Why the Grave Yards is Full

This was one of those incidents that prompt men to say, “They should make a movie about this place.” It went down in a cellblock where the noise was constant and overpowering, even in the early mornings. Five open floors of companies, forty-six cells per, many of which were filled with men who had no concept of an indoor voice and even lesser understanding of decorum. Imagine two hundred and thirty metal cubbies in a tenement-scale diorama. There were inhabitants who assumed an outsize presence in the building because they had no compunction about yelling across hundreds of feet of cells, calling for someone to send a bowl of food, a book of matches, a ratty porno mag. A harsh aural tapestry existed, competing bellows, the never-ending cacophony of every Tom, Dick, and Hardon shouting each other out. 1-block was the worst block in what’s become a dumping ground, Prison C, and I landed there, straight on arrival. And on the flats, no less, the bottom floor, so what amounted to my front porch would accrue garbage tossed from the cells above: banana peels, ramen wrapper, cigarette butts, a veritable smorgasbord for the scurrying armies of cockroaches.

The noise of acute aggression was different, however piecing through the din. Especially when it came from a neighboring cell, like it did that morning, barley after seven, when my neighbor Mac’s bars shook and reverberated through quarter-inch steel walls.

“The fuck away from cell, punk muhfucker.”

Jay, the company porter, who was delivering the morning’s hot water, broke free of the old man’s grasp and jumped back. He then quickly backed out the “water buffalo” and wheeled to my cell. I’d moved my water bucket away from Mac’s side, out of consideration for Jay, because while I didn’t know what was going on, I knew enough to know it wasn’t pleasant.

A word on the water buffalo, an ingenious water-ferrying contrivance made by the prison’s maintenance department. It consisted of a large puck-shaped plastic tank—thirty-gallon capacity—framed with PVC tubing, raised and set on wheels, with a PVC spigot ending phallically outward to penetrate the bars and sluice out its steaming contents. Because there is no hot water in the cells, prison administrators pay certain men to get hot water from the slop sink on each company and deliver it to the inhabitants several times a day. In other prisons I’ve been in, the hot water was delivered in watering cans or scooped out of a large garbage can, requiring much more work from the waterman. Though “water buffalo” is apt, the contraption more closely resembles the GOP’s elephant logo. There is one in use on each of the prison’s fifty-plus companies.

Jay, the man at the tap, was light-skinned and slight, with large white teeth that seemed to want to expose themselves in an equine grin. He did thankless work, and was poorly compensated for it. Like most porters, Jay lived on perks, a cigarette for ferrying something to a hard-to-reach cell, a cup of instant coffee given in the guise of good will for a favor that would shortly be called in; thrice-daily feed-up trays delivered from the mess hall (though, if the guards or block sergeant were in a mood, Jay would have to walk to chow); a private shower on the company as opposed to a communal one in the bathhouse, like the rest of us schnooks. No matter what Jay did, he seemed to run afoul of someone, the guards or his peers—he was the kind of person
who the Fates seem to enjoy flicking from one precarious position to the net. (A few days after this went down, Jay would get his face sliced in the yard, allegedly for not sharing his cigarette with a crazy teenager who just came up north. “Wasn’t Jay’s week,” one of my neighbors said.) Jay earned fifteen cents an hour, about ten bucks every two weeks, with which to buy a couple pouches of roll-your-own tobacco, instant coffee, and not much else at the prison commissary. So it was all the more aggravating, I suppose, that he was taking such guff from Mac. All because he delivered duffels, as directed by a guard, and informed the old timer that he’d be moving.

Mac kept up his harangue even after Jay had walked on. I brushed my teeth, sporadically jotting down memorable lines as I got ready for work, recording how Mac melted down and decompensated, turning from Morgan Freeman to Mr. T, and how the peanut gallery loved every minute of it.

Jay walked by, sliding a large gray Rubbermaid across the tan terrazzo floor, collecting trash. Mac, in a tone that could’ve been labeled mischievous or conciliatory, said, “C’mere.” It sounded like there was a smile on his face.

Cautiously, Jay pushed the bin towards Mac’s cell. When he was a few feet away, liquid splashed out. Jay danced backwards, his khaki sweatshirt bearing a dark splatter, feeling foolish that he’d been roped in. He smiled awkwardly, like, O.K., fool me once, etc.

Mac called out, “Uptown, moth-uh-fuck-uh!”

And the crowd when wild, enjoying this character who seemed like he was straight out of a blaxploitation flick.

“This ain’t no joke, punk!”

Pandemonium in the cheap seats. My face hurt from stifling laughter, so I wouldn’t appear to be joining the coalition against Jay. As he walked off, Mac kept at it, now enlivened by the raucous crowd: “I seen him workin’ for the po-lice—“

Two or three floors above, a chess game had begun, and the players were calling out their moves.

“—Pays them an ice cream each week—“

A radio boomed to life with Mobb Deep: there’s a war goin’ outside / no man is safe from… Someone obviously wanted to add a soundtrack to this movie.

“—Hey, c’mere, punk—”

On the company overhead, a guy beefed with the waterman for not providing enough water.

“—Suck on this black dick!”

A collective “WHOA,” followed by anticipatory silence. This was the official demarcation. Mac had gone berserk. In here, inviting someone to your vittles is one of the surest ways to bring about a physical altercation. It is no exaggeration to note that men have been stabbed to death over lesser violations of The Code.

Beast, two cells over, called out, hoarse and loud so everyone could here, “Talk to him, O.G.” It was a new formulation for me – “talk to him,” or more frequently, “talk that talk” – an export from the Box, where loud, vocal aggression is elevated to pastime. Some call it gatebanging – a portmanteau of “talking on the gate” and “gangbanging’ – and it’s analogous to the hateful spew of anonymous Internet trolls. With sports, politics, or religion, the talking inevitably turns to screaming, which quickly leads to vile aggression. Because of the twenty-three-hour lockdown, these guys won’t come within swinging distance of each other (and they’re not thinking ahead to where they might end up in population together), so they delight in the verbal assaults, which often culminate in “opening the frank stand,” i.e., telling someone to suck your dick. Many men who go to the Box get conditioned to engage in such behavior, and they inevitably bring it with them when they return to population, where it spreads like the infection that it is. About half of the men in Prison C came from the Box, and that number was even greater for 1-block, where most remained in the cells, idle, staying up late, getting into all manner of things. It was a Mecca of noise, drugs, violence, and nightly dice games played through the bars of adjoining cells. For most of my fourteen years behind the wall, I‘ve had jobs that got me to better living areas, so I was unversed in this language. The talk was so greasy it came with handwipes.

Mac called out, “HEY! Lil’ monkey, come get this wood.” His voice sounded more distinct, like he was right up against the bars, and I wondered if he had indeed exposed himself.

There were loud guffaws from all around. I smelled someone spark up a pungent joint, all the better to enjoy the morning’s entertainment.

Nearly twice my age, Mac was a seventy-two year-old who looked like the Grinch, the classic cartoon version, and he’d been my neighbor for a couple of weeks, moving in not long after I arrived in Prison C. He didn’t bring with him much property, and what he had was ill packed, seemingly jumbled at random. After exchanging pleasantries, he handed over a stack of clothing catalogs that he’d deemed necessary to travel with, Sierra an upmarket purchase for us in here, causing me to wonder if Mac were the patriarch of a well-to-do family, doing a couple years for some minor felony, now being cared for by his children – he was wearing a nice sweater and relatively good footwear, Columbia trail-type sneakers. Over the course of the next hours, he asked for a pen, matches, and coffee. Two years’ worth of monthly Sierra catalogues, but no matches.

When he returned the pen it was missing its cap, which I mentioned, but it would be days before he found it. He needed another book of matches, another shot of coffee, and info info info. That’s me: the helper, the human guide dog. But it quickly became apparent that he was dealing with DSM-grade issues and needed more help than I could ever provide, so I had to keep him at arm’s length, help when I could, and keep from getting tangled in his dragnet of lunacy (one of the first things you learn as a lifeguard is to avoid jumping in the water if you can help it—throw a buoy or use a pole rather than battle a victim’s flailing limbs).

Mornings were particularly bad for Mac. Coming back from breakfast once, he asked the guard, as I’d suggested, for the small broom that we are given—usually after several requests—to keep in our cell. The guard didn’t feel like going into the block’s supply room, and Mac locked into his cell empty handed, then proceeded to mutter curses for the better part of an hour. Mo, Jay’s counterpart, did Mac a good turn by bringing him a used broom, something to tide him over until he could get a new one. But Mac didn’t see it that way at all. He accused Mo of taking the new broom the guard gave him to give Mac and pulling a switcheroo. After Mo walked away, Mac flung the broom out of his cell and onto the company.

Later, when a guard made a round, the broom was still lying on the company. “You throw this broom out here?” The institutional culture at Prison C is less harsh than I experienced in Prisons A and F, but this guard didn’t fit that mold; he was young and belligerent and appeared to be hungover.

Mac, bumfuzzled, was quiet for a moment, then burbled a word soup of dismay at the broom’s condition.

The guard heard all he could stand. “While you’re here, you’ll never get a fucking broom.” And then he walked on. He was in front of my cell when Mac called out, “O.K., homie.” The guard bristled, stopped, and turned on his heels, and returned to Mac. “Don’t you ever, ever call my your homie.”

Mac was left muttering something about how Mo had set him up. He often entertained paranoid delusions, causing him to bite the hands that fed him, primarily the company’s porters with whom he had the most daily interaction.

Every prison has its porters, an anachronistic job title for men who work as janitors, basic maintenance people, and gofers. Most of them have a hustle to supplement their meager wages, way, welling purloined cleaning supplies, or facilitating transactions for a small fee. The savvier operators engage in creative arbitrage: a Hustler magazine sold for a pouch of tobacco, which is turned into loose cigs sold for stamps, which are eventually used to buy two pouches, etc., etc. But pickings are slim here; even by prison standards, the guys are broke. Mac tried with varying degrees of success to sell his clothing and toiletries for pouches of tobacco. He’d offered me the same picture frames he later asked Mo to sell. They were ugly—someone had obviously made them by stretching thick maroon cloth (likely ripped from a bulletin board) over cardboard. One of the matching pair held an oil-smudged piece of white paper on which there was a faint, degraded photocopy of a photocopy of an average quality line drawing. Mac said it was his wife. It was a poignant metaphor for Mac’s connection to his past —nebulous and fading.

Mo couldn’t do anything with the frames, but he did, rather graciously, agree to find a buyer for a pair of Mac’s long johns. Twenty minutes later, he returned, and reported that the prospective buyer said they were used. A low intensity back and forth ensued, and culminated in Mac accusing Mo of running a scam. Mo smiled benignly, addressed Mac using the honorific “O.T.” (Old Timer), then stepped off. Passing my cell, he looked at me and we traded shrugs. Apparently, he, too, was a believer in the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished.

Mac grumbled to no one in particular, and owning to the block’s noise, all I could make out was every fifth word of his attempt at psychological repair, something in the vein of, Good thing that sucka broke out, I was gonna give him a piece of my mind. That was Mac’s version of what the French call esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the staircase, witty rejoinders that come to you after you quit the room and slink up the stairs, off to your room. Even standing at the cell’s bars, separated by mere inches, I had to strain to hear him. That’s why small mirrors are often held out through the bas, angled so both men can see the others’ nonverbal. But I didn’t want to encourage more talk from him, since he already mumbled to me every hour or so, to which I’d usually reply, convincingly enough, “Yeah” or “I hear ya.” Because I’m helpful and communicative by nature, I never simply ignored him as did many of our peers, but he didn’t seem to mind (or realize) that communication was problematic. That night, apropos of nothing, he handed me a note:

That sorry M.F. who claim I try to sale him some use long johns is the one who took my red cap – I never wore it and then he tried to play him with my stuff – HA!!! I sold him my lotion, and that fool got played. It mix with baby oil mix. I got him. Long as he keep his self away from my belonging he got no problem from me.

Obviously, he was steaming all day about the exchange with Mo. I knocked on his wall and said, “Awright, buddy.”

Since that encounter, there was no love lost on Mo, but Jay was Mac’s bete noir. He and Mac were like oil and water, if oil and water wanted to spit in each other’s face. Viewed one way, Jay was standoffish, antisocial, and unhelpful. Seen in a more empathetic light, however, Jaya small man in a rough environment, was wary of opening doors with those around him. But Mac wasn’t the charitable sort, and I got the distinct impression that, were he in his prime, he’d bury a knife in Jay’s gut then slip off into the crowd.

When seven-thirty came on that morning of bad craziness, my gate opened, and I left for work, giving a cautious no to Mac as I walked past his cell.

News spreads quickly among the terminally bored. By the time I left the mess hall and walked to the school building under an angry gray sky, I overheard several groups of men talking about “O.T. who told son to suck some’in’.” When I passed another neighbor, Sleepy—he of the heavy eyelids—slow-walking and sharing a smoke with his crew, he called to me, “Yo, that shit was ill.”

Me: “Right? That got ugly quick. Hope my floor isn’t soaked when I get back from work.”

“I didn’t want to leave.”

The morning on that company was a train wreck, and part of me, like Sleepy, wanted to watch the drama unfold and see how things shake out, but a larger part wanted to get to work, to walk into the empty classroom and unpack my thoughts before the guard allowed the week’s participants into the room.

Even though Mac and I lived in neighboring cells, the most interaction we had—face-to-face, uninterrupted—was when he was a partisan in the orientation group. He sat in the back right corner, where the thugs tend to sit, and engaged in minimal banter with his group mates and they with him.

As a whole, we prisoners show a modicum of respect to the elderly in our midst, and are still more deferential if the oldster has a lot of time under his belt. Mac had an 85 number, meaning he went away in 1985 (or, more likely, 1984, accounting for county jail time before being processed into the state system and issued his identification number), thirty years ago. Half the guys in that group weren’t even born yet. Hell, I was in third grade when Mac went to jail.

He confided to me that a couple months before being rested for “this one,” he had been related from prison after completing a twenty-five-year bid that he began as an eighteen-year-old. Some back-of-the-envelope calculation revealed that that bid began in 1960 and that he was born in 1942. The family and friends who hadn’t died or drifted away over the years of his first incarceration had vanished by the time ace came to be living next to me. He was nearing the end of a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence, about to go to his third parole board. But parole boards are held in the morning, not Mac’s finest hour, and via video conference, which to him probably feels as technologically incomprehensible as the holodeck on “Star Trek.” And those misbehavior reports—the reason he was taken out of a medium-security prison and brought to this max—will be read into the record. Rather than view his acting out as a sign of deteriorating mental faculties, they will likely label him a disciplinary problem and use that to justify denying him parole for another two years. Mac’s advanced age, his criminal and institutional history—it wouldn’t be the first time that the board slow walked someone like him, two years at a time, into a pauper’s grave in the potter’s field just over the prison wall. Cliché as it sounds, I don’t’ know that he really wanted out after fifty-five years, with two-thirds of his life spent in a cage.

In what would be our only sustained interaction in the classroom, I slid into a desk next to his and asked how he was doing.

“Aw, shit,” he said, smiling that smile of the Grinch reformed, “same old.”

It was moments like that when I’d think he was squared away, but ten minutes later I found him wandering the halls, unable to retrace his route after a trip to the bathroom. Was he experiencing the cognitive decay of Alzheimer’s? “Nah, seriously,” I said. “Talk to me, tell me something.”

Mac cocked his head, hesitated for a moment, then genially asked if I had been in front of his cell the day before, using a brightly-colored scarf to introduce and offer up the Puerto Rican transgender woman (“the sissy-boy” in Mac’s parlance) who lived a few cells down from us. I guess I asked for it, insisting that he tell me something. Through his glistening, rheumy eyes, I fancied that I was able to step into his world: a false recollection involving two real people, courtesy of a hallucination or perhaps a dream so vivid he mistook it for waking life.

I attempted to undeceive him, and, sheepishly, he said that he didn’t think it went down like he remembered it. But I saw the confusion on his face, his not knowing whether to trust his memory or me. In prison, where so many freedoms are taken away, and so many decisions made for you, the body is caged but the mind is your final frontier. When you can no longer trust the contours of your inner world, you are truly lost.

On the walk back from work, I found myself hoping Mac had been moved. No sooner did I step on the company than I saw—from a hundred-fifty feet away—that things were wrong. A garbage can sat several feet in front of Mac’s cell, presumably as a makeshift wet-floor sign. I gave it a wide berth so Mac wouldn’t confuse me for Jay and wet me down. Gingerly, I stepped through the large puddle and into my cell, grateful to see that no water had flowed in.

Within minutes, the calls started coming from all around. “What happened to Ol’ Boy?” “Did Jay get his wig split?” the fellas lamented being at school, missing even a few hours of the drama. These louts were, as always, hungry for action, meaningless violence to punctuate the monotony, giving them conversational fodder for lunchtime. The scenario was win-win for them: an old man goes to pieces in sensational fashion, a weaker man gets colorfully disrespected. There’s a wonderful Italian term, un gioco al massacre, which literally translates as “a game to the massacre,” and refers to conflagrations where both parties are destroyed because of a stubborn desire to win an argument. Just like the coliseum of old, bloodshed and humiliation make for good sport, and is always a crowd favorite. The smart money learns—in my case, the hard way—to steer clear of such massacres. So, as much as I wanted to play consigliere and get in between the two men, say a few soothing magic words and bask in the effervescence of a truce made, I knew better.

Mac, who’d been sedate just moments earlier, responded to the litany of indirect taunts and resumed threatening Jay, venting spleen. Beast, who had managed to talk the company officer into letting him out of his cell that morning, on the pretest of doing auxiliary porter work, piloted a push broom to where the action was A proper menace, Beast was in his early twenties, dreg-seeking, tough, smart, and gang-affiliated. In a voice characteristically hoarse from shouting, he made some noise about getting Mac’s cell open so he could fight Jay.

A voice from the floor above pleaded, “Leave that alone, Beast.”

“Yo!” Beast barked back, “Mind ya fuckin’ business! That’s why the graveyards is full.” It was a favorite retort of his, a quick verbal jab to anyone who intruded upon his conversation.

A guard walked, taking the chow and work list. At Mac’s cell, he paused, and said, “I can’t have you throwing water all over the company.”

I was still getting used to the relatively human nature of staff here. At Prisons A and F, where I spent my previous years, such behavior, from an old man or not, would result in the beats being put to you.

It was then that Mac dimed out Jay: “He be fuckin’ wit me.”

Beast, gawking from behind the guard, nodded frantically to Mac, then couldn’t help speaking. “He wants to get a few minutes.” He said it lightly, like a naughty dog coming out of Stay.

That was all the spectators needed.

“Blood in the water!” “Shark food.”

It chimed with Hunter S Thompson’s description of Las Vegas: “the shark ethic prevails—eat the wounded.”

From a few cells over, Sleepy called out in his nasal baritone, “Some things in life, my man, you talk these things into existence.” It wasn’t clear who, exactly, he was addressing.

Mac was sitting on his bed when I got back from work that afternoon. I was sorry to lay eyes on him, a train wreck in such slo-mo that he appeared to be stop-mo, and I feared that the logical progression would require life to go in reverse, having the morning repeated. The fluorescents illuminated his institutional-teal-colored walls, and several white duffels sat beside him on the bare plastic mattress. With relief, I noted that he wasn’t bleeding or broken up.

He knocked on our common wall.

“Hey buddy,” I said.

Through the bars, his arthritic hand passed a heavy book accompanied by a folded piece of yellowed paper.

Ever since the stated me with that meds, I started fucking up but, if you know, I started coming around plus, I was going to fart (?) my cell up, I found too many roaches in here last nite and, I came up all nite but, when the police told me I was on transfer, I knew this punk boy started it – I’m okay just fed up with that kid so, let me go before I lose my mind and do something I might regret. I will stay strong and stay out of people...you are the first white guy I felt cool around. A friend…Mac

A touching note, with an incongruously firm grasp of punctuation: setting off a parenthetical expression with commas—very noice. He’d written on the back of a hole-punched page which read EXHBIT “C,” likely a useless remnant from a decades-old appeal that obviously went nowhere.

The book, in contracts, was a practically brand new New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, the dust jacket clean, shiny, and still embossed. For a writer in a place without Internet access, a desk reference is worth is weight in tobacco. The Times Guide was broken into categories like art, architecture, foreign words and phrases—thoughtfully curated like an encyclopedic best-of and more meaningful than an almanac’s sports statistics and state capitals. I’d borrowed the volume throughout the years, but this one was brand new, up to date, and all mine. I couldn’t believe it was still being published.

I thanked Mac profusely and handed him a sealed jar of peanut butter as a going-away present. When he asked for my last name, I provided a fake. Mac and I were on good terms, but who knew what kind of cockamamie notions would enter his head in the next hour or by the following day. His methods were no longer sound.

On Thursday morning, Mac was let out of his cell, and he slowly dragged his two duffels, fumbling his way to the front of the company. The guard told Jay he’d overlook some fisticuffs – only fisties, no weapons – but Mac didn’t go for it, choosing to leave without a bang.

I told Jay I respected him for not snuffing Mac, but he took some shit from guys who wanted bloodshed. Jay had no wins: take shit for not fighting or take shit for beating on old man. And there was the possibility, however remote, that I Jay did fight, Mac would somehow get the better of him with a jagged can top or improvised weapon.

By Friday, the cell next to mine had a new occupant, and Mac was fading from the collective memory. I found myself thinking about him, where he was and how he was doing. There was plenty of sadness in his story, an object lesson in what happens when a street guy goes senile in a place where no one – peers, staff – really cares one way or the other. If he’s released, he’ll likely end up in a nursing home of last resort, only slightly better than prison, with overworked and uncaring staff, bad food, mind-numbing routine, and little freedom of movement. But that’s only if he gets released. The deeper Mac slips into dementia, or whatever it is, the more he’ll act out. The board can deny his parole on the grounds that he’s a danger to society. Or maybe the next Jay won’t hesitate to puncture Mac’s lung, leaving him to bleed out in a darkened stairwell.

Thoughts like that were occupying my mind when my sane, smart neighbor Rob knocked on our common wall and asked if I had his Times Guide. I hesitated for a moment, then asked him to describe it.

Laughing it off, I handed over the book, explaining to Rob that Mac had passed it to me without asking me to pass it on to my right. When I thanked him for it, Mac either didn’t hear, or was fine with me thinking he’d given me a gift. Both explanations were equally plausible.

To Rob’s credit, he didn’t—so far as I could tell—think I had knowingly received and held onto his property, a actionable offense in these parts.

I looked at my bookshelf, and the now-empty space between The Merck Manual and a Norton anthology. Being completely honest with myself, I acknowledged a moment, just a few seconds long, when I considered telling Rob that I hadn’t seen his book then sheistily hiding it until one or the other of us moved on. If Mac were in my shoes, I think that’s how he would’ve played it.