Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison (7 page)

I jumped up to look out.

Inmates at the end of the cellblock were grabbing milk, juice, and small wax paper bags from the cross-section of the bars. Breakfast consisted of three whitepowdered donuts, a half pint of milk and a four-ounce container of orange juice. I walked down to get it, but when I got there, there was only a carton of milk left.

"You snooze-You lose," a white inmate said. He was holding an orange juice and milk, but someone had taken his bag as well. "You gotta get here quick or some motherfucker steals your donuts, man."

I took the milk from the bars and looked to see if I could spot a deputy through the small opening in the outer door.

"Don't even bother to call the deps, Little Bro." He walked hack toward his cell, "They really don't give a fuck."

I was hungry. I hadn't eaten since the steak dinner my brother bought me two days earlier. The next morning, when the light came on, I was up and ready for the mad breakfast derby. When the deputies pulled the brake, like a horse bolting from the starting gate, I was off and running to get my three powdered rings from the cross-section of the finishing line. Win, Place, or Show, I was sure to get mine. But this time, when I arrived at the front of the line, the same white guy from the day before, was there to greet me. As I took my share, I watched him snatch two bags of donuts and stuff then into his underwear, grab a third in his hand and quickly pull his shirt down to hide it.

He shot me a look that said, don't you dare say a fucking word.

As I walked hack toward my cell, I overheard him telling the new fish behind me, "You snooze-you lose, Little Brother. But don't even bother to tell the deputies. They really don't give a fuck."

8

The Big Blue Wagon Ride

The Detroit Free Press was delivered in the morning, The Detroit News in the afternoon. I once won a sales contest by delivering the paper as early as anyone wanted it. I converted several News customers to Free Press accounts by delivering before 6:00 A.M. The papers were ready as early as 3:00, but I preferred getting them at 4:00. That way, I could be back in bed by 5:30 to catch an extra hour of sleep before school. Even in the summer, I was up and out before dawn. I loved how peaceful it was, being alone on the street, with the solitary sound of my rusty red wagon's rickety wheels.

"Does anyone have a cigarette?" I yelled through the screen of the hippies' home. They were early on my route and often still up when I got there by 4:15.

"Who's that?" one of them asked.

"It's the paperboy!" a guy yelled from the couch.

From the porch, I watched as he passed a joint to the gal sitting on his lap. She was in cut-off jeans, with filthy feet, and her long brown hair looked as scattered as her speech.

"How cute," she stammered, handing the joint toward me. "Do ya wanna hit, toke smoke off of this?"

Her name was Crystal, but she sometimes answered to Joy.

"Na," I said. "But I'll take a cigarette."

Her eyes looked red and watery.

Zingy, the guy who let me in, must have used the same barber.

I was about to turn fourteen, and like most kids in my neighborhood, I had started smoking that year. I didn't like it at first, but we all thought it was cool to smoke Kools. The hippies were always good for a cigarette, or a beer, and if I wanted it, pot, but it made me feel stupid and fearful, so I stuck to the smokes and an occasional brew.

Pretty soon, the hippies' home became a regular hangout for me.

An aging poster of Jimi Hendrix hung on the wall above a large stack of albums. A beat-up sofa, a beanbag chair, a few overstuffed pillows, and three dead houseplants completed the living room. An uneven beaded curtain hung from the doorway that led to the kitchen. The quadraphonic stereo was their only decent possession. They said things like shedding the shackles of social conformity and ridding the mind of material illusions. The house reeked of patchouli incense that camouflaged the smell of marijuana.

I loved having older friends, and even better, it made some of the younger ones jealous. My brother was away in the military, and they somehow made missing him easier-even when they ragged on me about the Vietnam War. It didn't seem to matter that my brother was in Texas, or that the war had ended earlier that year.

The hippies were good tippers too-that is, when they paid their bill. Each week when it came time to collect, they'd pass a hat and fill it with coins, cigarettes, and joints. I gave the pot to my friends, keeping the cigarettes for myself. Most of the time, there wasn't enough change to cover the cost of the paper, but since I never saw anyone reading it, I figured it was a fair trade. I enjoyed their company and with the cost of cigarettes and beer I came out ahead, especially when my other friends and I needed someone to "buy." The drinking age in Michigan was eighteen.

Every third or fourth morning, I'd find the hippies had crashed, and the house lay quiet. Bodies were strewn on the sofa, sprawled on the floor, and sometimes even in the hall. One time, when I went to use the bathroom, there was someone sleeping in the tub. On these occasions, I'd just step over the bodies, grab a beer from the fridge, a cigarette from the table, and toss the paper onto a chair.

It was on one such morning that I discovered my first addiction-stealing cars. There, next to the cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, and a baggy of green and white pills, lay a set of car keys. Out the kitchen window, their rusty blue station wagon sat tempting me in the drive. It was a 1968 powder blue, Ford LTD station wagon.

Well, if I'm old enough to smoke and old enough to drink, then why shouldn't I be able to drive? I stared at the keys and the bag of drugs on the table. "One pill makes you larger," Ziggy would say, quoting Jefferson Airplane. I'd have it back before they'd wake up and they'd never know it was gone. And besides, I'd probably have my papers delivered in half the time.

I grabbed the canvas sack from my little red wagon and tossed it onto the passenger seat of the Blue. I didn't want to risk waking them with the sound of the starting engine or the muffler that needed replacing, so like my Dad and Uncle's prank of years before, where they pushed all those cars down their driveways, I slipped the transmission into neutral and gave it a shove. I was wrong about the time it took to deliver my papers. I was done in a third of the time. I could have finished sooner, except that I pulled into each driveway along my route, tossing the paper onto the porch or lawn. It was riskier doing it that way, but since everyone was asleep-no one was the wiser.

Instead of returning the car back when I had finished, I drove around awhile enjoying my newfound freedom. Driving came easily to me. I'd been driving a mini-bike since I was eleven, and now driving a car was way too much fun to have to wait two or three more years till I was old enough for Driver's Ed. Down with the established order!

My sister was in summer school, so I decided to go home and pick her up. "Do you want a ride to school?" I asked, beaming. She hated taking the bus, especially on hot humid mornings, but she struggled to comprehend what I was saying.

"It belongs to the hippies," I said. "They're letting me borrow it."

It was sort of true, I thought. I was just borrowing it, and considering the way they were all passed out, they were in a sense letting me.

It was 7:30 in the morning, and they often slept till noon, but since I wasn't sure when they had crashed, I figured I had until about nine o'clock. Connie didn't have to be at school until 8:30, so we picked up her girlfriends along the way. They were fifteen, and I wished it wasn't so early, so that my friends could see me driving around with three older girls.

We were on the other side of town when I realized how much gas we'd used. I wanted to make sure there was enough in the tank so they wouldn't know I had taken it. But when I pulled into the gas station, I misjudged the right front corner of the car and the bumper caught the edge of the pump. It collapsed rather easily. Too easily, and when I put the car in reverse to back up, I stepped on the gas too hard, squealing the tires, and hit a pick-up truck behind me. Inside the wagon, the girls were screaming so loud, I couldn't hear the screeching and grinding of the ignition as I tried to re-start the engine, even though it was already running. Everyone at the station had stopped, as if frozen in place, and stared at us. I slammed the transmission into park and leapt from the car.

"I'll go call the police," I shouted and quickly ran from the scene.

Two attendants were right on my tail and caught me before I got far. When they brought me back, I noticed Connie and her girlfriends walking off through an adjacent lot.

"Connie!" I screamed. "Please don't leave me!"

"Oh yeah? " She and her friends screamed, flipping me a finger. "You left us!"

I was arrested and brought to the police station, where they took me into the back. They sat me at an empty desk and called my dad. About twenty minutes later, I heard my name mentioned in conversation out at the front desk. I strained to listen to what they were saying. The voices were low and familiar, though not my dad. I couldn't make it out at first, until I heard one of the hippies say, "No. That's OK. We don't want to press charges. He's our paperboy."

9

Prison Transfer

The black and white vans had gold emblems on the two front doors, with round stirrups on each tip of the six-pointed star. It was the official seal of the Wayne County Sheriff. PRISONER TRANSFER, KEEP BACK 500 FEET emblazoned the rear. Inside, two black padded benches ran vertically along each side, with metal hoops on the floor, for the stringing of chains. Six transports were to be filled from the secure loading dock that morning, all of them headed for the State Prison of Southern Michigan.

It felt like we were cattle being herded into separate corrals, the way they kept moving us from one bullpen to another. We were shifted three times, as they sorted out the prisoners who were going to court from those who were going to prison. I didn't notice anyone being sorted out to go home.

They returned our street clothes, and I was finally given the carton of cigarettes they took from me after sentencing. I couldn't wait to open them. It had been hours since I last took a drag off a short, and a day and half since I last smoked a whole cigarette. A short was the end of a cigarette where a puff or two remained before the fire hit the filter.

"Save me shorts?" you'd ask a fellow inmate as he lit up, but you had to ask quickly, or someone else would beat you to it.

Cigarettes were in short supply, and the deputies liked keeping it that way. It was one of the few outside luxuries we were allowed. There was no reason they couldn't have given them back to me the night I arrived from court. They hardly mattered to me now, since we couldn't smoke inside the vans. The other inmates warned that any cigarettes would be tossed out when we got to Jackson. I didn't know if I could believe them, but everyone kept hitting me up. "C'mon man, the motherfuckers are just gonna throw 'em out." After seeing one or two others do the same, I started handing them out. We chain-smoked while we waited to be called to the transport chains.

Someone said we'd get a bag of Bull Durham and some rolling papers inside our toiletry kits at Jackson. I'd read about Bull Durham, in a Louis L'Amour western, and was surprised it still existed. It was a roll-your-own tobacco that came in a drawstring pouch. "That shit is nasty," an inmate said. "It's like smokin' shit rolled in toilet paper."