This is Entry 14 of an ongoing serialized memoir.
Start at the beginning → Superpower
Cackling laughter reverberates off the concrete walls. My hackles raise. A new batch of prisoners arrived today. The laugher, a white man with slicked back black hair, angles towards the control desk with a pimp limp so pronounced that it looks like his left leg is a full 12 inches shorter than his right. He uses three hops on his right leg to swing the left one over. He wears a long white sleeve shirt, odd because it’s not part of the standard clothing that we’ve been issued and beneath this these sleeves are other ones. Black and blue scrawlings of ink that creep down his arms, up his neck and around his ears. Scary clowns, skulls with eyeballs that bulge, smoking pistols. His laugh sounds like a Gatling gun. So loud that it feels like a taunt. A dare to the guards or other inmates, anyone, to quiet him.
His laugh an act of defiance.
I watch the guards defer to Navarro like the kids in high school who acquiesced to the bad kids ones an effort to fit in. It’s hard to imagination who would choose to work here? Guys that tried to become cops but failed? People desperately in need of work. The guards will spend more time in jail than most of the inmates.
Navarro has a side kick. Dark head shaved peach-fuzz short, olive skin, chunky black glasses. Latino or Lakota, hard to tell. He spends hours doing boot camp style exercises on the concrete in the yard. A single tattoo tear drops from his eye. Small but shouting. While Navarro distracts by rattling like a shaken can of spray paint, his sidekick looks like the one who will slip in and slit your throat.
Tail keeps a wary lookout from inside our cell.
I don’t mess with those Mafia guys.
The vibe shift has me on edge too. I scour for unspoken meanings and underlying codes. Scars with stories. Chipped teeth that chatter. Tattoos that tattle.
These inmates move different. They use wet toilet paper to wrap to pencils end for end and make them longer. Their plastic cups are personalized with scratches and excess edges of stamps. They pore over the Rapid City classifieds and talk about motorcycles.
They call it doing your own time.
I absentmindedly left my plastic cup out in the pod before the last lockdown. It’s a point of rank to have a plastic one rather than be stuck with a styrofoam one. From within our cell I can see it sitting at a table next to a errant newspaper. When the doors click open at the end of the lockdown, I beeline it to the table to scoop it and dip back into our cell.
A pair of hands reaches out and both pulls me in and slams me hard against the wall.
Tail.
He’s livid. In my face. Growling.
Boy, are you crazy?!?
Did you see that dude that was eyeing the paper? He’s in for capital M.
Never walk up behind someone all fast like dat.
That’s how you get fucked up.
The Royal Wedding fills every channel today as Kate Middleton marries the future King of England. William.
The inmates stare up at the TV screen with captive interest. The pageantry. The adulation. The amount of money poured into this one event would significantly change the lives of every Native American in South Dakota. Pine Ridge Reservation hosts the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere outside Haiti. 48 years for men. 52 for women.
I taste the irony - thick and sticky. American colonists fleeing the English monarchy, came to the New World and set in motion a chain of events that decimated the people already here. And here we are, in jail, cheering on the oppressor of their oppressors.
But, alas, everybody is running from something.
That’s how we justify trampling those that stand in the way of our retreat.
Even though I now have money on my commissary and money to make call, the only calls I make go to Bruce’s office. As quickly as my brother’s appeared on screen, they have disappeared. Returned to their busy lives on either edge of the United States. Their work now will be much but behind the scenes. They spread a wide net when they were searching for me. Anyone that needs to know what happened to me will have found out by now.
Besides, anything sensitive should not be uttered over a jailhouse phone. As Bruce reminds me:
Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean that they aren’t watching you.
Thursday night is movie night in Pennington County Jail. If one were to start searching prisoners as they went back into their cells, one would start finding an inordinate amount of buttery socks as movie night approaches - the little Dixie cups that they come in ingeniously pulled apart and folded into little pouches - because along with movie night comes popcorn!
First, though, we must clean and scrub the pod for inspection.
Every institution of men has something similar. On the tall ship, it was Field Day, my fraternity called it House Clean Up. At home, my dad would say a simple, “Go pick up fuzz,” and the four of us would sprawl across the shag carpet like chickens pecking for grubs.
In jail, with a pretty simple carrot of movie night held out, the inmates rush to sweep and mop before the Unit Commander comes through for a white glove inspection.
For the cleaning, the stronger solvents come out. Like trays, like silverware, like anything non-consumable that enters the pod, they need to be accounted for. What comes in must go out.
Today, the trustee discovers a little plastic nozzle from a spray bottle missing. The C.O. warns that, if not found, lockdown replaces movie night. Anything unaccounted for risks being weaponized. Spray nozzles. Pencils. Thoughts….
The pod scrambles. Trash cans overturned and sifted: warm half-drunk milks, fruit cocktail sludge, chicken cacciatore… At last the nozzle turns up - snuggled in like a grape.
Tail can barely contain his fury.
Fucking Paint Huffer snitch! He best remember who’s side he’s on! I’d kick his teeth in if he had any left.
With movie night salvaged, after dinner the chairs are pulled close under the high-mounted tv. Even though the pod conversations have shifted from probation holds to five year minimums or simple assault to attempted M, once assembled and waiting it’s all pinches and fidgeting. Wet willies. Outbreaks of laughter. A loud fart and a shock wave of chairs disperses from the guilty epicenter - pink t-shirts pulled up over noses and mouths.
Puppies.
Tonight’s movie is Street Kings II. A plotless gem with Ray Liotta whining and shuffling through a cadre of dirty cops, crime and betrayal. What the curatorial genius picked this out to show a bunch of inmates?
Despite the onscreen atrocity, the room is mesmerized. Eyes tilted upwards. Mouths agape.
I try to gauge on who everyone’s rooting for. The good guys? The bad guys?
We are the bad guys. Right?
Mercifully, Street Kings II is short. Last week’s feature ran long and clicked off mid scene as lockdown began. With nary a complaint, the inmates averted their gazes, pushed their chairs back to their places and returned to their cells.
Good dogs.
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