by Gary Mulgrew
I had often heard this argument made in newspapers and radio shows in the UK, that ‘those kind of people’ should be sent to a prison where the other prisoners ‘will make sure their lives are a living hell’ and I can imagine most of us, at some level, can see a certain attraction to that idea. But even if you put aside the degree of punishment someone like John should receive, it still left other equally troubling questions. What form of rehabilitation can ever work when you give inmates carte blanche to beat another inmate as and when they want to? How do you teach someone that violence is wrong if you implicitly suggest it’s alright on certain occasions? John was put in there with the expectation that the other inmates would beat him and abuse him. When the judge sentenced him, he should have added: ‘You will be placed in a facility where for large periods of the day and most of the night there will be no guards or officers present, but up to a hundred other inmates will have free access to you, where we expect you to have regular and constant beatings, possibly even leading to your death.’
By now, I’d seen John being hit a few times, usually by the same few people. There was nothing in their action that suggested to me their rage was anything other than indiscriminate – they were hitting John not because they were angry with him, just because they were angry. This was no moral crusade – John was an institutionally appointed punch-bag. He also fulfilled another important role for the inmates – he was the lowest of the low, a base point that allowed many of the inmates some solace. ‘At least I’m not a fucking chomo!’ was a frequently heard comment when the heat was on.
But I turned my back to John as he stumbled into the bathroom and everyone in the room got back to the extraordinary business of killing time.
Chief stripped his bed bare, and then stripped it again, mumbling my name all the time in disgust, but Biggles would never be seen again. Chief reckoned it took him three weeks before he could sleep again without scratching. As for me, after the giant flying cockroach, the extra protein in my tortilla, the fat mosquitoes and the biting spiders, even the noise of the rats running through the air vents at night couldn’t affect me anymore. Like so much else in Big Spring, a ‘world-class shithole’ as New York called it, I taught myself to ignore it and just hoped my sanity would hold, even though that was getting harder by the day.
Killing a few mosquitoes who’d spent the night eating me just became part of my morning routine. I’d follow it by gazing out of the window, mumbling a quiet prayer to ask for the strength to get through another day, and taking a pen to mark another chunk of time served on the window ledge.
After a few minutes I would stumble down from my top bunk, careful not to disturb Ramon, whose ‘privileged’ job of clearing the bins at night (which took all of ten minutes) allowed him the luxury of a lie-in. Resisting the temptation to enter the ubiquitous queue for the toilet, I would hold on a bit longer until it was less busy.
If Mendiola or Big City were getting dressed at the same time as me, we would all have to negotiate this in the tiniest of spaces, each precariously balancing on one leg to put on a sock or pull on a trouser leg, not even room for a chair in the cramped spaces between the bunks. Often we would bump into each other, my sweating damp skin rubbing against theirs, and of all the things that freaked me out, that freaked me out the most. I hated it. I hated the lack of space. I hated the lack of privacy, I hated the feel of another man’s skin slightly sticking against yours, his breathing, my breathing, the awkwardness of an intimacy none of us wanted nor could avoid. I found that the hardest thing; the part of the day when I had to really fight not to scream.
But I’d never scream. Instead, temporarily dressed in shorts and an old T-shirt, I would head to the kitchen and use the microwave to quickly cook myself some porridge and make myself a coffee. Occasionally Mendiola would have ‘obtained’ some fresh milk for me from the kitchen in exchange for three stamps – which should give you an insight into the quality of the training shoes he sold me for two – otherwise it was a powder mixture for both the coffee and oatmeal. With space at a premium, and people still chaotically milling around, I would climb back up onto my bunk, careful not to disturb either Ramon or to spill my coffee. Often I would just look out of the window and watch the birds swing into action as the other inmates would gradually stir.
Always at this time I would end up thinking of Calum and Julie and the other loved ones in my life; wondering where they were and what they were doing. It would already be lunchtime back home. Sometimes I would close my eyes and think of Calum, try to feel him, thinking that maybe if I could just concentrate hard enough I might in some way sense him; sense how he was feeling. Of course it never worked, but I seemed to get some comfort from trying. Occasionally on those early mornings I would allow myself to think of Cara too, but having no idea what kind of life she had, where she was, the kind of school she attended or what friends she had, I found it hard even imagining. Instead, all I could do was remember her. Her cheeky smile, her bravado, her strength and independence. Remember how close we were.
I rarely went for breakfast. They had oatmeal, but my own was better, and the sticky buns they gave out were an unwelcome temptation. Prison was stressful enough without clogging up my arteries. By 7 a.m. the room had begun to quieten down again, and I would head off to the bathroom and either shower or strip down to my shorts and wash in one of the hand basins if the showers were full. I’d come back to my bunk and dress, this time in my khaki fatigues, the standard wear for working hours. Packing up my Spanish language book, pens and writing paper and usually a few Sudoku puzzles, I would set off around 7.25 a.m. for work. Often I would meet AJ halfway and we would complete the rest of the journey together.
I would work through the morning, then head out at 12.05 with AJ for lunch, taking it in turns to eat on the ‘white boys’ side’ (his words) or ‘the dark side’ (mine). With lunch over, I would head back to the Range and most days now change into gym gear and head up to the weight pile or the gymnasium. An hour or two later, I would be back and spend the rest of the afternoon ‘siesta-ing’, as I called it, or reading or writing some more. Some days I would just ‘shoot the shit’ with New York or Chief or whomever was around. Whatever I did, though, and however many people surrounded me, loneliness covered me like a jacket, and my heart was constantly in mourning. I accepted my life was terrible and that inside I was sad. It wasn’t hard to see that nearly everyone there was. The challenge was just to hold on, to remind yourself that a better life awaited, if you could just navigate the challenges of Big Spring.
By 4 p.m. all the other roomies would start to filter back in, the filter a torrent by half-past. At 4.35 p.m. we had the second count of the day, followed by ‘mail call’, which had now become known as ‘Mulgrew Call’ because of the rising levels of letters I was receiving. For many, mail call was a daily, public reminder of how unloved, how forgotten, they had become. I felt I was the lucky one.
The doors would then be locked again until they started to let us out for evening chow, depending upon where in the queue our Range was. Typically we were first out, and the few times we slipped to lower in the queue, the drop in choice and quantity of food was marked.
After food there was ‘free movement’ until 9 p.m., and I would usually head up to the running track and walk endless laps around it until it was time to go back to the Range. Often I would meet New York or AJ up there, sometimes Turk the Knife, who had become a good friend, and once or twice a week I would play football with the Hispanics, showing them the wonders of the Scottish tackle from behind. I was sent off three times in my first four games although the second one was definitely harsh. Some days I would watch TV, but only once or twice a week. The TV room held about thirty-five seats comfortably with a few more spilling into the corridor. Getting a seat in there was like getting a box at the opera – a distinct kind of status symbol. The ground floor of Sunset had only two Ranges, smaller than the ones on the floors above – but still meaning that around 180 inmates were chasin
g thirty-five chairs when a big TV event was on.
If you wanted to watch uninterrupted – or unstabbed – you had to learn and keep to another set of rules. The Blacks tended to dominate the English-speaking rooms and would often have 80 or 90% of the seats. The Hispanics, meanwhile, would NEVER show any English-speaking programmes. So on some nights, the English room would actually be jam-packed with Spanish-speaking inmates eager to see some major sporting event, while next door, in a room of the same size, no more than a couple of elderly Mexican lifers dozed in front of an obscure Latin game show. The logic of that didn’t matter. If you were to attempt to switch the game show to something in English, you’d have the combined might of the Azteca, the East Texas Mafia and the Surenos to deal with.
Amongst the Blacks, the Native Indians and the Whites in the English-speaking TV rooms, the seats went first of all to the shot-callers. Even on a busy night, with no space and room temperature hitting 100 degrees, the shot-callers’ seats would remain unoccupied unless they themselves were sitting in them. The rest of the seats, as far as I could see, were ‘held’ by those who over time had historically earned or gained them. There were no hard or fast rules except that there were groupings of seats that always belonged to the Blacks (around thirty), to the Natives (around three) and the Whites (around three). Often the seats were shared between two or three people, and these were typically what you’d call the alpha males in the Range. A lot of ‘stuff’ went on in the TV rooms – both the settling of scores and the setting-up of them – so many of the quieter inmates simply chose to avoid them.
The white plastic seats we sat on were stacked up each night just before lockdown. When the 4.30 p.m. count was completed and the doors opened for dinner, there would be a rush to lay out the chairs, and place a calling-card on a booked seat. I had a torn piece of the Scotland on Sunday newspaper with the word ‘Scotland’ printed next to a thistle (or poppy, depending upon your view). I shared this right to a seat with Chief and now New York, an arrangement which worked quite well as we all liked different things: Chief, movies; sport for me; and for New York, Desperate Housewives or anything else with remotely attractive women in it. Chief had originally inherited the seat from another Native three years earlier and held jealously onto it ever since – aware, as we all were, that you had to keep up occupancy to ensure some new challenger didn’t come along and take it away. You wouldn’t just lose your right to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer if that happened – you’d lose face, and be signalling to everyone else the fact that you were weak and exploitable.
A seat-challenge happened to our little syndicate a few months into my stay. Some of the Aryan Brotherhood had been sniffing around for another seat for a week or two, so Chief, New York and I would always make sure one of us was using it. One night I was due to have taken the seat to watch a movie, but I had had to queue longer than usual to use the microwaves, so had missed the start of it. I heated up some popcorn, made some coffee and filled my water bottle. With the popcorn bag precariously held in my mouth and a drink in each hand, I started squeezing my way through the extremely tight spaces to our seat, getting in everyone’s way and annoying them as I did so.
‘Shit Scotland, get that big white ass of yours outta ma face!’
‘Sorry, sorry . . .’ I was mumbling through clenched teeth, still trying to squeeze through without spilling anything, and I had made it about halfway across the room when I realised our seat was occupied. Now I had a dilemma. If I went backwards, it would be a very public retreat. If I went forward, it was confrontation time. As I was contemplating this, I was still moving along, and before I really had time to think about it I was upon the interloper, coffee cup in one hand, water in another, with a bag of popcorn hanging precariously from my mouth. Right in front of me was an alumnus of the Aryan Brotherhood – the same short guy who had come to see me with SlumDawg the first day I arrived; the guy with ‘Bob’ issues.
He looked up at me and we both hesitated. Everyone else was waiting to see what would happen. With my hands full and my mouth clenching the bag of popcorn my options were limited, so I instinctively motioned for him to move with my head. He didn’t. The coffee was in a paper cup and was beginning to burn my hand. There was no space to turn around, to move back, or to put it down. As I looked at the burning cup, a thought flashed into my mind about something AJ had told me, how inmates would use boiling water to throw onto a chomo’s face if the mood struck them. The trick, AJ had cheerfully explained, was to load the boiling water with sugar first, as sugar sticks to the person’s face, then burns through, permanently marking the victim.
I didn’t take sugar or milk in my coffee, having decided that was a luxury I couldn’t afford in prison. Nor was I seriously intending to use the coffee as a weapon, but with it burning my hand, I had naturally looked at it as these thoughts started creeping into my head. Whatever my intentions, it had the desired effect. Drawn by my gaze, my favourite AB, perhaps contemplating a sugar-inspired scalding of his fine baldy scalp, hesitated then quickly shifted and got out of the chair. Moving carefully away from me as my hand started to really burn, he looped round in front of the TV in full view of everyone, thus completing his humiliation.
For my part, I sat down, quickly rested the burning cup on the floor, and engrossed myself in the movie, as if I regularly stared down methadone-crazed, tattoo-skulled Aryan Brotherhood gang members, armed with nothing more than a cup of coffee and a bag of popcorn.
Inside, though, I was in turmoil. On the plus side, my credibility might have just gone up a notch or two – I had defended the seat and had given a good ‘don’t-fuck-with-me’ type performance; albeit accidentally. On the downside, though, it felt like another life used up. I was stumbling through these things with more luck than reason, more Mr Bean than Mr T. Worse still, I had humiliated Mr Bob, possibly for the second time, depending upon how he took my refusal to join the ABs. It was a lesson I had learned as a boy in Glasgow – even when you have the upper hand you never humiliate someone; and if they are going to be humiliated, you try to do it as privately as possible. Public shame usually only led to one thing – revenge. It seemed every place and every situation in Big Spring carried some dangers.
More often than not – and precisely because such situations were happening there all the time – I would stay out of the TV room and play cards with New York. We would play for hours, just shooting the shit and talking to everyone around us. People would typically start meandering back into the Range around 8 p.m., getting things ready for the next day and chatting about the latest fight in the Yard.
At 9 p.m. on the dot, the count already completed, the door would be slammed shut, the lights dimmed. It would re-open ten or fifteen minutes later and then close permanently around 11 p.m., provided the count had gone without a hitch, but by 10 p.m., I would usually have crawled up onto my bunk, tired from the exercise, the heat and the tension of surviving another day. Closing my eyes, I would list my Ten Good Things: letters and books received; a telephone call made; good times with AJ, New York, Chief, Kola or whoever had been with me that day; a sunset; some fresh milk from Mendiola; a newspaper from home – and so it would go on. There would always be ten things. There would always be more than ten things, even in this terrible place. The negatives I would try to suppress, but I knew them nonetheless: I was using my lives up quickly; Angel still hadn’t come back to me about the gang membership issue; still no word of Cara; and still no meeting with my Case Manager. On top of that, casually, during one hard-fought game of gin rummy, New York tossed in the news that he’d been chatting to some people in the Yard, and heard my name come up. Word was, apparently, that the Brotherhood were angry with me for disrespecting them, and intended to get even. The noose was tightening.
‘Let ’em try,’ I replied, just as calmly. New York scanned me carefully, but I let him see nothing. ‘Gin,’ I added, placing my winning hand down before him. New York stared at the cards, and from the cards to me.
�
��Lucky Scottish bastard,’ he said with real warmth.
‘That’s me,’ I answered. And for the split-second it took to say it, I believed it.
15
STAMPS
ONE OF THE LESS LIKELY PASTIMES in Big Spring was stamp-collecting – a by-product, perhaps, of the fact that unfranked stamps were valuable currency. I received letters from friends and well-wishers all around the world, and whenever I had a stamp of particular beauty, I’d pass it over to Mendiola, who would extract it painstakingly, using a small razor taken from a disused Bic.
Another keen philatelist was a Colombian guy I played football with called Polvora. His nickname meant ‘thunderbolt’ or ‘firecracker’, and had been given to him on account of how hard he could kick the ball. He had a ten-year-old daughter back home in Ancerma, near Pereira, Northern Colombia, and he sent old stamps to her for her collection.
Two friends of mine in particular, Phil and Melinda, would send me a different postcard every week from the different parts of Asia they travelled to, resulting in a small treasure-trove of gaily coloured exotic stamps, and I’d marked out Polvora’s daughter as the ideal recipient for these. My own letter-writing done for the day, I decided to head down to the weight pile, and drop off the stamps on the way.
‘Para tu hija’ (‘For your daughter’), I said simply, and placed them down on the bed, folded up in a blank piece of paper. Polvora looked surprised and tentatively opened the paper. His hands began to tremble as he gently thumbed through each stamp, seemingly more enamoured with each new one.
It was always the Latin Americans – the ones who collected the stamps, who did odd jobs for the other inmates for a tiny stipend – who sent money home to their families. For many of them, particularly those from El Salvador and Nicaragua, prison in Texas offered a better standard of life than being free at home, and often they had committed no ‘crime’ except to be over the border, trying to earn money without a visa.
