Honcho: A Tale about Water

It’s pouring and they’ve canceled rec for the day.  Tropical Storm Andrea is off the coast and bands of rain and gusts of winds are making an already dismal prison day worse.  My friend DC convinced me early this morning to head outside and run in the torrential rain.  I was game.  See, we’ve been locked down since 6:00 am Monday – our twice a year shakedown ritual – and didn’t see the fresh air until Thursday after 6:00 pm count, save for the walk down the boulevard for our meals and our hour and a half in the gym waiting on a strip search and officers digging through your stuff. 

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”.

Conspiracies Everywhere

I was an unwilling participant to a conspiracy conversation the other day which got me thinking about failures in the nations corrections philosophy that are so prevalent today.  A couple of the young black college guys were debating the “real causes” of 9/11.  All three of these guys had read a revisionist “historians” (the guys not really a historian) take that the CIA and White House led the attack.  When I challenged their “research” they claimed I was too gullible.  “America’s the shit Larry.  Don’t you know that after what you’ve been through?”

Ignorance is alive and well in the inmate population.  Guys will buy any conspiracy theory – join bizarre prison created “religions” with off the wall theories.  I used to find it mildly entertaining.  But, like the rapid rise of another group of conspiracy believers – the Tea Party crew – I’m feeling a great deal of unease.  Prison spurs kooky views.  It’s up to the corrections professionals to address it.

When I was still held at the Henrico Jail I met an early twenties white kid who was an amazing artist.  He could draw anything – portraits, scenery, cars, you name it.  He was also covered in Nazi tattoos.  One morning around 5:00 as was my custom, I was drinking coffee, writing in my journal.  The kid sat down with me with a pained expression on his face.

“Mr. Larry, you’re a nice man.  I’m afraid the darks are gonna hurt you when you get to prison.  You need to join the Aryans.”

I thanked him for worrying about me but politely told him I didn’t need a white supremist group to keep me safe in prison.

Then I get to prison and I run up on Aryans, Hispanic gangs, a half dozen black gangs, Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, and a host of other fringe groups who each espouse a philosophy built on a corrupt power elite beating down on them.

Ask the average inmate to consider the real cost (in dollars) to taxpayers to keep them locked up and they will tell you prisons make money.  Why do they believe that when the evidence overwhelmingly shows the financial drain corrections has become? “If you were right Larry it’d make no sense to keep us locked up without early release.  Only a fool would run a system like that?” (Are you listening Governor McDonnell?).

Black inmates are suspicious of white inmates.  Two groups:  NOI and Five Percenters (anti-white) are recruiting members in droves.  Why?  Because they offer simplistic explanations for the despair that permeates the lives of inmates.  It is easier to accept your station in life believing “white America is a racist country bent on destroying blacks through prisons and drugs” (and one need only look at the extraordinarily high percentage of blacks incarcerated to see why this gains traction) than to engage in an in-depth study of this country’s racial schizophrenia.

As I tutor guys in History, English, Philosophy and the Social Sciences I am constantly surprised how little these guys know.  They have very little knowledge of history and are unable to synthesize events as they develop across historical/sociological lines.  Every event can be boiled down to some knee-jerk neo-Marxian theory of power and suppression of people.

So, what I do is, when asked, I state the truth.  I let the facts speak.  Does it change some things?  Sometimes.  Guys hunger to know why.  Prison should be a place of honest reflection.  Instead, it is a jungle of lies, anger and ignorance.  And the system feeds those three.  Courts aren’t “blind” arbiters of justice; sentences are disparate, even when crimes are similar; race and money matter in too many convictions and sentences.  Prisons become dumping grounds with too few programs, too little educational opportunities and sadistic guards and inmates vying for supremacy.

Men lose hope and without hope there is nothing.  In one of the most moving scenes in “The Shawshank Redemption”, Andy, sorting records in the warden’s office, barricades himself inside and takes over the prison speakers.  He puts on an operatic aria and the prison suddenly stills as the men listen to two women sing in Italian.  He is caught and goes to the hole.

The next scene, he is in chow – thirty days later with his friends.  They sit and stare in amazement at Andy looking fresh after such a long period in the hole.  “How’d you do it?” they asked.

“I listened to Mozart the whole time.” 

“You had music back there?”

Andy pauses, “In my mind.  They can physically keep me here, but in my mind I’m free.  I still have hope.”

There’s a reason hope lives even in a place as dehumanizing as prison.  Hope is about truth, and beauty, and love.  Too many men in prison have given up on hope.  They look for simple explanations; they see nothing but time.  Until prisons become places of hope, conspiracy theories will thrive; anger, despair and hatred will have homes; and fringe groups will flourish.

Hopefully, it will change.