Sweet Hell on Fire (16 page)

I’d been a Sergeant for exactly three days and I’d yet to run my own cell house, meaning I’d yet to be in charge of other staff and oversee the operations. One hour into the shift on this night, a First Sergeant had to go home for a family emergency. The Captain called me to ask if I thought I could run his house.

I’d be working out of class, working a position that was a rank above mine, in what they called the animal house. Three tiers of assholes known for starting fires, throwing flaming rolls of toilet paper, and, most recently, pegging an officer in the back of the head with a soup because they didn’t like the way she enforced policy.

Hell yeah, I could do it.

As soon as I took over for the OIC, there were a flood of inmates trying to talk to me, following me around as I went about my duties, or spilling into the office either to see what kind of Sergeant I was or trying to get me to approve something the regular OIC wouldn’t have.

It was impossible for me to get an accountability count done, so I locked them down. No rec time, no phone, no library, no nothing until I had accurate and verified numbers of where all my inmates were.

They didn’t like this much, but there were no flaming rolls of toilet paper, no mattress fires. No one threw anything at me as I passed each cell or when I was walking on the tiers.

Why? I’d made use of the porters—inmate workers who saw to the upkeep of the cell house, oversaw the distribution and accounting of cleaning supplies, linens, etc.

Back in the old days of corrections, porters ran the prisons. They were in charge of the tiers and when shit needed to be handled, they handled it. It wasn’t so much like that anymore, but they were still a useful tool when you wanted to distribute information.

They would come into the office and try to look over your shoulder, spreading whatever business you were doing all around the cell house. If you were writing a disciplinary report, if you were about to search someone’s cell, whatever bit of information they could gather.

I talked to the head porter first thing. He came up and introduced himself, asked me if I needed anything, and asked me questions about myself. All things he would carry back to the tier. As well as whatever he thought they’d be able to get past me.

So, I obliged him. I told him things I wanted all the inmates to know. Like what would happen to them if they started fires and “sparked” while I was running the house. Sparking is when they would use things like paperclips to get a spark from their electrical outlets. They’d use that to start fires if they didn’t have any lighters or matches hidden somewhere. It would also short out the breaker and send the whole cell house into darkness.

I figured if they had enough toilet paper to light on fire, they didn’t need more. They knew that sparking shorted out the circuits, so obviously they must want to sit in the dark. So, if they wanted to be stuck in their cells wiping their asses with their hands in the dark, that was no skin off my ass. And if they hit me with something they’d thrown? God help them because no one else would be able to.

The porter was laughing so hard by this point, he almost couldn’t speak to ask me what exactly it was I would do if I got hit with whatever they were throwing, be it urine, feces, or spunk. They were known to throw all three.

I told him that as a woman, I had ammunition more horrible than anything they could ever dream up. And whoever hit me may not feel my vengeance today, tomorrow, or even in a year. But it would happen and if I got fired, I didn’t care. I could go get another job, but the guy who hit me with something would forever be the guy who got slapped in the face with a used tampon. No matter where he went, no matter how much time he did, no matter what else he ever did with his life, that story would live on forever.

He was horrified.

And so were all the other inmates in the house.

Granted, they still tried to get away with shit, but when I caught them or called them on it, no one had anything nasty to say and there were no projectiles, flaming or otherwise, in the cell house that night.

I was assigned to that same cell house the next day.

The schedule of movement for inmates was crazy, but I managed. On my shift, inmates might be out of their cells for many different reasons, ranging from religious services, going to chow, library privileges, recreation time on the yard, showering—and all of that had to be monitored and checked, to ensure that everyone was going where they were supposed to be.

It’s hard for any officer working in a new cell house to monitor everyone, since you don’t know faces yet, and it’s imperative that inmates who aren’t engaging in sanctioned activities be locked back in their cells. Otherwise, contraband can be passed, and other possibly dangerous activities can occur. The two regular officers who were assigned there were fantastic. It was a great team effort.

But it would have been too easy for the night to go off without something happening.

Around six p.m., my phone rang and it was one of the new officers on shift—straight out of training. She was crying, sobbing like someone had run over her dog. I told her to call the Captain’s office and get someone to relieve her and tell the Captain she needed to come to my cell house.

I’d told all the new officers out of training to call me if they ever had any problems and they were unsure about what to do. I didn’t claim to know everything, but I knew I could point them in the right direction. Even if it was just going with them to talk to the Captain. In training they told us that when we excluded new officers from the pack and made them feel they had more in common with the inmates than other officers, that’s when they were prime prey for the inmates to turn dirty. So making myself available to rookies for questions or whatever they needed was me doing my part to try to make the institution a safer place.

On her first day of OJT, I told this officer who had called me that she needed to wear less makeup. Yes, if you like makeup, you should wear it. And in an ideal world, you wouldn’t be treated differently because you wear makeup. But this wasn’t an ideal world. It’s fucking prison. If you come in painted like a French whore, that’s a signal to them you’re looking for a man and you will be targeted. Period.

Personal rights are all well and good, but be aware of your environment. Inmates don’t care about other’s rights. Obviously.

Anyway, she came in to my office still bawling. I locked the office door and just hugged her and let her cry for a little bit. Then I got her to tell me what had her so upset. She’d been running the chapel—overseeing the religious gatherings—and three inmates had cornered her, telling her they knew where they could go where the camera wouldn’t see them. They’d put their hands on her ass, her breasts, between her legs.

My first question was why she hadn’t called an alarm. With three against one, even I would have hit the button that signaled my body alarm and brought the cavalry running, and I’d been known to follow an inmate down the tier in a rage after he’d grabbed me and demand “what the fuck” rather than push my body alarm.

She said she was too afraid.

But that’s the point of the alarm. If you’re ever in fear for your life, hit that button. Any situation you can’t handle alone, hit that button. If she’d hit that button, the fury of all hell would have been unleashed on those poor bastards, with ten to fifteen officers responding, trained like Pavlov’s fucking dogs to fight when they hear that alarm.

That training was a part of what made watching my husband car shopping such a treat. At most dealerships, they have a tone that plays over the intercom to let a salesman know there is a phone call or a customer on the floor. These tones they use sound exactly like the tones that sounded over the radio at the prison when an alarm was called. Every time they went off, he launched himself from the chair and looked a bit like a rabid dog. I wouldn’t want fifteen of him ready to knock me on my ass.

Anyway, because she didn’t call the alarm, she lost credibility with both officers and inmates. Inmates had no respect for dirty officers even though they tried constantly to turn them. They knew as a dirty officer she wouldn’t be fair, firm, or consistent. The officers had already been wary of her because she wore such heavy makeup, but this was the last nail in her coffin. The only officers who would talk to her after that were others who were suspected of being dirty.

It was generally believed that she didn’t call the alarm because she invited the contact. That she changed her mind later after she realized how much shit she could be in.

This belief was only solidified when she got caught having a relationship with an inmate. I wasn’t surprised. I just knew she wouldn’t last. She set off my Dirty Bitch Detector and I knew it was only a matter of time before they turned her.

She had low self-esteem. The inmates look for that, a chink in the armor—somewhere they can burrow in and get inside your head.

I have a copy of an inmate instruction guide called “How to Have an Inappropriate Relationship with Staff,” which they’ve passed amongst themselves. The title in itself is funny because that’s what they call it in the staff training: inappropriate relationships with staff.

Someone has written special instructions for what to look for in an officer who’s prime to be turned and how to prime them if they aren’t.

The first thing on the list is someone who obviously has low self-esteem. Someone who doesn’t often make eye contact, who doesn’t hold their head up. It’s like culling the sick gazelle from the rest of the herd.

The next step is to talk to the officer, and while it happens with men too, it’s usually women who are targeted. Talk to her every day, ask her how she is and be sympathetic. Listen to everything she says. Be aware of her moods and react accordingly. Offer her something she doesn’t get at home.

Then do something so she knows she’s special to you. Make yourself stand out. Be patient. Promise her you can keep a secret. Establish that your relationship is different than what she has with anyone else, staff or inmate.

It goes on from there, step by step, and those tactics have worked countless times. Officers have sacrificed careers and family, even endangered lives in the community.

One woman, not an officer but a volunteer with a program inside the prison, was turned by a convicted murderer who was twenty-one years younger than she was. She had a family, a husband and children, and she walked away from them to be with this man. She gave him a gun and helped him escape, smuggling him out in one of the program’s vehicles. When she was interviewed by a local paper after her trial, the first thing they quoted was that she said this inmate was someone she could really talk to.

The preliminary tests after my mother’s surgery showed that they got the entire tumor and that she was cancer free. That was good news, but we began to suspect that she had a stroke on the table or some other catastrophic event. She was having auditory and visual hallucinations. She was convinced that things were happening around her that weren’t. And she’d get very angry when told that she was mistaken.

She kept having episodes in which it was like she’d short-circuit and get stuck in a certain position, or she’d fall. She went back to the doctor who’d performed her surgery and when she did fall, the doctor sneered at her and told her she was fine and to get up. The doctor didn’t offer my mother any assistance, or even any compassion.
The
doctor
saw
a
woman
fall—a woman who had come to her about post-surgical issues involving this very thing—and the doctor insisted she was fine without even examining her.

What a cunt. I don’t use that word very often; it’s an icky word and, for most women, a fighting word. I say it here with relish. If I ever see this woman again, this word will sit on my tongue like the finest artisan chocolate and will taste even sweeter when I spit it at her.

I wish I’d have been there because I would have taken a bite out of this bitch so large, she’d still be looking for the rest of her ass with both hands. When people are sick, they are more easily managed, especially by someone they see as an authority figure who knows more than they do. They just want to know that someone is going to make them feel better. When you go to a caregiver, the treatment my mother got is not the kind of treatment one would, or should, expect. The doctor thought she could treat my mother that way because she was sick and aging.

And my mother thinks the sun rises and sets on those initials after the doctor’s name, so she’d never argue with one, even to defend herself against a wrong as obvious as this one. She hasn’t learned to be an advocate for her own health yet.

I’ve learned to let go of a lot of things now, but this wasn’t one of them. I hope someday this doctor is sick and terrified. That her body betrays her and someone treats her the same way she treated my mother.

She also double billed for several visits. Now that, I could do something about. I have a certificate in medical billing and coding, so I called the office and got that handled right away. I also turned the incident in to the insurance commissioner so she’d most likely get an audit. After all, if the bitch had done that to my mother for more than one visit, how many other sick people was she double billing and taking advantage of?

I also finally took the opportunity to tell my mother that I was sorry. I got emotional and choked up, so it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say. How much I still needed her to be my mom. How I was sorry that when she first got sick, I didn’t notice. I didn’t help her. How I was too caught up in my own shit to think about her. All I said was that I was sorry about everything and that I loved her.

I know now I’m really lucky that I got a chance to say that. I’d let so many things go unsaid. Unrecognized. It was another bright, burning banner for all that I didn’t like about my life.

And myself.

I’d been directing all of my disgust outward for so long that when I finally looked inside, it was a mess of nuclear proportions. The light was too bright, and while I’d managed to own up to what I’d done wrong with my mother, I wasn’t ready to look at the rest of it. That sort of introspection required a bottle of bourbon so I could forget it all in the morning.