by Gary Mulgrew
‘Mulgrew!’ Miss Reed shouted from behind her desk after I had been waiting nervously outside her office for ten minutes or so. I walked in, and waited to be told to sit at the chair on the other side of her desk. Her head was down writing something, her office in total chaos. Another decaying US government office and another person not looking at me. There were books everywhere, some new, some battered, some badly defaced. Book rage seemed to be an issue in Big Spring. Miss Reed looked around the mid-forties mark, although it was difficult to tell, as she hadn’t raised her head yet. She had curly dark hair, partially dyed, and from what small portions of her I could see, seemed a bit overweight and caked in make-up. I hadn’t seen any women so far in Big Spring, other than the psych, and I knew from Chief that the library employed ‘civilians’, so I was really unsure what to call her or what the overall etiquette was. So I stood in front of her desk awkwardly, waiting to be told to take a seat.
‘Sit, Mulgrew,’ she barked, waving her pen and still not looking at me. This began to irk me.
‘I’m a man, a human being,’ I thought, ‘not a dog,’ but just as quickly I rebuked myself. I was a fool to be looking for normal human interaction – I was here to be punished, and every engagement with officialdom was a reminder. I was a bad person, a crook, a criminal, a transgressor. I had failed society and society deemed I had to be taken out and ‘corrected’. I sighed.
Miss Reed nodded her head lightly at some of the books strewn across her desk in front of me. ‘Can you read from one of them, Mulgrew?’ she asked, still studiously avoiding looking up.
‘Fucking look at me,’ I thought. This was beginning to get to me. I looked down at the books – quite an assortment, and some of them surprised me. Paulo Coelho and a number of self-help books, lots of Grisham and Patterson, and even my fellow ‘crim’ Lord Jeffrey Archer graced her desk. I reached for a battered Penguin copy of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .’ I checked to see if Miss Reed was listening. She continued to write. I went on. ‘ . . . it was the age of wisdom, it was the epoch of belief, it was the incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .’ The words held resonance for me, but little, apparently, for Miss Reed. She was still writing.
Injecting more feeling into the prose and slightly increasing the volume to accentuate the negatives, I continued, ‘ . . . we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short . . .’ but before I could continue, Miss Reed looked up at me. I stopped.
I was right, I thought, about mid forties and showing signs of Big Spring wear and tear. Her face wasn’t as covered in make-up as I had thought and I imagined she probably had a nice countenance in the free world. But in here she was stern and unflinching. She looked back down at her work.
‘You Irish, Mulgrew?’ she asked as she picked her pen back up.
‘Scottish,’ I said, happy there was some sort of dialogue.
‘Where do you work now?’ she asked, back to addressing her questions to the papers in front of her.
‘I clean the toilets in the Range; I’ve only just arrived.’ I said those words, but six weeks already felt like a lifetime.
‘Oh,’ she said, sounding disappointed in this information, without offering a reason why. She was silent for a while longer. ‘Well,’ she eventually said, ‘there’s a position available in a week or two working with AJ. Do you know AJ?’
‘No, ma’am.’ I wondered if ‘knowing AJ’ was significant.
‘Well, anyway,’ she continued, ‘there’s a position for you if you want it. It pays $14 a month and your hours are 7.30 a.m. to 12.05. Let me know by next week; assuming, of course, you can manage to get yourself out of working in the kitchens. Do you think you are resourceful enough to figure that out, Mulgrew?’ she asked, glancing back at me briefly.
‘I’ll try, ma’am,’ I responded, taking my cue that the ‘interview’ was over. She didn’t speak or look up again as I exited the room, my colour-coded CV still tucked away in my shirt pocket.
I wanted that library job because I was desperate for some respite from the noise and constant chaos of the Big Room. Our Range kept filling up by the day, with new arrivals making the space feel ever more constrained. The bunk below me was still unoccupied and a few of the bunks around me as well. But I dreaded the moment, the moment I knew must come, when inmates moved into that last tiny island of space.
The most intimidating arrival of all had been a large black man (known as ‘Big City’) who, much to my horror, lumbered around looking for his bunk number before heading my way and occupying the bottom bed immediately next to my bunk. He was around 6ft 10, and about 350lbs, a giant of a man. He had a shaved head and a New Orleans Saints tattoo on his cheek which I recognised from all the coverage that team had received after Hurricane Katrina. Since we often called Cara by her middle name Katrina, I used to joke with her that she had a hurricane named after her, which given her feisty little character and sweep of curly hair, seemed rather appropriate.
This giant of a man was festooned with other tattoos, but as prison tattoos were mainly in black ink, they were harder to discern on black men, and you didn’t want to be caught staring too closely trying to figure them out. Big City towered over everyone and I could tell I wasn’t the only one intimidated. His arrival had been talked about for a couple of days before – word was he had a fifteen-year stretch for drug-dealing and had been moved to Big Spring because of some problems he’d caused in a prison in Alabama. He looked like the kind of guy who’d cause problems in a prison in Alabama. Or anywhere.
‘What the fuck are you lookin at?’ he fired at me, dispensing with the usual pleasantries. I was curled up reading a book, trying desperately not to stare at him. He looked the stuff of nightmares.
Big City’s opening gambit had exposed a set of pure gold teeth, favoured by many of the African-Americans in Big Spring. He moved directly towards me, his head and shoulders comfortably clearing my top bunk. This guy could have played the part of a black Jaws in a James Bond movie, although he would have been quickly typecast.
‘You from New Orleans?’ I asked, unsure which part of my brain was still functioning well enough to let me speak. I guess I must have appeared relaxed lying on the bunk, book in hand, but inside I was on full terror alert. My brain cells were on hyper-alert, preparing various exit strategies. But I knew I couldn’t seem afraid.
I’d heard a few new guys whimper at night during my first few weeks there. It was a haunting sound; the saddest and most desperate sound you could ever imagine. It was also the most dangerous: a clarion call to the wolves, the hyenas, the scavengers. By the morning the whimperer would be finished – the pattern of his life in Big Spring established. Part of an extortion ring maybe, someone’s bitch if they were attractive enough, or someone’s fun fuck even if they weren’t.
The worst whimperers were the middle-aged men; the Whites, invariably. Perhaps because they had led too comfortable a life before, perhaps because there was less of a structure in the white gangs, less of that bond that seemed to tie the Indians, the Hispanics and Blacks to their individual gangs or communities. I would lie awake listening to them – hoping they would stop, wanting to help, but knowing after my Angel conversation I couldn’t. It was the sound of complete despair, of defeat, of abject surrender. But then if you are in your mid forties or fifties and you enter the Big Room for your first night of a fifteen to twenty-year stretch – knowing your kids will be grown up and will quite possibly hate you, your wife or partner gone and almost certainly hating you, your career finished, your prospects nothing more than this room for years or decades to come – then maybe you would whimper too. Ironically, such things made me feel I was lucky.
For the first few months, perhaps for the first few years, most prisoners would focus on the l
ife they had lost, rather than the life they now had. There was always a key moment, according to Chief, when the inmate would realise that his life was Big Spring; that his ‘other life’, his life in the free world, was over. That’s when you saw the biggest change in them, and the quicker a prisoner could make that transition the better. But I was lucky. I was fortunate. My life in the free world was still there for me. I had a son to get home to. I had a job as a father to do. I had a daughter to find; to love and be with. I had cuddles to receive and love to give. I wasn’t ready for whimpering.
Big City loomed ever larger. I was struck by how big his face was.
‘You like the Saints?’ he asked as he came right up to me, smiling and flashing me the set of gold gnashers.
‘Naw,’ I replied, trying to act as calm as I could. ‘I don’t like American football.’
This wasn’t received so well, but then Big City changed tack. ‘What you reading?’ he asked, nodding towards the book in my hand.
‘Oh, Shogun. James Clavell.’ I’d picked it up at the library when I’d seen Miss Reed.
I wondered if I should ask Big City if he’d read it but, remembering Chief’s allusion to literacy levels, I decided it was better not to. Maybe he’d think I was ‘dissing’ him, and highlighting his lack of education, or maybe not. I didn’t know – Big Spring was still a complete powder keg for me.
‘It’s based in Japan,’ I said airily, fumbling for some direction, any direction, to take the conversation in – hopefully one that would avoid Jaws testing his gold teeth on my throat.
‘I know that, motherfucka!’ Big City exploded, although bizarrely still with a big grin on his face. I could see one of his gold teeth had a diamond in it. ‘I was going to ask you if you’d read Taipan, motherfucka, and if you felt that had more depth as a story?’
‘Erm . . .’
Before I could answer, Big City cut in quietly, ‘What, you never thought some really ugly big nigger could be readin’ your white honkey books?’
I looked away from him to the book, ashamed. ‘Well?’ he asked in a tone that left me uncertain if he was playing with me or about to whack me. ‘What you thinking about, white boy?’
I hesitated. ‘I, eh . . . I was thinking you’re not that ugly,’ I said. Big City’s face lit up, gold and diamond teeth gleaming, New Orleans tattoo creased by his smile. Maybe not ugly, I gulped, but not a beauty either. ‘A face fit for radio,’ as my old friend Joe would have said.
‘OK, OK. That works. That’s OK,’ Big City said, still smiling, as he offered his catcher’s mitt of a hand for a fist bump. ‘We could be a’ight,’ he continued. ‘A’ight indeed. You’re from Scotland, right?’ he asked, surprising me again.
‘Yeah, Glasgow.’ I stopped myself from saying Pollok.
‘Is all that Braveheart shit true, then?’ Big City asked, as he started unpacking his things into his locker and onto his unfeasibly small bed. Once again I was grateful to Mel Gibson for the fact that for so many Americans, and for so many of the inmates in Big Spring, their reference point for Scotland was positive. Before Braveheart came out it would have been Brigadoon and I would already be a dead Scotsman.
‘No, a load of rubbish really,’ I said. He stopped and looked at me.
‘Shame,’ he said. ‘Best film Mel Gibson done, in my view.’
Another bunk filled, I mused, trying to get on with my book, and this time by someone not half as frightening as he seemed. But how long could my luck hold out? And what species of prison life would end up occupying the bed immediately below mine?
Your relationship with your bunkie, Chief told me, was closer and more intense than your relationship with your wife; the lack of space making even the most marginal infraction the cause of severe disharmony. I had a fashion parade of prospective ‘bunkies’: every person who had entered the room looked first at the number on their hand then scanned around for their new bunk. I didn’t want a whimperer, as that would attract the hyenas to my corner, and I certainly didn’t want a chomo either, as I just didn’t trust my natural predilection for befriending everyone and anyone, sometimes in spite of my better judgement. That left all the usual nutcases, gang-bangers and psychos – I wasn’t really choosing from a good gene pool.
All of these stresses made it all the more important for me to escape to the peace of the library. Not only would I have some calmness around me, but there’d be fewer people – therefore, less chance of me putting my foot in it with someone. If that took care of the mornings, then in the afternoons I could come back to the Range when most others were working, again minimising my chances of getting myself into trouble. That would just leave the evenings to navigate; no mean feat, but possible. It was clear to me already that in such an environment with so many men – so many dangerous angry men, confined in such cramped uncomfortable conditions for so long – and with the guards basically invisible, that ‘stuff’ was always going to happen. I had to stay away from that ‘stuff’ as much as possible.
‘I’ve been locked up in a badassed USP high-security prison and a medium as well – both were far better and safer than Big Spring,’ Chief told me one day as I hung out with him and Kola.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, looking nervously around me. ‘I thought Big Spring was a low-security prison?’
‘Sure it is, Scotty. But all that means is that there are fewer cops around. In the USP it can be one guard to five inmates; here it’s more like one to a hundred,’ explained Kola.
‘What you have to remember, Scotty,’ continued Chief seamlessly, ‘is that if you put eighty normal dudes into a room in the desert and leave them to it for years it would be pretty bad. When you add in all us psychos and nutcases and gang-bangers, you’re left with serious shit.’
‘Serious shit,’ echoed Kola, clearly enjoying the theme. ‘You also got to remember that while most of them aren’t in here for murder and the like, these nutcases have got more than a couple of notches on their belt – they are career criminals, if you know what I mean. What they are in for is often the least bad thing they ever did!’ he added, with unsuitable relish.
Chief nodded. ‘What they’re in for is nuthin’ to what they done.’ I’m sure I caught him glancing at Joker as he said this. ‘Things really began to change about six or seven years ago, when they just kept jamming more and more dudes into these rooms, and we seemed to have fewer and fewer cops. And now they pay more at McDonald’s than they do a guard, so you can imagine the kind of guy that comes and works here now. Whooheee!’ exclaimed Chief, as he contorted his face to look like some imbecile.
‘Yeah, some of those motherfuckers are dumber than us!’ said Kola, without a hint of irony. ‘Shit, Scotty, you’ll probably be earning more than those jackasses if you work in the library.’
Not quite. $14 a month was a good deal short of a guard’s pay or the $200 on offer at the factory. But in the end it was really just a question of perspective. $14 meant I would have doubled my salary from cleaning the latrines in a little under a few months and potentially doubling my telephone minutes to 14 a month also. I’d never doubled my salary before, so I was definitely on the up. At 157 steps from the Range to the library door, I still had an outstanding commute. What more could a man ask for? The only obstacle was getting out of kitchen duty.
Fortunately, the opportunity came to me when I was sent for my work medical. In spite of the months that had passed since our last meeting, the young Colombian doctor seemed to recognise me. I was, after all, the guy with the foreskin.
‘Hola Mulgrew, cómo estás?’
‘Fine, Doctor. How are you?’
‘Muy bien. Now let’s have a look at you.’
This medical was much less intrusive than our previous encounter, and consisted mainly of answering questions about medical history and checking heart rate, pulse and blood pressure. I was in fine health and ready to be passed fully fit for work when I started scratching my hand aggressively.
‘Doctor,’ I began diffi
dently. ‘The only medical problem I ever have is sometimes I get terrible eczema, dried skin on my hands.’
He looked quickly at my hands. ‘I don’t see any sign of that,’ he responded, turning back away from me.
‘It comes up when my hands get wet or are in water for any length of time. It gets pretty bad,’ I continued a bit more hesitantly. All rubbish of course, but this guy didn’t need help in joining the dots.
‘So . . . working in the kitchen would be difficult for you?’ he asked, glancing again at my hands as if some dry skin might suddenly appear.
‘Si, señor,’ I responded with a slightly embarrassed smile. Nodding his head, he looked at me for a second then turned around to finish off his paperwork. Ripping off a piece of paper, he turned back to me.
‘Hand this in at the Range office. You are medically fit to continue working, Mulgrew . . .’ He paused for effect, then added, without a smile, ‘ . . . para la cocina.’ (Except for the kitchen.)
Knowing he had just granted me a huge favour, I thought about smiling, but decided against it. ‘Gracias, tu es un hombre amable,’ I said, with all the sincerity I felt. He nodded slightly and kept his back turned to me.
It occurred to me as I left his office how much my life had changed in such a short time and how, even in terrible circumstances, you can feel emotions of great gratitude, even joy, over the simplest of things. My expectations of prison were so low that the slightest kindness, the most marginal piece of luck, elicited such simple pleasure, and that thought in itself encouraged me. Maybe I really could survive this; maybe I could get home intact to find Cara Katrina, to be a good father to Calum. I’d just secured a job working in a run-down library in a Texas desert with a monosyllabic boss at $14 a month, and I positively skipped back to the Range. The thought of even a tiny victory over the system encouraged me greatly, but my elation was short-lived.
