Sweet Hell on Fire (3 page)

Work seemed unnaturally quiet, and while I was sure something big was brewing, I admitted it could be just another day.

Nothing happened. Everyone went home safe. That made it a good day above everything else.

But there was no rest for the wicked.

My husband and I had separated almost a year ago, and I lived with my parents. That hadn’t been an ideal situation at seventeen, let alone at thirty. I loved my parents, but we had different ideas about how I should live my life and how I should raise my children. I appreciated their input, they’re fantastic to my kids, but ultimately, I didn’t want their advice unsolicited.

My mother had been so angry when I took “The Job.” I’d had another job offer from an airline the same time the offer from the prison came, but my car had a catastrophic blowout and I had to accept the job at the prison. I could get rides in town, but all the way to the airport was another matter entirely. She told me she’d spent twenty years worrying if my father was going to come home every night working at the federal prison, and now she had to worry about me at the state prison and it was a shitty thing for me to do to her.

My dad acted differently. He asked me if I had all the equipment I needed to start. He told me I would see people carrying these huge Maglite flashlights so they could use them like billy clubs, but that I shouldn’t take anything behind the walls I wasn’t prepared to eat, meaning nothing I wouldn’t want used against me or stuffed in any various orifices.

When my estranged husband caught me trying to fit my flashlight into my mouth, he asked me if I was planning on trying to promote early by showing off that I could, in fact, fit it inside.

Anyway, when I got home that night, my mother was screaming—it was a high-pitched sound, horrible and shrill, like something being torn out of her.

She was in the bedroom where she spent most of her time in those days, and all she could do was howl. The kids were spending the night with their dad and my father was at work. The dog came to me, crawling on her belly and whining, obviously afraid. This had been going on for some time.

I went into the bedroom and my mother was crying, holding her belly with vomit in the trashcan and burning cigarettes in the ashtray. She had a window open; it was summer. But she had the electric blanket wrapped around her and she was shaking.

I didn’t know what to do. These attacks had been coming more often, and due to her other illnesses, she hadn’t been able to leave the house so she could go see a doctor.

“Help me,” she begged.

Oh, God. How? I didn’t know what was wrong with her, so how could I help her?

“Help me,” she cried again, louder.

I sat down on the bed next to her and tried to rub her back, to soothe her as she’d done to me when I was sick. It didn’t help. Nothing did.

Her cries for help got louder until she was screaming again and I was at a loss. She screamed and screamed at me to help her and when her voice cracked, she’d whimper. All she could tell me was that it was a pain in her belly.

I called my dad and asked him to come home. He told me he would and to call an ambulance.

She screamed until they arrived, begging me the whole time to help her. To make it stop. EMS shot her up with painkillers and took her to the ER.

She spent twelve hours in the ER only to be sent home with a referral to an ob-gyn.

Still in pain and with no answers.

She begged me to stay home with her.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

Not only because I had no idea how to help her, but because I was still on probation at work. I could be fired for absolutely anything in the first year. If I called in sick during this time, I could lose my job. There was literally nowhere else in town I could get a job where I could get insurance and still support myself. The pay was horrible, barely a living, but the benefits were good.

My starting pay was around $12 an hour; I made approximately $24,000 a year. The poverty level guidelines for my state and a family of three sit at $27,000 a year. Incidentally, the federal average for corrections officers was $53,000 a year in 2009. I made less than half of the national average and under the poverty level.

As a kid, I’d quit so many jobs because I didn’t like them, or just didn’t want to do them. Like I thought they grew on trees. I’d never had a problem getting hired until I was a stay-at-home mom for eight years suddenly thrust back into the job force.

Although my husband and I were separated, and we’d had some really awful fights, he was never mean about money. He was happy to provide for his children and even gave me the money to get my own apartment.

But I couldn’t keep relying on him.

The worst part was I didn’t
want
to stay home with her even if I could. Honestly, I had enough shit on my plate to deal with without my mother screaming and sobbing all day long and demanding I stay in the bedroom with her while she did it.

I know, that’s horrible. She’s my mom. She was afraid and hurting, and she needed me. I wasn’t there for her.

We didn’t always have a good relationship and she was sick a lot when I was growing up. Her illnesses were due to nervous conditions. I didn’t have much patience for her through those times, and I guess I thought this was the same thing. I don’t know what else to say without sounding like I’m badmouthing her and making excuses. So I’ll just own it. My reasons were my own, but I didn’t want to do it. So I didn’t.

Instead, I went to work.

I left an hour early so I had time to drive around, to ditch all my baggage at the door before I went behind the walls.

Any shit I would have carried in with me would have been twice as heavy while I was there, and I would have been distracted and maybe even a danger to my fellow officers. The inmates see those things, know to look for them.

If an officer didn’t shine their boots, if their normally clean and crisp uniform was rumpled, if the way a person carried themselves was different—they’d use it to slide in. To bond. It would start out simple enough with something like: “What’s wrong, Sarge? You don’t look like yourself.”

Do they give a shit? No. They’re trying to get over on someone, have some officer cull themselves from the herd and spill their guts all over the place, telling personal business. Then suddenly he’s the one who understands you, who cares about you, convinces you he’s the only one…

Yeah, puke.

So I drove around with the windows down and Pantera’s
Vulgar
Display
of
Power
album as loud as it would go.

The lyrics to “Walk” have always spiked my adrenaline and amped me up, ready to go, fight or flight. In this instance, it helped me get to that constant state of alert where all corrections officers have to be to get the job done.

I dropped my baggage at the door to do my eight, then the gate, as they say.

My Friday.

I think it was a Tuesday in the outside world, but for me, it was Friday. Last day of the workweek. Two days ahead with more bullshit, but at least it was a different flavor and I’d see my kids.

I also went out on my Friday nights. Just a couple of beers, maybe some dancing and a few games of pool. Something to decompress, to not have to be anywhere or be anything. I wasn’t even going to go home and change. I’d brought my clothes with me.

Yeah, smart one that I was, I brought clothes, but no lunch. So I got a cupcake out of the vending machine.

I could have gotten a tray from the chow hall like some of the other guys I worked with, but I’d seen roaches crawl out of the trays down in Segregation. I’d accidentally jostled the cart and it looked like the tower of trays was doing the hula. Until I realized it wasn’t the trays, but the roaches crawling out of them. Sadly, that wasn’t specific to Segregation but the whole prison. Exterminators were in all the time, but it never seemed to do any good. All officers were advised to shake out all of their belongings before we left the institution after shift so we didn’t take any of the roaches home. Anyone working there longer than five minutes probably has a roach story that would make your skin crawl right off your body.

A quiet night was too much to hope for.

Although that was my own fault.

A Segregation position was coming open soon, and I wanted it so bad I could taste it. I’d already applied for the position, but there would be a lengthy screening process with interviews and reviews of my employee file. It was a lot more work, more intense all around, but it was what I’d always thought prison should be like. It would also look great for promotions. So when I found out shift was overstaffed, I asked if I could be sent to Segregation to help out.

There was always something to do down there, even with all the inmates locked up and four officers on duty: property to be distributed or taken away, cleaning, something. I wanted to talk to the Seg OIC (First Sergeant) and show my interest in the position. I wanted him to see I could handle the job and I wouldn’t cry over the bitch work all newbies get stuck with, nor would I demand he watch his mouth like some of the people who worked there and forgot they were in a prison. If you’re someone who is easily offended, you don’t belong working behind the walls.

The Captain asked me why in the hell I wanted to work down there. I couldn’t explain it. From seeing the Seg officers’ interactions with each other both inside and outside the walls, it seemed like a closer-knit group, and most everyone who worked the post promoted quickly. If this was going to be my career, I wasn’t going to half-ass it; I’d go for the throat and pay my dues.

I shrugged and said it sounded fun. So he sent me and another officer down to train. The other officer was young, early twenties. He had a baby face, shoulders like a linebacker, and a mouth that wrote checks his ass could cash maybe 50 percent of the time. He’d worked Segregation before, and as we were walking to the cell house, he told me I wasn’t going to get the post because he had more experience. He worked as a bouncer on his off time. Bouncing was a far cry from corrections, although a lot of the guys moonlighted as bouncers at some of the local clubs and bars.

I didn’t bother to tell him this was my second stint of employment with the prison and I’d been doing this job when his mom was still wiping his ass and putting his food in a blender. I’d worked there the first time at nineteen as a single mom. I was still too young then to have the temperament to be any good at it. But now I had the experience and knew what I was doing.

“Hey, I see you finally nagged him into putting you down here,” the OIC said when I walked through the extra set of doors that gave Seg an additional feeling of security.

“I’ve been married. I can nag the spots off a leopard.”

“Yeah?” He smirked. “Why don’t you go see if you can get 304 to give up his earphones? He’s not supposed to have them.”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

I didn’t get a chance to try. As I passed the first cell on the lower tier, I saw that the inmate inside had a razor or some other sharp instrument. He’d cut superficial strips down his arms and had smeared blood all over himself. He’d painted his face too. He looked like something out of a Clive Barker movie. I consoled myself with the thought that at least it wasn’t feces. Some of the inmates, either legitimately mentally disturbed or just looking for a diagnosis to get meds or different sentencing, would cover themselves with their own feces, make little Claymation animals out of it, or even eat it. A cutter sounded infinitely easier to deal with in my book.

“Hey, man. You okay?” I had my hand on my radio, ready to call a medical emergency as I peered inside the darkened cell. It stank of sweat and prison food, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m okay. You okay?” He licked his lips, slid his tongue over his teeth in a repetitive motion.

“I’m doing great, thanks for asking.” My gut told me then he was just looking for a reaction, so I kept calm and cool.

“My TV has been talking to me.” I relaxed the hand on my radio. In my experience, if he’d really wanted to hurt himself, he wouldn’t have tried to keep me there talking.

“Oh yeah? What’s it say?”

“It’s just talking. Told me to cut myself.”

I personally thought he was full of shit. Sounds callous, right? But not on closer inspection. His cuts were only superficial. They hadn’t bled much and he’d made it a point to smear it all over himself where it was the most advantageous to being seen. I’d known girls in high school who were cutters and they’d cut deeper than that if the vending machine gave them Coke instead of Pepsi. I could cut someone deeper and with more purpose with my fingernails. I’d still be calling mental health. Protocol.

“That wasn’t nice of them and it sounds distracting. You want me to take your TV so they can’t talk to you anymore?”

He looked at me and narrowed his eyes.

Yeah, sell your crazy to the nurse.

“Nah, they’d get mad.”

“They would? Okay. How about you give me the razor so you can’t cut yourself even if they want you to?”

“I can’t do that either.”

“Well, you’re better off if you give it to me because they’re going to be really mad if the blacksuits have to take it. And you’ll lose your TV anyway. If you have the razor, they’ll consider you armed and may use the shock shield. I bet the voices would like that even less.”

I know. It sounds like I’m saying “just wait until your father gets home.” But they’d either come spray him in the face with pepper spray until he handed it over, or they would break out the shock shield—think the polymer shields cops use for crowd control, but electrified—to incapacitate him so he couldn’t hurt anyone else, including himself.

“Put out your hand,” he commanded.

Oh, hell no. I didn’t know where his blood had been. He had long enough arms; he could reach out and cut me if I put my hand out.

“Drop it on the floor and I’ll get it.”

“You don’t trust me?” He sounded hurt.

I almost snorted out loud. I didn’t trust anybody. “You
can’t
be trusted right now.” As if he could ever be. He was an inmate. Now that doesn’t mean I thought they were all dog shit, but if the voices really were talking to him, his behavior and reactions were going to be unpredictable. And if he was trying to pull some kind of con, then I had to be especially wary. “Would you trust someone who told you they heard voices? I’m just trying to help you.”

The razor clattered to the floor and I picked it up gingerly, careful not to let the edges come in contact with my skin—even though I wore gloves, the razor could easily slice through both the latex and my flesh. I called the OIC over the radio to send another officer to come watch this guy while we called mental health.

As I walked back to the officer’s station, an inmate in another cell yelled out my name. I turned to look and a skinny black inmate with long braids motioned for me to come over.

“Not right now, guy. I’ll be there in a few minutes after I handle this, okay?”

“It’s an emergency!” he demanded. His forehead was sweaty and his eyes were wide and from what I could see of his body, it looked like he was jumping up and down.

What now? I took the stairs two at a time and came to stand in front of his cell. It was definitely not an emergency. He was jacking off.

“Really? Are you kidding me?”

He grinned really big, as if he was proud of himself, and held his cock out with one hand while he continued to stroke with the other. “Nope.”

“Well you should be. That little thing is a waste of anyone’s time.”

I trudged back down to the office. I wasn’t embarrassed or horrified that he was naked. I saw upwards of six hundred dicks a day, and one more wasn’t a big deal. No, it pissed me off that he interrupted something so urgent to show me his dick. Which looked like every other dick I’d ever seen. Black, white, yellow, brown, blue—it was all still penis.

What was that supposed to do for me? Was I supposed to fall over on my back like some turtle and gasp at the amazing wonder that was his cock? Sorry. Not going to happen. I wasn’t impressed.

So then I not only had the ton of paperwork for the mental health guy, but then I had to write a disciplinary report for the dick smacker.

Why did I want to work Seg again?