Earlier in the week while walking the corridor the corrections officer did a double-take. There were three hot-seats in front of my desk with three teenage-convicts flipping through page after page of “major misconduct” tickets I had written, copied, and filed in a three-ring binder.
“Damn,” one of them said, “he’s got tickets in here that are older than I am.”
“My point exactly,” I said. “Don’t think for a minute that I won’t write your asses up, that I won’t make you disappear. Continue doing what you’re doing and you just might end up in an observation cell in your skivvies, weighted down in a bam-bam suit, lying on a thin mattress with no blanket, no nothing. Do you really think anyone in here gives two-shits about you?”
As two of them decided to get out of earshot—my advice: a wind tunnel of words rushing through their ears—muttering white bread muthafucka, asshooole, the third hung back. “I’m gonna die in here,” he said.
“You’re doing life?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well then, you have a choice: die now or die later.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
I explained how he needed to learn how to do his time without pissing off the other convicts. “Over the years we’ve had inmates mysteriously hang themselves; we’ve had more stabbings then I’d care to count; we’ve also had an inmate drown in a toilet with another inmate’s foot conveniently placed on the back of his neck.” I’m not sure he understood my message; he slumped down in the hot-seat; he looked defeated. “Now go back to your desk and do your assignment.” I had nothing more to give, nothing more to say. Then, as he turned to leave, I offered the following consolation, “Hey, at least you’re alive. That’s got to count for something.”
8 comments:
Wow.
You're really starting to write!
Takes a while to get up to speed, donnit?
Not exactly Club Fed it appears.
...If only your loser punk student had had the genius of Jean Genet--to write the greatest gay poem-novel ofa Jean Genet--And therefore, by the grace of Jean-Paul Sartre of not only winning his freedom as "St. Genet", but landing a job with Esquire Magazine, to cover the Chicago riots of l968, where as a gay ex-con, he marvelled at the "thighs of the booted Chicago cops." Ha.
There is always a way out?
But nothing dumb survives in the jungle.
Ah but that takes genius.
I wonder how much it does count for.
But yes, definitely something.
You know, JR, sometimes it's hard to tell your prison from my neighborhood!
Hey, is that thing (reading) still on for the 19th?
Everything, no matter how dire the circumstances, has to count for something.
Yes Rick, the reading is still on. You may want to get there early due to limited seating. I promise not to sing.
Maybe...just MAYbe...he'll think about what you've said.
Gotta love the lifers with their, "I'll die in here and will kill you too" philosophy of life. I almost miss it.
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