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”.

Playing Soccer

So last week the gang unit came through on their annual visit.  Every man, stripped down to boxers, standing at the end of their bed to be examined (i.e. stared at) by gang unit members for telltale “tats” indicating your affiliation status and rank.  Like so many things in prison:  the strip searches (“lift you sac, squat and cough”), the urine testing with an officer so close observing you can feel his breath, you learn to shrug off the daily indignities and violations of your person hood.  After all, you’re an inmate.  You brought it on yourself; you have no rights.

The search ended and the rec yards reopened and the building soccer team needed to get ready for a game.  Big S – the team captain – came at me with Goat and Jordan.  “We need you.  None of our subs have any wind.  You run every day.”  I hemmed and hawed a bit then figured “what the hell”.

I found myself out on the soccer field chasing around a bunch of guys young enough to be my sons.  The oldest, Big S, is only 31.  Most of the team is 24 to 28.  I ran and kicked the ball and ran some more.  It was exhausting yes, liberating and fun.  Here I am 52 years old, and I’m playing a kids games with, well with kids my older son’s age.  I was drenched with sweat.  My legs ached.  Still, two hours running on the field felt amazing.

There are many days when I wonder “does any of this really matter?”  I ask myself what use my adult years have been.  Thirty years ago I had my life in front of me.   I had prestigious graduate and law schools wanting me.  My entire life was set out in my mind’s eye.  I took a different path.  I followed my heart and it didn’t end as I expected.  Bad choices (through good intentions) and I find myself alone in prison.

I think of Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”.  Heartbroken, he confronts his brother who, for a few quick bucks years earlier convinced Brando’s character to “take a dive” in a fight.  “I coulda been somebody Jimmy.  I coulda been a contender.  Now I’m nuttin but a bum.”  Tragic words.  But that “bum” found his courage – the heart of the champ.  The movie ends with a powerful heart-in-throat scene as Brando, broken and beaten, crosses the union line to work the docks.

So I ran the soccer field with a bunch of 20 year old convicts:  drug dealers and other societal misfits.  And they rooted me on and I did the same for them.

That night, I had an American Lit review session.  The guys were reading one of Thomas Paine’s immortal pieces.  It began “these are the time that try men’s souls”.

Ironically, those were the first words of the only letter my older son has written me in the three years since my arrest (and in another ironic twist, they are the last words of a letter I sent him on the exact date he wrote me).  As I was explaining Paine’s meaning to the three guys gathered around, my mind drifted back to soccer practice.  It was just a bunch of guys running, playing ball, having fun.

Does any of this matter?  Apparently, it does.  They asked me to play soccer because I belong.  I’m part of these guys’ lives in here.  I am the “father” figure, the guy to bring your questions to.  And for me, at this stage, that’s enough.  I matter to these college guys.  I’m a part of the team.

Lockdown Again

Lunenburg was on lockdown all last week for its semi-annual shakedown. At higher custody level facilities, lockdown is serious business. For example, Nottoway prison – about seven miles from here and which is a level 3/4 violent felon prison – has been on lockdown for over a month since the stabbing death of an inmate and an assault on an officer.



Here, however, lockdown is more like a parent sending their child to their room and only letting them come out for meals. For most guys here, lockdown is viewed as a vacation, a chance to get out of work for a few days, catch up on sleep, TV, and reading. Other than the actual search of your things, it’s a pretty boring week interspersed by the occasional fist fight that breaks out as a result of 96 guys being crammed together without break for four straight days.


As I reported last spring, everyone knows lockdown is coming. Much like moving the clocks forward and back, lockdown comes in spring and fall. The concept is this: eliminate all unnecessary movement of inmates around the compound, then swoop in with a large mass of officers and search every building for drugs, weapons and contraband. In theory, it’s a necessary component to the effective maintenance of security and order at the prison. In practice, it’s a joke.


At 7:45 am last Monday morning, the intercom announced “cease all inmate movement. Lunenburg is on lockdown until further word”. Within ten minutes of the announcement a pile of blue state shirts and jeans appeared along with dozens of towels, sheets and pillowcases. Then, inmates began hiding plastic knives (used for cooking) and extra shoes (inmates are limited to one pair of boots, one pair of sneakers and one pair of shower shoes).


There are thirteen housing units that are in use here. There is a vocational education building; a maintenance shop, two chow halls, two kitchens, a staff dining room, an enterprise factory, a medical unit, a programs building holding four classrooms, a library, a law library, barbershop, school and psychologist office, gym and visitation room, as well as two large rec yards. Every one of those areas needs searching during a shakedown. Even with extra staff working overtime, there is a limit to what can be searched in one day. During this shakedown three housing units a day were searched.


My building went through “shakedown” on Tuesday morning. We were led up to the visitation room after passing by the drug dogs. The dogs then pass through the building (no drugs were detected). Inmates are then called back ten at a time (five sets of cut mates) for individual shakedown.


You are taken into the bathroom and undergo a strip search. Following getting dressed, inmates (by cut) are assigned two officers that actually go through your things, and a third officer to keep records.


In my case, I was assigned the chief investigator for the compound. Being mildly OCD has its benefits. All of my property is organized. I have numerous file folders set up with paperwork, including receipts for every purchase I’ve ever made during my incarceration.


The investigator picked up a few things, looked at me with a smile and said “You’re that lawyer here. I know there’s nothing in here to worry about”. He then made me toss out two empty peanut butter jars. That was it.


The big “contraband” item found was 53 televisions inmates left behind for friends who didn’t own their own set. All electronics are engraved with your inmate name and number. DOC prohibits inmates from giving or receiving anything from another inmate. In principle, the policy makes sense. You never want to be indebted to another man in the penitentiary. But, as a practical matter, guys look out for their “stick men” (friends).


Friday at lunch, “lockdown” ended. I headed outside for a nice run. Six more months and the whole process starts again. I can’t wait!