Jailing Read online

  November 20

  Willie Polk’s father died and he went home to Toledo on a furlough for the funeral. Before leaving, he made a promise to his friends. And sure enough, when he got back this evening – three days later – he took us into a corner of the dorm and extended the middle finger of his right hand. It smelled of pussy – rank pussy at that. “I promised you, dint I?” Willie said. Coming back on the Greyhound bus he had wrapped his hand in gauze bandages, he said, to keep the smell intact.

  Thanksgiving Day

  Most of the men have nude pinups on their lockers. I can’t look at them – the sight of a fluffy blonde pussy and stiff nipples just drives me out of my tree. I don’t know how these guys can take it. Yesterday I found an old copy of Esquire with an article on beef, and I cut out a full page photograph of a perfect 16 ounce dark-red marbled New York cut sirloin steak, and taped it to my locker. The guys crowded round. “What the fuck is that?”

  “That’s what I dream of.”

  “You’re not well, kid,” Sioti said to me.

  November 29

  Conversations:

  *Old George, the paperhanger, complains to me, “I got ten years for one lousy hundred dollar check. Ten years!”

  “Yeah,” Joe D. said to him, “but you forgot to mention you threatened to blow the bank teller’s head off with a sawed-off if he didn’t cash it.

  *“Joe, if you were on the parole Board – “

  “We could do business, yes.”

  *We’re rapping in my house and Tiny, 6’8” tall, an ungainly, kind man, doing time for manslaughter, is trying to write a letter.

  “Tiny, are we disturbing you?”

  Tiny, slowly: “I’ve been disturbed for years.”

  *Joe D.: “Sorry, kid, didn’t mean to interrupt you while you were reading.”

  Me: “After the basic interruption, there can be no more.”

  *The younger men say: “What the fuck, if I get caught next time, maybe I’ll get five years. So with good time I’m out in forty months and change. I can do that standing on my head.” All they dream of is a big score. Work? They don’t know what it is, don’t want to know. Their sense of time is bruised, warped. Doing ten years, with less than two to go, they’re already practically home – it means nothing. They don’t see it, but they’re really doing life on the installment plan.

  December 6

  Jogging cleanses my mind. I think of nothing but the jogging. We can jog a mile on the road past the factory. I see a hawk on a dead tree, another hawk soaring. The trees are maple, walnut, oak, hickory, birch, wild cherry. A cold wind blows but the sky is wonderfully blue and clear, and a crow caws in the distance. I veer to avoid the mud puddles. Some of the puddles are frozen but my weight will crack the ice. The sound of my sneakers thudding with purposeful regularity on the road is soothing, even invigorating. As I take deep breaths of the cold air I catch the faint smell of cow manure. The fields are a rich dark brown with light brown icing where they’ve been tilled.

  The shit of this life can’t penetrate when I jog. I try to do three miles. I wish I could do it forever.

  Afterwards I know I’ll rest for fifteen minutes on my bed, hands supporting my head, looking up at the brown painted ceiling as my breathing slows, the sweat dries; and then just at the right moment, before the sweat turns cold and the muscles begin to stiffen, I’ll tuck my clean towel and fresh white underwear under my arm and go take a hot shower – stand under there naked for twenty minutes and let the hot water beat on my body like fists, let it work its way through flesh and tired joints to the bone. Then towel down and shave, back to my bed, feeling well. I have a good book to read.

  Joe D. passes by, sees me, smiles. “You’re really jailing, kid.”

  December 9

  Snowing today – big fat flakes, so that the scene from my window looks either like Siberia or a lovely Christmas card, depending on your mood.

  Thirty-six men from Danbury prison in Connecticut arrived on a bus last night and were shoved into corridors and the card rooms of Dorms One and Two. Looked like stunned oxen last night, sitting dazed on the bunks under the lights. They tell me Danbury’s overcrowded, a walled prison, a chickenshit place. They volunteered to come here. They were told there were new dorms here with individual rooms and that they would get Christmas furloughs. When we told them that there was a zero probability to the first promise and a pretty low one to the second, they just nodded as if, after all, they weren’t too surprised.

  December 14

  Several of the hacks, led by Herr Weger himself, roared through the dorms yesterday morning while the men were at work, and ripped apart the cubicles. All those flimsy little plywood desks and personal decorations were removed and destroyed. Nick, who’s taken Geraldine’s place as my neighbor, had scored some green felt from the factory for me a while ago and I’d glued it to the tops of my two lockers. Why? Because in some devious way that I don’t fully understand, or want to understand, I’m trying to establish a territory for myself and put my personal stamp on it – trying to be at home. I don’t want to be at home here but my instincts drive me to establish a nest, to be comfortable, to develop the illusion that I’m a full-fledged human being in a human environment.

  But this is what the administration won’t tolerate. Just as you nearly complete the structure of the illusion that you’re human, and entitled to a small chunk of peace and comfort, they tear down your house – literally – to remind you that you’re a criminal in prison.

  Nick was here when the hacks went through the dorm. He says, “They dug it, man. You could see it in their faces. They come with big scissors and razor blades and just had a good, good time.”

  My green felt was ripped off. So is the photograph of my steak. A mimeographed form was left on my bed, as on all the beds, stating that window sills were not to be used for the stacking of books. No cartons are to be stored under beds. A resident may place on the top of his locker one ashtray, a reasonable amount of books and magazines, and one framed photograph. I have two.

  Men display different attitudes to what’s happened. Joe D. smiles and says, “Don’t worry. They go apeshit every now and then. It’s their job to harass us. Now that they’ve done it, they’re happy. And they’ll treat you better when they’re happy. You’ll see. So you cool it for a couple of weeks and then start putting your stuff back, a little bit at a time, and they get used to it and hardly notice, and they won’t say anything or rip it off for another four, five, six months. They got us, kid. Accept it.”

  It amuses him, that’s all. Hogg, on the other hand, says quietly and coldly: “I never had nothin on my lockers or under my bed. I don’t keep nothin personal because I know them pigs will tear it off sooner or later, and if I catch them doin it I’ll bust some hack’s fuckin head and get sent to the hole, and I don’t need that shit. So I got nothin, and they can’t take that away from me.” A grimmer version, I suppose, of the song from Porgy and Bess . . .

  Men jail in different ways. I’m new to it. I’m enraged. At myself as much as at the administration, because I’m a sucker for the traps inherent in this life, and because there’s nothing tangible I can do to express my rage, my sense of having been violated. I’m not amused. I can’t become a zombie. I don’t want to be a rebel or a hardcase, because I have good hopes for parole in the spring. So, I’ll jail.

  December 19

  I’m teaching a course in Creative Writing to both interested and uninterested inmates. I don’t much enjoy teaching but the theory is that it will show my seriousness, my desire to do good for my fellow men, my capacity for rehabilitation, and such other shit. All because I want parole, want it badly. Class met last night at the Education Building – a tan clapboard shack near the Weight Room.

  Previous session I’d discussed the concept of plot and asked the men to sketch a brief plot of something they’d like to do.

  One of the younger men, Leroy, read his sketch to us. “Goes like this,” he said. “Me and t
hese other dudes is thinking of knocking off a bank. Here’s the plot. John will stand by the door, keep an eye on the street. Eddie sticks a gun in the teller’s face. I take care of the bank guard. That’s the plot.”

  I restrained myself from laughing but the other men howled, whereupon Leroy said angrily, “You badass motherfuckers’re so fucking smart, how come you’re in here? You got a better plot, how come you got caught?”

  Hard to answer that one.

  December 22

  Joe D. was busted yesterday for possession of a $5 bill, a Pennsylvania state lottery ticket and some postage stamps. He had it in his pocket and he was stopped just as he entered the chow hall. All of that was contraband – illegal. Someone must have ratted on him – the hacks knew exactly where and when to look. They hustled Joe over to The Wall in handcuffs and today I heard he was shipped east to Danbury.

  Christmas present today from the Federal Bureau of Prisons: a brown paper bag containing two packs of Old Golds, one Westcott Mixed Nuts, one Sunshine Chip-A-Roos Chocolate Chip Cookies, one 39 cent Plantation Assorted Cookies, and one bag of Betteryet Hard Candies. I bought a six-pack of Genessee beer from Fitz, the runner, and got quietly drunk with Sioti. I’ll miss Joe. He was a friend, and he taught me a lot.

  Christmas Day

  A Christmas rape this morning, about 2 a.m. A new kid arrived last week and some black dudes have been propositioning him. The kid complained to a hack but wouldn’t name names. So this morning they dragged him outside the dorm, with about five other men playing cards, seeing it all but saying nothing, stuffed a yellow towel in his mouth and raped him. One of the most uncool things you can do in the joint is interfere with some other dude’s serious intentions, particularly if those intentions are unlawful. There was a lot of muttering when the boy called out for help, but none of the onlookers charged into the fray as Robert Redford’s screenwriters would have him do. Hell, no.

  Now it’s evening and they’ve already collared the three men who did it. They’ll be sent to The Wall or Terre Haute – no charges against them, because the kid’s afraid to finger them – in any case, to a joint where they can rape and be raped with much less fuss and palaver. When there’s rape at the county jails and the three-star maximum security federal penitentiaries no one of the bystanders even dare to mutter. To my surprise, one of the men who did it was my neighbor, Bubba, who hardly ever said a word and was, I thought, just a nice quiet kid who played basketball and farted in his sleep. He and the others have spent most of their lives in reformatories like Petersburg, the federal joint in Virginia, where they fuck each other nonstop up the ass. Nick, my other black neighbor, explained it to me. “Man, they tell some dude, ‘I wanna fuck you.’ He say no, they feel insulted. Bubba didn’t wanna hurt that boy – you right, Bubba gentle as a lamb – he just need some place to stick his meat.”

  Some country club.

  Officials of the Bureau of Prisons have an interesting attitude toward incidents like this morning’s. I imagine that most of the wardens, hacks and caseworkers qualify as human beings and don’t especially like to contemplate the undeniable fact that they’re running a freak show where the weak and meek are systematically brutalized by the strong and vicious. On the other hand, it’s my observation and that of all the men I know that 100% of prison officials have only one aim and object in their workaday lives, and that is to keep the population calm – for when the natives get restless at places like Lewisburg or Attica, it means trouble. Trouble isn’t a torn anus, trouble is losing your job or your GSA rating or getting dressed down by the warden if the facts leak to the press. Better a hundred rapes than a single riot. And so officialdom, from the lowly hack right up to Herr Weger, and even the hierarchy in Washington, do their best to look the other way. “Law and order, no matter whose. Don’t bother us, and we won’t bother youse” – that’s the creed.

  Oh, I was right. I heard from the Time Magazine photographer and they won’t run the piece on Allenwood.

  January 3, 1973

  Good thought: I’ll be out of prison some time this year.

  A fight broke out New Year’s morning in the dorm. Hogg was drunk and babbling to his buddy, Blaine, around two o’clock in the morning. No one could sleep and Claude told them to shut up. Hogg said, “Fuck you, faggot,” whereupon Claude catapulted out of bed clutching a baseball bat and slammed Hogg across the side of his shoulder with it – a good, solid swing. Hogg just stood there, completely stunned, but he didn’t fall, so Claude hit him again: home run. Next thing, Hogg was down on the concrete floor and Blaine was out of bed with a lead pipe in his hand. I jumped up, too. I didn’t have a weapon. What really rattled me was that practically everyone else did – shanks, pipes, bats, wooden clubs, coiled springs, even one guy with a golf club, a number 6 iron, I’d guess. Where did they all come from?

  Somehow it calmed down and no one was hurt, except Hogg, before the hacks arrived. The weapons vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. They asked Hogg what happened to his arm, which was purple and swelling up fast.

  “I slipped in the shower,” he said. He was very pale. They took him off to the hospital at The Wall.

  Later, Claude said, “I have to sleep with one eye open from now on.”

  On Sioti’s advice, yesterday I bought a combination lock in the Commissary, put it inside a knotted white gym sock, and now I sleep with it under my pillow. Sioti says if the hacks shake down the dorm and find it, it’s not technically a weapon.

  January 10

  You can buy booze here for $20 a fifth. Now that the men trust me, they ask me if I want any, and Fitz, the runner, brings me the list from the Pennsylvania State Liquor Authority. I’m impressed. You can choose your brand and they have everything, including some good California wines and French cognacs. I take a six-pack of beer a few times and then a bottle of Chivas Regal. Why am I doing this? I don’t really know. It has something to do with the stripping of my house that day and their busting Joe and their attitude toward the rape. I suppose it has something to do with the whole situation and with everything I think and feel, and with boredom, and with anger, and with the knowledge that you can’t just be another Normal Clark. However, it’s risky, and not the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done.

  Whatever you buy, you have to drink it all the night you get it, since you can’t very well store beer cans or a bottle of scotch in your locker. This means you have to share. You have to be careful with whom.

  Fitz works on the Cattle Detail. He just slips under the fence, through the trees to the road, Route 15, where a taxi’s waiting. He makes his buy in Williamsport through a friend, comes back and hides it under a haystack.

  This morning he told me that all the beer froze last night under the haystack.

  January 17

  Hogg made parole. Figure that one out. He got drunk to celebrate, walked over to Claude and said, “I can’t kill you now. Leastways, not in here.” And there wasn’t the trace of a smile on his face.

  January 22

  A new man arrives, a birdlike, bespectacled 50-year-old accountant named Dershowitz, from Baltimore. He’s serving a 30-day sentence. He’s so frightened he’s afraid to talk to anyone. A few of the older men calm him down. First thing he wants to know is: will he get any time off for good behavior? This doesn’t endear him to the men who have a few more years to go or are finishing up a 12-year bit. And then Dershowitz is so ashamed to be here. What’s his beef? Apparently someone filed a fraudulent federal income tax return and he was the CPA who okayed it. “It was only carelessness,” he says. John Masiello always tells me, laughing, “No one in this joint is guilty except you and me, Clifford.”

  In the Visiting Room, his family gathered round him, poor little Dershowitz cries. He seems to get a visit practically every day from wife, sons, cousins, the whole mishpuchah. They rally round, but he weeps. Thirty days! And his world’s come to an end. Well, I understand. To the man pulling thirty years, my thirty months must seem like a long weekend. I tr
ead softly with those guys.

  Today, on the chow line, Dershowitz is in front of me carrying his tray. A glass of milk, some thin pea soup, the inevitable meat loaf, lemon jello. He’s surrounded by chattering blacks. They don’t menace him, he doesn’t interest them at all, but they flow around him like big smooth shiny dark sharks, teeth so white and sharp, and he starts to shake and then the tray slips from his fingers. Pea soup, milk and meat loaf gravy spray in all directions. Dershowitz starts to cry. Tears leak down his thin pink cheeks. His glasses fog.

  “Oh my,” he says. “Oh my, oh my, oh my.”

  Not many people laugh. Cadillac Jones, some badassed 220-pound black dude in for bank robbery, gently helps Dershowitz out of the line to an empty table. Dershowitz, misty tears blocking his vision, doesn’t even know who’s got hold of him. “Thank you,” he says. Now and then, en route, he says: “Oh, my.”

  Cadillac Jones plants the little man safely in a wobbly plastic chair, looks around, finally spots a group of white men nearby, watching. “Here,” he rumbles. “Here’s a brother of yours needs help. Take care of him.”

  I went over, too, but Dershowitz, in a world of his own, didn’t need anything then that Cadillac hadn’t already given him.

  January 30

  Finally, yesterday, I went out.

  This was lunacy and I know it, but I gave in out of weakness or a strength I can’t and don’t want to define. Sioti, Claude and Willie Polk were going and talked me into it. They’ve been planning it for weeks.

  Unless there’s an emergency, the longest stretch of free time is between the 4 p.m. count, just after we quit work, and the 10 p.m. count just before Lights Out. It has snowed again, it was awfully cold, and Willie said to me as final reassurance, “Them hacks’ll be jerkin each other off in front of the electric heater down at Control.”