Sweet Hell on Fire (17 page)

I worked a First Sergeant post again, one step above my current rank. That was an awesome feeling.

I was still in the Max, which also made me happy. Until I saw who one of my officers was going to be. This guy was nice to me, but he was dumber than a box of hair. He also stuffed his pants with a sock.

When asked about it, he swore it was some kind of tumor or gigantism of the balls, but on intense observation, a sock was all it could be. I’ve never known a man who could lean his junk against a table and have the table move said junk down to his knee and he not make some sort of high-pitched sound. Or stop breathing.

He didn’t know how to talk to people, or really how to do his job at all. He would have been tolerable had he been open to learning or hearing what another more experienced officer had to say, but he wasn’t. He was convinced he was smarter than everyone else.

I’d worked with him before, one time in Seg. It wasn’t a good experience. You know when you’re coming up the stairs and you hear an inmate say, “Don’t do it, it’s Sarge,” that someone is in for a world of shit. Literally. That time I had peeked up over the railing in Seg and the inmate who’d been speaking smiled at me. “You’re good,” he’d said.

I asked him what had them wound up enough to throw things. When this officer had passed out chow, he’d refused to pass the other things that went around with chow. Grievance forms, toilet paper, other request forms, etc. Chow times were the only times these inmates had to get these things. But regardless of that, they had them coming. You give them what they have coming. No more. No less. And they were entitled to these things.

I told them I would take care of it.

That was something else. Do what you say you’re going to. Period. I told them I would handle it and they believed me. I also told them as fun as I’m sure it would be to tag him in the face with a shit bomb, he was still an officer and I couldn’t let them treat an officer that way.

I talked to this officer and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Fuck ’em.” No. Not fuck ’em. Do your fucking job. Outside of that, sure. Then he said he couldn’t go back up on the tier because he was afraid of getting hit with whatever they were going to throw.

Too bad.

He made his bed and whether it was shit or roses, I wasn’t cleaning it up.

Although I did watch him from the bottom tier as he made his rounds, and the inmates noticed this. I’m sure if I hadn’t been there, he would have gotten a shit gun to the face.

So needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to working with him again. He’d cost me three hours of my night in Seg when all the inmates were locked up. I could only imagine the night I was going to have with them out and running around and him shooting his mouth off.

I wasn’t disappointed.

First of all, he caught an inmate—a kitchen worker—trying to sneak produce back to his cell. So he confiscated it. Okay, he did something right. No, that was too much to hope for. He ate the pepper he took after I told him not to, and then mid-bite the Lieutenant came in for a post check. Looked bad for him and for me. I got my ass reamed because I didn’t stop him. What was I supposed to do, jerk it out of his mouth and get into a scuffle with another officer in full view of the inmates over food? Yeah, I’d never live that down.

Then, after the Lieutenant had left and I was already butt sore, an inmate walked by the officer’s station, and this officer made a snide remark to the inmate. It was obvious from the look on the inmate’s face that they didn’t have the kind of rapport that engendered that sort of thing, so I waited for the inmate to pass and then I corrected him. I would never correct a fellow officer in front of an inmate.

The officer laughed, grabbed the mic, and made an announcement to the entire cell house, calling the inmate by name and telling him to go straight to his cell and not to stop and suck his boyfriend’s cock on the way.

I kind of want to bang my head on my desk just remembering this fuckery. Like so many other acts of wanton stupidity, you have to remember where you are. This is prison, not the eighth grade party where you kissed the girl who sat in front of you in math and then tied her bra to the ceiling fan.

Everyone
has cred to maintain in prison. Yes, this inmate was gay. Yes, his boyfriend lived in the same cell house. Everyone knew it, but to call it out like that over the intercom was disrespectful. This officer should have been prepared to take whatever consequences he had coming. Dishing out crap and then hiding behind the uniform was a sure way to get yourself shanked.

Five minutes later, almost time for Count, and this officer was up on his tier. Suddenly I heard an alarm come over the radio. An alarm from
my
cell house.

Motherfucker.

There was one other officer up on the third tier, but I knew it wasn’t him. It was dumbass on tier two. I charged up the stairs as fast as I could, adrenaline racing, running through a thousand scenarios in my head and what I would do—only to find him standing there with his thumb up his ass and the inmate he’d been harassing standing in front of his cell, refusing to go inside.

Before I had the chance to handle the situation, first responders filled the tier, headed up by the same Captain I’d had to explain my womanly needs to. He was ready to kill someone. He filled the width of the tier, his legs were braced apart, and he reminded me of a bull getting ready to charge. For one horrible moment, I really thought I’d see smoke come out of his nostrils and he’d leave me as a sad little ink stain on the floor.

But I found my balls and asked what was going on.

“He refused to lock up,” the officer said.

“Did he threaten you?”

“No.”

This shit did not require an alarm. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“He refused a direct order.”

The Captain deflated slowly but was still obviously pissed.

“Go to the office. Right now.”

“But—”

“Go!” I turned to the inmate. “Are you going to lock up?”

“No problem, Sarge.” He went into his cell.

As we were walking back down to the office, the Captain took me aside and asked me what I knew of the situation. I told him about the events leading up to what had happened. All he said was, “Counsel your corporal.”

I so desperately wanted to say he wasn’t
my
corporal. But that’s not a team mentality. I was supposed to be in charge of shit and I couldn’t handle the corporal in my cell house. “Most definitely.”

“Then send him to me for further counseling and write something to put in his file about the counseling and the incident.”

Same cell house the next day.

And they sent me another dipshit.

I started to understand why corrections officers have such a bad reputation. This guy looked just like Milton from
Office
Space
. Dead ringer. He stared at me blankly for the first few minutes of the shift. My mouth moved, words were coming out, but he didn’t assimilate any of it.

I told him to get out on the tier and start locking up for first Count. Instead, he sat down at the desk right next to me.

First of all, I like my personal space. I don’t have a personal bubble; I have a personal brick. All the better to smack people who invade said personal area. But that wasn’t the most horrific part. The part that had me almost ripping off my own skin was that his arms were covered in sores. Not just little mosquito-like bites he might have scratched, but full-on oozing, leprosy-looking, ulcerated, open-wound sores. Like infected spider bites.

The hallmarks of MRSA.

MRSA is a dirty bastard of an infection. Its technical name is
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
. Which means it’s resistant to antibiotics. It can also live on surfaces for months at a time.

And he’d rubbed his arm on mine.

“So, what’s that on your arm?” I asked, trying not scream and light him on fire.

“Spider bites.”

“Wow, you must have a lot of spiders.”

“I guess so. I think they were in the barn I cleaned out yesterday.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I just woke up and had it.”

Oh, the fuck you did.

“You know,” I said as I drenched my arm in hand sanitizer, “prison is dirty. There’s all sorts of things living on the surfaces here. It’s not a good place to have open wounds. If that’s not MRSA, you could get it. Or anything else that could infect you through an open wound. Hepatitis, HIV, if someone who is infected gets hurt. You need to have that looked at.”

“Yeah, I will tomorrow,” he said and went to the staff bathroom before I could say anything else.

Tomorrow? The fuck you say
.

An inmate knocked on the office door. “Uh, I don’t mean any disrespect, but you have to get that man out of here. Is that MRSA on his arm?” His voice hit a note higher than anything I could hit. He was bordering on the edge of freaking out too.

“I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got a handle on it.”

I did have to get him out of there. That shit on his arm wasn’t healthy for anyone. Especially not me because I was going to freak right the fuck out. Yeah, I could handle a man’s brains on me, but this guy’s creeping crud twisted my guts.

When he came back, I sent him to the Captain’s office and they sent him to the clinic. He returned to the cell house with his arms bandaged from the wrist to the elbow.

A few days later he called me to thank me for making him get it looked at. It was MRSA.

This man did not belong in a corrections environment. This incident was a banner for every reason why. He wasn’t aware of his surroundings and couldn’t think farther ahead than his next meal.

The next time I had to work with him, an alarm called in another cell house, and his position in our cell house meant he was a first responder. Officers were running out of their cell houses as if the hounds of hell slavered at their heels and “Milton” wandered up to me casually and told me he couldn’t respond to the alarm because he had a heart condition and that I needed to go.

Lives depend on first responders. He was not someone I would trust to guard my back. I was more than happy to call the Captain and get him the hell out of my cell house.

It’s amazing how one person can have a certain rapport with someone and another person’s interactions can be completely the opposite.

For example, there was one inmate I didn’t particularly like, but he seemed to want to talk to me every second he could be near me. I didn’t have to look up his crime to know he was a sex offender. When I first came on shift, he would always try to stand too close and he would lick his lips incessantly when talking to me, making this sound like he was eye-fucking some scrumptious bit of cake.

I told him I found it offensive, and if he wanted to speak to me, he would do it without sucking on his lips or making that sound. A couple of the other officers I had talked to about it told me not to say anything, to just let it go. That he’d do it more if he knew it bothered me. But I’m not one to keep my mouth shut if I find something unacceptable. I had done nothing but treat him with respect, and I expected the same.

He actually apologized and told me that it was meant as a compliment. Um, no. He was a misogynist who thought all women were whores who could be manipulated or cowed into submission. He did like that I was willing to speak with him, though, so he did it on my terms.

I even ended up talking to him about how he treated another officer, a friend of mine. He made her cry by saying all sorts of nasty things about her weight. He said even being without a woman as he had for ten years, he still wouldn’t fuck her, etc., and so on. First, I gave her shit that she let him see how upset he’d made her. He was a sex offender. With them, it’s all about the power they can have over you. I told him I was disappointed in him for treating her with such disrespect. He’d said she didn’t deserve respect because she didn’t stand up and take it.

She told me he gave her the “heebie jeebies”—she’d looked up his crime and she didn’t even want him breathing the same air she did. She wouldn’t look him in the eye because she didn’t want to look at him at all. But being a predator, he took that as fear and zeroed in on her.

Same guy, two officers, completely different result.

While that’s no surprise, because no two people will have the same experience with one another, inmates and officers assume they will get similar treatment from people they know are connected. Officers will expect inmates who are related to behave a certain way—good or bad depending on how their relation behaves since they come from the same circumstances. And inmates will expect officers who are related to behave similarly.

When the two officers were my husband and I, inmates always commented on the differences between us.

I knew I’d made it as an officer when my husband came to second shift for a while when he promoted to Sergeant. When the inmates sent the porter to talk to him to see what kind of officer he was, what his expectations were, the inmate told him that the cell house didn’t have to be like Seg.

My husband was confused and said he didn’t know what the inmate was talking about. The inmate responded that he’d heard something about a real hard-ass named Lunsford who had just come out of Segregation and that it didn’t have to be like that, that they could all “just get along.” My husband laughed and said, “You’re talking about my wife.” The inmate didn’t quite know what to do with that.

But I did. I went out to celebrate that night. I wasn’t just a bitch, or a whore, or a cunt. I wasn’t female. I was an officer. I was a hard-ass. Consistently. Firmly. Hopefully fairly. I was simply authority. That meant something.

While we were on the same shift (we never worked the same cell house or even the same security level), I was asked a hundred times if “the other Lunsford” was my husband. Most of the time, I just wanted to raise my eyebrow and scowl. Lunsford, like Sasek, wasn’t like Smith. It’s kind of unique. At least in parts of the country where my father-in-law didn’t live for very long.

When I would acknowledge the question, I’d never get a neutral response. It was either, “Wow, that guy is a bastard. How do you stand it?” “No wonder he’s such a dick being married to you.” Or even “Poor guy. What did he do to deserve you?” But eventually, after dealing with us both on a long-term basis, a few inmates decided, and loudly I might add, that we deserved each other.

I’d been gone for a year when my husband went into work one night with pot roast. An inmate asked him if I’d made it for him and my husband responded that I had. The inmate clicked his tongue and shook his head and told him he should employ a food taster because he wouldn’t trust anything I’d made. I was the most evil woman ever to walk the earth.

I still laugh when my husband tells that story. I don’t think I was ever evil. I may have had to whip my dick out a few times, but they had it coming. My dad always said to give them what they had coming.

Then there were other guys who I had absolutely no problem with who took major issue with my husband. One got out and threatened him on camera at a gas station. Said he was going to come to our house, rape and kill me and our children. My husband filed a police report, so that way if he did come to the house and we riddled him with bullets, we’d have the paperwork to back us up. But the next we heard of him, he’d beaten his girlfriend’s four-year-old son to death.

And when he was in my cell house, I’d never heard a peep out of him.