Page 33 of The River Is Waiting

“In here, it’s usually two slices of white bread and some kind of slop ladled onto a Styrofoam tray. You shovel it in with a plastic spork. And you better eat fast. They’re supposed to give us twenty minutes, but we’re lucky if it’s twelve or thirteen. They like to rush us out of there and get us locked back in our cells so they can sit around on their asses until their shift’s over. Play Candy Crush or watch porn on the phones they’re not supposed to bring in here. And don’t let them catch you trying to walk out of the chow hall with food you didn’t finish. They’ll give you a ticket if they catch you with ‘takeout.’ Doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Just don’t get caught.”

I hear that electronic pop again. Pug pushes the door open and holds it for me. “You know what?” I say. “On second thought, I’m not that hungry.”

“Whatever,” he says, and joins the others tramping through the corridor.

While he’s gone, I try to settle in a little. My craving for a chemical escape hatch had been subsiding since I got clean and sober, but being in prison for a couple of hours has made my urges come roaring back. I begin to shake from needing a stiff drink or a couple of Ativan right aboutnow. Start wondering whether there’s a black market here so that I might be able to score some benzos. If I could get ahold of something, I’d take it no matter what I promised Emily. No matter what Dale advised me to do to quiet the urge.

I dump the stuff from my survival kit onto my mattress: a worn pair of shower flip-flops, a rolled-up set of paper-thin sheets, a shabby-looking towel. There’s some travel-sized hygiene stuff—soap, shampoo, toothpaste and a two-inch toothbrush, plus three commissary-order sheets and one of those little pencils like they give out at minigolf. I scoop up that stuff and drop it into the empty storage box that must be mine. Make up my bed. Check out the view of the outside from the skinny slit of a back window: a parking lot, a dying spruce tree, a couple of dumpsters, a scurrying rat. When I turn around again, I take in the size of the cell; it’s about the same dimensions as our bathroom on Butternut Avenue.Herbathroom for the next three years. Is Maisie okay? Poor kid. She must really miss her brother. Does she miss me?

By the time Pug gets back, I’m curled up on my upper bunk, facing the wall so he won’t see that I’ve been crying. “Here,” he says. Whatever he’s just thrown at me hits me on the hip. I reach back and grab it—a granola bar. I tell him thanks. Peel off the wrapper and stuff half of it in my mouth. Have I eaten anything since before Mom and I left for the courthouse this morning? I can’t remember. God, it’s still the same day? Hard to believe.

I hear the TV go on—the nightly news: Trump’s bromance with Kim Jong Un, how “zero tolerance” is separating kids and their parents at the border. After the commercials, there’s a story about a white guy who’s gunned down Black seniors at a supermarket in Kentucky. Pug starts singing that old Queen song, “And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone. Another one bites the dust.”

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter under my breath—or thought I did until I realize that Pug is standing next to my bed.

“Something the matter?” he asks.

I don’t answer him at first, but when I can sense that he’s still standingthere waiting, I raise my head, turn around, and face him. Tell him I don’t think people getting shot and killed is something to sing about.

“No?” he says. “That’s interesting coming from a guy who killed his own kid.”

My instinct is to jump off the bunk and get into it with this scumbag. But I hear Lieutenant Cavagnero’s advice to shake it off. Don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing that they’re getting to you. I turn my back to him and mumble, “Yeah, okay, Pug. Whatever.”

But he’s not letting it go. “Let me explain something to you, buddy boy,” he says. “Educate you a little. The spooks and their amigos sneaking in here from Mexico both breed like flies. They think that as soon as they outnumber us, they’ll be in charge. Except they’re sadly mistaken. This is our country, not theirs. We’re the ones who made America what it is, and if we have to get into a race war against them and their pansy-ass sympathizers to remind them of that reality, then that’s what we’re gonna do. And if you know what’s good for you, you better fucking decide which side you’re on because race traitors get dealt with in here and it ain’t pretty.”

I deserve to be punished for the death of my son; I know that. I just don’t know how I’m going to survive in this place for the next three years.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

August 2017

Days 2–22 of 1,095

It doesn’t take me long to observe that Yates prison assigns white guys to cells with other white guys, that Blacks are paired with Blacks, and that Latinos become the bunkies of other Latinos—doesn’t matter whether one is a Spanish-speaking Mexican, the other a Brazilian whose language is Portuguese, or a Haitian who speaks French. Here at Yates, cell assignments are all about the melanin.

It doesn’t matter to me what race my fellow inmates are or where they came from; I’m intimidated by almost everyone walking the grounds here. Most of them scowl as they walk past me and half of them don’t so much walk as strut, their bodies chiseled and bulging with muscles. I’m no featherweight, but I could get squashed like a bug in here.

Pug does his best to fuel my fear. He tells me about how one white inmate’s face was bludgeoned beyond recognition by a Black guy who got slashed in return. “And some guys with a score to settle? They’ll whittle a toothbrush into a shiv and somebody ends up getting stabbed in the eye or the neck. One guy over in D Block got stuck in the heart by one of the spooks on his tier and he bled out on the spot. And when it gets around here what you’re in here for, you better hope no one hears ‘dead kid’ and mistakes you for an Uncle Chester.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Someone who gets his rocks off by diddling little kids. They get the worst of it. A lot of the guys here were the victims of those pervs when they were kids. The COs hate ‘em, too, so they look the other way when something’s going down out in the yard or someplace where there’s no cameras. I’m not saying someone’sgonnamistake you for a Chester the Molester. I’m just saying you better watch your back. They hear you killed a kid, they might jump to conclusions, you know? And watch out for the spooks. Where they come from, everyone’s shootin’ and killin’ each other, OD’ing on smack and dying, so they don’t value life like we do. It’s the law of the jungle with the jungle bunnies.”

I coexist uneasily and warily with my fellow Caucasian bunkie by saying very little, obeying his rules, and acknowledging that he is the alpha dog of Cell 3-E. The one time I accidentally break one of Pug’s edicts, we’re headed for the shower room. It slips my mind that I’m not supposed to walk behind him where he can’t see me. Reeling around, he shoves me against the wall, his fist cocked until he pulls his punch at the last second, possibly sparing me a broken jaw.

There’s no such thing as relaxing in Pug’s presence, so the only relief I get is when he goes off the compound for his job. He’s part of a work crew that picks up litter on the sides of the highway. This keeps him out of our cell for six or seven hours at a time most weekdays. Rainy days and weekends are a different story; he watches TV, naps, plays solitaire, and masturbates to the skin magazines he keeps hidden in his lockbox. Privacy isn’t one of his priorities when he’s having sex with himself. I guess it would be futile anyway, given the dimensions of our cell and the fact that he talks dirty to get himself there and shouts when he arrives.

Another of Pug’s weekend activities is rolling makeshift cigarettes. On his trash-collecting detail during the week, he pockets the discarded butts he finds. Then on Saturday, he removes whatever unburned tobacco is still in them, separates the pile into smaller piles, and rolls each of them in two layers of toilet paper. After that, he’ll light up on the sneak whenever an opportunity presents itself.

I learn from the tier’s gossip, Manny something, that Pug’s real name is Albert Liggett. A mechanic on the outside, he caught six years in here for operating a “chop shop” for car thieves out of New York City. I begin to notice that Pug lets his racist comments rip when it’s just the two of us, but he watches his mouth outside our cell. He’s particularly cautious around Black inmates, and one morning, when I’m sitting across from Manny at morning chow, I find out why. During Pug’s first year here, he was out in the yard talking with one of his cronies when he referred to Blacks on welfare as “lazy porch monkeys.” The next day, he was on the walkway when someone jumped him from behind, choked him until he passed out, and left him in a heap. According to Manny, Pug spent some time in the medical unit because of a cartilage fracture in his larynx. His paranoia about someone creeping up behind him is no doubt triggered by the fact that his assailant was never identified. “How do you know all this stuff?” I’d asked Manny. He said he’s naturally curious and his radar is always up.

Almost two weeks in, I’m just barely holding on in here. Stifled crying jags, insomnia. Except for chow time, I stay in our cell and pretty much detach from the day-to-day. I make a visitors’ list like they told me to do—put down Emily’s and Maisie’s names, plus my mom, and my AA sponsor, Dale. I hesitate before adding my father to the list, but at the last minute, I write down his name, too. When I give the list to one of the counselors, she says it will take about four or five weeks before I can expect visitors.

“Why so long?” I ask.

That makes her smile. “Because everyone whose name’s on here has to be checked out and approved. Or denied if there’s a felony conviction on their record. Nothing in here moves fast. It helps if you realize that and develop some patience.”

“Hey, I was told to ask you about AA and NA meetings in here. Is there a list?”

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