Hard Time (15 page)

As if the possibility of being smashed by his own race had just dawned, Carter stood up. ‘Fuck it! I’ll fight him again.’ He returned to cell 3.

SmackDown had his breath back. He retreated into the cell and raised his fists. Carter raised his. SmackDown feigned a few jabs. Lacking energy, Carter skipped around like a man whose heart wasn’t in the fight. He seemed resigned to his fate, which soon arrived in the form of a cross to his left eye. He swayed, dropping his guard. He was kicked in the leg and blows pulverised him. But he wasn’t knocked out. He couldn’t stand it and again dashed from the cell in such a hurry that he collided with the stairs. The prisoners jeered. Panting and disorientated, he leaned forward and rested his hands just above his knees.

Gravedigger marched up to Carter. ‘Roll yer shit up! I’m the new head of the whites! Does any of you woods have a problem with that?’ He panned his eyes from white to white prisoner. No one objected.

Much to my relief, the threat to Troll and me did indeed leave with its instigator. Carter limped out of the pod with a battered face, a rolled-up mattress and all of his property. Billy told me Carter’s property included photos of his new wife that he hadn’t shown to the whites. If he had shown the photos to the whites, they never would have crowned him their head. She was Mexican American.

The prisoners respected Lev Egorov because of his tough aura and association with the Russian Mafia. He was short, had a solid physique and cropped brown hair with flecks of grey. Right down to the wrinkles on his forehead, he had the look of a KGB agent. Introduced to chess as a child, he was an enthusiast I played almost every day. As immigrants, we bonded quickly. The topics of our lively discussions ranged from geopolitics to the corruption in the legal system. When a battered East European arrived at our pod – a Muslim from the Balkan Peninsula who didn’t fit into any of the four major racial categories and had been smashed everywhere he’d been housed – Lev rounded up some of the saner whites, including me, and we agreed to protect him. Unfortunately, the guards moved the Muslim a few weeks later, and he was beaten and hospitalised, and we never saw him again.

Lev was the only person I ever saw in the jail criticise the addicts to their faces. In his deep angry voice and strong Russian accent, he’d yell, ‘You fucking Yankees have sucked your brains out by doing dope! If the Yankee didn’t do the dope, maybe the Yankee would have more intelligence. The dope is destroying this country. It is the greatest weapon against the Yankee.’

It’s generally not a good idea to ask prisoners what their charges are until you get to know them. Questions along those lines from newcomers can make the more established feel disrespected – and the common answer to disrespect was usually a punch to the face. Burning with curiosity as to what Lev was in for, I waited until I’d known him for a few weeks before I popped the question: ‘How did you end up in jail?’

‘Ha! First, let me tell you the story of how I came to America.’

‘OK,’ I said, sitting on my bunk.

‘I deserted the Russian army and ended up in a jail in Germany. I contacted the American embassy and offered to trade them knowledge of the Russian military for US citizenship. They agreed, and I signed a two-year contract to work for the CIA. I did this to save my sister’s life.’

‘Save your sister’s life?’ I asked, confused.

‘She was stuck in Russia dying from the effects of the Chernobyl accident. I came here, introduced her to a Yankee, who married her so she could come here legally and get the correct medical treatment. The Yankee doctors cured her, and now she is living here and has remarried and has her own family.’

‘Good for you, man!’ I was so tired of hearing farfetched crime tales, Lev’s story nourished my soul. ‘So how did you end up here?’

‘Almost ten years ago, I was involved in cocaine in Arizona. Someone murdered my business partner. I went looking for the murderer. I entered the house of the murderer’s brother with a gun. The murderer was not there. The brother was, and he called the cops, and they charged me with assault with a deadly weapon and attempted kidnapping.’

‘Assault and kidnapping?’

‘Yes, because he said I pointed the gun at him, which I didn’t. But I did shoot the floor when I was yelling at him. I was arrested and released. They didn’t do anything for years, so I thought it was dropped. Then they recently extradited me from Washington, where my family lives and where I was working as a mechanic.’

I wondered why some people were arrested, released and then rearrested on the same charges years later. I imagined bureaucrats in police departments reopening certain cases to fill their quotas. ‘That sucks, that they’d have Washington ship you back years later.’ His case was so old I sympathised. His actions, such as risking his personal safety to stand up for the Muslim, led me to believe he’d matured from that life of crime into a well-meaning person.

Lev was my next workout partner after Sniper. Using a towel, we tied the broomstick in the day room to the handle of a mop bucket full of water. Holding the stick horizontal, we did a variety of weight-lifting exercises. We wrapped our pink socks around sections of the metal-grid stairs to make handgrips for pull-ups. In his youth, Lev had won prizes for gymnastics, and his ability still showed. He breezed through sets of pull-ups, starting with 50 reps, working his way down to 30 – with many onlookers awestruck – and he always dismounted gracefully. I’d grow tired around five pull-ups, and he’d support my back so I could do more. At first, my lats remained sore for days, but that soon wore off, and I was surprised by the increased strength I felt in that region.

The heads of all of the races arranged a chess tournament. Each contender contributed one commissary item of food to the jackpot. Outside of the jackpot, the inmates bet heavily on the two favourites: Lev and me.

To put my mind in overdrive prior to the tournament, I ate several brownies. I punched a bag made from toilet rolls in a sock that I’d hung from the top bunk, stopping only when my knuckles bled. Psyched up, I bounced down the day-room stairs, shadow-boxing, singing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor, my eyes mad-dogging Lev the whole time. I took a stool at one of the steel tables and commenced my first game, radiating chess expertise.

Surrounded by onlookers – half of them yelling advice that would have caused anyone who took it to lose the game, the rest telling them to shut up or else – I beat all eight contestants, including Lev. I expected to receive the jackpot, but Gravedigger, who had bet on his cellmate, Lev, said that the top four players now had to play three games each against each other. In the zone and feeling invincible, I agreed.

Lev and I crushed the competition and commenced playing each other. Concentrating on the available moves, the opportunities each move presented, Lev’s possible responses to each move and my responses to his responses, I could almost feel my neurons firing. About ten minutes in, I had to stand up to stop trembling. The atmosphere intensified as we each won a game. Due to the large amount of side bets, the audience remained riveted as the third game began. Mid-game, my energy level subsided, and the audience’s cockfight wisecracks started to get to me. I knew I was in trouble. But Lev was also taking longer to move and making silly mistakes, so I banked on his brain being more frazzled than mine. My morale sank as I made a series of moves I regretted and lost some key pieces. Sensing my downfall, Lev’s supporters, egged on by Gravedigger, heckled me all the more. When I saw Lev could checkmate me in three moves, I positioned my king for a stalemate, while staring blankly at the board so as not to betray my sneakiness. But Lev knew me well enough to see through that strategy. Biding his time, he checkmated me. As the crowd mocked me for losing, I almost collapsed from mental exhaustion. Lev congratulated me on being a worthy opponent, and secured the jackpot (mostly melted Snickers and Kit Kats). ‘You played well and deserved to win,’ I told him. Vowing never to let that happen again, I ordered my first chess book.

A Space Hopper of a youngster moved into an upper-tier cell. Eighteen-year-old Alejandro, a 400-pound half-Mexican half-Native American, had shot an AK-47 at a car full of rival gang members, all teenagers, who’d ventured into his westside neighbourhood. Some of his victims were in critical condition, and if any of them died he would be facing a sentence of death by lethal injection.

Every night, just in time for the beginning of the news, Alejandro emerged from his cell with a look of dread and positioned himself at the back of the two dozen or so noisy prisoners clustered in front of the TV on the day-room wall. When the news started, he’d move forward as if yanked by its familiar jingle. Sweating more visibly than the rest, he’d urge everyone to hush. Out of deference for the gravity of his situation, the heads of all of the races would order their youngsters to shut up. By the time the condition of his victims was reported, the unusual quiet – which in the jail meant something bad was happening to somebody somewhere – had drawn the attention of the card and domino players and even brought the hermits from their cells, doubling the size of the audience. I was sure that all of the men watching from the balcony and every corner and table of the day room were thinking the same as me:
Will a victim die? What’s it like to be facing the death penalty?

Alejandro would stand there, arms folded, his bulk swaying slightly, with a fear in his eyes as if he were not looking at a TV that barely tuned in but at a gun pointed at him. The prisoners usually remained quiet, except for the night a reporter revealed that one of Alejandro’s bullets had exited through a girl’s nipple. That caused many groans and expressions of displeasure. The reports invariably ended with his victims in critical but stable condition. None dead. After digesting this, Alejandro would set off relieved. He’d trudge up the metal-grid stairs, the hermits disappearing into the cells in front of him and the noise in the day room picking up behind him.

The heat made him sweat and stink so much his race held a meeting about whether to get rid of him. Bad hygiene could get you smashed by your own race. In Alejandro’s case, a compromise was reached. Under threats of violence, Alejandro had to take a shower every few hours and afterwards members of his race coated him in baby powder.

Sensing a frightened child inside the gunman, I was one of the first to befriend him. ‘How much is your bond for shooting those people?’ I asked.

‘Only ten gees, homey,’ Alejandro said.

‘Ten grand!’ I said, envious. ‘I’ve got drug charges. Mine’s three-quarters of a mill.’

‘That’s way too much for drugs, homey. They got me on attempted murder. Hey, I’m gonna get bonded outta here real soon.’ In a lowered voice, he asked, ‘Think I should go on the run, homey?’

‘I can’t be recommending that. It could open me up to new charges. But I think even if none of your victims dies, they’re going to put you away for a long time. I’m not recommending you do anything illegal, but if it were me, and my bond was only ten gees, I’d disappear into Mexico and
never ever
come back to Arizona.’

‘I’ve been told I’m dead as soon as I touch down on a prison yard.’

‘How come?’

‘That hood’s got a hit out on me now for blasting their homies. And my victims have family members in the prison system.’

I didn’t know what to say to comfort him. Hearing he was facing multiple life sentences and possibly the death penalty had given me a sense of relief that I wasn’t in that much trouble. I steered the conversation around to parties, and he reminisced about his rave experiences.

To see a doctor you had to beg a guard for a form called a medical tank order. If the guard was in a good mood he might give you one on his next security walk. You then had to return the form to the guard, who had to sign it, and hope it survived its journey through various departments to the medical staff. The medical staff decided who got seen and who didn’t. Depending upon how serious they deemed the nature of your complaint, they’d call you to Medical in a few days’ time at the earliest, call you weeks or months later, or not call you at all. The medical staff operated under the assumption that most of the sick inmates were fakers. They often turned away genuine cases, resulting in deaths and life-threatening situations.

Someone decided Lev was the closest thing we had to a doctor. Inmates from all of the races inundated him with demands for medical treatment due to a menace from the insect world: spiders that crawled on us during the night and bit while we slept. The culprit was rarely seen. Some thought it the brown recluse, others the Arizona brown. Whatever the spider, the result was always the same: during the first few days, the bite would slowly expand from a small white blister to a pus-oozing sore; over the next few, tissue would slough away from the abscess leaving a sunken ulcerated crater, exposing underlying tissue. These holes were sometimes as broad as the palm of a hand. Other side effects included fever, chills, vomiting and shock.