Pain Killers (3 page)

“Enjoy your life,” he said. “I can’t.”

“
There
you are!”

My contact, Officer Rincin, sauntered toward me from the ID window. He was a stocky, red-faced grinner of sixty or so. One of those skinny guys with a belly—what beer drunks call a “party ball”—pushing apart the buttons of his tan correction officer’s shirt as though it were still inflating. Gray hair wisped out of his brown baseball cap. He might have been top floor man in the Sears appliance section, except for the mild menace of his wire-rim reflector shades and the cuffs on his belt.

“What’dja get?” he inquired, indicating the paper bag in my hand.

“Key chains.”

I opened the bag so he could see in. To show him I wasn’t smuggling anything.

“Great stocking stuffers,” he said. “I understand you’re law enforcement yourself.”

“Was. Young man’s game.”

I said it like I’d simply aged out of the profession, as opposed to crawling out with a bag of dirty money and a wife with “perp” after her name.
Memories!

“Didn’t want to end up dead or behind a desk,” I blathered on. “Not that there’s a hell of a lot of difference.”

“I hear ya,” my new friend sighed, still grinning. The grin was disconcerting, until I realized it never stopped. Which was more disconcerting. It was like rictus, with jowls and cop ’stache. “You didn’t give Twitchy a lighter, did you?”

“No, why would I?”

“Because he asked.”

“Well, they always want to get over one way or the other, don’t they? My experience, dogs bark, cows moo and convicts con. It’s their nature.”

“You’re all right,” he said. “Course, if you’d have given him that lighter, we’d be marchin’ you to intake for a bun-spread yourself. They take the contraband thing here real serious.”

“But you didn’t really have to sweat me, you have it on video, right?”

“Aren’t you a sharpie!” Rincin grinned some more, then pointed to my gym bag. “Travel light, huh?”

“Yeah, I left the cologne and tuxedo at home.”

“Aces. We’ll just sign your butt in, get you a badge. They can use the photo off your DL. They’re puttin’ you in the Can Patch. Little trailer park on the ass end of the property. Lot of guards live there when they’re startin’ out.”

“Great,” I said.

Rincin just grinned. Of course. We walked toward the gray and stately administration building, where I was surprised to see more inmates in denim walking by, single or paired up.

“A lot of your lifers are pretty mellow,” he said when they ambled by. “It’s the transitionals are the knuckleheads, punks just comin’ in who got something to prove. They’re the ones in orange jumpsuits.”

We stepped inside, into the smell of furniture polish and dust. A bored middle-aged woman, chewing gum behind a grille on the left, buzzed us through, toward another pair of Goliath-sized glass and wood doors.

“Hey, Lil,” Rincin said to the buzzer woman. He pointed at me. “Temp staff, here’s his DL.” She snatched my license while we waited in between the doors that locked behind us and the ones still locked in front of us. A pair of mustached young men with gym memberships and dark suits were buzzed out. They eyed me as they passed. My own outfit—black T-shirt, gray Dickies pants, scuffed boots and black leather jacket that made as much sense as ear muffs in the heat—earned a professional size-up from the exiting suits. The taller one waved to Lil and she winked back as she slid a form through the slot. Office romance.

“Have him fill this out,” she said to Rincin, who replied, “Will do, pretty lady,” and handed it to me like I was invisible to everybody but him.

I wrote down the address of my storage space, where most of my possessions used to live. For an extra five a month, the owner accepted mail. The one thing you couldn’t do, Omar the U-Stor-It man informed me when I signed on, was party in the storage space. “Gypsies,” he’d explained, without elaborating. “They ruin the fun for everybody.”

At the line requesting Social Security, I didn’t hesitate. Anyone stealing my identity would be blessed with much more debt than credit. I was happy to share.

“Done,” I said, as if I’d passed some mighty test. Rincin snatched my paperwork and slid it back to Lil. She buzzed us through the second set of doors, past the warden’s office. The whole place was high-ceilinged and airy. The floor shined like it got polished hourly. Nobody seemed concerned about their proximity to killers, thugs and sex maniacs. The air had a testosterone and Endust tang.

I followed Rincin to a courtyard facing another beautiful stone building, 1852 on a keystone over its entrance. A half-dozen contractors banged away just under the roof. Or maybe they weren’t contractors. They all had muscles and back ink. Swinging sledgehammers on a scaffold two flights up struck me as misguided, but maybe OSHA regulations didn’t apply to prison labor.

“That there’s the original prison site,” Rincin tour-guided. “They’re finally tearing her down. Lots of folks wanted to come in and photograph the dungeon, but the warden isn’t having it. What’s the upside of letting the
Chronicle
come in and take pictures of the rack, or all the chains still hanging from the wall rings?”

“Well, it’s history,” I offered.

“That’s my point,” he said.

Rincin yanked off his hat, gave his bald spot a scratch, and slapped it back on without explaining himself further. He pointed to another edifice, from which a large Latino guard escorted a moon-faced white inmate in hand and ankle cuffs. The hefty guard waved across the courtyard to my host.

Rincin waved back. “
Hola,
Pedro!” It was one big happy campus.

“This here’s the AC, the Adjustment Center,” Rincin said. “For guys too violent for gen pop. You work in there, you pretty much have to eat and shit in riot gear. They keep ’em down twenty-three hours. Roll ’em out for an hour exercise in a cage. Then back in the hole.”

It was another second before I realized he was leading me over there. I swallowed and tried to smother my fear in the crib.

“So, uh, Officer Rincin, you’re not putting me in…?”

I pointed at the adjustment center in what I hoped was a casual fashion. Rincin’s grin got a little bigger.

“What? No! Should I?” Then he got sly. “Had you worried, huh?”

“Little bit.”

“The environment takes some getting used to. But like I say, you’ll be stayin’ in a trailer. It’s comin’ up. Just around the other end of the lower yard. We’ll pop in my car.”

We rounded a corner and that’s when I saw it: the yard. As featured in every prison entertainment from
Twenty-Thousand Years in Sing-Sing
to
Oz.
The inmates really did walk the track in slow circles, clusters of like-skinned fellows strolling together discussing the fine points of the Council of Nicaea, the falling dollar or other subjects of interest. Blacks owned the hoops. Cannonball-bicepped white guys spotted each other on weight benches. A row of ripped skinheads curled plastic gallon jugs of water. Despite the blast furnace heat, nobody seemed to be slathering on sunblock. Maybe that was the real reason they tattooed their arms to sleeves. It wasn’t that they wanted to blanket their epidermis in flaming tits and swastikas, they just wanted to block out the killer UV rays.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

Rincin nudged me as we headed past a fat hack checking names on a clipboard marked YARD LOG, out onto the track.

“You’re thinking,
What do the Mexican guys do for exercise?
”

“How did you know?”

“Folks always do. See, for one thing this isn’t the only yard. For another—and this’ll surprise you—your Mexicans hold down the tennis courts.”

“Mexican prison tennis,” I repeated dumbly. I didn’t know if he was fucking with me, but since he didn’t march out Samoan badminton I let it go.

“There’s a lot of things that would surprise you,” he said cryptically.

“No doubt.”

Nobody in the yard showed overt interest, but I felt the eyes. Once or twice I thought I heard somebody whistle. Not the kind of thing you want to turn around and check. I didn’t tell Rincin what really surprised me—beyond the fact that someone was possibly hard-up enough to find forty-year-old white meat worth whistling at. What spooked me even more was how
normal
the residents looked.

Watch enough of the nonstop
Lockdown
and
Lockup
on basic cable, and you’d think the guys inside were all malevolent freaks. Much more chilling, it was just the opposite: the majority wandered the track staring blankly, pasty faces stamped with nothing more menacing than resignation and fatigue. More than half had committed their crimes while intoxicated. Half of these sobered up in the delousing shower. Or just came out of their blackouts in state clothes.

Rincin nudged me. “Check out Hiawatha.”

I looked where I thought he was looking. On our right, in the patchy grass, sat a trio of broad-shouldered, ponytailed young men styling plucked eyebrows and shaved stomachs, one with pubescent starter breasts showing through his shirt.

“Regulations let ’em unbutton to the solar plexus,” Rincin said to fill me in. “What they do is roll and knot the tails right here, for maximum midriff.” He tapped the top of his hard, round stomach, just under his man cleavage. “Turns a prison shirt into a bikini top.”

He watched me watching. “As you can see, they like to show off their titty beans.” Rincin banged me hard on the arm. “Now check this out.”

In a fenced-off square of earth just off the yard, a shirtless, overweight man with white hair down his back ducked into the mouth of a low hut and disappeared. “Warden lets ’em have their own sweat lodge.”

A young Native American, hair in braided pigtails down his back, squatted on a wooden bench, hands on his knees, staring back at me with no expression.

“Say one thing for the red man,” said Rincin, “there ain’t a lot of white boys I’d want to strip down to my skivvies and sit in the dark with.”

“You ever go in there, look for contraband?”

I imagined the pigtailed man had somehow read my lips and felt his accusing eyes on me. Was there such a thing as too paranoid in prison?

Rincin shook his head. “You’ve seen too many of them jailhouse shows. ’Round here we call ’em ‘prison porn.’”

“What does that make you guys? Fluffers?”

For a second Rincin didn’t reply. Even though his grin remained intact, I could see him thinking:
If an inmate doesn’t do it, I’m going to shank this asshole myself.

Then, even before the buzzer, everybody in the yard dropped to the ground. I started to hit the dirt and Rincin grabbed me. Yanked me back up by the shoulder. He wasn’t gentle. “Dumbest fucking thing you can do is get on the ground. You stay on your feet, standing up, the tower shooter knows you’re one of us.”

Eager to move on, I pointed across the field, in front of the bleachers, where a team of paramedics was trying to pluck a thrashing orange jumpsuit off the ground onto a gurney. “What happened to him?”

Rincin grabbed my hand and pulled it down. “Don’t ever point in prison.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“No biggie.” Rincin looked back at the paramedics, now carrying the stricken inmate off on a stretcher. “Guy’s probably a flopper. In this sun, some boys just keel over and have seizures.” He turned back to me, gripped my shoulder and wagged a finger at me. “Crank and sun don’t mix! Tell your kids!”

“Words to live by,” I said.

“Better believe it…. The car’s right over here.”

I followed Rincin down a steep row of wooden stairs to a dusty parking lot. He held out his key and beeped it at a black Impala. “Sorry if I was a little rough back there.”

“No,
I’m
sorry. I’m the green one.”

“That would be true,” he said.

Rincin drove with his elbow out the window, expounding on the sights. “What you’re looking at is a small city. Four hundred and seventy-three acres. We are now going by North Block. The death house, built in nineteen twenty-four,” he announced, with the canned enthusiasm of a tour bus operator touting Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “Somebody here may tell you that Scott Peterson can see the spot where they fished his pregnant wife out of the water by the bridge. They may be telling the truth.”

“Wow.”

I felt him staring at me.

“No, I mean that. Wow!”

“Right. Over there you got your infirmary. Behind that, your South Block. Behind that, your dining hall and water cannons.” With this he reached into the backseat into a cooler. Pulled out two cans of Coke. He popped both pop-tops at once and handed me one. That must have taken practice. We both sucked fizz from the lids and wiped our mouths.

“Coca-Cola,” he said. “Calms my nerves.”

“You still get…not calm?”

“I’ve stroked out twice.” He stared away from the ocean, toward the water tower. “You know, I been here twenty-eight years.” His smile, unchanged, now seemed poignant. “You know what’s different now? I’m
old
!” Suddenly he snapped his fingers as if he’d remembered something important. “I bet this might interest you—I was here for the Kosher Mosher reclassification fight. In ’eighty-eight.”

I told him I hadn’t heard of that.

“Really? I figured you for a Jew.”

“Uh-huh.”

Rincin knocked back the last of his Coke and belched. “Well,” he said, crushing the can in his hand and grabbing another one. “That’s the tragedy, isn’t it? When your own people forget.”

A blue and white sailboat floated out in the bay, in some shimmering world that had nothing to do with this one. The outs. I wondered if the sailboat people knew that they were half a mile from the Hillside Strangler and 317 other killers with nicknames, professional and recreational.

It would probably be scorching later, but right now the temperature was perfect. The CO handed me another preopened can of Coke. Somehow knowing I’d finished my first.

“So who
was
Mosher?” I asked, since it seemed expected.