Doing Time (22 page)

Pve noticed too during this unseasonably warm and humid

winter at the Louisiana Correctional Center from where I write that a whole new generation has hatched —now there are tiny tot roaches inside my typewriter growing toward full roachhood What do they think this is, a brooder?

The plastic coated ribbon must be emitting some hdlaciously appetizing radon odors or something else equally as sensual that drives these vile creatures into a breeding frenzy because every time I snap the case shut —
they're at it!

How do I work with all this gross activity occurring just inches from my fingertips— ? With much grimacing and teeth grinding.

What we writers have to endure sometimes ain't nothing nice

I wonder how many other roaches, older, wiser, and warier are crouched in the farthest most inaccessible spaces of my Canon feeding on these nutritiously addictive command wires, disemboweling the computer circuitry byte by byte? Inexorably they're forcing me to condense my long, languorous tender love scenes into cheap, artless quickies forget foreplay — there's no time a bunch of stupid roaches are pushing me perilously close to writing pornography Is there no hope? No remedy? Is my art to be sacrificed to these wanton, concupiscent creatures?

If only I had some bug spray — I'd douse those mothers good and proper! Black Flag would do the job but lethal stuff like that is absolutely prohibited to us inmates

A pest control man does come around occasionally, spraying the baseboards, which only drives the little vermins deeper into the sanctuary of my locker and typewriter; they love it here — and why not? They've got everything they need for a happy life: darkness, dampness, and lots of hard juicy plastic to munch on I tell you, it's a battle. I've got to hurry and finish this novel before they completely overrun my machine I swear I'd forfeit a month's Good Time — really! maybe more for just one smalt can of that deadly stuff

1993, Avoyelles Correctional Center Cottonport, Louisiana

Big shots on both sides of the razor wire are often called “players,” and their games are legion. Prisoners favor the street jingle: “X is my name and Y is my game.” Games in prison can be rap, routine, or hustle. The two worlds of hustling, inside and out, overlap, especially where gangs are concentrated. New inmates must learn how to recognize and respond to prison games if they are to navigate a course among treacherous allies or protectors and outright predators. This means adopting, or simulating, an appropriate role. In one way or another, all prisoners become players. For some, “doing time” and playing games are one.

In “I See Your Work,” the protagonist “Willis — prison greenhorn, political activist, and coming computer-game entrepreneur — tells his story in the overheated and telegraphic patois he is trying to master: “Jammin'. My cool still chillin'? Do I know what time it is?” Mentored by a supreme gamesmaster — the law librarian and jail-house lawyer — “Willis prowls the multicultural maze of prison hustles while practicing his own. At the same time, he is plotting out a computer game about prison life. The story peels back the title's layers of meaning, from I-see-what-you've-done to I've got your number.

As in other “total” institutions like the army or boarding school, solidarity among peers is an option in prison, but conditions militate against it. Prisoners' desire to curry favor with the staff and — among men — commitments to macho image intensify disunity. In “solidarity with cataracts,” Vera Montgomery (whose use of “k” to spell “camp” betokens her allegiance to the black power movement), laments her sisters' deafness to one another's cries for help, their collaboration in wantonly destructive cell searches, and their readiness to snitch for privileges. Fourteen years later, Marilyn Buck spins out a fantasy of a rebellious solidarity built on woman-love.

Convict culture in men's prisons appears to be dominated by ornate systems of games — ranging from handball, poker, and business deals to scams and deadly gambles — which are often interlinked. The byzantine plots of the stories by Jackie Ruzas, David Wood and Dax Xenos seem dictated by the very atmosphere of scheming and calculation that pervades the cellblock. Yet unexpected moral complexity blossoms in each tale. In “Ryan's Ruse” both the handball game and interethnic rivalry are manipulated to heat up the betting, which in turn serves the friendship of Irish Ryan and black Hap. Having AIDS locks the inmates in “Feathers on the Solar Wind” into a prison within the prison until a gamble with death confers a wild kind of liberty on some and propels others to seek forgiveness. The narrator of “Death of a Duke” has mastered the rules of the doing-time game: the joint “is like quicksand,” he says, “like one of those Chinese finger stretchers. The more you struggle, the deeper you go or the tighter it gets. But you can be cool and make your way through it and get out.” But the passion of the bigtime player, the Duke of Earl, makes him strain against such rules. Like “Lee's Time” (Race), this story inquires whether morality can be reconciled with doing time coolly in prison.

The C.O. at the front gate was idly watching Willis with government issue long-barreled Nikon binoculars. He had noticed Willis up close on the compound, noticed how he was different from the rest, immune it seemed, with a distinctive kind of observer's calm, as if he were here for the waters. He seemed more purposeful if a bit clumsy and inexperienced. And in fact Willis
was
on an expedition of sorts, both killing time for a moral stance and conducting research for a project long on his mind.

He was down for taking a hammer in a destructive unpatriotic manner to the tail of an Air Force jet. Going to jail was the purple heart of Willis's activist group led by the well known Fathers. Willis's companions were not with him, having distanced themselves at a critical time and receiving only a trespassing charge and the symbolic one night in jail. Willis, though not awash in remorse had, admittedly, been unsettled at his sentence, which was quite a bit longer than the group legal theorist had predicted. His sentence of a year and a day translated in federal computation to ten months.

Educated fringe dweller Willis had, in his work with a Catholic relief agency, run a soup kitchen and rubbed scabbed elbows with enough alley dwellers to grow boldly curious about their street life. The fruit of this curiosity had emerged as his first independent software production, a simulation game called
Homeless.
For his field work he had immersed himself in the cold city of Washington, D.C., scavenging the alleys of late autumn until almost Christmas. Except for the regular postings of his notes he remained isolated and unfunded. He utilized what he learned: the picking of a pizza dump-ster lock with a pop-top from a soda can, panhandling stolen morning papers, the heating grate territories, choice outdoor places to shit, and he packed these details into software that explored this world in an engaging and moving manner, one simpatico with his activist roots. The game became a cult favorite and now he was prospecting for details to pack into a followup that would make a serious name in the industry and fund some serious kitchens for those urban outdoors people. He owed it to them; he owed it to himself. Only Fulton, his software distributor, knew of the plans.

Willis stepped into the prison law library. Russ, the legal librarian on duty, stood behind the interior dutch door taking delivery of a half-filled mesh commissary bag, payoff for a legal brief. The bag jutted angles of coffee jars and oranges, a plastic bottle of hot sauce, and many packets of rice and beans. On the top was a clump of green bananas. Facing Russ across the door-shelf was a jockey-size man smiling broadly and shaking a sheaf of legal papers over his head as if he held a Bible.

“I seen your work with Shorty Bighead,” the man said. “Now got my own. Be like throwing a dead dog in the backyard of that car company. And better, that worthless bitch will piss all over herself. Gonna rock her little world.”

Russ nodded his head in time to his customer's praise. It was good to get paid. It didn't always happen. “Make your copies first,” he said. “Remember, Hollis, you owe me two bucks for the postage. Envelope all set up and good to go.” Russ winked at Willis. “And next time your old lady sells a car, you can't owe on it.”

“Not no next time with her. She smoked the damn money up less'n a week. D'int send a dime. Cabs to the dope corner, sometime on the hour, was how my cousin said. Then them fuckin' letters from the car people. Tapping into my paycheck. Gonna ruin my good credit.”

“We can start that divorce any time,” said Russ.

Hollis rubbed his bristly chin. ‘‘After my furlough we do ir. (Jetting twelve hours this weekend. My ex—old lady got a tiny sister name Dee-dee. She gonna check me out, pick me up. Still counts as family on the paperwork. Gonna knock over some ol that. We been eying each other for years, see, and Dee dee don't like her sisrer neither, She gonna take hack a Polaroid of my Johnson, see if rbe birch still know it.”

Russ shook his head. “Hollis, you gonna need me plenty more, that's my prediction. Just keep rollirf with that commissary” — he shook the hag— “I'll keep the typewriter hot. I ley, and jump on one time tor me.”

“Yeah,” Hollis said, tilting back his head. “Saturday I'm gonna be lying in the crib and you be thumbing them thick books wishing,”

They laughed, slapped hands. “On time about that,” said Russ. Hollis was out the door smiling.

While he waited, Willis gazed around the walls at the musty paper inventory ot LAW. This room was i repository heart-deep in the iron beast, a pool of magical chants which sometimes, when strung in perfect order, went poof and everything changed, all the bureaucratic locks snapped open, legal cancer cured like from above. But mostly these arcane and blunt instruments were used against the researcher, the petitioner, the ever hopeful.

“Next,” Russ said, pointing a pinkie at Willis.

“Just a little off the top,” joked Willis.

“What up?” asked Russ, slumping in a stylized manner. He made a street-gang signal with his right hand, forefinger, pinkie, thumb extended, hand inverted. The Conquistadors from Chicago. He'd shown Willis a dozen times and still Willis couldn't duplicate it.

“Jammin',” said Willis. “My cool still chillin'? Do I know what time it is?”

“Not exactly, you're still runnin' slow. Sound a bit like Zippy the Pinhead, but on the other hand there's been progress of a serious nature, I wouldn't kid you about that. You got potential. For now how about a shift to another gear? A practical task out in the wide world.”

Russ reached behind some federal law supplements and extracted a bag. “What we have here is genuine sliced cheap cheese of the chow hall variety.” He grabbed another bag and slightly shook it. “Here we got chicken breasts of the boneless persuasion nicely marinated; a rare and precious item. Take the cheese, walk through rec. A quarter a packet, a buck for the chicken breast, which we leave here for now. You get one packet of cheese just for strolling around, putting the product out there.”

Willis was skeptical. “You sound like my distributor.”

“You mean dealer?”

“I mean software distributor.” Willis looked at the cold yellow lumps. “I don't know who to sell to.”

“They find you.” Russ grinned close to Willis's face, “You ain't pushing for a bigger cut are you? Look, it's the trip of living here. You tell me you want to know, here it is. Just walk around to people you know. Get close to them, look over your shoulder, get shifty. Be like the SOB selfin' watches in the bus station. Pass the word in a whisper. People go for the sly deal. Get them leaning. The price is right. No dealing. Credit if they seem straight to you. Let'm know in that case who's behind you.”

“All right. You sold me. I'll try it. Probably be bringing the cheese back.”

“Just try. This will be good for you. Remember. Slink around when you start cruising the customers. Zip here. Jit there. Point A to point B. People notice, it's advertising. On the way there shoot by the rec office and make sure them motherfuckers still on their dead asses.”

Willis put the cheese in his coat pocket, hesitated. Did he really need this? Yes. He'd take his little notepad with him.

Russ shook his finger at him. “Go on with you. Mix it up with the kids.”

The wide central hallway was quiet except for a pickup basketball game in the gym, ball dribble echoing out, some sharp exhalations, a curse. The auditorium movie had sucked away population, leaving the corridor unnaturally vacant. Further along the wall on the top of a low dusty glass trophy case two of the girls played some game, slapping down cards with a lazy indifference. The tall one, called Lick-lick Willis believed, red scarf around head, hip outshot, looked over the few people in the hallway. Willis angled toward the bathroom and Lick-lick shifted, head tossing the dangling scarf fringe. She prepared to intercept him. Belatedly Willis realized Lick-lick was a lockout so shifted his course to the other side of the broad hallway. Another behavioral twitch. Jot it down, program to silicon reality.