You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  "Maybe if you'd fucking read this book you wouldn't of had that six-pack and decided to take a fucking meat cleaver to your sister!"

  Teacup starts crying.

  "You are way the fuck out of line, Ace," I say.

  Ace springs out of his chair and is in my face with three quick steps. Or he would be in my face if I hadn't stood up the moment I saw him tense. The top of his rat's nest comes up to my chin. Ace is talking shit.

  "Just who the fuck are you! Acting like you're about something! Telling me I'm outta line!" The sound of steel folding chairs scraping on concrete as all the A.A. dawgs scamper to shelter against the wall. When the Shit Jumps Off, unless you want to be up in the mix, it's best to find a hole and pull it over you.

  Ace is ranting and raving two inches from my face— definitely a violation of my personal space. But so far, no foul. Just wolf tickets.

  "…you the punk's daddy or something, think you're the motherfucking Red Cross? You ain't jack shit!"

  I remain silent. I don't have to do anything unless Ace crosses the line and puts his hate-hate hands on me.

  Ace puts his hands on me.

  His finger, to be precise. The one with the "H." Jabs it against my chest.

  I back up two steps, ostensibly to signal Ace my cowardice. This creates the necessary slack for my right hand to fly out of my pocket like a jackhammer on steroids. I haven't been curling four-gallon garbage cans in my cell every morning to impress the babes on the beach one day.

  I opt for the clenched-fist, backhanded bitch-slap. For a couple of reasons: it won't kill Ace and, perhaps more important, a prison bitch-slap brings the added burden of humiliation to the recipient. Sends a message much more powerful than physical pain: You ain't nothing but a punk-ass bitch, so this time you're getting a little bitch-slap. Dis me again, motherfucker, and you're dead!

  My fist crashes into Ace's mouth. There is a sharp snapping sound as his upper fangs shatter, followed by a satisfying thud as he hits the floor, ass-first. Blood is pouring from his fang hole onto a hate hand, which he is pressing against his now completely toothless mouth.

  "You fucking crazy, dawg!" The bark has been transformed into a whine. He doesn't try to get up. "I was just trying to get a fucking discussion started! Fuck, dawg, you busted my teeth." Ace is moaning in pain now.

  Tooshay, who's been playing lookout for Bubblecop, approaches the stricken Ace with the care of a man inspecting a rattlesnake that's wounded but still writhing and hissing.

  "Damn, O.G.! You be one cold muthafucka!"

  I decide not to wait for the closing Lord's Prayer. I'm the first out the door and on the yard. I don't unclench my fist until I'm halfway to my house.

  Four bloody AA batteries drop into the raked brown dirt.

  * * *

  Three Parole Board members, representing the full board of seven, travel from prison to prison in Nevada like the itinerant judges in the old western territories. Once a month they encamp in a conference room in the visiting building, where they plot out the future career paths of thirty to fifty applicants.

  C.O. Leach, wearing plastic gloves and Jack Daniel's aftershave, strip-searches me in a small holding cell before sending me into the conference room. At Chico's suggestion, I am wearing only my state-issue blues and sneakers. Chico's only other counsel was to "check your sideways shit at the door."

  Leach escorts me past all the dawgs waiting on the benches and into the hearing room. He guides me into the chair in front of the conference table and manages to stagger off without falling down once.

  The Parole Board— three tired suits encasing three middle-aged, sunbaked white guys, all wearing those little string tie contraptions with ornamental buckle clasps. No pictures on the wall, no furniture, no rugs, not even the state flag of Nevada. Which I believe depicts Bugsy Siegel shooting craps at the Flamingo Hotel.

  Center String speaks first. "Please state your back number."

  "Six-one-six-three-four," I answer, and they all nod— approvingly? I think so. I am absurdly, childishly delighted to get their first question right. My Inner Nerd, that ass-licking, favor-currying, chronic A student, that unfailingly neat and Nice Jewish Boy from Brooklyn, scholar and scourge of imprecision, is resonating. My parents didn't spend good money on my SAT prep classes for nothing.

  Center String makes the introductions. "I'm Chairman Griffin, and joining us today are Commissioners Shelton and Carruth. Mr. Lerner, we have reviewed your I-file and Caseworker Sykes's program progress report. Your file is complete."

  My file is complete? Like omniscient archangels perusing the Book of Deeds, they have my entire life in front of them. My file is complete. Could they possibly know about the time, aged eleven or so, I (allegedly) disfigured my little sister Lisa's Chatty Cathy doll? Or was it Barbie? My brother, Michael, would know— he did it. Or the one-armed man.

  Does the complete I-file disclose the time I liberated a copy of Playboy from beneath the mattress of my older cousin, Billy? Strictly for the article about setting up the new "Stereo" sound system.

  Of course, they know I killed the Monster. But does the I-file also enumerate all my sins of omission? The time I was too lazy and self-centered to visit Crystal once again at the University Hospital. The phone calls and the letters not returned from old friends who had moved away. The smiles withheld from strangers on the street. The gifts forgotten or never given.

  I took the Monster's life. Does the I-file reflect the life I once saved? A five-year-old girl I pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool and breathed life back into.

  Griffin looks up from the complete file and smiles— a good sign I think.

  "I must say, Mr. Lerner, after reviewing your file, I— we"— he nods to the second and third strings, who now also smile— "are quite favorably impressed. Your military service, your education, your career at the phone company, and your unblemished record while incarcerated here. In addition, Caseworker Sykes's report indicates you are on a solid programming track."

  "Thank you, sir." Mental note to self: put Wally on my Hanukkah card list. Which I will compile— one day.

  "Mr. Lerner, we only have a few minutes per applicant, and there are a few dozen difficult cases waiting outside. So let me just say now that our staff has computed your 'risk assessment factors' and the numbers fall squarely on the matrix for the earliest possible release…"

  I love this matrix! At the phone company I was a master of the multidimensional matrix. After a consultant suggested we copy American Airlines's Frequent Flier concept, I developed a matrix to distinguish the dial-tone dogs from our high-toll, enhanced-services "Gold" customers. I know from matrixes and I have rarely met one I didn't like.

  "…so unless you have any questions, we must move on to our more… problematical candidates."

  I'm down with that, but I don't tell him that. I also have no questions. My mentor, Mr. Brown, once told me to never, "never sell past the close."

  In what is probably a departure from the usual script, I rise to clasp the hands of the three String Ties. Warm smiles and handshakes all around. Definitely some Major Rapport here.

  Chairman Griffin dismisses me on a comforting note. "I think you already know our decision, but of course our formal, written decision will be sent to Caseworker Sykes in about two weeks, who will then call you in for the results."

  "Thank you again, sir."

  Leach enters— unsteadily— with the next petitioner. I can't wait to get back to my house and study my calendar, to count and recount my dwindling days here on Planet Wood.

  I think I finally got something coming!

  * * *

  Back in cellblock 4, C.O. Fallon unlocks the small library room for me. Spoony's been spreading it through the wire that "O.G. is down with fractions, dawgs— his English is good too." What started as an infrequent, hesitant teenage knock on my cell door at night— "Yogee, can you check my numbers?"— cascaded swiftly to a virtual school of felonious fish seeking my help in unrav
eling the mysteries of double multiplication and sentence structure.

  Rather than deal with this nightly deluge, I obtained permission from Wally to just conduct a math and English class twice a week in the library. Open-door policy and I don't record "tardies." I used to be a liberal arts kind of guy. Before I became an M.B.A. kind of guy, a cubicle kind of guy, then a killer kind of guy.

  Definitely a different drum beating out my karma. Go figure.

  Chico, although not a Fun with Fractions fan, takes advantage of the unlocked library door to slip in to search for any new Saint Mary's donated paperbacks. Deathrow Dom is right behind him.

  Deathrow Dominic Carlucci acts like he and I are soulmates because he is also from New York, originally. He is forever asking me about possible mutual acquaintances. "Yo, O.G. Didja know Lenny da Hump that usta hang out on Flatbush?" No, sorry, Dom. "How 'bout dis guy Phil, probably went witchu to Erasmus High School?" Sorry, Dom. Deathrow Dom is a compact bull of a man in his sixties. His death sentence was converted to Life Without back in the seventies when the Supreme Court invalidated existing state death penalty laws.

  "Any new poetry come in, O.G.?" Chico asks, already sifting through the boxes on the floor.

  "Who are you looking for?" The dawgs here just assume I'm the cellblock librarian because I'm in here so often.

  "This one looks good," Chico says. He holds a thick paperback up for my inspection: The Best of T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. The best of? What's next— a Walt Whitman sampler?

  "Did you read this one yet?" Chico flips open the tattered cover, which falls promptly to the floor.

  "No, but I think I may have caught the movie: Alfred Prufrock Goes Ungently into the Night, Trousers Unrolled."

  "That's pretty good. Did you share that one with the Parole Board?"

  "Wrong demographics, Chico." Deathrow Dom, after asking if I know a Vinnie somebody from Canarsie, scoops up Stephen King's The Green Mile and takes off.

  Chico spots my students coming across the rotunda. "Uh-oh… here comes the Sesame Swastika Street Gang. Spoony, Looney, Teacup, et al."

  "Who ate Al?" I want to know.

  "Your madre, O.G. Gonna stop by later for a chess lesson? I feel like busting some pawns."

  "I'll be by after the count."

  "Later, bro." We tap clenched fists.

  At eighteen, Spoony is the oldest member of my "class." He's also the only one of the skinhead teens not doing life. Teacup has just succumbed to the siren call of the Aryan Tribes. The wild mop of red hair is gone, his dome gleaming beneath the library fluorescents, his neck swollen from his first tattoo— a small swastika. They are all the rage since Kansas reclaimed his throne as Chief Shotcaller.

  Kansas also encourages his cattle to brand themselves while they are in the pen. Might need to round up a stray one day.

  There are eight baby Nazis in all, aged fourteen to eighteen, seated solemnly around a small conference table Wally acquired from the DMV. The GED test is scheduled for next month.

  "How about some geography today, dawgs?" I take my place in front of the blackboard, where I tape a map of Europe. Baby skinheads shine with suspicion. If they want to stay "classified" to education status (thereby avoiding being a kitchen worker and living in the Inferno), they must either pass the GED or at least be able to demonstrate a strong effort on the test.

  "Let's say you live here," I instruct, placing my fingertip pointer on the black dot representing Berlin. "And one morning, oh, let's say one morning in 1939, you wake up with an overpowering urge to goose-step straight through Poland. Which way do you go?"

  Spoony raises a hand— I insist on a modicum of classroom discipline. "Whatchu mean which way? Ya mean like up or down? Or across?"

  "Good question! Would you and your like-minded buddies march north, east, south, or west?"

  Eight white cue balls are bobbing in concentration, calling out the answers.

  "North!"

  "East!"

  "Both!"

  "Who said both?" These white cue balls all look alike to me. Probably some unconscious racism on my part.

  "Me!" Looney, a fifteen-year-old apprentice Aryan (Kansas is withholding his swastika until "he shows some heart"), raises his hand. "It's both because you gotta surround them, ya know, like cut off their escape, like." Looney, a straight-up J-Cat, is in this class only because he was expelled from his regular high school in Reno after bringing two unauthorized guests to school with him— Messieurs Smith and Wesson.

  Smith and Wesson must not have liked the geometry class because in the thick of a lecture on the Pythagorean theorem, S and W went ballistic, spraying federal 125-grain Magnums at the blackboard. Bad for the blackboard.

  Very bad for the geometry teacher standing in front of it.

  During the sentencing phase of the murder trial, Looney's lawyer was able to introduce psychiatric testimony to the effect that Looney had been conversing, since the age of five, with tiny, yogurt-fleshed creatures that lived in his refrigerator. Sometimes they told him to do bad things.

  The inmates here dubbed it the Dannon Defense. The judge gave Looney a Life With, and Looney spent his first six months here in the Moo, eating Haldol.

  Now he's my star pupil— a future conqueror of Poland, a closet irredentist.

  " 'Both' is a good answer," I assure Looney, conscious I am standing between him and a blackboard. "But east is more precise."

  An hour later I'm wrapping the session up with some applied mathematics, inspired by my surprising encounter with Two-Tears.

  "Okay, Teacup, let's say you're down for a double dime, running wild. You get good-time and work credit for half the first leg. The rest of the time you're strained up in the Shoe. How long to expire the first sentence?"

  Teacup scribbles furiously on his pad, adding, subtracting, calculating his way to mathematical freedom.

  "Anyone? Anyone can answer." I'm a collaborative kind of pedagogue. Teacup, calculations complete, raises his hand.

  "Well, you have to subtract out twenty months good time for the first nickel— but you add back twenty months work credits, sooo… you're looking at another three and a half years till you roll over to the wild leg."

  It's moments like this that make teaching a rewarding avocation.

  Almost.

  "Class dismissed."

  * * *

  "Who's up first, O.G.?" Ringer is already tired, anxious to get home for the Fourth of July holiday.

  I consult my clipboard with today's roster of reprobates.

  "Cheslewick, Walter. Six-two-one-three-nine. A fish. General violation G-2: unauthorized or unwanted contact with a private citizen."

  Ringer yells out to Stanger, who is keeping order on the bench. "Send in Cheesedick!"

  "Cheesedick! On your feet!" Stanger slams this skinny white boy down in the chair and races back out to the bench.

  The kid gazes first at Ringer, then me, his lawyer. His green eyes are glowing not with anger or even apprehension, but with the fire of the True Believer.

  "That's Cheslewick, sir," he says. Ringer glances at me to confirm this assertion. Convicts will lie about anything.

  "That's correct— Cheslewick, Walter." I didn't survive years of downsizing, restructuring, streamlining, and market repositioning without adding value to whatever process I was involved in. Ringer picks up a copy of the write-up.

  "…and are charged with a violation of the Nevada Code of Penal Discipline, G-2, in that, despite previous verbal warnings, you persisted in attempting to establish unwanted contact via a series of letters with a private citizen, one Jodie Foster, said repeated attempts constituting harassment. How do you plead?"

  I counseled him to plead guilty.

  "Not guilty," he says with the serenity of the full-blown fanatic. "It's my First Amendment right to correspond with anyone I want."

  Ringer sighs the universal sigh of the Beleaguered Civil Servant. We have twenty-three more hearings to go today.

  "Before I
pronounce you guilty, is there anything you want to tell me?"

  Cheesedick shakes his head, empowered with First Amendment righteousness.

  "Inmate substitute counsel Lerner— any factors in mitigation you wish to present?"

  The best I can do here is preserve my client's good time— no way to keep him out of the Hole. I check my notes.

  Cheesedick is down behind a "stalking" charge— an ex-girlfriend dropped a dime on him. Nothing mitigating there.

  "I think not," I say. "Mr. Cheslewick would respectfully request that any sanctions imposed do not include the loss of category A stat time." I give Cheesedick a cautionary look— please don't say anything.