Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (25 page)

Carried away a little, I made a reverse ‘L’ with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ said AJ doubtfully. ‘That some kind of motherfucking Aryan Brotherhood sign you doin’ at me now, motherfucka, ’cos if you’re a . . .’

We both looked at my hand making a backwards ‘L’ sign. ‘AJ – relax, relax,’ I said, hastily. ‘I was just doing an L sign . . .’ It felt rather silly now. ‘You know – that’s the secret librarians’ sign, dude.’

‘Cool!’ said AJ, instantly becalmed again as he started playing around with making the sign himself. ‘Librarians!!’ he cried out.

AJ and I didn’t look back from that first day, and we spent a lot of time together even when we weren’t working mornings in the library. He was tremendously insightful about prison life and its strange workings, although his manner got him into a lot of trouble with other inmates and the cops. He was very bright and sarcastic and it amazed me that a man with such inner resources and potential had only ever had one job in his life – selling crack cocaine. My upbringing had taught me that plenty of people stayed poor however hard they worked, but over the years I’d been in banking I’d developed the idea that everything sort of found its natural level. Bright people, strong people, talented people rose up – those who were less so, stayed put. But meeting people like AJ turned that idea on its head. In spite of his brains and wit, there was little chance of him ‘working his way to the top’ – as the American Dream would have had it – because he had no concept of being entitled to another life, much less any idea what he needed to do to achieve it. His greatest attribute was his sense of humour and he seemed really pleased when I told him he reminded me of Eddie Murphy. ‘In
Shrek
,’ I added – much to his disappointment.

Friendships had different levels in prison, just like on the outside. AJ was a workmate – a joking and teasing partner, and later on, someone for whom I came to have immense fondness and respect. But there was something different in my relationship with Chief. He’d been a sort of mentor to me right at the start – and, I guess, like the relationships we form at the start of our lives, there was something more intense about the way we were with each other. A couple of times, I crossed the line with him – such as when I called out: ‘Afternoon, ladies,’ to him and Kola when they returned from their traditional native Indian sweat-up session in the exercise yard. The two men eyed me closely for a while, then left me alone, later on calling me over to advise me on yet another point of prison etiquette.

‘Never joke with someone you don’t know, and never, ever, ever,’ Chief said slowing down for emphasis, ‘insinuate someone is a homo or feminine, or you’ll get your Scottish face mashed up real bad.’ I took the point.

And it was hammered home even harder by the fact that, later on that day, Chief told me casually, almost as if in passing, that he’d been praying for me out in the Yard. He and Kola would go to a sweat usually once a week, with the other ‘Injuns’. They’d burn a fire and sit in a small wigwam that was permanently in place up to the side of the main yard, sweating away as they chanted, prayed or sang through the afternoon. I sat watching them a few times, envious perhaps of the brotherhood they had, and feeling more alone as a result. Given it was always over 90 degrees outside, I shuddered to think how much sweating they actually did in these meets, but Chief had told me he regularly would get to the point of passing out and hallucinating which, I surmised from the way he smiled as he said it, was the effect he was aiming for. I was taken aback at the idea that he’d put me in his prayers, and deeply touched.

I discovered his story later on, from Kola, on a day Chief had declined to go to the chow hall because he had taco exhaustion. He had served with pride, Kola told me, in Iran and Iraq, and he had also seen action in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. Eventually, after eight years of service, his luck ran out and a night jump over Afghanistan went badly wrong for him when his parachute wouldn’t properly open. Sure he was going to die, he said he stopped struggling and was prepared to meet the Big Chief in the sky, but some trees broke his descent and he survived. Unfortunately they also broke his back and crushed his skull. ‘You don’t actually need a working parachute to skydive,’ Chief told me later. ‘You only need a working one if you want to skydive twice.’

He would never skydive again. Fourteen months later, with an honourable discharge and a veteran’s pension, he walked, stiffly and painfully, out of the life he’d loved, and into nothing. He had a broken body, and excruciating headaches that led in time to epilepsy. After the initial few hurrahs and welcomes-back on the Reservation, he hit the bottle – his fortunes taking a further dramatic downturn one night when partying with some friends around a camp fire.

They were joined in their revels by a couple of guys whom Chief didn’t know, and one who soon started to taunt him about his strained walking style. Things deteriorated rapidly between the two of them, until the interloper foolishly pulled Chief’s gun out from his trouser belt and started taunting him about his inability to use it. According to Kola, Chief immediately disarmed the man, ‘pistol-whipped his ass’, tied him up and dunked him in and out of the lake for a few minutes at a time for good measure. He then began to fire his gun over the wretched guy’s head while performing a Zuni war dance around him. When the cops arrived, Chief was sitting calmly waiting for them at the fireplace, his captive still tied up and warming himself by the fire. As well as kidnapping and assault, he was charged with the further Federal offence of ‘discharging a weapon in a reservation’ – a big no-no which, combined with his other no-nos, got him fifteen years in the slammer. I couldn’t help feeling his country would be better served if they’d given him fifteen weeks with a psychiatrist instead, but Chief was less easy on himself. ‘There’s no excuse for what I did,’ he eventually told me. ‘I got what I deserved. If it hadn’t been that guy it would have been someone else – I was a wreck.’

Chief was a good example of one of the myths that lawyers and judges perpetrate about prison – that it’s full of people claiming to be innocent. In my time in Big Spring, I met only three people who made that claim – the rest just ‘fronted up’ and accepted they were guilty. Chief was even sceptical of those three. ‘In here, a clear conscience is usually the sign of a fuzzy memory,’ he would say. They nearly all had complaints about how they were caught, or the details of the charge (even Chief claimed that he hadn’t actually discharged his weapon), but most were serial offenders, and took the view that they were going to be caught sooner or later for something.

With AJ, Kola and Chief, I had at least met some people I could talk to, and that I liked, although relating to them was sometimes a struggle. I tried not to judge any of them, because I’d stopped feeling it was my right to. Fortunately for me, another good friend called Carlos, aka ‘New York’, was to arrive in the Range about a month after I got there, and was one of the last people in to make up our complement of eighty-two inmates in the Big Room.

New York was white, quite tall at around six feet, with short dark hair. As I watched him walk in one day from my vantage point in the corner, I knew immediately he was an old hand despite his relative youthfulness. From his swagger and the way he unpacked his stuff and made up his bed, he’d obviously been to lots of prisons – which meant he was a player or a troublemaker. He looked European, although I could hear from his accent that he was a New Yorker, from Brooklyn I guessed, thinking maybe he was Italian in background. I’d lived in New York for four years in the nineties, and Calum was born there, so at that moment I had more in common with Carlos than any of the other 1,500 inmates in Big Spring. I liked New York and New Yorkers, their abrasive style sitting comfortably with a Glaswegian from Pollok.

By then I was receiving a daily copy of
The New York Times
, courtesy of an Australian journalist friend of mine, Peter Wilson, who had also been doing a lot of ‘undercover’ work to help me track Cara. It was often late, very late, and then would sometimes come in groups of five or six papers at a time. Sometimes it didn’t come at all, but that didn’t really matter – time wasn’t an issue in prison and news didn’t have to be up to date for it to be current in my world.

I took a copy down to Carlos a few days after he’d arrived and stood at the bottom of his bunk with it in my hand. He was sitting on his own on the top bunk, cross-legged, playing cards. Without looking up, and before I could speak, he said, ‘What the fuck d’you want?’ Maybe more Queens than Brooklyn, but definitely a confirmed New Yorker, I decided.

‘Nuthin’,’ I began. ‘I just thought you might want a copy of
The New York Times
.’ I placed it up on his bunk, smiling.

Without looking up or stopping his card game, Carlos responded, ‘Oh yeah?’ He paused, studying one card for a moment, but still not looking up. ‘And why would you want to do that?’

‘I heard your accent,’ I started. ‘I guessed you were from New York or nearby and thought you might like it . . .’ I trailed off, beginning to feel that this act of consideration was probably a mistake. I didn’t know this guy; I couldn’t guess that I’d like him or get on with him. I had to stop behaving as I would on the outside.

Carlos had by now looked up at me and held his hand out to take the paper. ‘Huh. Tuesday’s,’ he said as he threw it to the side of his bunk. Today was Friday. Now he looked at me square on. ‘What are you – a fuckin’ chomo or something?’ Deeply regretting my approach to him, I spluttered ‘No!’ as indignantly as I could and as I struggled for something else to say he continued, ‘Well what the fuck are you then? A faggot?’

‘Am I fuck!’ I answered angrily, ‘I was only trying to be friendly . . .’ I was instantly aware of the stupidity of that phrase, and the stupidity of what I was trying to do. I was annoyed at myself. Normal civilities didn’t work here; they were seen as weakness not a strength. I was annoyed at myself letting my guard down. ‘Forget it!’ I said and marched off back the thirteen steps to my bunk. Carlos went back to his cards while Chief, ever watchful, just shook his head.

‘And you can shut up as well!’ I called over to him as I passed his bunk and clambered back up onto mine. That started him laughing some more and shaking his head as he returned to writing one of his enormous letters. ‘Yeah, put that in your letter as well!’ I called over. ‘I’m glad I entertain you, Chief!’ I lay back on my bunk and stared at the ceiling.

‘Oh you do, Scotty! You keep us all entertained.’ I leaned up on one arm to see Kola grinning furiously himself.

I saw Carlos read
The Times
cover to cover over the next few days. ‘Piece of shit,’ I mumbled to myself. I noticed he spent quite a lot of time with Angel, who still hadn’t gotten back to me on my papers, and Joker, who still looked quite capable of strangling me at a moment’s notice. They always spoke in Spanish and I wondered if Carlos was a Sureno or a King – second-generation Hispanic perhaps. Whatever he was, he seemed an old practised hand at prison life – not a bumbling fool like me.

This was typical prison behaviour, though, from him and myself. Everyone watched everyone else in the Big Room. Who was talking to whom; who was arguing with whom; who had what; who went to whose bed during the night. Carlos wasn’t being particularly aggressive towards me – just protecting himself, and showing everyone else who might be watching what sort of a man he was.

In any case, people who were after sex didn’t go handing out free newspapers. It went on – I discovered that on my second night, when I took a trip to the latrines and found one pair of Hispanic guys pleasuring each other in a bunk, and another two going at it vigorously in the shower – but discreetly, according to rules I never enquired into. The Mexicans even had a phrase: ‘
Detras de la valla, el no es gay
’ – ‘Behind the fence, it’s not gay’. Other racial groups in prison seemed to take a dimmer view of the activity – but that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t indulging themselves.

About a fortnight after my first, failed attempt to strike up a friendship with Carlos, I was lying on my bunk one afternoon, when the cocky bastard suddenly decided to acknowledge me.

‘Hey Scotland?’ he called out. ‘D’you play cards?’

‘You after another copy of
The Times
?’ I responded disdainfully.

‘Of course I am!’ he exclaimed gleefully. ‘So do you play cards or not?’

‘No.’

‘Good, then I’ll teach you,’ he said, without missing a beat as he moved over and stood at one of the disused lockers at the foot of Chief’s bunk. ‘You don’t mind if we play here Chief, do ya?’ he asked, shuffling the cards with a dexterity both impressive and unsurprising.

‘Long as you wup Scotty’s ass, New York,’ replied Chief, barely looking up from this week’s masterpiece, as I clambered reluctantly down from my bunk and began my first game of cards with Carlos. There was no apology, no attempt to explain – certainly no suggestion of him saying thanks for the loan of the paper. It was the male relationship stripped down to its purest form: Carlos had just decided to be friends with me – and so we were. I’d play every night with him from then on, while learning Carlos’ unique perspective on the rights and wrongs of prison life and the life of crime. It was a card school in the truest sense of the term.

My relationship with my bunkie Ramon continued to develop well, because he was respectful and, for the most part, quiet. I practised my Spanish with him most days and also with Mendiola, an older man who had moved into the bunk just across from me. He was a kindly, gentle man in his early sixties, who had been in Big Spring for over twelve years, and seemed to have no hopes of leaving. He didn’t seem to have a job as such, but he got paid for fixing and mending things – including an old pair of training shoes, which he’d revamped with electrician’s tape and some judicious stitching, and sold to me for the very reasonable sum of two stamps. They were around a size twelve, and you wouldn’t get entry into a nightclub wearing them, but they were heaven-sent because they meant I could go up to the weight pile and gymnasium now and finally start to work out again. He’d also make simple wooden crucifixes from beads and laces which he’d bless in the Catholic church up near the Yard before selling them for a few stamps to the Hispanic inmates. I came back one day to find one left for me under my pillow – a gift offered without words. Mendiola was quiet and reserved, someone who seemed to be wrestling with some private inner grief, and I never knew why he was so fond of me. I would like to think I’d have been friends with him – and a number of others – on the outside, but I know that the pressures of overcrowded prison life had a lot to do with it. If someone slept, dressed, shat and ate within a few feet of you month after month, and they were quiet and clean and respectful and co-operative, then they were your friends. If they weren’t respectful, then it didn’t matter how much you had in common – they were your enemies. I hoped I didn’t have any at that point.