officer asked her, “Who’s next?” That meant it was time for me to go. I stood, looked at the unmarked pad of paper and said, Thanks.
Two weeks later a letter came and told me that I didn’t get the job. So I kept the overnight weekend shift at the water-bottling factory and the reality of my life: that I worked the overnight weekend shift in a water-bottling factory.
~
WHEN those five officers around the table rejected me, the fear message was lost—I only felt the money. What is hepatitis A, really, but a few weeks of fatigue and clay-colored feces? The state will pay you 80 percent of your wages until you’re healed up. Enjoy the three months off. More if you can prove your liver’s still inflamed.
I stood spinning a bottle labeler for a year thinking about how I should have answered those questions.
~
THEN, after being promoted to water-bottling team leader over a single mother of two and watching her cry because of it—she felt that loss of money hard, that blue-collar pain—a letter from Rockview showed up asking me to come in for another interview.
This time three officers sat in folding chairs in HR and asked me questions like, “Do you hunt?”
I told them that my friend hunted everything. He ate sparrows (he really did). They laughed, and I, at the age of twenty-seven, the college dropout, the failer of first interviews, the bottle-labeling expert, got to learn the ways of correcting men. When the letter came offering me the job, I was happy to sign up for the union. Inmates weren’t even a consideration then.
And fear? Please. They had pills for that.
~
SOON after, I took my girlfriend out to dinner. She was a petite and driven graduate student studying French at Penn State. She told good stories. Definitely American dreamy. And while eating ice cream I told her that I loved her more than waffle cones and handed her a ring I’d bought with my MasterCard. And she let me put it on her. We went to sleep that night with the synchronized deep breath that lovers do: long inhale, long exhale.
Then I left the next week to attend the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Training Academy to learn how to harden myself emotionally, peer into men’s anuses, and avoid cups of piss and shit like my life depended on it.
Because it did.
D-Ranging
IN jail, everything bolts to something. Bunks: bolted to the floor. Cabinets: bolted to the floor. Block TVs: bolted to the wall.
On the top level of D block, range 5, inmate Normal, a young guy, reached through his cell bars and gave his rug an underhand toss. It went across the range, through the cage bars, down fifty feet, and landed on top of a card table. That’s how inmates reserved tables: first rug won.
“Boom!” he said. “Mine.”
The tables: stainless steel, polished, and bolted to the floor in the twenty feet of open space between the cells and outer walls. The cells: enclosed by a hundred-year-old cage. It was hard not to imagine it as a birdcage for something prehistoric and huge and shrieking.
The block sergeant, who weighed 350 pounds and who everyone called Shrek, rang the bell from the bubble (jail speak for glass-enclosed officer station). The doors, all 250 of them, opened.
Inmates bolted down.
Block out! Yard out! Shrek yelled into the PA system.
Normal ran by me and said, “Carpet bomb, CO. You like?” He disappeared into the mass of inmates wearing brown pants and white T-shirts.
The bell meant count was clear, evening yard was open, school was on, chapel too, for almost three hours, until lockdown for the night, final count, and the end of my six days straight on D block. That’s how the shifts worked: six on, two off.
The sun, the steam pipes, the shower room, and the 458 bodies on the block radiated heat. The hanging lights glared. The trash stunk.
When the jail was first built, the windows opened by hand crank. But time and grime had knocked the teeth off the gears and bent the shafts and sealed in every degree and breath and slam.
As soon as the inmates cleared the range, I shut cell doors. I went fast. The regular guard in the cage made it a competition. “Last one down,” he said, “sits by Shrek tonight.”
In three hours we’d be playing spades or hearts in the guard station drinking iced tea and fake-laughing at Shrek’s jokes to finish the shift. His iced tea was syrup—that’s how much sugar he used. And all his jokes had blowjob punch lines.
Earlier he asked, “Why did God invent women?”
I gave up.
“Blowjobs,” he said.
I dreaded it. The jokes. The tea. The cards. He cheated. I had had enough stimulation for one week.
Inmate Normal, the carpet bomber, ran back to his cell before I could shut it. He said, “Damn, CO. Forgot my cup. We playing for shots” (jail speak for a tablespoon of instant coffee).
He had had a busy week too. Lost two cellies to solitary confinement.
After the second, Shrek said, “That means Normal ain’t putting out.”
Must be, I said.
He said, “I’m talking about blowjobs, Langston.”
I got it, I told him.
I never knew what to say to Shrek.
Normal had stacks of soap in his cell. “Air fresheners,” he said. “New guy be dying or something.” A young guy sat watching Normal’s TV. He did smell a bit like death.
I checked on Melvin. Only his celly was there.
He said, “Nothing but a baby, that one. I have to tell him to brush his teeth. Why they put babies in jail?”
Shrek yelled into the PA system, “You, standing on the table! Yes, you. Come here.”
From below, I heard Melvin yell back, “But I won!”
He looked tiny down there. He looked like Melvin. His pants around his thighs. His white boxers billowed and bunched up above them. His fists full of lollipops and Hershey bars. The men around him laughing.
Normal played for shots.
Melvin played for candy.
Shrek got serious in the PA, “Come here, young man.”
I slammed cell doors, which seemed the right way to do it. The block was loud. The noise had built all day. I first walked into the concrete bunker to the quiet of an extended after-lunch count, not even a toilet flushing. But it was hot, eighty degrees, easily. And when count cleared, most inmates went to yard (always called just “yard” in jail speak, never “the yard”) and let me walk the ranges alone in peace. I was damp. My hat itched. I made the rounds. Doors opened. I closed them. I didn’t listen to the block announcements. My job was to shut cage doors. So that’s what I became. The caged doorman. The bell rang and a few hundred guys came back from yard and ran up and down the stairs and to and from the showers. I saw agitation. It was ninety degrees by then. They crowded me on the ranges. They yelled about the NBA finals going on that night. I walked the rectangular cage. Technically, it was a rectangular prism. It refracted smoky light. A prison prism that I rounded and climbed and sprayed with sweat.
Lines went out. There was the chapel line, the shot line, the right-before-the-evening-meal line when the inmates filed back in line. I left the cage once, for the chili con carne in the staff dining hall. Inmates left for their own chili ration and took their hopeful basketball game expectations with them down the steps. “Pistons by fifteen.” I shut doors. “Spurs by ten.” I shut doors. “Chili on a hot-ass day like today?” From the cage I watched the last one leave. I shut doors. They came back louder. “Pistons by twenty-motherfucking-two!”