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

it like he was proud of it, almost sitting up taller with each graduation to the next level of incarceration. "I came to the joint at seventeen." But then he started to shrink again. "My mom was violent and beat me, and my dad was hardly ever home. Out drinkin' somewhere or getting laid by some whore. When he did come home, he was always drunk, and then he'd get verbally abusive." "Like how?"

He shrugged.

"How?" I repeated, wondering how his father compared to mine.

"I could take his punches," he said, softly. "But when he called me a queer, his little cocksucker-it was like he'd punched my lights out without having to lift a finger."

I wanted to ask him how he knew Paul was gay, since he didn't act like it. But I could tell it would have been useless to probe. Paul kept that part of himself at arm's length.

Instead, Paul shook it off and slid his face down my stomach-the sharp bristles of his stubble scrapping my skin.

"It's why we have to go out and create our own families," Paul said.

He was lying on my chest again, and I stroked his back and caressed his long wet hair. The smell of spent sex hung heavy in the air, trapped under the bed by the blankets used to conceal us.

The springs of his bed above were familiar to me now. The squiggly curves reminded me of the lines my mother used to make on the side of the cakes she baked. When I was a young boy, I remembered she'd let me lick the spoons and the mixers, until my belly ached from too much sugar. She was so good in the kitchen that my aunts used to tell her she should open a bakery. Mom made the cakes, and my Aunt Patsy was known for her pies.

"Do you think you'd ever like to have kids," I asked.

"No way," he said.

"Why not?"

"I'm not into pussy for one," he said.

"Ever have it?"

"Yeah, but the girl I had it with wasn't the best example," Paul said. "And besides, I wouldn't want to bring a kid into this world, no-how."

"Why not?"

"Who'd want to bring a kid into this rotten world?" He kissed my belly. "Anyway, I've already got my baby."

I smiled, and stared back up at the springs.

"I'd like to have a kid," I said, "and I think I'd like to learn how to bake."

29

The Oracle

I was amazed that one word could be worth so many points.

"Mongrels?" Sharon said. "What the hell are mongrels?"

"I don't know. I read it in the newspaper." Mayor Hubbard told some New York paper he didn't think whites should have to live with blacks because it would lead to mongrels. "Whatever they are, it's worth 117 points."

"It is not, "Sharon said. But it was, because the word spanned two red premium squares, which meant you tripled the score, and then tripled it again, plus I had a double letter count on "G". (13 x 3 x 3 = 117).

"And," I said, now nearly gloating, "Iget 50 bonus points for using seven letters in a single play!"

I loved Scrabble!

"Go to bed," Sharon said. "It's past your bedtime, anyway." But that was only after she challenged my word and forfeited a turn.

"It doesn't say I have know what it means. It just has to be a word."

"Well, just get your ass in bed," she said.

It took a long time to fall asleep that night because I couldn't stop smiling. I learned a valuable lesson-that even if I didn't know what something meant-it paid to study the rules of the game.

Sharon was pissed, and for once I had finally beaten her!

We decided to name the prison newspaper The Oracle. Spaulding, our editor, had found the word in Webster's Dictionary. He read us the definition and everyone agreed it was perfect because it reminded us of Miss Bain. An oracle is a person (as a priestess of ancient Greece) through whom a deity is believed to speak-a person giving wise or authoritative opinions.

Spaulding had worked closely with Miss Bain to pick the team of five reporters, an assistant editor, and me. I was hired as the administrative assistant. I'd never held a real job, much less one with a title, so I was especially excited to take part in the project. Four of us were white, and four were black.

When Miss Bain first assembled us, she handed everyone brand new journals and said that we each brought something unique to the paper. She wanted us to share our unique experiences, something no one before had ever asked me to do. She told us Warden Handlon wanted the paper to win an award for prison newspapers and that he instructed her to hire the best and brightest at MTU.

Josh, the white guy I knew from Riverside, was our legal writer. He was studying to become a paralegal and worked in the law library. I hated him for setting me up with Rock when I first arrived at MTU, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from advancing myself.

Spaulding was also white, and the oldest among us, had worked on a newspaper at Jackson prison. At twenty-four, he was older than most inmates at MTU. No one knew why he was there, since MTU was for inmates who were under twenty-one. The rumor was that he had snitched while on the North Side of Jackson. Warden Handlon believed that anyone who had served time in Jackson didn't belong at MTU, since its focus was on younger inmates who still had a chance of reforming. But Spaulding was a college graduate, and his experience on the newspaper must have had something to do with him joining us. Miss Bain said that Warden Handlon was the type of man who once he set his mind to something, like winning the National Penal Press Award, he'd stop at nothing to accomplish it.

I was the youngest on the