Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (2 page)

“Yo, boy, I want that meat.”

“The only meat I see around here is you, asshole.”

A C.O. drifted toward us and Peshawar took off without the chop.

For cons like me, who couldn’t afford protection, challenges were part of everyday prison life. I wasn’t particularly aggressive, but I had my tattoo and I didn’t think much of the incident. Most likely, Peshawar was trying to impress one of the all-black posses that dealt in contraband, maybe the one that ruled his Housing Area. Since I’d gotten in the last word, I didn’t have to worry about losing face. In fact, my response had drawn laughter from the cons sitting at my table. I watched my back for a couple of weeks and then forgot about it altogether. Peshawar had remembered.

Protective custody is nothing more than voluntary keeplock. You stay in your cell for twenty-three hours on most days. A C.O. accompanies you whenever you leave the block, because now that you’ve informed the administration of your personal danger, the state can be sued if somebody fucks you up. Not that you’re ever completely safe. There is no safety in the Institution. Readiness for combat is the first test of the instinct for survival.

But protective custody is also the hardest way to do time outside of being someone’s punk. If I hadn’t been due for parole, I would never have requested it. I would have sought out Peshawar with the intention of eliminating him before he eliminated me. It’s also very likely that if I wasn’t scheduled to go out, I wouldn’t have lost my nerve. The need to survive would have controlled my actions, as it always had.

Unfortunately, once your courage goes, it’s hard to get it back and I lost my nerve forever during that week in P.C. I began to think about Terrentini, about what I was doing inside myself while he burned. I’d watched him calmly, but the expression on a convict’s face never reveals what he’s actually thinking. In truth, the only emotion I’m sure I felt was relief. Somehow, fate had skipped over me, stopping one cell down the line to snuff Joe Terrentini.

Knowing I was the target should have heightened that feeling of escape. Instead, it scared the shit out of me. In a week, the incident would be forgotten. Peshawar and Williams would be transferred to an Albany jail where a judge would eventually add twenty-five years to their life sentences. Instead of looking for revenge, I’d be in some halfway house in New York City. True, Peshawar’s murder method had been spectacular. But in the Institution, where disputes are commonly settled by tossing homemade lye in your enemy’s face, Terrentini’s memory would be obliterated by the next stabbing. Or the next mini-riot. Or as soon as one of the dealers got hold of some decent shit.

Little by little, no matter how tough you are, the Institution destroys you. The cons, trapped in their own bravado, try to live by the credo that “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” The idea is total bullshit. Everything kills you—the violence of the other cons, the C.O.’s with their small humiliations, a parole board that decides your fate without knowing who you are, the endless division of time into small, contained segments.

Eventually, I came to understand that my life had been dishonorable from the beginning. I’d been dishonored by the world because of my birth and I’d bought the label. I felt courage dissolving. Despite all the fights. Despite the idiot belief that living by the rule of fang and claw made me superior to the judges and the C.O.’s and the society that provided my definitions.

I was dead and I was afraid to die. I surrendered all hope of protecting myself with psychological courage. Other prisoners gave me curious looks, sensing the change. I fought to maintain my regular expression, but I was convinced that I couldn’t survive in the Institution, that my life depended on getting out. I found conspiracy on the face of every convict passing my cell. I watched hands, expecting a knife. I refused to answer simple questions. I saw my death in every greeting.

I was so scared, I could easily have killed someone by mistake. A prisoner carrying a toothbrush or a pencil. With my record, any attack on another con would result in my finishing my time inside. At the least. The rest of my sentence, five years of a fifteen year bit, would nail my coffin shut forever.
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR
was the only truth I had and it vanished the minute I realized that I had no honor to defend.

E
IGHT DAYS AFTER THE
death of Joe Terrentini, I pulled on a pair of gray trousers, a blue shirt and a blue jacket, white socks and black shoes. All courtesy of the state. Most prisoners have clothes sent up to them by relatives, but I had burnt my bridges to the world long before. Still, despite the poor fit and cheap quality, it was the first time I’d been out of a prison uniform in ten years. It should have felt good, but it didn’t. It frightened me.

After seven bits, I feared getting out of prison as much as I feared going in. Another chance at failure. Another chance to confirm the psychologist who’d labeled me a sociopath when I was eleven years old, a label that stayed with me for twenty-four years. I knew how to deal with prison, but the world was another matter. The skills that enable a prisoner to survive in a Max A prison don’t apply to the world.

I was the only prisoner to be released on that May 4th. That was because, technically, I wasn’t given parole. The board had turned me down three times. I think they would have liked to keep me inside for the entire fifteen years of my sentence, but in New York prisoners who behave themselves must be granted conditional release after serving two thirds of their time. (This, of course, does not apply to inmates serving life sentences. What, after all, is two thirds of a life?)

A short, fat screw named Pierre Braque came to get me about ten o’clock in the morning. Having nothing to pack, I’d been dressed and ready since five-thirty, listening to the radio for any news of New York City, which was where I was going. The Cortlandt Correctional Facility is located in the town of Danville, twenty miles from the Canadian border. It was forty-one degrees in Danville and fifty-five in Manhattan.

Braque and two other C.O.’s led me through the tunnels that connect H Block to Administration. Technically, I was entitled to protection until I left the Institution, and that’s what they were going to give me. We passed other prisoners in the tunnel and a few of them greeted me, offering good luck. I tried to smile back, but I kept my eyes on their hands.

I didn’t relax until I was in the office of Deputy Warden Jack Camille. His greeting, “Hello, scumbag,” twisted my fear into anger—that barely suppressed rage felt, justifiably or not, by every prisoner. There are only two industries in the town of Danville: lumber and prison. Jobs in Cortlandt are handed down from father to son, and most of the C.O.’s are related. Their own code of honor requires them to humiliate the prisoners at every turn. The prisoners’ code of honor requires them to hate the C.O.’s. It all works wonderfully until the day you come out.

Camille had a special reason for hating me. Five years before, when he was an ordinary C.O. with a special reputation for provoking prisoners into responses that justified violence, I’d made him look bad. Not that it was my fault.

Prisoners coming into the mess hall at Cortlandt divide into two serving lines. One line is entirely black and the other is white and Puerto Rican. It was like that when I got to Cortlandt and it hadn’t changed in ten years.

For some reason the white serving line on this particular evening was much longer than the black line. The evening meal is voluntary and many cons choose to stay out in the yard. Apparently, more blacks had taken this option than whites and Puerto Ricans. It could easily have been the other way, with the black line running out the door while the white line was empty, and I wasn’t paying much attention until Camille, who had mess hall duty, said, “Get over in the other line. Even it up.”

At first, I didn’t realize that he was talking to me. Then he called me by name and number, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Frangello, 83A4255, get your ass over to the other line.”

I’d never had a beef with Camille, though I was aware of his rep. Why did he choose me? I didn’t know and never would. But I had to react. To accept his disrespect, to step into that black line, would have meant an extreme loss of face. Blacks, whites, and Ricans, with rare exceptions, don’t mix in prison. If there had been a third serving line in the dining area, either the whites or the Puerto Ricans would have been on it.

“You mean me, boss?” I asked.

He walked up close to me. His square red face was twisted with rage. “I told you to get in the other fucking line. What’s the matter, you too good to eat with the niggers?”

There are no blacks living in the town of Danville. No Puerto Ricans, either. Eighty percent of the population is made up of French Canadians who wandered south a hundred years ago. The younger screws are afraid of the inmates, most of whom come from the big, bad city. They cover their fear with macho bullshit.

“Can’t go over there, sir.” I said, trying to sound subservient and firm at the same time, which is a good trick. “That’s not my line, sir.”

I accepted the fact that Camille would write a ticket and I’d be hit with a two-week keeplock, but I’d been confined to my cell before and the punishment didn’t particularly frighten me.

Then he shoved me. “Get in the other line, you piece of shit.”

Goodbye freedom
, I thought,
here comes the box
. The box and the beating that goes with it.

I shoved him back. There was nothing else I could do. Not with a hundred cons watching me. But instead of clubs and fists, Sergeant Paul Cartier, one of the oldest guards in the Institution and Jack Camille’s uncle, stepped between us.

“You’re in trouble, Frangello,” he said to me as he led his nephew away.

Then I noticed that the cons on both lines were stirring. There aren’t many freedoms for prisoners, but those we have, including racism, are jealously guarded. Cartier hadn’t stepped in to protect me. He was trying to prevent what the administration likes to call a “disturbance.” As the ranking C.O., he was responsible for the dining area, and he wasn’t about to let an asshole like Jack Camille start a riot.

I got my two weeks’ keeplock. Two weeks in my cell doing a thousand push-ups a day, reading magazines, drinking prison hooch smuggled in by my crew. No big deal, like I said. After I came out, Camille and a few of his buddies tried to put the heat on me, cursing me and ordering me about. Only now I was allowed the privilege of not reacting. Once the heat was official, once I was a target, obedience was honorable. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but, then again, it’s not the world, either. After a few weeks, the C.O.’s grew bored and moved on to some other amusement.

Camille shuffled through my folder, shaking his head. He had deep blue, redneck eyes and blond hair cut to within an inch of his scalp. In the summer he rolled his shirtsleeves up far enough to show the black swastika tattooed on his shoulder. “Hey, Frangello,” Camille finally said, “you buying a round-trip bus ticket? Says here you ain’t been out of jail more than three straight years since you were sixteen.”

I didn’t answer. This was my day to return to the world.

He shook his head slowly. “I know I live in a fucked-up society when I have to release a piece of shit like you. Damn, I feel like a traitor to my country signing these papers.”

“I’m not coming back.”

I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it. Camille laughed until snot ran out of his nose. Then he wiped his face on the back of his sleeve and lit a cigarette. “What I’d like to do is put out this butt in the middle of your face. Make a mark so the world can see you coming. Like a sign:
SCUM WARNING
. Whatta you think about that, 83A4255?”

We were alone in Camille’s office. No witnesses. And I knew that a prisoner would have to commit a major, major offense to be remanded on the day of his release. My answer was cold and calculated. At that moment, I hated Camille more than the life I’d led for thirty-eight years.

“Why don’t you cut the bullshit, Camille, and sign the fucking papers?”

“What did you say?”

“What I said is that you’re a chickenshit faggot and the only place you’ve got the balls to put that cigarette is in your cunt mouth.” His face reddened, matching the ordinary color of his neck. “You’ll be back, Frangello. You ain’t been straight for ten minutes in your whole miserable life. I already sent out a letter to your parole officer. You’re a piece of shit and you’re gonna get violated the first time you spit on the sidewalk.” He paused, managed a wet smirk. “Personally, I can’t wait to welcome you home.”

T
HERE’S NO WAY TO
describe what it feels like to step out into the open air after a long incarceration. Unless, of course, you’ve done it seven or eight times.

The Cortlandt Correctional Facility sits in the center of the town of Danville (pop. 1433), New York. Forty-foot walls, complete with gun towers, line one side of Main Street. A mix of shops and homes and a single cheap hotel lines the other. I stood with my back to the walls and swept the street with my eyes. It was just like stepping onto the flats in Cortlandt where hundreds of prisoners milled about, many of them strapped and ready.
All
of them willing to kill.

I missed nothing, but even ten feet away, you wouldn’t have picked up the movement of my eyes. The trick, inside, is to see everything without revealing the intense fear that necessitates the search for enemies. It’s not a trick that’s easily unlearned.

The few citizens on the street seemed mild enough. They undoubtedly made me for a released convict, but that’s the way it goes. As my eyes swept the rooftops, I walked across the street and strolled into the 7-11, where I bought a pack of cigarettes, a Snickers, and a can of Coke. Then I went back outside to wait for the bus. I had no illusions about freedom. With $97.85 and no job, my life would be anything but free. What I
did
have was a list of the phone numbers of convicts from my crew who’d been released before me. If I wanted quick money instead of poverty, an apartment instead of a homeless shelter, all I had to do was dial a number and tap the old cons’ network. That’s what jail’s all about. That’s what the cons talk about on the courts. The crimes they’ve committed and the ones they intend to commit.