I force myself to walk, to keep pace with my guides.
We slide our way across the floor, heading (hopefully) for higher ground.
The carnage is unbelievable. The prison is literally on fire. I can see now all the way down to the other end, a couple hundred yards, and up the tiers, three stories. Fires everywhere, countless fires. Everything is on fire: mattresses, trash, any piece of wood the men have been able to get their hands on. Huge oil drums are all over the place, they must have been brought in from the farm area outside, where they’re stored to fuel the equipment. In hindsight you wonder why in the world would a prison keep so much flammable shit around?
It’s like handing a loaded machine-gun to a three-year-old. The drums are all spewing fire, small tires mostly, the kind you see on Chicago street corners in winter. But it’s almost summer now, outside the heat is in the eighties, in here they are burning fires.
I’m immediately drenched in sweat. It feels like a sauna from hell. It must be a hundred and fifteen in here. The fumes roiling to the ceiling, the oil-smoke thick and harsh to the lungs. I press the wet towel to my face as we march onwards.
Every man in the prison is in this building, it seems, and every one of them is out in these corridors. They stand there, in the corridors and in the cells, watching me as I pass them. They are all masked, like my guides. Bandannas around their faces, burnooses fashioned from towels, from pieces of torn-up sheet. Anything to hide behind. Eyes looking out, intense, ready to explode.
To a man, they’re armed. A few; the elite, the appointed leaders, the ones controlling the action, have guns. Shotguns, rifles, pistols. Tear-gas guns, whatever they could get their hands on that can fire a load.
The others, the majority, have their own weapons, made up of what they could find or fashion. Knives, axes, lengths of metal, bedframes torn from the walls, smashed into crude sharp-pointed spears. Others carry bludgeons, pieces of wood, lengths of pipe, bricks, chains wrapped around forearms and wrists. Anything that can kill.
I understand, seeing this, that the weapons, and more important, the masks, are not only for protection from the outside, but are there to cover up from the others in here. It’s an uprising, yes, all banding together for one cause, but it’s also anarchy, every man for himself. The first rule inside: cover your ass. No one can tell who anyone is, with a few exceptions like the blacks. You’ve got to cover your ass, hide your face, because you don’t know when an enemy might use this chaos as an excuse to settle an old score. You learn super-fast on the inside that almost all deaths in prison riots are revenge killings, inmates killing inmates, usually over very petty shit.
“All right, now, watch your step here. Don’t want you falling and breaking your neck, boss,” the lead escort tells me, almost jocularly. “You ’bout the onliest hope we got to settle this thing up without no more bloodshed,”
Without no more bloodshed. That starts my stomach going again.
Have there been killings? Who were they? Hostages we don’t know about, prisoners, what?
He leads me up a set of metal stairs in the center of the complex that winds around the tower housing the control centers where the guards are normally bastioned. From this core area, which extends a hundred feet up and has at its center one secure safety-glass-walled control unit for each floor, a single guard can see three hundred and sixty degrees; he can spot trouble in the making and seal himself off until help arrives, if it’s necessary. The uprising couldn’t have taken place here, because the population in this unit doesn’t have the freedom of movement they give the less-restricted areas. With more freedom of movement comes more responsibility and liberty, and with more liberty and responsibility came anarchy. An irony that will be pondered deeply in days to come.
We’re in the middle tier now. I follow my escorts down a long row of cells. The row is crowded with men, moving about aimlessly, holding onto their weapons. They all watch me as we pass. A few throw out choice epithets, such as ‘jive-ass white-bread motherfucker,’ a few spit on the ground as I pass, but for the most part they watch me silently, hundreds of sets of eyes behind masks boring into me front and back. A gauntlet of fury and rage.
I’m ushered into a large, open room at the end of the cellblock that’s normally used as a dayroom for inmates who’ve earned points for good behavior; trusties and the like. The two televisions have been smashed, as has the Ping-Pong table. The couches have been ripped up for the wire, which is now in use as weapons and defense barriers throughout the building; I passed crude wire barriers on my way through the corridors. Chairs and tables have been brought in; bottles of water, cartons of canned food are stacked in corners.
“Hey there, ace.” From across the room comes the familiar voice.
Alone among the prisoners, Lone Wolf is unmasked. He sits at a long table in the center of the inmate council. His place at the table, the fact that he alone is without a mask, and his overall regal demeanor tell me that he’s the leader. They are all working in concert, of course, but he’s the jefe, he’s running the show.
It’s been six weeks since we last sat face to face. He’s let his beard grow longer than he’d been keeping it; for some reason I flash on Che Guevara, on the pictures of Che that used to adorn walls in college dorm rooms back in the radical sixties and early seventies, including my own. Che and Huey and Mao, the unholy trinity to the white kids who were so desperate for a cause, so eager to get in on the action instead of living vicariously on the sidelines like their parents had; looking back on it now, Vietnam was a blessing in disguise, especially to those who didn’t go, because it was something to be passionate for, especially after the blacks kicked the white kids out of the civil-rights movement. (So we thought about Nam—we were never going to cop-out, become middle class. Shit, what drugged-out dreamers we turned out to be.)
Three black-and-white posters on the wall, three heroes of my generation, dead and mostly discredited now, or even worse, irrelevant. The permanency of impermanence.
Fuck, man. I have to remind myself: you’re in prison, there’s no ideology here, just the quick and the dead. Don’t romanticize this, not for a second.
Flanking Lone Wolf are several other inmates. I immediately pick out Goose, seated directly to Lone Wolf’s left. He smiles at me, peeling off his bandanna, leaning across the table to shake my hand.
There are nine of them, seated in a row on one side of the table, waiting for me. The prison council, the men in charge, the ones I’ll be negotiating with.
It’s marginally cleaner in here, the air is less foul. They’ve kept the ugliest part of it away from this area, because this is where the bargaining will take place and they don’t want me to be constantly reminded of what’s happened. It’s a smart move, the conditions in this place couldn’t help but color my judgment, no matter how impartial I want to be. I am a lawyer for men such as these, yes, but I’m also part of the establishment, I’m on the other side of the fence, the other side of this table, I make no bones about that. I am not their buddy: we’re not in this together except inasmuch as we have a common problem to solve.
Even so, I’m glad to see Lone Wolf and Goose. I’m glad they’re alive. I wasn’t sure.
“We got us a situation here,” Lone Wolf says.
“I can see that,” I answer. He’s cool; I can be cooler.
We look at each other. I can’t help it, I smile. Relief, someone I know I can talk to. Then I turn and look at all of them across from me, each in turn. We take each other’s measure in deliberate doses.
How they perceive me, how straight they think I’ll be with them, will in large part determine how successful I can be. How successful this will work, without it becoming a war.
Lone Wolf looks up and down the table at his confederates.
“We’ve prepared a list of grievances,” he says, shoving a sheaf of lined papers across the table towards me.
I let it lie there.
“Certain things come first,” I continue, “before
any of this.”
“Like what?” one of the men on the other side asks.
“The condition of the hostages,” I tell him.
“They’re okay,” Lone Wolf says.
“I want to see them.”
“That can happen.”
“Privately,” I say.
He shrugs as if to say ‘I knew that.’
“Yeh, we can do that. Something I want you to see first, though. I’ll take you myself.”
He strides around the table, heads for the door. I follow closely. My black escort accompanies us. Everyone else waits. Something they’re good at.
We’re down in the old hole, the solitary unit. It isn’t so wet down here, the courts decreed this area off-limits a few years ago, too cruel and unusual, so there weren’t men down here to stop the toilets up. The smell is just as bad, though, it’s a different smell, not rank and sour like human shit, but sweeter somehow, more pungent. It’s hot as hell, even hotter down here than up in the cellblock. We’re all dripping sweat now, it’s coming off us in buckets.
The doors along this corridor are solid. One small opening in the bottom to push the food-trays in and get them back.
“Prepare yourself,” Lone Wolf cautions me. He pushes open a door.
Armed to the teeth, and now in possession of high-tech tools, tools strong enough to knock over the so-called impregnable walls of the control center in less than five minutes, a core group of rioters made their way to the protective custody wing.
There was one group of prisoners that lived in dread of a successful prison uprising. When they heard that the revolt had succeeded they collectively started saying their prayers. They knew an assault on their wing was coming but they didn’t know when; all they could do was wait, and hope that the bars which kept them locked in would safeguard them against those who would want them out from behind those bars. They didn’t know who would be coming—the faces—but they knew of the inevitability of it. It was a chance they’d all taken when they’d agreed to turn on their fellow inmates. It seemed like a reasonable risk, because the prison system had a strong vested interest in the safety and welfare of these men. They would be protected against almost everything.
The inmates taking over the asylum was one of the few things they couldn’t be protected against.
When the men inside these cells saw who was coming they started screaming for real, a high-pitched hysterical wail, like women or castrati. This was their worst nightmare come true. That the guards despised them, they knew. Everyone despised them, it came with the territory, as did the up-side, which was having their own sentences knocked down dramatically, which in some cases in the past had been as dramatic as a life-without-parole magically turning into time-served and adiós, amigo.
They also knew, these bottom-feeders of the system, these lowest of the low, that no matter how much they were hated, despised, and reviled, by prisoners and authorities alike, not even the guards could touch them, because of their special status. They were hated and needed at the same time. Without them, some of the men in here wouldn’t be: they’d be out on the streets, free. Most of those men were guilty, yes, but they couldn’t have been convicted without the testimony of the snitches. A select few (not the bikers specifically, but men like them, in here under different circumstances) were actually innocent of their particular crime. They had been framed by the testimony of one or more of the men in this wing.
The men that the snitches had turned were among the leaders of the takeover. Now these same men were facing their accusers, their reasons for being in this hole, and now they were armed with their shanks and other home-brewed weapons, as well as the blowtorches and high-tech tools. The only things separating them now were locked prison bars and doors; big fucking deal at this point.
The rioters could have killed the snitches right away. They could have set the cells on fire and let them burn to death. But that wouldn’t satisfy the blood need, the rage that had been festering for years. These men wanted their accusers’ deaths to be slow deaths, as slow and as painful as possible.
So instead of putting the stoolies out of their misery in a fast and (relatively) humane fashion, they did it the long way. The long, slow, psychologically torturous way, building an appetite with the taste of sweet revenge.
What they did was cut through the bars of the snitches’ cages with their newly-liberated high-tech acetylene torches and metal-cutters. It was long, hard work, but they didn’t mind. On the contrary—they relished it.
As they cut they taunted the men on the other side of the bars, telling them all the slow, horrifically painful ways they were going to use to kill them.
You could hear the screams all over the prison. Even the bikers, isolated on Death Row, could hear them. The cellblock was a natural amplifier, the screams carried all over, echoing off the walls.
“Poor bastards,” Goose commiserated.
“They really deserve our tears, don’t they? You forgetting it was bastards like them put us in here?” Lone Wolf reminded him, pitiless. “You gonna live that life you got to be ready to die it.”
They made no move to intervene. No one did. It was something that had to be done.
The rioters finally cut through the snitches’ cages. They dragged them out, kicking and screaming, onto the corridor floor. They were in one section of the top floor.
The first two were killed the most mercifully; they were tossed off the tier to the floor a hundred feet below, shattering against the concrete, their blood splashing all over the walls.
“One, two, three, heave!” The rioters laughed uproariously as they tossed them like sacks of potatoes.
After that, they got more creative. One rioter pulled a snitch out of his cell—it took some doing, the snitch had torn up his mattress and tied himself to the bars with batting and wire, literally wired himself to his cell. He’d done such a good job that his tormentor had to cut him loose with bolt-cutters; it pissed him off royally, ‘have the balls one time to die like a man’ his tormentor said. He was disgusted at the lack of heart in the snitch. Heart was important, if it was your time to check out you should check out like a man, with dignity. The snitch didn’t give a shit about dignity, he cried like a baby.
It didn’t matter. He got to play, now he was going to have to pay. Using the same blowtorch with which he had painstakingly cut the bars of the snitch’s cell, his liberator now used it to burn flesh. The snitch’s screams were unlike any sound a human had ever screamed, the flame from the blowtorch dancing over his body, paying particular attention to his private parts. Burnt that lying jailhouse sack of shit to a crisp.
His fellow rioters cheered him on. Then they tossed what was left over the side to join the remains of his companions.
That killing liberated their blood-hunger. It became butcher’s theater. Several men held each snitch down in turn while one of them would cut off his testicles as slowly and as painfully as possible, talking to him all the while, ‘How does it feel to get fucked instead of doing it, you ain’t gonna have nothing to fuck with no more, turkey.’ Then a shotgun blast to the face, a rifle bullet in the back, or in one case, a steel bar driven through the temple.
They did each snitch one at a time. It took a long time. After it went on for a few hours the men who were doing it, who had been dreaming of such a day for years, even they got sick of it, but they had to finish the job. The luckiest ones were the last few; by then no one had much stomach for it, so those fortunates were executed gangland-style, a bullet behind the ear, and then their equipment hacked off.
After that it got quiet for awhile; everyone, even the most crazed, needed breathing room. But there was an undercurrent of rumble, of electric rumble, that an experienced man could detect, like animals know an earthquake’s coming before it does. Lone Wolf was a man experienced in that.
He got up and walked out the door of his cell to the railing and looked out. He could see virtually the whole cellblock from here. There were men everywhere.
Some were starting the fires, others were starting the flood. Soon, he knew, it would be total chaos, unless he did something about it. Anarchy, every man for himself and none for all, half the men could be dead if they didn’t create something of order.
“Where’re you going?” Roach asked.
“Check the lay of the land,” Lone Wolf said. “Let’s go together. Ain’t nobody gonna fuck with the four of us together.”
By now enough time had passed so that men were getting scared. First the snitches; then who? Everyone has a grudge in the joint, everyone has someone they’d like to off if given the chance. Now everyone had the chance.
The masks went on. A few men got the idea, they ripped up their sheets and covered their faces with them and ventured out into the corridors, brandishing their weapons as shields, and the others saw it and picked up on the idea, soon everybody was masked from everybody else. By this time the fires were going good, the oil-drums had been brought in earlier, the air was so thick with smoke you couldn’t see five feet in front of you. Someone would suddenly appear out of the smoke and your scrotum would get tight, because you didn’t know who he was, he could be the cat who sounded you in the yard last week, the one who accused you of hogging the weights, who vowed payback. Or someone who had a grudge against you you didn’t even know about. The cat you thought was your best asshole buddy and pal secretly hated you for a million imagined slights.
Lone Wolf knew this was in their minds, that paranoia feeds on itself like a tapeworm. And he knew that his only chance to ever walk out of here alive was to get some order going, so that it could end. Otherwise, when the authorities finally did get back in, the inmates would have done the job for them. There would be nothing left but the burials.
They went first to where the women hostages had been sequestered. Lone Wolf had his suspicions that stuff might go down there first, and he was right. Now that the snitch-killers had had a meal of blood they were ready for the next course, which was pussy. Half a dozen of them had ripped the clothes off one of the women when Lone Wolf and the other bikers stuck their heads into the door.
Against the Wind Page 36
