No rec. So much for
getting soaked to the bone and taking my mind far away from here. Lockdown is difficult to describe. In receiving, we were confined to our cells
for four and a half days straight. Meals
and mail were brought to us. We never
moved until our cell was shook down.
Handcuffed and patted down, we stood outside our cell door while two
officers tore open everything my cellie and I had, then left all those possessions
in a pile on our bunks. And that,
truthfully, is nothing. I do time with
guys from higher levels who endured six, nine, twelve months of lockdown.
Here, it’s just sit around and wait for your building to be
called. No one ever gets caught with
anything. Now, with the budget
tightening, DOC can’t bring that many extra officers in. And, shakedowns matter a whole lot more at
higher levels where stabbings and rapes are part of daily life. Here, it’s form over substance. By Thursday afternoon the officers were
exhausted, the buildings stunk, and guys were plain tired of the loss of even
the little bit of freedom you have in here.
I put on classical music – Mozart and Franz Liszt chamber
music seems to work the best – and I think about the waste that is almost every
action by DOC and almost every life inside.
One thing about lockdown, if you can’t get along with someone day to
day, it’s magnified by the 24/7 time spent together for those wasted days. And so it is for me dealing with Honcho.
Who’s Honcho? He’s
the guy in the bunk above me and he is a caricature of everything you think of
when you imagine a multi-bid offender with six kids, a wife and girlfriend, and
all before reaching age 33. Honcho isn’t
in the college program. He’s one of
those guys who come here straight from the regional jail to do their eighteen
to twenty-four month sentence. We have a
few open bunks in here and we end up with the “extras”.
These guys are all the same, and that – I think – is what
pisses me off the most. Honcho, like
thousands of others, is a drug dealer and user:
small time – weed, crack, and powdered coke; give it away to your “homeys”;
let your baby’s mamma get state aid while you drink Hennessy; wear your pants
low, call everyone “”bro”, and sing nonsensical misogynistic rap lyrics by Lil
Wayne or some other knucklehead.
Everything this dude does pisses me off. He’s dirty, sloppy, loud and ignorant. And worse, you can see it in his face; he
carries on because he has such a low opinion of himself. It’s so obvious with so many of these twenty
or thirty something black guys. They tell
you how “bad” they are, but you see right through it. They are cowards, and worse – they are
failures.
Three times this guy’s been to Lunenburg. Each time for two years, or so. He sleeps all day, plays dominoes all night,
and burns up the phone begging one of his women to send money so he can eat
($200 to $300 each month on commissary).
I say what I think. “I’m
just doin’ my bid, Bro”, he’ll tell me. “I’m
not your bro crack head. Get your head
out of your ass and do something constructive with your life!” I reply and guys look shocked that anyone
would dare speak to Honcho or another home dog like that.
Here’s the weird thing.
I get away with that because I intimidate these guys. No less than my buddy DC has told me, “these
guys are afraid of you, the way you carry yourself, your self respect”. So I tell them what I see. And, what I see in Honcho is a guy too
scared, too self loathing to say to himself “Damn it, I can do better”. And, it pisses me off.
So many people in the “real world” see prison and prisoners
as caricatures. They think they know all
about lawbreakers and prison life and they’re so dead set sure that everything
that happens inside here to these men and women behind bars is divine or karmic
justice. They couldn’t be further from
the truth.
The late, brilliant American write David Foster Wallace gave
a commencement address back in 2005 at one of America’s premier liberal arts
colleges. And, it wasn’t a typical graduation
speech about reaching your dreams and self-aggrandizing plaudits for having a
liberal arts diploma. Instead, it was
harsh and direct. He spoke about thinking, real thinking, the kind that says “I’m
not the center of the universe” and the kind that doesn’t get numbed by
worshiping money and status.
Wallace began with a story about two young fish swimming
along when an older fish comes the other way, nods at them and says “morning
boys; how’s the water?” The two young
fish look at each other and say “what the hell is water?” http://youtu.be/SFt7EzpsZQo
The point of the parable:
that too often we go through life numb to the world and the people
around.
Real thinking is built on empathy and being aware of what
is, as he said “so real and essential”.
Truth, he said, is all about life before death. A life is more than the sum total of your
failures. And even guys like Honcho can
grow into someone if they only learn to think, think beyond the numbing rat
race of life and their own shortcomings.
There is as much humanity inside these walls as there is
outside. And Mozart sounds just as
sweet. Honcho is failing, but he’s not a
failure.
There are horrible people in prison who have done terrible
things and, if let go, they would do perhaps even worse. But, there are also regular people trying to
fit in, trying the wrong way to make it. People like Honcho who succumb to the
numbness around them and become so desperate to be “somebody” they’ll do the
wrong thing. I know, I was one of those
guys. And they deserve our encouragement
and occasionally a kick in the ass. As I
sat here during lockdown I realized I didn’t know Honcho’s life, hadn’t walked
in his shoes. All I could think was, “this
is water”, and somewhere I hoped David Foster Wallace was smiling and saying “he
gets it, he’s thinking”.
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