Chapter Fifteen #2
On odd-numbered days, our tier gets thirty minutes out in the yard for fresh air, exercise, and sunshine.
I try it once, but I basically just stand there by myself, watching some Black guys playing a roughneck game of basketball with a netless hoop.
A couple of the older inmates are playing checkers, and a bunch of the weight room bros are gathered around a picnic table, cheering on an arm-wrestling match between two of their own.
It feels like I’m back in middle school, watching all the cliques I don’t belong to.
Three poker-faced COs—one Black, two white—oversee us all like playground supervisors.
Having become more aware of the racial divide at this place, I notice that Manny is hanging with six or seven guys who are Black, white, and Brown—the queer clique from the looks of it.
For once, he isn’t monopolizing the conversation.
The person holding court is a tall, skinny, light-skinned Black dude with loud, affected speech and what sounds like a Jamaican accent.
He’s wearing red lipstick, blue eye makeup, uniform pants rolled up to midcalf.
There’s a purple feather boa around his neck that, apparently, the COs aren’t interested in confiscating.
“So I said gurl, if I went down on that monster, I’d get lockjaw!
” Having seen the attitude toward gays around here, I kind of admire his “fuck you” declaration of queerness in the midst of all this prison yard machismo.
I look away when he catches me staring at him.
Too late. “Hey there, handsome! I’m Jheri Curl.
Like what you see?” I try for an expression of bored indifference but can feel myself blushing.
“I got some junk in the trunk for you, baby. Can you go deep the way I like it? Never can tell what you white boys got until showtime.” Hoots and laughter from the others except for Manny.
He says something I can’t hear. Whatever it is, the drag queen says, “I was just jokin’ with Uptight Whitey was all.
Can’t a gurl have a little fun out here? ”
I look over at the COs to see whether they’ve picked up on any of this, but they’re occupied with their own conversation. When the hell are they going to let us go back to our cells? Thirty minutes? It feels like we’ve been out here for an hour.
Halfway across the yard, a skirmish breaks out and I follow some of the others who are gearing up to watch the show.
Two guys are yelling at each other in Spanish.
When it escalates into a shoving match, the three guards move in, separating them and threatening each with pepper spray if they don’t knock it off.
One guy is compliant. The other one launches a hawker that lands on the shoe of his opponent.
The CO who cuffs him escorts him out of the yard.
“Hey, Ledbetter!” someone calls. Who knows my name?
“Yeah?”
My eyes find two white guys walking toward me.
The older one has a shaved head and a bushy salt-and-pepper beard.
I’ve seen the younger one talking with Pug in the shower room a couple of times.
Naked, this guy is covered front and back with tattoos: the Confederate flag on his left pec, on his right one a circle and cross.
An angry-looking American eagle takes flight on the entirety of his broad back, along with the words “White Pride Worldwide.”
The older guy does the talking. “I’m Wes and this is Gunnar. We want to discuss something with you. Let’s get out of earshot.”
“Nah. I’m good,” I say. “How do you know my name?”
“Made it our business to find out,” he says.
He lowers his voice. “Look, you’re new here, but you must have figured out by now that the spics, the spades, and the half-breeds outnumber us.
Now that presents a clear and present danger to us three and every other white guy doing time here. Know what I’m saying?”
Play dumb, I tell myself. Shake my head.
“Then let me spell it out for you. You can already hear the beat of the jungle drum at this place and we’ve got reliable intel that the ‘libtard’ governor of this fucking state is pushing the commissioner to appoint a nigger as the next warden here.
The nigs are already coddled at this institution and it’ll get a whole lot worse if that happens.
Sooner or later there’s gonna be a war breaking out at a lot of prisons around the country, including this one. ”
I look over and see the Black CO, McGreavy, eagle-eyeing us. I’ve got to walk away from these crackpots or I’ll be lumped with them.
“You better decide where your loyalty’s at,” the tattooed one says. “Wes and me just want to advise you not to betray your race.”
Is this a threat or a recruitment spiel?
Whatever it is, before I can respond, I’m saved by McGreavy’s whistle.
“Rec time’s over!” he shouts. His wingman—I think his name is Yarnall—claps his hands and shouts, “Let’s go!
Back inside!” I’m relieved that “outdoor recess” is finally over.
This is what I get for venturing outside my cell, but I don’t plan on making that mistake again.
Manny comes up from behind me as I enter the building. “Don’t let Jheri get to you,” he says. “She’s got a big mouth, but she’s harmless.”
I shrug. “Where did ‘she’ get that drag queen makeup from? Is that stuff listed on the commissary order sheet?”
Manny shakes his head and laughs. “After you’ve been here awhile, you get pretty good at improvising.
You’d be surprised how much dye you can suck out of Starburst gummies, Jolly Ranchers, and strawberry Twizzlers.
By the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but I was the one who got Jheri to stop teasing you. ”
“Yeah, thanks,” I say. But if Manny thinks this is going to make us buddies, he’s mistaken.
By now I’ve seen some of the shitty treatment gay guys get at this place, from COs as well as other inmates.
I don’t want to be associated with them any more than I want to hang out with the racist frat boys I just met.
I haven’t met anyone at Yates who isn’t a liability.
I have nothing in common with any of these guys, and yet I’m one of them.
I have to admit that I sometimes catch myself thinking I’m better than them—that they deserve to be here but I don’t.
But who am I kidding? The opposite is true.
How many of them caused the death of their own child?
When I get back to our cell, Pug’s there. Back early from work, he’s using a magazine to fan away the smoke from his roadkill cigarette. “What are you going to do if someday a CO walks in here and sees this haze? Smells it?” It’s the first time I’ve challenged him.
“I’ll probably throw you under the bus,” he says. “Claim that you were the one who was lighting up.” He says it like it’s a joke, but I know he’d do just that.
That night, when I climb up to my bunk, I smell something. Shit. My sheet is smeared with feces and there’s a turd sitting on my pillow.
By my third week, I’ve picked up on some of the slang you hear at this place.
A private note wrapped up tight and thrown from one prisoner to another is a “kite” that arrives “airmail.” If you die in prison before your sentence is up, you’ve gotten a “back-door parole.” You’ll catch “dinner and a show” when a fight breaks out in the chow hall and you watch the guards pepper-spray the brawlers.
Crapping into your cell’s toilet is “feeding the warden.” It’s part gallows humor and part survival mechanism.
It also serves as a kind of antidote to the bullshit euphemisms the institution loves to hide behind.
Take the name of this place for instance: the Yates Correctional Institution.
The only thing most of the staff is interested in “correcting” is a new inmate’s assumption that he might be something more than a worthless piece of shit with a felony conviction and an inmate number.
I know I deserve to be here. But if you want to fix yourself while you’re doing time at Yates, I think you’re pretty much on your own.
The days here are bad enough, but the nights are worse.
Pug snores and sometimes shouts out in his sleep and his restlessness shakes my bunk as well as his.
Some nights I can’t get to sleep and other nights I can’t stay asleep because of it.
Either way, I’m awake for hours, silently asking my baby boy and baby girl for forgiveness or pleading with Emily not to give up on me.
As the hours crawl by, my desperation reawakens my craving for the benzos and booze that used to allow me to drift into merciful unconsciousness.
Now, instead of sleep, I experience night sweats, tightness in my chest, palpitations, shallow breathing.
When I finally doze off for an hour or two, I sometimes wake up startled by disturbing dreams: my father screaming at my mother and me as we cower together on the kitchen floor; Michael Jackson laughing as I beg him to stop dangling Niko upside down over a balcony railing.
One night I’m awakened by the smell of burnt toast that isn’t really there.
Next thing I know, I’m lying there reliving in painful detail what happened that morning: the smoke alarm, Niko’s fascination with the ants in the driveway, Linda McNally waving her McDonald’s bag from across the street, me putting the CRV in reverse without checking the back seat.
I begin to dread the sun going down. Nighttime is when the fire burns most fiercely inside my head and I’m at a loss to know how to put it out.