The Smurf is dragging a garbage bag full of what is known as “nuisance contraband”: extra books, extra sets of underwear, unauthorized food stolen from the kitchen, pornography, nude pictures of your girlfriend or your wife—whatever, it is all bullshit. But Shindola has taken to implementing the regulation that calls for shaking down the cells in the housing units twice weekly and confiscating any unauthorized items, as per the rules and regulations no one else follows. Shakedowns are roughly equivalent to having one’s home ransacked, and being made to stand there and watch. The cops take a perverse delight in violating us yet again. It’s not enough that they can look up our assholes any time they please. A cell shakedown is an invasion of what little privacy we have, and it’s upsetting, particularly when you always possess an excess of “nuisance contraband” as well as bigger, more serious unauthorized items that are ripe for confiscation.
“Shakedown,” Shindola mumbles and invites me to stand outside the cell while he goes through my possessions.
“C’mon, Murphy. Leave me alone.”
“Shakedown,” he repeats. “Step outside.”
I get up from my desk, where I have in plain sight a serious unauthorized item—a typewriter, and not just a typewriter, an IBM Selectric typewriter. I also have more than the specified number of books. I have maybe twelve or fifteen books, whereas the rules and regulations of the institution stipulate that inmates are allowed no more than nine books in their cells. I have cardboard cartons stuffed with legal papers and my manuscripts stacked at the end of my bunk—that might be a violation of some rule as well, a fire hazard. I have three or four sets of underwear over the three-set limit. Some contraband food, oranges, an apple or two. You know, whatever, it’s all petty shit—except for the typewriter. That is an extraordinary piece of contraband. No one has such a machine in his cell. Be assured, the really serious contraband—the kind that could get me a “shot,” a write-up and time in the Hole, and possibly a new drug-trafficking charge—the two ounces of high-altitude Humbolt weed I have smuggled into the institution every fortnight by a corrupt lady staff member who works in UNICOR. That contraband is well stashed in one of the prison factories, and it will never be discovered by Shindola or by anyone else. And the cash money I get from selling most of the weed gets transferred street to street. A money order shows up in my commissary account, and no one is the wiser. It’s business as usual. The Shindola Murphys of the Federal Punishment Bureau will never penetrate and never shut down that level of violation of their rules and regulations. We are, after all, professional criminals.
“Stratton,” he calls me back into the cell.
“What’s up, Murphy?”
“Where’d you get that typewriter?”
Shindola’s been on the unit now for about three weeks, inspected my cell half a dozen times, seized all manner of nuisance contraband, and this is the first time he’s noticed that I have a large IBM Selectric typewriter sitting on my desk.
“What typewriter?” I ask, fucking with him.
“That one right there,” he points to the Selectric. The guy has no sense of humor.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It’s authorized.”
A lie, but one I figure I can get over on with the Smurf. Actually, some convicts stole the typewriter from the safety department. They smuggled it into this unit and gave it to me in exchange for an ounce of weed. I use the machine to type up my own briefs as well as the various pleadings I have submitted to different courts on behalf of six or seven convicts for whom I am doing legal work. I use it to type up my stories after I write them out in longhand on yellow legal pads. I have had the typewriter for at least six months, through two different unit officer regimes and any number of shakedowns. The cops just figure that if I have the thing, and it’s so obvious, just sitting out on my desk where anyone can see it, then it must be authorized.
“Who authorized it?”
“Who authorized what?”
He’s getting frustrated. I can tell by the way his shoulders start to twitch and his head bobs. He stammers and looks around nervously. He knows I’m fucking with him, and he’s not happy about it, but not sure what to do.
“Look, Murphy, forget about it,” I tell him. “The typewriter is authorized. Ask anybody. Everything’s cool. We’re okay here…. Nothing to worry about.”
He grunts and moves on hauling his bag of nuisance contraband, which is even heavier with the things he seized from my cell. Whatever he’s taken, it’s okay; I’ll get it all back, and more. As long as he’s accepted my lie about the typewriter, everything is as it should be.
Shindola writes me a pass to the recreation yard, and I’m outside for the afternoon. But when I return to the unit for the four o’clock count, the typewriter is gone. Son-of-a-bitch! That fucking Shindola!
As if that were not enough, now Murphy has begun to enforce the ridiculous rule that during the day while the unit is supposed to be undergoing the daily sanitation routine, convicts will be permitted to watch TV only in the Blue Section TV room. It is another of those rules most of the hacks ignore. The Iran-Contra hearings are going on, and a few of the prisoners who live in the Blue Section are following the hearings closely on CNN, while others insist on watching their soap operas or music videos. This has created unwanted strife among the prisoners. Every so often Shindola gets up from his desk and goes around to the different sections and shuts off the TVs. By the time he returns to his desk and sits down, they are all back on. Shindola starts to holler to shut off the TVs. The convicts respond by turning up the volume. The noise level escalates.
Murphy doesn’t seem to understand that he’s not a good cop. A good cop keeps the peace and maintains security. Shindola creates havoc and imperils our lives by pissing everybody off. Nor does it seem to have dawned on him that even at the highest levels of government, from the president of the United States—a former movie star—and his crony, the director of Central Intelligence, and a lieutenant colonel named Oliver North with the National Security Council staff, from the top on down, as proven by the Iran-Contra affair, these guys don’t play by their own rules and regulations. So why should we? And why should he?
The homeboys from DC are most affected by the implementation of the new TV rules and have taken to fucking with Shindola relentlessly. But he’s like a pit bull. The more they—or we, for I have joined the ranks of those who wish to drive him from our midst—the more we resist Murphy’s rule, the more he digs in and creates more grief and turmoil with the dogged insistence that he is only enforcing the rules and regulations of the institution. He just cannot seem to grasp that life in prison, much like life in the World, falls far below the ideal.
Today we are subjected to a double dose of the Smurf as the evening-watch hack banged in sick, and Shindola is stuck pulling sixteen hours straight. You’d think he’d be tired and just sit at his desk and leave us alone. But not Murphy, no, he can’t help himself. There’s an Italian guy in the unit we call Alley Oop, who, two or three times a week, cooks up a big pot full of spaghetti in his cell using an elaborate heating element known as a “stinger” he made in the UNICOR factory, and with some obvious nuisance contraband and unauthorized food. The odor of pasta and sauce permeates the unit. It smells good. Alley Oop will often share a bowl of the “macaronis,” as he calls it, with the evening-watch hack. Nobody gives a shit. Except Shindola. He busts Alley Oop, seizes the stinger, the pot, the pasta, the sauce, garlic cloves, everything, and writes Alley Oop a shot that could result in some Hole time. A good convict, Alley Oop doesn’t even object.
But later, after the 9:00 p.m. count, Shindola is at his desk when suddenly the lights go out. Someone has hit the main circuit breaker and cut the electricity in the unit. Then, as Shindola panics and stands from his desk looking about in the dim glow from the emergency security lamps, he is pelted with a hail of pool balls coming from the Yellow Section, where most of the DC blacks live. Shindola is hit and he goes down. He’s on the floor with hi
s hands and arms cradling his head as he crawls under his desk for cover. One of the pool balls hits the clock above Shindola’s chair and smashes it. Convicts stand on the tiers and cheer as the pool balls rain down on Murphy, who cowers under his desk. Finally, he hits the panic button on his body alarm, and minutes later the goon squad marches into the unit.
We spend the rest of the night and the next morning locked in our cells. Nine convicts, all blacks living in the Yellow Section, and Alley Oop are locked up in the Hole. But apparently no one rats, as they are all released a few days later. Shindola reports for work after a few days’ sick leave with a golf ball–size goose egg on his head. But he’s undeterred. In fact, he’s coming down on us even harder, shutting off all the TVs, insisting the unit orderlies put in a full, eight-hour day, shaking down the cells every day. He’s enraged, flabbergasted when he sees that I have the IBM Selectric typewriter back in my cell. Once again, he confiscates it, has it locked up in the unit officer’s closet. He doesn’t understand that even the other cops and the lieutenants are all pissed at him as well because his strict adherence to the rules and regulations of the institution that most of them ignore makes them look bad and gives them all more work.
Shindola’s on the prowl, and he’s more determined than ever to show us who’s in control. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that no one is in the TV rooms watching TV. The orderlies, the prisoners who are off work, the genuinely sick, and the malingerers are all hanging out on the tiers or in the common area milling around, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. A truly perceptive hack would sense that something is up. But Shindola is too busy hunting for nuisance contraband and muttering to himself to pick up on the conspiratorial vibe and sense that some plan is afoot.
The unit officer’s phone rings. Shindola is down on the bottom tier in the Green Section shaking down cells. He’s got to get back up and over to his desk to answer the phone mounted on the wall. He seems unsure what to do with his bag of nuisance contraband, as he knows that if he leaves it on the tier while he goes for the phone, the prisoners will take all their stuff back. So he drags the bag with him and does not even notice that nearly everyone in the unit, at least ten men, are hanging out watching him.
This is a nasty old convict trick, and any seasoned hack would have picked up on it right away. Not Shindola. He grabs the phone receiver and sticks it to his ear. Someone—I’ll never know who, but I suspect whoever it was lives in the Yellow Section—someone has taken a gob of fresh human shit and smeared it all over the earpiece of the cop’s phone. Shindola gets an earful of shit and is obviously having a hard time hearing whatever is being said to him through the clogged receiver and his shit-filled ear.
“Shit on the phone! Shit on the phone!” Shindola screams and drops the receiver. He looks around wild-eyed and lopes off to the second tier of the Blue Section, where there is another officer’s phone. You would think he’d at least check the phone before he grabs the receiver and sticks it to his other ear. But in his haste to answer the call, he does not. This one also has been pasted with shit. Shindola gets a double dose, shit in both ears. He drops the receiver, screams, and falls to his knees. The convicts all laugh at him. Shindola may even be weeping. For a moment he does not seem to know what to do. He’s rubbing both ears as he tries to clear them of the shit. Then he hits the panic button on his body alarm.
“Shit on the phone! Shit on the phone!” Shindola bellows and sobs. Moments later the goon squad enters the unit for the second time in as many weeks. They find no riot, no convict dangerously out of control, just Shindola on his knees weeping, trying to clear his ears, and both phone receivers still smeared with shit dangling from their wall mounts.
IT’S HARD TO say who really wins this round. I get my typewriter back even before it leaves the unit. The evening-shift hack is an old timer who wants only to put in his eight hours and go home. I convince him he should open the closet and give me the typewriter. “It’s authorized,” I tell him. He knows I’m lying, but he does not care. When Shindola returns to work after a few days off, he’s oddly subdued. He appears broken, resigned to a bullshit job. He ignores us now, and we treat him like he does not exist except when we have to go to him for something: a roll of toilet paper, a pass to the gym or the law library. He sees I’ve got the typewriter back and pays it no mind. Rumor has it he’s been seeing the institution shrink complaining of depression.
The post rotation at last removes Shindola from our confines, and we get an experienced cop who lets us do our time and keep up appearances with a minimum of hassle and turmoil. My days ease back into the dull comfort of routine. Then, only a week after the post rotation, early one morning I am in my cell at work on the contraband typewriter when, through the narrow rectangular window above my desk, I see first one, then two, then several cops run past. Keys jangle as they react to an obvious state of emergency.
“Oh, God! Jesus!” I hear someone shout, a rare display of panic. There is more shouting I can’t make out. One of the guards hits a body alarm, and soon every hack within running distance is heading toward the southeast corner of the compound, where one of the manned gun towers stands fixed against the southern sky like a lighthouse warning of lives shipwrecked here.
Then … all is quiet, until perhaps thirty minutes later when the unit phone rings. Several cops enter; we are locked down for the morning with no breakfast and no explanation. There is never an explanation for a lockdown or anything else our keepers decide to subject us to; it’s as though they figure we are not mature or intelligent enough to handle the information. The Bureau of Punishment rulers reason that any body of adult men subject to having their assholes inspected at will has no right to know what is going on.
When at last we are released from our cells but kept locked in the unit to await the call to the chow hall for lunch, the rumormongers maintain that there was a fight between two guards in the gun tower, and one of the guards shot and killed the other. Who? No one seems to know. This hardly seems credible. Guards fighting and shooting each other—it’s too good to be true. The day-shift unit hack will not give up a word of what happened or who was involved.
When, finally, we are released for the noon meal, as I make the short walk to chow, I see where someone has scrawled on the outside wall of the mess hall: Convicts 1—Guards 0.
THE OLD CON, that font of prison intelligence, has the real story—of course.
“There wasn’t no fight,” he says and curls his thin lips in a sneer. “That’s bullshit. You think these cops are gonna start killin’ each other? Hell, now that would be a real cause for celebration.”
My thoughts exactly. He has all our attention as he strokes the stubble of gray whiskers on his chin and gazes at us with his bleary, milky gray eyes. “No way. But I’ll tell ya’ what really happened.”
He pauses, betrays the glimmer of a smile. “Some hack blew his brains out.” And he nods pensively. “Yep, an’ it weren’t no accident, neither. He reported for work in the gun tower this mornin’, took out his service revolver and”—the Old Con points his trigger finger into his mouth and cocks his thumb—“kaboom! Splattered what little brains he had all over the inside of the gun tower.”
“Damn, ain’t that some shit,” Red says. “Who was it?”
The Old Con shrugs. He doesn’t need to say it; I already know.
“New guy,” he says and takes a sip of coffee. “Can’t say as I knew him myself. Name a’ Murphy.” He looks over at me. “Just come from your unit, didn’t he?”
THAT EVENING THE story is all over the local TV news. In our unit cheers and boisterous laughter comes from the TV rooms. Turns out there is a Mrs. Shindola Murphy, who seems stunned as much by the presence of the news cameras and reporters as by her husband’s suicide.
“He hadn’t been himself,” she tells the reporters, “since startin’ that new job over at the prison.”
And there are little Shindolas, a babe in arms and a three-year-old boy who looks just like his
departed dad.
At first, I’m not sure how to take this turn of events or how I feel in my heart of hearts about the fact that this rookie cop, Shindola a.k.a. Murph the Smurf killed himself with, no doubt, more than a little help from me and the convicts in this unit. Actually, I am having trouble connecting with my heart of hearts—that part of me that has remained untouched by these years of imprisonment and the necessary annealing of the emotions and cloistering of the soul that comes with having to survive many years of internment in these places.
You can’t be a man who is subject to tender feelings and expect to make it in prison. Witness Shindola. He let it get to him. I should say: Fuck Shindola. Good, I’m glad he killed himself. He was a dick. I have got to understand and come to terms with what goes on in these prisons. All the worst aspects of masculinity—selfish aggression, imposing physical domination, psychological control over those perceived to be less confident, preying on those who are weaker and gentler or not as clever—those vicious aspects of primitive survival are heightened and intensified when you take a bunch of highly testosterone-charged males who do not give a fuck about the law and care less for each other and lock them all up together under the command of keepers, who also must survive in this loveless world and who are equally if not more susceptible to being changed by living here. These places, separated from the family of man and woman, are breeding grounds for uncaring, brutal human beings—guards, staff, and convicts alike.
But, alone in my cell late at night when all is quiet, I can still reach out into the cosmos beyond the fences and gun towers, and I can still try to connect with that man I used to know, touch my heart. Yes, that man was arrogant, a fool trying to be somebody he was not, self-centered and crippled by hubris—but he had a heart. He believed, and I still believe, that there is more to me than the criminal, the prisoner, the callous convict I have become. There is a man who cares for and loves his fellow man. The man I used to know is buried but living and breathing, locked up. And that inner man is sorry, sorry we fucked with Shindola Murphy to the point where he saw no way out except to kill himself.
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