Hard Time (22 page)

The high demand for Catholic Mass was not from prisoners seeking absolution from their sins but from those eager to exchange gossip and drugs with their friends from other towers. Problem was, only ten men were allowed to attend from each forty-five-man pod. And when the guards announced ‘Catholic Mass! First ten at the sliding door only!’, dozens charged for the door, leading to much squabbling, pushing and occasional bloodshed. Fortunately, when it came to the battle for the ten spaces, my friendship with Marco gave me an advantage. Marco had so much inside information he often knew the actions of the guards in advance. So ten minutes before the guards were due to announce Catholic Mass, Marco told Joey Crack and me to line up at the sliding door with all of Little Italy. With the Italians eager to meet Wild Man, we set off.

In a black cassock and white alb, tall bespectacled Father O’Donnell greeted us at the door of the windowless religious-services room. He wasn’t his usual chirpy self. We rushed past him, secured the back row of plastic chairs and waited for the other towers to join us. When Tower 2 arrived, Wild Man gave me a bear hug and sat in-between Joey Crack and me. The seats filled quickly, and the latecomers had to stand.

‘This is Wild Man,’ I said to the Italians.

‘Ah! So this is Wild Man! We’ve heard so much about you,’ Paulie said in his gruffest voice. He leaned across me to shake Wild Man’s hand, crushing my stomach and tilting my seat back.

‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ...’ Most of the inmates trading gossip hushed as Father O’Donnell started the introductory rites. As the Mass progressed, he seemed more serious than usual, and before the distribution of Communion he explained why. His mother was on her deathbed in hospital, and he asked us all to pray for the restoration of her health. Her illness had arisen unexpectedly, and Father O’Donnell wept as he described her condition. Tears streamed from Hugo. His sobbing attracted so much attention that he buried his face in his hands and bowed his head. At either side of Hugo, Marco and Nick turned teary-eyed. Marco made the sign of the cross and closed his eyes. Paulie wept openly, rubbed his eyes, dried them off, calmed down, looked at Hugo and wept again. Marco patted Hugo on the back. The more Father O’Donnell sobbed, the more the audience reacted. Some wept. Some offered sympathy. I felt moved but not enough to cry. The crying peaked when Father O’Donnell started sputtering. He paused to regain his composure then travelled the rows feeding the men Communion, which they devoured in the hurried manner of starving people. When Father O’Donnell reached the back row, Hugo swore we would all pray for his mother and that she would recover. Revisiting the subject of Father O’Donnell’s mother provoked another round of tears from Little Italy. We received Communion, and Father O’Donnell headed back to the front.

‘What’s everyone crying for?’ Wild Man said. ‘Look how old he is. His mum’s got to have one foot in the grave by now. She’s probably 100 years old.’ The congregation tsk-tsking only encouraged Wild Man. He spat an intact Communion wafer into his hand, put it over his left eye as if it were a pirate’s patch and yelled, ‘Look at me! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’

Prisoners stopped praying and craned their necks to watch Wild Man.

‘You’re all fucking sinners! You don’t fool me! You’re all going straight to hell!’ Wild Man’s maniacal laughter drew more attention.

Inmates elbowed each other until the majority had turned around to look at Wild Man. Reactions from Little Italy ranged from an appalled Hugo to an amused Paulie.

Wild Man removed the Communion wafer from his eye and launched it at Father O’Donnell, who was approaching the front of the room with his back facing us. The onlookers steered their heads, following the trajectory of the Body of Christ. It ascended steadily. When it skimmed the ceiling, a few men whoa’d. The skim should have knocked it off course, but it continued on, descending at a steady rate, arcing relentlessly towards the priest as if under the guidance of an invisible evil hand. Just as Father O’Donnell placed down the ciborium, a few arms from the front row shot up but failed to stop the wafer from hitting the priest square in the back like a perfectly aimed Frisbee. The congregation gasped. Wild Man said, ‘Bull’s eye!’ The worshippers shook their heads or snickered, but no one spoke up against Wild Man. Nick and Marco were speechless. In a show of disapproval, Hugo took his seat to the front row.

‘He’s a fucking lunatic,’ Paulie said, grinning. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘He’s worse in real life than he is in Joey Crack’s stories.’

Fortunately, Father O’Donnell didn’t notice the Communion wafer roll across the floor and settle under the table he’d set up with holy water and Christian pamphlets. When Mass ended, Hugo discreetly pocketed it.

Wild Man continued his antics in the corridor. ‘Fucking church, eh? That priest can kiss my arse!’ He dropped his pink boxers and mooned the prisoners, failing to notice the arrival of a female guard.

‘You’re on report! Give me your ID!’ she yelled, her face pinched. She called backup, who handcuffed Wild Man and led him away.

The following week, Wild Man was still in the hole, unable to join the rowdy cheering in Catholic Mass when a joyous Father O’Donnell announced his mother was out of hospital and on the mend.

By the end of 2002, Marco and his Praetorian guards seemed to have more control over Tower 6 than the jail administration. Every day, the guards chose Little Italy to serve chow and turned a blind eye when they stole the leftover Ladmo bags and trays and divvied the food out to the heads of all of the races. They were applying Troll’s law –
he who controls the food controls the prisoners
– on a mass scale. Business was booming for the ‘two-for-one store’ Marco ran out of D15, which enabled inmates to buy commissary provided they repaid double on ‘store day’ – the day of the week our commissary orders were delivered. Whenever the goon squad was due to raid our pod, Marco knew in advance. During such searches, the guards confiscated our extra clothing, towels and sheets, but Marco simply had the next shift walk Little Italy to the property room. They would return with mountains of fresh laundry, grinning triumphantly.

Marco dealt with disgruntled inmates sympathetically. He presided over the kangaroo court of white-inmate conflicts, and when he banished inmates from our pod or decreed they must settle things by fighting, everyone later commented on how fairly he’d adjudicated. His power was such he could have the guards move any inmate in or out of our pod, and he was inundated with requests from inmates wanting to move. They mostly wanted to move into our pod, which was humming with the vibrancy of Little Italy.

Settling into a disciplined study and exercise regimen was helping the time go by for me. Lying on my bunk at angles that minimised the discomfort of my bedsores, I read for hours. At first, the abundance of time to read rekindled my teenage obsession with stock-market books. But then a prisoner urged me to read two novels: George Orwell’s
1984
and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. Prior to my arrest, I had considered reading fiction a frivolous pastime. The last novel I’d read was
To Kill a Mockingbird
, required reading in high school. But in the dystopian jail environment, I related to Orwell’s Big Brother and Room 101. Reading Huxley, I saw parallels in my life with the characters taking grams of the hallucinogenic drug soma and orgying. These books dramatised two things I hadn’t stopped dwelling on since my arrest: the excesses of my lifestyle and the justice system.

I’d been doing yoga exercises almost daily since I read
Yoga Made Easy
sent by my sister, Karen. At first I saw the book as an attempt at effemination and hid it under my mattress to avoid being mocked. But Karen insisted I give the basic postures a try, and I felt so relaxed after stretching my cables I kept coming back for more. I was soon proficient in postures such as the cobra, forward bend, cat, dog, side bend and seated spinal twist, and I yearned to master the harder ones.

As well as working out with Marco, I established a second workout partner, Burklev, a Canadian of Yugoslavian descent who’d been arrested on his bicycle after policemen in a parked vehicle noticed him turn a corner without signalling. The police had insisted on conducting a search and found a water bottle with a small quantity of methamphetamine dissolved in it and a pool-cleaning chemical in his backpack. Classifying his bicycle as a two-wheeled vehicle, they’d charged him with operating a mobile meth lab. He claimed to have been a pro bodybuilder, but meth had taken its toll on his physique. He was six foot five, and with a smoothly shaved head and face he resembled a giant matchstick. For weights, Burklev and I used the mop bucket like I’d done with Lev. By attaching a towel to the mop handle, we performed rowing, curling and shoulder exercises. Other than Mordhorst, most of the guards didn’t mind us working out with the mop bucket in the corner of the day room. Every now and then one yelled through the speakers ‘No working out with the cleaning supplies!’, which usually meant his superior officer had entered the tower.

The glut of drugs and cigarettes in Tower 6 was thanks in part to the keystering skills of the car thief Magoo, a tall, bespectacled hippy with a spattering of crystal-meth sores on his face. He prided himself on his ability to stuff long packages into his anal cavity. Magoo set himself up as a mule for hire. His fee: a percentage of what he smuggled in. At Visitation, I watched Magoo observing the guards through his thick-lensed glasses. When a querying visitor distracted Officer Green, Magoo received some cellophane-wrapped packages under the table, which disappeared into his trousers. He didn’t even flinch as he deposited them deep enough in his behind so as not to peek out during the strip search. He received numerous visits each week from strangers bearing such packages and never got caught or sent to a dry cell to defecate, even though after each visit he walked in a bandy-legged, leaning-back way as if he’d been speared in the behind.

The sense of community spirit in our pod rose even further when we adopted a needy youngster named Slopester as our son. Eighteen-year-old Slopester had been living on the streets of Sunnyslope, a crack and crystal-meth hub of Phoenix, with his younger sister. With his mouth closed, he resembled Christopher Walken. But he smiled constantly, displaying a graveyard of brown teeth. Caught shoplifting clothes from Dillard’s in Paradise Valley Mall, he’d pulled a butterfly knife on an employee. Arrested in the parking lot, he was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. In Durango, a minimum-security jail, the gangs had preyed upon him. After receiving numerous tickets for fighting, he was reclassified to Towers jail.

Marco put him to work offering a hand-laundry service. The jail replaced our laundry once a week, but in the meantime our underwear and towels collected filth and sweat. For one item of candy, Slopester hand-washed two items of clothing. ‘Bleach is free,’ he tittered as he closed his sales. Prior to visits from Claudia, I took advantage of his laundry service. I also paid him to barter for state cheese, but he brought me so much it repeated on me for hours, and I had to tell him to stop. Needed and cared for, Slopester blossomed. We rejoiced to see him so happy. Other youngsters took notice of his growing importance, and he became the king of the waifs.

The atmosphere grew increasingly circuslike, and newcomers added to the furore. Kyle came from lockdown. His last fight had yet again resulted in his opponent defecating. Upon regaining consciousness, his opponent had been ordered by the head of the whites to clean the faeces off the floor before he rolled up. Kyle and a skinny African American did daily back-flip shows off the chow tables. The competition between them delighted us.

Christmas was the most depressing time of the year for inmates. The majority longed to be celebrating with their loved ones. But the antics of our Italian Mafia rulers made Christmas the best it could be under the circumstances. On Christmas Eve, we paraded around singing ‘
Felice Navidad
’ and our favourite Jumping Bill songs. A few days later, seeking adventure outside the pod, Marco field-tripped most of the whites to Muslim services. We outnumbered the Muslim congregation. Anticipating a race riot, the frightened imam radioed the guards. But Marco settled the imam down, sent the guards packing and encouraged the imam to teach us the Arabic alphabet. At the end of the service, we knelt with the Muslims in prayer to Allah, and the imam invited us back.

With exuberance running so rampant, Joey Crack had to take his shenanigans to another level. He wanted a Prince Albert piercing, so he sharpened the end of a paperclip, spent a few seconds studying his penis and then stuck the paperclip into his frenulum and out of the urethra. The blood trickling into the toilet didn’t deter him from shoving a tiny silver bar through the hole he’d made. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d stop what I was doing to stare at a man’s penis, but it’s hard to concentrate on writing when such things are going on around you. Sitting on the stool, I was amazed he had the nerve/insanity to gore such a precious organ.

Some inmates were astonished, others sickened as he walked onto the balcony waving blood-stained hands, blood dripping from his penis, with an intoxicated look in his eyes. ‘Look, fellas, I’ve put a bar in my cock, and ’cause the bar’s straight it feels like it’s ripping me apart. So what we’ve gotta do, fellas, is, I’m gonna put my cock between the cell door and the wall, and then I want someone to put their fingers in the same spot, ’cause we need to close the door on my cock, and hopefully the door will bend the jewellery, but I don’t want to completely close the door and crush my cock, so if one of you guys has your fingers in the same spot then we can judge how far we can close the door without anyone’s fingers or cock getting hurt. Got it? Who’ll put their fingers in the door, and who’ll slowly shut it?’

Slopester volunteered to put his fingers between the door and the wall. Joey Crack inserted his penis and positioned the silver bar, so that the force from the closing door would bend it. Magoo slowly closed the door. The jewellery slipped twice and the audience in the day room gasped over the fate of Joey Crack’s penis, which looked as though it were being crushed between the door and the wall. The jewellery held steady during the third attempt, and the bar bent.

‘That’s fucking great! My cock doesn’t feel like it’s being ripped apart any more, but it’s gonna hurt like hell when I take a piss! Thanks, fellas!’

December 2002