Andrew Vachss - The Weight

“Man, I can see why they all love you. Gonna write a lot of sweet letters to the Parole Board for them, huh? You fucking chump-all that college and you still get played for a retard? Or maybe you just get your rocks off listening to their stories, is that it?”

I crossed my arms. Not to make the biceps pop, the way some of those iron freaks do. Just to wall me off from them… and make them see it. “Me, I’m not in PC,” I said. “I can walk the yard.” I turned to look at the shrink. “You think that’s because of your faggot ‘societal attitudes,’ you don’t know shit. I can walk the yard because the people out there don’t care about what you did to someone else-they only care about what you can do to them .”

When I got back from Yard later, I found the paper in my cell. I knew it had to be from the people who run the place-who else’s got enough juice to get a kite put right on your bunk?

It said I was “found to be a poor candidate for treatment” because… ah, the rest was a bunch of words I didn’t give a damn about. Just another reason for the Parole Board to hit me when I came up. Like they needed another one.

You never count the days unless your sentence is in days, like that county-jail slap I got before. Ninety days, that’s a number you can count. Felony time, the faster you move, the slower it goes.

They sent me to the joint I wanted. Not because I asked or anything. Probably because they figured it would be the last place I’d want.

Dannemora. “Little Siberia” is what everybody called it. Just a few miles from the Canadian border. Nobody wants to jail there, because it means your family has to travel a whole day just to get a visit. Most of them, they come up the day before, stay at some motel. So it’s really a three-day trip. That all costs money, makes it even harder.

Black guys really hate the place. They’re all city boys. Not only do their people have to come all that distance to see them, but the town where they have to stay, everyone knows why they’re there. The Latinos don’t like it much, either.

But it’s a good place for a guy like me. Everyone wants to transfer out, so the race-war thing is dialed way down. And if you don’t try to go into business for yourself-like getting your girlfriend to mule in some dope, or opening a gambling book-you don’t make anybody mad at you, either.

Lots of notorious guys were there when I was. I mean, guys you would have read about in the paper. Like that “Preppie Killer.” When the jury hung on his first murder trial, they let him plead to manslaughter, and threw in a bunch of burglaries, no charge. Another one had killed hookers. Lots of them.

For most cons, the more of those kind, the better. They were always getting money sent in, and you could usually muscle them off a piece of their haul when they drew commissary.

I never did that. The best way to do your own time is to stay out of the rackets-even the little ones, like trading your phone time.

You never take favors. Like when a con offers to get a girl to visit you. His girlfriend, she’s got a friend. All it’s supposed to cost you is a slice of whatever you manage to work the girl for.

No use telling the other guy you’ve already got a girl, since anyone can see you’re not getting visits. So you have to say no and make sure he never asks you again.

The first time I hit the yard, I was a little surprised that I didn’t know one single guy out there. Eddie was gone, but I figured, my life, the odds were pretty good I’d know someone . I guess any decent outlaw would have managed to work himself into a joint where there was more action.

Action was what you needed if you were pulling a long piece of time. Me, I was probably the shortest guy in the whole pen. They used to keep this place reserved for the hardcores: double-lifers, cons who had stuck a guard, top-shelf gangsters. Then the dumb fucks who run the system figured out that a joint full of men with nothing to lose wasn’t such a bright idea. I think it might have been the guards’ union that tipped them off.

My account was always kept full, so I could get what I needed without going on the arm, or putting in work for one of the crews.

I paid for smokes, never borrowed any. After a while, I just quit. Whole goddamned place was supposed to be smoke-free, so you couldn’t walk around with a pack, much less a crate. You had to do one at a time, and you’d catch a ticket if you got caught, too. Fuck all that.

You’d think prison, it’d be the last place to change. From the outside, it might look that way, but things had really shifted since I’d been away the last time. Even what the cons called the guards: it was “hacks” my first time, now it was “COs” or “cops.”

Changing what you call things doesn’t make them different.

There’s two kinds of contraband: the kind that gives you power inside the prison, and the kind that you could use to get out.

The first kind mostly comes from drugs. Which means they have to be muled in. The gang that has the best traffic system could buy a lot more power with the profits. More fancy sneakers, more color TVs-stuff you could buy, that was how you showed off.

My first time, everyone knew the mob guys didn’t use mules. They got their supply direct from the prison pharmacy. It was the best connection of all, until the blacks started jumping them, right out in the open. That wasn’t about black against white; it was about gang against gang. The black gang might have been nothing on the street, but Inside, they way outnumbered the mob guys.

Some of the blacks ended up binged for life. Only too many of the mob guys ended up dead, so the blacks took over the drug trade anyway.

That was a long time ago, but I could see it was still that way. Only now, the Spanish guys had their own operation, too.

What did change was that other kind of contraband. On my first bit, if you got caught holding soft money, they’d lock you down tight. And if you got caught with a pistol-not a zip, the real thing-you’d probably never see daylight.

Only reason to have soft money was if you were planning to slip out. If you go without a dime in your pocket, you’re as good as caught. Plenty of guys plan how to get out, but don’t have a clue on what they’re going to do once they clear the wall.

You can’t make a life-without sentence longer, but you can sure make it harder. Anyone who ever got brought back after making an escape could tell you that.

A zip gun, that’s for settling an individual beef, not for trying to bust out. Even a real pistol’s no good for that-you can threaten to kill a guard all day and they’re not going to open the gates. But it’s great for taking hostages, and getting a lot of cells opened. Which means a riot.

Nobody could mule a pistol in. But a couple of gang bosses were known to have access to one. There had to be guards in on a deal like that.

That’s the first thing that hit me. I hadn’t been away that long, but now it seemed like nobody cared about going for the Wall anymore. The guys with real juice, they could get anything they wanted right there. They didn’t care about soft money. Or even pistols. What they really wanted was cell phones.

A cell phone, that’s super-bling. The ultimate. Perfect for a shot-caller who’s never getting out of Ad-Seg. That’s what they call the hole they dump you in for heavy violence now. Stands for “Administrative Segregation.”

With a cell, the shot-caller can reach out anytime he wants. And touch somebody, too.

I thought that was amazing, but a guy who’d done time in Mexico told me the narco kingpins always had cell phones there. Carried them around, nobody said a thing.