by Gary Mulgrew
My view was partially obscured as the victim fell to the floor and it was only the sounds I was reacting to. The clinical nature in which the attackers laid into their quarry, and the fact that everyone else continued to behave as if nothing was happening, added to the surreal, almost eerie feel of the moment. I had expected violence in Big Spring and had steeled myself for it, but this just didn’t seem real. The older man was so limp he now needed two of his attackers to support him, as they held him up then rammed him once more straight into the iron frame. There was a sickening crack and then he was dropped again to the floor. The other two attackers stepped in and delivered the coup de grâce: the ‘lock in the sock’ raining down on the now motionless figure. Still no one spoke. The music continued to play away – the Mexican department store Top Twenty elevator hits interspersed by the vigorous whack of sock-encased padlocks thumping down on the prostrate body. Through all this, I kept sneaking glances at Joker and the others around him. All of them kept their backs to the action, although a few seemed compelled to steal a nervous glance or two. Joker never once turned around. His card game over, he was now folding some of his laundry, his back to the fight, although his posture suggested he was listening to each sickening blow.
It had all happened so fast. After thirty or forty seconds only, the four attackers moved swiftly back out of the room, each taking a separate path. They only started to remove their head coverings as they approached the door. There was a brief silence before the usual chatter of the Big Room resumed. No one went near the victim. I realised that I’d blown my reading cover and that I had been staring for the last minute or so. Joker looked over at me without a flicker of emotion and held my gaze for a second, as he kept folding his laundry precisely and meticulously with his unfeasibly large hands. I swallowed hard as I looked away – I guess he’d always be Choker to me.
Still no one had moved to see how the new arrival was. I could only see his foot, which twitched violently a couple of times. Any pretence that my life in Big Spring might be easy or that I would avoid all the violence had just been blown away, replaced by a new, harsher reality. I saw Chief continue to draw, Kola sitting cross-legged on his bunk playing cards on his own, despite being no more than five feet away from a man who’d been beaten unconscious.
‘The best thing you can do, Scotland, is to see nothin’,’ he told me later. ‘And it’s a lot easier to see nuthin’ when you don’t see nuthin’. You got me?’ I got him, but by then it was too late – I had seen somethin’. I tried to go back to the book my step-mum Audrey had sent me, but I couldn’t begin to concentrate. All I could think about was a man bleeding in the middle of our room. I was increasingly distracted, frustrated. Although only minutes had passed, they felt like an eternity. Still no one moved towards the prone figure; clearly no one cared whether he lived or died.
‘What’s wrong with these people?’ I thought, the inhumanity of the situation suddenly hitting me. I had already jumped down from my bunk and taken about four steps towards the man before I was intercepted by Chief in a move that belied his overall physical condition.
‘No, Scotland!’ he said, putting his hands firmly on my chest and pushing me with a conviction that surprised me. Startled, I looked at him, and then beyond him. My new position afforded me a better view of the beaten man.
‘I just want to see if the guy is alright.’ It was more lament than anything as I raised my arm out towards the prone figure, who was still not moving. By this time Kola had jumped down from his bunk and was on me as well, blocking my view and my way forward.
‘Bad idea, Scotland. Bad idea,’ he was saying over and over again, as I tried to move away from them and get a better view of the man. They kept pushing me back and repeating their warnings, even as the man at last struggled to his feet. With astonishing dignity, he started first stemming the blood loss from his face and head and then, having gathered himself, started remaking his bed. It seemed like a determined statement of his intent to stay put.
Just then, Kola whispered in my ear: ‘Trust me, Scotland, get back up on your bunk, turn your back and read your book. Trust me,’ he said for a second time, looking searchingly into my eyes. I looked between him and Chief, suddenly wondering if I really knew them at all. But something in Chief’s look – compassion maybe; or was it just fatigue? – caused me to stop. I pulled my arms away from them both and without saying another word, climbed back up into my bunk. All the while Joker had been watching me, only briefly turning to watch the new arrival remake his blood-spattered bed. I saw him make another hand gesture to his minions. Like before, they flew out of the room without a word. Everyone knew how this sketch played out – everyone that is, except me.
A moment or two after I had climbed back up on my bunk, three men appeared – different, I think, from the first four – again bare-chested with their faces and heads covered. The second beating was equally brutal and swift, and again the victim offered no resistance and no words were spoken. People continued to play cards and to fold laundry; I continued to pretend to read, shocked and appalled by what I was witnessing, but too cowardly to do anything about it.
Again the victim lay prone on the floor. This time I could see his blood trickling down on the hard concrete surface of the Range floor. Although everyone was continuing to ignore him, the tension in the room was reaching breaking point. I was going through huge personal turmoil. Why wasn’t I doing something? What was happening to me in this place? Was I going to become like these people: folding pants while some poor guy was getting his head kicked in a few feet away? How could these people live like this? How could the cops allow this place to function in this manner? The longer he lay prone there, the more desperate I became. I contemplated going to help again, but I could feel Kola and Chief watching my every move. Just as I thought I could bear it no longer, the victim once more hauled himself to his feet. This time he staggered into the bathroom and washed off his bloodied face. It occurred to me I’d have to clean that up in the morning. Again I saw the slight nod of Joker’s head as another minion darted off on a violent errand.
This time three more men appeared, yet again bare-chested with their heads covered and definitely different from the previous group. How many of these thugs were there? The established pattern was followed through once more with sickening speed and cruelty. This is the price you pay for being recruited with shower shoes and chocolate – you become a foot soldier for whatever gang had enlisted you. This time, halfway through the beating, another man entered the room, without any covering or mask, and headed straight towards the already unconscious victim. He was shouting, screaming almost, as he entered the room, and the others simply stepped aside as he paused over the unmoving figure before aiming a kick deep into the prone man’s midriff. The abuse in Spanish continued as he assailed the punch-bag below him. He spat repeatedly on his victim, punched and kicked him some more, running gradually out of steam. This attack was different from the others – it was personal.
I had given up all pretence of not watching and sat on my bunk, my legs folded up in front of me, with my back to the wall, wondering where the hell I was. I hated all these people. I hated myself for watching it. I hated the people who had sent me here. Is this what those cunts in the DoJ wanted to teach me? Was this how anyone was supposed to be ‘corrected’? I wanted to scream, to tear the walls down, to attack them all, but I just sat there like I was watching a movie, trying to ignore a memory brought back by the beating – a memory I thought I had buried.
I was around fourteen or fifteen years old, and I was walking back home one night with my two brothers, Mark and Michael, best pal Joe and a few other school friends, Billy Lee, Jim Mullan and Raymie Weir. There were also a couple of girls with us. We were approaching the walking bridge between Penilee and Pollok, always a hazardous journey as there were never any functioning lights and often a number of the 50 Krew, including Finn and his chief enforcer, DumbDumb, would be lying in wait for any unsuspecting victim. Normally,
as the ‘Mulgrews fae Dormanside’, my brothers and I were OK, but on this occasion – perhaps still smarting from being cheated out of our paper-run money and probably fuelled by glue – Finn, his sidekick DumbDumb and about five others lay chase to us straightaway.
I managed to hide in a storm door with a couple of the girls, but as I hid there I heard DumbDumb catch up with my brother Mark and start to kick and punch him. From the crack in the door, I could see Mark wrap himself around DumbDumb’s legs tightly, much to DumbDumb’s irritation, as he couldn’t get a clear shot at him. But I did nothing. The girls were squealing; I just hid in the storm doors with them. Then I saw Michael appear out of the blue. Although much younger and smaller than DumbDumb, who was a fully grown man, Michael launched himself at him and Finn with a viciousness that belied his size. His intervention turned the tide, and with Billy and Joe joining in now, Finn and DumbDumb ran off. Re-emerging from behind the storm doors, frightened and ashamed, I couldn’t look at Mark or Michael or Joe. No one ever mentioned it, but they knew. And I knew.
That memory, that shame, had stayed with me. Over the years I had realised that none of us are necessarily cowards, nor are we courageous all the time. You have to try to choose what you will be as the circumstances present themselves and sometimes shit just happens to you. I had tried to learn to be more courageous after that incident. I’d thought perhaps I had become more courageous, and might one day have a chance to atone for letting my brothers down, but here I was in Big Spring, Texas, a coward again.
Joker barked some new orders to a couple of the men around him, who jumped up and steered away the attacker from his quarry. Still the insults continued, but I couldn’t make out any except the word ‘rata’, said again and again, with increasing venom. So he was a rat, and this was the retribution. The attacker spat on his victim once more and then was ushered from the room still ranting and shouting abuse. Everyone was looking at the attacker with genuine concern, it seemed, while the victim lay ignored and bleeding on the floor. ‘The parallel world of Big Spring,’ I thought, my head spinning.
I tried to return to my book, feeling sick to my stomach. The victim, I noticed with dread, had pulled himself back onto his bunk for a third time. But this time, he started to pack up his things. The Joker was motionless; this scene had clearly played out. I never saw a cop the whole time, and I realised then that in Big Spring I probably never would. They policed the edges of the place – the inmates were in charge of the rest.
Once he had gathered up his belongings, the victim made a slow and painful exit from the Range – less than twenty minutes after walking in. This time some other Hispanics lined up either side of him as they watched him go, spitting on him and kicking or punching him, often to the floor, his humiliation complete as he dragged himself back to his feet, picked up his load and stumbled forward again. As I watched this, I had a deeply uncomfortable memory of Sunday school classes and scripture lessons. This scene could have been taken from Palestine, two thousand years earlier, but back then some had been brave enough to step forward and help. I stayed on my bunk.
The savage beating had immediate consequences. Almost as soon as the old man had staggered out of the Range, the sirens went off and we went into lockdown: TV rooms closed off, phones disconnected, microwaves off, everything terminated. Even as the man was making his way out, some inmates had started jostling for the water fountains, realising that lockdown was imminent and that they needed to stock up on water. Some of the lockdowns in the past had lasted for days, the infamous ‘chomo beatings lockdown’ for six weeks.
This one was over in three hours. Having closed our Range, the guards ordered us all off our bunks and told us to strip down to our underpants. There then followed a limp inspection of every person in the Range, the guards ‘scrutinising’ our hands and fingers for any signs of damage caused by punching someone, or any bloodstains anywhere else. Of course there were none, and the lack of enthusiasm of the officers showed they neither expected to find anything, nor cared too much either way. Incidents like this were an all too regular occurrence.
By the time the door to the Range had been unlocked and the inmates started to file out for chow, everything seemed to have returned to normal, other than my mood. I felt very low, wondering how I’d ever survive in this level of inhumanity.
Kola tried to cheer me up telling me that, ‘This makes life in Big Spring interesting,’ and reminding me that I couldn’t solve every battle, or right every perceived wrong.
I listened in silence to Chief as we walked down to the food hall, my cowardice still taunting me. ‘Shit like that happens every week in Big Spring. Only people from other Ranges ever come to our Range to beat up some dude and vice versa. They cover their faces for obvious reasons and they’re bare-chested so no blood splatters onto their clothes for the cops to see later. And the deal is everyone else looks away. No one sees it; so no one can tell the cops about it. It’s gang business.’
‘But what kind of business ends like that?’ I asked loudly. Chief and Kola winced, so I lowered my voice. ‘With a man nearly being beaten to death with padlocks?’
Chief shrugged. ‘That old dude had a twenty-five-year sentence, which was suddenly commuted to five. Word got out he was transferred in from Alabama, and they kept him in solitary for a while until the cops were ready to place him quietly in the Range, in the hope he’d skip under the radar and miss out on the retribution. See, he got the reduction because he ratted out on some other gang members – someone in the Aztecas. The surprise is that they didn’t kill him. The shot-callers must have made that decision, otherwise he would just have been left alone initially then shanked during the night.’ Chief said all of this so matter-of-factly; his dispassionate tone sunk my mood further. I wanted more from him; I wanted him to care.
‘That’s how they treat a rat,’ Chief continued as we joined the dinner queue. ‘They will beat him until he drags himself from the room and checks himself back into solitary. And that will be the pattern for the rest of his stay in prison. The gangs will keep tabs on him and follow his whereabouts and each time he leaves solitary, they will beat him until he checks himself back in, completes the walk of shame from the Range. The Feds will always try and ‘lose’ him somewhere in the system, but this time they screwed up. Usually the guards are thick enough with the gangs that they will tip them off about who’s coming onto the Yard. ’Cos even the guards hate rats. And the dude that walked down without a mask on and was screaming an’ shit? He was the brother of one of the men he ratted on. His brother got fifty-two years.’
‘Why don’t they just kill him?’ I asked, sickened by the whole episode.
‘Oh they will, Scotty,’ said a tired-sounding Chief, ‘but five years in the Hole is five years of pure hell. They’ll wait till he thinks he’s almost home, before the Aztecas will make sure he’ll get his.’
‘Hey, tacos tonight!’ exclaimed Kola, right on cue, as the serving counters came into view.
‘Cool,’ responded Chief, as they eagerly grabbed a tray each and continued to move down the food queue.
After chow – most of my tacos went to Chief and Kola – I climbed up onto my bunk and, ignoring the books and letters I’d received, I just turned my face to the wall and tried to block out some of the chaos and noise around me. Sometimes it felt like living on a building site or in a busy shopping centre – just less comfortable. I hadn’t managed to eat or sleep very well since my arrival and thought about maybe dozing off and trying to block the last few hours out of my mind. I tried to read again, but the events of the day kept rattling through my mind. The moral dilemmas I was facing were draining me, and I found them deeply unsettling and confusing. I closed my eyes and tried to take my mind home to a place in Scotland, a quiet valley near Glencoe where I could walk untroubled through sights and sounds that reminded me of home. I had to hold onto them tightly, lest they would fade and leave me abandoned here.
11
PLEADING
I HAD A FEELING THERE WOULD be consequences for my near-intervention in the beating – my breaking of the rules by interfering in ‘gang business’ – and it didn’t take long before I had a visitor.
‘Escosais?’ I recognised Joker’s voice before I turned round. I’d wondered when he’d come calling. Beside him was another guy, taller, medium build, with a far more pleasant countenance. He had a goatee and jet-black hair, pulled back tightly from his face. He looked Hispanic, but probably second generation, and this was confirmed by his American accent. They’ve probably come to choke me, I thought, feeling so tired and drained I didn’t actually care.
‘Hi Scotland, how you doin’?’ the second guy asked, as he offered me a fist bump. Bumping back, I sat upright on my bunk wondering what was coming next.
‘People call me Angel,’ my new friend said chirpily. ‘Can you come down, Scotland? We need to talk.’ With that he turned to the non-smiling Joker and, putting his hand on his shoulder, said, ‘Gracias amigo.’
