Sure, I was a little nervous, like a kid on his first day of school. The butterflies gave my tummy a good tickling as we passed through the gates on our way to the great concrete building. Uniformed men brandishing shotguns and handcuffs ushered us roughly from the bus with dirty looks and insults, generally calling us scumbags and questioning our manhood. One of them berated an elderly fellow, saying, “I bet you lotion your penis on the outside, huh? You like to lotion your penis? Well, there’s no lotion in here. For your penis.” The old man started to cry.
I alone seemed to find comfort in the terrible manners of our rather obscene prison guards. They reminded me of my old camp counselors at Lake Cayuga. Scamps and rascals, every one of them. (Once, a Lake Cayuga counselor held my head underwater in an attempt to prove his deranged theory that, given the proper motivation, a human would grow gills.)
The hazing from the guards continued well inside the walls. They kept calling us fish, for some reason. Fresh fish, which is hardly what I would consider demoralizing. My schoolmates in the second grade had been far crueler, some of them even stooping low enough to call each other ‘poopy.’
PROCESSED MEAT
Next we were all told to strip down to our bacon and bend over so they could shine lights into our buttholes. I was just dying for the guard to make some comment about the cleanliness of my area, to tell me how he admired the general upkeep. It wasn’t vanity. It’s just that when a man puts a lot of work into a thing it’s only natural to want some recognition. But the man must have seen prettier.
They threw delousing powder on our naked bodies and hosed us down. This part actually reminded me of the wet hot summers at my Uncle Frank’s beach house, for who it was always a point of pride to blast every last speck of sand from his nephew’s crevices with a high-powered garden hose. It was Uncle Frank who first taught me that any job worth doing was worth doing right.
CON-FIDENCE
I have heard horror stories about life in prison, about the abuses, both physical and spiritual. I have heard that it is a cruel place, where only the cruelest survive, and that a lily-white white boy like me does the hardest time of all.
But I am here today to tell you that those stories are bullshit. On my very first walk to my new cell I was told how pretty I was by no less than six different inmates. As someone who has always felt a good twenty pounds overweight, this boost to my self-esteem cannot be overstated.
And it was only uphill from there.
BUNK BROTHERS
My cellmate and new best friend was a large black man by the name of Lester Wiggins. Lester had a breathing problem, among several other problems, chief among them diabetes. He was constantly passing out or begging the guards to give him his goddamn insulin, which I would soon discover made him very easy to rape.
I introduced myself. Lester extended his shaking hand to me and whispered, “Diabetes…”
“That’s rough,” I said, and patted him on the shoulder.
CHOW TIME
At dinner they served us something the inmates called ‘nutra-loaf,’ a term I’d been told was a euphemism for whatever leftover scrapings of old food the kitchen staff could cobble together into a singular disgusting sponge and slap onto your plate. This too is more typical media bullshit, something I’ve no doubt the lifers started as an amusing way to scare the newbies… because this ambrosial kaleidoscope of exquisite contradictions produced textures and flavors unlike anything I had ever known. Bolts of magic danced on the tip of my tongue. The tornado of pleasure was nothing short of bliss, its aftertaste an eclectic mix of spicy, sweet, soap, and nickel.
The inmate to my right threw up two bites in, which meant more for yours truly.
For dessert we had jello.
NEW FRIENDS
In the showers that night I was introduced to a new game playfully referred to as rape-tag, by a spirited and heavily tattooed young man by the name of Mad Martinez, and a large octogenarian with drooping tits called Mr. Wang. I lost the game 3-5-7, but for a beginner I felt I got in my licks, and that I had in some small measure earned the men’s appreciation with my pluck and good humor. I know the crowd sure enjoyed themselves. Sometimes I can still hear them cheering my name, like in that movie Rudy.
THE WARDEN
After a good towel down it was outside to the yard, where we all sat around a campfire for a sing-along and s’mores. The warden told us stories about his childhood, and the first man he’d ever killed, a story he’d told many times before. “His name was Cortez,” the old man said in his reassuring southern drawl. “He said he just wanted water… but you know what I said to him, right boys?” Expectant murmurs rose up from the ranks, and everyone shouted in unison: “‘Bullshit! You just wanna steal my hogs!’” This always made the inmates howl with laughter and wrestle each other warmly. Some of the guys even started kissing. “Yee-haw!” the Warden said.
WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT
Nights were a revolving door of rapes and gangbangs and no rubbers in sight, and everyone got their turn on the merry-go-round. Pimps and daddies sold us to horny and hopped up marks, while the prison guards used our butts to play hide the cabbage. Everyone got passed around, like big fat doobies that never seemed to run out of grass.
It was pretty great.
THE BIG H
Later that night I became addicted to heroin. Lester had passed out (again) and left his stash out on the toilet. I decided not to rape him and tried his heroin instead.
Now, better writers have already written numerous pieces on the subject of the big H, of its effects, both euphoric and terrible. So I will not bore you with a prolonged description of my particular high.
Instead all I will say to you about heroin is this: You really should try it. There’s nothing else like it.
SUCKY-SUCKY, SIR?
By morning I was going into pretty serious withdrawal and was relieved to discover that my newfound dick-sucking skills could actually work for me. This began a phase of my incarceration I like to call, “The Entrepreneur.”
By mid-week I had sucked the last shred of worthwhile information out of the trickest of marks; I now knew the total lay of the land, all of its angles and its secret doors. Like the cunning geishas of yore I was going to suck my way right to the top.
TCB
The top was a man named Corky, aka the Shot-Caller, or as I liked to call him, the Big Cheese. “So you’re the Big Cheese,” I said to him. I had not been invited over to his table, and none of his large friends seemed to appreciate my fun new nickname. I only surmise this as for the next three days and three nights I was beaten without mercy until I no longer resembled a human form, until I half-believed I had become a new species entirely. Actually it reminded me of my hazing at the hands of my old sorority sisters in Alpha Beta Phi. No, I am not a transsexual, but I did pose as a woman for three years in college. My sorority nickname was, “That hairy bitch with the righteous tits.”
Corky the Big Cheese was a towering white man covered in swastikas who often struggled with an ill temperament. I used to say to him, “What’s with the ill temperament?” But he was always too ill tempered to respond.
Eventually Corky decided to make me his new “needle bitch,” having murdered his last three. He said only my hands were soft and delicate enough to find a good vein.
By sheer stroke of luck, much like my cellmate, Corky the Big Cheese was also diabetic. A diabetic and a heroin addict, I thought. Surely there were many cunning ways to see that such a person suffered an unfortunate accident…
THE SCHEME
Five years later, after the diabetic neuropathy had destroyed his feet, I shoved Corky down the stairs.
The entire cellblock saw me do it. Guards and inmates stood together in slack-jawed awe. “Hey!” someone said. “Honky killed the Big Cheese!”
There were some shouts, sporadic cheers. A death threat or two. Corky’s right hand man approached me with a dumbbell in his hand, meaning, I assume, to bash in my skull.
“Halt!” a voice said. An elderly and decaying old hermit who had lived ninety percent of his ancient life behind these stone walls appeared through the crowd. All who heard him acknowledged him, because he looked like a wizard. His name was Moe or something. I think he killed his wife in the fifties.
In his hand was held the ancient scroll, written entirely on toilet paper. He unrolled it to the appropriate passage, and his desiccated voice rasped the holy words of the prison code.
And the prison code named me King. The man with the dumbbell reluctantly dropped it to the floor, looked around at his peers, and bent the knee. With a bow of his head he took my right hand and kissed the knuckle. “My Lord,” he said.
I killed him on the spot with a shiv I made out of a toothbrush, which was also part of the code.
Then in celebration of my coronation I began to shower the people with heroin, friends and enemies alike, prisoners and guards, heroin for everybody. For a moment in time that sweet brown powder seemed without end. It rained down upon their crowns in condoms and syringes. Hands reached up grasping for more and I kept handing it out like heroin Santa Claus until Corky’s entire stash was spent. My reign as the Head Honcho Big Cheese was officially underway.
I had found my paradise in Hell.
IN CLOSING
Now I won’t promise you that setting fire to a series of hospitals will work out quite as well for you as it did for me, but I also can’t promise you that it won’t. It might. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know your future.
And I really don’t care.