Preparation for the Next Life (25 page)

They never stole heavy duty construction equipment—Bobcats or lifts—and loaded them onto interstate flatbed trucks. When Jimmy was arrested, it was for DUI. He had a couple of bags of cement in his trunk and a Ryobi that retailed at six hundred dollars. He wasn’t raised to steal, Mrs. Murphy said. I know he knows better. Up in the Bronx, the local received a call about him and in the bars they said he was going to get bounced. In the meantime, he kept working. He had his supporters. Keep your head high, Jim. He went to the rectangular building with many windows on Queens Boulevard near Union Turnpike and went through the metal detector, found his Part.

His defender, a sarcastic man with a double chin, did not seem to understand that they were both Irish and what this meant or that Jimmy was a union man and what that meant. Jimmy stood outside the Part waiting for him against the dirty marble wall with the other people who were milling and waiting. The defender showed up late after the case had been called, pushing through the crowd with his briefcase, sweating and distracted.

They called me already.

I’m sorry, I had another case. The judge talks too much. But you don’t need me today. They’re dropping the vandalism, aren’t they?

What vandalism? That wasn’t me. I’m DUI.

DUI, right. You’re Turner. I thought you were Rodriguez. Are you sure this is where you’re supposed to be?

They looked at the names under the glass.

That’s you. Let’s go in. I’ve got another client here. Wait for me while I go talk to him.

The case was continued. The next time he got arrested, they impounded his Skylark and locked him up and he stood before the court while wearing sneakers minus the laces. In court, they referred to him as Mr. Turner. He turned to his defender: I thought you were
getting me off. His defender said: Nobody can get you off. You’re guilty. Right or wrong? You did it, didn’t you? Yes or no? So take the plea and next time learn to call a cab.

Then they led him back out to the bus after waiting eight hours in the holding area behind the courtroom where you could not use the bathroom. He sat pushing against the individual shackled next to him who pushed him back. They drove through Jackson Heights, they looked out the windows at the taillights, the Spanish women getting off the subway. He looked ahead at the front of the bus, the transport officers behind the cage, at where they were going. They were surrounded by industrial buildings and the airport. He heard the vacuum cleaner roaring of jet engines going over them and saw the shadow of a plane come rushing over them, swooping down, and landing, and the dark water going by, the lights on the fences in the dusk.

Rikers could make you deaf. It made him smell. For weeks after his release, he shouted. It turned his volume up. He somehow found himself in exchanges with other men on the subway or on the street who had passed through the jail as well. In hoarse rattling voices, they shouted about the mayhem or the riots or the way it had been worse five years ago, before the reforms. They found each other by the way they spoke out in public, in the line outside the unmarked entrance in Ozone Park where Jimmy waited with the other offenders wearing sweatshirts over their heads and blowing vapor in the cold, shuffling upstairs to give his number and get his pills, as part of the terms of his release.

On the corner, wind-burned, dull-eyed, they said, Oh, you a union man. There’s a pride, Jimmy said. You got it made, they said. All you gotta do is keep tight. Keep it in tight! they laughed. They lived in a shelter off Centre Street and did temporary work unloading trucks for Chinese merchants who owned lighting businesses on Bowery.

When I got out after five years, I would do any job, a Puerto Rican named Cat said. My sentence was for murder. I served my time, I don’t care. It happened because I was seeing a woman. She was Dominican. Highly attractive to men. Everybody noticed me with her. This guy, he was a big dude, he liked her and he kept trying to pursue an interest in her. I went to talk to him. He broke my nose, hurt my pride. I came back and knocked on the door. She come out
and I said, Get José, and as soon as he come, I had a butcher knife. I jumped on him and kept stabbing him. They gave me murder. When I served my time, I used to jump rope, go for a jog, anything to forget the time. What’d you think of Rikers?

It didn’t affect me.

When I passed through there, they had the lawsuit against the city. It would have affected you, homeboy, let me tell you.

All I know is I got used to it.

I got used to it too. That don’t mean nothin.

I’m not going to change myself just to do what somebody’s tellin me to do.

Neither will I, Cat said. But you can’t get the years back.

So be it.

So be it. That don’t make it right.

To make it right, he took a loop up to the Bronx on his way out to Nassau and cruised down Webster Avenue. When he got far enough, he saw a woman standing by herself with a black handbag and black boots. She was very fat and pale and had small eyes. After she got the rubber on him, he had some trouble, so he repositioned. She looked at him apologetically and said, I can’t do it if you choke me. He just stared at her. Okay, but just like don’t choke me or nothing. Then he was fine. Leave it. Don’t resist. Just keep at it. His skull ring imprinted her white neck. With her missing teeth and rasping voice, she truly reminded him of his mother, at two hundred instead of three hundred pounds. She had bruises on her skin either from getting smacked around or from Kaposi’s sarcoma from AIDS.

The third time he was incarcerated, as an alternative to his full sentence of fifteen months, he was given the option of a five-month intensive rehabilitation program run on a boot-camp model. His common-law wife had just gotten pregnant and there was considerable pressure on him to do the right thing.

He’s got to do it and make the most of it, Mrs. Murphy said. I only wish they could have offered this to him the first time this happened, but they didn’t have it. The discipline is what he never got from Patrick. Some need more than others. You’re not going to get through to him unless you earn his respect, which is why I had high hopes for the union.

In the program, you were required to be awake and in full uniform for count, which was held six times a day. The staff called you
Offender. He was issued bedding, towels, white socks, denim trousers, gray uniform shirts, black oxfords, and a black tie. They did group calisthenics and manual labor, sanded furniture. You could only get so many disciplinary reports, though there was an appeal process. The most common thing to get kicked out for was smoking. In the classroom, a black kid in cornrows raised his hand and told the counselor: I’m in this to win this. Then they mopped their facility and made it smell like cleaning solution, the white winter sun falling in the cell windows, a slice of sky visible.

On a visitation day two months in, Mrs. Murphy told Jimmy that she saw a difference in him. It’s paying off already.

They got us running like ten miles every day.

He admitted that he already had two disciplinary reports coming. They’re saying I wasn’t in uniform at count.

It’s a test, Mrs. Murphy said. That’s how you have to look at it.

He was agitated that his wife hadn’t showed up.

His wife wasn’t feeling well, his mother said.

Some of us have to be here whether we feel well or not.

It’s not for me to say. You’re here, I know. But I’m not gonna add fuel to it.

I’m doing everything in my power in here.

I know. Don’t add fuel to it.

He didn’t know what he was trying for, he said.

Jim, she begged.

You could have told her to come.

We’ve got forty-five minutes. Let’s keep it together. I can cry on the drive back. I’m all cried-out, she grinned, exposing her missing tooth.

They ended on a hug. Seeya next time.

But towards the end of the five months, when he had already been given a final warning, he and four other offenders rolled a cigarette using an envelope for writing letters home and lit it with a tulip—a twist of toilet paper, which they ignited using a battery and a piece of foil—and smoked it standing on a footlocker and blowing their smoke into the air vent.

After he had been violated and sent to another facility to serve his full sentence, he covered his heartbreak by saying I didn’t like it there. They try to make you act like a little square boy.

The new system was different. Fresh off the bus, seven of them crossed the hard yard in orange jumpsuits carrying their blankets, while inmates whistled at them. Someone said, Put your chest down. The staff told you one story, the inmates another. Here it was all about the hustle. They didn’t want you to be square. After the urine test, they entered the cell block where inmates in black t-shirts sat at square tables rotated like diamonds. Some wore beads and crosses. One of the smaller new arrivals had the tendency to avoid confrontation, name of Mayfield. He had prominent ears. To Mayfield, they said: You look worried. You know that girl? Brittany? (meaning coward). Nice ears. Smile.

Mayfield let people hit him for fun and was placed in protective custody where you heard banging for hours and it was hard to sleep. He heard the disordered nothingness. Medicated prisoners who walked in circles, tireless walking, saying, I keep going round and round. My Dopaquel was switched to Trazodone. Got me sweating and having chills. Mayfield was going to live like that for the next fifteen years.

Jimmy was tense until he fought. The staff rushed in and broke it up and he kept his head up as he was led away. Twelve hours later, they brought him back and the tension started building again. So did the schemes. The idea was to get ahold of tobacco or coffee or anything for a buzz. He cliqued-up with a couple guys from New York who had in common that they were not black.

One was German-Italian, a young man in whose field-mouse-colored hair you could see the scars in his scalp. What hood you claim? They played cards using sugar packs from the chow hall as chips. That’s where I’m from, said Frankie. Bum-rushing Flushing. How come I ain’t never heard a you? What level you at?

Prepared to fight again, Jimmy stood up. Frankie hugged him. One love, kid. Frankie from Franklin Street, all my life, since ’93. Stay on point. We fight niggers all day in here.

He caught another case and this time got sent to Krayville, Indiana, where they admitted him on a summer day. The orientation
was brief. The only thing they asked him was, Are you a Nazi or an Aryan?

He named his last prison. I was with the white boys there.

Then they put him on the vast yard with the general population and he could feel something physical immediately, an air pressure, a difficulty breathing.

He saw whites wearing flip-flops and white socks and mustaches and red jumpsuits, being released from the security housing unit, getting patted down, sticking out their tongues, arms out like Christ, white eyes with flat black circles like sharks, getting walked with leashes.

An Aryan told him:

Hey, peckerwood, you hang with us.

After they were done processing him, he rolled it up and moved in with white boys who talked about Mongols.

New York? You can tell us where Jimmy Hoffa’s at. Until then, you rent your spot with us.

They went to chow together, the yard together, they moved as a unit, posted sentries when they were working out.

You do laundry. You might have to slam something for the house. We got requirements.

The first thing he learned was that this was a war zone. There were politics and the politics were secret—you’re out of bounds asking about it, so don’t ask. In the yard, they put their towels out on the ground and did their calisthenics, following cadence called by the mob. He practiced the sequence of squat, step, lunge, squat-thrust, which were to be performed by a column of soldiers in unison while walking forward. Everyone had to be ready. The tension he had felt was constant and real. They jogged together under the Indiana sky, past the sign that said One Person At A Time mounted on the smooth synthetic brick and cement structure, the green glass of the pod windows appearing black in daylight. The facility was constructed like a mathematical puzzle, controlled from a central module by Midwesterners with deep resonant country voices.

The mob taught how to be stabbed under freezing showers, to teach you not to flinch. Their workouts were secret like Shaolin monks. Jimmy held a piece for the whites. It’s not about hate, everybody’s just clicked-up, they said, referring to the Nazi signs. It’s family. They wore Chinese symbols on their chests, eyelids, meaning
strength, stealth, honor. The swastika itself was a Buddhist sign. It represented the pattern of a ghost running in an ancient field. They tattooed their faces, shaved their heads, stole the hardened steel spring from the barber’s clippers to carve a dagger out of the metal stock of their bunks, going over and over the same cuts tens of thousands of times, a form of meditation. Don’t talk about it, be about it, the powerlifters said, facing 30 years and 52 years, respectively, for burglary and burglary with sexual assault. The mind is a weapon. Tunnel vision comes into play. The guards believe they have power. What they have is the tower, an illusion. Jimmy was given what they called artillery to put in his rectum. He carried it out on the yard and removed it and secreted it in the dirt under the picnic table.