With Intent to Sell and Smoke
It was a Tuesday, my birthday actually, when they came and got me and took me to the sally port and put me on the bus handcuffed to Number 4.
Since it was my birthday it was the first week of October. What I could see of the air seemed typical of Winston-Salem, a rich blue sky and a still warm breeze and the first hint of gold in the poplar trees downtown. I couldn’t see much on the ride to the courthouse, just a thin strip of sky between the building tops, much like the slice of sky I could see from the narrow horizontal window in my cell. I‘d been in solitary confinement since May so I’d grown accustomed to not seeing the sky.
But it was my birthday and I knew the weather would be glorious. This made me sad. Thoughts of my childhood and crisp days with my grandparents soothed me for a moment until I remembered I was handcuffed to Number 4.
We had to wait while the other bus unloaded at the dock to the basement of the courthouse. I sat in silence and looked up the sidewalk that passed by the office I used to work in as a minor court official processing mountains of criminal papers each day. I remembered the pretty reporter from Bristol, Tennessee that I’d leaked information to about the murder arrest of a trucker from her town about a year earlier. I thought about the dark thing that consumed me later that year and the anger of failure that drove me to bleaker levels of despair. I thought about how I’d cracked in March and did the ugly thing and went on the run until I sobered up enough to turn myself in.
Today I was pleading guilty on my birthday and hoping to begin reclaiming my life. But right now I was handcuffed to Number 4.
He hadn’t been there long, just about six weeks. He’d come in the cell block quietly about mid-morning but was on the 12 o’clock news. His peace was short lived. I passed the days as usual, reading and sleeping and occasionally talking on the phone to my mom or my friend Doug. They took my phone calls when they eventually let me out of the cell at 3 a.m. for my hour on the floor. I didn’t think much about Number 4 or what he’d done. I made friends with a trustee and a crazy black man who’d been there for two years and would come by my cell door to tell me about the cartoon fantasies he created in his frequent psychotic states. The late summer passed quickly after I told my lawyer I was ready to plead guilty for the ugly thing and move on.
Unmemorable things happened each day until this brick of a man appeared at my cell door one afternoon. I’d seen him the night before when I was looking out the cell door window at the inmates shuffling about.
“White boy gimmie a cigarette,” he barked at me. His large black face was covered in a thick black beard. His chest muscles evidenced years working out in prison.
I was known as the quiet man they never let out of his cell except every other night and only then chained at the wrists and ankles with a thick leather restraint belt limiting the movement of both. I figured the trustee told him I was good for a square.
“Yeah I got one for you. What’s your name?”
“Donald,” he said.
“I’ll give you a cigarette, Donald, but you have to answer me a question.”
“Bet? What is it bruh?”
“Well, see, I never been in trouble before. I never been to jail.”
He laughed. “I can tell that’s true.”
“So, I wanted to know, if I have to go to prison, is prison rape real? Should I expect it will happen to me?”
A wide, soft grin spread across Donald’s face.
“Nah, my dude,” he said. “There is so much free ass in prison it’s not a problem. You’ll be alright. But that guy, Number 4 ..” He looked down the row. “They got a special place for him. They’ll take him in a closet with a broomstick and make him bleed.”
I gulped and rolled two cigarettes under the crack of the door.
“Here, have another,” I said.
He bent down to pick them up.
“What are you in for,” I asked him.
“Murder, my man,” he said. “I’m here so they might reduce my sentence.” He walked off and put one square behind his ear.
I thought about this as I stood handcuffed to Number 4 at the entrance to the courthouse holding cell. We waited two by two as a deputy took the cuffs off and we stepped in.
I’d been in solitary for 139 days and only once had I been around other inmates. The week after July 4th the cell door popped open suddenly in the afternoon. I was sitting on the bed reading about Fagin in the condemned cell. I put the book down and went to the door. It was open so I pushed out. Every inmate in the block was loose. Some jumping about but most rushing to start a smoke on the lighter embedded in the wall.
I knew I should not be out. I was on the highest level of administrative segregation possible and Jenkins and Saunders made it clear each time they came in to shackle me that they’d love for me to flex just once so they could crack my head open.
I sat down at one of the metal tables anchored to the floor. The trustee, Henry, resided in number 8 next to me and he came out and sat down. We made small talk about the chaos for a minute until Parsons, a white jailer who was often decent to us, came stomping across the block right at me.
“Ashton, get in that cell right now,” he exclaimed pointing toward my door. I got up and went in and Parsons came and slammed it shut. I looked out the glass and saw SRT coming in hot to deal with the rest.
The courthouse holding cell was jam packed already with about 25 inmates. So far I had not run across anyone who remembered me from the office days. Most guys milled about. Some stretched out on the floor. I saw space on the bench near the corner of the cell and made a move in that direction. I was freed from Number 4 but instinctively he followed me. I took a seat a few feet from the corner and Number 4 sat down right next to me. I still pretended he was not there.
I adjusted my glasses and gathered my thoughts and tried not to look around or look at Number 4. I was staring a hole in the cement floor when I saw sock feet and jailhouse flip flops. I looked up and a young black man with jangly dreadlocks was looking right at me.
“Ain’t you the dude from the booking office? What are you doing in here?”
“I fucked up,” I said.
“He’s in for arson,” another voice said. “It was all over the news.” I looked over to see a white dude built like a stump stretched out on the floor. He wore a white trustee jumper. Dreadlocks wore gen-pop blue that complimented the bright orange Number 4 and myself sported from solitary.
I remembered them both. The white dude was Daniel Redmon. I went to high school with his older sister and had booked him at least twice and committed him to psych ward when his mother came to the office with the papers.
Dreadlocks looked me up and down. I had booked him a half-dozen times in three years.
“Yeah, I remember you,” he said. I cringed. After a pause he continued. “You was always polite, respectful even. That’s what I remember.”
“Same,” Daniel said and I hoped he didn’t know I was the one who committed him, “I remember the first time you was real courteous explaining the details of the charge and what I could expect.”
“Why you in segregation,” Dreadlocks asked.
“I dunno man, punishment I guess.”
“They afraid he’ll get his ass kicked,” Daniel said. “They don’t even let him out the cell every day. Only every other day and sometimes they make him go three or four days. They even make him walk naked and chained up to the shower.”
“Man that’s fucked up,” Dreadlocks said.
The jailers came and took a few guys off to their court appearance and Daniel went with them. Dreadlocks walked off and sat down next to a guy that couldn’t have been a day over 19.
“What you in for cuz?”
“Possession with intent to sell and smoke,” the kid said indignant. He was riffing on the court language of the most frequently charged felony drug crime. “Motherfuckers came up on me out of nowhere. I had just got a half pound of mexicali and was rolling a blunt when they got me.”
“Man that’s cold,” Dreadlocks said. After a pause he looked down the row toward me, whispered something to the kid and got up.
There seemed to be increased chatter among some of the younger black guys and I could feel them eyeballing me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I prepared for what I thought would be an attack from someone I had not been so courteous to at the office.
Dreadlocks came and stood in front of me. He seemed to be welling up spit in his mouth. A few guys made a battle line next to him.
“Hold up,” he said. I widened my eyes to take it all in, to be prepared for the flank attack but Dreadlocks looked at me and made a “get out of the way” motion with his right hand. That’s when I realized they had come for Number 4.
I got up just as the loogies began to rain down on him. He shuddered and another inmate took his cock out and began to shower him with yellow urine. I noticed two inmates standing in front of the glass window at the door looking back at us. A couple of guys struck him and one made a karate kick to his head. It bounced off the wall and Number 4 fell into the floor and took a beating. He got up and moaned his way to the toilet in the corner.
“That’s nothing like what you gonna get in the pen motherfucker,” Dreadlocks said to him.
Number 4 dropped his jumper and sprayed shit all over the toilet and the floor before he hit the metal seat. He wiped the murk from his face and stood up and pulled his jumper over his shoulders.
“That molester motherfucker didn’t even wipe his ass,” one of them said.
Number 4 took a few shots to the head as he walked back to the only place left for him. He curled in the corner and buried his face in his knees with his arms over his head. He took gulps of air, his body heaving, as he tried not to cry.
I’d barely the time to take it all in when the guys at the door scattered. A jailer opened the lock and shouted for me. I went before the judge and pleaded guilty to the ugly thing on my birthday. I was ready to begin living again but I still had to ride back to the jail handcuffed to Number 4.