Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (17 page)

I was thinking about what other positives there might be, and getting up quite a sweat as I continued to dislodge some serious human debris from under the rim, when I noticed two bare-chested Hispanics standing outside the cubicle watching me and chatting. Tuning into their conversation, I picked up a couple of words here and there. ‘
Gringo, vea, bueno, rodillos, limpian
,’ which I guessed basically meant ‘good to see a white boy on his knees cleaning.’

Ignoring them, I just kept on belting into the Great Rim Challenge, periodically adjusting my position to glance over at them both still standing there, arms folded, fascinated, it seemed, by Scottish cleaning techniques. Eventually I stood up, accepting of the fact that I was a sinner, a flawed man, sweating heavily both from my body and forehead. It was so hot that even the simplest exertion resulted in you being bathed in sweat. I was significantly taller and bigger than the Hispanic guys, but they both looked muscular and unfazed by the size differential. The front one’s entire torso was covered in tattoos – testimony to a long and distinguished career in some Latino gang, no doubt. He also wore a bandana, which I had to admit made him much cooler looking than me with my baggy pants and Coco the Clown shoes.

The second guy was also covered in gang memorabilia and looked just as intimidating. As I looked at him I noticed a nasty facial scar, which gave him an even more fearsome look. Both sported moustaches, which pigeon-holed them as ‘two wee Mexicans’ in the complex filing system my mind had set up to figure out who was who in the Big Room. I was quickly realising, however, that the category of ‘a wee Mexican with a moustache’ covered about 60% of the room, and I was going to have to work on my descriptive techniques.

‘I haven’t cleaned those two toilets in there if you need to go,’ I said slowly and in English, turning and pointing to the two other stalls next to me and hoping that might make them go away.

‘No. We use this one!’ said the leading Mexican emphatically with a big grin that revealed a couple of whopping big gold teeth, as his buddy nodded in agreement. Thrown by his gaudy gnashers and by his strong lavatorial preferences I hesitated for a moment, wondering what was so special about this particular little palace. I looked around for a moment, sighed, thought disappointingly about my half-finished rim job, placed my brushes and powders back into my bucket, and started to head out.

‘No,
cabrone
!’ said my friendly little Mexican gang-banger, this time looking not nearly so friendly. His hand was out in front of him in the universally known ‘stop’ sign, so I duly obeyed ‘You clean. I shit. Then you clean again!’ He smiled once more to re-emphasis the expensive nature of his dental work. This stumped me. I never faced this type of situation at NatWest.

‘Yeez,’ added his number two in much more heavily accented English, ‘then I sheet. You clin and I sheet again.’

His English wasn’t great, but I got the general picture.

‘What do you do now, smartarse?’ I asked myself, staring at the two grinning
hombres
. Of course, in the movies, this would be the bit where I stuck the bucket over their heads, nutted one of them, kicked the other one in the balls, stuck one of their heads down the toilet and flushed it. But these guys looked tough and were probably well versed in dealing with the whole ‘gringos in the toilet’ sketch. One thing for sure, though, I wasn’t about to get on my hands and knees and start scrubbing again, let them shit, and then start cleaning again. Fuck that. I was sure that would go round the room in about two seconds and next thing I would be hand-wiping anyone’s backside who wanted it. I felt my heart start to race – I had a decision to make.

It seemed too early in the morning for someone to be beating up another inmate; I always thought that kind of stuff would happen after the watershed at 10 p.m. Hoping I was right, I smiled, picked up my little brush and theatrically threw it into my bucket. Then I picked up the bucket and slowly walked out past the two of them, trying to emphasise, as best I could, my height advantage over them. I didn’t look long at them – just the briefest eye contact in case they went for me (at which point my plan was to hit one of them as hard as I could, Sergei-style). Instead I just brushed past them, skin briefly touching skin (much to my discomfort) as I moved out of the bathroom across the room and hauled myself up onto my bunk in a ceremonial huff. I lay back and looked straight at the ceiling above, waiting for the fallout to come, my heart racing, my breathing heavy as I wondered if my penance was about to deepen.

They never came.

Half an hour or so later, I was back in cleaning the stalls, having given up on stall #1 as I couldn’t bring myself to re-enter, it having so recently seen action. Gato had come over and was helping me out with the sinks. ‘Those two guys like to play around with all the new cleaners?’ I asked the Cat, as we scrubbed two adjacent sinks.

‘No
cabrone
,’ he began seriously. ‘You are an easy target. You stand out; you’re not a gringo and you’re not one of us. You can’t afford to take too long to decide who you eez runnin’ with, or else you are isolated. That is a bad thing here. Why did you say no to the two guys last night?’

‘Those two white men?’ I asked rhetorically, worried by his tone. ‘They are racists right? Aryan Brotherhood. I have zero in common with them; nothing. I can’t join up with a gang like them.’ I tailed off, wondering how isolated I might become.

‘
Oye cabrone,
’ he said. ‘Very brave, but maybe very foolish. People may think that you find trouble, then it becomes very dangerous for you in Big Spring.’ With that, Gato walked off to his bunk.

In the afternoon I was called out to change into my regular prison attire, my first-day suit having served its purpose. McKenzie seemed pleased to see me and actually made an effort to give me clothes that fit this time: five everyday khaki shirts; two pairs of khaki trousers; six white T-shirts; seven pairs of underpants; eight pairs of socks; and one pair of industrial-strength black reinforced boots. There was probably some logic in the quantities, but it escaped me. In addition, I received one set of ‘visit clothes’ – basically the same khaki shirts and trousers and undershirt, but in slightly better nick.

‘Not new, Scotland; just newer!’ McKenzie surveyed me approvingly in my new prison fatigues. ‘Now you almost look like you belong,’ he added, obviously pleased with his work. Tank and the others looked on, disinterested and sluggish in the heat.

10

THE RAT & THE COWARD

I
N PRISON, TIME PERFORMS THAT STRANGE
trick of seeming to pass slowly and swiftly at once. A couple of weeks went by, suddenly and yet tediously, taken up with a simple routine of scrubbing the toilets with Gato in the morning, writing a few letters and studying Spanish in the afternoon, then heading to the chow hall in the evening with Chief and Kola. During that time I was keeping a low profile, and hadn’t explored any further around the prison. A glitch – or perhaps just the enduring sluggishness of the system – ensured that I still had no money, so no phone calls and no training shoes, which you needed to be allowed to go up into the gym and the Yard. I felt a million miles from home. I’d already decided that even when I did get money, I wouldn’t spend it all on the usual luxuries of coffee, biscuits and chocolate and the like. Phone calls were $1 a minute to call the UK, buying me all of 7 minutes a month on my toilet pay so I guessed I would need all my money for that and stamps for my letters. Anyway, I wanted the discipline of the spartan lifestyle. I thought it would be better for me never to get too comfortable in my surroundings.

The Range was filling up rapidly, with five or six more people arriving every week or so – all transfers from other prisons. Focusing on the positives, I’d received two sets of legal papers: those for Cara Katrina and those from my case. The former were to refer to in case anything happened with or to Cara while I was inside; the latter my case papers so I could confirm with my Case Manager the deal the Department of Justice had made with me.

There was another reason everyone needed their case papers; so their roommates could confirm they were in there for the reasons they’d stated. One of the reasons Kola had been suspicious with me at the start, I later found out, was that the despised chomos would often claim to have ‘robbed a bank’ rather than admitting their true crimes.

The Range’s checking-in process was every bit as detailed as the one performed by the prison officers – twice as deadly if you slipped up, too. Every day, in between writing letters or reading my book, I’d watch the new inmates arriving as our room continued to fill up. Within a short while of dumping his stuff, the new fish would be approached by the members of his own ethnic group as had happened with me with the AB’s. He would be told to remove his top and trousers and a careful inspection of his tattoos would take place – not dissimilar to the inspection the cops would have completed as the inmates were booked in. This would be accompanied by a close grilling about where the newbie had been transferred in from, which august members of America’s burgeoning prison population he’d served time with, and what gang he’d run with, if any. There being no glitches in his story, then and only then would the new arrival be furnished with his shower shoes, toiletries and other essentials.

Towards the end of my second month, as I was kicking back in my bunk one afternoon, an older inmate walked in. I noticed him straight away, because he walked faster than people normally did when they first entered the room. Usually they walked in quite slowly; looking for people they knew or might have heard of. This man looked scared straight away. Mid fifties, I guessed, with a full head of grey hair and a grey beard. Betraying your fear wasn’t that unusual, but he was Hispanic, and I noticed that none of the other Hispanics came near him as he found his bunk about ten beds away from mine – no more than thirty feet away. I’d never seen that before; even to my untrained eye, it didn’t look right. My corner bunk position afforded me a perfect view of the room but I didn’t want to be caught staring, so I positioned myself so it looked like I was still reading. Chief had lent me his headphones and his radio and I turned the volume down when I heard Joker bark out some instructions to a couple of his minions, who then ran quickly from the room. It was clearly something to do with the new arrival, and Joker stared unapologetically in the man’s direction before turning his back on him and continuing his card game. The tension in the room was palpable.

What happened next unfolded so quickly I barely had time to process it. Four men entered the room, moving at speed. They were completely silent and bare-chested, with their heads and faces covered by assorted scarves and shirts. They each took a separate path through the maze of beds in the Big Room, each heading directly towards the new arrival. I don’t know if he saw them coming, they were upon him so fast. I noticed that two were carrying a ‘lock in a sock’: the weapon of choice in Big Spring when a good old shank wasn’t available. With Joker and the rest of my roomies all turning their backs on what was about to unfold, and calmly going on with their business as if nothing was happening, the first protagonist came from behind his victim, grabbed his arm and his hair and quickly rammed his face straight into the cast-iron frame of the bunk. No introductions, no conversations, just swift and brutal justice, Big Spring style. The sound – a cross between a cracking noise and a more general thunk – would have made me wince, had it not been followed up so rapidly by a number of other connections; each one swiftly executed and each one seemingly worse than the last.

My view was partially obscured as the victim fell to the floor and it was only the sounds I was reacting to. The clinical nature in which the attackers laid into their quarry, and the fact that everyone else continued to behave as if nothing was happening, added to the surreal, almost eerie feel of the moment. I had expected violence in Big Spring and had steeled myself for it, but this just didn’t seem real. The older man was so limp he now needed two of his attackers to support him, as they held him up then rammed him once more straight into the iron frame. There was a sickening crack and then he was dropped again to the floor. The other two attackers stepped in and delivered the
coup de grâce
: the ‘lock in the sock’ raining down on the now motionless figure. Still no one spoke. The music continued to play away – the Mexican department store Top Twenty elevator hits interspersed by the vigorous whack of sock-encased padlocks thumping down on the prostrate body. Through all this, I kept sneaking glances at Joker and the others around him. All of them kept their backs to the action, although a few seemed compelled to steal a nervous glance or two. Joker never once turned around. His card game over, he was now folding some of his laundry, his back to the fight, although his posture suggested he was listening to each sickening blow.

It had all happened so fast. After thirty or forty seconds only, the four attackers moved swiftly back out of the room, each taking a separate path. They only started to remove their head coverings as they approached the door. There was a brief silence before the usual chatter of the Big Room resumed. No one went near the victim. I realised that I’d blown my reading cover and that I had been staring for the last minute or so. Joker looked over at me without a flicker of emotion and held my gaze for a second, as he kept folding his laundry precisely and meticulously with his unfeasibly large hands. I swallowed hard as I looked away – I guess he’d always be Choker to me.

Still no one had moved to see how the new arrival was. I could only see his foot, which twitched violently a couple of times. Any pretence that my life in Big Spring might be easy or that I would avoid all the violence had just been blown away, replaced by a new, harsher reality. I saw Chief continue to draw, Kola sitting cross-legged on his bunk playing cards on his own, despite being no more than five feet away from a man who’d been beaten unconscious.