Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison (11 page)

Late one morning, I was startled by the guard's routine check of the prison bars. Guards ran their wooden batons along the face of each cell, above and below each cross-section, to ensure that no one was slowing hacking away at them. I say slowly, because the guards did this check every Saturday morning, so that if an inmate did have a saw, he needed to cut through the bars pretty quickly. The guy in the cell next to me said the bars had rollers on the inside, which would spin, preventing a saw from gripping and cutting through to the other side. The guard's baton would make a clunk if it hit a broken bar.

The spot check seemed silly, because even if an inmate were able to get out of his cell, he still had nowhere to go; he'd need to get out of the block and then over the wall and past the razor wire and motion sensors and gun towers and dogs. I wondered what would happen if someone came in with a helicopter, but it would have to be bulletproof, since the guards would shoot at it from the towers. And tunneling wasn't an option, since we didn't get any yard time on Two-Special.

The guy next to me was also seventeen. He was shorter than me, about five foot eleven, and couldn't have weighed more than 130 pounds. He had short, dark brown hair and large hazel eyes, which seemed out of proportion with his face. An inmate porter commented on how he looked like a grasshopper, and from then on, the name stuck.

Grasshopper was serving time for arson. He grew up in Genesee County, in the upper part of the state. "The problem with getting jammed in the sticks," he said, "is that you end up getting sentenced by hicks."

Even though it was his first offense-and the only thing he had burned down was an abandoned building-the judge decided to make an example of him by sentencing him to eight years in prison.

"It's not like nobody got hurt or nothin'," Grasshopper said. He was worried about his classification, because even with good time, he'd have to serve seventy-two months, which meant he might have to go inside for a year until he could transfer to a medium security. "I know what happens to guys like me. If they send me inside, I'll never make it."

Grasshopper was pretty, by anyone's standards, and I was hoping the Classification Committee would take that into account. But arson was considered a violent crime so his chances didn't look good. He'd already had his physical and was now waiting to see the psychologist, before his final hearing.

With all the noise, it was hard to hear each other, so we stood at the back of our cells and yelled from around the wall. I purchased a small mirror from the commissary when my money from the county jail finally landed in my account, which only took four weeks. We used our mirrors to see one another as we spoke-sticking them out of the bars and tilting it at the other. Somehow, it was easier to hear, when I could see his lips moving.

The guy on the other side of me, who never talked much anyway, said even less after he returned from the psychologist. I wondered if lie, too, was being sent inside.

A guard with a clipboard came by my cell and said I was scheduled for my physical the next morning. He told me not to eat breakfast, because they'd be taking blood. I hated needles and giving blood, but was happy to see the process finally moving along.

I fell asleep early that evening, but was awakened by whistling and cheering, catcalls and the sound of the laugher. I sprang to the front of my cell to see, and there on the tier above, in between the two long rows of cells, were the three black drag queens.

In an effort to avoid problems, the guards showered the queens separately. So there they were in all their glory with their hands held high in the air. They were facing the wall and shaking their butts, while the cellblock went nuts with laughter. They turned in unison to face the open block. Their dicks were stuffed between their legs so that all you saw were their pubic hairs. It looked like they had real pussies, and from where I was standing, they looked liked women, especially Lisa Marie. They shimmied forward with their legs together and danced, their movements in sync with one another. The energy felt almost electric the way it sliced through the boredom and enlivened the giant birdcage. Even the guards, who were standing on the opposite catwalk, looked up and laughed, shaking their heads.

"I could use one of them bitches right about now," an inmate said, walking past my cell. "Shit, I'm tired of jerkin' oft:"

I was embarrassed by the drag queens. I didn't understand it, but they frightened me, and I felt ashamed for them. I wasn't like them in any way. I had no desire to be anything that flamboyant. No matter what thoughts I may have had about my identity, I was not going to be turned into one of those.

Turned-out was the expression for someone who was "turned" gay. To be turned-out, a guy was either raped or pressed into having sex. Men were expected to defend their manhood, and if it were lost, they would need another man to protect them. For a weaker con, the choice of having to do it with one was a better than having to do it with many. Or sometimes, inmates were even tricked into it by another punk or queen.

"There's this queen in here named Geraldine," Grasshopper told me. "She was huge! I saw her when I went inside for my physical. She was about six foot six, and weighed close to three hundred pounds."

I had first heard about Geraldine back at the county jail. Her reputation was almost legendary, and though I had never seen her myself, most inmates claimed that they had.

The story went that Geraldine had a thing for white boys. She loved to suck their dicks. According to legend, she'd trick them into her house (which is what inmates called their cells) and she'd hide them under her bed where she'd give them the best head they'd ever had.

"She's quite experienced," Grasshopper bragged, as if he'd sampled her trade. "She's probably sucked hundreds of dicks in her day, especially in here, where there's an endless and eager supply."

I was surprised he was talking about it so freely, given all his fears, but maybe if he joked about it, he wouldn't seem so afraid.

"Anyway, she'd suck their dick, and then when she was done, her voice would get all full of bass, and she'd say," Grasshopper dropped his voice real low, "OK, motherfucker. It's my turn."

"The only problem was," he said, "these white boys were straight, so as soon as they'd start to object and say something like, `But Miss Geraldine, I'm not that way . . .' BAM! Miss Geraldine would knock 'em out."

Grasshopper paused to laugh. "And then, when they woke up, the white boys would say something like, `God damn! That bitch hit me so hard my asshole hurts."'

The next morning, we were escorted to the infirmary. Two of the drag queens from Two-Special were in our group. I wondered why the guards weren't suspicious of all the appointments they had to see the doctor. The inmate clerks kept putting them on the call-out list.

"I'm a diabetic," I heard one of them say.

"Sugar needs her sugar," the other explained.

I didn't know if she was referring to insulin shots or the Zoos Zoos and Wham Whams they returned with later.

To the right of the infirmary, I noticed a building that had a major pharmaceutical company's name posted over the doorway.

"That's where they're testing the Swine Flu vaccine," one of the old timers told us. "They pay inmates to test new drugs and run experiments on their asses."

"Cheaper than chimpanzees," another said.

Rooster laughed. "Ain't no fuckin' way. I ain't gonna be a guinea pig for nobody."

"Medical records have a funny way of disappearin'," the old tinier said.

Inside the infirmary, an inmate clerk explained the program. It was a clinic that paid inmates to participate in Phase I and Phase II drug trials. The clinic measured side affects and inmates were paid up to two dollars a day. It was good pay, he said, considering most jobs paid about fifty cents a day. The money came in handy for those who had no other income.

"Oh yeah?" an inmate said. "When your dick falls off, then what do you do?"

"You better hold onto that," Rooster said. "These motherfuckers done took everything else."

The old timer said they measured side affects, but they didn't say they'd treat 'em. "They just record and measure," he said, "as your nuts roll off the side of the catwalk."

"Yeah," Rooster added, "They'll wanna see how high they'll bounce from base."

Everyone laughed, until the old tinier told us about a study down south, where a bunch of blacks were infected with syphilis as scientists sat back and watched, even after a cure, as some of the men in the study went blind and died. Or another one, down in Ohio, where inmates had cancer cells injected into their arms and a few weeks later, so they could study cancer growth, researchers cut parts of their arms off.

None of those things had anything to do with this particular pharmaceutical company, but the inmates didn't care. To them, it was all the same thing. "Just put me back in my hamster cage," Rooster said, "and leave me the fuck alone."

Some inmates looked a little skeptical. "It's been in all the papers," the old timer said, "don't any of y'all dumb asses know how to read?" He was old and black, so he could get away with talking like that. "You silly ass jitterbugs are too busy boostin' records and bustin' caps, that none of you all don't know nothin'. These motherfuckers will have you ass strung out so bad, your own momma won't recognize ya."

"Now that's some fucked up shit there," one of the younger blacks said.

"It sure is, son. Your own momma won't know you."

"Oh, don't bring my momma into this, Pops, or we'll be boostin' that silly old ass of yours. And the only thing we'll be bustin'-is that head."

Boostin' was the term for stealing, and bustin' caps meant firing a gun.

"The Man just wants to see the black man eradicated," Moseley said, "it's as simple as that. If we can't shoot 'em off the streets, we'll send 'em to prison, and if that's not enough, we'll poison their asses. But either way, we're gettin' rid of the niggers."

I once heard that if you weren't a racist when you went into prison-you would be by the time you got out. Again, I was suddenly aware of how many blacks there were in the room, and how few whites.

I was surprised that private companies like Upjohn and Park/Davis had a laboratory in Jackson prison. The pay they were offering inmates wasn't much, but the old timer said they wouldn't pay more because they considered it unethical.

"Unethical?" It was the first time I spoke up, but I was surprised by what he said. "If they paid any more," he looked over at me. "They'd be afraid it would fuck their results. If inmates are making too much-they might not report their problems out of fear of being dropped from the study."

Two dollars a day wasn't more than enough to buy smokes and a couple of extras at the inmate store. It hardly seemed worth it, considering you had no idea what you were getting yourself into. And what really seemed unethical was that inmates would be reduced to selling their bodies for commissary. But just then, the drag queens got up and went into a room marked X-ray. They weren't seen again until later in the day, when the returned to Quarantine, each carrying a box of goodies.

I glanced back and noticed Moseley was staring at me.

A few minutes later, an inmate with a clipboard came out and called my name. He brought me inside a room where I was given a physical. They took my temperature and a vial of blood. That was it. I waited nearly six weeks to have an inmate nurse stick a needle in my arm and a thermometer under my tongue. It was all the recording and measuring necessary.

Later that evening, I would meet with the prison psychologist, the one who had informed me that I was not going to a camp. He said I was being sent inside until my case was adjudicated.

"Ever been fucked?" he asked abruptly.

"Excuse me?"

"Fucked," he repeated. It was the first time he looked up from his desk.

12

Riverside Correctional Facility

As the state van made its exit from 1-96 and headed north on a small twolane highway, a gas station and a McDonald's blemished the landscape of open fields and farmland. The men inside the van, who were mostly from Detroit, tried to swallow up and devour everything they could see, hear, and smell, and squirrel it away for the oncoming famine. A sign warned motorists-Prison Area: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers. I wondered how long it would be before I had another Big Mac.