The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (30 page)

Ruut, a Dutch inmate, was another prisoner whose health had declined. He was in his late 50s and had a bald head the shape of a melon, a big belly and man boobs. I called him ‘the Buddha’. His right shin had become infected with some flesh-eating disorder. His leg looked like someone had ripped the skin off his right shin – and not with any precision. The mad thing was that the colour of the flesh and skin was a charcoal grey and black. The shin had swollen, too, and looked like an elephant’s leg.

What started out as a small mark like a scrape spread out across his shin in a matter of weeks and looked like a mushroom cloud after a nuclear-bomb explosion. He was treated in the infirmary in the jail for a while and given daily bandages, after it got so bad he could only walk with the help of a crutch. After a while it got worse and he was shipped off to the military hospital next to Los Teques jail. I was sure he’d be sorted there and we wouldn’t see him again. He’d served a good four years and was due to be sent back to Holland to serve the rest of his time at home, like most Dutch prisoners. It was a deal their officials had drawn up with the local government, like many embassies in Venezuela did for their nationals locked up there.

In weeks Ruut was back. ‘Great there, nice nurses, nice food,’ he said, smiling.

‘Thought you’d be in Holland. So what are you doing back here?’

‘They can only treat you for a short time, then you have to leave.’ He went back to the infirmary for daily treatment on his leg, but they were tired of him and weren’t bothered. They seemed to have it in their heads that they would help you for a while and then that was that, you were on your own. So Ruut asked me to take over and do his nursing.

‘Please, Paul, I’d be very grateful. Those morons in there just brush me off.’

‘Sure. Course I will.’ He was a nice guy – I would have felt bad saying no.

Myself and Ruut got on well. We spoke a lot. It was great to talk to someone older and wiser, and not just the usual bunch of gringo kids decades younger than me.

The first day nursing him I put his leg up on mine and slowly peeled off the rotten, septic bandages. I nearly got sick. The smell was putrid, like rotten meat left in a butcher’s bin. How his leg got infected we didn’t know. He was a diabetic, which was probably part of the reason. Or he’d probably got a small cut and dirt got into it.

Twice a day I put fresh bandages on and he was beaming because of the help. I went to the infirmary to get the materials every day. Some days there was none. Medical supplies used to come in once a month, so if you were ill around that time they might be able to help you, but towards the end of the month you were screwed. I reckoned a medic was selling the drugs and materials, probably one of the lags who helped out in there. All I could do was roll off the bandages and turn them around, so the side soiled with blood was on the outside. Some of the gays also gave me cotton swabs they used for their make-up, which I used to clean Ruut’s wound. The gays were good like that.

But Ruut also needed antibiotics and there was rarely much in that line in the infirmary. I had to go to the shop in the wing and buy an antibiotic they sold there. They were little white tablets that I crumbled between my fingers into powder and then tapped out across Ruut’s shin before wrapping up the bandages over it. It wasn’t pretty work, but I didn’t mind doing it. Penance for my sins and all that.

His leg didn’t seem to get any worse over the weeks, but it wasn’t getting any better. One morning I took pictures of it on my mobile phone and emailed them off to his son back in Holland. The photos were like something you’d see in a medical journal: a hideous lump of damaged flesh that reminded me a bit of a slab of meat in a kebab shop, the lower end tapering where the chefs had sliced it off. The plan was that Ruut’s son would send the pictures to the Dutch Embassy in Caracas and get them to put pressure on the authorities in Venezuela. All going well, Ruut would get released to serve his time in Holland. We heard they only did a week there before being freed.

I woke up one morning not long after and noticed a large spot on my thigh. Jesus, I thought. Maybe I had Ruut’s flesh-eating bug? I’d be bound to Maxima for years with a gammy leg, my plans to flee Venezuela through the jungles to Colombia up in smoke. I started scratching the spot, digging my nails into it in the hope it would go away. ‘Don’t, don’t do that,’ said Mariano. ‘It’s from a spider. It lays the egg inside. It’ll only get worse if you scratch. Leave it till it’s big enough to cut out.’ So a spider had laid its eggs inside me. Great, I was going to be a daddy spider. At least it didn’t look like flesh would start to roll off my legs like Ruut.

A couple of weeks passed and the bite grew into the size of a small egg, by which time I could hardly walk. It was time to get it cut out. I went down to the infirmary. In the past they had treated you in a basic dedicated clinic, but it had been turned into a wing when prisoner numbers hit the roof and space started running out. So I went into the office next to it. In my head it wasn’t a place you’d get better in. Any time I saw it I thought about the prisoners whose bodies were carried in after they had been shot, stabbed, beaten to death or having cut their own throats or even blown themselves up with grenades. There was rarely a doctor in it, anyway. Only a nurse, sometimes – usually one of the prisoners who had first-aid experience.

Mariano came with me to the infirmary to interpret, his lanky legs swaggering up the passageway. ‘The problem is getting a doctor, Paul. If he comes it’s on Tuesday.’

‘Today’s Monday.’

‘I know, so that’s the problem. But I said
if
he comes – often he doesn’t.’

‘There’s no point in going then.’

‘Yes, there’s a point. If you wait you may have spiderwebs in your leg by the time you get to see him. There are prisoners who are nurses there; they do all the work.’

‘Are they qualified?’ I was starting to have second thoughts.

‘Probably not, but they have experience. The only guy to avoid is the Butcher from Amsterdam.’

‘The what?’ I was really getting nervous now.

‘A Dutch guy. He walks around with a white coat and a stethoscope. He’s not a doctor at all. He pretends. He’s a crackhead and sells all the medicine in the infirmary to prisoners so he can buy a few stones.’ I didn’t want to hear any more.

In the infirmary it was a nurse inmate all right, but he seemed OK. I’d take my chances. He sat me on the side of a bed and started squeezing pus out of the bite, then sterilised and swabbed it. ‘Jesus,’ I shouted, nearly hitting the roof. I looked at him making an incision the shape of a cross in it with a scalpel. ‘Agh,’ I cried out. ‘Have you not got an anaesthetic or painkillers or something?’

‘
No, nada
,’ he said, with a look that said he was wondering why I would even ask such a thing.

I sat there while he poked around in my thigh with a blade. John Wayne might have had a stick to bite on when a fellow cowboy cut a bullet out of him and a shot of whiskey to drown the pain. I got nothing. I just sat there clenching my teeth. I had to go back three days in a row before it had all been cut out.

But after a while the wound cleared up, the scar all but disappeared and there was no sign of any baby spiders practising their web-spinning inside my thigh. The only other health problem I’d had till then was that half the time I couldn’t eat. I was suffering with mouth ulcers. Bumps like little white pinheads were popping up inside my mouth and on my tongue. I could barely take in food. When it was really bad, I could only eat the odd ice-pop I got out of the shop, sucking on it, the coolness giving a bit of relief.

* * *

‘Dear Paul, thank you very much for sending me those pictures. I will do what I can to push our embassy to get my father out of there,’ Ruut’s son wrote back in an email. Weeks passed and there was no word from the Dutch Embassy. Ruut would have to sit tight, suffer and count the days to his release, hoping his leg didn’t fall off in the meantime.

* * *

A big cheer went up in the yard. ‘Hhhhheeeyyy.’ A group of both gringos and Venos were shaking each other’s hands and waving their arms in the air.

‘He’s dead, did you hear?’ said Hanz, beaming.

‘Who’s dead?’ I said.

‘McKenzie was killed. Shot up. Couple of hours after getting out of Macuto.’

‘Yeah? How?’ I was only curious and wouldn’t be sending any wreaths.

‘He got day release at the end of his sentence. He was gunned down only a few hours after getting out on the streets.’ Hanz started jumping and cheering now.

McKenzie’s fate didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t exactly popular in Macuto. What struck me was how so many were jumping up and down in the yard, cheering. Venos and gringos. More prisoners had passed through Macuto than I knew, and many had had a taste of McKenzie’s machete, poked into their ribs as he robbed them of all they had.

* * *

If your body didn’t let you down in Los Teques, your mind might. One day a new Veno inmate walked out into the yard. He was a big tall black guy. He stood still for ages with his bottom lip quivering, crippled with fright – or something else. He wouldn’t speak to anyone. Wouldn’t move. It was clear he wasn’t right in the head. Later, during the número, I saw one of the luceros help him over to a bucket and sit him down for the roll call. He was on another planet and didn’t know what was going on.

‘This man doesn’t need a prison, he needs a mental hospital. A blind man can see that,’ I said to the lads, Billy and Eddy.

‘I know,’ said Eddy. ‘It’s not right. Shouldn’t be here.’ A few days later he was gone: I heard he was moved to the Church wing. Months later I saw him working in the canteen serving food. He’d put on weight and seemed clued in to the world. Months of morning prayer and discipline away from booze and the fear of violence must have sorted him out. Just as well; in Los Teques you could barely get a hold of a doctor let alone a psychiatrist.

He wasn’t the only one affected by mental torture. For months I’d watched Billy go into a steady spiral of depression. He started having spasms like mini fits. We’d be sitting there talking to him and his arms would bolt forward with his hands stretched out, shaking, and his face froze. ‘Billy, Billy Scissorhands,’ I said, roaring with laughter. It was obvious he was suffering from some sort of stress disorder, and although I was joking I think it helped lighten the moment for him.

I knew what was going on. It was slowly dawning on him that his lawyer wasn’t doing anything for him. I’d seen him on the phone only a few nights before the spasms, roaring and shouting into the phone. All I could hear was ‘fuck’ this and ‘fuck’ that, while he paced around in circles. I didn’t want to bother him, but he later told me what was happening. His lawyer had phoned him demanding another 5,000 euro or he couldn’t do anything more with his case in trying to get him out on early release. This was after Billy’s family had already pumped about 14,000 euro into him. Billy wasn’t quick off the mark, but he was finally realising the abogado was taking him and his family to the cleaners. He’d have to find another way to get out. To me, the lawyer was a tonic salesman. Buy me and I’ll cure all ailments. He’d been fooling Billy and his family for about three years now. In fairness to them, the lawyer was a smooth talker. He even had the wool pulled over Father Pat’s eyes. But he hadn’t fooled me – he might have had the gift of the gab, but I’d smelled his bullshit.

Billy soon got another lawyer on the go, one recommended by Vito. He finally copped he was wasting his time with his original abogado. ‘It’s the only thing I can do,’ Billy told me. ‘The guy hasn’t done anything.’ I could see the despair in his eyes. ‘Vito is raving about this woman, Viviana. Says she does great work and gets results, and she can get me out on parole because I’ve done over three years now.’

‘Sounds like the right thing, Billy,’ I said. ‘You have to try someone else now.’ I realised it was the same woman who got Terry out, so I knew he was on to something good.

Macalou, a French-Algerian, had also hired Viviana. He was completely paralysed, wheelchair-bound. He couldn’t even hold a cup. He had arrived in Los Teques on his two feet but then got struck by some muscular disorder. Luckily for him he had a few quid to pay an inmate to feed him, bathe him and bring him to the toilet. He was about my age, a slim guy with a huge smile, which he wore all day despite being stuck in a wheelchair inside Los Teques. We got on great and spoke a lot.

Viviana said she could get him out on humanitarian grounds. She even organised a court case with a judge to hear his case. But when a cop came into the wing and said there was an
ambulancia
waiting to take him, he pulled out. There were gringo lags who, no matter how bad Los Teques was, didn’t find it easy to go home and face whatever their demons were – or just had nothing to go home to. Many were drug addicts whose family and friends had long given up on them. Others just enjoyed the steady supply of crack and coke, morning, noon and night – a false paradise they slipped into.

I never spoke to Macalou about turning down the court case. I knew it was a personal thing, and there were some things no inmate wanted to talk about, no matter how well you got on with them.

I asked him about Viviana, though. I was hearing yet more good things about her work. ‘A wonderful woman,’ smiled Macalou, his white teeth gleaming, with a couple of gaps between them like the black keys on a piano.

I was intrigued by the lawyer. I wanted to find out more, to see if she could help get me out of here on parole. What I didn’t know then was I’d soon need her legal help not for that but to pressure the prison chiefs into getting me to the local hospital in an ambulance.

THE GUN WAS SHOT JUST OVER MY RIGHT SHOULDER, LEVEL WITH MY EAR. The crack of the rounds of bullets caught me by surprise. I jolted to the left from where I was sitting on my bucket. My back hit the wall and I lost my balance and toppled over. I only stopped myself from landing on the ground by pushing out my left hand. I sat up, dazed, rebalanced myself, and fixed my glasses, which were to the side. There was a mad buzzing sensation in my right ear. Then a hollow sound with air whistling inside, like my eardrum had sucked in a tornado. Then it went numb.