by Gary Mulgrew
I motioned to ask if I could sit down on the bunk across from him.
‘Sure, that’s Kola’s bunk, but he’s cool. He’s one of the Natives.’
‘Natives?’ I sat uncomfortably on the bottom bunk across from Chief, my head bent forward and neck craning away from the steel frame of the top bunk. ‘Who’s Kola?’
‘I’m Kola.’ A man materialised at the foot of the bunk. He had the thickest neck I’d ever seen in my life and a squat body to match, as if he’d just stepped out of a compactor. He wore heavy black glasses – standard prison issue, I found out later – with thick lenses that magnified his eyes to an alarming degree.
‘Who the fuck’s sitting on my bed?’ he asked, the glasses adding weight to the question, as if he might not actually be able to see who was sitting on his bed. I imagine the question had a similar impact on me as Daddy Bear’s must have had on Goldilocks.
Before I could leap out of my skin and scarper off his bed, Chief had responded, ‘Ni-ya-hey, Kola! This here’s Scotty Boy, I told him it was cool for him to sit there. He’s new.’
‘What’s up, Scotty Boy?’ said Kola with a smile I couldn’t have imagined him carrying just a few seconds earlier. ‘You come to hang out with the Injuns in our own mini reservation?’
‘Scotty’s tribe are from Pollok. In Scotland,’ said Chief, clearly enjoying the irony of it.
That got Kola’s attention. ‘They have a shithole called Pollok in your land too?’ he mused, as if he’d found a franchise to rival McDonald’s.
‘Well, sort of. Not quite the same thing,’ I responded, regretting that I had ever uttered the word Pollok in the first place. The lack of space disturbed me and even in changing his clothes, Kola bumped into me two or three times. They were obviously used to it because Chief never batted an eyelid, even on the numerous occasions when Kola’s arse came perilously close to his face. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when other inmates came to use the top bunks and there were four people crammed into this tiny area. It began to dawn on me that I was going to lose all sense of privacy or solitude. There was simply no space in this room at all – and it had been arranged that way deliberately, to punish the people in it.
‘How come all the beds aren’t occupied?’ I asked, trying to suppress my rising fears.
‘Oh Range Four has only just re-opened since the riot,’ answered Chief in a relaxed tone.
‘Riot!?’
‘All those fucking chomos!’ responded Kola, looking and sounding like Daddy Bear again. I resisted the temptation to ask what a chomo was, but I sensed it was bad.
‘All the gangs got together for that one, although the Natives would have no part. Even though they are paedophiles and molesters, and I hate every fuckin’ one of those sick freaks, we Natives don’t take sides and we don’t judge unless it’s one of our own.’
‘So there are child . . . chomos . . . in here? Along with everyone else?’
‘Some of those dudes got fucked up real bad,’ Chief replied. ‘In there.’ He motioned with a slight nod of his head towards the shower and toilet room. The proximity to such violence was disconcerting, but not surprising – in the few hours I had already spent in this room, I’d felt the steady undercurrent of aggression and violence. Was this how it always was, or had I just stumbled in on a bad day?
‘Are there any, er, chomos in here now?’ I asked, anxiously switching my view from one side to another as if they would be easy to spot.
‘Hell yeah,’ said Chief. ‘They done shipped out half the population who instigated the beatings, everyone else got forty-two days lockdown, and then they just invited those motherfucka chomos right back in here.’ Kola shook his head in disgust, and I realised that even within this band of thieves, dealers and killers, there was a hierarchy. Everyone knew their place in it, too. Except me.
‘COUNT! COUNT TIME!’ shouted one of the two officers who suddenly entered the room. ‘Stand by your bunks!’ One of them had already started off in an anticlockwise direction, the other going clockwise, as inmates scrambled towards their beds. I got there double-quick, only to notice that a number of others, such as the large-handed Choker, just ambled along back to theirs, still chatting, seemingly impervious to the authority of the officers.
The room smoothly descended into silence as all radios and chatting ceased and everyone stood quietly by their bunks. It made me aware of just how noisy it had been before – so many men crammed into one room will do that. For some reason I felt nervous, my heart racing again as I waited to be counted, firstly by the anticlockwise officer (squat, partially bald, round faced and slow moving) and the clockwise guy (the handlebar-moustached man I recognised from before, almost jogging round). Both were white, I noted, as nearly all the officers seemed to be, except for a couple of Hispanic ones I had passed on my way in earlier. I hadn’t seen one black officer and I wondered if there was any significance in that in an environment where race seemed to be the single most important social signifier, next to being a ‘chomo’.
The count finished quickly, but not before I heard the short squat guard confirm to Village People that there were thirty-seven inmates – less than half full. Given how noisy and claustrophobic it already seemed, I wondered how I’d cope when we got up to the full complement. Having exchanged notes on the number, the two officers departed just as quickly, ostentatiously slamming the door to the room shut behind them. Everyone started moving around again and the radios and chatter resumed as I climbed back up onto my bunk. The radios were predominantly playing Hispanic music – bland, continuous, the sort of thing you might hear if you were trapped in an elevator in a Mexican department store. I familiarised myself with my rock-like pillow and tried to imagine what the rest of this excruciating day would hold.
Staring at the ceiling for a while, I shut my eyes and tried to concentrate on some of the positives. In the last few years I had developed a habit of saying thank you for ten things each night before I fell asleep. Despite all my difficulties, I’d always managed to find at least ten and wondered if even today I might still have a shot at it. I had a nice corner location, had met a couple of nice native Indians and survived my initial skirmish with the Aryan Brotherhood. No one had tried to stab me or beat me and Choker had resisted the temptation to check out my collar size – on the whole a pretty positive start. I knew that the first few days and weeks would probably determine how things went for my whole sentence here in Big Spring. Make a good start, and I’d have a reasonable chance of surviving the rest. And that was the plan. Survive. Get home. Find Cara. Love Calum. Everyone needed a plan.
Some of my roomies had already started queuing at the front of the locked door to our room, in expectation of being fed. Many had their own plates and cutlery, although I noticed there were no knives. Mind you, I reflected, a fork could be just as dangerous in the wrong hands, and many of the hands here seemed pretty wrong. There was an excited chatter as I heard the assortment of tattooed gang-bangers discussing what was likely to be on the menu that day. Others stood with a wide array of ingredients, I guessed for use in the small kitchen area.
The chow hall just represented another challenge. I had thought of maybe not going while I was wearing the neon outfit, but having been tantalised by a Nazi’s bar of chocolate – white chocolate, no doubt – I was hungry now, and I realised I’d best face this sooner rather than later. But in all my nightmares of prison, the dining hall was where a lot of it kicked off – the gladiatorial arena. In those nightmares, if it wasn’t going off in the shower, then it was going on in the dining room. Even if there was no outright violence involved, I imagined myself pathetically meandering from table to table, unable to sit anywhere, until everyone started pointing and laughing at me. Maybe I would just stay on my bunk, at least until I had normal prison clothes and could blend in with the other inmates.
Kola had come over to my bunk and was stepping up on the bed below to get a look out of the window.
‘Any movement out there,
Scotty?’ he asked, craning his neck to see. Other than a few birds flying in and out, the no-man’s-land between Sunset and Sunrise was completely deserted. ‘They call the diabetics and other sickies first,’ he said, still peering out of the window. ‘Then they call it in order of the cleanest Range. They inspect us once a week,’ he added smiling at me, ‘so make sure your bed is always made and all your shit is put away. You don’t want to cause us to be last out down to chow hall. ‘Cause then your roomies would have a problem with you.’
‘You mean Choker would come and visit me?’ I said, in a lame attempt at humour.
‘Who’s Choker?’ asked Kola bemused. I nudged over my head in the direction of a smiling Choker, currently chatting away happily to some of his compadres in the corner. Kola looked across and then smiled.
‘Oh, you mean Joker? Yeah, he’s a funny guy.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought you said Choker!’ he laughed.
Too embarrassed to admit my mistake, I just smiled back. ‘Guess it’s my Scottish accent,’ I said sheepishly.
At that moment, I heard the door to our Range being unlocked and a shout of ‘Diabetics and meds!’ echoing through the room. Looking back out of the window, I saw them start to emerge. Wheelchairs, crutches, crooked and broken bodies, shuffling and sliding as they funnelled out from the main central exit, fanning out into the dusty space between the buildings and then starting to head down towards the left, where I assumed the food hall must be located.
‘Would you look at those poor fuckers?’ mused Kola quietly. It seemed to me even the birds around my bird house had stopped their activities and were watching this awful spectacle as the sick inmates shuffled torturously towards their food. I saw two guys who only had one leg apiece, and a few others missing an arm, in each case with no prosthetics, maybe in case they used them as a weapon. Without wanting to, my mind’s eye conjured up an image of some crazy white supremacist guy suddenly unscrewing his false arm and beating my head open after I had upset him in the dining room by asking for the salt. I had to try to stop thinking things like that. And still the ‘meds’ came out, each one slower than the last, their steps painfully crooked, misshaped and full of misery. Was every sick or disabled person in Texas in this jail?
Without thinking, I mumbled to Kola, ‘It looks like the opening scene to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.’
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Kola, turning round to Chief. ‘You hear what Scotty dog just done said?’
‘Nope.’
‘Said those poor fuckers out there look like the start of that Michael Jackson video.’
Chief stared at me. I wasn’t sure if he was upset, bewildered or just furious. ‘The “Thriller” video,’ I added lamely.
There was another dreadful pause, and then the Chief erupted in gales of laughter, joined, to a lesser extent, by Kola. I had no choice but to smile along with them, realising as I did so that this was the second time I’d been smiling on this, the most awful of days.
‘Come on, Scotty dog,’ said Kola as he got down from the bunk and slapped me on the foot. ‘Come and have chow with the Natives.’ I knew I had to be careful about trusting people in this place, and I knew that one of my weaknesses (in this environment, at any rate) was that I tended to trust everyone. But I couldn’t help liking Chief and Kola. I’d always liked the Indians more than the cowboys whenever I used to watch those Saturday afternoon Westerns on BBC2 with my mum when I was a little boy. I would sit at her legs in front of the fire, and she would sometimes aimlessly play with my curls, rolling them between her fingers – one of my fondest memories from childhood. My brothers, Mark and Michael, used to like the cowboys, who invariably won, but my Mum and I supported the Injuns!
Kola and Chief seemed like a couple of decent Injuns to me, I thought, wondering for the first time what they were in for. Wondering, too, why they hadn’t asked me why I was there. How did they know I wasn’t a chomo? ‘What’s the prison etiquette about asking this stuff?’ I wondered, as I started putting away my Correctional Rules for the Big Spring Correctional Facility in my locker.
‘You don’t want to read all that shit,’ said Chief, shuffling up beside me. ‘What you need to know to survive in here isn’t written down anywhere!’ he added, with a smile. Kola nodded enthusiastically. I felt how close they were both standing to me and realised they were oblivi-ous to the fact that in the outside world this level of intimacy would be considered odd, but I tried not to let my discomfort show as we stood there, all three of us compressed between the lockers and bunks.
‘Let’s go before chow’s finished,’ said Chief as he slapped me on the back.
Once we left our Range and got into the corridor we were soon moving at snail’s pace, as inmates were streaming down from every direction towards the only exit from the Sunset building. There were hundreds of people, and it felt like slowly moving through a football crowd. I was anxious not to make eye contact with anyone, but I noticed quite a few people checking me out – I wasn’t difficult to spot with my day one attire on. Chief told me later that he thought it wasn’t the outfit so much as that I just looked ‘different’. ‘You look all European or somethin’,’ – that was his verdict.
Chief was right beside me as we slowly filed along. ‘OK, Scotland. First thing you need to know is we have controlled movement here. That means five to and five past the hour are the only times you can move around the prison, except weekends when there is free movement until 5 p.m. If you miss the move, you stay in whatever section of the facility you are in until five to the hour again.’
The heat and the crush of bodies was bothering me, but I tried to put it out of my mind. So many of the characters around me looked intimidating. For a moment, I wished I was shorter and not so visible. I thought about crouching a little, but reminded myself to try and stand tall and not look fazed. I desperately wanted to get out into the evening air and breathe, but when we finally did reach the exit, the heat offered little respite.
‘There are three counts a day,’ Chief continued, oblivious to my discomfort. ‘One at 6.45 a.m., one at 1.30 p.m. after lunch, or 5 p.m. on a weekend, and an evening roll-call at 9 p.m. Don’t miss the count and stand still by your bunk or else it’s serious shit.’
‘Burritos tonight!’ interjected Kola, with considerable relish.
‘Ah, I hate Mexican food,’ I said, to no one in particular.
Both Kola and Chief stared at me. ‘Shiiit!! You are gonna starve then, man!’ Chief exclaimed. ‘That’s all they serve here. Burritos, tortillas an’ all that shit. The kitchen’s overrun with Mexicans.’
This was another blow. I hate spicy food, and I had avoided Mexican fare like the plague in the twenty-two months I had lived in Houston – which had not been an easy thing to do. What with the heat and the Mexican food, this place was a Scotsman’s Hell.
‘Next thing you need to learn is how to queue,’ said Kola, as we crept towards the hall itself.
‘Fortunately, one thing we all got plenty of is time,’ Chief quipped. There was an awkward pause for a minute or two as the queue continued to creep slowly forward. ‘How much time d’you get Scotland?’ he added, clearly having decided it was time to ask a key question. Both he and Kola were looking at me expectantly.
‘Just over three years,’ I said quietly, looking straight at them for a reaction.
‘Shit, that ain’t nuthin’,’ said Kola disparagingly, as Chief looked right at me, his smile gone and his head shaking. Kola had turned his back on me – not overly dramatically, but I felt there was some message in it. It was as if I had seemed alright, then let them down.
‘That’s short, Scotland. Short. You’re short already. Three years ain’t nuthin’,’ Chief confirmed. ‘Most guys here got at least ten or fifteen. Shit, Kola here got twenty.’ There was silence for a moment or two as the shortness of my sentence (which seemed a lifetime to me) was digested further. Chief turned around to me again.
‘Why’d they bring you all the way out here to Big S
pring if you only got three?’ he asked, looking at me closely.
‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ I answered honestly. ‘No one told me, no one explained. My co-ds (co-defendants) both got nicer prisons on the coast – I guess I just got unlucky,’ I said, feeling very, very unlucky at that moment.
‘What your co-ds get?’ said Kola, suddenly spinning round quickly to face me again. The atmosphere had changed, and I could tell that this conversation was taking on some new significance and that it held dangers for me. A few others around us seemed to have tuned in and stopped their own conversations, seemingly waiting for my response. It was suddenly very quiet, and I felt under threat. The heat only added to my confusion. I wanted to tell them to fuck off, to walk away and eat on my own, but realised that wasn’t an option.
‘They got thirty-seven months like me,’ I answered slowly and precisely, watching for a response and resenting the implication behind the question. It wasn’t my fault I had such a short sentence. It seemed long enough to me. And what was everyone staring at?
‘What?’ I said to Kola, deciding to confront the situ-ation. ‘Do you want to ask me something?’ Still nothing was said. So I said it for them.
‘Bank robbery,’ I said, breaking the tension. ‘I’m supposed to have robbed a bank.’ I figured that saying I breached my employment contract would sound ridiculous. I saw Chief raise his eyebrows a little and nod his head lightly, as if in approval.
The queue began to move again and that seemed to ease the tension further. Kola had his back to me again and we continued to slowly edge forward towards the burritos. Chief put his arm on my shoulder after a minute or two and told me not to mind his brother, Kola. He had just had his sentence reviewed and had failed to get it reduced, so was very sore at the moment. It was nothing personal.
‘He was worried you might be a rat. That you got a light sentence because you testified against your co-ds, that’s all.’
The truth was that the Department of Justice (DoJ) had approached the three of us repeatedly to see if we would ‘rat out’ on each other, every deal offered slightly better than the last one, and always with the promise of a thirty-five-year sentence for the ones left fighting.
