Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (6 page)

The negatives I saw, as I stripped down naked in front of my bathroom mirror, were numerous. Number one: I was flabby. I was forty-six and the middle-age spread, while not being too pronounced, was definitely there. I had been a keen sportsman most of my life, but mainly football and golf. My upper body lacked definition, my arms lacked strength. I didn’t look very intimidating. I realised, of course, that I wasn’t entering a strong man competition, but this was all about my own self-confidence. As a bouncer, I had learned that in nearly all situations a calm, confident persona would defuse even the most psychotic Glaswegian. But you had to be confident in yourself and it helped if you looked tough. I looked more critically at myself in the mirror. The curly hair would have to go. I had a heavy growth, almost a beard and quite dark, so I’d keep that.

During all of this appraisal, without admitting it, my eye kept being drawn to my rear end, my rump. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but I had a huge arse. It was much bigger than I could ever remember it and, horror of horrors, it started to wobble when I walked. When did this happen? I meandered up and down a couple of times naked in front of the full-length mirrors. It looked enormous. And it was out of proportion to the rest of me. It was a notably large arse. Not only that, but with the rest of me having become quite brown in the Houston sun, it was an especially white arse. This sent me into a tailspin of panic. My large, white arse would be like a beacon to every bum-rapist throughout the prison – I could become a prized possession. I had read once that they liked straight guys more and they saw it as taking your virginity – or was I thinking of
The Shawshank Redemption
again?

What would happen in the showers, the dreaded showers? My carefully written out diagram was becoming a blur as I descended into panic. I remembered all the jokes about not bending down to pick up the soap. I looked at the bar of soap by the sink tap. Without thinking much more about it, I reached across to it and threw it down on the floor. ‘Pick it up, Mulgrew,’ I thought to myself. ‘Pick it up, wobble bottom.’ Slowly I leaned forward to collect the bar, while watching myself carefully in the mirror. ‘Oh, my God,’ I blurted out. Bending over seemed to make my arse look larger. My arse had expanded. I looked like a big light bulb, a neon sign saying, ‘Over here boys!’ This was a disaster. I replaced the soap and tried again, this time clenching my buttocks as tight as I could (harder to do than you would think). That gave my buttocks a shape and form I really didn’t want them to have. Attempt three involved crouching to pick it up, which momentarily I thought was a winner until I realised my head was now at dick level and I was picking up the soap like a girl, all dainty and delicate. That sort of act could just encourage the crowd. Standing up, I kicked the soap across the room. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘If the soap drops, I’ll stay dirty.’

At least these reminiscences of me playing the fool made me smile a little as I shifted in my aeroplane seat. The flight to Big Spring would only take an hour and a half and we had already been in the air for thirty minutes. I felt the need for a drink, an alcoholic one even this early in the day, but I guessed they would be testing me when I got there and didn’t want to have anything in my system. I’d need all my wits about me.

I looked out of the window and saw the brown scrubland below; just an empty wasteland. I could populate that emptiness with fear, or stick to my careful, determined preparation. I forced my thoughts back to all the work I’d done in the months before.

The fitter and stronger I felt, the less likely it would be that I would be attacked; that was my core logic. So first of all, I needed to go into training. It was not just a question of stepping up my usual running and weights routine, but also of learning self-defence and focused, clear attack techniques. I hadn’t suddenly gained an upsurge of courage, but the soap sketch had been about confronting one of my deepest fears and I wanted to be in a position to defend myself if need be. My thinking was: if I did get into an awkward situation and my fat virginal white ass proved too much of an attraction, then at least I wanted to be able to handle myself. After all, Tim Robbins always gave as good as he got in
Shawshank
.

Kyle and Lucy, two Scottish neighbours in my apartment block had introduced me to Sergei, a Ukrainian personal trainer who was to become a good friend of mine, and as much a philosopher as a fitness coach. He was in his late thirties and handsome – a cross between Daniel Craig and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I approached him to train me with a clear mandate to teach me to fight, which he took to with some enthusiasm. We trained almost every day, often double or triple sessions, and my weight quickly increased as we mixed weights with martial arts and boxing. At that stage I was waiting for a letter to arrive to tell me when and where to report to prison, which made going to the mailbox a daily nightmare, my hand trembling each time it reached inside, but which also gave my training an intensity and focus Sergei liked.

‘Shit, Mulgrew, you seem more angry than usual today. This eez good!’ he would exclaim in his heavily accented English, as he cuffed me around the ear and told me to keep my guard up. He would hit me quite often as our training progressed, ‘To get you used to the pain and numbness; so it doesn’t stop you from hitting back,’ he explained gleefully. So we focused on hitting and moving away; hitting and moving away; getting down on the ground, then quickly back to my feet for a quick one-two combination, then flat on the ground again. It was exhausting, but exhilarating and I felt that if I had to, if I really had to, I could at least hurt the person trying to hurt me.

Sergei also talked to me throughout the training, encouraging me and reminding me: ‘Everyone is scared. Remember that. Everyone is scared – always.’ That made me feel better, but I wondered if it was true.

The plane started its descent and I looked anxiously over at Reid as he gave me another compassionate smile. The realisation that I was getting closer, and that I would soon find out if any of my preparations had counted for anything, made my stomach lurch. I felt ashamed, an idiot, when I considered the final part of my preparation, the time I’d spent in the cupboard trying to control my fear of the dark; a coward, a boy entering a man’s world. I rubbed the sweat off the palms of my hands as the plane touched down and my breath shortened. I leaned forward in my chair with my eyes closed, wishing I was somewhere, anywhere, but here.

4

BIG SPRING, TEXAS

W
ITH NO LUGGAGE AT ALL FOR
the second time in my life, we were swiftly out of the airport and into the hire car Reid had pre-booked. Midland/Odessa seemed as dreary as I had imagined, a small town ten hours’ drive from Houston and six from Dallas. Its claim to fame was that George Bush Jnr had lived there and by all accounts intended to return some time after his presidency was over. He was completely welcome to it. After a few minutes we were on the I-20 heading east towards Big Spring, around seventy miles away. If we had gone in the other direction, four hours west, we would hit Juárez on the Mexican border, just across the Rio Grande and by now the murder capital of the world. I thought of suggesting we head west to Reid, but my stock of jokes was wearing thin. We were getting closer.

We drove along the long, straight endless road in silence, my mood darkening. The landscape was bleak, desolate and unforgiving. Flat as far as the eye could see and hot, damned hot! ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I thought as I surveyed what looked to me like the end of the Earth. I’d lived the dream; now I was living the nightmare, and it kept getting worse. Nothing but tumbleweed and abandoned jack-hammers. I felt I was being taken to a place time had forgotten, a place you take people simply to punish them.

‘I can’t believe you’re having to do this,’ Reid said eventually, disturbing the silence.

‘I can’t either,’ I murmured back, still looking out at the endless stretch of desert.

‘I keep beating myself up that I should have been able to get you out of this, that I should have been a better lawyer,’ Reid said, genuinely emotional as he spoke.

‘This was the best I was going to get. We were always going to get extradited no matter what, and we never would have won at trial. I’ve been fucked for a long time, all this was inevitable.’ I waved my hand lamely at the tumbleweed and emptiness as I tried to make him feel better, knowing that what I was saying was ludicrous – how could any of this ever be inevitable?

I looked out across the empty wasteland again; barren and desolate.

After a while the long road found a destination and the town of Big Spring shimmered into view. Population of 33,267 – not including the 1,500 inmates of the Federal prison or the 3,000 housed in the nearby immigration facility. The town’s website had boasted that the sun shone uninterrupted on Big Spring for over 320 days a year, and this was certainly one of them. It was named after the ‘big spring’ in Sulphur Draw, a historical watering place for coyotes, wolves, and herds of buffalo, antelope and mustangs, but all I could see was run-down housing and abandoned trucks. The spring had supposedly been a source of conflict between Comanche and Shawnee Indians with hundreds of skirmishes over the years, until the white settlers came along and turned it into the paradise it now was. Looking up into the sky, I wiped my brow and peered towards the sun. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen; always the saddest of sad sights for a Scotsman. It looked like it hadn’t rained in months. We drove through the stretched-out town in silence.

‘Jeez, even the prison has to be better than this,’ I said to Reid as we surveyed the abandoned trailers and boarded-up houses at the sides of the road. Reid stayed silent.

Halfway up the main street, we saw a Rib Shack and parked in there. It was still only eleven o’clock, three hours before I was due to report. I had no intention of turning up early, although the state of the town was giving me second thoughts. Reid ordered some food and I stepped outside to phone home to say some difficult goodbyes. As promised, I spoke to Calum and tried to sound upbeat. I told him the prison looked nice, like a library, and the people looked pretty friendly. I joked that I hoped they wouldn’t feel too intimidated when they saw me.

Actually Big Spring did look a bit like a library when I had searched for it on the Internet.

For two months I had been going to my mailbox every morning, waiting for the letter from the Bureau of Prisons to tell me when, and where, I had to report to prison. I tried to kid myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care – a prison was a prison, after all – but the truth was my hand would shake every day as I felt for the dreaded letter. Sometimes my heart would be beating so violently as I approached the mailbox I was sure it must be visible to anyone walking past. I would struggle to breathe and it would take me twenty minutes or so to recover my composure once I’d found the mailbox empty.

In the end, as it happened, the news didn’t come via the postman. I was at Dan Cogdell’s house – David’s lawyer – with him and David, when David called his pre-trial officer to find out where and when we were going. He called out his prison first (a reasonable facility on the Californian coast) then shouted, ‘Big Spring for Mulgrew.’ Dan’s face went white – so white that I wished I’d waited for the letter after all. It didn’t help when he stopped opening the bottle of wine he was uncorking, walked over, put his arm around me and said, ‘Sorry Mulgrew. Unlucky. You lucked out.’ I didn’t ask why he was saying that; I didn’t want to know. David also confirmed that I was going in first, in ten days’ time, with Giles heading off a week later to somewhere on the East Coast and David another week thereafter. They couldn’t have placed the three of us any further apart.

By the time I got back to my apartment, fear was gripping me, and I plunged straight onto the Internet to find out what I could about the notorious Big Spring. Surprisingly, they had put quite a flattering photo of it on the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) website. Without the barbed wire and the fences, the main building looked somewhat like a library – just as I told Calum. I even got excited when I first explored the site, because on the drop-down list on the left-hand side of the BoP home screen, alongside items like Daily Routine, Visiting Rules and Facilities, it had a section headed ‘Conjugal Visits’. Despite my anxiety to find out about the prison, I ignored everything else and double-clicked straight onto that page. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but all there was to read was spelt out in bold capital letters: THERE ARE NO CONJUGAL VISITS. Oh how I laughed. Some bastard in the Bureau of Prisons clearly had a sense of humour, which was reassuring since I was checking in that afternoon for an extended stay.

The call with Calum passed quite well, and I surprised myself at how easily I managed to stay calm and assured. I didn’t talk to him for long for fear I couldn’t keep it going. Next I called my mum and found her in ‘Politician Mode’. It was the stance she’d started to adopt ever since she’d been elected, a few years earlier, to the Scottish Parliament. She sounded strong and assured, only betraying her feelings briefly at the end as we said goodbye – I wondered how long for.

Then I phoned Julie, with whom I could be more honest. I reminded her that it might take two or three weeks to ‘clear’ my phone numbers with the prison authorities; maybe even longer in my case since all my phone numbers would be foreign. Even then I would only be able to speak for a few minutes each week, as the cost would eat into what little monies I was allowed or could earn in prison. Julie sounded very strong, as she always seemed to be, and promised me she would take care of Calum like he was her own. We finished the phone call quickly, both fearful of the strain and emotion of the conversation, and Julie ended by promising to tell me everything that happened back home in Britain – no matter how good or bad. We agreed not to say goodbye and I promised her for the thousandth time that I’d keep my head down and stay out of harm’s way, and that I loved her.