by Gary Mulgrew
The world in which a strong, tough man like Polvora could take so much joy in some old stamps was a world far removed from the one I’d moved in, so far that it was hard to believe they occurred on the same planet. One required the other, though – I was beginning to see that more and more clearly. The huge sums of money we’d moved around in my former life depended, somewhere down the line, on the existence and desperation of people like Polvora. People with next to nothing, but who still had hope.
Polvora had still not spoken but was looking at each stamp in turn again. I was quite taken by his reaction and felt awkward as I started to move away. Polvora, so uncompromising on the football field, his face scarred by the unforgiving life he’d led, grabbed my arm and tried to speak, but became very emotional and choked on his words. He looked from me to the brightly coloured stamps, still holding my arm tightly as he continued to finger the stamps gently as if they were diamonds or pieces of gold. Still not releasing me, he looked right at me, searching my face and asked, ‘Por qué?’
‘Mi hijo es la misma edad’ (‘My son is the same age’), I responded quietly, surprised by my own answer, as I hadn’t really considered why I was doing it. I was suddenly shocked by the intense emotion that this scene had evoked in both of us. I felt sorry for myself, I longed to see my son – and at the same time I felt intensely sad for a man I knew had a ten-year sentence and would never see his daughter grow up, maybe never be a father. All Polvora had was things like these stamps to make his connection. Still touching the stamps lightly and without raising his head, he spoke softly, the effort apparent in his voice.
‘Gracias, Escosais, gracias. Dios le bendice y su familia.’ (Thank you, Scotland. God bless you and your family.)
I grabbed his shoulder tightly and nodded – two fathers joined in their pain, the longing to be home with their children, and the intense guilt from not being there, not being a proper father. Swallowing hard, I turned away and walked quickly out of the room, trying to force myself to calm down, and not really succeeding.
I headed out into the glaring sunlight and the boiling fucking heat and made my way through the various sections towards the weight pile, fuelled by anger and irritation – at the way things were, but mostly just at myself. Why did I have to get so involved with people?
It was free movement between twelve and one o’clock and I figured it must be close to one now as I stepped up my pace, already sweating and thirsty from the heat and dust. The weight pile was quite busy, so I spoke to a few of AJ’s friends and ‘booked’ the bench and a bar and weights for when they were finished. I walked across to the fixed bars and started a series of pull-ups, still thinking about my emotional interlude with Polvora. Was I angry? Was that what was fuelling me as I pulled myself up for ten reps with ease and in a manner I had never managed before?
‘Bueno Escosais, bueno. Muy fuerte!’ (Good Scotland, good. Very strong!) shouted a friend of mine called Toro, as he lined up along with six or seven others to use the pull-up bar.
‘That’s what ah’m talkin about Scotland,’ said McKenzie, my erstwhile tailor, high-fiving me as I took my place towards the end of the line.
‘Fuck this place,’ I thought as I stood waiting in line for the next turn. ‘Fuck these people for taking me away from my son.’
‘These people’ were everyone: judges, lawyers, politicians, weak witnesses, former colleagues, journalists. Even myself. My actions hadn’t passed the morality test, I knew that. My biggest ever bonus was paid for cutting over a hundred jobs – making their lives suck while mine improved. I ran a Structured Finance Group whose sole rationale had been to take whatever accounting or tax rules that existed and find out how to bend those rules without breaking them, to maximise the financial benefit to our clients, and as a consequence of that, the financial benefit to us. Was that all wrong, or was it alright?
Did that mean I deserved to be in here? Perhaps so. But did Calum deserve to be without me? Did Cara deserve to be without me and her big brother? Did any of the people who’d judged me and testified against me and written about me and withheld the truth from me actually know or care what I’d done or whether this place was just recompense for it?
Suddenly I felt I hated all of them – the witnesses who wouldn’t help; the politicians who didn’t care. It was my turn again. I hauled myself up at the bar in a smooth movement. I started to say some of their names each time I pulled my body up. Ex-colleagues; lawyers; magistrates and judges – their names propelling me like rocket fuel, each one thrust me further up, my chin comfortably clearing that simple iron bar in my prison home in the middle of the desert in Texas. ‘Fuck the lot of you,’ I thought, as I finished my second set of ten reps.
‘Wow, Escosais!! You motherfucka angry today!’ shouted Toro, his English gently mixed up as always, and his handsome smiling face beaming right back at me as I moved down the line, high-fiving all the various lunatics, nutcases and criminal masterminds along the way. ‘Get that shit out, man!’ he shouted as all the other Latinos and Blacks in the line shouted and hollered as well.
‘Yeah, yeah man! Get it out!’ everyone cried. I was pumped. I was so pumped, feeling so angry, so physically powerful but still so powerless in this giant toilet I lived in.
‘Yeah!’ I suddenly hollered with a volume that amazed me, clenching my fists and throwing them into the air in an unintended impersonation of Rocky Balboa. ‘Yeah, yeah, fucking yeah!’ I screamed as I banged chests, bumped fists and high-fived my way back up and down the line again, everyone now looking at me, the line joining in the frenzy.
‘Go Scotland, you fuckin’ hit it man. Hit it!’ shouted McKenzie.
‘Vamos Escosais! Viva Escotia!’ they cried as I kept shouting and shouting.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck the lot of them. Fuck every fucking one of them!’ Carried away with the crowd, I suddenly felt so much better, so empowered. ‘Better than any high-priced therapy session,’ I thought, the energy still coursing through my veins as I looked for something to do.
‘Git out of ma way!’ I shouted as I theatrically pushed some of the laughing inmates out of their position in the queue – something I never would have dared to do at any other time.
‘Git out of the motherfuckin’ way, the Big Man is coming in,’ I added, in that little known dialect of Americanised street Scottish, pushing the last two, large, black guys out the way, to continuous laughter and cheering around me.
‘Come on Escosais, rip that motherfucka up!’ shouted a laughing Toro as I attacked the push-up bar for a third time with even greater zest and vigour.
I flew into the first one, almost pulling my chest right over the bar to even more adrenalin-filled cheers. I launched into the second and got there reasonably quickly, as the cheers continued. The third was a struggle, as the shouting subsided, and by the fourth, I had hit the wall, barely able to budge my frame up at all, my arms starting to shake as I started straining to get my chin to the bar. All that adrenalin and emotion had surged off as quickly as it arrived. I felt knackered. Behind me there was silence.
‘Look at that motherfuckin’ white boy trying to get that large white ass up over that bar,’ I heard McKenzie say, as I dangled there trying to contemplate my next move. ‘Man that boy got a big ass, for such motherfuckin’ skinny arms. He ain’t haulin’ that gi’normous ass thing up no further,’ McKenzie continued.
‘You OK, Escosais?’ shouted Toro, the humour in his voice still apparent.
‘Uhm, yeah,’ I said, the effort of even just dangling starting to hurt. ‘I’m just hanging out,’ I added in a poor attempt at humour, too embarrassed to drop down.
The bad joke worked though, and Toro came running forward with McKenzie, Turk the Knife and a couple of others and grabbed my legs and started pushing me up and down to get me to complete my set of ten. ‘Cuatro, cinco, seis!!’ everyone joined in, seemingly more people emerging to push me up to ensure I finished the set. ‘Oucho, nueve . . . diez!!’ they all shouted and then cheered
as I let go of the bar and collapsed onto Toro and McKenzie, laughing hysterically with the rest of them, having forgotten, for the first time, and for just the briefest second, that I was in prison in the middle of Texas. The wonders of group therapy.
When I returned to the Range it was quieter than usual, with just Mendiola mending a shirt for someone in his bunk and Chief, by the looks of it, writing another long letter. As always, he seemed to be concentrating on one thing while keeping an eye on many others, and after a few minutes he glanced up and said, simply, ‘You’re on the Call-Out list, Scotty. You’re seeing your Case Manager in the morning. Miss Matthews.’
The fact that my Case Manager was a woman barely registered as I sprinted across to the Call-Out sheet pinned up on the Range noticeboard. ‘10 a.m., Thursday morning; Miss Matthews, Initial Case Manager Meeting.’ Not exactly War and Peace, but I re-read it two or three times to make sure it was all correct.
Chief looked up again as I came back to my bunk. ‘Mousey Matthews, huh? She likes you white dudes.’
‘Why does it all have to be about race with you guys?’ I asked, slightly irritated.
‘Because everything is.’
Refusing to be drawn into that conversation, I headed off to my locker to get my best khakis and start preparing for my interview. My heart was racing. This was it: the first step; the tiniest, almost imperceptible first move towards Cara Katrina, towards home and out of this inferno. I got to my locker, still lacking a padlock since I hadn’t made enough to buy one yet, and started searching frantically for my ‘dress’ khakis.
‘Scotty . . . Scotty . . .’ Chief called me softly as I went into a panic about where my best clothes had got to.
‘What?’ I snapped irritably, and span around to see him pointing at my khakis all immaculately pressed and ready on a hanger being held up by a grinning Mendiola.
‘We figured you would be in a tailspin, so we took the liberty of paying Turko one stamp to do a top job for you. We know how serious you take your interviews,’ he added drily.
That night I slept fitfully as I ran through the interview time and time again in my mind. I thought back to some of the techniques Jack Black had taught me on his MindStore courses. Meditation was all but impossible in the hub-bub of the Big Room, but one of his tips was to visualise a critical meeting or situation going well, over and over again, and I tried that now as I lay awake excited and worried about my meeting in equal measure. I eventually slipped off into a dream, in which I seemed to be sheltering from an earthquake under a table, which probably had something to do with the fact that I was still reading Shogun.
I woke up and realised that the trembling and shaking was still going on. At first I thought that someone was shaking the bunk to awaken me or that maybe I had over-slept somehow and panicked about missing my meeting.
Gradually however, after removing the eye-mask I’d improvised from a pair of old socks sewn one end to the other, and the wads of tissue paper I used to block out the continual snoring in the room, I realised what was happening. I groaned and pushed the toilet paper back in my ears to try and block the sound of Ramon, my bunkie, masturbating languidly below me.
At least he was on his own, I thought, as I gave up trying to sleep and lay staring at the ceiling as he kept whacking one off below. I put my arm behind my head, turned to my little window and looked at the moon outside as I wondered how my life had ever come to this point. How do you end up lying here at three in the morning on a bunk bed in the middle of the Texas desert in a room with eighty-odd psychos, child molesters and gangsters, while your heavily tattooed cartel-leading bunkie is happily choking the chicken below you? Life can take some bizarre turns sometimes, I thought. All this for supposedly breaking my employment contract in London?
With Ramon seemingly struggling to reach a crescendo I thought back to the words Judge Werlein said as he sentenced me. He hoped that, since I had appeared to have lived an ‘interesting life’ thus far, maybe over the next few years I would have time to pause and reflect on the error of my ways. Maybe, I wondered now, this was the kind of moment he had in mind: in the small hours of the night, awake and listening as my heavily tattooed neighbour pleasured himself below me? Maybe the judge was right in his way, that this sort of thing would be a warning to others and ensure that I never dared to break my employment contract again.
Fortunately, after much huffing and puffing, Ramon reached the denouement and my bed stopped shaking. Within moments he was sound asleep, seemingly untroubled by the kind of thoughts that made me sleep even more fitfully for the rest of the night.
16
MISS MATTHEWS
I WAS UP EARLY AND DRESSED in my best khakis by eight, much to the amusement of my Indian chums. I waited nervously until the ten o’clock move, anxiously checking through my papers and re-reading my plea-bargain ‘agreement’ with the Government.
On the ten o’clock move, I walked the 112 steps down to the Administrative Office and waited in the corridor outside her office for some time. There were three other inmates to see her before me and I could sense from the body language, that for at least two of them the appointment mattered as much to them as it did to me. Would any of it matter to Miss Matthews though?
For many of the inmates, Big Spring was a real hardship post. Apart from the constant violence, and the dominance of the gangs, the prison was hundreds of miles from anywhere significant and sometimes thousands of miles from where an inmate had initially ‘caught his case’. Like AJ, they’d often been sent here for a minor infraction of the rules elsewhere, or because they were deemed to be violent. In a system dedicated to administering punishment, Big Spring was in a category all of its own. With so many inmates in the US being poorly educated and having limited financial resources, a transfer to Big Spring often meant you wouldn’t see your family or children for years. Since recidivism rates were best kept down when inmates retained a family structure, the logic of this approach seemed questionable, but then again, by the time you were sent to Big Spring, I realised the system had probably already given up on you.
The first inmate stormed out of the office in great distress, his annual ten minutes with the Justice System over in a matter of seven. I began to feel increasingly anxious, but I pushed myself to breathe, to relax and to focus again on the meeting going well. Where was Jack Black when I needed him?
Eventually my time came and I entered a surprisingly neat and tidy office. There were cuddly toys and various child-like desk objects popping up everywhere I looked, which took me aback, as did Miss Matthews. A white woman in her mid thirties, she seemed timid and mousey, with short dark hair in a bob and small delicate features. She was wearing a frumpy high-necked blouse, reminiscent of an old school teacher, and she seemed even more out of place in Big Spring than I was.
‘Sit Mulgrew,’ she motioned. She knew my name, I thought. That was encouraging. ‘Your name is Gary Mulgrew,’ she intoned, reading from my file. ‘And you pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and were sentenced to thirty-seven months here in Big Spring, Texas.’
‘Yes, that’s right, but . . .’
She carried on, as if I wasn’t there. ‘Your sentence is due to finish on 11 May, 2011 at 10.30 a.m., although you could be released by 14 January of the same year if you have no infractions.’
Did she think I didn’t know all this? Was this ‘interview’ actually meant to remind people lost in the US prison system who they were and how they’d ended up there?
‘You were born in . . . Glass-gauw in 1962,’ she went on. I had a strong sense that my ten-minute window was disappearing.
‘Miss Matthews?’ I interjected, softly, but firmly.
She stopped in her tracks and looked right at me. ‘Yes?’ She looked alarmed.
‘I came to speak to you about a transfer back to England.’
‘Oh,’ she said quietly, looking around her desk as if she had mislaid something and then moving her hand protectively to the high neck of her old-fashi
oned blouse.
‘Normally you would request a transfer at our next meeting.’
‘But our next meeting isn’t until next year, Miss Matthews.’
‘Yes, that’s right; in precisely twelve months from now . . .’ she said firmly and with renewed confidence. ‘At 10 a.m.’
‘Wait!’ I said more brusquely than I intended. Miss Matthews instantly recoiled, and I imagined her hand under the desk searching for a panic button.
I felt like the prosecutors were stiffing me again, reneging on the deal to get me home. But I knew if I got angry that would be the end of this meeting.
‘If you look at my file,’ I said, pointing a bit too forcefully at the file on her desk, ‘you will see I have a deal, an arrangement with the DoJ to get transferred home. They promised.’
She had pushed herself as far back in her seat as she possibly could and was looking past me, probably for some help. Taking a large breath and using every atom of willpower I could summon, I eased slowly back from her desk and sat upright in my chair. I spoke very softly.
‘Miss Matthews,’ I began very carefully. ‘A key part of my agreement and my decision to plead guilty was that the Department of Justice agreed to expedite my transfer home to England where I can properly begin the search for my missing daughter.’
I kept my voice on an even keel and seemed gradually to be coaxing her back towards her desk and the open file.
‘Unusually, expediting my transfer was specifically written within the plea agreement you have in your file,’ I finished as I moved myself even further away from her desk, trying to appear as non-threatening as a 6ft 2 Glaswegian convict ever could.
Relaxing her grip on the neck of her blouse, Miss Matthews nervously edged forward and thumbed the file, before pulling out what I recognised was the plea agreement itself. She began to read through it. I stayed silent, my heart pounding as I waited for this most delicate of souls to reach the key passage of the agreement. I’d hoped the unusual nature of this deal might prick her interest, and it seemed to. Eventually she spoke. ‘No transfer can take place if you are launching an appeal.’ I stayed silent as she continued to read. ‘You have started your appeal . . .’ then a few seconds later, she added, ‘No, you’re . . . not having an appeal?’
