PRISONER EXPRESS

This happened last week. I'm laying here trying to write my way out of this sewer, and in comes three nicotine friends trying to wiggle in deeper. They light up and smog out, then, in mid-drag, the kop walks by on a routine snooping mission. His inquisitive face suddenly fills the slit-window in the door. Jigger-boy swears and jumps back.

"Ditch it. Dood! He's coming in!"

The keys jingle. The toilet flushes. All three try to fart; one succeeds. Another snatches up a huge plastic jug of perfumed bath-talc and insanely begins puffing out of it huge clouds of lung-death into the air. I swear, wrestle the jug of powdered rock out of the buffoon's hands and angrily kick it under the sleeping rack. The kop comes in. I rush past all the imbeciles and manage to get outside to the clean air in the day-cage. The kip yells at me, "Come back here!" He acts as if he's going to try and grab me, but wisely decides not. There ensues the usual riot of nonsense: the kop tries to figure out what he blundered into by demanding confessions, making threats and by concocting wild speculations about what "we" were up to. The kops don't much use their deductive powers. Their technique is like the prosecutor's or the real cops'. He doesn't know if he's found a poker game, a tattoo parlor, queer-orgy or dope den, so he just starts at the top of their standard list and begins making bold accusations.

There's no physical evidence except the lighter-contraption (a ball of wires and homemade resistor), and it hasn't been found yet. This means that two of these monkeys think that they're going to get away, and one monkey is trying to edge to the back of the crowd and ditch it somewhere in my cage before we all get strip-searched. It's Smith, a debt-dodging scumbag whom I've had trouble with before. He hates me because I wouldn't let him cheat when my job was running card, chess and domino, etc tournaments for the state, to keep these silly faux occupied. I despise him for the cur he is. He was so desperate to win a chess tournament and the three cases of pop that it paid that he tries to intimidate me several times. First he bragged about his "boxing game." When that didn't work, he suggested he might "get some guys" to attack me. Then he mumbled an unconvincing death threat half-heartedly. None of his tricks worked, and it makes him seethe every time he sees me, though we remain civil to one another to all appearances.

The maggot squad arrives. They strip search us and ransack my cage. Sure enough, the lighter is found under my rack. Now the kops are making me doubly guilty, because I "ran", to get away with almost no sanction, and I'm going to their "jail", unless I do something. When the kops go into confab mode with each other, I face Smith and stare him down. In my most serious and deadly voice, I whisper, "You take the lighter, Smith, or else."

"Or else what?" he smirks. He is very brave for a shrimp (only about 150 pounds). Too brave, and very stupid, because, though he's been in prison 18 years to my 35, he's never been to a prison where sometimes you are forced to kill in order to live. This hole in his experience makes him think that everything is just a little boxing game, like the kind he learned from watching hours of it on TV. I ignore his question, because serious persons do not have to explain what "or else" means, even to stupid children in men's bodies. He's been told that I'm a veteran, and I told him myself that I don't "box". This is all the warning he gets. I try again to reach him. As is his handicap, he takes it for weakness. I tell him: "These kops are not going to reach up my ass and find your cigarettes. You are going to take your bust off me, or you are going to wish you had. Which is it?"

Smith smirks up at me. He thinks this is funny. He says, "Fuck you, asshole."

I give the hell up. My palm suddenly smacks up underneath his chin. His teeth clop together, and something flies out of his mouth. His head rocks backward as if hit by a sledgehammer. He stumbles back two steps, and then his head hits the cement as he keels over. It makes a loud, hollow sound: "TOK"! I am so angry at what this oily little twerp has done to me that I momentarily consider stomping his nuts flat while the kops gaze at the tableau we've created. My eyes are attracted to the white thing next to Smith's head. It is an obscene section jaw with three teeth in it. Smith's nasty, nearly toothless mouth hangs open, showing his real, left-over teeth. They are red, black and rotted; testament to the quality of his much over hyped "boxing game". I decided to leave him his testicles, though he is a sleazy little shitbird who deserves more than he has ever gotten for the evil he's wrought. His mother took a death sentence for him over Smith's murder of his "girlfriend", a crack-whore. People who kill women are worse than child molesters.

The kops dogpile me, and get a stretcher for Smith. He tried to drag me down with him to lockup: I decided to instead drag him down with me to the men's prison at McAlester. We are busted for "fighting", and will be hogtied and shipped to the hell-unit by midnight. About five o'clock they bring Smith from the clinic and throw him on lockup with us. Soon as the kops leave, I hear him shrieking insanely at me from a few cages toward the front. The other inmates (NOT prisoners) beg to hear Smith's story. He begins with whispers, then they pass notes to and from each other for hours. Finally the punk in the cage across from me, frustrated from being unable to draw me to the door, catches me when I get up to piss. "Fucking rat!" he says. "They'll kill you in McAlester. Fucking rat!" Smith has worked his greasy, used-car salesman magic on these youngsters' soft, shallow heads. I don't even bother to sneer at him. This pisses him off worse than if I'd laughed at him. No matter what response I'd given him, he'd have launched into his mad-dog-barking routine anyway. He barks for a full two minutes before finally shutting his stupid, ignorant, gullible face.

Midnight occurs. The kops go down the line, hogtying each person one by one. My cage is last, so I get to see a tiny image of Smith through the sliver of broken mirror that some previous tenant has thoughtfully left in the usual hiding place. He's wearing chains, shackles, legions and a while foam neck brace, which the kop takes from him despite loud, whiny protest. I get tired of watching and lay back down. The clanging and banging gets closer and closer. The kops drag away my neighbor, Rat-Caller. My turn is next. I wait and wait, but nobody comes. The night lasts forever without my watch. Soon as I get to sleep, breakfast arrives, then the Security Chief. He has been here almost as long as I have and is about to retire. He knows me from McAlester's kitchen. He used to wake me up in the dish room every Saturday and ask me if I am one of the drunks. I never was. He looks down his nostrils at me and issues an order:

"Get your shit and go back to your call."

Looks like his investigation was a success.

-James Bauhaus