I should consider myself lucky that I’m still alive. So many have died.
Prison rescued me. Punishment saved me from my own selfish behavior. Prison forced me to confront my unbridled megalomania. Prison humbled me. I learned that I am not really in control of the outward aspects of my life. God rules, we humans submit or go astray. Throughout these prison years, I have consoled myself with the notion that the authorities may have my body, but they will never have my mind. They can never control my attitude or even my opinions. In my head I will continue to say: Go fuck yourself. You will not break my outlaw American spirit.
But how to occupy these days in solitary? How to fill this void of time in the Hole? Hour upon hour with nothing to do but cogitate. Or masturbate. I could play with my prick. Some guys in the joint jerk off two, three times a day. They take their porno magazines, “fuck books” they call them, or “fiend,” and go into a stall in the communal bathroom and beat their meat. That gets old fast. No, I’ll leave it alone. I want to see how far I can go on pure mental energy.
Of course, there is always sleep, and the strange alter-life of dreams. Great dreams in the Hole. It’s so quiet I can actually get a solid night’s rest and dream vividly. It used to amaze me how much bank robbers sleep once they get locked up. They must have rich dream lives. They are usually tall and thin. I see a tall, skinny guy who sleeps twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, chances are he’s a bank robber. He’ll get up to eat, then go back to sleep. They must need a lot of rest to replenish all the adrenaline they burn up robbing banks and partying with the proceeds.
My meals, delivered on trays slid through the slot in the cell door, punctuate my wakeful hours. The food is standard prison fare. I don’t eat red meat or pork, haven’t eaten it since my early twenties—some sort of hippie vegetarian pothead. Not that they serve much meat in the joint. Occasionally they serve fried chicken, which usually results in a run on the mess hall. I was in the mess hall one evening when they served fried chicken, and a rat of the four-legged variety ran out from the kitchen. All these hardcore convicts freaked out. Except this one big old Southern boy who sat idly munching on a chicken leg when the rat ran by his table, and without so much as looking up from his drumstick, stomped on the rat with his heavy steel-toed boot and broke the creature’s back. The rat writhed and twitched for a few moments, then expired. A small puddle of dark blood spewed from its pointy snout.
No great loss in being kept from joining the throng of cons in the mess hall. Standing in long lines to receive your issue of sustenance. Prison is all about standing in lines. Fuck that. Awful shit. Soul killing. Being in the Hole, having my meals served to the cell, hell, this could be compared to my former self—Dr. Lowell, ensconced in a suite at the Plaza Hotel ordering from room service. Though not quite.
RECENTLY SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY took place at this prison, an event so remarkable I will never forget it. I will go so far as to say it was life-changing. One of my real-life heroes came to visit and spoke to us convicts as though we were men of substance, his brothers. A convict doing time here, an optometrist who got pinched on a medical fraud case, claimed to be a friend of the great world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. Nobody believed him. I have always loved Ali. I admire him not just as a fighter, though he was The Greatest, but also as a man. He stood up for what he believes. No Viet Cong ever called him nigger. It took real courage to stick to his convictions and refuse to be drafted and fight a war so many believed was wrong, and to give up his heavyweight title as a result of holding fast to his beliefs. It is one thing to profess certain values, quite another to stick to those ideals when threatened with great personal sacrifice or years in prison. I was hopeful the optometrist was on the level when he told us Ali had agreed to come to the prison and speak to the population.
At last the day arrived. Ali was due to show up any time. The optometrist kept assuring everyone the champ was coming. “He’ll be here,” the guy said. “Believe me, Ali doesn’t say he’s going to do something and then not follow through.”
But it wasn’t Ali we doubted; it was the optometrist. When it came time for the four o’clock count and still there was no Ali, we figured the optometrist was full of shit. Nothing interferes with the four o’clock count; these Punishment people take it very seriously. They will write you a shot and lock your ass up in the Hole for interfering with the count. So when four o’clock rolled around and we heard that mournful whistle blow to announce the end of the workday and a return to units for count, everybody was ragging the optometrist, calling him another full-of-shit con telling stories to make himself appear important.
Imagine all our surprise when there came an announcement over the PA system that anyone who wished to see a special visitor to the penal institution should assemble in the recreation yard. Could it be Ali? Who else? I was optimistic for the veracity of the optometrist. Only a man of Ali’s stature could cause these bureaucrats to delay the four o’clock count.
Prisoners of all color and stripe streamed out to the yard to see the great Muhammad Ali. And there he was. Parkinson’s had already begun to take its toll, but Ali was still whimsical and sharp-witted as ever, and light on his feet. The warden stood before the assembly and began some banal introductory remarks. Ali stood up, danced out beside him, and threw a few mock jabs and hooks. Did the Ali shuffle.
“Sit down, man,” Ali told the warden. “These are my people!” Indicating us, the throng of prisoners. “They didn’t come out here to listen to you!”
And in that brief time and place—killers, dope dealers, fraudsters, punks, genuine tough guys, Asians, black and white Americans, Aryan Brotherhood and Black Panthers, Colombians and Cubans, bank robbers, pederasts, criminals, and blood suckers, prisoners of the war on drugs—we were all of one accord. Ali told us not to define ourselves by our past. We are not the sum of our previous mistakes, Ali said. We are ever becoming who we are, redefining ourselves in the moment, even now as we sat listening—not to some “nigger,” not to Cassius Clay, not to some draft dodger—but to Muhammad Ali—The Greatest. A man who stood up for his beliefs.
“You all made one mistake or you wouldn’t be here,” Ali said. “You got caught! There’re a lot of big crooks out there that never get caught. They steal more money with a pen and a briefcase than you did with your pistol.”
There is a way through this, Ali was saying, there is a sacred path that goes both inside and out. His life spoke of it. Deeper in is the way out.
ALI’S WORDS AND the example he set in his own life sustains me and gives me hope during my sojourn in the Hole. I too have been called names. Criminal, inmate, convict, prisoner, kingpin, drug smuggler: these are the words the authorities use to describe me. But there is something to be said for having taken responsibility for my actions and having served the time. Whatever else they may call me, they can never say rat; that’s a name I would have had to take to the grave. Here, in the solitude of the prison cell with Ali’s words sounding in my head, I am forced to go deep within, compelled to confront who I really am, to question who I hope to become, and to ask what I will do with the rest of my life.
This time, these eight years, the experience of being locked up for trafficking in a plant, has tested me and strengthened me in ways I might never have known had I not been caught, or had I chosen to become a government informer. Yes, there is a way out, and I found it here. It’s the way of learning and embracing who you really are and what you believe about yourself. So perhaps we can make a truce, my evil twin and me. We can say I stood for something.
Chapter Fifteen
UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
THEY LET ME outside today. For forty-five minutes I was allowed to exercise in a narrow cage like a dog run attached to the rear of the cell house. I paced, did some push-ups—same old same old. But being that it was outside, it felt different. And there were a few cons out walking the compound who called to me.
“Hey, brother, how you doin’?”
One guy
folded his hands and put them beside his head like a pillow, some kind of sign language. I didn’t get the meaning until I was returned to my cell in the Hole and saw a pillow on my bunk. Nice. Imagine my surprise when I felt under the pillow and found a skinny joint—a “pinner” as we call a joint so thin you can suck the whole thing down in one long deep drag. Only one problem: no matches.
While I was contemplating how to address this issue, unit manager Axelrod appears in front of my cell.
“Open F-3,” he calls.
A hard clank of steel on steel. A whirring and grinding sound of gears, the cell door slowly sliding open. I’m thinking, Shit, someone ratted me out. He’s here to shake me down and bust me for possessing the pinner. I’ve been set up. Haven’t even had time to stash the joint. It is tucked in the breast pocket of my jumpsuit.
“Move over, Stratton,” Axelrod says and sits down on the bunk beside me.
This is highly unusual. Staff members don’t just cozy up to convicts. Something is wrong.
Axelrod is wearing a Bureau of Punishment baseball cap, gray slacks, white shirt, and blue blazer with the Punishment Bureau seal on the pocket. He’s not from around here but transferred in from some other region. The Punishment bureaucrats move staff around almost as much as they transfer convicts. The idea is not to let anyone get too comfortable in any particular joint. That’s when corruption seeps in.
Axelrod is from Oregon. He’s tall, slim, in his forties, my age or a few years younger, though he relates to me as though I were a child or a precocious teenager, and a juvenile delinquent. We bonded, somewhat, as much as one can with these BOP types when you are a prisoner; we found a common interest in the writings of Ken Kesey, another Oregonian and a wrestler. Axelrod saw me reading a copy of Kesey’s novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. We talked about wrestling. Axelrod wrestled in high school, as did I, and we discussed Kesey’s other book, the more celebrated One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
This led to a discussion of a prisoner called Rojas, who bunks in my unit and has taken a liking to me. Rojas is a street-level crack dealer, a Dominican from Washington Heights caught up in the angry mood of the times. He can’t be much more than twenty-two, and he has an eighteen-year sentence for possession of a handful of rock cocaine. Rojas sometimes sits up in his bed in the middle of the day or at night and wails loudly, or makes inhuman, birdlike chirping sounds that cut through the daytime clamor or echo in the quiet of the night like the call of a mating loon. Scared the hell out of me first time I heard him go off. I came to marvel at the volume and timbre of sounds issuing from such a small man, and I applauded him for having the courage to make himself heard. I clapped and cheered him on. The other convicts used to scream at him to shut the fuck up. But then they began to clap, too, and Rojas beamed with pride. He became known as the Birdman of Ashland. Axelrod and I talked about how this place bears some resemblance to the nut ward described in Kesey’s novel. He asked me if I thought Rojas was a danger to himself or to others. I said I thought he was harmless, just acting out.
Now Axelrod looks at me and says, “You know, you’re as crazy as any of them, Stratton.” He tips the brim of his cap back, exposing the whiter flesh of his upper brow and his receding hairline. “Have you considered psychological counseling?”
I shrug. I’m preoccupied, worried about being caught with the joint and getting another shot, loss of more good-time, and blowing my still unknown release date.
“Seriously,” he goes on, “you’re going to be required to go through some pre-release counseling. But it’s pretty basic: how to balance a checkbook, stuff like that. But I would recommend you talk to the shrink. These places, you know, after you’ve done as much time as you have, they can mess with your head. You don’t want to get out there and put a beating on the first sucker who steps on your toe.”
He’s got a point. I’m not the man I once was. Though who is to say if I am crazier or saner? Gentler or more violent? Wiser or still a fool? The reefer in my pocket would argue for the latter.
“It was just one of those things,” I say, referring to the fight with Rector. “I’ll be okay. I’m not really angry.”
He nods. “As long as you’re aware that … well, eight years in the joint can have some lasting effects on how you deal with—”
“Frustration,” I finish his sentence, then admit, “I try not to think about it. I thought I might have learned something about patience, but all this hassle they’re giving me over the good-time, and not knowing what the fuck is happening with my release date, it has me wrapped pretty tight. So … I snapped.”
“Short-timer’s syndrome,” Axelrod says. “Rector’s going home in a few months, too.”
“It was really nothing,” I say. “Stupid shit. I have nothing against Rector.”
I’m thinking: a few months? Fuck that. I want out of here in days, weeks at the most.
Axelrod nods. “You know,” he says, “I gotta tell you, in all the time I’ve been with the Bureau, almost twenty years now, I’ve never seen anything like this happen before.”
He pauses, gives me time to wonder what he’s talking about.
“I must’ve had ten, fifteen inmates come to my office in the last couple of weeks,” he goes on. “Blacks. Whites. Latinos—your little pal there, Rojas. Inmates don’t usually step up for each other. But every one of ’em said the same thing: ‘Stratton’s a good man. Cut him some slack. Rector, too. These guys aren’t troublemakers.’”
This surprises me. Like Axelrod says, it goes against the convict code, which decrees: Don’t stick your nose in anyone else’s business. See nothing. Hear nothing. Say nothing. Feel nothing. I’m amazed to hear Axelrod tell me that convicts actually put in a good word for Rector and me.
“You’ve got a lot of friends on the compound,” Axelrod says. He’s so close to me I’m afraid if he looks down he’ll spot the reefer nestled in my jumpsuit pocket.
It’s true, I do have a lot of friends, mostly because I do legal work and don’t charge. I’ve become the jailhouse lawyer in demand since I had my twenty-five-year sentence vacated and was resentenced to ten years. Now if I could just get these fuckers to set my ass free.
“Open F-3,” Axelrod calls out, and the cell door cranks open.
Axelrod stands. “Let’s go,” he tells me.
“Where’re we going?”
“I’m going home. You’re going back to your unit.”
“What about Rector?” I ask. “I’m not leaving if he’s still locked up.”
Axelrod says, “I cut Rector loose while you were in the yard. I’m giving you both a pass. No shot.”
Relief. “Thanks.”
Good move. Let the black guy out of the Hole first so it doesn’t look like the white man’s getting preferential treatment.
Now if I can just get out of here without getting busted with the pinner.
Axelrod is on me like grease. He and the seg cop take me into the shakedown room to strip-search me. What the fuck would I be smuggling out of the Hole? The irony is not lost on me that in fact I am smuggling a joint out of the Hole. I’m trying to slip the pinner from the pocket of the jumpsuit without them noticing. It’s either that or roll it up in the jumpsuit and toss it on the pile of soiled laundry on the floor.
Forget it, I can’t do that. I want to smoke it. I snag the reefer with two fingers, wrap it in the palm of my hand. It’s the old smuggler’s axiom: the bold way is the best way. If Axelrod sees what I’m up to, he chooses not to question me. The seg cop tells me to drop my drawers, bend over and spread ’em. As he peeks up my ass, I slip the joint in my mouth, tuck it under my upper lip like I know what I’m doing.
“Open your mouth,” the seg cop orders me.
I do. The joint is stuck in the groove above my gums. This is all perfunctory anyway. This cop has probably strip-searched thousands upon thousands of convicts, looked up any number of Hershey Highways. He hands me my khakis.
Axelrod wishes me luck. We shake hands.
<
br /> “When do you think we’ll hear something from the Bureau on my release date?” I ask.
“Should be any day now,” he says.
The seg cop speaks into his radio. An electronic door release sounds. The sally port door pops open, and I walk from the Hole, the segregation unit, out into the relative freedom of the compound.
Back in the unit, I find a letter on my bunk. It has been opened and inspected for contraband, read for evidence of illegal contact with the World. They open and review all our mail except legal correspondence. This letter is from PEN America, signed by a man named Fielding Dawson who writes to congratulate me on my short story having won First Prize in the PEN Prison Writing Contest. He wants to know where he should send the $200 prize money.
This is great news. I am thrilled. But I contain my joy; there is no one I want to share it with.
IT’S SPRINGTIME IN the Ohio River Valley. They say this area has one of the highest lung cancer tolls in the country due to air pollution from the coke ovens used to form and melt steel and iron. On cold damp mornings over the winter, I felt the trapped coke oven residue in the air settling into the alveoli of my lungs like a thin toxic patina. I grew heavy with the air. People who live here all their life croak at an alarming rate once they hit forty. So why would you stay? Where would you go if your only job prospects were working in the coke ovens or the prison? The local 7-Eleven?
I’m out walking in the yard. This is an extended version of freedom compared to the Hole, moving in a greater sphere, trying to get into position to fire up the pinner and celebrate without anyone seeing me. There are no gun towers at this low-medium–security prison, no guards with binoculars and high-powered rifles watching our every move as they do in Lewisburg, where I started this bid, or Petersburg, where I did most of my time. But there is a hack in a truck circling the compound surveying the double perimeter fence coiled along the top with ribbons of razor wire like a vicious slinky. The cop keeps an eye out for anyone insane or desperate enough to try to climb over the fence and get ground up like hamburger by a million little razor blades.
Kingpin Page 29