locked up?
“What about?” I asked the lieutenant.
“A homicide,” he told me.
Fred is dead. Dead Fred. Yes, my old pal Fred Barnswallow, who testified against me at trial in Maine. Fred took two slugs in the head. Or maybe it was one, I don’t know. The FBI was involved because dead Fred had been a federal witness. He did a couple of years and then was released. From what I was told, he went right back to his old stomping grounds in Southern Maine. One night—or maybe it was afternoon—someone shot him and killed him. His body was found in a clump of bushes beside a parking lot. The FBI was working on the theory that I ordered the hit from prison. They are still operating under the delusion that I am some hippie mob boss who can command my minions to kill even after years in custody. I told them that they should convene a grand jury and attempt to indict me if they really believed I was capable of ordering the hit. I think they were on a fishing expedition. They wanted to know who I thought might have had Freddy killed. Of course, I have my suspicions. Then they asked if I would be willing to take a polygraph test.
I declined. For all they would have to ask is if I had any idea who might have killed Fred, or who ordered the hit to cause the needle to begin waving. It’s like DEA Special Agent Bernie Wolfshein said: this isn’t child’s play. People go to prison. People are murdered. Some people go to prison, they get out, and then they are murdered.
Next thing I knew I was getting calls from the press in Portland, Maine. My only comment: “Karma has a way of catching up with you.”
Poor Freddy. Did I order his killing? Hell, no. Why should I? I liked Fred. Using him to help me stash that huge load of Colombian pot was my mistake. I knew he was strung out on blow, and I knew he got his coke from my Colombian ex-girlfriend. I never should have been doing business with Fred in the first place. That was my mistake, going against my own rules. I felt bad when the agents killed Fred’s dog. His testimony at trial in Maine didn’t really hurt me. It was that other fucker, Mild Bill, that Abraham Lincoln look-alike who buried me. But I hold no grudge against any of them. Hammoud. Nasif. Biff. That rodent Herbert Humbert, the real estate agent. Fuck them all. They did what they chose to do. I chose not to become a rat and to do the time. And I’m still doing it: Time. Time … and more time … one day at a time.
Now, you see, I have figured it out. I don’t need to kill people. Why? They have no power over me. I need only to pursue my study of the law and get my ass out of prison, give the Feds back this illegal and cumbersome sentence. Maybe my life here is not so bad, but it is still prison. The worst thing about prison, as I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, is that it’s lonely. It is so fucking lonely. Brutally lonely, especially for a man who loves the company of women. Yes, you make friends. I have made some strong friendships with people I would never have met, and probably never would have wanted to meet. And I’ve learned a lot about men from all strata of society. But at the end of the day, life in prison is as lonely as the tomb. You are cut off from the people you love, cut off from the real world and real life; and that is the punishment. Imprisonment is not legally meant to be a tactic used to get people to roll over and become rats—even though that is exactly what incarceration has become in the hands of the Feds.
AND SO IT goes. Shit happens. Convicts die. They climb water towers or get squashed in the trash compactor. A guy who celled near me recently died of lung cancer. He had been complaining of pain in his back for months. One morning he failed to report for work. They found him dead in his bunk. Another guy in a different unit got sliced up badly by some dude wielding a shank made by sticking a razor blade in the melted handle of a toothbrush; he nearly bled to death. Occasionally someone gets released on parole or mandatory release upon having maxed-out his sentence. Guys come back after violating parole or picking up a new case. The bus arrives with twenty or thirty fresh convicts and not enough cells to accommodate them. For a time, they set up bunks in the TV rooms and put mattresses on the floors of the single cells and doubled them up. But then they opened a couple of new federal joints somewhere and shipped a bunch of convicts out. Life, such as it is, goes on.
I think we all know, however—we sense it, we feel it, we see it, and we anticipate it—as the new day-watch hack, one Shindola Murphy, shambles onto the unit to report for work, that our lives are about to change and it will not be for the better.
That Shindola is a rookie cop is obvious. We can see he’s as green as unripened fruit, having recently completed the three-week course “Introduction to Correctional Techniques” at the Punishment Staff Training Academy in Glynco, Georgia. We can tell by the way he carries himself and by how he relates to us convicts. This is his first assignment to an actual unit at a real prison, and we are his first live prisoners. He is still steeped in the philosophy of corrections—more accurately, punishment—and the “rules and regulations of the institution,” which is how his superiors have instructed him to control us convicts and run a clean and orderly unit.
He’s a black man, Shindola, with dark, dusty-looking, pitted skin like the surface of an old parking lot. At least sixty percent of the prisoner population in this institution is made up of black men. Because of its proximity to the District of Columbia, FCI Petersburg has a disproportionately large number of DC blacks doing time in this joint. These men do not give a fuck. Many of them are physical specimens: tall, strapping, lean and muscled, tough and fearless. They have survived some of the worst ghettos in our nation and the most dangerous jails. Not so Shindola. Shindola is a country boy, that’s apparent from the way he walks and the way he talks. He’s short, with abnormally long arms. He has the physique of a Hottentot, with a potbelly hanging over his belt and a big, protruding round ass. He’s ugly. He has a low, sloping brow, sunken eyes in a small skull, and a sparse crop of whiskers on his lantern jaw. He’s difficult to understand even for the other blacks. He doesn’t so much talk as emit loud, unintelligible grunts when he wants something. The convicts have taken to calling him “Murph the Smurf.”
None of this would matter to me. Shindola and I could get along just fine, except that he is obdurate, stubborn as a goat. He may even be pitifully stupid; it’s hard to tell. He simply will not accept that no matter what they may have taught him at Glynco, and regardless of what his lieutenants and the captain and the associate wardens may tell him, everyone else except him understands that all that crap is theory and only written or stated procedure, whereas what he’s faced with now is the practical, real-life, day-to-day application of rules and regulations designed to govern a body of men who have distinguished themselves by refusing to obey the law.
I wish I could sit the Smurf down and tell him to relax, let him know how simple it is to get along with us and how it has nothing to do with us wanting to make him look bad. It is all about mutual respect. However, if he insists on fucking with us, he will regret it. He seems to have taken exceptional resentment to me, which is too bad, really, because of all the men in this unit I probably feel more compassion for Shindola than the rest because I want to get along with him. It will make my job as unit orderly easier. But it goes deeper than that: I feel sorry for Shindola. I can see in his eyes and I can sense in his manner that he is afraid of us. He does not want to be here any more than any of us want to be here. But he simply does not have the imagination to perceive how to get along with men over whom he has authority only in as much as we allow him. Stronger men, smarter men, better looking men, more daring and more dangerous men—but men who nevertheless are prisoners and who are therefore at once powerless and powerful—powerless to change our circumstances but powerful in that we have nothing to lose.
Maybe Shindola resents me because I am white and apparently well-educated, the resident jailhouse lawyer in this unit, and I seem to have it so easy, done with my grunt work in a couple of hours each
day and then free to play or busy myself writing whereas he must put in a full, demanding eight hours and often more on overtime. I understand that and, again, I would be happy to make peace with Shindola. I would tell him how lonely I am most of the time. I would confess how I miss my loved ones so much that I ache and confide how uncertain I am of my future. I would admit that I dwell on whether I will ever have another wife and a family to love and to love me, children of my own to raise, and how I worry about how warped and crazy I might be, and if my parents will still be alive and even recognize me by the time I get out of prison—if I ever get out. I could talk to him about how difficult it is to actually make it through a long sentence and get free as there is just so much that can go wrong, and how it changes your character, how you become a different person after so many years of living in these prisons. Or I could commiserate and confess how ashamed I am of how I fucked up my life, how much guilt I feel over all the hurt and wrong I did, particularly to the women with whom I became intimate. There is so much I could say to Shindola, we could embrace and laugh and weep in each other’s arms.
Yeah, right. I would just as soon strangle the stupid cocksucker.
Here he comes, headed straight for my cell long after my work has been done and the Red Section passed inspection with high marks, and who gives a shit anyway? Shindola does, and that’s his problem. He doesn’t get it that nobody really cares. Fuck the Red Section. Okay? Fuck this prison. Fuck the Bureau of Punishment. Just leave us the fuck alone. I have work to do and it has nothing to do with anything except how to get the fuck out of doing all these years in prison.
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