by Les Edgerton
“Let’s find out what’s going down,” Manny said and Dusty reached out and grabbed the arm of a guy we knew, Baker, and yelled, “What’s the situation, man?”
He ran it down for us.
It seems it all started over at the infirmary. “Big Alice” one of the weight-lifting drag queens was there to get her finger looked at—she’d got it caught in a drill press over at the metal shop. When she asked for something for the pain the cheezy little Third World doctor just laughed and so Big Alice grabbed him and broke his arm. Then all hell broke loose, according to Baker.
It might have all ended there if the hack on duty had been around, but it turns out he was AWOL, having slipped over to the officer’s mess to grab a quick sandwich. Guards aren’t supposed to do that, leave their duty station, but they all did. When he came back, Alice and some of the other inmate patients grabbed him and threw him in a closet with the doc. They took his sandwich too, Baker said. We all laughed at that.
From there it just escalated, he said. Two other hacks were walking by on their way to the front gate when one of them must have noticed something wrong at the hospital and decided to investigate. His buddy went on up to the gate and it was him that sounded the alarm, probably when he couldn’t raise his partner on the walkie-talkie. His partner couldn’t have called in as he was dead. By the time he walked into the hospital Big Alice and the rest of the cons there had broken into one of the drug cabinets and were all high as loons. They decided to get the guard high too and shot him full of Demerol only they gave him a little bit more than what would be a safe dosage. He died happy, Baker said, and we all got another grin out of that.
From what we could figure from what Baker told us, it most likely could have ended right there, but our lame-brain Warden, Mr. Coffey, pushed the panic button and hit the whistle, ordered all the inmates locked down, and for the officers to come back up front until they could figure out exactly what was going on. That was a guess on our part, but it fit with what Baker told us. Coffey was a weasel from the git-go, always pulled boneheaded stunts like that. He blew their only chance to contain things before it became a riot. All he would have had to do was send about six of the biggest hacks with tear gas and the whole thing would have been history. Instead, he wasted enough time trying to make a decision that Alice and the hospital inmates recruited some others out in the yard, and it blew sky high when the barber school guard Jonesy and Sniffles got shanked going into J. The inmates there grabbed Jonesy’s keys and let out the whole damned block and then the shit was in the fire. There was about fifty inmates locked up that all of a sudden weren’t and they ran over to the chow hall and started grabbing officers’ steaks out of the reefer and cooking them. Naturally, it wasn’t long before they started burning down the place, which we’d seen from our window at K earlier.
We looked around, dozens of guys running here and there, bunch of fucking baboons and Dusty said, “Don’t much look like the movies, does it?” he said it to Manny.
No shit. In the movies, they have a riot, they make the convicts look like the Teamsters Union. Organized like nobody’s business. Movie riots in the joint always have committees with lists of demands and all this strategy. Real riots aren’t anything like that. Everybody’s just shittin’ and gittin’, trying to grab all the goodies they can from each other, from the commissary, the chow hall, wherever, and guys go nuts trying to shank each other. Only people usually hurt are inmates. Usually by other inmates. I bet the doc and the guard over at the hospital were completely forgotten by Alice and the others who were probably over at the commissary breaking down the wire cage to get at the cookie stash. Only reason the guards hadn’t moved in yet was we had us a warden believed all that movie crap, was no doubt waiting for the Convict Committee to show up with their Twenty Demands. Like we didn’t have but one demand. Let us the fuck out! Not much chance of that happening.
What they’d do is let us burn everything down, kill each other, and then early the next morning come in with the guns and dogs and shoot a few more of us. Most of us wouldn’t be in any shape to resist. Twenty guys, for instance, would be working on making some quick applejack to get drunk on while they had the chance. In fact, that sounded like a good idea to us.
“Fire’s probably burned down in K by now,” Dusty said. “Let’s get our asses over to the chow hall and pick up some peaches and stuff and get loaded.”
We booked over to what was left of the chow hall and sure enough there was a whole gang of guys loading up on fruit. We each loaded up a big bagful and headed back over to K.
The way you made applejack was to scrub down the commode until it was squeaky clean, then you dumped a bunch of fruit and sugar and yeast in the water and let it set, three, four days until it started to ferment. You skimmed off the fruit that was pretty ripe by then and drank what was left. Some good shit, made you insane it was so good. Only place you could brew applejack was if you were in a cell. In the dorms, no way. There was only two toilets for about fifty guys and there was always a few pitched a bitch if you was to even hint you were gonna be using their crapper for that long. Besides, in a dorm was a boatful of snitches would rat you out long before it was done and you’d end up in the hole and back in a cell house after they let you out.
We didn’t figure we had three or four days to let the stuff brew naturally like it was supposed to, so Dusty said let’s go over to the hospital and get some rubbing alcohol to speed things up.
There was a mob over there must have had the same idea as we did. “Let’s split up,” Dusty said, when we saw two dozen guys with the same idea. “Everybody take a room and look for anything has alcohol in it. Grab as much as you can carry, and we’ll meet back at the front door.”
It was a good plan and we took off, each a different direction. I went straight for the back of the building seeing as how most guys were looking in the front offices. I figured if there was any alcohol up there they’d have found it by now and if there was any left in the building it would be toward the back.
The first room I went into wasn’t nothing but some kind of linen storage room. It only took five seconds to see they didn’t keep anything but sheets and pillowcases and stuff like that in there, so I ran out and down the hall to the very last room. Nobody’d been there as the door was still locked. A good sign. If the room was locked it meant there was something worth stealing there.
The door went down easy. I only had to hit it twice and the whole door jamb splintered and I was in. I’d hit the mother lode. Up against the far wall was a long glass cabinet and I could see it was loaded with drugs and medication. Where the drugs were, the alcohol would be too and I was gonna load up with pills and stuff. If I could hide ‘em good enough, I’d be rich when this all blew over. Plus, I had it in mind to get a little high myself.
I didn’t mess around with the locks on the cabinets, just picked up a bedpan was sitting on a counter and started bashing in glass. I went up and down the entire row of cabinets and busted out all the glass. I was looking around for a bag or something to put the bottles in when I heard something over by the door. I whirled around, sure it was one of the hacks—I was busted! I wish it had of been a guard. It was Frick, my old pal from the city lockup in Fort Wayne.
“Hey, chump,” he said. “I been lookin’ for you.”
He had a shank in his hand looked like a regular knife, not a homemade job like most. I wondered how he’d come to have a weapon like that.
CHAPTER 15
We stood there a moment just staring at each other and all kinds of things went through my mind. Fear wasn’t one of them. Oh, a bit I guess but not much. My first thought was that he most likely wasn’t aware I had a shank. Easy pickings is what he must see, standing there looking at me the way he was. Carve me up some honky, I bet is what he was thinking. Otherwise, he would have just snuck up behind me which would have been easy, all the noise I was making, breaking open cabinets. No, he figured I was unarmed so he’d have himself some fun, scare the h
onky, maybe fuck him.
I thought about taking him right then and there and then I had another thought. At least ten guys saw me go back this way not counting Manny and Dusty. There’s gotta be one snitch in any ten guys and if I fucked up this cocksucker back here my ass would be in slam, guaranteed, and one more sentence to serve. No, I had to get him someplace else.
There was a back door just to my left, maybe three feet away. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the chain lock was off, but I didn’t know if the regular door lock was on or off. I decided to chance it was unlocked. If it was locked, he’d be on me before I could unlock it and open it but if I was in luck, I’d be out of there and he’d have to come after me. If worse came to worse, I’d take him on in the room and there was no doubt in my mind how that’d turn out. Dead nigger is how that would end.
Cool. It was unlocked. I was out the door before he knew what happened and booking across the yard toward the chow hall. I knew where I wanted to go and only hoped I could outrun him. My goal was the roof of the laundry.
I was halfway up the fire escape before I saw him, and up over the top just as he was grabbing the bottom rung.
I don’t think the little punk even knew what hit him. I think he was expecting to come up, chase me around a little bit and then repeat our little tete-a-tete back at the city lockup, and then take me out, cut through the fine veins and capillaries of my neck. It didn’t work out that way and I’m sure he was disappointed.
What happened was, when his head came up over the top I grabbed his fro and pulled him bodily the rest of the way up, at the same time I’m jabbing him with my straightened out laundry pin. He must have been one cocky sonofabitch ‘cause he didn’t even have his shank out yet, had it stuck in his back pocket. He fucked up. Like the old joke goes, “Don’t bring one knife to a two-shank fight especially if you’re climbing up a fire escape and don’t know what’s waiting.”
I must have went a little nutsy because I didn’t nail him just once or twice which would have done the trick. Instead, I performed needlepoint on him, punched a whole bunch of holes in his punk ass. I guess it was the music of his screams. Every time I stuck him he’d give out with an E-flat screech and I played an inspirational kind of tune on my instrument. It felt so fucking good. I think I tried to poke him about as many times as he had me, back in city lockup. Maybe a few more. The only reason I finally quit was, in all honesty my arm just got tired. I simply couldn’t lift it one more time. Besides, he had shut up, wasn’t playing the game anymore.
I looked around but I knew no one had seen us. Nobody else was on the roof, which was why I had headed there and I was certain no one had seen us come up. Everybody was too busy robbing and pillaging each other.
First thing I did after I climbed down was walk over to the barber school. The inmates owned the institution, at least for a little while longer and I could go just about anywhere I wanted. I had to get rid of my clothes being as they were pretty nasty, what with the blood and all and I kept an extra change at the school.
Once there, it was a piece of cake to bust a window in the door, reach in and unlock it. Inside, I shucked my bloody clothes and threw them on the floor of the shower stall and turned the cold water on. I remembered hearing someplace that cold water washes out blood better than hot. When they quit running red, I squeezed out the excess water and threw them out on the floor, adjusted the water so it was comfortable and stepped in, lathering down with shampoo all over. All the time I was doing this, I could hear guys running by outside, yelling and stuff. Drying off, I grabbed my extra jeans and shirt and dressed, grabbed the lump of wet clothes and took off. At the dumpster out back, I threw the wet clothes in and went off to find Dusty and Manny. As I passed by the chow hall, I took the laundry pin and dropped it on the grass in plain sight. Someone would find it and grab it I figured. Then, if there was an investigation and it turned up, it would turn up in someone else’s possession and heaven help whoever had it try and explain how he came to have it and where he was during the riot when Frick had bought it.
Pretty slick, I thought. Just your genius criminal mind at work.
I went back to the hospital, back to the room where I’d found the drugs. It was cleaned out. I hurried up to the front, looking in each room to see if Manny and Dusty were still there. They weren’t. I didn’t have a clue where they had gone so I just went out in the yard where there must have been five hundred inmates running around. Back and forth I went, but they weren’t out in the yard unless I missed them somehow. On a hunch I walked over to K Dorm and went inside and up to the dorm. The fires had died down and all there was was a little smoke in layers coming from some of the bunks in the rear. Dusty and Manny were sitting on his bunk with all kinds of shit spread out between them.
“Hey, where you been!” They looked up and grinned and pointed down to the stuff on the bed.
There must have been six dozen bottles of different pills and stuff piled up there. They were putting them in baggies and twisting them shut.
“Separate the uppers from the downers and put six in a bag,” Dusty said. I jumped in and began sorting out bottles. When we were done he told Manny to go stand by the door and keep watch.
“Anybody comes up you let me know right now,” he said. We gathered up an armful of baggies each and went over to the far wall. Dusty still had the same hiding place he’d had when I was in before, a concrete block that he pulled out from the back wall. It was a tight fit, but we got them all crammed into the space behind it. Before he replaced the block he took the little can of gray paint he kept in the space and poured some on a paper towel. Putting the block back into place, he took his finger and repainted the lines around the block, filling in the gap. When he was done you couldn’t tell the block had ever been out.
We went back over and sat down on his bunk and Dusty reached up and pulled down a bag of the peaches we’d copped at the chow hall.
“You gonna make some applejack?” I said.
“Naw. Let’s just eat these. I got something better.” He reached back in the bag and brought out a loaf of bread. I didn’t understand what was so exciting about that until he reached back in the bag and pulled out a couple of bottles of aftershave. Aqua Velva.
“Oh, man! This is great!”
“We’re gonna get so-ooo drunk!” I said.
“On that?” Manny said.
“Yeah. Just watch.”
Dusty and I grabbed our coffee cups and told Manny to get his too. Dusty opened the bread and handed us each a stack. I held three pieces of bread over my cup and Dusty began to pour the Aqua-Velva over it slowly.
“Hold it!” The stuff had started to eat a hole through the bread. I grabbed another stack and he began pouring again. It took six more slices before he emptied the bottle.
“What’s that do?” Manny asked.
“Cuts the oil,” Dusty said.
It wasn’t Jack Daniels, but it did the job. After the first couple of sips it didn’t even taste too bad. We finished both bottles.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s go turn ourselves in. I don’t want to end up in the hole with the rest of these clowns, do you?”
We walked up to the front gate at the visitor’s room, our fingers laced behind our heads and sure enough, all the hacks were gathered there, milling around on the other side of the bars like a herd of cattle.
They acted tough, grabbing us and shaking us down and even doing the body cavity routine, but we expected that. You could tell they were scared. I couldn’t tell if they could see that we were half-drunk or not, not that I cared.
“How come your hands are sweaty?” I asked the hack who was having trouble getting his hand into a rubber glove. “This your first date?”
They put us in the officer’s barber shop along with about a dozen other inmates who had had the same idea, mostly old hands who knew what was coming. There was a window where you could see the parking lot outside the main administrative building. I knew then that time would slow d
own for a while when this was all over, with the memory of that view of freedom just inches away.
Most guys who’ve done any time at all will tell you that being in the joint is a thousand times easier than doing time in a city or county lockup. The reason is, in the joint you never see the outside. That may sound tough but believe me, it’s far worse in most city jails where you can see the streets outside. All it does is remind you of where you’re not. Outside, where you can go buy a beer, talk to a lady—shit—even turn on the TV and watch some stupid show. Freedom. The last thing you want when you’ve got a stretch of time ahead of you to pull is to be reminded of what you’re missing. Inside the walls, you never see it and you get so you can keep it from entering your mind and time goes easy.
That’s why guys hate to have to go testify at trials, which happens from time to time when somebody gets killed inside. It means you have to climb in a van and get driven to some court, usually in Indianapolis, where you give your testimony. What’s hard about it is you’re on the road with regular folks, people on their way to their jobs or maybe to get laid, whatever. You see a car go by and there’s a guy driving and a girl sitting next to him and then you see her bob down and you know what she’s doing and it just kills you. For months afterward, that’s all you think about. Some guys though, they’re just the opposite. Every chance they get to get out, trial, whatever, they’re first on the bus. I guess they just like to torture themselves.
I remember the time right before I did my first bit, sitting in the South Bend city lockup staring out a window at the cars going by. Sundays were the worst because there wasn’t much traffic or people going by and when they did, like say a couple walked by beneath you arm in arm, you had plenty of time to fantasize about where they were going, what they were going to be doing, and here you sat with your willie in your hand and it sure wasn’t going to be the same and wouldn’t be for a long, long time.
