Mortal Bonds (18 page)

M
y father and I share a minor nonfatal obsessive-compulsive behavioral tic. When planning a trip, any trip, like him, I must review every possible approach to my goal, even if it’s just across Amsterdam Avenue to the Häagen-Dazs store. And though I am much better than he at controlling these impulses, I had plotted this trip to the site of my last incarceration with infinite care.

The GW Bridge to Palisades Parkway to the New York State Thruway, all the way to Harriman, where I picked up 17 West to 211. It’s both quick and the scenic route, and the Dead’s
Nightfall of Diamonds
kept me company until my anxiety over where I was headed got the better of me and I turned the music off.

My last six months in the federal penal system, I was domiciled at the minimum-security satellite camp at Otisville in the middle of the Catskills. Vinny had been doing his stretch at the main, medium-security facility there, but had already been transferred to the camp. I don’t know that visiting any other federal prison would have been easier on my psyche, but returning to Otisville was giving me a headache, sour stomach, nausea, and a dull-headed exhaustion. I felt like I had all the side effects they warn you about in those TV ads for prescription meds.

A few miles west of Middletown, the winding curves of 211 finally got to me. I pulled over, but not quite off the road—I hadn’t seen another car in miles—and opened the window. It was hot and humid—it was hot and humid all over the Northeast—but the mountain air smelled of pine, and I took a minute to pull myself together. It was deliciously quiet. My breaths came slower and freer. The rope around my chest eased. Confidence returned. I could do this.

Movement in the rearview mirror caught my eye. A white SUV with dark tinted windows was slowing down behind me. I rolled down the window and waved him on around me. A GMC Denali. A compact for those who found the Hummer too ostentatious. He stopped twenty feet back and waited. I waved again—a bit more forcefully. A moment later the big engine raced and he sped by me, deeper into the woods. I watched the truck bounce as it hit a pothole a few hundred yards down the road, then it was around a bend and gone. The silence of the woods returned and, almost immediately, became oppressive.

My hands felt clammy and I felt an annoying buzz in my head, like too much bad coffee or the first shades of an oncoming cold. Or claustrophobia. I was eight months on the outside and capable of going days at a time without thinking of the two years I’d been a reluctant guest of the U.S. penal system, but it didn’t take much more than the sight of a roll of razor wire over a chain-link fence to churn it all up again.

I started the car and finished the drive. I made the right in the middle of town and a few minutes later the sign for the prison appeared.

Ahead, there was a series of orange cones guiding any traffic down into a single narrow lane that led to a freestanding guardhouse. I pulled up to the booth. A perfectly pleasant young man in a blue guard uniform very politely asked me my business. He scared the shit out of me. I had to clear my throat twice to answer.

“I’m visiting.”

“An inmate?”

I nodded.

“Have you been here before? You know where you’re going?”

Yes, I had been there before. And no, I had no idea where I was going. The last time I hadn’t come in the visitors’ entrance. I shook my head.

“Okay. Pull through the gate here and park in the visitors’ lot. Someone will show you where to go from there.”

I cleared my throat again. “Thanks.”

“You all right?”

I forced a smile. “Allergies.”

He smiled back and gave a half-salute as I drove off.

The gate—a section of the chain-link fence on rollers—pulled back as I approached, and I continued inside. My ears started ringing. I shook my head and tried to ignore it. I drove down a corridor between two fences. I passed a guard carrying a black pump shotgun and walking a German shepherd that looked to be the size of a small horse. I reminded myself to breathe again.

VISITOR PARKING
. I looked around. Antony had been right. If you had to do time in the federal prison system, this is where you wanted to be. The buildings were mostly Quonset huts and two-story barracks, surrounded by green grass, bushes, and even a ball field. It wasn’t the Club Fed, of a bygone era—those had disappeared twenty years ago—but neither was it designed to break your spirit. And that is what the Federal Bureau of Prisons is all about. It is punishment, not rehabilitation. From the ADX or ADMAX facilities—the maximum-security penitentiaries where terrorists like the Unabomber are kept in permanent solitary confinement—and the infamous USPs—high-security penitentiaries—like Beaumont and Big Sandy, to the Federal Correctional Institutions like Ray Brook, where I spent the first eighteen months of my sentence, they all share a unified purpose: to grind away at each prisoner’s last shreds of dignity and humanity.

FPCs—Federal Prison Camps—like Fort Dix and the camp at Otisville, are a little different. Each has its own style—rules, privileges, privations—but they are all essentially holding areas for short-timers. Usually the camps are attached to some other facility, so that the low-security prisoners can do all of the maintenance for both facilities. Cheap labor. Fights are few, escape attempts almost nonexistent—the calendar is your friend. Any forbidden activity that might prolong your stay by even a day is to be avoided.

But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant. It’s still prison.

Two COs, armed with Tasers and clipboards, took my name, wrote down the license-plate number on my rental car, and directed me into the main office, where another steely-eyed bureaucrat with a badge checked my ID against the computer and told me to take a seat in the next room.

“When you hear your name called, go to the window at the far end and they’ll take you through.”

Stepping through the door, I had to make a conscious effort not to flinch. I was inside the “facility.”

The waiting room was almost empty. Three lawyers—two men and a woman, all in suits and carrying both briefcases and expandable file folders—were tapping away on laptops. No families. It was Monday—a workday, a school day, not a regular visiting day. Brady had made the call to get me in. Another reluctant favor I owed him.

I went to the treasurer’s window and completed the necessary forms to put a hundred bucks in Vinny’s commissary account—he could buy cigarettes, snacks, or newspapers. I doubted he’d be able to get his beloved
Racing Form
, but maybe they let in the
New York Post
.

Then I waited.

A speaker crackled to life and a name was called. One of the suits got up and went to the window, showed his ID—again—deposited all valuables in a manila envelope, had his picture taken, stepped through the body scanner and the puffer machine, and went into the next room. A moment later, a second name was called and the process repeated, until, last, I heard “Jason Stafford.”

There was no logical reason for my stomach to lurch, or for the back of my neck to suddenly go ice-cold. I was a free man. Clean. Almost squeaky clean, if you ignored the money I had hidden in Switzerland. I’d even cleared the trip with my parole officer—an ignominious exercise, somewhat akin to raising your hand to go to the bathroom in middle school—though I had somehow managed to leave him with the impression that I was visiting with the warden rather than a fellow felon. Unless I tried to slip Vinny some item of contraband—like a gun, or drugs, or a copy of
Penthouse
—no one could lay a hand on me. Logic is a cold comfort.

The CO minding the scanners had biceps that threatened to tear his short-sleeved uniform to shreds. He was bored but alert, efficiently doing his job without giving it—or me—any thought. He waved me through. I patted myself on the back for how well I was handling being this close to the enemy once again—on his own turf.

A moment later, I almost lost it.

We were sitting in a large room that might have doubled as a small cafeteria. One wall held snack, soda, and coffee machines, and long tables, built like Formica picnic benches, lined the room. There was enough space that all of the visitors were able to spread out and get some privacy. Then an oversized metal door at the end of the room opened and the prisoners came in.

It was the gray jumpsuits that did it. I couldn’t see Vinny’s face. All I saw were four shadows fanning out across the room and approaching. I rose and stumbled back over the bench, almost falling. Vinny grabbed my arm and held me upright.

“Easy there, sport. You all right?”

Past and present flickered in my head. I was in prison. I was gagging on the acrid smells of men locked down in too-close proximity. Sweat, urine, semen, and a blend of cleaning chemicals that never seemed to truly rid the air of those other scents. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I was not all right.

My third day of incarceration, I wandered down to the dayroom, a twenty-by-twenty space that boasted a television mounted on one wall and plastic chairs arranged in rows. A soap opera was on, a pair of beautiful actors mumbling at each other in deadly earnest. There was no one in the room. I stood there, still feeling like I had landed in an episode of
The Prisoner
, with no idea of the rules of this alien world. Could I sit down? Could I change the channel? Was I allowed to be there? These issues had not been covered in the handout when I first checked in.

After a few minutes, the murmuring voices on the screen were starting to get to me. I looked for some way of changing the channel. No luck. I grabbed a chair and stood on it. The small black buttons on the set had long lost their markings. I tried pushing one. The volume increased. I pushed another. The screen went blank. Shit.

Then the chair flew out from beneath me and I hit the ground. I felt a heavy foot swing by my head. I rolled away, smashing through a cluster of chairs until I was clear. I rose up to see three gray jumpsuits coming at me. One of the men was screaming something about me and TV and who the fuck did I think I was and how he was now going to welcome me properly to Ray Brook. Then he called me “Punk.”

One of the services offered by my crack legal defense team, after the production of my PSR—pre-sentencing report—and just before I surrendered myself directly at Ray Brook, was an afternoon session with their team of Survival Consultants. Two ex-convicts answered my questions about my upcoming experience and gave me advice on a range of subjects.

Never look directly into another man’s cell—it’s an invasion of privacy and you will pay for it.

When you’re on the can, be polite. Flush halfway through. It cuts down on the aroma.

Never join a gang. The protection offered is an illusion and they will own you.

Looking a man in the eye is an act of intimacy, which can lead to sex, violence, or both.

No one is your friend. Least of all, the Correctional Officers.

Don’t be a snitch.

Don’t hog the phone. There’s a line of angry, impatient convicts behind you.

And so on, down to the final:

And never—never—let a man call you Punk. Punks belong to anyone. Prey for anything. It is far better to take a beating than to be branded.

I backed away, letting the guy follow, let him back me into a corner of the room. It was a dead-end move, but it made it hard for all three of them to come at me at once. The two on the flanks held back and gave me my chance.

I grabbed a chair and swung it as hard as I could at his face. He ducked back, but not quite fast enough. I caught him across the bridge of the nose. Not hard enough to put him down, but hard enough to hurt. He roared and swiped at me clumsily, giving me enough time for a second shot. This time I connected cleanly with his temple. The light plastic chair did not make a formidable weapon, but I lucked out. He dropped like Mike Piazza getting beaned by Roger Clemens.

The other two rushed me. I held the chair in front of me like a shield. It held them up for about a nanosecond. There was plenty of room in the corner for two guys to beat on me, and the walls made it worse, holding me upright a lot longer than my legs did. I flailed a couple of times, but I’d never been a fighter. I had no idea how to throw a punch and make it hurt. They did.

Long before the COs arrived, the two guys had to make a decision whether to kill me or let me collapse to the floor. Luckily for me, they chose door number two.

I spent three days in the hospital ward, with my ribs taped, a concussion, and a fracture of the left eye socket that the doctor thought could give me eyesight problems later in life. When the guards asked me who had done it, I was able to identify them only as “three white guys in gray jumpsuits.” They thought I was wising off, so I did two weeks in SHU—Special Housing Unit—what was called “solitary” in less Orwellian times and otherwise known as “the hole” or “the bucket.”

My first day back in gen-pop I was terrified—if my attackers wanted to see that I returned to the hospital, they could take me just about anywhere. When two nights passed and I was still alive, I began to remember some of the other lessons of my survival class. My cellmate, a black man half my age but with twice my street smarts, confirmed my thoughts.

“Check this out. See, G, them Caspers thinking they found themselves a Gregory to put the hurt on, but you come down like a clown with some serious drama. You peeled that ding’s wig!” He slapped my palm at that point. “And when the COs wanted you to snitch, turns out you solid. You do the bucket and come out stand-up. You got cred now, dog.”

And after some patient explanations on his part, I understood that in defending myself and refusing to give up my attackers—who I couldn’t have identified anyway—I had gained the respect of my colleagues and had no reason to fear retribution.

And I had only another seven hundred and ten days to go.

Vinny sat me down and brought me a Diet Coke.

“I thought I could do this,” I said. “Now, I’m not so sure.”