There was no fuss about the scuffle
from Officer Dunn or Jo-Bob. I would have been surprised had there been
anything made of it by anyone but alpha monkeys like Red. There's plenty of
time to think when locked up, and I considered the bout with Jo-Bob and I wondered
if my fury had anything to do with his crude lack of remorse for committing,
essentially, the same crime that I'd committed. I had no reason to feel
righteous just because I regretted mine and he had no regret for his. I felt
that it went deeper. It had more to do with every bully I had ever faced. I
knew that bullies were generally cowards. I knew this to be true because the
fear of cowardice was my own beast. Fear is everywhere in thugs, liars, and
thieves... that we'd be unmasked, found out, and to be lacking basic manhood
and this weakness must be hidden at all cost through threat and intimidation. I
knew that I had to go at them all-out. How did I assert power and control of
The Crew, but through manipulation... a shell game of power for fear of having none?
You can rest assured that there’s no
polite or diplomatic tone that would appease us once we saw you hesitate or
smelled our fears in you as a mark to be used and dominated by a broad range of
tactics from brute force to any form of con job. My hassle with Jo-Bob was on
more than a physical level. He saw me as competition for his manhood believing
that his only strategy was to usurp mine. I was in no mood to let him do that but
not to preserve, or assert, my own warped masculinity, I simply wished to be
left alone.
I would have to strike first and
strike hard. It is the only real rule of war... the only rule of engagement that
mattered. More importantly, I knew that with men like Jo-Bob, I would have to
finish the job, or submit… to find common accord because people like Jo-Bob
don’t forget who wins or loses. By hook
or crook, he will get even if I give him a chance.
Jo-Bob came to me afterwards offering,
“Let’s say it was a tie. You got some gumption, Preacher.”
I knew that this peace offering was
anything but that a truce without total victory of one side or the other is
only a pause in the conflict. I knew he knew that I had him beat and he was
only saved by the bell. Still, I had to be diplomatic about it, “Sure, a tie
alright.”
I accepted his hand and he squeezed
my knuckles together in a vice-grip handshake. He had to reassure me of his
machismo.
Things settled down on the
cell-block. I made no effort to impose any form of jailhouse dominion over Jo-Bob
or anyone else. I was sick of our game and wished it hadn’t been necessary to
go to war. I knew how the game was played. I knew that I had no control over
what was going to happen to me and wondered whether I had any control over my
present circumstances at all. Every night my mind went back to reviewing the
events that led up to my arrest. Sometimes I awoke in a cold sweat knowing I
deserved everything and anything I got out of life from this point on. I
thought about praying, wishing I knew of someone on the other end of that
prayer. My big question wasn’t whether or not there was, but rather; do I even
want forgiveness?
Sundays were amusing enough and a
break from the routine as the inmates were marched downstairs to the room the
Bible-thumpers used. I didn’t want anything to do with the dogma that was being
preached but I did find a peculiar fascination with what these folks referred
to as the ‘Born Again’ experience. I could successfully argue against the dogma
they preached but I couldn’t argue against the experience they spoke of. I
could explain it in my own mind by applying what I’d experienced in New Mexico
and my night on the beach in Waikiki. But these people said they had this
spiritual experience without drugs and that puzzled me.
More amusing were the nut cases in
the bull-pen who’d claimed to have similar experiences. One such case was a
wino who touted this doozy:
“I met Jesus when I was walking on some
tracks, crossin’ a trestle. I sees this guy coming from the afar side. He was
in white robes and had him a nap sack, see.”
“You sure he was Jesus and not just
some guy in a white robe?” I probed.
“Oh yes, his robe was so white it
blinded me.”
Red was having some fun with it
asking, “You sure it wasn’t the white port you drank instead of white robes you
saw?”
“I swear it was Jesus himself. I hit
my knees and axed forgiveness. He took a gold cross out of his nap sack, held
it to my face and saved me right there in the middle of the railroad trestle!”
“How did he save you and what did he
save you from?” I wanted to know what was meant by saved.
He continued… barely pausing, like I
hadn’t said anything at all, “And when I got off my knees and looked up, he was
gone… disappeared, jess lack that!” The old drunk’s eyes nearly bulged
completely out of their sockets as he strained way too hard to convince
everyone in the bull pen.
Red wasn’t buying it, “Were you
lookin’ up or down when he held the cross to your face?”
“I swear it on my grandma’s
grave… I was sober as a jedge!”
Saintly sinners and sinning saints…
Holy bull-shit, that’s about all I could get out of anyone in jail other than
the clean-cut and polished boys downstairs on Sundays.
Time became a new hell for me. The
others in the Bull Pen didn’t seem to be bothered by it. This was something I
swore I would not be doing when I rode that bus off of Treasure Island the year
before. The routine of the cell block, where the only break in the monotony was
the Bible thumpers downstairs every Sunday, began to wear me down. At first I
felt that what I got was just desserts for what I’d done to that poor girl. But
time took care of that. I thought of my crime less and dreamed more of escape.
My twenty-fourth birthday came and went. Jimi Hendrix overdosed. Janis Joplin
passed the same way. And I sat among my cell mates, day after day, in tedious
repetition of the previous cluster of days. I started to wonder when my case
would ever go to court. The guards knew nothing about such matters. I wrote a
letter to the courts asking for a court date but got no reply. I had no idea
whether or not my letters went anywhere.
I considered writing my folks but
thought better of it. What was I going to write? Dear Mom and Dad, It is me,
your son. I am in a Florida jail for selling drugs and raping a girl… they seem
to have thrown away the keys on me but I’m okay. P.S. Can you possibly help me
out? It just didn’t seem like a good idea to do that.
I’d gotten into a petty scrap with a trustee named Ray over a lunch tray that was shoved in my face abruptly through
the slot where the treys were passed into the bull-pen. I told Ray that I was
going to kick his fairy-ass if I ever got a chance. He called me a few names
and went off to deliver his treys to the other cell-block. Trustees were never
in the cell-blocks. They had cells downstairs where it was rumored they had all
the food they wanted and even female companionship. It was true about the food
but jailhouse fantasy about the other. The incident was not a big deal, but it
was known by everyone in both cell-blocks and blown out of all proportion by
the guards and the inmates alike.
While laying around in the cell after
lock-down, I had been checking out the steel plate cover for the rails that
pulled the cell doors open. The locks were attached to a rail above that pulled
them up via the wheel turned by a guard on the other side of the door leading
outside of the catwalk. I listened to the mechanism open and close the doors several
times a day and figured the sounds coming from inside the works were the rails that
moved levers that unlocked and locked all the doors. I saw that the cover for
the works were plate steel sections of three-foot lengths that fit tightly and
clamped down over a ridge rather than being riveted, welded or bolted in place.
I took a broom handle at the edge of the cover and hammered at it with a shoe. My
cell mates must have thought I was crazy at first, but took an interest at any
activity out of boredom. To my amazement it moved so very slightly each time I
hit the broom stick. They paid real attention when the cover over the glides
popped open after about forty-five minutes of hammering at it a tap at a time
with pauses, so as not to attract attention from the guards, it just opened up
on heavy duty piano-hinges.
I reached up and pulled on the rail
going down to the latch on the door. The door opened, and I stepped out into
the cat-walk thinking of trying the door leading out of the cell block next. There
was a cover to a vent above the door to the cell block that looked like it
might have been easily pried off and I began working on that as the whole cell
block went crazy screaming and shouting. I just hadn’t figured how ignorant my
fellow inmates were as they started hooting and hollering for me to open their
doors too. My cell mates then saw that the horizontal rail could be pulled to
open all the cell doors, letting all of the inmates on the block out into the
catwalk and the bull-pen. My idea was to
get the fuck out of the damned place as far from the State of Florida as my feet
would take me, but these institutionalized morons were satisfied with creating havoc and running amok no further away from their cozy bunks than the relative freedom of the cat-walk.
Red was one of the guys making the
most noise… shouting my name loud enough to be heard in the lobby, “Hey, Max,
what gave you this idea!”
I just dropped my arms to my side and
turned back towards my cell.
“What’s the use?” I lay down in my
bunk and pulled the covers up over my head.
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