Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

It’s not like Lefebvre hadn’t been in that underworld before. Whether driving an all-night cab in Calgary or experiencing L.A.’s detention center, he knew firsthand how to deal with the people society won’t talk about or hang out with: “I got along because I was able to fake it — a lot of those guys thought I was from New York. I talk like they talk, and I say the kind of shit I usually say. There was this one guy, Taz, when he was busted he said he was worth $140 million. I said, ‘Is that all?’ One tooth was surrounded with gold and it had a big diamond and the next was surrounded by silver with another big jewel in the middle. Taz was heavy shit, a heroin trafficker and a murderer.”

Because Lefebvre’s sentence was so brief, he became a holdover and remained with the pretrial inmates. This situation had an additional advantage: pretrial cellees could not be forced to work while in prison because they had not been convicted. Lefebvre was free to indulge in the one pastime he knew could teleport him out of his new daily regime: he devoured nine books to forget.

Jean-Paul Sartre would have been proud. Not only did Sartre turn around the Cartesian affirmation of existence — not “I think, therefore I am,” but rather “I am, therefore I think”—he also believed a prisoner was existentially, if not physically, free. And here Lefebvre was putting that old theory to the test.

Some of that testing wore down his patience. Remember, Sartre also said hell was other people. Lefebvre says,

They all listen to different radio stations, and when they talk to each other they yell over that. It’s fucking noisy in there — painful, all concrete. The Spanish guys are so loud! The black guys are bad enough but the Spanish guys: “Alegre! Alegre!” It means happy but it also means loud. The louder you are the happier you are, and they’re all jumping around trying to pick up each other’s spirits.

When I was in jail in 1969–70 in Western Canada, there were some fifties greaseball guys, and it was different. Those guys, anybody makes any noise, it was, “Dummy up!” and everybody would shut up. They wanted it to be cool. Guys from the fifties, they know what cool really means. Guys from the nineties and 2000s, they wouldn’t know cool if it bit them in the ass. If they ran into cool they’d fuck it up right now by making a bunch of noise.

What is cool, what is hip, what is hipster, what is bohemian, these terms have been in flux for years. I met a friend at a John Cale show a few years back and he said of the small crowd, “Take a good look around, this is what’s left of bohemia.” At the time I thought that was a fairly profound statement, but I’m impressionable. Lefebvre now had empirical evidence. Jail culture mirrored the mainstream society’s co-option of cool. As for his forty-one-day stretch, he figured, in retrospect, it could have gone far worse.

“I don’t know whether it was intentional or just lucky/smart,” he says, “but they put me in with a bunch of pretrial guys. I was the only guy in there who had already been sentenced. Actually, the whole building was filled with pretrial guys, so they were on good behavior. They were going to save knifing people for when they were in proper prison. That saved me a little bit.”

The routine was straightforward. At six in the morning, guards opened the cell doors. Prisoners were allowed to go have breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of cereal — Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes, or Cream of Wheat — plus an apple or two, a couple of small pieces of cake, and a quarter-pint or two of milk. “Guys get their cereal and their pieces of cake and their milk and they mix it all together into this great big pabulum, and then they eat that and get fat.”

Unlike in MDC L.A., prisoners weren’t forced to get up and go to breakfast. The guards allowed the men who didn’t feel like eating until lunch to hang back.

“Count” occurred, Monday through Friday, between 4 and 5 p.m. and between 8 and 9 p.m. On weekends, guards added one additional count, 10 to 11 a.m. This procedure allowed them to count the entire building, over and over and over.

Except for the fact that you’re a prisoner and you had to be there, Lefebvre says the time wasn’t so bad. “You have the walk of the range, three double tiers that have tables running down the middle of them, like McDonald’s, nailed-to-the-floor furniture. Guys are playing chess and playing cards and just sitting and bullshitting.”

The guards let inmates outside twice a day. Lefebvre tried it and decided it wasn’t for him: “You go out to this roof and you’ve got thirty-foot-high concrete walls and a big wire mesh across the top of it. And you’re looking up at all these people looking down at you with magnifying glasses. And they’re playing basketball and shit up there. And it’s a sound sewer; so much noisier even than inside.”

It was noisy enough that Lefebvre decided once was enough for him: “When everyone went up on the roof for an hour and a half, those were the most peaceful times. I figured early on that the best thing to do is to get up in the morning and enjoy that time.”

The rules were a little different from the detention center in L.A. and gave the impression of a bit more freedom of movement within 7 South itself. Yet the atmosphere was loud and rude compared to the West Coast facility. He explains,

When I was in MDC L.A., there was a TV on at that end of the room and there was a TV on at this end of the room. One of them was in Spanish and one of them wasn’t. And that was it.

In MCC, there were four TVs over there and three TVs over here. And those three were in Spanish. And under each TV was a little FM transmitter that had a number on it, like 94.7 or 103.2. And then you had these little Walkmans you could put on FM local, and you had four preset buttons. And so you set the preset buttons to the TVs that were in the language you wanted to listen to. You touched one button and got the football game, and over there was MTV, and over here was Fox News. So everybody was listening to something, and whenever they were talking THEY WERE TALKING OVER THE TOP OF WHATEVER WAS COMING IN THEIR EARS!! It was brutal. MCC New York was way more animalistic.

Turns out the first guy Lefebvre encountered on the way in, the one insistently demanding fellatio at top volume night and day, may have been the perfect, nasty metaphor. And while the guards weren’t necessarily “Bend & Separate!” sadists as in L.A., they were hardly a compassionate lot. About a third of the guards acted like human beings, he figures, but some of them were cruel. Still, in terms of time moving fast or slow, he looks back and says it went better than he thought:

Looking forward is always a super-drag: Forty more days? Fuck!! You’re like this, right? You have to gather yourself. You’re surrounded by people who wish they had your problems. If I started whining about my forty days, I’d get pasted.

And then after breakfast I could just sit there. A lot of guys were still in bed. It was the quietest time of the day, breakfast till lunch call. I had my Walkman that I bought from the commissary. They’re thirty-eight bucks and you get little ear buds and I was listening to WQXR, the great classical music station in New York City. It happened to be Beethoven month. I got a poster that was going around town on the buses that said OBEY across the top and THOVEN across the bottom, this picture of Beethoven with his knit brows. I was going to bed at night listening to piano sonatas and string quartets and violin concertos. It was good. If I have to listen to noise I might as well at least filter it through some good classical music.

So Lefebvre fought their noise with his kind of noise and then read. The lighting was way better than at FTC Oklahoma — the usual fluorescent bulbs, but they were bright enough — and he was allowed to keep them on so long as his bunkee said it was okay. “By 10:30, 11 at night I was really ready to go to sleep.”