Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As bad as the rock was, I know now that the hole is worse. Back then I would have done anything to get out of G-unit, so when the opportunity came to move to I-unit, I volunteered. All of the other inmates told me how wild it was over there and how inmates were always getting stabbed up on I-unit. It’s gotta be better than this shit. Fuck it.

  I-unit was located under the gym and was “open dorm” (no cells). Ninety or so inmates called the place home, with its five rows of bunks and its smell—like cat piss or something, but sweet. Candied cat piss. The first and last rows were bunk beds, and the three rows between them were single beds. The rows were referred to as streets: First Street, Second Street—you get the idea. I was assigned to a bunk above a black guy who was a for-real, no-shit African. He went by the name Mac, and he worked in the kitchen. We eventually started to kick it some, and he would look out for me by bringing an extra sandwich from the kitchen sometimes. Mac had a thick accent, and you had to listen to him real close to understand. He seemed to be a good, genuine dude.

  A couple of days after my arrival on I-unit I was pulled out for orientation. It was held in the gym, and I received a rule book for the facility and another pamphlet, which really struck me at the time and has stayed with me since. I was told that drugs were discouraged at this facility, but that if I was using, I needed to read the pamphlet. It had the expected stuff about HIV/AIDS, and it also had a diagram with directions on how to bleach out a syringe. Holy shit. How fucked is this facility if they’re like, “To hell with it! At least clean your shit right!” Just one of those things I’ve never forgotten.

  Hace hici-mokkeye. Creek Indian term for marijuana joint. Literally, it translates to “drunken cigarette.” After a few weeks on I-unit, another Native who went by the name Vic Smooth asked me if I fucked with it. I said I did. Vic gave me a joint, which we then smoked together. He said, “I notice you’ve been getting visits,” and asked me who I had coming up to see me. I told him it was my mom and my wife. Vic nodded a knowing nod and asked, “They don’t be gettin’ down?” I told him that they hadn’t, and asked him how difficult it was to get drugs in through visits. Vic said, “Ain’t shit,” and ran it all down for me.

  So, at my next visit I ran it all down for my mother. “Mom, check it out. You know, I’m trying to smoke some weed to chill my ass out. I need you bring me some.”

  “Jesus. How?”

  I told her to get the weed and take out the seeds and stems, and then to buy some little water balloons and fill two or three of them with weed. “Cut a hole in the bottom of your pocket, that way you can put the balloons in your panties, and when you go to get a snack for me, you stick your hand in your pocket and reach across your panties and grab the balloons. That way, it looks like you’re digging for change.”

  “And then?”

  “Keep the balloons in your hand. Microwave my sandwich, and grab some napkins. Come back to the table. Let me finish my sandwich, and while I’m doing that, put the balloons in a napkin and wad them up.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “While you’re doing that, I’ll be wiping my mouth with other napkins and wadding them up, placing them on the table. You’ll set your napkin next to mine, and when I finish the sandwich, I’ll grab all the trash to throw away in the can. I’ll palm your napkin in the process, see? Then I’ll fish the balloons out of the napkin and keep them in my hand.”

  “Yeah, but what then? Geez, Ed. You can’t just carry that stuff back in. How are you going to hide the balloons once you get them in your hand?” My mom had that look of half concerned disappointment, half brokenheartedness, which I had seen before whenever I’d been in trouble growing up. I also could see that she was going to do whatever I asked. My mom raised me with no help at all from anyone, and she really tried to do her best by me. But I was her baby, and she just didn’t have it in her to say no in what she perceived was my hour of need.

  “Just listen, okay? You get me some peanut M&Ms. I’ll eat a handful, and when I get to the last few in the bag, I’ll pour them in my hand with the balloons and slap them all in my mouth at once. I’ll work the balloons under my tongue. Then I’ll chew up the M&Ms, swallow them, and swallow the balloons right behind them. That’s the plan.”

  The first time we tried it, which was a couple of weeks later, it worked perfectly. I got back to my bunk, then hit the bathroom and started trying to throw up the balloons. The initial part of the process had been worrisome, but this was definitely the most difficult part of the operation. I remember I couldn’t get them to come up. I tried everything. I even drank a shampoo mixture in an attempt to make myself sick. Didn’t work. I used a toothbrush to gag myself and only managed to bust vessels in my eyes from straining so hard.

  On to plan B—catch them coming out the other end, if they didn’t get eaten up by my stomach acids. I think it took me about two days of digging through my own shit to finally get the balloons back, but I did it. It was a lot of work for just short of seven grams of Oklahoma homegrown. So Vic and I smoked a fat joint, and I gave him another for schooling me on what I’d needed to know. Hace hici-mokkeye. It sure made I-unit seem like a better place. Compared to the rock, I-unit didn’t seem so bad, but I wasn’t destined to stay there much longer.

  I had met this dude we called Black Bean. He was a black guy, and his mama had named him Bert. Bert Smalley. How he got the name Black Bean, I don’t know. That’s what he was called though, and I had been kind of kickin’ it with him and some of his dudes, shooting hoops and playing spades. So one day, Vic and I had smoked a big joint. We got stupid high, and I was cheesing my ass off. I got real hungry too. Later that night, Bean had looked out for me by giving me a bag of coffee and a rack of cookies. A dude’s got to be real careful what he accepts in prison from another inmate. No matter how innocent it may seem, you just can never fucking tell. So I told Bean that I was straight, that I had money on the way, and that I didn’t want to owe anyone shit.

  He was like, “Come on, homey! It ain’t even like that. You don’t owe me shit. I’m giving you this shit, not storing it to you!” (Storing is a practice in prison in which a guy loans someone something for that same item plus fifty percent back.)

  So I was like, “Cool. Good looking out.”

  A few nights later, I was playing cards with Bean and he asked me if I wanted some coke. I asked him how much it was, and he told that would depend on how much I wanted. I said my money would be showing up in a day or two and that I might want to get a little bit. I’d had a meth habit, and I had shot coke before, so I figured I would do a little, since talking about it had me jonesing anyway.

  We were on Fifth Street, and he had blankets hanging off the top bunk to give a little bit of privacy. I was wondering as I sat there where I would get an outfit (syringe), when Bean reached down in his sock and pulled out a bundle of what looked like yellowish-tan rocks.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Coke!”

  “Man, I’m not an idiot. I know what coke looks like.” (Obviously, I was an idiot, because I hadn’t known what crack cocaine looked like.)

  “Trust me. It’s coke.” He told me to stick my tongue to a small piece, and to my surprise, my tongue became numb where it had touched the stuff. Now, I’m from the woods, and I had never smoked crack or even seen it before, so yeah, I was suspicious. I asked Bean how in the hell I was supposed to shoot a fucking rock.

  “Just smoke the shit. Peep game. You’s my dude, so this is what’s up. We’ll smoke a couple of dubs together. I’ll show you how to smoke them, and if you like it, I’ll sell you some. If not, then you don’t owe me shit. Cool?”

  Shit, you already know I was all-in on that deal. Bean pulled out a piece of antenna he had stashed from a GE Superadio III and started to put a bit of Brillo pad down inside it. I was fascinated, wide-eyed. He had something taped or wrapped around the end that he told me was the part I’d put my mouth on. He put a piece of crack inside the antenna and lit it just en
ough that it would, as Bean said, “stay put.” Then he began heating it as he spun the antenna and inhaled the smoke. He held his breath and his nose and sat there for a second before exhaling.

  He repeated that same process until the whole rock was cashed, and then handed the antenna to me. I grabbed the silver part. It was hotter than shit, so I dropped it like a dumbass, looking real stupid. Bean gave a little snort, and just nodded toward the floor. I picked it up, and then mimicked what I’d seen him do. Almost instantly, shit changed. I felt like I could see farther, hear better, and that all of my senses were really clicking. I finished the two dubs with Bean and felt like I needed to move around. He told me to enjoy it and to let him know what I thought about it later, so I split.

  I remembered the smell, the sweet, sickly smell from when I first came to I-unit. It turned out that the smell was crack. Every day is a lesson in prison, just not the kind of lesson that folks want kids to learn.

  The next morning, while I was taking a shower, Bean walked in and asked me what I thought about the crack. I told him it wasn’t for me and that the shit had me paranoid and trippin’ for real. I told him that while I was on it, everyone seemed to be acting like some straight creeps.

  “Yeah, shit be like that sometimes.”

  I told him I was cool with that, and as I was washing the soap out of my face, I thought I heard him say, “Mmmmmm.”

  “What?”

  Bean stepped back casually. “That’s cool.”

  I thought I had been trippin’ again, so I let it go. I finished my shower and got dressed. When I returned to my bunk, Mac had some sandwiches and a couple of boiled eggs for me. They were right on time. I felt famished. I’d worked out that day with Vic, who had seen me looking real bug-eyed and suspicious the night before. He talked shit and joked about how I’d looked.

  I finished my day by shooting a few hoops with Bean. Before we left the gym, he said, “After you get done showering, swing by and we’ll play some cards or something.”

  “Cool.”

  I was taking a dump a little later and had that odd sensation you get when you feel someone is watching, staring at you. I glanced up and saw Bean just standing there.

  I said, “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just checking to see if you was ready.”

  “Nah, going to hit the shower after this and then I’ll holler at ya.” He said that was cool and then split. Couldn’t even shit in peace.

  After my shower, I went to Bean’s bunk, and he was the only one there. I sat in a chair, and he told me that the dudes had backed out of the card game but that we could still chill. I said that was all right with me. We bullshitted for a bit and then this young mixed kid, probably my age, came and sat down next to Bean. The kid didn’t say a thing, just sat there, eyes cast downward with his hands in his lap. Bean turned toward the kid and said, “Put your leg over mine and give me a kiss.”

  I thought my hearing stuttered! Can hearing stutter? The kid glanced nervously at me, and then Bean told him to quit acting “brand new” and said, “Silverfox don’t care.”

  Let’s pause this for a second so I can catch you up. When I first went into prison, I didn’t like gays. I guess I was what they call “homophobic.” Extremely. I had never been around it, so I guess that’s where the phobia part came from. I no longer feel the same way, but back then, the idea of a man being with another man in that way was disgusting to me. So anyway, I shrugged like it was of no significance to me, like I’d seen it every day, even though my teeth were set on edge, for real. So the mixed kid kissed Bean square on the mouth, tongue and all. Wow! I was definitely speechless. I mumbled that I had something to take care of and split pretty soon.

  A few days later, Bean asked me if I was down to play some cards. I tried to keep it cool, like none of what had happened the other day had bothered me, so I said, “Yeah.” We played spades for a few hours and smoked some cigs. After the game everyone left and Bean and I were chilling and listening to his radio.

  “You know I’m in love with you, Little Daddy.” Now, I hoped my ears were just clumsy, ’cause my hearing sure seemed to be trippin’.

  “What?”

  And this fool said the same shit! Bean’s voice reminded me of the rapper Tone Loc, balding, missing a front tooth. I immediately flashed back to him walking in while I had been showering—while I had been shitting! The dude had been stalking me like a lion stalking a zebra, only with words and “friendship.”

  “I’m in love with you, Little Daddy.”

  I snapped back to reality and stuttered, “L-look, I got a wife, dawg.” Bean said that he had a wife too. I told him, “Look, I’m not gay!” He said he wasn’t either. He told me he was bisexual. I remembered what I had heard on a stand-up comedy routine by Andrew Dice Clay and I said, “You either suck dick or you don’t.”

  Bean got a little salty over my joke (though I was hardly joking at the time) and began to tell me how he had been comforting a lot of these so-called straight dudes. He also told me to stay up late that night to watch all the guys who would sneak into his bunk. He told me about a white boy I knew, who always fronted like he was a hard-ass peckerwood—Willy Geegs. He told me how Willy would come and get dope from him and let Bean suck his dick and fuck him. Bean said that when they were done, Willy would go straight to the bathroom to shit out Bean’s “kids” and to wipe the grease off his ass. I started to feel a little queasy. Bean reached down and pulled a small bag of rocks out of his sock and counted out seven of them. He told me I could have them if I would just let him suck my dick.

  “What the fuck!”

  He then showed me a slip from the inmate trust office showing that he had a little over nine hundred dollars on his books. He was very persistent, bordering on desperate. I finally found my legs and got up to leave.

  Bean said to my back as I was walking away, “Stay up tonight and watch. You’ll see.”

  I took myself straight to Vic’s bunk, and told him what had gone down with Bean. Vic spat into a paper cup and nodded, seemingly unimpressed, unsurprised. “Yeah. Bean’s a buzzard.”

  I had heard the term “buzzard” and knew it to mean a gay man who would prey on young kids when they came into prison.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Hell no! How would I know?

  “Seven stones and suck your dick? Pretty good deal.”

  I looked at Vic all crazylike. He started to laugh. “Damn, dude.” And I laughed too.

  That night I stayed awake and watched from my top bunk to Bean’s bottom bunk all the way across the dorm. I saw dudes going in and out, but none stayed very long. Then later in the night—early morning, I guess—I saw Willy G. creep over there. I couldn’t tell you exactly how much time Willy spent in there with Bean, but it was at least two to three times longer than anyone else. When Willy came out, I watched him walk directly to the toilets, where he disappeared behind the wall. I looked back toward Bean’s bunk. He was standing up and smiling at me as if to say, I told you. This is prison, Silverfox.

  I avoided Bean after that. No more basketball. No more spades. Definitely no more kickin’ it. I spent more of my time with Vic. Sometimes I would chop it up with Mac. I was starting to get more drugs more often, and I had been doing a little business along those lines. I began to read a little. I never really got into books before, but I preferred them to the television. There was never anything on I wanted to watch. All these bad-ass dudes in here for violent crimes. Gangsters. And they all watched General Hospital.

  * * *

  One evening, I was headed back to my bunk after working out, and Vic rolled up on me. “Listen, Fox. I need to holler at you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Not here. Let’s take a walk.” We strolled out toward the wall and Vic told me how he had heard that Bean had been running his mouth around the unit, talking about how he was gonna fuck me before I left the facility. I asked Vic what I should do about it. Vic paused, rubbed his chin, and said, �
��We gotta deal with this. You got no choice here. You gotta stab him. Do it while he’s in the shower. I’ll post up outside the area to make sure no one else comes in. You slip in and stab him. Just like that.”

  Just like that. Just like that, I had found myself in what one could call a “situation.” Bean was from Red Mob. They were a Blood gang. Vic and I had to have our shit together or this little plan of ours would cause real trouble, probably not just for me, but also for the Warrior clique Vic ran with. It was clear from what I had learned in prison already that if I didn’t deal with Bean, I could find myself a target of all kinds of unpleasantness. (I would later learn that Warriors had beef with Red Mob. My situation was a convenient one for Vic and his clique. I guess I never questioned Vic’s motive in anything.)

  The next day, Vic brought me a knife. I began to wait. I grew more nervous by the minute. I found myself on the toilet, shitting my guts out. It felt like they had turned to water. After I had finished, I was washing up when Vic found me. “Come on. Bean’s in the shower.”

  I dried my hands, slipped my crude blade (a sharpened-up old butter knife) into my pocket, and walked back to the shower. Vic posted up at the door and nodded the go-ahead. My brain was buzzing. There was no time to think about it now. Vic whispered, “Handle this shit.”

  I pulled the knife out and put the lifeline around my wrist. The knife had a bit of twine attached to it in a loop. Vic had told me to put the loop around my wrist so that I couldn’t drop the knife. I headed into the shower and caught a bit of a lucky break, I guess, because Bean had just soaped up his face. I walked up behind him, stabbed him in the back, and at the same time grabbed him around his neck. Bean tried to spin in my grasp, as I continued to stab him over and over.

  I walked away as he fell to the floor. I wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. I didn’t have any idea how many times I had stabbed him. I put the knife back in my pocket and rinsed myself off as best I could, then returned to Vic’s bunk, changed clothes, and gave the knife and bloody clothes to Vic to dispose of. Again, I waited. I was waiting to see if Bean would be discovered. I was waiting to see if anyone would snitch me off. I was waiting to see if Bean was dead or alive. The waiting is always the worst in anything, I think.