A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Four times a day, before meals and bedtime, guards roamed for count time under the fluorescent tier lights, threatening cons with disciplinary write-ups if they didn’t get in their cells. Since our only freedom was going to the chow hall, we generally tried to scam extra freedom when we could. From the moment a con entered the block, passing through arches with built-in electronic metal detectors that scanned for weapons, he stayed out of his cell as much as possible. It was worth having the guard yelling at you by waiting until the last second before he reached for his pen. Eventually, the tiers cleared and the thick-necked beer-bellied bulls went cell to cell, checking numbers off on a clipboard.

  I’d lean my face between my cell bars to study their beige uniforms and black boots, brass skeleton keys jangling at three-inch black belts, rank stripes on sleeves, gold braid and black-billed visor cap, lead-filled club slapping their thighs. The cons across the landing—Chicanos, Mexicans, blacks, whites, and a small group of Indios who hung with the Chicanos—looked at us and we looked back. Chicanos hand-signed to homeboys across the landing, a coded language that went on for hours. Others whistled elaborate bird chirps or hawk cries that ricocheted off the cavernous slate granite walls. After count time, in the bulletproof Plexiglas cubicle at the entrance, in the glare of sunlight that glimmered off the polished linoleum, a fat guard sat on a swivel chair punching panel buttons and crackling intercom orders through the mike by number—Tier 3, out for showers! . . . 14772, kitchen duty! . . . 16730, counselor! . . . 23911, infirmary! . . . 30225, chow detail! The earsplitting roar sounded all day as the control cage guard opened the main block gates to let in new cons being escorted to cells up the black angle-iron stairwells on both sides of the block. The fat guard in the main guard station also buzzed the cells to let out cons who’d completed their diagnostic process in DC and were joining general population.

  Every day, I anxiously waited for my number to be called for a counselor interview. Most of the guys on two-for-one sentences earned good time—for every day you served without getting in trouble, you got another day knocked off your sentence—but only if you were eligible, which I wasn’t. Because I was convicted and sentenced under a new law for drug dealers, I had to do what they called flat time, day for day. Still, once on the yard, I’d make twelve cents an hour working and I could buy street cigarettes, toiletries, and candy at the canteen; learn a trade, or get my GED; even go to college if I could get smart enough. In general population, you were allowed to have a TV and radio and to go to the exercise field, movies, and library. To break up the boring hours, I’d gotten into doing push-ups and sit-ups, standing at the bars watching cons, then exercising some more. The only thing that broke up the monotony was rapping to Macaron, the con in the next cell.

  My harmonica had been confiscated in Albuquerque, but it had made its way here and I was jamming a Leadbelly blues one day when Macaron asked to borrow it. I expected him to blow a few notes but he handed it back to me through the bars in three pieces, the main body and two side plates, charred inside where he had cooked heroin. I didn’t know how to respond. I knew enough from my past street life that if you let a guy get over on you, the rest of the wolves will follow. I paced up and down, thinking. Should I tell him he had to buy me a new one? This would lead to a fight, and I didn’t want trouble. There was a thin line between fear and respect. He might be testing me, and I knew if I didn’t say anything he might think I was a punk. When I heard him stirring around next door, rousing out of his heroin doze, I was trying to decide what to do when he tapped my bars and his hand shot around the bars with two packs of Camels. That showed respect. I put my harmonica back together and ultimately found that the heat had actually seasoned the reeds and allowed them to bend more easily when I blew into it. I was later glad that I didn’t jump to any rash conclusions, because he invited me to sit at his table in the dining room. This was a big deal—it meant I was being accepted.

  At night, when the block darkened—except for the control cage glowing at the entrance in the foyer—graveyard guards patrolled tiers every hour, shining a flashlight into each cell on their rounds, keys rattling against their hips. I often had trouble sleeping. The heat, the starched sheets, and the coarse blanket made it worse. I lay in the dark listening to a few voices talk across the landing; to the dripping shower stall down the tier; to the opening and closing gates echoing in the block; to cons groaning and sighing in their troubled sleep. I’d sit down by the bars, staring into the dark landing, and whisper to ask if Macaron was awake. If he was, we’d talk sitting on the floor with our backs against the bars. Macaron (nicknamed so because he loved macaroni) grew up in Phoenix. He dropped out in eighth grade, got into drugs, and spent most of his youth in institutions. It was the same story we all had, but now in his late forties with a graying crew cut, all he had to show for it were tattoos and scars covering his stout brown muscled frame. He had gotten into drugs to escape the pain of a fucked-up life, and as he got more addicted, he committed more burglaries. He’d been in and out of prison six times, for fourteen years all told. He was what they called a veterano, a con who knew the ropes and had earned a rep. The others respected him; porters kept coming by to drop off smokes, coffee, comics, and heroin and give him information about what was going on.

  “That guy you came in with, over in B-Twelve,” he said, one afternoon before supper. ‘They’re gonna make a play on him.”

  Wedo had been his usual self, yelling for hours, crossing back and forth on the tier when he was out for a shower, bumming cigarettes, borrowing coffee, begging credit from drug dealers. But other than that, my untrained eye hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. A few days later, though, during shower time in the evening, Macaron called me to the bars. ‘The two bangers at the end of the tier, check them out. They’re La eMe, Mexican mafia.”

  I whistled to get his attention, but only the bangers turned to look at me.

  “Do that again,” Macaron warned, “and it’ll get you killed.”

  “I can’t warn him?” I asked, feeling some allegiance because we had arrived together.

  “Do your time, not his. He stands the line or punks out.”

  They strutted, towels in hand, in boxer shorts and thongs, down the tier. Wedo was lying down, feet to the bars toward the tier. They stopped in front of his cell. One of them slipped a toothbrush from his towel and ran the bristles up the pads of Wedo’s bare feet. Then they walked away, stuffing the toothbrush back in the rolled towel. Blood gushed from Wedo’s feet. He got up, wedged his face between the bars, and yelled, “I’ll show you how it’s done, punks!” Grinning, he said, “Ain’t nothing but a meatball,” and he sat down, tore his sheet in strips, and wrapped his feet.

  “They had a razor blade in the brush,” Macaron said.

  “Why?”

  “Trying to get him to pay protection. It happens to ‘fish’—first-timers.”

  Macaron explained it further the next morning. At 5 A.M. the cell-block speakers blasted, “Chow time! Chow time! Hubba-hubba! Come ‘n’ git it!” We dressed out in jeans and T-shirt, rolled down the stairwell onto the landing and out under the stars and moon. The main yard was awash in klieg lights. We stood in a line of twos, facing the front gate, waiting in the semi-dark as a chain gang was marched out of the mess hall and across the main yard, filing out through a series of Cyclone-fence gates that led to trucks waiting to carry them to the fields. They passed the infirmary and library to the left. As each one stepped through the last gate exiting the main yard, he spread his arms and feet apart; guards scanned them with a hand metal detector and moved them on. They were sunburned from working under a blazing sun and looked exhausted in faded jeans and T-shirts and scuffed prison brogans. Even though there were hundreds of them, their withdrawn hardness made the yard eerily vacant and quiet. Guards stationed up and down the line talked into radio receivers attached to their belts, coordinating movements of prisoners coming and going from the chow hall. I kept my eyes on the horizon of c
oiled razor wire, above which the red light of dawn spread out across the sky. One of the line guards yelled, and we marched past a thirty-foot-high concrete cylinder cone in the middle of the yard. It was the Wheelhouse, or administrative center, where our “jackets,” or court transcripts, were kept. A con coming out of it nodded at Macaron, who was next to me. The bangers ran it, so before you hit DC, they knew everything about you. The guards on its catwalk cradled loaded rifles and followed us with their stares. One of them had a small transistor radio that I could barely hear; it was playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Two captains that everybody knew, Mad Dog Madril and Five Hundred, strode back and forth across the yard, yelling at cons and guards alike. Beyond the Wheelhouse, already this early in the morning, the main gates were creaking open as marshals brought in new fish, just as sunrise reached over the granite walls, glimmered on the razor wire, and spread over the main yard.

  We marched in through the north side of the chow hall, a low-roofed cinder-block building with gray painted-steel doors and reinforced chicken-wire windows. Whites sat with whites, blacks with blacks, and Chicanos with Chicanos. It held about a hundred cons at a time; as one group finished eating, deposited their trays at the wash window next to the slop cans, and went out at the south end, a new set of cons came in through the north. We were allowed fifteen minutes to eat, and if we took longer we got a write-up. Guards flanked doors on opposite ends of the dining room, others were stationed by the serving line and juice machines, and more guards roamed around the tables. Behind Macaron, I took a tray and spoon, went through the serving line, and stuck my tray under a plastic partition, and the kitchen workers slopped down powdered scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage patties. I filled my plastic cup at the milk machine and followed Macaron to a table. Two other veteranos joined us, and I listened as they talked about friends in Phoenix who got busted and were on their way back; about visiting on Sundays and drugs being smuggled in; about getting classified to minimum security, where they had more freedom.

  Wedo approached, breaking in on the conversation. ‘What’s up? Fucking brogans are too big! What’s with all this baggy shit? These clothes don’t fit! I want some real threads!” Macaron shot me a jaded glance. Wedo clenched inches of loose waistline and snugged his belt over it tightly to keep his pants up. “Motherfuckers.” He smiled, looking over the heads in the chow hall. “A carton of smokes a week or get fucked?” He pointed at his chest and raised his eyebrows. “Me? You talking to me?” His eyes were glazed and he was limping a little, but seeming otherwise okay, he left.

  Instead of following his tier out, he unexpectedly went left, heading straight for the table where the two bangers were sitting. He pulled something from his waistline and plunged it into the back of one of them, shouting, “Pay protection, motherfuckers!” Guards blew whistles as the two bangers leaped up on Wedo. He kept stabbing them wildly with a metal shank, sharpened to an icepick point. Led by Mad Dog Madril and Five Hundred, goons rushed into the mess hall, clubbing Wedo and dragging him away. All the way out, Mad Dog Madril kept whipping Wedo’s head and body with a flat leather paddle. Another guard, Big Foot, who was about three hundred and fifty pounds, kicked at the bangers until they were clutching their ribs and heads on the floor.

  As the guards took the two stabbed cons to the infirmary, we went on eating. One of Macaron’s homeboys gave me an irritable look. ‘Tell him never to come to our table again.”

  “They rode in together,” Macaron offered. “He doesn’t know the guy.” The veterano nodded at Macaron and sipped his coffee.

  I waited for them to finish eating, studying their tattooed hands and arms, covered in religious symbols of La Virgen de Guadalupe or Jesus’ crown of thorns, or nightmarish depictions of violence and bloodshed, or names of lovers in hearts. On one man sitting across from me, I saw the upside-down tattoo of La eMe initials, camouflaged in a labyrinth of flowers and crosses. I rested my hand under my chin to keep the nervous twitch in my cheek from being noticed. When we left, I made sure I was behind them.

  There were times, usually as we came out for meals, when Macaron signaled me with a nod to tell me to hold back; minutes later, a fight would break out in line or in the landing below. I was thankful to him for taking me under his wing. He advised me not to give the future or the past much thought. “It’ll drive you crazy,” he said. “Keep your mind on the present, forget about the streets and freedom, and things will work out.” Yet when we crossed and re-crossed the yard, I sometimes experienced powerful yearnings for freedom; regret at allowing life to pass me by pressed so hard against my heart that I felt it might never end. Nights were sometimes worse, especially when cons talked aloud in the dark about girlfriends, small towns they had come from, things they remembered doing. My brain would start boiling forth so many memories that I had to put toilet paper in my ears to block out the voices. Other times, however, nothing helped and I would wake up sweating and frightened, feeling I had no chance of ever having a decent life.

  When the counselor interviewed me, he told me that if I behaved well and obeyed the institutional rules, I’d be permitted to go to school. I’d have to do my time behind the wall because of the aggravating circumstances of my crime (an FBI agent’s getting shot), but he assured me that after sixty days in the kitchen without a disciplinary report, the Reclassification Committee would let me attend school to get my GED.

  Macaron had a homeboy clerking for the counselor, who arranged for us to be neighbors in Cell Block 2 and work in the kitchen together. Beneath the everyday routine of prison life, this secret system operated through the intricate network of homeboys, messengers, porters, trusties, and corrupt guards. Macaron said the system could be used to your advantage, but he also warned that a twenty-dollar bribe or a bottle cap of heroin residue was enough of a pay-off that some cons and guards would do anything, even kill or set you up. “It works both ways,” he said, “and you always have to be aware of it—remember, the money’s easy and drugs are an addict’s god.”

  CB2 was an archaic tomb of concrete and iron that smelled clammy and damp. The noise waved out in mind-numbing shocks: iron bars clanged, concrete hummed, radios and TVs jumbled out English and Spanish, speakers blared numbers and crackled orders. Guards ambled down tiers all day and all night. Everyone was hollering and signing and involved in a clandestine scheme of one sort or another: trying to get drugs, avoiding a poker bill, setting up a sister with another con through letters, making bets on sports games, preparing legal paperwork in another attempt at freedom, grieving over a wife’s letter that informed the con she was getting married to another guy. It was a world within a world, the difference being that you lived in a cage with a thousand other caged men. Macaron and I were put into B9 and B10, second tier. Solemn faces stared from cells smaller than in DC, their serene demeanor suppressing a violence behind calm brown eyes. Water dripped from plumbing pipes in the maintenance space behind the cells; often, two cons were cramped in cells smaller than in DC; the oxidized iron and concrete floor had a dull sheen from years of human wear; rusting hanging lamps with massive tin shades created a creepy horror-house effect, making cons’ shadowy faces more ominous. The three-story cell block with exposed steel-beam rooftop creaked and the rusting tin roof made it all the more eerie—a gigantic warehouse for storing unquartered human beef. The air shook with the tread of black-booted guards hurrying in squads everywhere up and down scaffolds of black-painted staircases. I’d never heard so much noise compressed into one space. Steam hissed behind the walls; pipes rattled; gates clanged. The dark granite was smoked with the ingrained body sweat of decades of caged prisoners. But it was more than that—it was as if their despair and rage had taken on a palpable presence of its own, haunting the shadows in the hollow corners of the block.

  At 4 A.M., Macaron and I and four others were racked out of our cells and escorted across the yard to the kitchen. We prepared powdered eggs and toast, brewed coffee, filled up the milk machines, made oatmeal, set
out the plastic glasses and spoons. In the afternoon we went to the exercise field and usually played handball, or if we were tired we’d walk around the field talking.

  Things were going well until one day after work, about three months into my sentence. I stopped in the foyer for the guards to scan me before entering the block; then I went past them into the landing and toward the wrought-iron stairwell up to my cell. I noticed this huge burly black porter watching me. For a few days in a row, he stood by the guard booth, leaning on his broom, throwing me a smile. I didn’t know how to handle a man looking at me like that, and with an embarrassed silence I averted my eyes. I hoped that by ignoring him he’d go away. Instead he took my indifference to mean I was frightened and accessible, and he began to rub his crotch and grin more boldly. One evening, after mail call, I came out of the shower, and he came over to my cell offering cigarettes and coffee. I shook my head no, adding a lingering glare to back him off, but he mad-dogged me back. For the moment it was a standoff, but I knew it wasn’t the end. I could see in his hard dark eyes that he felt he could break me, and the thought of him thinking of me as a woman filled me with anger. Guys thinking they could beat me up weren’t new to me; I could handle that. But a guy wanting to rape me got under my skin in the worst way. I was too humiliated to talk about it until a few days later, when Macaron and I had just finished playing handball. Sweating and exhausted, we sat on the grass and Macaron asked if something was bothering me. I told him about the problem with the black fag.

  “Take him down, you don’t wanna get turned out,” he said matter-of-factly. “You can’t pretend it’s not happening.”