Sweet Hell on Fire (12 page)

The next day there was a note on the pack of cards that said, “Fuck You.” So I cut them all up in little pieces and then put them back in the box. And my whole crew and I laughed hysterically while I did it.

It was amazing I found the time to sit down to cut up those cards because apparently we had to pay for all the fun we’d had the day before. The place was like a madhouse.

To begin, I had a newbie to train. He meant well, but he was slower than a box of hair. He was also afraid of the inmates. Not a good combination. Especially when one of the cells we had to search for the day belonged to a serial killer who was special management inside of special management. He was in Segregation not for something he’d done but because he was so charismatic, he couldn’t be permitted out in general population. When officers spoke to him, we had to do it in pairs, and the brass preferred they be Sergeant and above.

The inmate obviously had severe OCD. Everything in his cell was just so. He even had three salt packets and three pepper packets arranged exactly two millimeters apart. I know because I was curious enough to measure it. When he put his playing cards away, they were in order by suit. The other officer was afraid to touch anything.

“What if he knows I was going through his things?” he asked me.

I rolled my eyes and asked for deliverance from dumb-shittery. “Of course he knows you went through his things. This is prison.” I found myself using that phrase to explain things more and more.

“But what if he’s mad?” His eyes were wide and he reminded me of a rabbit.

“So the fuck what? He’s an inmate. It’s his job to hide shit and it’s yours to find it. Do your job. I can guarantee you that he did his.”

I really thought he was going to cry. I think if I’d held a gun to his head, he might have still had to think about whether he was going to touch this inmate’s property. Now, usually, I treat an inmate’s cell with respect. Still, I’m not going to let that interfere with my job. I usually tried to put things back where the inmate had left them, but if it wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t going to cry about it. I had to finish searching the cell myself and I found nothing but nuisance contraband, so I confiscated that. I did put his playing cards back in the pack out of order and I thought this officer was going to cry again, but I did it for training purposes. The inmate never said shit to me about it. He accepted it was just part of prison. And the officer, well, he didn’t last very long.

The guy in the next cell had more than two hundred pictures. I told him after he got back from his shower he needed to mail some home. Now, I didn’t have to do that. I could have chosen which fifty he got to keep and sent the rest to Property, where they would have been mailed home at his expense. Some officers would do that, picking the crappiest, least meaningful pictures that they could to let the guy keep.

He tried to argue with me, like I knew he would. They all do. I discussed it with him for a half an hour, again, something else I didn’t have to do. Policy said fifty pictures. Period. Finally, I’d had enough and told him to send them out or I would.

The trays for chow arrived and after we’d passed about half of them, the house started rocking again, bunks banging, screaming. I asked one of the guys what the problem was—turned out they’d been shorted their cookie.

Food isn’t just food in prison. It’s the stuff of riots and shit bombs. I wasn’t about to take all that nonsense because some dumbshit in the kitchen forgot to put cookies on the trays. I finished passing the rest of my trays, then made an announcement on the mic that I would be on the phone with the kitchen to get their cookies directly.

The Lieutenant had just come in for the post check as I made the announcement and he was talking to the First Sergeant when I made the call.

“This is Lunsford in Seg. The trays were missing the cookies,” I told the food service supervisor.

“No, they weren’t.”

I sighed. “Yes, they were. I passed the trays myself. Saw there were no cookies on the trays.”

“I put them on there myself.”

Highly fucking unlikely since I’d passed the trays myself and checked each one. “Well, then the inmates you sent with the trays ate them on the way over.
Send
the
cookies
.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Listen to me very fucking closely. If you think I’m going to get hit with a piss bomb because you don’t want to give us the cookies, you are sadly fucking mistaken. My guys will get their cookies. They have them coming. If you don’t have those over here in ten goddamn minutes, I’m going to come to the kitchen and get them myself. I can promise you, if I have to leave my post to come over there, you will not fucking like it.
Bring
me
the
goddamn
cookies
.” I slammed the phone down.

Through the whole exchange, the Lieutenant had been motioning for me to give him the phone. After I hung up, he laughed. “Why didn’t you give me the phone? That’s what I’m for.”

“I don’t need you to handle my business.”

“Obviously.” He looked at me and we both laughed, realizing that I’d just said the same thing to him I said to inmates when they offered me “protection.”

The food service supervisor’s supervisor called. He said he didn’t appreciate how I’d talked to his employee, his employee was very upset, and he threatened to talk to the Lieutenant. I told him the Lieutenant had been standing right next to me the whole time.

We got our cookies.

That wasn’t the end of the bullshit though. The new guy had been threatened. An inmate he’d made angry had threatened to shank him, and that meant an immediate transfer to a slam cell—a regular cell that had an extra door that further segregated inmates from staff and other inmates. The inmate promptly refused and we had to do a Force Cell Move. Since the inmate refused to come out to be moved, our special team had to suit up in riot gear and go in and get him, which was always a pain in the ass, but we were lucky he wasn’t one who liked to play in his own waste. Some guys, out of sheer perversity, would slather themselves in their own shit to make it harder for the officers to get a good grip on them.

Then we had to make two more moves because two guys got rolled from the Medium and we had to deal with their property. I found hooch—homemade alcohol—in a V05 shampoo bottle in one of the boxes of property. At first sniff, it even smelled good, almost like some fruity shampoo. But the label on the bottle didn’t match the scent and there was a bit of a tang to the scent. So I called for a testing kit to verify the alcohol content.

We had to make more moves in the cell house because the inmate in possession of the hooch had to be moved to a slam cell too. All he would get was a paper dress for the first twenty-four hours and he’d be behind a slam door—what Segregation should actually be like.

It’s called Segregation for a reason—the inmates are segregated from the rest of the population and from each other. Seg is supposed to be solitary and isolated, but our Segregation unit was more like a regular cell house, with the restriction that the inmates never got to come out of their cells unless it was for their hour of rec time or their shower. They weren’t really solitary and isolated unless they’d earned time in one of the slam door cells, but we only had a few of those.

It wasn’t until much later in the evening that I finally was able to sit down and write the disciplinary report. I came out of the office to get another officer to sign as witness and it looked like a tornado of picture bits had exploded outside a cell, the one with the inmate whom I’d told to mail out his pictures. And they smelled like piss. So rather than mail out his pictures and keep fifty, he’d torn them
all
up and pissed all over them.
His
pictures. That another inmate would have to clean up.

How did this punish me exactly? I’d already had a hard day, and if he wanted his cell to smell like piss, it was no skin off my ass. In fact, if he stunk up the whole cell house, it was possible the next time he was in general population, he’d get his ass kicked. So again, what did that have to do with me?

Sometimes I was scheduled to listen to inmate phone calls. Every single call inmates made were recorded and had to be reviewed. It didn’t always suck, but most days an anal yeast infection was more fun. Although, sometimes, it was better than
General
Hospital
.

First on the docket was the same serial killer whose cell I’d searched the day before. I didn’t want to know that his wife could fit the cordless phone all the way into her vagina. Or the sound it made into the phone as she did so, like stirring macaroni. I didn’t want to know that it hurt her, but she did it because he got off on the control he had over her. She obviously didn’t understand he was getting off on her pain too. He wanted to be told everything she was wearing, but he wanted to hear about the brands. Ralph Lauren sheets. DKNY nightshirt. Some Italian underwear. Her voice was so high-pitched and vacuous. It gave me a headache just to hear her speak. She so obviously had no clue if this guy ever got out he’d kill her. Probably with phones in her vagina.

It was also interesting to note that she’d married him and not told her parents. She was going to a friend’s house later because they’d be home, so he should call her there. Nothing really interesting to write down and report.

The first half of the next phone call was in Spanish, so I made a note to get a translator to listen to the call. Sometimes, they’d speak in another language if they were talking about things they didn’t want us to understand. About halfway through this call, though, they switched back to English and it was more sex. That was all these fuckers talked about. Sex. Drugs. How the man is keeping them down.

I almost felt bad for this guy. He was talking to his girlfriend about what their first time was going to be like when he got out, and he was telling her how much he missed her, how much he wanted her. She got down and dirty and asked him for details. She wanted him to measure his dick. So he did, and when he told her it was six inches hard, there was dead silence on the line. He asked her if it made her hot, if it’s a good length. More silence and then she scrambled to reassure him it was a good length, but he wouldn’t be soothed.

The next call was an inmate who I know had at least three women putting money on his account so he could buy things through the prison store. The woman he was calling didn’t answer right away, so the first thing he wanted to know was what she was doing that she was too busy to accept his call. They fought, on her dime, for an hour. He accused her of fucking everyone from the bum on the corner to his brother. The kicker came when she admitted that she had, in fact, been banging his brother blue and she was sucking him off when this guy called.

I spit out my coffee and half snorted it out my nose. The inmate lost his shit like some rabid baboon. He said he’d kill her when he got out, that he was going to find a way to get out before his release date and she wouldn’t know when or where it’d happen, only that he would. He talked about lighting her on fire and doing obscene things to her dead body.

I had to give this woman credit. Rather than be afraid, she told him if he lit her on fire, he wouldn’t have a dead body left to do obscene things to and he should really rethink his strategy. And that if he’d been a man and had a real job to begin with, he’d be taking care of her instead of sitting in prison, letting other women take care of him. While he was still trying to understand what was happening, she drove it home and called him a pussy and said that’s why she was with a real man, and then hung up the phone.

So I guess she’d found out about the other women. He’d be a real peach the next few days.

He was also an escape risk. He’d made criminal threats against this woman. I had to document it and turn it in, which meant he’d probably be coming to Seg. It was going to be hard not to point and laugh at him because he got told, as they say.

My mom finally went in for her tests and they scheduled her surgery. We discovered later that Dilly, my parents’ dog, had developed ovarian cancer around the same time. We lost Dilly.

It’s kind of crazy and makes no sense, but sometimes I wondered if Dilly did that for my mother, if she went through it so my mother could survive it. It’s stupid, but I wanted to believe it then and I still want to now, I guess to give shape and form to the chaos. To have proof of some higher power even if it’s just the love of an animal for her human.

The treatment plan for my mother was a full hysterectomy and then more tests to see if they needed to do chemotherapy. My mother had been expecting worse. Her mother had fought breast cancer for a long time, beginning with lump removal all the way to a double mastectomy.

My mom was still afraid, we all were, but there was strength in knowing a fix for her pain loomed on the horizon.

And I felt like an asshole all over again for leaving her alone. I wanted to apologize, but I still didn’t know how. I mean, I could open my mouth, I could say the words, but would they mean anything to her?

I’d stopped arguing with her about every little thing, even when I knew I was right. She didn’t have to agree with me for me to be right. I didn’t have to shove my thoughts down her throat and I didn’t have to let her shove hers down mine. It wasn’t worth the shouting matches and the upset it caused both of us.

If she said something I didn’t like, I’d ask her to let it go, and if she wouldn’t, I just got up and left. Disengaged.

I knew she’d never change her mind on anything, and neither would I. So what was the point in arguing? I didn’t have enough energy to keep banging my head against a brick wall.