by Kris Bertin
The Big Man spoke from in between two walls of men.
“DJ,” he whispered, “is not to be fucked with, is what I said.”
Boss Cook had a paper cup and gestured with it when he spoke:
“You did say that.”
“And so you fucked with him?”
“We didn’t fuck with nobody. One has a right to speak or not speak with whomever they please. Even here.”
Then one of the Chuck Wagoners spoke out of turn and tried to say We hear enough of him already, but was silenced with a look from Boss Cook.
“The problem’s been dealt with,” Big Man said. “I dealt with it. He’s gonna be quiet from now on.”
Boss Cook thought about it for a long time before he said it. Took a sip of his drink, then tilted his head.
Carefully, he said:
“The man gets special provision.”
“It’s a compromise.”
“Man who shouldn’t be talking in the first place gets to talk. In the library. Where none of us can talk. Where we don’t want to hear nobody talk?”
“They’re gonna unlock a damn reading room for him.”
“More special provision, then?” Boss asked, his eyebrows raised, his lower lip slack.
Then both men stared at one another, and we all stared at them.
***
Here, one might have expected it to end.
If The Big Man were a peacemaker like he claimed to be, if he were truly a teacher, if he were actually a Big Man, he might have made some effort to appease the fellows at that very moment.
But he was not, and he did not.
In response, The Big Man leaned over, right past the Boss, and swiped at a garbage bag partially hidden in a tall stack of milk crates. This unleashed a stream of homemade alcohol that shot through the air like a long pink finger and splattered on the floor. When the Chuck Wagon reacted, and a flurry of hands went for this enormous man, the Boss Cook barked Don’t touch him.
Two guards standing near poked their head in. The Big Man waved them away, so they merely backed up but kept watching, silent. Boss Cook sat back down, his bare feet in a puddle of his own drink. It crawled across the floor towards the freedom of a small metal drain.
“No problem,” Boss Cook said to the guards. “No problems in here.”
Then the Boss Cook parted the Chuck Wagon with a simple hand gesture and they obeyed, as if compelled by an unnatural power, making way for Big Man.
Before leaving, Big Man held his own wrecked throat to stabilize his voice while standing in the pruno, his rippling body covered in strange, broken symbols:
“DJ’s not to be fucked with.”
***
Speculation was the Chuck Wagon wasn’t going to try and take on Big Man.
Their values (and I really do believe that’s what they had, values) wouldn’t allow them to “make beef” over an insult. Especially over respect. Despite being in prison, they were reformists. They were Christians. They really believed in turning the other cheek, and when something did go wrong with a Chuck Wagoner, they either made reparations, apologized, or repented. It was that, or they were out. In my few years, I had seen more than one young man disowned by Boss Cook because they had acted out, and even more who weren’t allowed in because of what he saw in them, which is what happened to me, years before.
All of which is to say that the pruno incident should have been the end of it.
But that night, when the men were corralled into their cells and the doors rolled over and locked into place, a familiar echo sounded from next door:
“Greetings my PROS and CONS!” DJ screamed.
Then DJ went right back into his usual start-of-show preamble, despite having promised to finally stop. He started by saying he knew he had fans who couldn’t bear to miss his show, and that he would never put them through such a thing, deal or no deal. I knew right away that he was forfeiting everything, and that he didn’t know he was. That he had misunderstood something vital about The Big Man’s interest in him. About the limits of the protection offered to him.
The rest of this broadcast was a clear-as-day indictment of The Chuck Wagon as complete and utter faggots. He called them The Fuck Wagon, and then thought better of it and called them The Fuck Faggin. He guffawed and pumped his armpit a couple times, which he identified as the sound of dozens of dicks entering and leaving Boss Cook’s ass. In time, he moved onto more serious matters, such as why the food was so bad (They’re trying to poison us!) and why the bedding was so uncomfortable (They want our backs to go on us, so we can’t stand up to them!).
It was eerily silent. I think everyone was listening for everyone else, to try and figure out how to feel.
There was a moment when he looked at me from across the hall and I shook my head at him. The deal he’d brokered was supposed to go into effect tonight. I banged on the glass, trying to get his attention. When finally he noticed me, he pointed at me:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a caller on line one—Eric the arsonist, go ahead.”
“You have to stop,” I said loudly.
He considered it. He stopped, put a hand to his chin and pondered.
“I’m serious,” I told him, “you’re making a big mistake.”
He looked at me, still in his thinker pose, nodding slowly, continuously.
Then, he dropped his pants and mooned me, his hairy ass flattening white as an orchid against the reinforced glass.
“Here’s a short story for you!” he screamed.
A fart reported quietly from the window.
He continued for another moment before it began. Before people really started to go crazy. Inmates began to shout for him to shut up—separately, in clusters, until their voices came together. He had inspired this reaction before, but this time, it was something different. This time, everyone had been expecting tranquility, and his performance was a betrayal to each of us. I have never had the opportunity to use the word, but a cacophony—a real, floor-wide explosion of anger—then sounded. Men screamed for his death, some screamed for silence, and others just screamed. Men slapped their walls and banged on the doors. They threw whatever objects were within reach that could make a racket. One man destroyed his sink and threw it at his door. DJ could no longer be heard as a distinct voice, though I could see him still standing there, gesturing, motioning this way or that, his mouth still moving. At one point, amidst cries for harm to be done to his body, he did a little dance, shrugging his shoulders and clapping his hands, kicking his feet.
He was having fun.
The roar was long. It could’ve been ten, or even twenty minutes. I was amazed by the sound, which was like an indoor hurricane, but also by how it felt. Something about it was contagious. Even Bradley smashed his fist against my cot, made it jump up and down. I watched him beat the glass of the door with an open palm until he couldn’t do it anymore. I could feel the pull, too. I wanted to yell. I wanted to kick my books over and smash Bradley’s head into the wall.
Eventually, the lights went on, and new voices joined in. The correctional officers.
I watched as one of the butchier girls, a guard named Mary Beth who had personally been wrangling with DJ for months, got two fresh-faces with something to prove to go in there with her and tackle him. I watched DJ recoil to the back of his cell amidst the uproar, his mouth still moving, his hands up, his face red and smiling. Like always, he did his best to finish his show between blows, and continued shouting even after he tried, and failed, to jump toward his cell’s open door. He was slammed to the ground by one of the younger ones. Cowboys, they were called. Then he was arm-barred, restrained, and knelt upon. Moments later more guards came and helped unfold a stretcher, which he was quickly heaved onto. His body was secured by giant Velcro straps, and he was handcuffed to one of its guardrails. I watched Mary Beth put on latex gloves and fit him
with a spit guard, that is, a mesh hood with thick plastic over the mouth. I’d never seen any of this used before on our floor, and assumed these extra flourishes were added because of the profundity of his disruption.
He looked at me with that mask on. I could tell from his eyes that he was still smiling.
When he was rolled away, down the hallway towards solitary, he looked like a man about to be tortured. I guess if he was going to be alone for the next week or more, he really was; DJ couldn’t stand to be without his audience.
As he was wheeled by, the sound of the chaos changed. The threats turned to cheers, one by one, as he was carted off, as he passed each of the cells. Men were even thanking guards, clapping and whooping. I heard people shout things like So long fatso and Good riddance and You keep his bitch ass this time.
Since this prolonged outburst had started as a plea for quiet, the guards had to do very little for the noise to die down. Inside of one minute, all shouting was over. Then followed a clearing of throats, coughing, a few bursts of laughter at what had come before, and some gentle tidying of what had been disturbed.
Then, the lights clicked off and there was real silence.
I wondered if Boss Cook had joined in. Certainly he had heard it. Everyone heard it. I imagined that he had too much dignity for this kind of acting out. I think he must’ve been lying in bed, the floor sticky and filling the room with a pungent smell like something had died at his feet and liquefied. I think he might’ve just laid there and listened like I did.
I said all of this to Bradley. I also told him that this was bad news. I even swore, for his sake, to try and emphasize it, and said it was bad fucking news. I said I never imagined that DJ could be so stupid. We knew that DJ had broken his promise, but worse, that he had made Big Man look like a fool and pitted him against the Chuck Wagon. DJ had failed to agree to the terms of his own contract, and he’d done it for nothing. After thinking about Boss Cook some more, I thought of Jean Levesque, The Big Man. In my mind, he would have been the first to scream. I wondered what his scarred little voice box would sound like when his enormous torso let out a bellow. I could almost hear it, a noise like something a computer-generated monster might make in a movie.
“This isn’t gonna end here,” I said.
But no response came from below me. Instead, after a moment, I heard the moist sound of skin folding on skin, and Bradley’s shallow breathing.
***
I want to say that I am not innocent, but I’m not a con either.
Nor am I a fuck-up like Bradley. Certainly, everyone in prison has fucked up in some way, even just by hiring the wrong lawyer, but I am not the kind of government-burden chronic fuck-up that he is. Instead, I feel a part of a separate class, which is a very small minority of the total population. I am part of the shouldn’t be here class. This, again, doesn’t mean I didn’t do what I did. It means that I’m not the kind of person who typically ends up here. This means I lack the normal pedigree to be fully functional in this arena.
My parents have jobs, and are married. My brother is a high-level automotive engineer and my sister is a pediatrician. I have completed high school, and have a bachelor’s degree in English Literature with a double minor in French Literature and French Language Studies. I had a job before I was incarcerated, and sold furniture at a wholesale warehouse. I think I wanted to become a teacher. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I don’t know if I was ever really going to do that. I knew I would transform from the boy who sold couches into something else. That was it, though.
This, obviously, will not come to pass. In fact, my transformation had already happened and, like the vast majority of us—the guys who’d turned into full-blown thugs and adopted street lingo and dress they’d never dreamed of employing; the guys who’d gone from run-of-the-mill straight-acting gays to ultra-feminine sissies to appease some bullish alpha male; the guys who developed bad drug habits or who really lost it and started seeing little men or shadow people at night—my transformation wasn’t for the better. I’d told myself for a while that I’d hardened, that it was a positive thing, that I’d gained some fortitude or endurance or another useful trait. I lifted weights to fight off prison fat, I kept my mouth shut, I made a small, serviceable weapon out of a tin can that I hid in Bradley’s cot. I was tough now, I often thought.
But then I would have a crying fit in the middle of the night and have to force my pillow in my mouth to keep my sobs inaudible. My primary non-sexual fantasy, which I had more than any others, was about meeting another inmate. One who liked me, who would be my friend. Who would save me a seat at the cafeteria. Who would give me a birthday present, and really, actually mean it. Someone who might hug me.
I wasn’t a stone. Maybe I could look like one if you walked by, but inside I was soft and squishy. I was a bug.
I was a turtle.
I didn’t know if it was a permanent change, or if, when I was out, I could go back to being a normal person. I was most worried about the extremes. That I would come out a husk, and that whatever softness inside me will have rotted, dried up, and blown away. Or that, once released, I will be without any defenses, and be raw and naked and frightened, the kind of person who cannot cope with one single stressful interaction without breaking down completely. The kind of person you see screaming and crying at the bank teller’s window. I was preparing myself for the worst.
In the meantime, as someone who didn’t belong, the best I could do was watch. It was true that I felt like everything was a lesson, that every interaction had value, and that was a big part of why I stuck my head out of my shell, poked it out through the bars, and watched all of this so closely.
But it was also true, I’m not ashamed to admit, that it was fun to watch.
For a while, anyway.
***
Following DJ’s betrayal, Big Man’s whole reputation was at stake.
He was forced into action.
It was probably also the case that he hated to have to confront Boss Cook like that, a man who had, in the past, acted as a confidant to him. Someone told me that Boss Cook had once offered him real, useful counsel regarding the course of his life and a greater, spiritual voyage that The Big Man believed he had coming.
DJ had been given a quick smack or two in the past, had been knocked around and threatened, but never shanked or bludgeoned or anything so violent. Someone had stolen all three of his Game Boys, one after another, as his mother had produced them for him. I had watched this and felt bad for DJ, but also for his mother, who was dropping hundreds of dollars on these things. I told him to stop taking them out of his cell, but he said But that’s when I wanna play it and made no changes to his routine. When his last one went missing, it wasn’t replaced.
Another person, a true crazy named Rooney, had bitten him on the arm as a dare before getting sent away to the Loony Bin. The worst of DJ’s experiences had come from the guards, all of whom showed a great deal of restraint as a matter of policy, because we were a low-risk cellblock. The men housed here were largely screw-ups, one-time killers and drug users, people highly unlikely to reoffend but who nonetheless had to serve their time. Until he dissed The Big Man, DJ had only ever gotten off easy.
DJ’s first taste of true brutality came immediately following his weeklong stay in solitary:
The Big Man blew two years’ Good Behaviour by invading the Craft Centre during afternoon programs. He did it in a bright room with a crude jungle-scene mural consisting of parrots and jaguars, lions and elephants, each animal painted by a different con, each animal sporting different anatomy, proportion, contours, colour, and quality. He did what he thought was right, and made sure everyone saw.
The warden, a small Christian man who wore shorts and sneakers and a bucket hat because he thought it made him seem approachable, was later bewildered. He launched an inquiry, and had many cons come into his office to try and help him understand. Why
had The Big Man fought so hard for DJ to get this extra computer access, only to turn around and attack him? The guards, of course, could explain it to him, because they lived among us and had a greater understanding of the culture, but it still didn’t make sense to the warden. He was a believer in rehabilitation, and had adopted Big Man as his pet cause, even used his picture in newsletters. We’d all seen the photograph of him working in the machine shop with the caption:
Our rehabilitated inmates hold jobs to prepare them for life on the outside.
The injuries to DJ were so grievous that he was able to go on a number of small vacations for major surgeries, especially to his inner ear, which could only be saved by bringing in virtuoso aural surgeons and experts. They were, I’m sure, grateful to have such a profound problem to tackle.
The Big Man, as an individual who understood loss, having been robbed of that deep, powerful voice through his own illness, wanted to take something away from DJ. After beating him and then popping him in the gut a dozen times with a piece of antenna for good measure, an inspired Big Man kneeled with all of his weight on DJ’s skull, covered his mouth with a big hand, then squeezed hot glue from a plug-in glue gun into DJ’s eardrum. The pain was so intense he began to writhe and buck and he knocked himself unconscious before Big Man even got to his second ear canal.
The Crafting Class was inmate-run, and Big Man had attacked DJ with such efficiency that no sounds were able to leave his prey’s mouth. His reputation was such that it was the same for his witnesses. No guards were alerted, and once Big Man left, the class continued same as before, until the once-unconscious body on the floor came to life and began squealing in agony. The entire class pretended their prone classmate wasn’t there. The ultimate ghosting.
Security footage showed Big Man leaving his machine shop and walking to the Craft Centre in his grey coveralls and work gloves, only to leave four minutes later. Despite this, no one would admit to having seen his arrival or exit. If one were to go by eyewitness accounts only, neither DJ nor Big Man appeared to have been there at all. Even the ninety-pound former drug addicts and notorious rats claimed not to have seen anything.
