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Chapter 16
The first batch of offenders had been herded through the door. Now it was the turn of my batch. The door opened as we approached. On the other side of the steel frame was a steel box. When we were all inside it, the door closed behind us. We were scrunched together in order to fit. My cock rubbed against the cuffed hands of the offender in front of me. He of course was clutching his bag of personals, but he took advantage of the situation to wiggle his finger on my cock. He never turned around, but I jumped a little as he made contact."STAY STILL UNTIL ORDERED TO MOVE, CONVICT," an amplified voice demanded from the other side of the thick window, high up on one wall. I looked in that direction and saw two officers, surveying the ten convicts in the box. Behind the thick glass, they had a greenish look."Boss, sorry Boss," was my now almost automatic response. I heard a faint snicker from in front of me. Once again I was made aware that convicts did not stick together anything but physically. They used the pile-on philosophy. If an officer was treating some con like shit, the other cons joined in the abuse.A buzzer went off and the sheet of steel in front of us opened up. We were released from one closet- sized waiting area, only to face another one, with another door at its end. We stood stuffed together as usual, while some mysterious checking went on behind the window above. But when the second door opened from this second closet, I saw sky. For a moment I was almost blinded, looking up at that incredible blue. Then I saw a square of concrete paving, and two vehicles parked on it. Both had "DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS" lettered on the side, and both were obviously awaiting us.The closer one looked like a school bus, except it was painted white and the windows were covered by a steel mesh bolted solidly onto the side. The first gang of offenders had been taken off the long chain and were awaiting their turn to climb up the narrow steps into the bus. The process was going slowly, made difficult by their leg shackles and the fact that with one's hands cuffed behind one's back, navigating these steps was not easy. Once inside the bus, they apparently had a much easier time. The bus was big; they had no problem standing up in it. I could see their shadows moving down the aisle and taking their seats. I could see the ones already seated looking curiously out through the mesh. The bus looked almost comfortable. There was plenty of room in it. The first con in our gang started heading toward the door, so we could get in line to enter. The rest of us followed him across the white concrete.Immediately two officers headed us off."HALT! Where the FUCK do you think you're goin'?"
They didn't wait for an answer. They just administered correction to the first man in the normal, gentle way in which guards help inmates learn to avoid some error. He got a slap on his head. "You're goin' to the van, shithead!"We changed direction and headed for the second vehicle. It was short and squat, the vehicular version of a dumpster—bigger than a dumpster, of course, but much shorter than the school bus version. Instead of a thin steel mesh, this one was encrusted with thick steel bars. The sun was glinting off the bars, the windows, the wheels, which must have just been washed by convict labor."LINE UP!" an officer bawled. "FACE THE SIDE!"Soon ten bald, sweating convicts were standing in a row, facing the van, and awaiting further orders.
Clearly, they were going to put us into this van. And clearly, we would have to wait a while. All we could do was stand there, listening to the clanking of chains and the pounding of boots in the school bus next door. The sun that heated our backs turned the windows of our own transport vehicle into mirrors. They were narrow and set high in the side, and the vehicle seemed higher off the ground than a normal van.
All you could see in the window facing you was a faint reflection of a bald head crossed by bars—but you knew that the reflection was you, a convict that was about to visit the other side of that mirror. You also knew by now what any prisoner knows, that he is to do as told, exactly as told. If not ordered to do something, the prisoner is to remain absolutely stationary, and if shackled to stretch his legs as far apart as possible. I moved my legs apart until the chain between my ankles was taut and off the ground.
I was staring at the name of my new firm, DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, when I noticed a neatly printed announcement, to the left of the door: "All Persons Not Law Enforcement or on Official Business, Move at Least 10 Feet from This Vehicle if Parked." And under that: "Violators May Be Prosecuted." Clearly, once we were in the van we were not going to have any visitors.I heard boots behind me. A voice said, "Time to lock'em in." Then everything started happening.Down the line I heard the clank of the long chain as the first con was detached, then the rubbery swish of the van's door being opened, then a clumsy pounding as the convict was pulled up the steps. After that, a pounding and hurrying from front to back inside the vehicle. The van swayed as something heavy was dumped down, someplace inside. Then a clash of steel, and boots stomping back toward the front-- and the process started for the second convict in line. It happened four times. I was the fifth.
My belly chain suddenly pulled tight around my waist. A hand gripped the lock that attached me to the long chain, opened it, and let the end clang onto the concrete. I felt my cuffed hands being grabbed from behind. "Don't drop your personals, SIR," a voice said, sneery. "We'll handle the rest of the baggage." I heard several laughs from the officers behind me. The baggage, of course, was me.
As I was hustled to the door I remembered all those airport vans that I thought were so uncomfortable to ride in, whenever I was going to or from one of those places where I liked to vacation—New York, San Francisco, Paris . . . . It always seemed that the ride didn't need to be so crude. But now all I wanted was to be able to clamber up those narrow steel steps without breaking my neck. The officers, of course, were happy to help. Looking up, I saw a big gym rat in an officer uniform standing at the top of the stairs. The one in back pushed me forward, and the one above reached down and pulled me up by my belly chain. I heard myself making the same confused poundings that the first four of my "friends" had made. The officers were wasting no time with me. I hurtled up the four steps, into the van.
What I saw as I turned made me pause momentarily . . . which got me a swift smack on the butt to get me moving into my new mobile prison.
Directly in front of me as I reached the top of the stairs was a barred wall, but the door was open to welcome me into the main part of the van. The main cage, I should say, because what you saw in there was yet more bars--lines of bars, vertical and horizontal, and cages made from bars. Each side of the aisle was grilled with steel; and on the left and right, separate cages were grilled off, one after the other, five on each side. The four cages farthest in the back were shut--bars flush with the aisle, and a steel lock hanging from each of them like a giant insect. But the cages weren't just shut; there was things shut inside them, things that were bulky and orange, like piles of used clothing, or those orange trash bags you see alongside the freeway. I gulped—those bags of trash were convicts like me.
The other six doors were open, awaiting our arrival. There was one with a "5" painted over it, and that was for me. The officers quickly stuffed me into it.There was nothing in the cage except a narrow steel shelf, bolted to the back grille. They sat me on that.
Then one officer held me stationary while the other moved down and locked my shackle chain into the steel clamp on the floor. Looking down, I noted that the floor was solid steel plate. There was no talking your way out of that. Then my hands were uncuffed from behind me and cuffed individually to my belly chain. That was a relief, but not for long. Right away, my arms were pulled backwards and I felt a chain going between them. I felt and heard the chain being locked into place. I could now move my legs only inches, and the same with my hands. Finally a thick leather seatbelt was brought across my waist and locked into place. It was industrial strength, and I don't know how I could have gotten it off, even if it hadn't been locked onto me."Comfy SIR?" the officer mocked me.I momentarily thought of mocking him by saying, "Yes, thank you. I would like a cappuccino," but immediately decided that silence was my best option.WRONG!I received a bitch slap across my face. "When an officer asks an offender a question," I was told, "the offender will answer." Then I got the reverse slap, so that both sides of my face were now smarting.Having received this gentle reminder, I answered, "SIR yes SIR. Thank you SIR." But he wasn't done."That's better, shithead," he said. "And you better mean it. There are plenty of ways of dealing with smartasses. Don't forget that you're shit and your officers are gods.""SIR yes SIR. This dumb convict will remember that instruction SIR."He gave me one of those looks that meant, "Are you for real?" Then he must have decided that even if I wasn't, the humiliation was good enough. The cage door slammed; the lock was put in place; I was left inside, chained to the shelf, while the officers stomped off down the aisle to get inmate number 6. Now I was one more heap of orange trash, locked in a monkey cage.I was facing forward, with my little bag of personals nesting in my lap like a weird plastic cock, and the plastic envelope hanging against my chest, containing all the papers necessary to document my life. I pictured myself as I would look to any camera that might be recording this, as I would look on some reality TV show, perhaps. I would be the example of the lowest grade of human being . . . a subspecies . .
. a convict . . . . I kept waiting for the camera to focus on my face so I could relate my thoughts, the way the camera always does on reality TV. But who would want to know what a sack of garbage thought? I was thinking this over as the rest of my fellow inmates were brought up one by one and locked into position, until all ten of us were sitting on our shelves, safely barred off from any contact with human beings—ten orange bags of convict, each of us inserted in its own container. Thinking of comedy shows that I enjoyed, I said to myself. "Now don't we feel special?" I smiled inwardly. I had learned that part of convict behavior. You did not smile. If a guard caught a convict smiling, he would conclude that the con was planning to do something against the rules, because breaking the rules is the only thing that makes a convict happy. With that conclusion the convict would be marked for further "education."I remembered that when the corporal punishment authorization bill was being debated in the legislature, the assurance from prison administrators and the prison guards' association was that only in extreme cases would corporal punishment be used, and then with strict guidelines. Well, there may indeed be strict guidelines, but they are for show only. My sore butt knew that the strokes applied to me were more than gentle reminders. They were blows against my body that would cause pain, suffering, bruises, and humiliation. I was at the legislative hearing when they testified, and I knew they were lying.
Now I could prove it . . . . But no, I couldn't. I was an offender, and my word was worthless—and worse, would go unheard. Who could hear my plea from inside this cage, inside a prison van?I wondered why I would be treated this way. After all, I was only supposed to be imprisoned for six months. I thought it over, yet again, and decided that Jim maybe just wanted me to have that supreme convict experience. I thought to myself that perhaps I would write him and tell him that I would like to dial it back a little bit from the ultimate. But the ultimate was so real, I couldn't tell how you could dial it back.It was a long wait, till all the convicts were loaded, so I had a long time to toss that around. I tossed it until it exhausted me.Finally, two officers got into the front of the van and locked the barred door to our set of cages. The big white "school bus" was starting up and moving past us. Then we also started up, and moved in behind the bus. We drove slowly past a parking lot which I guessed was the lot that I myself and a few others had entered only a few days ago. Then, I didn't know what to expect. Now, as a shaven, chained, orange-clad, caged-up convict, I knew a lot more. And I realized just how little those in free society really knew about the life of a prisoner. Legislators talk about keeping society safe, and use terms like "correcting," "reforming," "rehabilitating," and even "helping." Now I knew how outrageous those lies actually were.
The DOC was following what the legislators and the people who elected them wanted it to do. They wanted people who are convicted of a crime to PAY for it, and to pay HARD. Secretly, and perhaps not too secretly, the citizens wanted me and every other offender to suffer. They didn't want us to be comfortable. They didn't want us to be "well treated." They wholeheartedly supported reinstating corporal punishment on us. They wanted prisons to be places where those who broke the rules, no matter what the reason, would pay hard for their violations. A paddle on a prisoner's ass was only a beginning. I knew how much Jim Cox had already paid for his crime, and I was sure Cox was going to pay more---much more. As we passed the parking lot from which I entered this hell, we were entering the road that led to another one.
I hadn't noticed that there were speed bumps in the road, but now there were, definitely. Every time we went over one of them, we were thrown up and down, with a general clanking of our chains. Damn, I thought—don't they have any shocks on this thing? Then I thought back to the night after my friend had proposed that I take Jim Cox's place. That night--when I still held the key—I locked my personal set of leg shackles onto my ankles and walked around in them. I remember thinking that the clanking of the chains was a sort of happy little sound. I thought of a babbling brook. That was not the sound I was hearing now. What I heard now was the sound of domination, subjugation, and helplessness. There was no similarity between being in my bedroom, where I controlled the keys, and being in this place, where I was held completely by others' will.We clanked over three bumps, and each time I realized that being chained on a steel seat allowed me to remember my butt's encounter with the paddle. I was one unhappy convict. I also knew that if the guards found out how completely I had screwed myself by volunteering for this treatment, they would only laugh. It would only prove to them that I deserved to be here, because only one dumb asshole, who deep down knew that he had done wrong, would ever volunteer for the convict reality show.
Just leaving this place took forever. When the fences came in sight, we slowed to a crawl, then inched over the concrete trench where the bottom of the bus and the van were solemnly inspected. Then we inched though the several gates that separated prison from free society--a society, I was sure, that was very glad we traveled in a mobile version of the prison we were leaving. When the last gate opened for us, we were no longer within walls and behind razor wire, but we were just as securely separated from society, and just as surely being punished. We turned into the public highway, chained up, and locked behind bars.
The windows in our cages were barred and small, but you could still see out, if you really wanted to. It's strange how you adjust your expectations. If this had been my private car, I would have said I couldn't see a thing. Now I was enjoying the view, happy to be able to look at scenery that was not walls and bars, at trees and grass and all the other things you can't see when you're in an R & D holding cell. I no longer felt contempt for the people freely driving wherever they wanted to go, the way I had on my normal commute. Then, they were so many obstacles in my way. Today, they were life as people lived it.
I imagined myself in one of those cars, wearing a carefully selected shirt and tie, with my suit coat draped carefully across the back seat, thinking over my presentation for the meeting I would soon be attending. If I saw a Department of Corrections vehicle, it might or might not occur to me that there were men caged inside, men like me, but going to their permanent place of punishment. I knew I didn't realize that a pair of eyes was looking back at me from each of the little barred windows, eyes that might be exactly like my own, except that they were attached to a convict body in an orange trash bag, on its way to the DOC dumpster, up the road. Even if I'd known that, I wouldn't have worried about it for more than a second or so. My dick would stiffen, but that would be the end of the thought. And that was what put me on this side of the bars, to begin with.
I thought about that, and now I was unhappy. More than unhappy. I was ready to scream, to protest, to demand to see a lawyer, to demand to see my contact in law enforcement. It was panic. Fortunately, when you're locked in a cage, with your hands and feet wearing irons and a belt securing you to your appointed shelf, it doesn't make any difference if you panic. You can scream if you want to, and get the paddle. So I didn't scream. Now we were passing the glass towers on the outskirts of the city—towers of beautiful offices, constructed for the important and prosperous. Out there, behind every window, there was a doctor or a lawyer, making hundreds of thousands a year, holding meetings, making appointments, writing documents. In here, there were ten convicts, on their way to a new set of prison walls. I truly regretted my crime--not just Jim Cox's but my own, Andy's: ignorance, stupidity, a libido that overwhelmed my reason.I noticed then that we were leaving the superhighway and starting along a four-lane major street. I also noticed that the school bus must have continued on the superhighway. It was going somewhere else, to some other facility—and if the comparison between the school bus and the van meant anything, it would be a place that was paradise compared to the place where I was going.
Looking down through my barred window, I could see passengers in cars looking up at us. At stoplights the drivers craned their necks up too. What were they thinking? Did they understand what it meant to be shipped from one meat locker to another? I remembered that when I was a kid, I had seen these strange-looking buses on the streets. I didn't know what they were. My father told me, "Oh those are convicts." He didn't explain. Later on I discovered how erotic it was to picture somebody being locked up and shipped out to prison. Only I didn't understand the specifics.All around us, the convicts, was normal society, and inside the van was the convict's own normal life. Cuffed, shackled, chained behind bars, dressed in a glaring orange suit, white tee, and clumsy clodhopper shoes, we traveled across free society in our own prison on wheels.
After a while the city gave way to fields—long, low, nondescript, as if even they understood that they were leading to nothing good. Fuck! Now I realized that I knew our destination. We weren't headed to any minimum security facility. We were headed to a state prison, one of the two maximum security institutions in the state. It was the penitentiary, the pen, the Big House.
The place was old. It had been built in 1920. I had been there; I had visited prisoners in it. It had the 1920 cell blocks, and also structures from every later era of prison building, all the way up to the most recent buildings, which had been added about ten years ago. I'd often pictured that prison as something scientific, geological—a sample of all the strata of corrections of the past century. But I hadn't understood what that meant—that the convicts inside weren't actually living anymore, that they were exhibits, fossilized animals locked in the strata of their sentences, turned to stone.I remembered being frisked and patted down—lightly, respectfully--as I entered the visiting room. I also remembered my glimpse of the little closet where an inmate who had a visit was stripped and searched before and after. I once asked why it was that I had to remain in the visiting room for several minutes after the visit was over. The CO looked at me as if I were a bit dense and said, "You need to be here until the inmate clears his exit strip search." I remembered that when he said that, I had a fleeting fear of being locked up and helpless. I was afraid and also stimulated. I remember that I moved so that the CO would not see that the idea of being locked away caused my cock to stiffen up. Well, now I would be arriving as a prisoner, and I would not be leaving.Rearing up as close to the window as I could get, I peered into the distance. Yes, there it was—the tall tower of the Administration Building, the creation of a famous architect who had wanted to imitate something Renaissance and Spanish. He ended up with a brick pillar out of which four pairs of windows seemed to peer, a pair on each side, looking out like the eyes of prison guards. The rest of the building was flat brown brick—brown as the fields around it, brown as a convict uniform.
That was the Administration Building; then there were the wings—five floors of steel barred windows, with fat stone buttresses between them. As an important visitor, I had entered at the Administration steps. Now I was going to see where the convicts were taken. We didn't stop at the front. Instead, after a real crescendo of our chains, passing over a double set of railroad tracks, we moved around the side of the tall brown walls. I had never been on that side of the prison. It was startling, how long those walls really were. At one point, a lighter section of wall pushed out from the old brown cliffs. This was evidently a newer part of the institution, but with prisons, as I'd noticed, every new part looks old right away. That was true about the "new" stone wall that now filled my view. Its surface was already streaked and weathering. That, and the guard stations rearing out of it, made it look like it was a thousand years old. The road turned and pointed to a gate—a pair of doors that must be the entrance. Remembering that it was only about 45 minutes from this place to my downtown office, I thought, "Well at least I'll be close to home." Then I remembered the sorry truth: "What am I thinking? My home is here. I am home right now." Someplace in that enormous pile of brick and stone rising up behind the wall was my new place of residence.
"Home" was a bigger spread than people like me are able to buy. The doors alone must have been 25 feet high. The man looking down from the guard tower only bothered to open one of them. We squeezed through, only to find ourselves facing two 20-foot fences, with razor wire on top—duplicates of each other, six feet apart. I mused to myself about this massive enthusiasm for security. Had there ever been an instance of somebody trying to get escape from inside the prison in a vehicle moving through this series of steel-mesh walls? I couldn't imagine it. No matter: our van was checked twice— visually, on the outside, and by mirrors on the underside. Finally we passed through the last gate. We were now on the inside of a 30-foot wall and two razor wire emplacements that would have stopped an army. Inserted into the dimensions of the penitentiary, we and our van were nothing. We were a box of identical toys, ready for insertion into this model prison--a model that was far out of scale for us.
My pits and my chest were wet; the sweat was breaking out again. Chained up the way I was, there was nothing I could do about it. The van paused, then turned toward a building that obviously was not very old. The bricks were an off color, orange, like nobody wanted to spend any money matching the original.
Then we stopped. We were there.
The driver got out, went to a side door, and entered. The door had a glass window, and it must have been unlocked for him before he reached it. He just did the normal grabbing of the handle and went inside. I saw this and realized that it was the only time I had seen a person entering or exiting any place I had been inside, for the past week, by just opening a door. WOW what an idea. What I had accepted for all the years of my life until the last week was now a noteworthy, unusual experience.
But soon he returned, and four more with him--also in uniform, but a different uniform from his. While the new ones stood outside, he returned to the van. His assistant opened the bars at the front. Then the driver and the assistant started opening our cages. One by one, the orange bags of trash were extracted and hauled away. Eventually they got to me. They unlocked my cage. They unlocked my seat belt. Then they reached behind me, and I felt the chain holding my arms being unlocked and falling. My shackles were released from the floor clamp. Now I could actually move a little. I thought of the old saying, "I was really depressed, until my friend said, `Cheer up. Things could get worse!' So I cheered up--and things got worse." In this case, I cheered up, and things seemed to be getting better, but I also knew that once we were inside the building in front of us, I might very well be worse.
I hardly had time to grab my personals with one of those hands that were still attached to my belly chain when they pulled me up the aisle and pushed me down the steps. As soon as I got to the bottom and put my feet on the pavement, my hands were grasped roughly by one of the new officers and I was pushed into my place beside my fellow convicts. I realized that once again I was going to be part of a chain gang.
We were ordered not to move. I did not acknowledge the order, but I also did as I was told. I had been trained by my previous place of incarceration that a prisoner did as ordered, but did not speak unless asked a direct question. Obedience was expected. Soon a lock went onto my belly chain, attaching me to the long chain and all nine of my fellow prisoners.
As we stood in the open, I for one enjoyed being able to see the sun and sky--a normal pleasure, which inmates don't always get to have. The problem was that I kept thinking how good it would be to walk off by myself and find a tree or a brook or at least a piece of grass to look at. But even if I had been free, I would have had to walk a long way to find those things. There was nothing like that here. We were standing next to the van on the slab of concrete that was its parking lot. The slab was brown and weathered, like almost everything else in this place, and a jagged crack had opened up in it, with brown weeds poking out. Beside the slab was a place where in normal life somebody would have planted grass, but all you could see was some dirt full of short brown weeds. A breeze came up, sweeping dust into the faces of the offenders waiting in the sun.
I saw a batch of paperwork being exchanged. It was exactly like when I took delivery of some new furniture. There was always the paperwork ensuring that the items I had purchased were received by me and were in good condition. Now the ten of us were the items. We were checked by the accepting guards, and signed for.
After that, the guards stood around for a while, chatting. Then the ones who brought us here strode back to the van. The motor coughed and came to life; the van turned and began to retrace its course.
Watching it go was like watching the last lifeboat departing, without me on it. The van was going through the first line of razor wire when one of the new guards stepped to the front, and we had to turn our heads toward him, and our new home.
This officer was obviously the chief. He looked at us with the normal boredom. "All right, offenders," he said. "You can come to attention." We came to attention. "I guess you know why you're here," he went on. "We're gonna take you from OUT HERE" (nodding toward the dirt, the weeds, and the sunlight glaring on the concrete) "and process you INTO THERE" (nodding toward the tall piles of bars and bricks, over in the background where none of us wanted to look). "You will follow THIS officer" (pointing at a young man in an officer suit, standing at the end of the line of young men in officer suits), "through THAT DOOR"--indicating a different door from the one that the officers had walked through themselves.
This second door was a black rectangle set in the orange wall—blank, windowless, lined with rivets.
"Once inside THAT DOOR, you will stop in the Receiving Room and await your release from the chain.
Immediately upon release you will proceed to one of the squares painted on the floor in front of you.
You will step into the next open square, and you will NOT move until ordered."
Nothing new here. I was surprised how quickly I was becoming an experienced prisoner.
The indicated officer came forward. "Right face!" he yelled. Then he smiled, watching some of us turn right and some of us trying to turn left. He smiled like you do when you find out you were right about something for the thousandth time. Offenders were always so stupid that they couldn't even tell their right from their left.
Eventually we straightened ourselves out. Ahead of me was a black door, with a line of orange backs pointed toward it. DANGER-DANGER-DANGER-DANGER said the big black letters on the line of backs. I wondered whether that was true. I wondered what was going on inside those four bald skulls in front of me, and those five bald skulls behind me. DANGER was on my own back too, but if you'd asked me what was going on inside my skull, I couldn't have told you.The smiling officer reached down to his belt and pulled out an enormous key. When he turned it, you could hear the lock echoing inside the black steel door. When he grabbed the handle, you could see his back muscles flexing inside his shirt. That door must have weighed a ton. I was praying that it wouldn't open. But it did. "March!" he ordered. So we marched—cuffed, shackled, chained, and clanking together--into our new place of punishment.