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I hope that you enjoy this chapter. Chapter 18 will be posted very soon.
daw
The Processor's Practicum
CHAPTER 17
It seemed like every time we were moved, we went to someplace more basic. Behind the black steel door was a square concrete room with a steel roof. Just under the roof was a line of little windows, like you see in a basement, except that your basement windows usually don't have steel bars, to make sure you don't leave. There were boxes painted on the floor, some cardboard cartons stacked along one wall, and a long steel rack on the left side, near the entrance, with a big inventory of chains, cuffs, and shackles hanging off of it.
When we got inside, officers were there to take control. I suppose we should have been happy that, as inmates, we could be sure that planning had gone into giving us minimal opportunity for choice in our actions. There was no need for us to wonder what to do.
"KNEEL" was the order. By now all of us had learned the fine art of kneeling while you are cuffed and shackled. I would like to tell you that my expensive and extensive education was what had allowed me to master this somewhat specialized skill, but the honest answer is that you learn from experience. The exercise requires you to move one of your legs forward a bit and use that leg as a balance for your body as you move the other knee both back and down. If you also do a bit of a lean toward the knee you moved forward, you can get in the kneeling position ordered with minimal damage to your kneecap. I saw this dance going on ahead of me, so when it was my turn to reach the yellow line where kneeling was to be performed, I had seen it done four times. I did an amateur job of it, but I did not fall on my knees as I had the first time I tried to follow the simple and oft repeated order.
When we were all on our knees, and not really in an advantageous position to make any dangerous moves, officers arrived behind us and I felt my hands uncuffed and my belly chain removed, together with my connection to the long chain. Instinctively now my hands found the opposite arms-to-elbows position, so I received no swats nor was I yelled at as my shackles were also unlocked. An officer walked rapidly past, yanking the plastic envelopes, the repositories of our convict documents, from around our necks. Now we were freed from the last remains of our identities. He stacked the envelopes by the cuffs and shackles rack, and the next time I looked, someone had taken them away.
As soon as my steel was on the rack and my documents were back in the hands of the officers, I was ordered up and obediently rose with hands still locked on elbows. Then, remembering the command I was given before entering the room, I scurried to the first open box I saw, and stood in it, waiting for further orders. I knew what the next step would be. Sure enough, when all of us were in our boxes, "STRIP DOWN AND FOLD `EM UP" was ordered. "PERSONALS ON DECK. DO IT NOW."
It did seem strange to me that we would have to strip naked again. On the van, we had been in chains, in plain sight—supposing that anyone would want to inspect the cargo in the back, since we had been strip searched leaving R&D. There hadn't been one second when we weren't under the watch and control of CO's. However, I had come to realize that logic and the prison system were absolutely not connected.
I put my little bag of personals on the "deck," the concrete floor, then dutifully stripped out of my coarse white socks, black ugly shoes, orange jumpsuit, and white tee, and finally stood and dropped my shorts. In the other boxes, shorts were falling on the floor like snow. Soon there were ten naked former humans gyrating in the center of the concrete room, trying to fold their discarded clothing—neatly, with the shoes (socks inside of them) pointing forward on the other side of the little stack of white and orange. After performing the fold, we assumed the standing position, hands grasping the opposite elbow, and awaited our inspection. Again, I marveled at how quickly I had accepted as normal that I would stand absolutely naked in my little box and await what I knew would be a humiliating violation of my body.
The inspection came as expected. I was lucky to be one of the first two to go through the drill. Mouth open, tongue up and all around, with a flashlight in your mouth; pull ears forward, flashlight shown into ears; hands over head so armpits can be checked (really dumb, since all of us were still fresh from induction and so devoid of hair); then of course, move your penis up and down and all around, and expose your balls, up, down, and all around, and pulling your ass cheeks apart let the officers look inside your asshole ("all right," I thought, "you asshole, just enjoy this view of mine"); followed by three deep knee bends ending with a hold at the bottom and a required two coughs. I knew the last was to make us expel whatever we had secreted up our butts in that luxury hotel we had just left.
While we were doing our welcoming exercises, two of the COs were going through our personals and inspecting our clothing, using plastic covered hands to fondle our shoes and the rest of our state supplied wardrobe. The orange suit with DANGER on the back was a transit uniform, but they were still inspecting our suits to see if they could catch us with some kind of contraband. Soon they would put us into our real uniforms, whatever those were. But that wouldn't happen right away. We offenders just took our hands-on-elbows stance, immobilized and staring forward. The officers gathered at the front of the room, chatting with each other and casting the occasional glance at the man-shaped objects in the boxes.
We waited in our boxes until another officer arrived with a clipboard. This one had more metal on his uniform. That, and the clipboard, meant that he was in charge. The other COs lined up respectfully to greet him. He nodded to them, then turned to us. He didn't nod. There was no greeting in our direction. He just glanced at us, and pointed to a convict at random.
"YOU BOY! YEAH, YOU! Grab one a those cartons and stack all these suits inside. Put the carton THERE. Then grab another one, stow the shoes inside, and put that one THERE. Do it."
The selected convict walked to the brown wall of cartons, took one, opened it hesitantly, and started picking our clothes off the floor. He inserted them in the carton, careful not to disturb their folds.
"Faster, boy!"
The convict stacked faster.
"FASTER!"
The convict was a machine whose speed had been dialed to the max. With hurried jerks of his arms and hands he filled the carton to the top with orange suits. He closed the top, then scurried, naked, to place the carton against the opposite wall, where the officer had ordered him to place it--and scurried back, dick bouncing, to grab another carton. Soon that one was filled with shoes, but there were still shoes left on the floor. The convict looked up, bewildered. "Run that one over, and grab another one," the officer commanded. "Stupid!" Once more the convict ran back and forth, bare assed and balls bouncing. Then he returned to his box, and stood there panting. Now our clothes were packed up, gone.
Looking at his clipboard, the officer began checking us off. Apparently, you can never do too much to make sure a convict hasn't somehow escaped from confinement. He called our numbers, one by one. I paid no attention but was alert to my own personal number.
"COX 117213!"
"SIR!" I shouted back, automatically, surprised by the sound of my voice as it echoed off the concrete. It was like I was still a human, permitted to speak.
The officer looked over at me, and I thought he gave me a little smile...or perhaps sneer would be a more accurate term.
Again I spaced out until I heard silence, and figured all of us had passed our latest check. The officer rested his clipboard against his thigh and addressed us as a group.
"LISTEN UP! You will now proceed to Uniform Issue. While you've been parked here, doing nothing, we've been fixing up your new suit of clothes. All new, all free, and all specially tailored, just for you. You'll find that the cons in the Stamp Room do a pretty good job."
Stamp Room? What was he talking about—philately? I was congratulating myself on remembering that word when he yelled, "GRAB YOUR PERSONALS AND GET YOUR ASSES OUTTA MY SIGHT! FOLLOW THAT OFFICER! RUN!" He pointed toward the back of the room, where another officer was pulling open another steel door. Ten naked inmates bent and grabbed, turned, and moved their asses toward the door. He said to run, so we ran.
Bolting through the door, buck naked, the best I could expect was that the place where they were herding us was still in the same building. But what difference would it make? In either case, I was just a bald head and a naked butt, running in a line of bald heads and naked butts.
"STAY TO THE LEFT!" someone shouted, and I saw that they had run us into a hallway with a yellow line separating the left one-third of its width from the right two-thirds. The one-third was for convicts; the two-thirds was for officers. There was an officer standing every 20 feet or so, to urge us on with a well-aimed slap to the butt or head.
This corridor was low, narrow, and windowless, with piss-colored tiles on the walls, like the ones you see in a really outmoded locker room. This was obviously an old convict highway, now attached to the "new" intake structure where our clothes had been removed. I had known before that prisons never die; they just add and subtract parts from themselves. We were getting toward the end of the dank old hall when an officer stepped out and deflected us toward a door on the left. On the other side of the door was a ramp. Before we'd run halfway to the bottom we were feeling cold clammy air and hearing our feet echoing on concrete a long way off. The ramp turned, and we found ourselves in a basement room with an officer yelling, "Personals on the shelf! Run to a head! Git UNDER it!"
Sloping floor, big concrete pillars, a pool of water lying in the center--the place looked like a cave, and smelled like it. The antique pipes dangling from the ceiling showed that this was the shower room. We dropped our personals on the rickety wooden shelf by the ramp, each con hoping he'd remember which of the identical bags was his. Then we sloshed through the backed up water and stood under the pipes, four cons to a "head," and waited, naked, for something to happen. From a distance came the drip-drip-drip of a rusted pipe.
I looked around. Ten convicts—seven white, two black, one that looked maybe Mexican, maybe Chinese. A couple of them returned my look with a hostile glare. More were impassive. The con across from me was wiping his eyes—crying and not wanting to show it. He must have been 20 years old, but he was bald and naked and shivering in the cold that seemed to ooze from the walls of the shower room. I realized that I was the oldest man in the cave.
I'd never paid much attention to the history of this place, but now what I knew came back to me. At the start, there was one penitentiary in the state, and some prison farms and road gangs. Then they decided that a special institution was needed for youthful offenders, aged 18 to 30. So this place was built. It was called the Princeton State Reformatory, and it was supposed to . . . reform. What happened then was what usually happened: the state built medium-security and minimum-security facilities elsewhere, and the "reformatory" turned into the state's second penitentiary, a maximum security institution. The inmates I used to visit said it was even tougher than "the Pen upstate." That was its reputation, which I hoped wasn't true. But it remained the Princeton State Reformatory, and its population remained younger than the other penitentiary's.
It was funny, I thought. Maybe the young man next to me, shivering under the old leaky shower head, was getting his wish—he had arrived at Princeton for his education. And I had gotten my wish too. I had wanted an educational experience, and here I was at the Princeton Pen. Grimly, I wondered which of us would learn more.
"Catch your soap!" the officer yelled. Bits of soap samples, like the ones you get with your hotel room, only gritty and yellow, landed at our feet. We bent to pick them up, but there weren't enough for all ten of us. I gave the one I managed to scrape off the floor to the kid who'd been crying. He gave me a scared look, and took it. Then the shower heads came to life.
When you haven't had a shower for nearly a week, any water you get is wonderful, even if it's lukewarm and you've got to share it with three other naked convicts. We were all hogging the head and rubbing the water over our chests, and if we had a fragment of soap we were lathering it onto our heads and nuts. There was no thought of shampoo, of course. The crying kid finally remembered me and handed back the rest of the soap, which wasn't much by that time, but enough for me to get a whiff of the chemical odor that wafted out of it. That soap was like the cleaning stuff you pour in your toilet. I rubbed it over my chest, my balls, my legs, and then there was still a little bit left, so I rubbed it over my stubby skull. I was trying to get it out of my eyes when the showers turned off. I guess five minutes was the maximum.
We stumbled away from the heads, dripping and sloshing. No towels, of course, so when we got to our personals, there were a lot of cons rubbing their eyes and trying to decide which items were theirs. They didn't get much time. "Up the ramp!" was the next command, so we trooped up the slippery steel ramp and got back into the piss-colored hallway.
"LEFT!" one of them yelled, so we turned left, slopping along to the end of the corridor, then waiting at another steel door till we were all present and accounted for, and one of the officers found the key.
The door creaked open, and we were herded into another room—old and high, with a peaked roof and an old-fashioned skylight, and an old wooden counter across one end. Behind the counter were four brown-suited inmates, standing impassively, hands-to-elbows. Behind the inmates was a rank of tall steel shelves, with thick brown objects stacked up on them, bottom to top.
As soon as we saw the two rows of boxes painted on the floor we all responded to our conditioning and went without instruction to the place where we belonged. Each of us took a box and stood in it, grasping our elbows. We stood, and the CO's stood, and the inmates behind the counter all stood quietly, waiting for the next thing to happen.
Finally a senior officer entered the room. He had to be important as I noted that the guards stiffened and approached military standards of standing at attention. It seemed that as we got deeper into the institution, we had the privilege of meeting officers who were higher up. We scum prisoners saw what was happening and, again reacting to our conditioning, tried to stand up straighter.
This officer was my age, but tall and burly. He walked down the line, looking at us new arrivals. Then he moved in front of us, and a young officer came forward and said, "Major McConnell will address you now." Major McConnell nodded to him, and began his speech.
"It is my duty," he said, "to welcome you to the Princeton State Reformatory--in other words, to the end of the road. YOUR road.
"You have shown by your criminal acts that you cannot abide by the rules that guide the citizens of this state. You have therefore been sent to an environment in which you will have to abide by rules. You had your chance to be free, and you failed. Now you have the certainty of punishment.
"The law gives the officers and the Department of Corrections broad authority over offenders, to ensure that you learn to follow and respect authority. In this facility, offenders will promptly and completely obey all orders given by their correctional officers. ALL orders. You may think that some order you receive is wrong. Unnecessary. Harmful to your precious ego. Even `illegal.' I assure you that no order given by a correctional officer is illegal. Either you will follow the rules, or further punishment will ensue. With absolute certainty. That includes what is known as corporal punishment, which includes such things as the paddle, the stocks, and other penalties that you will discover. It also includes something that many experienced offenders think is worse—Seg, Administrative Segregation. That's also called the Hole, for any of you that haven't had an education--yet.
"This institution is called a reformatory. Nevertheless, its purpose is not to reform you, help you, or in any way prepare you for some great future beyond these walls. It is the purpose of this institution to convince you to obey the rules of this institution. That is all that is expected from you. If you are not convinced, you will have to obey them anyway. You can start your learning process by forgetting any notion that you have a choice. Choice is something that you once had. What you have now is walls and bars.
"I am well aware that for most of you these words will be . . . what would you say? . . . lost in the buzz. You've spent your lives, such as they are, doing whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted to do it. You had parents that let you off with warnings. You had schools that let you off with warnings. You had judges that let you off with warnings. That's all gone. That all stopped when you stepped off that van out there. There will be no more allowance for choice. From now on, you will eat what you're told, wear what you're told, march where you're told. You will sleep where you're told—in a steel cage. You will get your grub, your suit, your little motel room, your five minutes under the shower--all free of charge. No more parents. No more teachers. No more bitches that you spent cash on. In here, everything is free of charge. No choice, no thought, no worry. You get up when we tell you, you go to sleep when we tell you, you shit and piss when we tell you. And if you don't want to do what we tell you, that's all right too. We'll be happy to provide the stocks, the paddle, the Hole, or whatever else will make you feel at home here. Because this is where you belong. Your application has been accepted; your reservations are in order; your room is ready.
"So again, welcome home. Lieutenant Morgan will provide your further orders."
That was it. The Major stopped and stepped back. A young officer with a flattop took his place. I was shaken by the speech. I thought the time in R&D was scary, but this was way beyond all that. Major McConnell looked like one of my senior colleagues. He looked like my dean, who treated me to drinks and dinner twice a year at the faculty club, and asked for my advice. But now he was treating me like a 19-year old punk who had been in trouble all his life. I wanted to tell him that I was not a punk, that I was a responsible person like him, that I was a college professor doing a research project on a subject that interested us both. I wanted to tell him how different I was from all the other naked men in boxes.
That was true, but it didn't matter. Now I realized just how helpless I was in here. I knew that the paddle would be a frequent visitor to my and every other offender's butt, and that in all probability I would also know of time and pain in the stocks. Me and the 19-year-olds who I thought were completely different from me.
I wanted to go home. This was not erotic; this was not exciting. This was not fun. Jim Henderson, Police Officer, I bet you knew that this would be my life, yet you allowed my uninformed decision to put me here. Indeed with my stupid help you engineered my movement into this hell on earth. What else would I find that awaited me in my ignorance? I caught myself looking down on my shrunken penis. It didn't realize that before I left here, I would be changed completely, from a respected college professor, doing research and giving lectures about the varieties of individual experience, into the latest bald, numbered, naked, locked up convict, forced to attend lectures from men who would be pleased to paddle me like a child for anything I did "wrong."
Meanwhile, the young officer was announcing, "When the clerk calls your number you will go forward, receive your uniform issue, return to your box, and suit up."
Numbers were called and offenders went forward to receive their clothing from the inmates at the counter. Each got a thick wad of brown cloth, with a tall pair of boots balanced on top of it. The R&D shoes had been bad enough, I thought, but these boots looked as big as battleships. As soon as a new con got his issue, he had to start putting it on. Soon the room was filled with men in all the stages of dressing in—some of them squirming into their shirts, some of them pulling up their shorts, some of them squatting to lace their boots, some of them shouldering their way into the heavy brown work coat that was a new addition to our convict garb.
Arms jutted accidentally into faces; bent heads dodged to avoid legs suddenly sticking out their way. It isn't simple to get dressed when you've got no place to sit or lean. There was a lot of hopping into trousers and flopping on the floor while trying to pull up socks. As the new cons went through their gymnastic exercises, everybody kept looking down at his body, like he was surprised to see that brown uniform growing up around his naked skin. It was obvious, just looking, that these browns were a lot thicker and meaner than the ones we'd left behind at R&D. Not to mention the boots. Those thick black towers made our big old shoes look like flimsy little gym sneaks. You could tell that a lot of these cons had never tried to get into a boot before, let alone lace one up. They almost fell over, the first time they tried to sink a foot in, and they kept getting their laces going the wrong way, and having to start again.
But the big news was the new decorations on our suits. The old uniforms announced that we were INMATES; our new garb advertised our names—our new, convict names. The six digits that represented our identities were now stamped across our backs.
I gulped. Now I realized what the Stamp Room was for—the stamping of numbers across convict backs. Huge numbers. Unmistakable. Permanent. And not just across our backs: I saw that the same numbers were stenciled on our right rumps and our left pecs, on both our outer and our inner wear--trouser, shirt, coat, shorts, and tee. There was something final about looking at your number stamped like that, all over you. A few of the cons kept staring at the shirt they were holding, there in their hands, and marveling at the tall black numbers that they now had to wear. Of course, just to make sure there would be no mistake, in case a wandering prisoner happened to encounter someone who didn't know what his number meant, CONVICT was stamped on the right pec of the shirt and the coat, and the left rump of the trousers. We had been INMATES. You can be an "inmate" even in your own house. But now we were something more definite—CONVICTS. We had been convicted for our crimes, and now we had to wear our convictions on our chests, and display them on our butts.
But "we" wasn't fully appropriate. I was still waiting for 213 to be called. Now almost everybody was straightening his heavy brown coat and hurrying to obey the officer's repeated instruction to "Button up! All the way to the top!" Clearly, a lot of these cons hadn't worn a tie in years, if ever. They were unused to the concept of anything buttoned to the top. Not that they would be wearing any ties from now on. But the process of tightening a collar around your neck seemed foreign to them. While the last bunch was undergoing that torture, the first few were looking with distaste at the caps that came with their stylish new suits. These weren't the baseball caps that most of them were undoubtedly used to propping jauntily on their heads, positioned with the back side to the front. These were heavy brown pillbox caps, with a heavy, stiff brim in front. Grimacing, they forced the caps onto their naked skulls.
The last one to finish was the kid that had been crying in the showers. They'd given him a uniform that was about two sizes too big, and now he was standing forlornly, encased in his huge, heavy suit, futilely trying to pull it up or around so it would fit his slender form. His brown cap went down to his eyebrows; his brown coat was nailed to his neck with a big steel button; all that was visible of him was two white hands and a little white face. The face was looking at his chest, studying the number stamped across it--when he suddenly looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes again, but the main look was surprise. Then I understood—I was the last one without a uniform, and no attempt had been made to give me one. I was the only naked man in a room now full of clothes.
But I wasn't being forgotten.
"You got a set of stripes back there?" the officer demanded of the inmates behind the counter.
"SIR yes SIR!" was their prompt rely.
Soon there appeared on the top of the counter a set of shirt and trousers with those old-fashioned black and white horizontal convict stripes. Each stripe seemed to be about two inches wide.
"COUNTER, BOY!" yelled the officer. "Get your stripes. After you serve your time in the Hole, we'll see about some browns for you."
"SIR yes SIR," I said loudly, promptly, and automatically. I didn't have time to reflect on what "the Hole" would mean, or why I was being given this special treatment. I ran to the counter and picked up my striped clothing. I noticed immediately that the cloth was coarse and heavy. I knew it would not be comfortable to wear, and I knew that the stripes would identify me as a criminal under extreme punishment, even in this strange world of convicts.
I was in a dilemma. I knew whatever way I went would be wrong, and my ass would pay. If I stood there naked, holding my stripes, I would not be following the general order to suit up. But no one had told me to do that, and evidently I was special. It was a game that I understood now. It's called The Prisoner Loses, the Officer Wins. I opted for just standing there. Might as well.
Turning my head nervously, I saw the superior officer who had given us the friendly welcome to the Princeton State Reformatory leaning in a corner of the room, watching me with a smile, no it was a smirk, on his face. I had a funny feeling about him. And just as I anticipated, he strode over to me.
"OFFENDER 213. You don't follow orders very well, do you?" I smiled, being careful only to smile inside.
"SIR this OFFENDER was trying to learn from the advice it was just given to follow orders, SIR. SIR this offender had no orders to dress SIR."
"So," he said, still smiling. "You're the smart one, all right. You like your silly games with words. You like making everything different from what it is. All new offenders were told to suit up, and that meant you."
I stood there, as I did not hear a question, and thus there was nothing that would allow me to speak under the rules that had just been explained to me.
"Tom, get me the paddle over there, would you? Three strokes for not following orders, boy."
Tom, one of the officers standing around and watching this little drama, promptly walked to one side of the room. While carefully not moving my head, I could just see a sort of larger frat-type paddle being removed from the wall and brought over to the senior officer.
"Assume the position, offender."
I assumed the position—I bent over and grabbed my ankles. The officer moved behind me. Again the first thing I felt was the smooth wood of the paddle being rubbed lightly across my butt. I knew now this was like a cat playing with a mouse it has caught and wants to terrify before the mouse meets its fate. It worked.
"You knew that whatever you did I was gonna give your butt some strokes, didn't you?"
"Sir . . . yes Sir."
"Well, get ready. I'm not gonna disappoint your ass."
The smooth paddle that had continued moving slowly across my butt was now removed. I tried to steel myself for the pain I knew was coming, Once again I felt movement, but once again, all I received were some more gentle rubbing of paddle against butt. I knew the officer was hoping to get me to relax just a little so that his stroke would be more dramatic, as I would not be sure it was coming.
Then it struck my butt cheeks so hard that it took every ounce of my determination to stay standing, and a second after I felt the wood hit butt, the brain was sending frantic messages of flight and pain. I knew I had to suppress the flight messages; and the pain, although bringing tears to my eyes, had to be endured.
"Convict, did I hear you thank me for the work I had to put into that stroke just to get through ugly hairless skull of yours? And did I hear you count that stroke?"
"Sir . . . ONE, Sir. Thank you Sir. And . . . may I have another . . . Sir?" I gasped. Although I hated the words that I knew I had to say, at least saying something was better than not making any sound.
Once again, I felt the paddle approach my butt, but once again the officer pulled up and caressed it lightly. Then once again the paddle disappeared, and once again I heard it moving through the air. And, once again, it stroked me lightly.
I decided that since it had made contact with my butt I would take a chance. "Sir, TWO, Sir. Thank you, Sir. May I have another, Sir?"
"You are indeed one dumb shit con with a turd up there where a brain should be. For that little performance, three more will be delivered."
Once again the paddle was removed, and this time it struck with at least the power of the first one, and as I was doing my little speech of "thank you," another strong blow hit my ass, a bit higher than the other two, and then, even before I could recover to make my little speech, another hit me again.
"Sir FIVE, Sir. Thank you, Sir." I fully expected to hear that those last two only counted as one, but the officer said, "One to go convict. I'll try to make it special."
I heard it starting, and just as my brain said "incoming, extra fast," the connection of wood to tenderized ass was so painful that I screamed, and screamed again. "Sir . . . . " I choked out. "FIVE . . . Sir. . . . Thank you Sir." My words were slurring when I added the propitiatory, "Sir thank you for . . . assisting me to . . . learn Sir."
That must have worked, because the next order was, "Suit up, convict." I bent over, painfully, and picked up my striped trousers. As I rose, I glanced at the line of my fellow inmates, now dressed in their new brown convict clothes. Some were staring at me with mouths open, obviously scared that the same thing was going to happen to them. But most were silently snickering and elbowing each other to make sure they all shared the fun. I looked for the little thin boy. He was there, tented in his big brown suit with his new name stamped on his chest, grinning nervously. Was he sympathetic, I wondered, but scared to show it, or was he as cold as all the rest of them?
But I could only look for a second. I had to put on my stripes. The things were every bit as stiff and uncomfortable to handle as I expected, and no underwear was provided. I sank my legs into the pants and pulled them up carefully over my freshly browned butt. I discovered that there were only buttons on the fly, and they weren't easy to nail down. There was no belt, so I was happy that the waist was tight and I had to suck in to button it. At least my trousers wouldn't fall off. I then picked up the shirt and pulled its scratchy fabric onto my shoulders. Inserting the iron buttons over my chest, I could see that this wasn't so much a shirt as a heavy duty coat—a "tunic" that you wear outside the pants. A coat and trousers . . . but weren't there any . . . ?
A pair of shoes fell at my feet, and a pair of rough socks landed on top of it. That answered my question. They were like the old clodhoppers, from R&D. I bent and tied my shoes. But there was one thing left.
"Get your cap," the young officer said. I looked at the counter and saw one of those expressionless convicts holding out a last, small, object of clothing. It was a cap, a cap somewhat like the other cons were wearing, except that this one had stripes on it. It was a little monkey cap to go with my big heavy monkey suit. I put it on my head. Now I was totally covered with stripes.
"Officers," said the Major. "Take the other offenders to their assigned cells. I'll take this one to the Hole and personally see to his comfort."
"Yes Sir," they said, laughing. As they were ushering the other convicts out of the room, I sank painfully to my knees while heavier than normal shackles were attached to my legs. Then I stood with my hands out so they could be cuffed together.
"Now let's get you to the Hole," the senior officer said casually. I knew my trip was casual to him. I also knew, without a doubt, that the Hole would show me that my previous two cells were luxury accommodations in comparison.
As my sack of personals was placed in my cuffed hands, I was thinking, "Jim Henderson, please come and rescue me. I know how stupid I was. How you must have laughed at my ignorance and arrogance in thinking I knew the kind of adventure I was asking for."
A second officer came forward holding a thick leather strap, with a large clip at one end. It reminded me of the clip at the end of a dog leash, but this one was thicker, heavier, and larger than would be needed for even the largest and most vicious dog. The second officer attached it to the chain between my cuffs. "This will keep you in line," he said, "as we go across the yard." This second officer then stood behind me. He held firmly onto my leash.
A brown line of convicts was already leaving Uniform Issue. I followed them in my stripes, held by my arm by the superior officer, and secured from behind by the officer holding my leash. The line snaked out of the room and into an alley like space between two buildings. At the end of the alley was a gate, with an officer standing next to it. The gate swung open and, led by our guards, we entered the Big Yard.
It was a breathtaking sight. Beneath our feet was an enormous wasteland of weeds and dirt, and concrete paths crossing like the remains of a giant spider's web. In the distance were the towering walls of the cell blocks, rising like Alps over the desert before them. As we prepared to cross the wasteland, our line began to separate. One segment, herded by its officer, was aimed at what looked like the main prison building, a hulk of concrete and brick, weathering in the sun. Other lines of brown ants moved along paths that led to smaller, more modern looking brick buildings—if "modern" means "not ancient." Meanwhile, I was the one in stripes with an officer holding my leash.
Now I saw that the dots scattered across the yard were other, brown-uniformed convicts, some of whom were now coming our way. These offenders seemed to have the godlike ability to walk across this walled world with no officer in attendance, and indeed with some freedom. To me they seemed almost like free men.
The "free men" flocked around the fish, offering gestures and catcalls and shouted invitations to "come by my house." The newbie was promised that if he would only come, he would be the center of attention and be made personally welcome in the world of the high-status offender. We knew from the leers that any such fish would have to fight to keep his virginity, if he still had any virginity of mouth and ass after time in jail and R&D.
Of course, I attracted attention by my zebra stripes, and the fact that I wore shackles, cuffs, and a dog leash. I heard whistles, and a lot of comments that made me realize that I was a new attraction. I had always enjoyed attention, but this was too much. The good thing was that one of the young officers, running interference, trotted over and told the invading convicts to fuck off or go to the Hole themselves. "And I don't mean that hole between your cheeks—we seen enough of that one." He didn't say which cheeks he meant. "And I got your numbers," he added. The gang melted away—leaving me still tramping across the yard, guided by the Major's hand and secured from any possibility of running away by the offer's firm control of my leashed cuffed wrists.
No matter what distractions I encountered on the way, I could see I was headed to a two story, fairly new building. The brickwork was the kind you see on the front of a church or a business office, but I was sure there was concrete underneath it. There were no windows, only a door. The door grew closer; the officer called ahead; the door buzzed open. We did our usual double door deal, with one closing behind us before the other one opened. Was this triple security, or quadruple? It made no difference. On the other side of the doors was another set of doors—on a two story set of cells. The doors on the lower tier were solid steel, with an opening toward the bottom that I knew was for food trays to be placed for the inmate to grab. All these openings were closed and locked. There was also a steel shutter about five feet up, which I knew covered a window into the cell. These shutters were also closed. Whatever was inside that door was absolutely separated from the world outside. The top tier was filled with doors made of steel mesh. An inmate could look out through a door like that. But what would he see? He would see the railing of the catwalk, and the concrete wall beyond it. As I'd noticed, this place had no windows.
"Open 16," the Major said into his shoulder microphone, and almost immediately one of the solid doors slid open. Again I saw a door coming closer, but this one I knew I did not want to enter. When we got to the cell I paused.
"Inside!" he ordered, unlocking my handcuffs. "Once inside, kneel by the bed shelf."
Looking in, I saw a concrete box with a concrete shelf. At one end of this shelf was a thin plastic mattress, rolled up for storage. This, I knew, was my bed.
With my newly acquired skill, I was able to kneel without ruining my knee caps. I felt my shackles being removed and the cuffs and my doggy leash similarly disappeared.
"Keep kneeling until that door closes. You may have noticed that this cell block is silent. If any inmate shouts at another inmate, or at an officer, or at himself, that inmate will receive punishment strokes and be chained in the cell in such an uncomfortable position that even dumbshits like you will realize we can make your life still more unpleasant, even in the Hole.
"In case you're wondering, you will remain here in the Hole until you think of ways to convince the officers assigned to this unit that you have reformed and want to attain the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by normal offenders in this facility. That means, among other things thicker mattresses, and blankets you might not be able to read through. . . . If you had anything to read.
"Now . . . . Clean this fucking toilet."
He turned and left the cell. The door of my box slid shut. I remained motionless until I heard the clank of the lock closing securely. I got up and looked around my home. There was the concrete shelf... or bench... whatever... I would be steeping on a mass of solid concrete. The florescent light far above me, and behind bars itself, allowed me to see that the stainless steel of the combination sink and toilet tower was just as bad as he had indicated. The previous occupant had entertained himself by filling the bowl with shit, and keeping it moist with piss. The sink looked like he had somehow managed to smear his combination of piss and shit in there also. I made a tentative push on the button that would give me a stream of water into the sink. You could use the stream to have water to drink, or use the water to wash yourself. The button worked. I used my hand to direct the water around the sink to try to clean it off a bit. The downside of this moistening was that the smell was renewed, and it was fetid. I was still trying to make some inroads on the sink when the little shutter at the bottom of the door suddenly opened.
"TWO THIRTEEN! Get your ass over here, take this cleaning stuff, and get to work."
I went to the little rectangular opening to the rest of my world . . . the inside area of the disciplinary segregation housing unit. I marveled at the deathly silence of the place. I had always been informed that the inmates in disciplinary segregation had nothing much to lose and so spent their time yelling, at the top of their lungs, their unhappiness at what was being done to them. It was eerie that this place was absolutely quiet. But I had only one focus to my life. Cleaning the toilet and sink of my cell.
I took in a roll--and it looked like a full roll--of toilet paper. I also received some stainless steel cleaner in a spray can with a handle that squeezed it out. There were also two real rectangles of cloth. The door slammed shut.
I had not expected that I would actually receive what I would need to clean this filthy accessory of the cell, but I had been justly treated in this. With my newly acquired appreciation for any officer who did not make sure that the inmate loses, I marveled that the officer who had so violently overreacted to me in the clothing area was also an officer who at least seemed to have given me a chance to get myself out of this place into which I had been rudely and unjustly placed.
With absolutely nothing else to do, I set to work.