Sweet Hell on Fire (8 page)

My first night in Seg.

Officially.

My OIC flipped me the bird with both hands as soon as I walked in. Supposedly, that meant he liked me. He was a skinny guy with close-cropped gray hair, glasses, and a pacemaker. He was a tough old son of a bitch, as they say. Tough like hundred-year-old jerky. He may have looked skinny and bent, but he’d fuck some shit up. Some of the crew called him The Old Man.

I flipped him back with the pocket creeper. Made like I was looking in my pocket for something, but instead of pulling out anything, I flew my middle finger high with a grin on my face.

As soon as I accepted my equipment for the shift—keys, radio, body alarm, and handcuffs—The Old Man shot me in the ass with a rubber band.
Cute. Real fucking cute
. I rolled my eyes. Then one of the other guys aimed for my breast. I’m not a small woman, and neither is my rack.

“Listen, that shit fucking hurts. Not the rack, okay?” I’d put up with all the hijinks, the bitch work, most anything but abuse of the boobs.

Yeah, he didn’t listen. With the biggest grin on his face, he shot me in the tit. Then laughed like a maniac. So I took after him. We got into a scuffle right there in the office, me punching him and slamming him into the wall and him laughing and letting me—the rest of the crew watching. Until I broke a coat hook off the wall with his back. That thing clattered to the floor as loud as a gunshot and we froze in place. I was half terrified that when he turned around, part of it would still be hanging out of his back and he’d have a punctured lung. He was fine, but we were both a little in awe.

We’d become friends after I first started on shift, but me kicking his ass seemed to make us family.

After that, he made me my own little rubber band weapon so I could fight with the rest of them. I have to say, I liked the rubber band game better than the fart game. That one was terrible. Especially when I’d have my mouth open to say something, and King Fart would walk behind me and bake one off at just the most opportune moment. Well, I hated it until I figured out I could use the fart game like a gun on the inmates who pissed me off. I could just call one of the guys up the tier, and if I made them stand there with me long enough, they’d gas the whole tier, a practice known as “crop dusting.”

My first day, they worked me like a five-dollar whore on a no-limit credit card. An incident had popped off in the chow hall and they’d had to kick people out to make room for the participants. That made us ears deep in property that should have been handled by the shift before. We had six going out and six coming in and all their property had to be searched, documented, and packed up.

When I say searched, I mean we had to look in the spines of books, take apart any electronics, check clothes, make sure items in containers matched the label, physically handle and inspect every item belonging to the inmate. Now, officers are supposed to do this before the property comes to Seg, but while searching incoming property on various occasions, I found hooch (homemade alcohol) made from oranges and Kool-Aid in a shampoo bottle, tobacco, tattoo needles in lamps, and shanks hidden in legal material.

Then before new inmates could be admitted, we have to search the cells, under the door, on top of lights, vents, drawers, every surface or space that could possibly hold contraband. While doing all of that, we still had to keep the cell house running efficiently by taking guys three at a time to the shower—one officer per inmate—and handing out and picking up trays for chow, then monitoring the porters while they cleaned the cell house.

And of course, since I was new meat, the inmates all tucked their heads straight up their asses. They knew I couldn’t tell exactly whose voice was whose, so I was serenaded with every filthy thing anyone could think of to say to me, from talking about how when they caught me alone they’d fuck me bloody, cut new holes in me to fuck, or alternately how I was too disgusting to fuck even for a guy who’d been in prison, etc., and so forth. One said something about what a good lay my mother was and asked me how much dick I could take.

They told us in training not to engage them with this sort of behavior and eventually they’d stop. Eventually? Fuck that. I lobbed that last one back. “Probably not as much dick as you.”

The whole cell house erupted in laughter and catcalls.

So of course the insults went back to my weight. One asked how much lunch I’d brought and if I had time to be out there on the tier when I had my food waiting for me in the office.

I told them no, I didn’t bring a good lunch, and one said, “Girl, don’t tell me you don’t eat. Not with an ass like that.”

“Oh no, punkin. I eat.
I
eat
good
. In fact, when I get off work tonight, I’m going to the buffet, and I’m going to eat crab legs.”

“Ha, I knew it.”

I don’t even like crab legs. You couldn’t pay me enough to put sea spider in my mouth. Or lobster. They look like big water roaches. But when was the last time any of these turds had any crab legs?

“Then I’m going to have some shrimp and steak. Maybe some lobster. A couple glasses of wine. And hell, just because I’m so fucking fat, I’m going to have some pizza too. All cheesy and juicy and…”

By this point the whole cell house had gone quiet. They were listening to me describe food they hadn’t had in years, some that a few of them would never have again.

“Fine, we get it. We get it,” an inmate whimpered from his cell.

“Oh, do you? I mean, you wanted to talk about what I eat so I thought I’d share. I think I’ll be bringing leftovers in my lunch tomorrow. I’ll be sure to set the fan at the office door so you can all smell my rib eye, loaded baked potato, and honey-glazed carrots.”

They quieted down somewhat, but there were still a few jeers as I walked past. I didn’t let it get to me though. I listened. I listened so I could learn the inmates’ voices and identify which cells they were coming from, a skill that would serve me well later.

Especially when inmates would scream obscenities at me and then later ask me to fix their cable. “Hmm, I don’t see either ‘Cunt’ or ‘Time Warner Cable’ on my shirt, so I guess you’re shit out of luck.”

“Oh no, this can’t be right, Lunsford.” The Captain’s mustache twitched as he looked through his roster, flipped the pages several times to make sure what he was seeing on the paper wasn’t a lie, or to make sure it wasn’t going to change the longer he looked at it. “There can’t be three women down in Seg. Women don’t belong in Seg anyway.”

What? Are you kidding me?

The other two women who would be down there with me looked at him as if he’d grown another head.

One day a week, there were three women on shift in Segregation. This was not a new thing. All three of us were hard-asses. We’d all been baptized by fire and come through the other side whole and hearty. None of us took any shit, or were mealymouthed about our expectations or treated any one inmate different than another. We were good officers.

But there was our Captain, crying about how unfair it was to the one guy who’d be down there, who would have to stand showers and do any stripouts that came in. Five minutes of nuts and butts while we had to do all of the cell searches and everything else? Cry me a river. Somebody’s vag was sandy, but it didn’t belong to any one of the three of us.

Everyone backed away from us as we looked at each other, processing. Almost like the way you’d back up from a hungry lion—careful, hoping the predator doesn’t notice your movement and pounce.

The relief OIC, a woman in her early fifties, who was like an angry bull when crossed, hopped on it immediately. “Well, since we’re just women, why don’t you come down to Seg and show us what we’re supposed to do? I don’t think we can figure it out all by ourselves. Do you?” She turned to look us.

“No, I don’t think we can manage,” I said. “I have a vagina; therefore, I am incapable of doing my job.”

He narrowed his eyes at us, as if there were some doubt as to whether we were serious.

“Lunsford,” the male who would be assigned with us said under his breath. “I know you really have a dick. Even if he doesn’t.”

It made me laugh, but I was still pissed off at what the Captain had said. Not just because it was a slur against women. I can even understand why men didn’t trust women as easily as other men in that environment. I’d seen firsthand too many women throw away their careers because some shit bag told them they were pretty.

I didn’t like it, but I understood it. But this Captain, he’d seen my work. He knew I was a good officer. He knew the other two were good officers, and he knew we had good, solid reputations.

We discussed it the whole way to the cell house. A couple of inmates from other cell houses yelled greetings to us on our way in and asked us about the weather, how we were doing, just looking to be acknowledged. My OIC told them she didn’t know and couldn’t figure it out because she was a woman. There were echoes of “fuck that” and “we’re fucked” the rest of the walk in. The inmates wanted nothing to do with us when we acted faux helpless. That was the calm before the storm. They knew we were pissed and wanted no part of it.

We hadn’t been on duty for fifteen minutes when the first call came asking us what cells we had open for someone who’d popped off at the mouth before shift change. We informed the Captain that we didn’t know because we were girls and didn’t belong in Segregation. We asked him, in unison, to please send us a big, strong man to help us. When he could locate one.

For women who couldn’t do the job, we pulled our own weight in contraband out of the cell house that day. The biggest find was the serrated blade we found in the cell of an inmate known to be HIV positive and who hated officers. It wasn’t unheard of for inmates to stick themselves and then use their blood as a weapon.

What scared us wasn’t that he’d had it. There was all manner of shit hidden all around the prison at any given time. It was where we were and how he’d gotten it.

Segregation was supposed to be the jail within the jail. It was supposed to be more secure than the rest of the prison. Inmates and their belongings were searched constantly. When inmates were brought into Seg, they were stripped naked and had a flashlight shined up their noses, in their ears, down their throats and up their asses. That blade was too big to be smuggled in the prison wallet (anus).

So either someone hadn’t searched his property, or some dirty motherfucker brought it in for him.

My mother finally heard back from her doctor. He suspected cervical cancer. She had to make an appointment to go back in for more tests, but she didn’t know how she’d get there because she was in so much pain all of the time that it was hard for her to even get out of bed.

I went in to work and nothing was any better there. For that week I was two days Seg, two days tower, and one day open. This was an open day, and the cell house they put me in had just had an outbreak of scabies.

Fucking scabies.

Scabies are basically skin lice. They’re little bugs that burrow and squirm beneath your skin and make you want to rip your own flesh off to stop the itch. They’re also highly contagious. You can pick them up by a simple touch or contact.

The whole cell house had to be quarantined and all of the bedding washed, every surface treated. I spent the whole shift drenching myself in hand sanitizer. I felt itchy just being there, but I knew better than to scratch. If I’d accidentally come into contact with any, they could be under my fingernails, or on my fingers or on my skin where I wanted to scratch.

Itching is my Achilles’ heel. I’d rather hurt than itch any day.

It wasn’t my Friday, but damn. After spending a shift walking around on my tiptoes, a beer couldn’t hurt. We went to a bar in the city with a mechanical bull. I remember saying I wasn’t going to ride it and I also remember a Hurricane in an orange juice carafe.

Then I remember lying on the floor. No one would ever tell me if I actually rode the bull or not. I don’t think I did, but what other reason would I have to be lying on the filthy floor of a bar? Aside from the fact I’d drank three of those Jolly Green Giant-sized Hurricanes?

There were too many people around me, and one guy in particular kept trying to touch me. Before I could knock his teeth out, one of the guys who was with our group, nicknamed Shrek, played knight in shining armor. With one shove, he knocked the guy back several feet and told him to keep his hands off me. He took care of me that night and a couple of others. It was nice to feel like someone really gave a shit about me just because I was me. Not because they felt I owed them something under the hat of wife, mother, daughter, or officer. Not because he was trying to get his dick wet. Because he was my friend. I really needed that. Probably more than I wanted to admit.