Authors: Jon Cole
“I’m Not Scared Of You, I’m Scared Of Me”
Clanging down one of the lanes between the cell block buildings with all my worldly possessions in my arms (well, all of my Thailand-based worldly possessions), I entered through the gate of cell block section #2 where most
of the farang
prisoners with over ten-year sentences were held. I was straight away shuffled upstairs and locked up alone in a cell at the end of a second-floor corridor. It was approximately four meters by two meters. Under the single small barred window at the end of the cell was a squat toilet and a water tank separated from the rest of the cell by a waist-high wall. The ceiling was almost as high as the room was long. The floor was marble. I had been told that I would be locked in here for at least a month.
That afternoon, the prisoner keyboy opened the door and handed me a small ice chest and closed the cell again without a word in spite of my asking him questions, first in English and then in Thai. I caught on soon enough that no one was to speak to me.
Upon inspection of the container, I found a quart jar of tea and an assortment of food – all on ice. This is pretty damn good room service prison food, I thought as I started sampling what was there. Then I discovered a plastic bag with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a note inside. The note read: “From your fellow American prisoners. No strings attached. Welcome to hell … Bob.”
It was comforting to know that there was someone out there who halfway gave a damn about me. However, this did not quite seem like hell … yet.
As dusk settled in, I could hear the keyboys opening the cell doors. Loud conversations and banter coming from further down the corridors echoed off the walls in a myriad of different languages. Things quieted down after lockup. A few hours later, the place was totally silent, but I was unable to sleep because heroin withdrawal had set in.
Morning came and went, its doldrums punctuated only by the keyboy delivering coffee from the Americans. He carried the ice chest away and, by late afternoon, returned it refilled. Food, though, was the last thing I was interested in by that time. I was getting intense hot flashes, cold sweats, cramping, puking and runs of diarrhea. Later that evening, after the latest bout of withdrawal symptoms, I noticed the little blue balloon of heroin that I had swallowed the day before was now floating in the commode. I was beyond ecstatic. A quick wash and rinse followed. Cutting a small hole in the balloon with my fingernail clippers and snorting only a tiny bit had me instantly cured. I ate heartily, then slept the beautiful dreamy half-sleep known only to those given to the love of the opium poppy.
Shortly after dawn, standing on the rim of the water tank under the window, I was able to see the large prison yard area of Lard Yao Building #2 cell block. Directly below was the chow hall where the Thai prisoners were reciting the obligatory three-line pledge before eating. Beyond it lay the sports field and a factory-cum-school building, while on the other side was a small hut, which was the building chief’s office. This hut was built on stilts in the middle of a pond, reachable only by a long, narrow bridge. In the corner of the walled-in yard was what looked like a small island village of thatched roof bamboo shanties, surrounded by the pond on one side and a moat on the other three sides. It was where most of the foreign prisoners stayed during the day. The tiny village was called The Garden.
After that morning’s National Anthem, along with the coffee delivery came a note from Bob. The para-consul from the US Embassy would be making his bi-weekly visit to check on us sometime that afternoon. I had usually foregone the visits from the embassy when at Bumbat, but I was happy to get out of solitary this day if even for an hour or so. Once downstairs, I met my fellow American inmates.
The pecking order of the almost dozen or so American prisoners was clear. Big Bob was obviously the top dog, not because he was biggest and baddest, but because he had been in Building # 2, Lard Yao, the longest and had the most money. A California reefer smuggler turned junkie-cum-heroin smuggler, Bob had already been there for five years of a twenty-five-year sentence. His wife, Sherry, was in the adjacent women’s prison, and it was said that she was the one with the money and thus the real top dog.
Hobbling along in chains during the half kilometer walk to the visit area, I had the opportunity to speak with Bob about getting a guard to cash a check so I could repay him for his help while I was in solitary. He said he could and that they always took care of fellow Americans in the hole with no obligation, but that once you are out, you are pretty much on your own. He did not ask me if I had any dope, which gave me an indication that he had his own. But it was hard to tell without being able to see his eyes which were always hidden behind the aviator sunglasses that he constantly wore.
The visiting area was a large green, surrounded on three sides by double-barred and screened partitions separating the visitors from the prisoners by two meters. There was a lot of shouting to be heard. Already present were about a half dozen Americans from the foreign section where foreigners with sentences of under ten years were held, segregated almost completely from the Thai prisoners. The US para-consul, Mr Vogel (who the whiner inmates called Mr Bogus), counted heads and asked about the well-being of those who were not present.
One American with us was Jasper, a disgraced US Army sergeant who wore the uniform of a blueshirt and carried a night stick. He had been busted thirteen years earlier for using US military flights to smuggle forty-five kilos of heroin. Largely ignored by the other American prisoners, he held himself aloof and apart from the others and was living in another cell block section away from all the other
farangs.
Jasper was very
gao laaeo
indeed: after many years of incarceration, he had learned to cleverly work the system. For instance, in addition to the US$100 emergency medical dietary assistance provided by the US embassy, he was known to frequently receive additional deliveries of a footlocker full of “supplies” from the JUSMAG sergeant responsible for seeing to his well-being. Although he was not a terribly social fellow, he always had a ready supply of Johnny Walker Red and Valium.
JUSMAG (Joint US Military Assistance Group) is under the US Security Assistance Organization (SAO) in Thailand responsible for all US bilateral and multilateral military exercises and operations conducted in Thailand. In addition to its military chain of command, JUSMAGTHAI is also responsible to the US Ambassador to Thailand.
Thirteen proved to be a lucky number for Jasper, as after thirteen years in prison, he was released under a General Royal Amnesty, which sharply reduced his original sentence. I’m not sure what happened to him after he left the Kingdom, but it was said that years before, he had turned informant, ratted out the others in his heroin-smuggling group and thus escaped further court-martial proceedings upon his eventual return to the US.
Most cons used the embassy visit as an opportunity to get out of the cell block section for multiple purposes. Either gawking at females in the visit area or trying to arrange deals with the foreign section inmates was the norm. Some just wanted to whine to the para-consul as if they thought the embassy should be helping them with any overwrought, petty problem they perceived themselves to be having.
Every month, the consul would deposit $100 to your prison store account; this was intended for dietary assistance. The amount was almost as much as the base pay for the lower-ranking guards. The primary reason for the embassy representative to visit was to determine that you were healthy, were not being abused, and were, indeed, still incarcerated. Many of the others thought that the embassy should be helping them to get out of prison, but that was not one of the embassy officials’ assigned duties.
With neither a deal to arrange, nor something to whine about, I was happily resigned to leering at the girls coming and going on the visit green. Going to the visit area was good for a change of scenery, but whenever you returned to your cell block section, you felt worse than before. Whenever I felt like whining about my situation, it was just to myself, not to some government official just trying to do a difficult job.
The little balloon of smack lasted roughly another two weeks. I had never experienced a complete withdrawal during my uninterrupted four-year-plus addiction. There had been numerous indications, while tapering off over the last few months, of what was in store for me someday. But now here in this prison solitary confinement lockdown, the last tiny amount of my remaining heroin was sniffed up and was gone … It was gone.
That certain someday which I had long feared was finally upon me and I knew that the monkey on my back was going to be beyond very mad when I had nothing to feed it. And it was.
I remembered that the sentencing judge had told me that the Thai prison system would help me with my addiction. I guess this is what he meant. I had put myself in this situation and now it was my debt alone to pay. With chains on my feet, rolling around on the cool marble floor for days on end and trying to find the smallest comfort where there was none, I was forced to own up and accept the consequences of my own karma. It is said that pain is your body’s way of letting you know that you have done something very wrong and are fortunately still alive. This new, most painful low point of my life, locked down in a Thai prison with a vicious jones, had been achieved. A hard rain had indeed fallen. Never before or since have I ever felt so utterly alone and separated from The Love of God.
Having lost track of time, I suddenly awoke an unknown number days later laying in my own excrement and vomit to discover that I had finally fallen asleep and that the more extreme physical aspects of my ordeal were over. I availed myself of the water to bathe and used my
pakama
to mop up my cell. When the ice chest of food arrived that afternoon, the keyboy spoke to me for the first time. In very broken English, he said, “Bob give you” as he held out half of a crumpled cigarette to me.
I lit it, took a couple of puffs of Thai ganja, closed my eyes and flashed back in time to the tiny shack on Soi 18 where a sixteen-year-old kid had taken the first steps of a treacherous journey that had ultimately brought him to this time and place. In all fairness though, before Pee Lek had handed me that opium pipe for that first time, he had warned, “Today OK … tomorrow no OK. Understand?” At that time, I had lied and said that I understood. Now I did. I really did understand.
At least another week passed until one morning, in the middle of May, the keyboy and a blueshirt came to my cell saying that I was to go out. Though it was the still the tail end of the dry season, the rainy season had come early. Two long days of thunderstorms had washed the air clean and soaked the manicured grounds. Taken to the Central Control Building by the blueshirt, I sat as the shackles were removed from my ankles. On the walk back to the cell block section, it struck me that not only was I now free from the chains and the solitary confinement, I was finally free from heroin. From then on, I would heed the words of Pee Lek. That happy thought was short-lived, however. Entering back through the steel gates of Building #2, it became obvious that I was still in a prison and had only just begun to own the consequences of my karma.
After gathering my bed roll and few possessions, I walked the prison yard for the first time. The keyboy had given me a clump of four or five tiny Thai bananas, still on their stem, which I ate while slowly making my way across the yard. As I passed the bridge leading to the building chief’s office, built on stilts in the middle of the pond, a blueshirt speaking Thai barked at me to go inside. Crossing the footbridge, removing my shoes at the doorway, I entered and squatted in front of the chief’s desk. The man had a weary look around his shifty eyes. Red-faced and sweating profusely in spite of his desk fan that appeared to be set on high, he asked me in English if I spoke Thai. I answered in English that I did. Then in Thai he said, “Don’t have problem … I see you … now go.”
I took “I see you” to mean that either he was going to be watching me or that he perceived who I was. I was never sure which he meant, but it may have been both. From then on, it was evident that he did see me.
After passing through the open bamboo gateway structure that led onto the island compound accommodating foreign inmates, I was in what the
farangs
called The Garden. Just inside the gate was a goofy-looking Australian guy dressed in only dirty underwear and ragged running shoes doing some very odd calisthenics.
Further down the path, between the huts, I encountered Yusef, a very kind, Hausa-tribe Nigerian Muslim whom I had known from Bumbat. He directed me to the American hut in the far corner of the island compound. Often he would invite me to help him supply the ingredients for the most wonderful soup I have ever known. It was a concoction of peppered sliced beef, okra, tomato, onion and crushed peanuts. Yusef had always claimed that the power of Allah would soon release him. A few years later, he died of tuberculosis and went home.
Continuing into the heart of The Garden, I peeled open my last banana, leaving the skin still attached to the stem with the other peels and continued down the lane, conscious of the eyes from the other huts silently taking stock of the new guy. The lane turned just past the large hut of the Hong Kong Chinese. Then, directly in my path, was the largest rat I had ever seen, sitting up on its haunches. Usually, Bangkok’s rats were seldom seen in the daytime. More disconcerting, there were indications this almost hairless, mangy creature was quite ill since it sat there tottering, apparently oblivious to my approach. I flung my stalk of banana peels in its general direction; they struck the rodent and wrapped around its torso like a bolo. Already almost dead and in its weakened condition, the wrap knocked him over.
Without breaking stride, I crushed his upper body underfoot and continued onto the bridge leading into the American house. Over my shoulder, I heard a clamor of clapping and cheering. Turning to look, I saw half a dozen Chinese guys examining the dead rat and jabbering in obvious amazement. I realized then that they had not noticed the rat, which was out of their line of sight when I had hurled the peels. Also, they had not seen me step on its head. All they saw now was a huge deceased rodent, wrapped in banana stem and peels, bleeding from its mouth.