by Gary Mulgrew
‘Well, he ain’t running with us!’ began TexMex. ‘Don’t care how good his Spanish is, he no is one of us.’
‘And he sure don’t look like one of us,’ rumbled the African-American shot-caller, a scholarly looking elder with glasses and a full beard.
As one, like the crowd at a tennis match, everyone looked at the Aryan Brotherhood representative. He didn’t look all that keen on me either, but I wasn’t going to give him the chance to speak.
‘I want to walk alone,’ I said, to a general intake of breath. ‘I’m Scottish. I’m not from here, and I don’t want to get involved in anyone else’s shit.’
‘You know you can’t do that, Scotland,’ a sympathetic Angel said, to general nodding. ‘I understand how you feel, but you stand out too much and you keep interfering. Everyone who shows has to run with someone.’
‘OK then,’ I said, suddenly having a brainwave – or possibly just signing my own death warrant, ‘then I will run with a gang . . . Mine,’ I said more quietly as my resolve faltered.
I paused then said ‘Los Escosais’ with renewed authority. ‘The Scottish.’
This elicited almost immediate laughter and a bigger than ever grin from Angel. The talkative black shot-caller slapped me on the back as he laughed. ‘A Scottish Gang, that’s a new one, Scotland! Who’s gonna be your shot-caller?’
‘I’ll be the shot-caller,’ I responded calmly and seriously. ‘If anyone wants to fuck with me, then they’ve got to clear it with me first!’
More chuckles. The tension seemed to have vanished from the stifling little room. Only the fat biker was looking brooding. ‘You can’t be serious,’ said a smiling Angel, through twinkling eyes.
But I was – and the more I thought about the idea, the more I realised it could be my safe passage. ‘Look, I’m not here for long, I will keep myself to myself and I will still technically be in a gang . . .’ I prompted, searching desperately for a sign of acquiescence in one of their faces. I didn’t see any – only, as the laughs faded, increasing scepticism.
‘Come on,’ I implored. ‘This is the best solution.’
The breakthrough came from TexMex. The slightest tilt of his head, the smallest incline of an eyebrow. I seized on it.
‘Por favor?’ I said, more quietly, looking straight at him as if no one else was in the room. ‘No quiero ser con los hombres blancos’ (‘I don’t want to be with the whites’) TexMex nodded.
‘What did he fucking say!?’ growled my biker friend, leaning aggressively towards me and pushing my shoulder. ‘What did you fucking say? What did he fucking say?’ he demanded again.
‘Get your hands away from him,’ interjected Angel with a steely calmness. ‘You know the rules about touching people in here.’ In here, I thought. No telling what revenge the Brotherhood might exact somewhere else.
TexMex raised the palm of his hand to him for quiet and it had the desired effect. He seemed the least likely to be in charge, short and chubby with a round bald head and no neck. He looked like a snowman with skin, but since Mexicans dominated the Yard through sheer scale of numbers, he clearly held sway here. ‘A gang of one?’ he queried in perfect English, clearly still thinking it through. Angel grinned some more at this comment, giving me encouragement.
‘We’re OK with it,’ said the Native Indian leader suddenly.
‘It’s cool with the brothers, too.’
‘Aw, this is bullshit!’ shouted the AB. ‘Total bullshit!’ He stood up and, ignoring me, stalked out of the room.
‘Oh, just ignore him,’ said Angel, slapping my thigh as he sat down in the fat Aryan Biker’s recently vacated seat.
‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new Scottish shot-caller!’ He smiled, although I sensed none of the others quite shared his enthusiasm.
‘Just remember, Escosais,’ said TexMex solemnly. ‘You walk alone now; you stay out of our issues, our problems. You do your own time. Any interference and there will be no protection for you. You understand?’
‘I understand. I will respect how the gangs operate and will keep out of everyone’s business. You won’t notice me.’
‘OK. And by the way,’ TexMex added as he started to get up, signifying the meeting was over. ‘If I were you . . . the last thing I’d do is ignore him.’ He motioned with his head in the direction taken by the disgruntled Aryan. ‘I would watch him like the hawk.’
He left as the African-American leader fist-bumped me and smiled. ‘Who knows, Scotland, we may even get some more of your guys here one day,’ he laughed.
‘Yeah.’ I smiled back as I stood up to leave, relieved that it had gone reasonably well. ‘If any pasty-looking white guys with ginger hair show up, they’re mine.’
18
TANK
WITH NOTHING ELSE TO DO NOW but serve my time and watch out for vengeful Aryans, life as the Scottish shot-caller settled into a monotonous routine of letter-writing and weightlifting. AJ and I had got as far as ‘J’ in the fiction section of the library and even Miss Reed had noticed what we were doing, although what she thought of it remained a mystery. The gang issue had gone away for the time being, but the sights and sounds and smells of prison life were no less oppressive. I never allowed myself to forget that I had another life elsewhere, outside, and while that made my time harder to serve, it also, to some extent, kept me going.
One hot day, deep in the middle of the brutal summer heat, I headed out to the weight pile in my new training shoes. These, my coffee and my porridge constituted my only worldly goods – whatever remained of my meagre income being spent on phone calls and stamps.
Communication was a lifeline to the outside, an umbilical cord keeping me linked to the world I intended to rejoin. But this only worked when the news was good or routine. Bad tidings seemed to hit me – and other inmates – more than they could have done on the outside, perhaps because of all the time you had to sit and dwell on them, and also because there was nothing, absolutely nothing, you could do about it.
I’d been hit by some terrible news about a good friend of mine, Paul Kavanagh, who, the week previously, had tripped going up some steps with his hands in his pockets, and died instantly, aged forty-three, of a broken neck. It was a senseless death – proof that however hard we try in this life, however good we are, we can still be snuffed out in an instant. For me, the fact that I hadn’t said goodbye to Paul – and the fact that life and death seemed to be going on elsewhere, without me – was especially painful.
I made my way slowly up to the weight pile. It was in a partially covered area at the top of the prison grounds, nothing more than a tin roof suspended on a couple of wooden beams. It gave it the look of a real man’s gym; the floor was concrete and other than the tin roof and a little mesh fencing around it, you were basically exercising in the Texas desert.
It was just before the main running track, although you seldom saw anyone running there because of the heat. Just behind the running track were the handball courts – always busy, whatever the temperature. I’d been told three people had died there from heat exhaustion the previous year, and I had visions of them just dragging the bodies off to the side of the courts so they didn’t get in the way of the next match. The games were fiercely contested, with a lot of money made and a lot more seemingly lost. In the middle of the running track was the dust bowl of the football pitch, where I had tried to introduce Scottish football techniques to unsuspecting Mexicans a couple of times a week. To the left of the weight pile was a large indoor gymnasium, used principally for never-ending games of basketball, although one inmate Turk the Knife had told me, shyly, that he had done yoga classes there in the morning. ‘Very early,’ he added, ‘so no one else sees us.’
The weight pile occupied a fairly large area, probably about fifty metres square, and all the weights were loose – no machines – although there were benches for bench pressing and support bars for squats. New York had told me that there used to be much more equipment but after a series of television progr
ammes by Barbara Walters on how ‘luxurious’ conditions were in US prisons, the relevant government department had declared that anything broken would either have to be repaired or thrown away. It would not be replaced. Ms Walters had also expressed concern about inmates getting a five or ten year sentence and spending that whole time using gym equipment and ‘getting bigger’ – so that they could wreak even more havoc and destruction on the good people of America on their release. She had a point.
I had passed the weight pile a number of times when I initially arrived at Big Spring, but had felt far too intimidated to enter. It was predominantly populated by the Blacks, and some of them were, for want of a better word, huge. As with the TV rooms, there was a clear but unwritten etiquette on how to stake a claim to the equipment, how it should be used, and for how long, and when it should be handed, without hesitation to someone else. Not knowing the rules, I was worried about falling foul of them and ending up with a barbell planted between my ears. Another reason I was intimidated was the sheer size of the weights the average pile-dawg lifted.
Eventually, I took some lessons from New York in how the ‘pile’ operated. After watching him a few times, I tried it alongside him, and then, when his job and his daily routine changed, I had a variety of companions. Some days, like today, I went there on my own.
The pile was quiet today and I managed to find a bench and a bar and a loose collection of weights in one corner to work with. Starting at a meagre 50kg, I started to bench press, moving up to 60kg after one set. After ten minutes or so Tank from the clothing store came over to me as I was taking a breather and drinking some water in the intense heat. We bumped fists. I was hot and sweating, the exertion and the heat beginning to catch up with me.
‘Hey, what’s happening Scotland?’ Even though I’d seen him around the Yard a few times after he’d given me the pillows on my first day there, I’d never really appreciated just how big Tank was until now. ‘What an apt name,’ I thought, surveying him.
‘How you doin’, Tank?’ I responded in between slugs of water.
‘You gettin’ big there, Scotland!’ exclaimed Tank, nodding with an ironic smile in the direction of my tiny biceps.
‘Yo, Scotland!’ shouted over McKenzie, himself a regular visitor to the weights. ‘Is you flashin’ them guns in this weight pile? Don’t go flashin’ them guns at nobody, you hear me? You flash them guns, you gonna bring every motherfucka down here lookin for some action . . . you know what I’m saying?’ As always I nodded back vaguely, hoping that was the right response to whatever he was saying.
‘You workin’ out alone, Scotland?’ continued Tank, then not waiting for a response added, ‘Can I work out with you?’
‘Sure Tank, but you do much heavier weights than me.’
‘Oh, that’s no problem, Scotland. I’ll just add some on a little here and there.’
We worked out for an hour or so, Tank swopping from my meagre 60kg to his 100kg, then 120kg. I started to struggle after a while, but Tank was full of encouragement, spotting me and shouting, ‘That’s all you, Scotland. That’s all you, baby!’ as enthusiastically as if I had just clean and jerked a new Olympic record. He kept giving me tips on the proper position for my elbows and back and even though I was rapidly running out of gas, I enjoyed training with him, and just chatting about nothing in particular. It helped to get my mind off Paul, and the lonely, senseless way he’d died.
After a while I was done. ‘I’m spent, Tank,’ I panted. ‘I’ve got to get heading back in the next movement.’ I was aiming to get back to the Range in the 2 p.m. window and have a well-needed shower. As he was adding another 20kg to his weights, and I was wiping my face, Tank looked up and asked quietly, ‘Hey Scotland, could you help me out with something?’
I hesitated. This was a leading question in prison, and flew in the face of the inmates’ survival mantra: do your own time. ‘Possibly . . .’ I replied, my hesitancy clear.
‘I’m in a bit of a jam,’ he began slowly. ‘I need a couple of books of stamps, just to see me through to next Friday.’
I said nothing, and Tank offered no more. Just then the movement bell sounded, as if to add to the pressure of the moment. This was bad. You didn’t want to borrow from or lend anyone anything in this place. That made them or you beholden to each other. And beholden, as AJ often said during his many sermons on prison life, was the doorway to trouble.
‘I’m not sure,’ I began slowly. ‘I don’t like to lend to anyone, you know, and I’m not sure if I have any spare.’ I was lying. I had ten books of stamps in my locker.
‘Oh come on, Scotland. Everyone knows you write about a hundred letters a day.’
By now he had moved closer to me, and although he was not attempting to intimidate me, I was feeling the pressure.
I liked people too much. This had always been my Achilles’ heel. I trusted them too much. Or rather, I wanted them to like me too much. Saying no was a problem for me. Thanks to my past, my childhood full of difficult separations, I was a classic needy type. I had developed an uncanny knack of empathising with people and getting on their right side. I used a combination of humour and kindness and sometimes just sheer unfettered manipulation to try and get people to like me, to get their attention and acclaim.
‘Look, man,’ continued the Tank, perhaps sensing my inner turmoil. ‘I give you my word. I’ll get it back to you by next Friday. Ask anyone in this Yard, when the Tank gives his word, that means something. After all, a man’s nothin’ in this Yard if he doesn’t have his word.’ I looked right at him, taken by his sincerity. He stared back, unflinching and confident.
I’d warned myself about this. Warned myself about my weakness, the sad, blind trust I invested in people, in the hope that they would like me. That’s how I had operated all my life; that was how, in prison speak, I liked to roll. But this was prison, this was different. People would take advantage of me in here. That’s what my eldest brother Michael had specifically warned me about, and Julie too. That’s what Giles had sarcastically predicted would be my downfall – trying to be Mr Popular in prison. I was too trusting, too soft, too easy on the outside maybe, but I understood the score in here. I ought to by now.
Tank was still looking at me.
‘OK then, but repay me by next Friday,’ I responded, having completely ignored the logical traffic in my mind. Regretting it instantly, I added, ‘Don’t let me down, Tank!’
‘I won’t, Scotland. I got you covered. I gave you my word.’
‘Alright man,’ I said, bumping fists with him, telling myself that people were basically good and I was right to trust him. The bell sounded again for final movement and I grabbed my stuff, and Tank lay down again and started bench-pressing 140kg like they were bags of sugar.
It only took a couple of days for AJ to find out what had happened. He had popped out of the library for a few minutes to collect some more writing paper from the Range. As he came back, I noticed he was moving much faster than his usual languid stroll, so I knew something was up. Perhaps another shakedown or a shanking. But he didn’t look irritated or on edge. He just looked angry. Angry at me. He slumped down into the chair beside me.
‘Man,’ he began at almost a whining pitch. ‘Don’t you listen to nuthin’ ah say to you, white boy?’ The use of ‘white boy’ was usually a bad sign. I waited for him to continue. He seemed really annoyed. ‘I told you. I spe-cif-ically told you. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you?’
I found myself nodding, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘Man, I knew I didn’t want to work with no green-behind-the-ears white boy,’ he started turning away from me and looking for something to throw around. ‘I don’t wanna be dragged into your shit. You want me dragged into your shit, Scotland? Is that what you want, man? Because I don’t do none of your, “It’s OK, I’m the Scottish shot-caller” white-boy shit?’ It was a passable Scottish accent.
‘AJ! AJ!’ I shouted, grabbing his shoulders as he turned
to face me. ‘What the fuck are you going on about!?’ I was getting tired of the theatrics.
He stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘Did you give Tank two books? Tell me you didn’t give the Tank two books of stamps?’
‘Oh!’ I responded rather sheepishly. ‘That.’ I looked away from him. Now I knew.
‘Shit!’ AJ replied.
‘He said he was in a jam and I lent him two books. He gave me his word that he would give me them back. He’s an honest guy, right?’ My conviction tailed off as I listened to my own words.
AJ looked right at me again, astonished. ‘An honest guy? An honest guy!? Shit Scotland! Do you realise where you live? Have you stopped to look around you for a minute, and remember where you are, you dumb motherfucka . . . Shit!’ he said once more, looking away from me, then refusing to talk to me any further. He continued to sulk for the rest of the morning session, thumbing through stylish magazines and mumbling things like ‘dumb motherfucka’, ‘shot-caller my ass’ and ‘ . . . right back to Scot-land’ without speaking to me further. When the lunch bell sounded, he was straight up from his seat and started heading out, but at the last moment, he stopped and turned to me.
‘Scotland, you better make sure he gives you those books back,’ he said with a look of woeful severity. I just nodded back, not wishing to offend AJ, but still feeling he was making too much of it.
The fact was, it was already Thursday, the day before Tank had promised to repay. And then Friday came and went and he didn’t show up. Perhaps I should have gone to find him at that point, but I didn’t know what I would say to him if I did. I imagined me standing there like an idiot in front of this man-mountain, meekly asking for my stamps back. He’d probably laugh at me and, even if he didn’t, the simple truth was that I was scared of him. In spite of having friends, and knowing the lingo, and being the shot-caller for the US Penitentiary System’s smallest gang, I was still afraid of most of the people in the prison.
