Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison T. Parsell (ebook reader play store .txt) 📖

"Let the crows go," he said.

The blacks filed out of the building first, followed a few minutes later by the whites. When I turned back to the inmate who had stopped me, he was gone.

Like everything else inside, the racial balance was controlled by Warden Handlon. The staff denied it, saying the mix had more to do with the youthful population than it did anything else. At any rate, it seemed to make matters worse, since at most other prisons the tensions didn't seem as high when one side grossly outnumbered the other. And though large-scale violence never broke out, there was frequent grumbling between the groups about rioting.

The oldest inmate there was Little John. He was forty-five and worked as a waiter in the Officer's Dining Room. He had worked for Warden Handlon for years while he was over at the Michigan Reformatory. Little John still wore his pant legs rolled-up like knickers, the way he did when he had first come to prison in the 1950s.

I heard someone call him the warden's house nigger, but no one had the nerve to say that to his face-not even the blacks. Everyone knew not to fuck with an older inmate.

I remembered Manley telling me that older convicts didn't like games. "Most of them have been down too long, so they don't have the patience for a lot of bullshit. They ain't gonna get up in your face like these young silly jitterbugs and talk a lot of smack. They'll just sneak up behind you, and quietly kill you."

Manley had also said that older convicts are more levelheaded. You're always better off with an older inmate than with someone younger. "These youngsters got no sense," he said. "They're too young, dumb, and full of cum, so they'd just as soon cut your head off and fuck you-and then ask if that pussy is any good; whereas the older cons are a lot smoother. They're just as dangerous, mind you-but they'd rather coax or trick that pussy out of your ass than just up and take it from you."

Perhaps I was being naive to think that since I was at a new prison, that I might be able to leave my past behind. I thought about the advice Black Diamond had given me: as long as I kept walking around like a lost sheep, people were going to keep dogging me. I was hoping to put an end to the question of whether I was gay or not, but as I turned the corner on the yard, I ran into Josh from Riverside. Josh was the chubby white guy that Slide Step had set me up with in the shower. It made sense to me now-how the guys in the Barracks knew my story.

"Hey, Tim. How you doing?"

I kept walking. "All right," I said.

"Wait up! I hear you're moving to C-unit."

Hoiv did he know that?

"One of my homeboys is a clerk in Housing." He said it like it gave him some kind of clout. "Anyway, it's a rough unit, so you're going to need protection."

I didn't say anything.

"It's one of the worst units in here," he said, sounding sincere. "So I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine."

"I'm not interested," I said, but just then his friend, Rock, walked up to us.

Josh said, "I know you'd rather be with a white guy."

Rock was so big he dwarfed me. He was a twenty-year-old bodybuilder, who was serving the last of a three-year sentence for selling drugs. His short wavy hair was a reddish blond, which matched his mustache and small goatee. He stood about six foot five, and his chest was so large I would have practically had to climb up on it, just to touch his chin. Rock was very sexy. In spite of myself, I started to grin.

"OK," I said. "But only if I have to."

When I moved to C-unit, it didn't seen like a rough unit, but I wouldn't really know for sure because by the time I got there, everyone knew that I belonged to Rock.

If MTU had a football team, Rock would have been captain, although he lacked the discipline to follow orders, and he took pride in the way lie skirted authority. Since lie was about to be discharged on the maximum of his sentence, lie didn't have to worry about pleasing the parole board. He had a way of carrying himself that, combined with his size, allowed him to hold court on the section of the yard where the bodybuilders hung out.

Rock's friends, all of whom were white, seemed to know each other from the streets or time served together in juvenile hall. Rock wasn't the best looking among his friends, though he was the largest-and lie carried himself like he knew it. He was the kind of guy the girls back home would have been crazy about-except that lie liked to brag about mistreating them. "I used to dog them bitches," lie once said, sitting back on the grass with a pint of ice cream.

"Man," Josh looked on admiringly, "he used to buke those hitches. He'd say to them, `Shut up bitch, and get your ass in there and clean them dishes.' And they would too!" Josh laughed. "They were only too happy to do it." Rock leaned back and smiled.

Buke was a word I remembered Slide Step using, when his team had beaten another team badly. Perhaps it was a bastardization of the word rebuke, yet I doubt anyone even knew. Rock's bragging about his abuse of women should have been a sign of things to come. But I was lost in staring at the curves of his shoulders, chest, and arms. I hardly noticed when he handed me the rest of his ice cream.

If Slide Step had two sides to him-a public and private side-Rock had only one: asshole. He never spent any time with me, and whenever I was