You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  "…in the Kansas pen, dawg, we'd of had something for them fucking dogs too. Would of been a few shanked shepherds for dinner, bro. You unnerstan' what I'm sayin' to you?"

  I can't find Alana anywhere in the cell.

  "Yo, Kansas," I begin. I'm so weary. Soul-sick. "Listen, dawg— we're not in Kansas anymore. You understand what I'm saying?"

  * * *

  Our house is a shambles. The Dirt took everything that wasn't issued to us by the state. Kansas and I take a painful inventory while the Dirt are gathering up and bagging all the contraband on the catwalk and rotunda floor. Incredibly they find a full set of handcuff keys among the shanks and drugs.

  All my store is gone: two writing tablets, envelopes, stamps, Bic pens, a bag of 4 Aces tobacco with rolling papers, one Heritage Stick deodorant ("Musk"), and a can of Pacific Pearl sardines ("lightly smoked in oil").

  Most devastating, though, is the loss of my comfort foods. Kansas says it's critical to make an itemized list in order to file a property claim form later on. He hands me a pencil stub and I start recording the missing-in-Dirt-action items: four Almond Joys, three bags of Digby's Jolly Ranchers (one assorted, two "fire"), a bag of Hershey's Kisses, five Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, two beef jerkies ("kipper"), three bags of Cactus Annie's pork rinds ("hot and spicy!"), one bag of licorice (cherry nibs), and seven bags of Sather's Gummi Bears.

  I particularly mourn the loss of the Gummi Bears. They always put me in a frolicsome humor.

  Also missing are two tattered paperback novels that Lester the Molester let me have for four stamps. The New York Times is gone, but I'm not sweating that— I'll get a new delivery tomorrow.

  All of Kansas's stuff (except his Nazi "literature") has also gone the way of dirt. Kansas ain't trippin' because he never bought any of it. Kansas doesn't believe in buying store. He takes other people's store. He insists other inmates just give him things.

  Kansas always allocates a portion of his one-hour tier time to terrorize fish into donating a percentage of their store to him. He tells them it is the standard "cell rental" charge and he is the collection agent for the landlord. Or he allows them to purchase a "life insurance" policy from him. When he spots fish who manifest sufficiently brutal tendencies, he explains that by paying "initiation dues" now they will be given top consideration for membership in his skinhead Nazi Low Rider club. And he means it.

  What puzzled me at first was that some of the more seasoned cons, the so-called hard cases, were eager to also pay tribute with candy, stamps, and tobacco.

  Skell tells me that Kansas is the Shotcaller again now that he's back in prison. He whispers this to me in the fish yard. Tells me to "keep it on the D.L." "What's the D.L., Skell?" Skell glances furtively around, which is the only way Skell ever glances around. "The D.L., dawg, is the down-low. You keep something on the D.L. and it stays with you— you down wid that?" I tell him I'm down with it.

  It's the usual morning hour for tier time, and convicts are banging on cell doors to be let out.

  "Tier time," they yell up at Bubblecop, who is relaxing behind the console with a Hustler and a bag of Gummi Bears. "Tier time!" they scream, and Bubblecop doesn't flinch.

  The Dirt is gone and C.O. Strunk is compelled to leave his icy pod to make a general announcement to the Fish Tank. Lately Strunk is looking less and less like a fire hydrant and more and more like a beach ball with a bad haircut. He stands in the center of the rotunda and bellows out the one word guaranteed to engender an unhealthful amount of fear and loathing:

  "LOCKDOWN!"

  Lockdowns go with shakedowns like— as Kansas would say— "stank on shit." The entire prison ramps up to a supermax security mode for a few hours, days, or even months. Kansas claims they are "part of the punishment." That they are as natural "as beating your redheaded stepchild."

  Strunk shouts once more before fleeing back to his office. "No tier time! You're on lockdown!"

  Kansas and a hundred others react by kicking the sturdy steel cell doors. Bad for the doors. Very bad for the feet. They also scream.

  "Motherfucking cocksuckers!"

  "Punk-ass po-lease!"

  "Punk-ass Strunk-ass fat muthafucka!"

  "Yo, Strunk! Lock this down, you punk-ass bitch!"

  Inmates are gathered in front of the doors, peering through the wire-mesh windows, trying to see what they can see.

  There is nothing to see except the faces of other fish pressed against the windows. Unless you count watching Strunk kick back in his reclining chair with his own copy of Hustler, scarfing down a bag of licorice (cherry nibs).

  Kansas finally gives up kung-fuing the cell door— the door won. As the heat climbs in the cellblock, the banging, clanging, pounding, and screaming gradually subside to the normal horrifying levels.

  At 5 P.M. we get out for two minutes to pick up our dinner trays— liver and onions and cold mashed potatoes. The Bone registers a complaint: "Cain't a muthafucka get nothin' but no cold-ass mashed?" No one cares.

  When Skell arrives on our front porch to pick up the trays (and deliver two more to Kansas), I ask him to bring me a book from Lester's library.

  Skell is immediately suspicious.

  "What do you mean a book?" Funny— you could ask Skell to fetch you a shank, a spear, a surface-to-air missile and he wouldn't bat a jaundiced eye. But a book?

  "A novel, Skell— any kind!"

  "Cost you two stamps, O.G. You down wid dat?"

  "I'm down with it."

  "Aiight then— later."

  Kansas makes another dookie announcement. This signals me to roll over on my side and face the wall or the window to afford Kansas a small measure of privacy.

  This may be more information than anyone needs, but there is a certain etiquette to taking a dookie in a prison cell. Every few seconds Kansas punches the flush button. Current convict theory holds that the continuous suction will carry the most vile odors away before they can permeate the entire cell.

  This theory cries out for revisiting. An oven-hot eight-by-six concrete cell in a post-dookie environment stinks.

  Too late, Kansas discovers the Dirt also took our toilet paper.

  "Shit! O.G., will you holler down to the C.O. for some shit paper?"

  "Aiight… C.O.! Cell 47!" After five minutes of shouting, C.O. Strunk deigns to put down his Hustler and glare up at me. To his credit he actually gets up (somewhat stiff-legged) and opens his door.

  "What do you need, O.G.?"

  "Toilet paper, sir." The "sir" is a syntactical appendage I am learning to overlay only when something is desperately needed.

  Strunk is visibly irritated to have been separated from his coffee and newly acquired Hustler to deal with such a prosaic problem.

  "You know the rules, O.G. You get two rolls of toilet paper per cell per week."

  "But the Dirt confiscated all our toilet paper."

  Strunk greets this annoying little factoid with indifference. It is clearly irrelevant. "That's on the Dirt— it ain't on me. I hand out two rolls per cell per week per Administrative Regulation number 22." Administrative Regulation number 22 is suspiciously cited by Strunk whenever he doesn't feel like doing his job. No one here has ever seen a copy of AR-22. And some of these dawgs have been down for more than a few days, if you know what I'm saying.

  "So what are we supposed to do?" The second this whining question is out of my mouth I know I have set myself up. Strunk is already pissed off over the universal disrespect disclosed by such an abundance of contraband in "his house." The Dirt finding handcuff keys didn't help. We all know he will be hearing about the entire mess from Stanger, or possibly the warden.

  "Use your fucking finger!" is Strunk's answer. Pleased with his resolution of the problem, he waddles back behind his desk, picks up the Hustler, and stuffs an Almond Joy in his mouth.

  Apparently the big winner in the shakedown is the cops.

  Still squatting, Kansas unleashes a virulent (even for him) stream of obscenities flavored wi
th his fervent promises of "getback." It ain't gonna be nothin' nice. No sir.

  There is no paper of any kind in our house except his Nazi tracts. I suggest pulling off a page or two from Secrets from the Bunker.

  "No fuckin' way! You're talking about writings that are practically sacred, like them Dead Scrolls they found. What else we got?"

  "We? You have probably over two hundred pages in your PSI and FBI reports— want me to peel off, say, ten pages of your early criminal history— age four?"

  "That's way outta line, dawg. What about… I got it! Remember when the punk-ass chaplain give us them Bibles when we first come in? Check in my tub— see if the Dirt got that too."

  Kansas snatches it from my hand, hesitates. "You figure this could be like a major sin, O.G.? 'Cause I ain't one of these fucking pagans that we got running around here, fucking Wiccans they call themselves. Buncha fucking freaks!"

  "From what you've told me about yourself this will probably be recorded— if at all— as a relatively minor transgression."

  "Minor? Like a misdemeanor or something?"

  "Probably even less than that— more like a parking violation."

  A minute later Kansas smacks the flush button, and a passage from Genesis is sucked deep down into the bowels of the Nevada prison sewage system.

  Now Skell is knocking on the cell door. "I gotcha a book but it's too fat to stuff under the door. I'm gonna have to tear it in half and kick the pieces under— you down wid dat?"

  "It's all good, Skell."

  Skell double-drop-kicks a bifurcated copy of a novel called The Temple of Gold by William Goldman. I'm devouring the novel, loving it, when down in cell 7 Lester the Molester starts screaming from his wheelchair. He wants his "meds." Prescribed medications are delivered two times a day to the cells by a justifiably nervous female nurse escorted by an infirmary cop.

  "C.O.— where's the fucking meds?" Lester yells under the cell door. "They're supposed to bring the meds at six!" This stirs up the J-Cats, all of whom receive psychotropic drugs, like it or not. The lower-tier J-Cat section is suddenly shrieking out requests.

  "Where's my motherfucking Thorazine!"

  "Yo, Strunk— I be needing my Haldol!"

  "Stell-zeen! I'm supposed to get my Stell-zeen!"

  "Where's the fucking Sin-nay-quan?"

  The bedlam builds to an earsplitting din. C.O. Strunk finally has to put down his bag of Cactus Annie's pork rinds (hot and spicy!) to call the infirmary.

  Kansas tapping on my tray.

  "What's up?" I ask, eschewing the more fashionable "Whassup."

  "Need to know what this word means."

  "What's the word?"

  "Purge-a-torry."

  "Hmmm… give it to me in context."

  "What contest?"

  "I mean read it in the sentence."

  As usual I end up reading it: There is a special place in purgatory for Jewish sympathizers that…

  "Very deep stuff, Kansas. The word is 'purgatory.' "

  "What's it mean?"

  The J-Cat screams are bouncing off the Fish Tank walls below. From our air vent comes that mysterious sobbing sound.

  "Purgatory? That's like this place."

  "Straight-up business, dawg? No sideways shit?"

  "On my skin, bro."

  "Aiight then."

  The muffled sobs amplify and become full-blown, uncontrollable weeping. Kansas and I both know it is coming from one of the teenagers' cells on our tier.

  A friend of mine, a priest, once told me that the three most powerful words in the Bible are: "And Jesus wept."

  * * *

  The lockdown drags on for days.

  The teenage fish who weeps through the air vent at night lives in cell 49, next door to Big Bear. We see him three times a day when we pick up our food trays from the lower tier. We see the bruises on his face. Sometimes we see worse things.

  The kid is sixteen but looks thirteen, so thin his ribs poke out through his bony white chest. All the dawgs call him Bobby-Boy except his cellie, who calls him "punk" or "little bitch" to his face. On the fish yard he refers to Bobby-Boy as "my kid," before smiling in a grotesque mockery of paternal pride.

  All the dawgs call the cellie Bruno, and he looks like one, full-sleeved with a bullet-shaped skinhead. His chest and arms reflect a decade spent between the weight piles and tattoo guns.

  Bruno is anything but a fish. He's supposed to be in the Hole, doing ninety days for theft, extortion, and rape, but with the Hole at full capacity Bruno is being kept in the Fish Tank on a "temporary administrative segregation hold" until a room is found for him at the inn.

  The days fall away, and September is every bit as hot and benumbing as August and July.

  And the lockdown continues.

  * * *

  Bobby-Boy died today.

  Or maybe it was yesterday— I can't be sure. In a prison lockdown, time is distorted. It bends and swirls and circles until nights dissolve into days that are perhaps Monday or Friday, but no one knows for sure and no one cares 'cause we're not going anywhere.

  And we got nothing coming.

  It happened when they opened the upper-tier cells for breakfast-tray pickup and we were filing out like zombies in underwear to the catwalk. It happened so fast that there was little anyone could do, presuming anyone would have been inclined to intervene.

  We emerge from our houses clutching our plastic mugs with the HARD TIME logo. An inmate gets only one chance at the portable milk dispenser. If you forget your cup in your cell, you can forget about a drink. Or, as Strunk says every day, "Got no cup, you're fucking burnt! You got nothin' comin'!"

  Bobby limps slowly and painfully out of cell 49. He is not carrying the obligatory cup. He is carrying a rope he has fashioned by knotting two sheets together. Bobby is holding one end of the sheet-rope. The other end is a noose and it is already around his neck.

  Bobby makes it to the catwalk railing with two shuffling steps. Big Bear sees him first, shouts "No, no, Bobby-Boy, no!" Bobby bends over to quickly anchor his end of the sheet-rope to the rail. His white state boxers are still bright with blood.

  Bubblecop gets his Hustler down and his shotgun up just in time to see Bobby dive headfirst over the railing. He flips once in midair before his neck snaps. It is a sound that I know will take up permanent residence in my repertoire of nightmares. Star billing alongside the Monster.

  "LOCK IT DOWN— NOW!!"

  Nobody is hungry anymore anyway.

  In the cell Kansas offers his analysis, filtered through his customary solipsistic prism.

  "Fuck! That shit was completely off the hook! Fucking Bobby-Boy should have P.C.'d up from the jump, know what I'm sayin'? Young punk like that belongs in protective custody! Bet they keep us locked down for a fucking year behind Bobby-Boy's punk-ass bullshit."

  Some of the Dirt arrive and take pictures of Bobby-Boy before they take him down. They also take Bruno off to the Hole to do his belated ninety days.

  Bruno actually does only seventy-eight days in the Hole. They gave him twelve days "time-served credits" for his stay in the Fish Tank.

  And Jesus wept.

  * * *

  The lockdown grinds into a third week. No more tier time. No more visits. No phones, no showers, no store, no yard. We got nothing coming. By federal law they have to give us mail, so I continue to receive the Times and several magazines that my little sister, Lisa— bless her heart!— has subscribed to for me.

  My "little" sister is now thirty-seven and a highly successful real estate attorney near Miami, where condominium residents think nothing of suing the condominium building owners across the street for painting the exterior pink. Or yellow. Or just for painting.

  To Lisa I'll always be the big brother who, she still insists, butchered the hair of her Chatty Cathy doll when she was six years old. She has steadfastly maintained this gross calumny despite almost three decades of my denials.

  For the record, I believe it was my olde
r brother, Michael, who attacked Chatty Cathy with a scissors and a penchant for early punk hairstyles.

  Michael, now a forty-eight-year-old medical doctor, claims "a one-armed man" did it.

  I still think Michael did it, but sometimes my brain can no longer distinguish between things that actually happened and the way I want them to have happened.

  Y'unnerstan' what I'm sayin' here, dawgs?