Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

The next day, Vic brought me a knife. I began to wait. I grew more nervous by the minute. I found myself on the toilet, shitting my guts out. It felt like they had turned to water. After I had finished, I was washing up when Vic found me. “Come on. Bean’s in the shower.”

I dried my hands, slipped my crude blade (a sharpened-up old butter knife) into my pocket, and walked back to the shower. Vic posted up at the door and nodded the go-ahead. My brain was buzzing. There was no time to think about it now. Vic whispered, “Handle this shit.”

I pulled the knife out and put the lifeline around my wrist. The knife had a bit of twine attached to it in a loop. Vic had told me to put the loop around my wrist so that I couldn’t drop the knife. I headed into the shower and caught a bit of a lucky break, I guess, because Bean had just soaped up his face. I walked up behind him, stabbed him in the back, and at the same time grabbed him around his neck. Bean tried to spin in my grasp, as I continued to stab him over and over.

I walked away as he fell to the floor. I wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. I didn’t have any idea how many times I had stabbed him. I put the knife back in my pocket and rinsed myself off as best I could, then returned to Vic’s bunk, changed clothes, and gave the knife and bloody clothes to Vic to dispose of. Again, I waited. I was waiting to see if Bean would be discovered. I was waiting to see if anyone would snitch me off. I was waiting to see if Bean was dead or alive. The waiting is always the worst in anything, I think.

Bean was discovered by another inmate fairly quickly because he was still alive and was making noises — moaning and stuff. Of course, someone told on me. Whether it was Bean or one of his homeys, I will never know. But I was sent to the hole and reclassified as a maximum-security inmate. I wish I could go back to being that naïve kid who didn’t know what to expect in the hole. Knowing just makes the dread of going back there so much greater. Shit, they’ll probably be here any minute.

Anyway, back then I was just a kid. I remember being walked to the H-unit, cuffed and shackled, and actually feeling impressed by the site. H-unit was underground, built into the side of a hill. All that was visible was the front of the building, set into the hill, and a skylight, about six inches wide, running all the way around the hill. The cells in H-unit were arranged in a circle and in two tiers. The bottom tier held cells A — L. The upper tier consisted of cells AA — LL. The cells at the ends of both the upper and lower tiers were supermax cells. I was placed in the supermax cell on the lower tier. Cell L. The supermax cell has one door which you step through, and then another which opens to the interior of the cell. There, an inmate is kept behind two locked doors, whereas all the other cells have one locking door. The doors are heavy, solid. The bars on H block were as big as my wrist. They were all over the entire pod, and they covered the skylight. I would soon learn that on H block, there is zero inmate-to-officer contact. There’s always a slider with those huge bars or a heavy solid door between inmates and officers. The solid doors have a “beanhole” near the bottom — a steel flap that opens with a key where a food tray can be passed into the cell. The officers also cuff and shackle the inmates through the beanhole before taking them out for rec or shower. H block is twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown. Ha. Some days it’s twenty-four hours straight. Sometimes it’s a week at a time. The unit gets locked down for all kinds of reasons.

I spent my nineteenth and twentieth birthdays in that cell. I realized during that time that prison is the place where a man’s dignity goes to die. If you wanted to recreate it, to feel what it might be like, you could move into your broom closet. Give the key to the guy who was the biggest bully at your school. Have him feed you only cheap, starchy, flavorless food. Only take a shit in full view of strangers. Never mind. There’s no way to recreate it. You can’t. You would never be able to fully account for all of the factors that make it miserable. Once you’re on H block, there are no more contact visits. You can’t hug or be hugged by any of the few people in the world who give a shit about you.

I remember during those two years that things grew steadily worse every day. It was as if the staff of the unit had regular meetings to brainstorm about more ways to fuck over the inmates. Calling to order our monthly meeting. It has been noted in the minutes from our last meeting that prison isn’t quite awful enough, terrifying enough. Anyone have any motions to present? Any ideas how we can make this prison worse?

It used to be that rec time (irregularly given, no guarantee) was multiple cells on the ball court at once. We could play a good game. It was during those times that I almost felt human, real. I would chop it up with some of the other guys. We still had our conflicts, but damn. It was all right, ya know? We would play ball for a while and grab a quick shower. Maybe use the phone. Eventually, this officer named De Soto came through and flattened all the basketballs. Even then, we would get together and play cards or dominoes. Then another guard — Hudson was his name — took a bunch of the dominoes out of the set and tore up some of the cards. We didn’t even have a full deck to play with, so we made up our own games.

Eventually they started running single-cell rec time. That meant that you could go with your cellie, if you had one. I was now supermax and single-celled, so I went to rec time alone. I started exercising during those times. At least I could stretch out a bit and move around. Isolation is a creeping kind of torture. At first I thought I would be okay. I read. I listened to music. After a while, I realized that I would probably rather die. Not sure though. Never been dead before. I can tell you, however, that it’s no vacation getaway like people make it out to be on the TV.

So I guess someone must have brought up how having rec at a reasonable time was not a good way to make prison worse . So they started taking me to rec time at one o’clock in the morning. During the winter it was so damn cold and dark that I often declined to go. I began to smell bad from not showering so much. I lived in an underground prison with no natural light. I was kept in a dark cell for most of the day. The tiny bit of natural light I could feel on my skin during daytime rec had now been taken away. Worse, indeed.

During the summer months, they were always working on the air-conditioning unit. It was hot. Sweltering. Sweat would run all down my face and down my back to the crack of my ass. Too hot to sleep. I’d have to wet my sheet at my little metal sink at night and hope that I would fall asleep before it dried. If it did, I would have to get up and wet it again. The cooling unit never really seemed to be up and running except, as if by some magic, on days when a tour came through or on days when the facility was having an execution.

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention: I was on H block West. H block South was death row. On days that they planned to kill one of them dudes, you could hear the men on H-South singing some kind of song all the way over on H-West. I could never make out the words, but it was the most mournful sound my ears have ever heard. In the days preceding an execution, they would clean the facility up real nice. Buff the floors. Get the AC running. The floors in the place were painted a dull battleship gray with some kind of real shiny clear coat on top. Buffed to a high gloss. Like a polished turd. I felt I was being squeezed ever tighter and tighter and that before long I would cease to breathe.

I’m still breathing, I guess. After those two years on H block, though, I never really bounced back. Once I got out of there, I was moved to a regular unit. I got contact visits, so I started up selling drugs around again. I figured out that if I ate a can of chili and drank a bunch of water before my visits in which I would swallow drug-filled balloons, it would be easier to puke ’em up later. I guess the grease from the chili made a kind of barrier over which the rest of my stomach contents would sort of float. I started bringing in meth too. That was what the people wanted, really. There was money to be made.