Prison Time Read online

  ‘I’ve never been on the internet.’ Bud eyes me suspiciously. ‘How does a blog work?’

  ‘I write your story down and mail it to my parents in England. They type it up, post it to the internet at my blog, Jon’s Jail Journal. People read it and post comments. After a week or so of it gathering comments, my parents print the story and the comments, then mail it to me.’

  ‘Fuck it!’ Bud says, smiling. ‘Give it a try. Hey, check this out.’ Bud waves me to the door.

  I spot two guards escorting Booga from the building, the back of his thighs and boxers coated in blood. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Booga’s always at Medical, complaining he’s bleeding from the rectum,’ Bud says. ‘What does he expect if he keeps sticking things in his asshole?’

  A few weeks later, I receive an envelope from my parents. I tear it open, praying for comments supportive of Bud, dreading having to deal with him if they’re not. My relief increases as I read each comment. Bud’s eyes light up as they settle on:

  ‘What he done to the child molester was certainly called for.’

  ‘Bud is the kind of criminal I could get behind.’

  ‘Way to go, Bud! Judge and jury all in one! Fervent admirer.’

  While Bud runs around the day room flaunting the comments, one in particular sticks in my mind: ‘I would be scared shitless of this guy if I were you.’

  4

  Jail etiquette demands that cellmates take turns cleaning the room, but, no matter how much effort I put into scrubbing the toilet and mopping, Bud always finds fault with me and gets angry. He has a certain way of doing things and any other way irritates him. Junior Bull suggests I hire his cleaner, George – stout, soft-spoken, silver-haired, in his early 50s – who charges $2 a week in commissary to do the cell, and extra to wash and fold laundry – a service in high demand from prisoners due for visits from wives and girlfriends. Bud allows me to hire George.

  While cleaning, George puts on an English accent, addresses me as ‘governor’ and sings ‘Rule Britannia’. He begs me to read a few pages of Harry Potter aloud. George is also a masseur. After I agree to a massage, Junior Bull warns me not to lie down but to sit on a stool to prevent George’s hands from wandering in between my legs. As expected, George asks me to relax on his bunk, but I refuse to leave the stool. He puts lotion on my back. I enjoy the sensation of his hands kneading the stress from my muscles. Every time a knot in my back pops, I groan.

  When the massage is over, George rests on the bottom bunk. In a high-pitched female-impersonator voice, he says, ‘Shaun’s too shy to get oral sex. Shaun’s too inhibited to get his willy played with by another man. Oh no! What if the Queen of England were to find out that a man had been fiddling with Shaun’s Prince William!’

  Taken aback, but no stranger to men coming on to me during incarceration, I say, ‘Inhibited? Shy? I’m too heterosexual, is that what you mean?’

  ‘You’re homophobic.’

  ‘I used to party at gay bars all the time!’

  ‘Then you’re confused. There’s nobody that’s 100 per cent heterosexual or homosexual. Humans are curious about sex. If you took away people’s inhibitions, there’d be a lot of bisexuals. Look at the ’60s, free love.’ George smiles as if reminiscing. ‘One minute you’re going down on a vagina, the next there’s a penis in your face and you’re just going to town on it.’

  I laugh. ‘Jesus, George!’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I’ve never been in a situation like that!’

  ‘It’s an orgy. You’re just rolling around from person to person without a care in the world. Surely you’ve been near a penis at some point in your life?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not even peeing contests or circle jerks?’

  ‘I helped put a fire out by peeing on it with a bunch of lads.’

  ‘See, you have had a penis near you!’ he yells, pointing at me. ‘Don’t you think that if it didn’t have social stigma you would do anything that feels good?’

  ‘Such as letting you suck my dick? Is that where this is heading?’

  ‘I say if it feels good, let it happen.’

  ‘No chance! You’re a fiend.’

  ‘Let me ask you this, then: if you stick your dick into a glory hole—’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A hole through which fellatio is performed anonymously. If you didn’t know whether a man or a woman was doing the sucking, what difference would receiving the pleasure make?’ he asks, tilting his head, cocking his brows suggestively.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But you agree that they’d both feel good, right?’

  ‘That’s called a tie-down. You’re asking me a question to solicit a yes answer?’

  ‘You know they’d both feel good,’ he says slowly, smiling slyly.

  ‘No, I don’t!’

  ‘You need to toss out your preconceived notions of right and wrong. Lose your inhibitions.’

  ‘It seems you’re beating me with semantics.’

  ‘Yay! I won. Now you have to drop your knickers and close your eyes.’

  ‘Bugger off, George! At least you have choices in here. Us heteros don’t.’

  George waves a hand dismissively. ‘Think about my question again. If you put your penis in a glory hole and you didn’t know if it was a male or a female giving you satisfaction, wouldn’t it be equally pleasurable?’

  ‘I’ll write about this and see what my blog readers think. Then I’ll find out if you’re a madman or not.’ I stand.

  ‘I’ll leave it at that for now, governor, shall I?’ Looking me up and down, George slides his tongue across his crooked teeth, yellowy and thin like flaked almonds, then licks his top lip.

  ‘Most definitely.’ I depart fast.

  5

  Returning from a shower, I try to enter my cell but get pushed out by Bud’s neighbour, a muscular Aryan Brother with a shaved head serving 25 to life for murdering a child molester. ‘You can’t go in your cell right now ’cause the fellas are shooting up,’ he says in a deep, dangerous voice.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I ask, frustrated.

  ‘Come back in ten minutes.’

  Passing Booga’s cell, I hear him yell, ‘Hey, England, are you uncut?’

  ‘Uncut?’ I ask, hastening away.

  He appears in his doorway. ‘Uncircumcised. It’s hard to find. I saw it in European porn. I just love to see it. It drives me wild!’

  Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I can’t help but smile at his insanity.

  ‘I can tell you are! C’mon, show me your foreskin.’

  Ignoring him, I go downstairs and watch Scrabble. Fifteen minutes later, I return to the cell, relieved only Bud is in there. Climbing up to my bunk, I prick my foot. ‘Shit, Bud, I got a needle stuck in my foot!’ I say, worried about catching hepatitis C, wondering whether he left it out on purpose. I remove the needle, relieved no blood is seeping out.

  ‘What have I told you?’ he yells, taking the needle. ‘You need to be more aware of your fucking surroundings!’

  I ignore him.

  His associate, Ken, swaggers in, a beast of a biker with a black ponytail, an imposing handlebar moustache and Harley-Davidson wings tattooed on his forehead. On his tree trunk of a neck is a patch resembling plastic where a rival took a blow torch to him. ‘What’s up, dude!’ he says, smiling, and wrenches my ankle. My shoulders slam against the mattress. He drags my body halfway off the bunk. Just when I’m about to fall, I grab the metal and hold on with all of my strength. ‘Give me your Walkman or else I’m gonna fuck you up!’ he yells, letting go of me.

  ‘Fuck you! I use it!’ I leap down, grab my writing supplies and leave for the day room until lockdown.

  At night, I read Don Quixote on my bunk. Absorbed by the story, I laugh aloud at the antics of the protagonist.

  Bud springs off the bottom bunk and yells in my face, ‘What the fuck’s so funny up there?’ High on heroin, the sudden movement makes him ill. He belche
s sickly air at me, grabs his stomach, rushes to the toilet and vomits.

  ‘This book’s pretty funny,’ I say, wincing at the stench of partially digested meat and refried beans.

  With vomit and drool streaking down his face, Bud manages to stand. ‘There’s something about you I can’t figure out. Something you’re hiding. When I figure out what it is, I’m gonna smash you, fish.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say, my pulse climbing. ‘I’ve showed you my charges. Junior Bull even vouched for me.’

  He produces a sock and extracts a padlock. ‘See this. I can kill you at any time,’ he says, stroking the metal.

  Spotting a pen on my bunk within reaching distance, I consider sticking it in his eyeball. Not considering myself a violent person, I’m surprised by the momentary glee I feel. Don’t be stupid. It could add years to your sentence.

  He cross-examines me about imaginary sex offences into the small hours, so high he keeps asking the same questions. Repeating my answers, I feel as if I’m trying to reason with a drunk. After a few hours’ sleep, I wake up for breakfast with blurry vision. In the day room, I write to a friend:

  My cellmate gave me the third-degree interrogation last night, for, lo and behold, being quiet! Yes, as I am quiet in here, it has aroused his suspicion that I’m hiding something! Despite my case being in the news, and people knowing about me from the blog, somehow I’m hiding something. There are some in here who will just not let people do their own time. Why should I have to explain myself to anyone? On top of all that it is documented that he has attacked and threatened inmates and guards. It’s exhausting answering his ridiculous questions, including – get this – he started insisting that I’d said there were 15-year-old girls partying with me at the raves! So his mind is developing this plot that I fiddled with 15 year olds. That’s not a good sign! Plus I have to put up with his smoking, yet there’s a dozen things he’s found fault with me for. They range from not folding my laundry properly to lint falling off my upper bunk onto his bunk. I have no control over gravity! I’ve had approximately a dozen cellmates before him and never had any problems with any of them. When the guards put me in this cell, they laughed and said, ‘Your new celly is a bit of a joker!’ I wondered what they meant and I now find the joke is on me. How did I get so unlucky? I’m more nervous as well because my mum and dad will be here soon.

  You asked how I felt when I was transported to Buckeye. It was entertaining – the drive. I felt like a young lad on a day out. But I was sad and shook up by the time I got here. I was sad when I saw free people driving by the prison bus – and even more sad when I saw places I used to live and my stockbrokerage office – the 13th floor of the high-rise at 3101 N Central Avenue – where I was the top producer two years in a row, making a sweet six-figure salary and winning awards. How stupid I was to throw away my life.

  I manage to stay strong most of the time in here, so you’re glimpsing a moment of weakness reading this letter.

  At recreation, I wait until no one’s near a phone, then call my aunt Ann, who’d been living in America since the 1970s and had been involved in helping create my blog. ‘I need your help getting my cell changed,’ I say in a low voice, hoping no one overhears.

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ Ann asks, alarmed.

  ‘It’s my cellmate.’ I crane my neck to see if anyone’s approaching. ‘He’s out of control and paranoid on heroin and meth. He keeps threatening to kill me in my sleep with a padlock in a sock. He’s so off his head, I can’t reason with him. Can you have my dad call the British Embassy, and ask them to call the prison and request I get moved? I’ve been through a lot of stuff, and I’ve never asked them to get involved, so they should know it’s serious. But they can’t tell the prison that I’m being threatened because I’d be viewed as a snitch and then everyone will want to kill me.’

  I return to the building, apprehensively, dreading what might happen next. I go downstairs and try to write but can’t concentrate. I’m expecting a backlash from Bud but hope it’ll be worth it to escape from him.

  A few hours later, a guard extracts me. The prisoners eye me suspiciously as I leave for the office of the Deputy Warden. I arrive in a spacious room, well lit and noticeably cooler, with a row of filing cabinets, a bookshelf and an American flag on a wall. Standing in front of a polished wooden desk with a few neat piles of paperwork is a stern-looking woman in her 50s, dressed in a navy-blue business suit with her arms folded. Next to her, about a foot taller and radiating the aggression of a sentinel, is a broad-shouldered female lieutenant in a beige shirt, brown pants and black boots. Both are scowling at me.

  ‘Why is the British Embassy calling to get you moved?’ she asks sharply.

  ‘I’m not getting along with my cellmate,’ I say.

  ‘Has he threatened you?’

  ‘No. We’re just incompatible.’

  ‘Are you aware of the procedure for inmates who want to move cells?’

  ‘No. I’ve only been here a few weeks,’ I lie, aware the procedure, if approved at all, can take weeks and sometimes months.

  ‘I’m not going to authorise a move if he’s not threatened you. Plus, you’ve gone outside our internal procedures.’

  ‘Then send me to lockdown.’ To stop my hands trembling, I claw my thighs. ‘I refuse to go back to that cell.’

  ‘You’d rather go to lockdown and lose your commissary?’

  ‘I’ve spent most of the last year locked-down. It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘Do you have mental-health issues?’

  ‘Diagnosed bipolar.’

  ‘Are you on meds?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to see the psychiatrist.’ She turns to my escorting officer. ‘Lock the building down and move him, but keep him in the same building.’ Addressing me, she says, ‘Don’t ever go outside our internal procedures again. If you request any more moves, you will be sent to lockdown.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’ I’m escorted to the foot of the control tower in my building.

  An announcement: ‘Lockdown! Everybody, lockdown!’

  The inmates trudge to their cells, cursing the lockdown. When a guard brings me into the day room, the inmates flock to their cells, some shaking their heads as if they want to hurt me. George waves goodbye. I follow the guard upstairs.

  He opens my door. ‘Grab your property and take it to Cell 2.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Bud snarls, hands on hips.

  ‘They’re moving me downstairs.’

  The prisoners watch me move boxes of books, letters, blog printouts and commissary to Cell 2, next door to Slingblade in Cell 3. Relieved that I won’t have to pass Booga’s door any more, I spot him smiling and blowing kisses at me, his boxers round his ankles, one hand cradling his scrotum, the other jerking his penis. When everything’s moved, the guard locks me in. I breathe easy for a few seconds before imagining what’s going through Bud’s mind. Ten minutes later, our doors open. Not wanting to appear weak by staying in my cell, I stride out to deal with Bud head on.

  ‘You motherfucker!’ Bud yells, flying down the stairs.

  I turn towards him, expecting to be attacked, ready to strike his chin in the hope of knocking him out. Prisoners mob around, all eyes on us.

  ‘What the fuck have you done?’ Bud yells, fists balled, his pale face red with rage. He rushes at me. ‘If you said anything about me, I’m gonna smash you right now, fish!’

  Raw nervous energy crackles through me, exploding into battle mode. ‘If I said anything about you, you wouldn’t be here,’ I say, holding his gaze.

  ‘Smash him, Bud!’

  ‘Fuck him up!’

  His associates circle me, magnifying the sense of danger.

  ‘We’re gonna bend you over in the shower, England.’

  ‘We’re gonna take that English ass.’

  ‘What did you tell them about me?’ Bud yells, spit flying out.

  ‘That we’re incompatible. That’s a
ll.’

  ‘Then how come they moved you so fast?’

  ‘The British Embassy put a call in.’

  ‘The British Embassy! You’re so full of shit! Who the fuck do you think you are? James fucking Bond? I’ve got a guard checking out exactly what happened! When I find out what you said about me, I’m gonna fucking kill you! And if you survive and they send me to lockdown, I’ll have someone else kill you! Do you understand me, motherfucker?’

  ‘If you snitched Bud out, you’re a dead man, England.’

  ‘I understand that, but I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m gonna find out!’ Bud storms off.

  Relieved we didn’t fight, I return to Cell 2. Anticipating violence, I wait. Bud’s associates cluster outside my door, rearing to attack me when the order comes.

  George arrives, excited. ‘Well done, governor! That was the fastest move in the history of DOC. Did you call in a favour from Queen Elizabeth?’ He grins.

  ‘Not quite. The British Embassy.’ I recount the story, aware he’ll spread the word, and that he may even be on a fact-finding mission for Bud.

  Every time a prisoner stops by, I brace to fight, but I breathe easier as each congratulates me on escaping from Bud.

  Just before lockdown, an object flies into the cell and hits me in the leg, stinging my thigh. I spot a battery on the floor and rush to the door, but see no one.

  6

  At Visitation, a concrete warehouse with Plexiglas windows into bare corridors on one side and overlooking the desert on another, I hug my parents, both in good shape from hiking and ballroom dancing but the brightness in their eyes dimmed by the stress of my incarceration and the fatigue of a 12-hour flight.

  ‘The orange suits you,’ Mum says.

  ‘You look like a giant baby,’ Dad says. ‘In an orange babygro.’

  We laugh and sit at a circular plastic table in a room that’s empty because there are no other special visits – weekday ones approved for out-of-state visitors. Dad puts down a bag containing $20 in coins. I eye a row of bean burritos – the vending-machine food is considered luxurious in comparison to chow – and reach for the coins.