Chapter 25

The 36-cell pod of men wasn’t as congenial as the open warehouse on the third floor had been. The cramped, windowless, polluted world made sleep deprived men more irritable and prone to violence. Every three or four days, there would be an offense of some sort between prisoners and a fistfight would erupt. Like everything else in jail, the fights had rules. The first rule was that there was no fighting in the common area. There was one room in the pod used for fighting. It wasn’t viewable by the surveillance cameras, and the guards couldn’t see inside from their tower. Fights were boxing matches, which is hands only, with no weapons of any sort. The fight lasted until one party gave up and the dispute was settled. If the disagreement was between two prisoners of different races, a fight was required to save the honor of the clan. If a man wouldn’t fight, he would be beaten by his own race for cowardice.

One day while lying on my bunk, I watched such a scene unfold down in the common area. One of the Kinfolk, a man in his forties, didn’t want to fight. He wanted to be left alone. The remaining Blacks in the room, about five of them, ganged up outside the door to his cell and were yelling at him. I couldn’t hear the words, but it was obvious from their agitation that the man was being threatened by them. His opponent, a Pisa in his late twenties, was in the fight cell waiting for him. Pisas were yelling at the Kinfolk in Spanish, mocking them.

The Black man in the cell relented and came out pushing his brethren aside and walking rapidly down to the fight cell bare-chested and dressed only in his stripped pajama bottoms. Being out of your cell without a full uniform is against jail rules, and I was certain that it would alert the guards in the tower that something was amiss. The older Black man disappeared beneath the catwalk grating, and a moment later I heard what sounded like large slabs of meat hitting a counter — Thwack…thwack…thwack! Thwack! Thwack! A long, silent, tense moment passed as I waited to see who came out of the room. Prisoners were milling about nonchalantly, sitting at tables, and talking as if nothing unusual was happening, only occasionally did someone look into the room for a peek at the contest.

The Kinfolk began to get excited, and the older Black man appeared from beneath the catwalk and walked straight into his cell without saying a word to anyone. Some moments later, the young Pisa appeared. Even from my perch thirty feet away, I could see that his face was swelling and that his eye was bleeding. There were a couple of red marks on his ribcage, too. Although he had clearly lost the fight, he was boasting and moving in such a way that I would have thought that he was the victor. As far as I could tell, the Black prisoner had never received a single blow.

“Lockdown! Lockdown! Get in your cells immediately!” yelled a guard over the loudspeakers. An instant later, cell doors begin to close as everyone made a mad dash for the confines of their tiny cell. To be caught outside your cell in a lockdown meant disciplinary action — such as going to the hole for thirty or forty days.
The door to the pod slid open and six male DOs rushed in. Two took the bottom level and two the top. The other two stood alertly looking around the room. We all knew the routine by heart. A DO would stand at the door, peering through the viewing slot. Each prisoner took a turn standing on the other side of the door, and he would show the guard his knuckles. When the DO nodded, the prisoner would raise his shirt and the DO would look for body abrasions. Richard went to the door and followed the routine. He was muscular, so the DO took a long time to look him over for signs of fighting. Then it was my turn. I showed my knuckles to the guard and reached to lift my shirt when he turned and walked away.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up with that?”

“He’s not worried about you,” Richard said. “You’re too old to fight.”

“The hell you say! I want him to come back here and look at me raise my shirt like everyone else.”
Richard laughed, picked up the book he had been reading, and laid down on the bunk. Shaking his head,

“OG, you’re a hoot. You don’t have to be a DO to tell that you wouldn’t be in a fight.”

“Hey, young fella. This place hasn’t killed me yet. I still have enough self-respect to defend myself.”

I watched as the guards pulled an inmate from two different cells to take them to the hole. They would spend the next forty-five days there. One of the men they selected was the loser in the fight. The other was another Latino, not the Black man.

When the lockdown ended, people were laughing about how stupid the DOs were. But the Black inmate wasn’t laughing; he was standing in the doorway to his cell, his shirt still missing, with a solemn look on his face. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked over to the tower and shouted something up to the guard. Then he walked to the pod door and waited. A minute later, the door opened and he disappeared through the entrance. Five minutes after that, the door opened again and the Mexican who had been mistaken for a combatant walked through the door and back to his cell.

The saddest day in the pod was the day they took Vinnie. Vinnie was another Vietnam Veteran. He had made it through his tour in Nam without incident, but he had been hit by a car on the Air Force Base after he had returned to the states. Vinnie had suffered extensive injuries to his brain that had left him more a child than a man. All of us gave Vinnie the best care we could, but he was still terrified of his surroundings. His speech was broken with stuttering, and he sometimes forgot the words he was going to say in mid-sentence. He carried his blanket with him whenever he left his cell and cried a lot. It was the fearful, quiet weeping of a lost child.

Vinnie was going to prison too. Andrew Thomas’ office had charged him with felony burglary — or something similar to that, Vinnie wasn’t quite sure what he had been charged with. He knew the public defender had given him a piece of paper to sign and that it meant he was going to prison. The rest was vague.

It took some days of getting to know Vinnie before he trusted me enough to talk at length. One day we walked in circles around the common area together and chatted. Vinnie’s crime was that he had wandered out of his parent’s house one night and had gotten lost. When he returned home, the door was locked. Scared to be outside alone, he broke a window to open it and had climbed into the house. He stumbled on some furniture in the dark and the lights began to come on. A man with a pistol pointed at him appeared in the doorway to the room. Vinnie was actually several blocks from his home, and the police were on their way.

Vinnie had medical records. Parents and Priests pleaded for him. The homeowner didn’t want to press charges. But Andrew Thomas wouldn’t let the accident be just that — an accident. He turned it into a felony.
When they called Vinnie to get his things and come to the pod door, we all helped him. He was crying and terrified of leaving the pod. I held his hand until the door opened, and then I and several other prisoners gave him a reassuring hug before he walked into an uncertain future. The last I saw of Vinnie was him looking back as the guards handcuffed him in the hallway and led him away. When the pod door began to close, I realized why he was sobbing so hard. The DOs had confiscated his blanket.

The jail would only allow inmates to have one pencil the length of a standard golf (or bowling) scoring pencil, less than four inches long. With my being over six feet tall and weighing an eighth of a ton, the tiny pencil was a matchstick in my hand. I simply couldn’t write with it.

Wild Child saw me attempting to write and asked if I wanted to buy a pencil. I told him I had a pencil. “No, Dude. I’ll make you a real pencil, like this one.” He raised a strange-looking paper object for me to look at. It was the length of a Pentel retractable pencil and had a piece of sharpened lead protruding from one end. The other end of the cylindrical barrel was open. It was constructed from a piece of notebook paper with a thread from a blanket tightly ‘whipped’ around it. The grip was comfortable and it wrote well, but I was skeptical.

“Okay, how do you keep the lead so sharp?”

“Rub it on the wall in the exercise area. If you stand beneath the tower, the guards can’t see you. The concrete makes a great pencil sharpener.”

“What happens when the lead—”

“Watch, man,” smiling, he reached for the pencil and held it in both hands, with his thumb and forefinger on the end with the lead. He pulled and the paper pencil came apart. The lower end was a small cylinder with lead in it, and the larger, string-encapsulated end was a hollow tube. The lead protruded from both sides of the smaller barrel. Wild Child pushed it to lengthen the exposed sharpened end.

“It works like this. When the lead gets low, you push it out a bit farther. When it gets short enough that you can’t do that, you put another piece of lead in behind it.”

“How did you get that small barrel to stay wrapped so tightly?”

“Glue. Well, not exactly glue. I use the toothpaste the sheriff gives us. It isn’t worth a shit for brushing your teeth, but it’s great glue.”

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Human ingenuity was amazing. The prisoners had homegrown entertainment, homegrown utensils, and a small economy in jail. They even formed a quasi-government with taxes (of food items) to help their poor.

“Sure, man. How much does one of your pencils cost?”

“Well, I don’t know, dude. I make the best pencils in the pod. It isn’t going to be cheap. Three Honey Buns on your next commissary order should cover it.”

“Where do you get the lead?”

“I soak those little pencils you have in water for a couple of days. The wood swells and then I split it apart with my fingernails. Speaking of that, I’ll need your pencil for the lead. I have some, but I like to replace them so I don’t run low.”

“You have yourself a deal,” I said.

“You’ll have to hide it from the guards. They’ll confiscate it if they find it.”

“No prob. When can you have it ready?”

“Give me ten minutes. I’ll be right back.” He stretched out his open hand and I gave him the pencil I was using.Ten minutes later, I was writing in style.

The sheriff doesn’t allow exercising. Signs posted everywhere say exercising is forbidden. But there is creative bodybuilding. Bench presses are accomplished by separating a broom’s handle from its long brush. The lifter lies down beneath the catwalk and holds the broom handle above his chest, bracing it against two of the four steel vertical I-beams supporting the staircase. One of the smaller prisoners stands on the handle for weight, his hands holding the beams for balance, as the lifter raises and lowers the other man to his chest. Back muscles are exercised by two prisoners standing face-to-face about two feet apart. They have two towels stretched between them so as to form an X. One prisoner opens his arms to the side, while the other prisoner provides resistance as the other man’s motions close his arms. The process is reversed for the next prisoner to pull and the first to resist. Pushups are easily done, but to be more creative, inmates put their feet on the staircase for added difficulty. Triceps and biceps are exercised by doing a handstand against the wall, the prisoner then lowering himself to the floor and then pushing back up.

In my third week in the pod, I had pretty much given up hope of getting to Work Furlough before I lost my job. The entire system was so clogged with humans that it was creaking like the hull on a submarine deep beneath the sea. Everyone in the pod was in transition to somewhere else in the system, but days would go by without anyone leaving. When someone did leave, within a few hours a new inmate arrived to fill the empty bunk.

After a month in captivity, prisonization was beginning to alter me. Distance was growing of my memory of Becky and the children. I was becoming a bull male, the husband and father fading into the background of my daily awareness. I felt myself growing tougher. I was aware that I was becoming institutionalized, but I couldn’t stop it. I was being assimilated into the system, and it felt like a cancer in my soul.

I was lying on my bunk reading the Bible when my name was called over the cell’s intercom. I was instructed to roll-up my things and come to the pod door. A few minutes later, I walked up to the large raised structure of the tower, my few belongings wrapped in a sheet. The guard opened the porthole in the guard tower and I asked him what was happening. He didn’t know. All he knew was that he had orders to remove me from the pod for transport to a different location.

I spent the next several hours traveling back through the series of small holding tanks deep within LBJ toward the loading dock holding cell near the entrance. When I reached the large holding cell that I had been in so many times, the DO told me to keep walking straight ahead to the counter. There, I signed for a large plastic bag that contained the clothes I had worn at my sentencing. Then I was taken to a different holding cell, one I had not been in before. It was filled with clothed prisoners. As I entered, he instructed me to remove the pajama stripes I was wearing and put on my street clothes which were inside the bag.

I should have been excited, but I was suspicious. My focus was to remain in control of my emotions. I walked to the corner of the holding cell and dressed quietly. I spoke to no one.

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