by Eldon Asp
I hightailed it back to the tank, and by now my imagination was just going crazy on me. It was like an oven in the tank with the bodies all piled on top of each other and I had to step over everybody to get to the stairs. Out of nowhere my mind started telling me that everyone was dead, that it was corpses piled all over the place. It was just horrible. So I got back to my carraca and I locked the door and curled up with the pillow over my head, totally regretting the trip and just waiting for it to be over, praying for it. Then all of a sudden I thought, “Oh shit—what if those guys are having a bad trip, too? What am I gonna do if they have a bad trip and decide they’re gonna come and lynch me?” Or shoot me or stab me or whatever. I started getting all these paranoid thoughts. This went on for probably a couple of hours. And right in the middle of this total panic attack, I heard a little tap at my door; I heard someone come up the stairs real quiet, and then there was this little tap at the door. Damn it.
Of course I thought, “Well, this is it. I’m gonna die now.” I was sure of it. And I didn’t even fight it. It just made sense to me at that point, in that condition. Why wouldn’t I die? So I walked over and opened the door, and there were these three little old farmers standing there. Their eyes were all huge and they were glowing like some kind of Christmas miracle, like they had halos around them. Just grinning ear to ear. They stared at me, smiling, for the longest time and then they stuck out their hands and said,
“Más.”
That’s it: just the one word, and these smiles. That just about made my year.
Mártir
Hank the Fallen Hero
I FIRST MET HANK IN lockup at La Ocho. He was the Marine who’d taken the fall for his buddies after they all got caught smuggling pot around the fence down there at the shoreline. It was Hank’s example that gave me the idea to spring my own partners the same way. Hank was a really good guy, just a standup character, and he looked like Captain America.
Anyway, we both wound up in La Mesa. Hank did all right for himself, I’d have to say, even though he’d never been to prison before and he looked even whiter than me. Everyone sensed that he was an honorable dude, and even if he wasn’t the hardest guy in there, you had to respect that, which people did. At first his buddies, the ones he took the fall for, they would come around and visit him and bring him money or food or whatever, but one by one they stopped coming. They abandoned him. And his parents, back there on the farm or wherever, I think they just wrote him off as a junky and a criminal. They were aware of his situation, but they didn’t care. He didn’t talk about them much except to say that they didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
But I would say probably the worst thing that happened to Hank was he befriended this one particular Mexican guy. His nickname was “Borrego,” same as mine, but he had black curly hair instead of blond. Borrego turned Hank on to some chiva, and that’s when Hank caught hepatitis.
There are, I believe, three different kinds of hepatitis, and a whole bunch of ways you can get it. For some people it’s no big deal and for others it’s deadly. Well, when Hank got it, he just became horribly sick right off the bat. It’s always been my belief that he got it from the needle. That’s just a feeling, but for some reason I’ve always been sure that was what did it. Anyway, it just laid him out. He went crazy from it. Here he was, this nice, levelheaded kid, and within a couple days he’s sick as a dog and just raving. I went to see him in his carraca one day—this was before I knew what he had—and I knocked on the door, and on the other side I heard him holler, “Fuck off! Get out of here and leave me alone!” We were good buddies, so I was thinking he must not have known it was me. So I knocked again, and I told him who it was. Again he said, “Get the fuck out of here!” Like I said, at this point I didn’t know how sick he was, so I was just like, “All right, fuck that guy.” And I left.
Well, the next day this Borrego character, the one who’d shot him up, came up to me and told me that Hank was real, real sick, and that they were gonna take him over to the infirmary. I hurried over to his place—he was the only American in E Tank—I hurried over and saw that some of the inmates from the tank had him on a stretcher. They all had bandanas tied over their faces like bandidos because they thought he had the plague or something, literally. They wanted him out of there. He was rolling around on the stretcher and the sweat was just pouring out of him and there was puke all over his cheek and his eyes were rolled up in his head and they were all yellow. He really looked terrible; a big strong Marine and he looked like he was dying.
They ran him over to the infirmary and basically dumped him there. Well, the medic at the infirmary was no braver than these guys; he didn’t want to get close to him, so Hank was getting no medical care whatsoever. I didn’t know what the hell to do for him, so I tried the only thing I could think of, which was to call this woman I knew on the outside and put her on the case to try to get the Marines involved. Or the Navy, or whoever was in charge of all that. And God bless her, she ran with it, she called all over the place, putting pressure on people. At first they didn’t want anything to do with it. They said he’s a junky and he’s a smuggler and like this, and there was nothing they could do for him. Well, she just kept calling and calling and hammering away at them, telling them “Look, this kid is real sick in there and they won’t help him, so if you guys don’t send a doctor or somebody down to take care of him, he’s gonna die!” Finally she told them that if Hank died, she was gonna call all the newspapers and the TV stations and tell them that the Navy had left this guy down there to croak when they could have saved him. That finally got through to them.
This had been going on for a few days already when they finally agreed to send a doctor down from Camp Pendleton. When the doctor showed up, it was me and Johnny Bigotes taking care of Hank in the infirmary because no one else would touch him, and Hank was bare-ass naked because he was just sweating and burning up. This doctor came in and took one look at Hank and jabbed an I.V. into him, hooked up to this bag of fluid, saline fluid or something. He gave me and Johnny the dirtiest look, like we were two pieces of shit, as if we’d caused Hank to be like this instead of being the only ones doing fuck-all to help the poor guy. The doctor told us if we couldn’t keep the fluid in him that Hank was gonna die for sure. His liver was shutting down. I said I’d do my best, but Jesus, the kid was in convulsions, he was thrashing all over while I tried to keep the needle in him. As fast as the fluid was going into him he was pissing it out, literally pissing all over the place and sweating like crazy. We could see him drying out right in front of our eyes. His lips were cracking right in front of us. We tried to hold him down but he was completely delirious, thrashing all around.
Then the doctor was gone. We stayed with Hank most of the night like that and he wasn’t getting any better, so finally the Mexicans, the infirmary workers, came in and said they were gonna take him over to the hospital because it looked like he was pretty close to dying, like this was the end. They wheeled him out and put him in an ambulance for the ride to the hospital, and he died along the way.
That just broke my heart. Here was this real good kid, this honorable kid, and everyone just abandoned him. He didn’t deserve that. He especially didn’t deserve to die that way, not in that place. So I decided I would reach out to his family, try to tell them what kind of a man their son turned out to be. How he took the fall for his buddies and what a brave thing that was. I would want to know that if it was my kid in that situation. So I wrote them a long letter, and I had my friend, the woman who’d pestered the Navy, track down his parents in Kansas and mail it to them. And I never heard a thing back from them. I don’t know if it did any good or not, or if they’d just written him off and that was the end of it.
Paredón
Guards Are Prisoners, Too
I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED IT’S IMPORTANT—and just plain smart, frankly—to treat people with respect until they disrespect you. It makes life easier, and since no one can see the future, you never kn
ow when it’s going to pay off. Situations can change suddenly; you can find yourself at the mercy of the guy who was maybe lower than you in the pecking order the day before, and then you’re gonna be happy you weren’t a dick to him for no reason. Or you’ll be sorry if you were. Some of the guards were like that, just regular people doing their jobs and not going out of their way to make life hard for us prisoners. Others—and you see this a lot in positions of authority—others got off on the power they had over us, and they never passed up a chance to lock us up or pistol whip us or just generally push us around. And sometimes it came back to haunt them.
Compared to most jobs, being a guard at La Mesa was pretty shitty. The wages were low and the danger level was high, both in terms of the violent situations they were always getting involved in but also from the constant threat of disease with all the hepatitis and dysentery and tuberculosis and everything else that was constantly going around. It was a hazardous job that did not pay well. Morale sucked, too. They didn’t get much in the way of training from the powers-that-be that ran the place, and it would be an understatement to say they were poorly equipped. They were a sad sight. They had uniforms, but they were ragged and outdated. I think they were left over from the ‘40s, or maybe the early ‘50s. Only a few of the guards had hats, which they had to provide themselves. They went for those high peaked motorcycle caps like the one Marlon Brando wore in “The Wild One.” I believe they were responsible for their own firearms as well, which is just crazy. So you had all these guards with mismatched weapons: some of them had decent hunting rifles, some had cheap Saturday Night Special-type handguns that were liable to blow up if they ever had to fire them, and a few had Wild West-style pistolas, old-school Colt revolvers in leather gun belts with the bullets all around. Those looked sweet; I don’t know how well they worked, but they sure looked cool. On the whole, though, the inmates had better guns than the guards. It was a sorry-ass operation, no two ways about it.
There was one funny thing that happened most nights after lockdown. Just to set the scene, there were gun towers every hundred feet or so along the top of the wall, with a catwalk connecting them. After I had my carraca dialed in all nice, with my bed up in the loft under the window, I was able to lie there and look out at the stars, and that was great, but it meant that my bed was right next to the catwalk. From time to time during the night the guards were supposed to holler at one another, sort of working their way from one tower to the next, so everyone could make sure everyone else was where they were supposed to be. The towers had numbers, and the way it worked was the guy in Tower One would yell out, “Uno alerta!” And then the guy in Tower Two would yell,
“Dos-e alerta!”
And the next one would go, “Tres-e alerta!”
Then “Cuatro alerta!” You get the idea.
They were supposed to do this every hour or so, but occasionally a guy would fall asleep, and then it would be like, “Dos-e alerta!” And he would wait. Then he’d go again: “Dos-e alerta!” Then louder: “DOS-E ALERTA!” And then you’d hear the door open and these footsteps running down the catwalk, and then he’d pound on the door and the other guy would be like, “Jesus Christ!” and then he’d yell, “Tres-e alerta!” and they’d go from there. Goofy-ass guards. It was funny.
But overall, as I said, it was a pretty unrewarding life, being a guard at La Mesa, so I guess it was understandable that a high percentage of the guards would supplement their income with various kinds of illegal shit. Not all of them, but a lot of them would try to steal whatever valuables they could get their hands on from the lower-ranking prisoners. Not the top guys, obviously, like Heladio or The Brothers—those guys were pretty much untouchable. But the rest of us had to watch out. More than once I caught a guard at night trying to fish through my window the same way the trusties in La Ocho had done, with a coat-hanger hook on the end of a long pole. I don’t know what they thought they were going to get off of me—it’s not like I had anything worthwhile—but it pissed me off nonetheless. The thieving was nickel-and-dime stuff, though; the real corruption was all about drugs.
Most of the drugs came into the prison through visitors, or through the girls that Heladio and his crew brought in, but a big part of the drug supply was smuggled in by the guards themselves. Heladio or The Brothers would have their people on the outside pay off the guard on the outside and give him the stuff to bring in. Then at a certain time in a certain spot, the guard would just walk along the catwalk and drop the package into the yard. That was it. There’d be some guys waiting for it and they’d bring it back to the capo’s place to split it into smaller packages for resale. Easy. Sometimes the guards would get paid in cash, sometimes in drugs—a lot of them were hooked on chiva just like the prisoners.
But even in a place as corrupt and out of control as La Mesa, there’s still a chance that sooner or later the crooked shit will catch up with the people doing it. Maybe a guard was so strung out he wasn’t pulling his weight, or maybe he’d done something to piss off the federales, but from time to time one of these guys would be targeted for surveillance or an investigation and then it was just a matter of time until he wound up in the prison right along with the rest of us. The federales pretty much always got what they wanted, so if they decided a guard needed to go to prison, that guy was going, no question.
(The feds were total pricks, pricks and bullies. Their jurisdiction covered the whole country, as their name would suggest, so they could come in and push everyone around whenever they wanted. They certainly were not shy about using their authority. One of the worst things they did, and they did it all the time just because they enjoyed it, was the way they used to herd guys around. The federales had these automatic rifles, and what they would do is, when they wanted a bunch of us to go somewhere, they’d just squeeze off a burst of gunfire out of these things, just spray a line of bullets in the dirt, and everyone would run from it. Then they’d do it again on the other side, and we’d all run back. That way they could just sweep whole groups of guys wherever they wanted them to go, because nobody wanted to get hit with these damn machine guns.)
Anyway, as if all of that weren’t bad enough, for a lot of years, including the time that I was there, they had a rule in La Mesa that said if you were a guard and somebody escaped on your watch, you had to serve out the rest of his term yourself. Think about how fucked up that is; that’s a true story. So for all these various reasons, every once in a while you’d have a guard thrown in with the prisoners. Now, this was not the same situation you’d picture from American prisons or American prison shows or whatever. There definitely was no such thing as segregated units for former law-enforcement or anything like that; it was strictly Gen Pop. But the guards wouldn’t necessarily be singled out for any kind of rough treatment. Everyone recognized that they were just guys like us, sad sacks with shitty jobs, and they were pretty much treated the same as everybody else.
If the guy in question had gone out of his way to be an asshole or a bully, though, and then wound up inside as a prisoner, he got it bad. They’d make sure he got a shit bath right off the bat, or else they’d stab him or beat him up or take his stuff—depends on what he’d done to them. But as I’ve said before, if you’ve been a jerk to people for no good reason, you can’t exactly cry about it when they want to get you back. How a guy wouldn’t expect that to happen, I have no idea.
Travestí
Robbie Was A Ladies’ Man
I HAVE A YOUNGER BROTHER, Robbie, and he was about eighteen or nineteen at the time I was in La Mesa. One day he came down to visit me. Robbie was a real good-looking kid: long hair, quite the ladies’ man. All the girls liked Robbie. I knew he was coming, so I made sure to meet him up by the front so he wouldn’t have to walk through the prison by himself looking for me. So I met up with him by the gate and we walked back to my carraca. Robbie was strutting through the place like a superstar, checking everything out.
We walked through the yard, through the corral, and we entered
C Tank. Robbie had never seen anything like it; he was looking everywhere just trying to take it all in. Anyway, I didn’t see this, but as I led him up the stairs to my carraca, he was busy checking out this hot chick that he saw. When we got inside my place, Robbie said, “Damn, Steve, who was that girl out there? She was checkin’ me out!”
It was still morning, so I was kind of bumfungled I guess you could say, because there weren’t usually any hot girls around that early in the day. The real cute ones usually started coming in in the early afternoon. I was confused. So I asked him, “Where did you see her?”
He said, “Right out there. She was watching TV.”
I went and poked my head out, looked down the row to where the television was, and there was this transvestite sitting there. A young dude, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, all done up and smiling at me. Not bad for a transvestite, honestly, but it was definitely a guy. I closed the door and turned back to Robbie. I said, “Robbie, you know that wasn’t no chick, right? That’s a dude.”
And Robbie said, “No way.”
I tried to explain it to him, how there were all these transvestites in there, these men who like to dress up like women, and you had to be careful so you didn’t get fooled. He was my brother; I was trying to look out for him, but he just kept shaking his head. He didn’t believe me. He got up like he was gonna go take another look and I stood in his way, tried to stop him before he opened the door again. “Please don’t open the door,” I said. “If you look out there again, she’s just gonna come down here and then we’ll never get rid of her.”
