Sweet Hell on Fire (13 page)

There was another incident at work, but still no big blowup like we’d been expecting. It goes like that sometimes, always in a state of flux. It waxes and wanes like the moon, but unlike the moon, it can’t be marked on any regular schedule.

This time it was inmate on officer.

It happened in the chow hall, with all the makings of a riot. Some of the officers on scene didn’t respond as they should have. You would have thought they’d be spoiling for a fight. But one of the fucking yard officers just stood there, frozen. Worthless. While an inmate assaulted one of the guys in black. A blacksuit. The blacksuits were supposed to be our elite crew, almost like a SWAT team.

And he knocked him smooth the fuck out.

The prison went on lockdown.

Which is what one would expect, right? But it wasn’t a true lockdown. No, it was only lockdown for guys who didn’t have jobs. The inmates who worked private industry jobs, the jobs in which the prison could make money on their labor and the jobs for which certain parties got paid bonuses, they got to still go to work. Which was about half of the Max. So it wasn’t really lockdown. And they wondered why morale was low, why there was such a high turnover of staff. Why officers gave up and got lazy, not bothering to do more than maintain the status quo. Yeah, there’s a clue. It was obvious what’s important to them.

At the fed, if staff is assaulted, they go on lockdown for a minimum of two weeks. No visitors for any inmates, no religious callouts, no activities, nothing. They mean what they say. Is it any wonder they look at the state officers and snicker behind their hands or just outright pity them?

Not only was it an insult to staff, it sent the message to the inmates that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted and they’d get away with it. Great way to stand behind your team, to build a strong herd where no one feels like maybe the inmates really do care more about you than your fellow staff.

Shitass repercussions aside, I’d decided this was going to be my career. So I bitched about it along with everyone else, but I kept going to work. That’s what you do in corrections, you go to work. We’d talked about protesting and staging a walkout, but we all knew no one would do that.

You’re sick. Go to work.

You’re dying. Go to work.

You’re dead. Get your bitch ass up and go to fucking work.

All of the pressure we’re under, the body adjusts. It’s when the body realizes it doesn’t have to function under that kind of stress that it says “fuck you” and promptly starts shutting down.

My father had two years of sick leave and vacation built up when he retired from the fed. He woke up one day and just couldn’t do it anymore. He’d been there for twenty-three years and he’d had enough. So he rode out his sick leave and he retired. They don’t let you accrue that much anymore, but that’s the general idea. You save up your leave and you use it when you just can’t stomach to look at the place.

A year into his sick leave, he promptly had a heart attack. That’s why a lot of guys just don’t retire. Or they retire, take a couple weeks off, and then they come back to work to start over. Some of the guys from the fed who had mandatory retirement didn’t even wait until the ink dried on their last check before starting at the state prison. They didn’t know anything else.

It was the same for my father. When my father had his heart attack, he drove himself to the hospital. That’s the kind of man my father is. When he nailed his thumb to a board with a nail gun, he calmly inspected it, pulled the nail out, wrapped it with duct tape, and worked another eight hours. After his heart attack, what did he do? He got another job. My father is getting close to seventy now. He is blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and still works full time. He still takes my kids running around hell’s half acre for whatever hijinks they can talk him into. He takes my daughter to all of her riding lessons and shows. Half of the reason he still works is so that my daughter can take riding lessons, so she can participate in the shows, so she can do what she loves and build a foundation for the career she dreams of. And he’s still got that thousand-yard stare that makes boys think twice about talking to my daughter. He taught me to drive; that alone is worth a medal of honor. This is the bar by which I measure all other men and why I find most of them lacking.

It is also the bar by which I measure myself, and I was not measuring up at all.

At this point in my life, I didn’t think I ever could and it was a waste of time to try. I wanted him to be proud of me, but there was very little to admire in me then. I had a job and my kids had insurance. They didn’t go to bed hungry, and that was the best I could say for myself. And even then, my parents were helping me by keeping my kids while I was at work.

I’d made a mess of things, but it was easier to think I had no other choice than to look at what I was doing.

They called him Cocoa Puff.

He was one of the biggest men I’d ever seen in my life. He was six foot something insane, had shoulders like pillars that could hold up a skyscraper, and he was round. I think he said once that he weighed something like four hundred pounds. He was also a queen, and I was very jealous of how well-groomed his eyebrows were. Still, it never got in the way of his job. Not his eyebrows, but his queen status. He wasn’t too much of a lady to knock the shit out of some of these guys if they were froggy enough to jump.

He came down to hear some of the disciplinary cases in Segregation, and it was always a good time when he was in the office. We always cut up in Seg, but it was even more of a good time when he came down.

Although on this particular day, my arsenal of witty remarks was empty. I was fighting a losing battle with my bra, which wasn’t really that unusual, but the underwire had broken through the seam and stabbed me in the armpit.

It was hard to be the mistress of snark when I had a metal bar trying to work its way into my lung by way of my armpit. I had to do something. I waited until the whole crew was out on the tier, and then I reached into my shirt and I pulled that god-awful metal crescent of doom out of my bra. But just as I tugged it out of my shirt, Cocoa Puff came back in through the office door. I’d expected them to be out on the tier for a good long while, so the sight of him startled me and I pinched the ends too vigorously.

Said metal bit spun out of my hand and toward Cocoa Puff. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open as the thing barreled straight for him and pegged him squarely between the eyes.

I was already laughing so hard, I could have cried. And then he picked it up and examined it from all angles like it was some UFO dropped to earth.

“What is this?” he asked and then he put it on his head. Like a tiara.

If that wasn’t enough, the First Sergeant came back through the door and snatched it off his head and put it on his own. They both did little dances around the office with my underwire on their heads.

Finally, the First Sergeant asked again what it was, but I was engaged in laughter that was really more of a choking. I was finally able to wheeze out that it was part of my underwire for my bra.

Cocoa Puff blushed and said, “But it fit on my head.”

The First Sergeant grinned and took it off his head and made a big show of measuring it against me from a distance and then putting it back on his head again. The thing achieved some kind of cult following, and as far as I know, it’s still hidden somewhere in the Seg office.

See, it wasn’t all brains and blood and death. There were times when we laughed, pranked, and built a cadre of moments that on the outside were nothing more complex than silliness. But it was those moments that bonded us together the same as the darkness. They were like little glass globes we could pull out and look at with just a glance or a word between those who were there—frozen in time and a shining beacon that no matter how dark things got, those moments would come again.

Another Seg day, bra meltdown resolved.

We were tearing shit up and taking names today. We got a tip from the investigations unit that someone had smuggled plugs of weed into Seg. Sure enough, we found them.

Plugs are exactly what they sound like. They’re shaped about the length and breadth of three tampons if they’d been wrapped together, and they’re transported in the prison wallet—anus. Or mangina, as it’s sometimes called.

I was excited and called the Lieutenant to tell him we’d found them. He asked if I’d verified what was inside.

Uh oh.

I told him I hadn’t and he told me I had to cut it open. So I got my multitool, I changed my gloves, and I sliced it open. I almost puked all over the table. It hadn’t had a smell until I sliced it open. The stench that immediately filled the room was like we’d just crawled inside this guy’s asshole—he’d had bad Mexican food for lunch.

Yes, and these guys roll this stuff up in porous rolling papers that smell just like ass and put it in their mouths. Inhale this smoke that has absorbed this man’s ass like Vader and the dark side. That thought made me want to vomit all over again.

I wrapped it back up, documented my findings and sent it to evidence, and wrote the disciplinary report. It took two days to get the office air back to tolerable.

It was one of those dreaded “three women in Seg” days. At least, dreaded for the rest of the institution. We liked our jobs.

That is, except for today. We’d gotten a guy in from the hospital who had gone out the week before in the care of EMS because he’d been shanked—sliced open like gutting the sickly white belly of a fish. He was running his mouth on us, and after dealing with him for five minutes, we all understood why he’d been shanked because we were ready to do it too.

The day he’d gotten shanked, he’d been a resident of the Medium and he’d been on his way back to his bunk for something, and this older convict had gotten in his way.

This older convict was the laundry porter. Well, the Medium didn’t technically have a laundry porter, but it gave him something to do and made him feel useful. He was an old man doing the last of his hard forty, but he was respected, even by the young gangbangers, and the officers didn’t mind that he wanted to work. He never got into any trouble; he was a convict, not an inmate.

The young, white inmate told him to hurry the fuck up and the old man didn’t listen. He’d been doing time since before this guy was born, so he didn’t pay him any mind. The cockbag pushed him and said, “I said get the fuck out of my way, nigger.”

So the old man pulled himself to his feet and went on to the unit where he’d been headed to get the laundry carts. Instead of a laundry cart, though, he got a shank. He calmly found the guy who’d insulted him and ripped him open from belly to sternum.

When the guy came back, he looked like he’d had an industrial zipper implanted in his skin.

And he was still acting like an entitled cockbag.

Inmates don’t get showers in the first forty-eight hours that they’re in Seg. This bitch was crying about how he had to have a shower and he had to wash his stitches and we had violated his rights and he was going to sue us and…I don’t even know what else he said because we stopped listening.

Then the Sergeant looked at me. She had The Look. The one she got on her face when she thought of something truly magnificent. She suggested that we give him a shower. And put him back in the showers with two of the biggest, angriest guys we could find who were scheduled to shower. It just so happened we chose a Crip and a Blood.

Yeah, buddy. Fuck you. That’ll teach you to keep your racist shit to yourself and to shut the fuck up and do your time with your head down.

He should have known when all three of us came to get him for his shower, but no. He thought he was just getting his due. Which I guess he was. He had it coming.

Everything went smoothly until we went back to take them back to their cells, and one of the guys asked how he got those stitches. I wanted to raise my hand and say, “Pick me, pick me. I know!” He said it was a misunderstanding. Oh, I wanted to say something so badly, but that would have been endangering his life. He had enough rope; he could hang himself with it on his own.

If looks could really kill, the one he gave me would have dropped me. He knew we’d put him in the showers with those other inmates specifically because he’d been spouting his racist crap and otherwise being more trouble than he was worth. I just shrugged. And the other two inmates both laughed, and one said, “Yeah, you push these bitches, they push back. I bet you’re that guy the old man shanked ’cause you called him a nigger.”

When loudmouth went back to his cell, we didn’t hear anything out of him for the rest of the night.

I’m a big fan of inmates policing themselves.