Doing Time (32 page)

One day I was walking some laps on the back field when I saw Pearl running the opposite way, coming toward me. I remembered that at The Rock Pearl had logged many miles on the prison track. A lot of men jog in prison, some just barely shuffling along, others moving a little faster, not much more than walking speed, but not Pearl. Pearl was a runner. I used to wonder what demons were chasing Pearl to make him run so fast, and for so long. He was watching the ground ahead of him as he approached me, his face showing the exhaustion, rivulets of sweat running down his ebony cheeks, lost in his world, oblivious to any outsiders.

As he came abreast of me, I said, “Pearl,” in a sort of acknowledgment, like the “Howdy,” or “Good Morning,” that normal folks in society might say to an acquaintance on passing. People are on guard in prison — you never know where or when something might jump off — and my saying “Pearl” was just enough of a shock to cause Pearl's eyes to dart upward from the ground to mine, a moment of panic, then a breathless “Hi,” as he registered “no threat,” and continued on. On the next lap Pearl was smiling as he came around, his glistening countenance completely different from the previous lap, recognition shining through as he ran past. It was amusing to me in a way, how we hadn't spoken or acknowledged each other for a week or so, then when we did, every time Pearl made a lap past me he'd smile real big and say, “Hi.”

That episode broke the ice, and from then on, whenever we passed each other we'd speak, and Pearl would say to his companions, “That's my friend, Norman, from Raiford.” Pearl was very courteous and polite to his old acquaintances and took pride in being friendly and gracious. Not everybody in prison is a Neanderthal.

Every now and then we'd be walking the same way and we'd talk. Pearl would remind me of the GOLAB, of someone I'd forgotten, and I'd tell him about someone we'd known then, where he was now. “I was so scared, at first, Norman, on that trust walk, with that blindfold on, I never liked to trust anybody.” I suppose we were being a bit maudlin, two prisoners trapped in the Twilight Zone time warp of prison, recalling a lost youth. Times had changed, we were all older, but the invisible bonds of that other time still linked us together.

I heard the whole story later, about the chain gang love triangle, how Pearl hadn't been true to Kilgore, how Kilgore threatened to kill him if he caught him with a certain individual again, how Pearl had ignored the threats.

Kilgore had it all planned out. He got a knife somewhere and hid it outside our building. The day before, he'd gotten some paint thinner from the chair factory and hidden it in a trash drum. On the day of the killing the guards were asleep, catching a little rest before the midnight shift got off at 8 A.M. Kilgore sauntered right past them, loaded for bear, with murder on his mind.

He'd stabbed Pearl first, several times, as Jerome and other prisoners stood and watched. Pearl fell by the shower, and Kilgore poured the paint thinner over his face and body, intending to burn him up. He tried to light a book of matches, but his hands were so bloody that the matches got wet and he couldn't light them. Another, larger, stronger prisoner took the matches away from him, perhaps thinking enough is enough, saving Pearl from flames. Kilgore walked out, leaving Pearl there on his back, dead.

It was 8:05
A.M.
when they wheeled Pearl into medical on a stretcher. About the same time Kilgore turned himself in to the guards, they cuffed him and escorted him to confinement. Pearl went out for the last time in an ambulance, slow, no lights or sirens for a dead man. Kilgore went out in the back seat of a deputy's car to the county jail and a first-degree-murder charge.

They did an autopsy on poor Emerson Jackson, the Black Pearl, violating his lifeless body one more time, verifying that he'd been murdered, intimating that the volatile liquid killed him before the stab wounds did. They said Pearl tested positive for AIDS, so he probably wouldn't have lived long anyway. That institutional “oh well” justification didn't minimize his death to me. Even after witnessing years of mind-numbing atrocities, after enduring incident after incident of dehumanizarion, after building up walls to hold back emotions, Pearl's death had a profound effect on me. I was silent that day, lost in my own thoughts, facing my own mortality, grieving for a friend. I wondered if anyone would grieve for me when my turn came.

1992, Polk Correctional Institution Polk City, Florida

“While trudging from the exercise yard today, I saw in the distance a tall, thin, green-clad black man, and thought for a heartbeat or two that it might be Sam. But, if it is Sam, I chuckled, silently, grimly, I should just forget my legal appeals because I'm dead already. But then, if ghosts really exist, I reflected further, I suspect that they tend to hang out in places like the dungeons of the castle that I call home, San Quentin's death row.

As I approached the black guard, I saw that it indeed wasn't Sam. Passing by with a simple nod of my head, I jogged up the stairs to my cell. Once my body was locked inside, the handcuffs were removed from my wrists. Still standing by the rusty, pitted iron bars, I peered out the filthy windows of the cellblock and watched the wind whip white crests across the blue swells of the San Francisco Bay. As my eyes studied the scene, my mind spun back to the first time that I'd encountered Sam.

Leaning against the yellow cinderblock wall that separates the condemned men's exercise yard from the world, I was contentedly puffing a rollie Bugler cancer-stick. As I pulled the smoke deep into my lungs, I felt real good about the kick-butt workout routine that I'd just put in on the weight pile. Stretching my arms out slowly, I hid behind my 187 sunglasses while feeling the sun's rays softly massaging my sore muscles. I was waiting to be called by the guard conducting yard recall. When my name pierced the air, it would be my turn to move to the yard's gate for handcuffs.

Penetrating my happy fatigue, I heard the murmuring of other dead men complaining: “Da canine's fuckin' it up! Jesus Christ, the damn five-oh can't even get the muthuhfuckin' list raht!”

Laughing at the curses, I watched the rookie canine struggle on and on with the yard recall lists. It didn't flash in my head for even a half a beat to help the mutt out, wasn't my day to babysit any infant coppers.

“Can't ja read!” bellowed an irate, pot-bellied sergeant while stomping out of the condemned-men cellblock and advancing on the helpless puppy cop. “Whad da hell do dey teach yeh at da ah-cad-emy, ennyway?”

The baby-guard that I came to know as Sam answered quickly in a half-strangled voice, “Of course I know how to read. The inmates aren't coming to the gate when I call their names.”

“Call ‘em twice!” snapped the sergeant. “Dey don't show, write ‘em!” Spinning on his patent-leather heel, the top dog walked.

My amusement over Sam's inexperienced fumbling changed to anger in a quarter beat the next day, when I found out that I was “Confined to Quarters.” Turned out Sam had claimed that I'd screwed up yard recall by not coming to the gate when he called me — a damned lie! Then, out of the kindness of his Kool-Aid pumping heart or to cover his butt, the mutt had written me a “Rule Violation Report.”

When Sam walked by my cell during yard release that day, I called to him in my most tactful, diplomatic manner. “Hey fuckhead! What's your mothuh-fuckin' problem? You blow the gig and you write me! For Christsakes, yard recall ain't rocket science. What are ya, anyway? Another example of affirmative action gone wild?”

Sam hesitated for a beat and then looked like he was going to flee the scene, But to his credit, he stepped to my bars and said softly, “Wasn't just you, I wrote Anderson, too.”

That's when my fury jumped from a rolling, boiling three to a nine plus — pretty near nuclear-explosion ground-zero time. For you to comprehend the full depth and intensity of my emotion, you'd have to understand prison from the inside. I'll do my best to lay it out for you, but describing doing all day long behind bars in a hard-core prison is a lot like explaining sex to a virgin. Words, pictures, diagrams just ain't a real good substitute for the real thing.

Anyway, S.Q. had been rocking and rolling for months. Whistles, alarms going off all over the place, violence as common as the cockroaches crawling around on the peeling, faded walls. Almost daily you'd see a bleeding body lying on an orange stretcher en route to the hospital or morgue. So many guys have been going down stabbed, shot, that the entire prison had been locked tight one out of every two days for the past year.

Six weeks before, the prison officials assigned to my housing unit had called the leaders of different gangs together, allegedly to try to work out a truce. At the conference, a Mexican gangbanger pulled out a shank, and yanked and cranked it into the body of a black leader until he was dead while the badges ran for cover.

Rumors (rumors I believed) abounded around the prison that the killing had been engineered by a high-ranking Mexican-American prison official, and the state legislature was holding hearings to determine whether this was true. If you weren't aware of racial tensions, you were too stupid to be walking around inside the walls of S.Q. without fuckin' training wheels.

White guards had offered me weapons if I'd agree to hit black or Mexican gangbangers. The canine would offer to search me himself to make certain that I got the shank to the exercise yard, and even guarantee a warning shot from the mutt with the assault rifle on the catwalk. In theory the warning would give me a chance to drop the shank, go to the ground, and keep from getting my head caved in with a bullet. Didn't really buy the warning-shot deal. Figured that once I made the hit, the canine with the assault rifle would bust open my skull with a .223 and laugh his ass off about the stupid dead man who believed in free passes and other such fairy tales.

A man would have to be a fool not to believe that black coppers weren't making the same offer to black prisoners, and Mexican coppers to Mexican prisoners. The badges fill our heads with their personal brand of vitriol, supply the implements of destruction, and then we get locked down again and again and again while they pull down the lockdown overtime pay.

Now, amid all that craziness, I got a black canine telling me not to take it personally that he wrote me up on a bogus beef, cuz he wrote another white prisoner too. Shit! Ain't that stupid, jus' look this way, man!

After lasering the canine with hate-filled eyes for a moment, I said, “Whatta coincidence, yah bagged two white guys.”

“Probably won't come as a news flash to you,” Sam mouthed quietly, “but I am brand new, fresh out of the academy. Didn't know what I was doing with the yard lists, and when the sarge jumped on me for messing it up, I told him that you guys weren't coming in when I called your names. When the sarge toP me to write the inmates who didn't show right away at the gate, I panicked; then I just pointed to two names at random. You know I don't know your names yet, or the color of the men behind the names. You got to believe me, it wasn't a racial move.

“Yeah,” he said, “I should have come clean with the sarge, but I am still on probation, and I really need this job. Need the paycheck. If you want,” Sam sighed, “I'll go tell the sarge right now that I screwed it up, and get you back on the yard list. But I'd really appreciate it if you let it slide for today. I'll owe you one, okay?”

Funny thing about the truth, you don't hear it often anywhere; in prison it's pretty damn near extinct. But when truth rings out, it rings clear, rings true, and sounds so beautiful that it is real hard to disturb the melody with a bunch of petty static. “Okay, man,” I heard myself answering as if from a distance while I wondered where my voice was taking me. “I'll get with Anderson and quash it with him, too. But you owe me. I don't just want some extra raggedy lunch bag sometime.”

“Deal,” came from behind flashing teeth, and the canine was gone.

On the yard the next day, I told Anderson that Sam had blown it, but I didn't think it was racial, just a new cop tripping all over himself. Even as I quashed it with Anderson, I wondered what the hell I was doing.

Guards on their nine-month probationary period are moved all around the prison, and just fill in wherever a badge is needed, so I didn't see very much of Sam. When our paths did cross, we'd just nod in that ritualistic way that people do when they know each other's faces, but aren't close. Never did we speak of his debt to me.

A year later. On the exercise yard, a Mexican hit-man conjured a shank out of nowhere and tried to drive it through my sunglasses into my right eye. Luckily, I was wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Instead of falling apart, the shades took the blow, deflected the blade upward, and it stuck into the bone above my right eye socket, just below the eyebrow. In the next few moments I was raining blood from my socket and blows filled with evil intent from my fists, when I heard the mechanical clack of a bullet slamming into the chamber of a canine's assault rifle. Even in the fog of my pain and rage, I realized that if I didn't stop fighting, in less than a beat a .223 would be tracking toward my skull. I raised my hands and backed off the assassin.

Later I wondered where in the hell were all my homeboys while I was getting blindsided and bleeding all over the concrete? I didn't ask them, though; they'd have some damned excuse — prison's full of them. My eye and vision returned to what they'd been before, but my view of my homeboys was changed forever. Oh, I still hit the iron with the fellas, but when the wotkout was done, I started double-tying my shoelaces and heading out to play basketball with the black guys. It blew the minds of the homies, but I didn't give a damn. I wanted to find out who the hell were some of the other guys hanging out on the condemned yard with me for years. So I told my workout partners, “Don't beat on my trip, and I won't beat on yours.”