The Weight (8 page)

It said I was “found to be a poor candidate for treatment” because … ah, the rest was a bunch of words I didn’t give a damn about. Just another reason for the Parole Board to hit me when I came up. Like they needed
another
one.

You never count the days unless your sentence is
in
days, like that county-jail slap I got before. Ninety days, that’s a number you can count. Felony time, the faster you move, the slower it goes.

They sent me to the joint I wanted. Not because I asked or anything. Probably because they figured it would be the last place I’d want.

Dannemora. “Little Siberia” is what everybody called it. Just a few miles from the Canadian border. Nobody wants to jail there, because it means your family has to travel a whole day just to get a visit. Most of them, they come up the day before, stay at some motel. So it’s really a three-day trip. That all costs money, makes it even harder.

Black guys
really
hate the place. They’re all city boys. Not only do their people have to come all that distance to see them, but the town where they have to stay, everyone knows why they’re there. The Latinos don’t like it much, either.

But it’s a good place for a guy like me. Everyone wants to transfer out, so the race-war thing is dialed way down. And if you don’t try to go into business for yourself—like getting your girlfriend to mule in some dope, or opening a gambling book—you don’t make anybody mad at you, either.

Lots of notorious guys were there when I was. I mean, guys you would have read about in the paper. Like that “Preppie Killer.” When the jury hung on his first murder trial, they let him plead to manslaughter, and threw in a bunch of burglaries, no charge. Another one had killed hookers. Lots of them.

For most cons, the more of those kind, the better. They were always getting money sent in, and you could usually muscle them off a piece of their haul when they drew commissary.

I never did that. The best way to do your own time is to stay out of the rackets—even the little ones, like trading your phone time.

You never take favors. Like when a con offers to get a girl to visit you. His girlfriend, she’s got a friend. All it’s supposed to cost you is a slice of whatever you manage to work the girl for.

No use telling the other guy you’ve already got a girl, since anyone can see you’re not getting visits. So you have to say no and make sure he never asks you again.

The first time I hit the yard, I was a little surprised that I didn’t
know one single guy out there. Eddie was gone, but I figured, my life, the odds were pretty good I’d know
someone
. I guess any decent outlaw would have managed to work himself into a joint where there was more action.

Action was what you needed if you were pulling a long piece of time. Me, I was probably the shortest guy in the whole pen. They used to keep this place reserved for the hardcores: double-lifers, cons who had stuck a guard, top-shelf gangsters. Then the dumb fucks who run the system figured out that a joint full of men with nothing to lose wasn’t such a bright idea. I think it might have been the guards’ union that tipped them off.

My account was always kept full, so I could get what I needed without going on the arm, or putting in work for one of the crews.

I
paid
for smokes, never borrowed any. After a while, I just quit. Whole goddamned place was supposed to be smoke-free, so you couldn’t walk around with a pack, much less a crate. You had to do one at a time, and you’d catch a ticket if you got caught, too. Fuck all that.

You’d think prison, it’d be the last place to change. From the outside, it might look that way, but things had really shifted since I’d been away the last time. Even what the cons called the guards: it was “hacks” my first time, now it was “COs” or “cops.”

Changing what you call things doesn’t make them different.

There’s two kinds of contraband: the kind that gives you power inside the prison, and the kind that you could use to get out.

The first kind mostly comes from drugs. Which means they have to be muled in. The gang that has the best traffic system could buy a lot more power with the profits. More fancy sneakers, more color TVs—stuff you could buy, that was how you showed off.

My first time, everyone knew the mob guys didn’t use mules. They got their supply direct from the prison pharmacy. It was the best connection of all, until the blacks started jumping them, right out in the open. That wasn’t about black against white; it was about gang against gang. The black gang might have been nothing on the street, but Inside, they way outnumbered the mob guys.

Some of the blacks ended up binged for life. Only too many of the mob guys ended up dead, so the blacks took over the drug trade anyway.

That was a long time ago, but I could see it was still that way. Only now, the Spanish guys had their own operation, too.

What did change was that other kind of contraband. On my first bit, if you got caught holding soft money, they’d lock you down tight. And if you got caught with a pistol—not a zip, the real thing—you’d probably never see daylight.

Only reason to have soft money was if you were planning to slip out. If you go without a dime in your pocket, you’re as good as caught. Plenty of guys plan how to get out, but don’t have a clue on what they’re going to do once they clear the wall.

You can’t make a life-without sentence longer, but you can sure make it harder. Anyone who ever got brought back after making an escape could tell you that.

A zip gun, that’s for settling an individual beef, not for trying to bust out. Even a real pistol’s no good for that—you can threaten to kill a guard all day and they’re not going to open the gates. But it’s great for taking hostages, and getting a lot of cells opened. Which means a riot.

Nobody could mule a pistol in. But a couple of gang bosses were known to have access to one. There
had
to be guards in on a deal like that.

That’s the first thing that hit me. I hadn’t been away that long, but now it seemed like nobody cared about going for the Wall anymore. The guys with real juice, they could get anything they wanted right there. They didn’t care about soft money. Or even pistols. What they really wanted was cell phones.

A cell phone, that’s super-bling. The ultimate. Perfect for a shot-caller who’s never getting out of Ad-Seg. That’s what they call the hole they dump you in for heavy violence now. Stands for “Administrative Segregation.”

With a cell, the shot-caller can reach out anytime he wants. And touch somebody, too.

I thought that was amazing, but a guy who’d done time in
Mexico told me the narco kingpins
always
had cell phones there. Carried them around, nobody said a thing.

Some of the shot-callers spent too much time in Ad-Seg. Once they snapped that it was really going to be forever, it drove them nuts. They used those cell phones all the time, texting members outside about who needed to be hit.

If you’re in
that
guy’s crew, there’s no way out. If you say out loud that he’s having people hit for no reason, you’ll be the next to go. And even if you keep quiet, you could end up on that same list anyway.

Yeah, that was the real difference. Instead of scheming to get out, everyone was scheming how to make their life better right where they were. You can’t even
plan
an escape without some help. My last time up, the gangs trusted each other a lot more, too. Now being crewed up didn’t mean you were safe. Not even from your own guys.

Outside, I never went near dope. In my line of work, nobody trusts a junkie. You get a rep for that, you’re done.

For sex fiends, it’s even worse. A junkie
might
kick his habit. An alkie
might
get off the booze. But no sex fiend ever gets off
his
train. Everybody knows that. Except maybe the people who run those bullshit “programs.”

Or maybe they
do
know. It’s a pretty good hustle. The State pays you to do something that can’t be done, so you don’t get blamed when one of them goes right back to doing what he likes to do after he’s been cut loose.

There’s another part about that “treatment” thing—it probably makes them harder to catch the next time. Those slimy fucks may call it “group,” but all they’re doing is passing around trade secrets. How this one slipped up with something on his computer, or this one took pictures with his phone and never deleted them. I guess you go through enough of those programs, you learn a bunch of new tricks.

So, yeah, probably it
does
look like the treatment works. I
mean, how are they going to “relapse”—that’s what they call it, when a sex sicko gets caught the next time, “relapse”—when they spend years learning how not to get caught the next time?

What I did was: watch a lot of TV, read some books, work out every damn day. I even answered some of “Marcy’s” letters, just to make sure Solly knew I was holding tight.

When I wrote Marcy that we’d pick up right where we left off, Solly’d understand that meant I’d be looking for my money.

Before I knew it, I’d already done the minimum.

The two weasels they sent up to decide what they’d “recommend” to the whole Board came with pages of reasons to deny me. I gave them a couple more. The man asked me, “Have you attempted to make any sort of restitution to your victim?”

“I don’t have a victim,” I told him.

“You’re saying you’re innocent.”

“Bring in a polygraph, you’ll see it for yourself.”

“It’s common knowledge that sociopaths are immune to polygraph examinations,” the woman said. “A polygraph doesn’t detect lies, it measures consciousness of guilt. And it’s clear from your record that you qualify.”

“Qualify as what?”

“A sociopath,” she said, real fussy-like. “You exhibit a pervasive pattern of conduct which—”

“Sure. I get it. Look, you’re not going to stamp my ticket no matter what, so just call it off, okay? I’m missing a show I always watch.”

“What show is that?” the woman asked, like she really was curious.

“This whole place,” I told her.