by Gary Mulgrew
With AJ, Kola and Chief, I had at least met some people I could talk to, and that I liked, although relating to them was sometimes a struggle. I tried not to judge any of them, because I’d stopped feeling it was my right to. Fortunately for me, another good friend called Carlos, aka ‘New York’, was to arrive in the Range about a month after I got there, and was one of the last people in to make up our complement of eighty-two inmates in the Big Room.
New York was white, quite tall at around six feet, with short dark hair. As I watched him walk in one day from my vantage point in the corner, I knew immediately he was an old hand despite his relative youthfulness. From his swagger and the way he unpacked his stuff and made up his bed, he’d obviously been to lots of prisons – which meant he was a player or a troublemaker. He looked European, although I could hear from his accent that he was a New Yorker, from Brooklyn I guessed, thinking maybe he was Italian in background. I’d lived in New York for four years in the nineties, and Calum was born there, so at that moment I had more in common with Carlos than any of the other 1,500 inmates in Big Spring. I liked New York and New Yorkers, their abrasive style sitting comfortably with a Glaswegian from Pollok.
By then I was receiving a daily copy of The New York Times, courtesy of an Australian journalist friend of mine, Peter Wilson, who had also been doing a lot of ‘undercover’ work to help me track Cara. It was often late, very late, and then would sometimes come in groups of five or six papers at a time. Sometimes it didn’t come at all, but that didn’t really matter – time wasn’t an issue in prison and news didn’t have to be up to date for it to be current in my world.
I took a copy down to Carlos a few days after he’d arrived and stood at the bottom of his bunk with it in my hand. He was sitting on his own on the top bunk, cross-legged, playing cards. Without looking up, and before I could speak, he said, ‘What the fuck d’you want?’ Maybe more Queens than Brooklyn, but definitely a confirmed New Yorker, I decided.
‘Nuthin’,’ I began. ‘I just thought you might want a copy of The New York Times.’ I placed it up on his bunk, smiling.
Without looking up or stopping his card game, Carlos responded, ‘Oh yeah?’ He paused, studying one card for a moment, but still not looking up. ‘And why would you want to do that?’
‘I heard your accent,’ I started. ‘I guessed you were from New York or nearby and thought you might like it . . .’ I trailed off, beginning to feel that this act of consideration was probably a mistake. I didn’t know this guy; I couldn’t guess that I’d like him or get on with him. I had to stop behaving as I would on the outside.
Carlos had by now looked up at me and held his hand out to take the paper. ‘Huh. Tuesday’s,’ he said as he threw it to the side of his bunk. Today was Friday. Now he looked at me square on. ‘What are you – a fuckin’ chomo or something?’ Deeply regretting my approach to him, I spluttered ‘No!’ as indignantly as I could and as I struggled for something else to say he continued, ‘Well what the fuck are you then? A faggot?’
‘Am I fuck!’ I answered angrily, ‘I was only trying to be friendly . . .’ I was instantly aware of the stupidity of that phrase, and the stupidity of what I was trying to do. I was annoyed at myself. Normal civilities didn’t work here; they were seen as weakness not a strength. I was annoyed at myself letting my guard down. ‘Forget it!’ I said and marched off back the thirteen steps to my bunk. Carlos went back to his cards while Chief, ever watchful, just shook his head.
‘And you can shut up as well!’ I called over to him as I passed his bunk and clambered back up onto mine. That started him laughing some more and shaking his head as he returned to writing one of his enormous letters. ‘Yeah, put that in your letter as well!’ I called over. ‘I’m glad I entertain you, Chief!’ I lay back on my bunk and stared at the ceiling.
‘Oh you do, Scotty! You keep us all entertained.’ I leaned up on one arm to see Kola grinning furiously himself.
I saw Carlos read The Times cover to cover over the next few days. ‘Piece of shit,’ I mumbled to myself. I noticed he spent quite a lot of time with Angel, who still hadn’t gotten back to me on my papers, and Joker, who still looked quite capable of strangling me at a moment’s notice. They always spoke in Spanish and I wondered if Carlos was a Sureno or a King – second-generation Hispanic perhaps. Whatever he was, he seemed an old practised hand at prison life – not a bumbling fool like me.
This was typical prison behaviour, though, from him and myself. Everyone watched everyone else in the Big Room. Who was talking to whom; who was arguing with whom; who had what; who went to whose bed during the night. Carlos wasn’t being particularly aggressive towards me – just protecting himself, and showing everyone else who might be watching what sort of a man he was.
In any case, people who were after sex didn’t go handing out free newspapers. It went on – I discovered that on my second night, when I took a trip to the latrines and found one pair of Hispanic guys pleasuring each other in a bunk, and another two going at it vigorously in the shower – but discreetly, according to rules I never enquired into. The Mexicans even had a phrase: ‘Detras de la valla, el no es gay’ – ‘Behind the fence, it’s not gay’. Other racial groups in prison seemed to take a dimmer view of the activity – but that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t indulging themselves.
About a fortnight after my first, failed attempt to strike up a friendship with Carlos, I was lying on my bunk one afternoon, when the cocky bastard suddenly decided to acknowledge me.
‘Hey Scotland?’ he called out. ‘D’you play cards?’
‘You after another copy of The Times?’ I responded disdainfully.
‘Of course I am!’ he exclaimed gleefully. ‘So do you play cards or not?’
‘No.’
‘Good, then I’ll teach you,’ he said, without missing a beat as he moved over and stood at one of the disused lockers at the foot of Chief’s bunk. ‘You don’t mind if we play here Chief, do ya?’ he asked, shuffling the cards with a dexterity both impressive and unsurprising.
‘Long as you wup Scotty’s ass, New York,’ replied Chief, barely looking up from this week’s masterpiece, as I clambered reluctantly down from my bunk and began my first game of cards with Carlos. There was no apology, no attempt to explain – certainly no suggestion of him saying thanks for the loan of the paper. It was the male relationship stripped down to its purest form: Carlos had just decided to be friends with me – and so we were. I’d play every night with him from then on, while learning Carlos’ unique perspective on the rights and wrongs of prison life and the life of crime. It was a card school in the truest sense of the term.
My relationship with my bunkie Ramon continued to develop well, because he was respectful and, for the most part, quiet. I practised my Spanish with him most days and also with Mendiola, an older man who had moved into the bunk just across from me. He was a kindly, gentle man in his early sixties, who had been in Big Spring for over twelve years, and seemed to have no hopes of leaving. He didn’t seem to have a job as such, but he got paid for fixing and mending things – including an old pair of training shoes, which he’d revamped with electrician’s tape and some judicious stitching, and sold to me for the very reasonable sum of two stamps. They were around a size twelve, and you wouldn’t get entry into a nightclub wearing them, but they were heaven-sent because they meant I could go up to the weight pile and gymnasium now and finally start to work out again. He’d also make simple wooden crucifixes from beads and laces which he’d bless in the Catholic church up near the Yard before selling them for a few stamps to the Hispanic inmates. I came back one day to find one left for me under my pillow – a gift offered without words. Mendiola was quiet and reserved, someone who seemed to be wrestling with some private inner grief, and I never knew why he was so fond of me. I would like to think I’d have been friends with him – and a number of others – on the outside, but I know that the pressures of overcrowded prison life had a lot to do with it. If someone sle
pt, dressed, shat and ate within a few feet of you month after month, and they were quiet and clean and respectful and co-operative, then they were your friends. If they weren’t respectful, then it didn’t matter how much you had in common – they were your enemies. I hoped I didn’t have any at that point.
14
BIGGLES
WITH A FEW PEOPLE AROUND WHOM I could consider as friends, and my job settled in the library at last, life was becoming almost bearable. I had begun work on re-organising the books alphabetically, much to the initial amusement of AJ, but by ‘C’ he had started joining me and that kept us busy and helped the time pass most mornings. Apparently, the books had been in alphabetical order years ago, but since so many of the inmates couldn’t read (between 60 to 70% illiteracy levels, AJ reckoned – about double the level in UK prisons) they had decided there was no point. I was perplexed by this – surely people who couldn’t read wouldn’t go into the library in the first place?
I’d probably said this too triumphantly because he just shook his head and mumbled about me being a naive Scottish asshole. He liked to mumble things like that about me a lot, and he was usually right. He was in this case. Illiteracy was shameful for many of the men, and he’d known dudes that had been coming to the library for years and changing books regularly but who could barely read. ‘It’s a pride thing,’ he said, in a way that made me embarrassed at all the opportunities I had had in my life.
‘You have a Master’s degree in Business, right?’ he asked me one day as we shuffled books about. We were on the Ds by that point.
‘Uh huh,’ I grunted.
‘An’ you got a Distinction or some shit for that right?’ he probed.
‘Mmmm . . .’ I concurred, regretting deeply that I’d ever shown him the stupid CV I’d prepared for Miss Reed.
‘And you had another degree before that right?’ he continued. By now I was down to nodding, understanding where he was going with this.
‘Well, by my reckoning, that just about makes you the dumbest person ever to have set foot in Big Spring,’ he announced triumphantly as he tossed me a copy of Days of Our Lives.
I couldn’t help but lower my head a little and nod in agreement as I stacked another book away. The opportunities I had been given, and look what I’d done with them.
The hardest thing was still the heat – which seemed to be rising every day but was, according to old hands like Chief, nowhere near its peak. Another frustration was the mosquitoes, which gorged on my exotic Scottish blood every night, and spent the day dozing provocatively on the wall by my bed.
These were slightly less disgusting than the biting spiders and the cockroaches – all of which seemed to thrive in the fetid conditions of the Range. The female spiders had a vicious bite and would often nest in or around the cold steel frames of the bunks or the lockers. The inmates were genuinely freaked out by them, especially those who had been bitten already, and the earnest way in which they searched and re-searched their beds each night convinced me that this was one small spider worth worrying about.
The females had brown markings on their hairy backs, and the word was they laid their eggs just under your skin, the young ones eventually exploding out of your arm one day when you were least expecting it. I wasn’t too sure about that, but I was certainly buying the rest of it, and completed a nightly inspection with Ramon around our bunks.
The cockroaches used to freak me out, appearing in a wondrous array of shapes and sizes every time I moved something while cleaning the toilet rooms. In the beginning, I’d spent half my time trying to kill them, but they seemed to be made of rubber, and if you did succeed in crushing one, the mess was ghastly to clean up. I overheard one of my bunkmates saying something one day about how the cockroaches were the only species to have survived ground zero at Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and after that I just decided to give up and try and get along with them.
Unfortunately, my peace treaty with the roaches was interrupted by two events. Firstly, I found one in my tortilla at lunch one day which was greeted by a shriek of terror from AJ. Two other big tough black dudes at our table all shrieked like babies as they realised I had half eaten it.
‘Jesus, Scotland, you one dirty motherfucka!’ said AJ, standing up and looking at me with his hands held up at his chest in horror as if I had just sprinkled Tabasco on the beast. The other two guys were now also standing up, slack jawed and staring as I spat as much of it out as I could.
‘Shit, Scotland!’ one of them said. ‘Why you done eat that shit for?’ I ignored him and kept spitting out everything I could, convinced I could feel thirty of its little legs still rolling around my tongue and mouth. The reaction of the kitchen staff when I showed it to them confirmed to me that we usually ate such things in our tortillas without noticing. Without so much as a word to me one of the kitchen porters grabbed the half-eaten tortilla, scooped the residual parts of the cockroach out with a dirty forefinger, then handed it back to me. I threw it ceremoniously into the bin and walked away to the sound of uproarious laughter from the rest of the kitchen staff. I’d need to start cooking my own food, I thought, as I stumbled out of that lunch, suddenly not hungry anymore.
The second event pertained to one individual cockroach; I’ll call him Biggles. I spent over an hour with New York strategising and chasing this unfeasibly large thing, black and red and about two and a half inches long, around my bunk one Tuesday afternoon before finally trapping it in a corner. By now, a growing crowd of well-wishers, including Chief, Kola and some more of the other Natives, had all crowded onto Chief and Kola’s bunks, and were chipping in with advice and ideas while noticeably keeping well away from it. We had been in lockdown for nearly five hours at this point and this had been the most entertainment we had had. There had been some kind of retribution beating over in Sunrise. It was the sort of gang fracas of great interest to the ‘players’, but to most others (including myself) the three injured bodies – all apparently stabbed or ‘shanked’ – that we’d seen being stretchered out of the neighbouring bunkhouse, signified only that another period of more intense boredom and frustration was about to begin. Was I becoming immune to such sights already?
For now, though, we were entertained with a beating of our own, and having surrounded our prey and asked everyone to keep quiet (thinking for some reason that might help), we started slowly moving in towards Biggles for the kill, with rolled-up copies of The New York Times in hand. It was a remarkably big cockroach, bigger than any I had seen or eaten. It seemed to know that this was it, the denouement, and contracted itself into some kind of ball, making me feel a little bit sorry for him. That feeling quickly changed though, when it lurched, contorted and suddenly metamorphosed into a different life-form altogether. Suddenly Biggles was airborne and flew right at me and New York.
‘Ahhhh!!’ we shrieked – I think half the room joined in as well – as it headed right towards us, my newspaper automatically swishing out at it. Nothing like as fast or nimble when airborne, it connected with the sports page of The Times, and was sent spinning in the direction of Chief’s bed. The Indians all shrieked, then started clearing off the reservation far quicker than any cowboys had ever managed to shift them, and we all stood aghast for a few moments, taking stock.
‘Where the fuck is it?’ asked Chief, tentatively stepping back towards his and Kola’s space. Kola was half hiding behind Chief, with his arms up covering his chest.
‘Erm . . .’ I pointed towards his messed up bed, deciding to say no more.
‘Shit, Scotty. What the hell did you do that for?’ He shot me an angry, aggrieved look, as if I’d just punched him. All the other Natives, including Kola, were looking at me just as accusingly. I turned to New York for solace, but he was looking at me accusingly as well.
Chief gingerly pulled his top blanket back. There was no sign of Biggles. A smart, as well as multi-faceted cockroach, he seemed to have cleared off in the melee. Chief started to strip the bed bare as the other inmates began to slowl
y disperse, today’s entertainment over for the day. I had already stopped smiling. In the furore surrounding Biggles, I hadn’t initially noticed John, the chomo, but as things calmed down and Chief strip-searched his bunk, I saw John lying prostrate on the floor near his own bunk, unconscious. Obviously someone had taken the opportunity of hitting him – from behind more than likely – as the rest of us had been focused on the cockroach hunt. Chief caught my eye-line and glanced towards John. I could tell, like me, he struggled with this, but we both continued with what we were doing – me attempting to write a positive letter back home, Chief to search for Biggles among his bedding. After a minute or two, John started to regain consciousness and for an uncomfortable few seconds he began to audibly moan, and my discomfort level heightened. I wasn’t stupid; any attempt to help a chomo would take me beyond the wrath of even the gangs and I would have the entire inmate population to deal with. But I felt my inaction lessened me, stripped away my humanity. Maybe I would become like everyone else in here soon enough.
Mercifully, John regained his strength and his composure and stumbled his way to the bathroom – ignored, as was the rule, by everyone. I saw Joker looking at me and averted my eyes, a feeling of shame coming over me as, putting my letter aside, I lay back on my bed and tried to think of something else; anything else. My mind kept coming back to the same thing however: that the decision to put paedophiles and sexual predators into our unguarded, unmanned dormitory was a conscious one. That this was society’s choice: to expose people like John to the random and almost constant beatings and abuses they knew – no, they wanted – the other inmates to inflict upon him.
