Memoir 4
The infirmary is a “cushy” and much coveted job, with short hours and relatively light work loads most of the time. morning. On my first day, I met my new co-worker and trainer, a lifer named Freddy Glen AKA Siyani Masamba.
Siyani was a 6’4” 250 pound black man with finely toned muscles from daily sessions on the weight pile. He wears his long hair relaxed and straightened, and always immaculately neat, with every hair in place.
After a number of weeks of working together we became friends and would talk at length in the evenings. I was treated with a new respect and friendliness; once people saw that I was kicking it with Siyani
I don’t know if people thought that I was his “bitch” or what, but I didn’t care. Siyani’s black friends would ask him “What you kicking it with that crazy ass white boy for?” but would rarely push it beyond that. If they didn’t like it, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Siyani was respected, and feared, with a reputation he’d built since coming into the system as an angry nineteen year old murder convict. Now, at the age of forty he had no need to fight, and no interest in doing so, but he lamented at times that the new “Young Guns” in from off the street, with reputations of their own to build, would feel the need to test him, to see what he was about. At those times, he wished that he did not have his formidable physique and almost legendary prowess as a fighter.
Siyani liked to watch pro wrestling on TV. When I asked him why, and pointed out how obviously choreographed and planned the wrestler’s moves were, he pointed out that their performances still required great strength and agility, and were not without danger. He said for me think of it in terms of “Men as big as Braxton (6’8” 300 lbs, by far the largest man in the prison) slamming into each other and falling down on those mats.”
Siyani was a convicted killer in a high profile case. He readily admitted his complicity to me, but maintained steadfastly that he did not cut the victims throat, and that the killer had fingered him to save himself.. Eventually I was to hear his side of the story in detail.
Siyani Masamba (Freddy Glenn) was one of four men convicted in a high profile murder. Their victim was Karen Grammer, sister of actor Kelsey Grammer, of “Cheers’ and “Frazier” fame.
Siyani and his associates were depicted as “psychopathic soldiers from Ft. Carson” (1) The same “Crime library” article details the religious conversion and 1st parole hearing of one of his co-defendants, Michael Corbett AKA “Hasani”. Detective Lou Smit (Now Captain Lou Smit) of the1 Colorado State Police is quoted in the same article, as saying “Corbett was a man completely without a conscience...”
The article’s author, Seamus McGraw characterized Siyani as Corbett’s #1 disciple.
Though he lacked Corbett's force of personality, and didn't share his almost psychopathic detachment, he was Corbett's devoted disciple.
The story of Karen Grammer’s murder, and numerous others committed by Corbett, Glenn, and a cooperative witness named Larry Dunn, who was granted immunity from prosecution, (although the story, even as he tells it incriminates him as much as any of the others involved)is a matter of public record and has been retold in detail many times. All those interested in the blood and gore of it, or the other crimes attributed to the co-defendants need only to look to the internet.
What is not widely known is the person I knew as “Siyani” some 21 years after the murder had been committed. His prison reputation was certainly fearsome, but unlike many who commanded that type of respect, he for the most part was admired as an honest, peaceful, and honorable old-school convict. I don’t know what might have become of me, had I not had the good fortune to get hired as his protégé in the prison infirmary.
He was a good and patient instructor, who cared about the job getting done, not just to pass Sergeant Margaret Storm’s daily inspections, but also for the benefit of the patients themselves. After a few days, I got the rhythm and technique of this assignment down and would show up at 7:00 AM each day and work ‘til 11:00, go to chow, lock down in my cell for count, and return to work shortly after 1:00 PM. On most days, Sgt. Storm dismissed us by 2:30 PM. I learned little bits of prison lore, and the names of notorious outlaws and convicts he knew in his youth, who were all starting to mellow with age too.
He spoke of his days as an enforcer and collector for a prison gang, and also told me how young and ignorant he’d been.
He learned to respect gays, “I didn’t like fags you know, but these fags will cut an M.F.’s throat before they knew what hit ‘em!” and had his first encounters with heroin, cocaine, and LSD in prison.
Things weren’t quite so mellow behind the walls during the 70s, in fact they averaged about 1 stabbing per week, and Siyani recounted that back when the cells only had bars instead of an inmate-controlled locking door as they do now. Sometimes people were set on fire with a flammable liquid, perhaps some gasoline from one of the many gas-powered grounds maintenance machines, or lighter fluid that an absent minded guard kept around for his Zippo, but left unattended, which would be thrown through the bars, dousing the intended victim. This would be followed by a well-aimed torch, usually a rag soaked in the same liquid. There was no way out of the cell, and the only recourse available was the toilet which in those days each cell had. Siyani recalls watching a man and hearing his screams, as he stood in his toilet making a futile effort to put out the liquid fueled flames.
Siyani denied giving in to the temptation of a warm mouth offered by a sexually ambivalent inmate, although he admitted that many of the drag queens were convincing enough to make him lust after them as females. He still denied ever having had sexual contact with another male.
He smoked cigarettes, but not all that many of them, and worked out on the weight-pile to maintain the formidable musculature on his tall and slim frame. At this point he was not trying to “bulk up,” or “get buff,” as the weightlifters called it. He was just trying to stay healthy, and maintain the strength that he had with him.
When he got around to telling me his version of the Karen Grammer case, I heard a sad story not all that different than the published accounts, except for one thing. He said that one of the other men in the car actually cut her throat although he didn’t name a name (I’m guessing Dunn) and that he had refused to testify against any of his comrades, holding onto the belief that no matter how despicable a crime has been committed, it is still more despicable to give up your supposed friends to save your own ass. Freddy Glenn wouldn’t snitch. Subsequently he was fingered by one of his co defendants as the man who murdered Karen Grammer. As he went on with the story, I saw tears forming in his eyes.
Sure, what he told me could have been self serving and self-justifying, but what possible reason in the world could he have for trying to deceive me. I was just some crazy-ass white boy whose opinion didn’t meant shit, and even if he’d told me, flat out that he had cut her throat, and felt nothing, the man I knew in the present moment inspired nothing but respect and admiration in me. My instinct at the time was to believe him, and even though he left out important parts of the story, like the alleged gang-rape described by Dunn, I still believe that what he told me was the truth.
He recalls the brave and indomitable, but foolish Karen Grammer sealing her fate by telling her captors that she had all their descriptions memorized as well as the car’s license number, and how much trouble they would all be when she turned them in. Siyani remembers begging her “Shut up girl, please, just shut up!” hoping ‘til the last minute that somehow their original plan, which was to cut her loose, alive, would still be carried out. He said that the only way he could have saved her life would have been to shoot one of his companions, and faced with this dilemma, he watched as Karen Grammer’s throat was cut.
I have never been able to determine from his words, whether he wishes now that his actions had been different at that late point in the chain of events; his regrets are for setting out with his friends that night for a little adventure, including an armed robbery. But his remorse, his heartbreak over the death of Karen Grammer was unmistakable. Certainly a parole board member, looking at the facts of the case and Siyani’s role in it might have cause to doubt his sincerity. But I, having no power over whether Siyani ever sees the outside again, have no reason to doubt him. Again, why should he lie to me?
During that early period in my own term of incarceration, CDOC had a fairly unique “Hospice” program for terminally ill inmates who weren’t likely candidates for a “compassionate release.”
The man I met, known as “P.J.” or “Gimme” was one of the hospice patients lodged at territorial.
He had terminal, severely metastasized cancer spread throughout his body, and was continually being offered morphine by the facility’s doctor, but at least when I knew him, he was limiting himself to an occasional, single tablet of Percodan, saying that he wanted to be as close to fully conscious as possible for his own death. Sometimes the old doctor would get angry with him, exhorting him to take his morphine and get on with the business of dying. I saw pictures on the wall of the room of a seemingly different man, a tall, long-haired, slim young biker with his arm around a stunning Chicana. Only the tattoos were the same.
The disease had broken him down into a shriveled, formless, bloated and atrophied old man, but his tattoos told the truth of the matter. I would talk to him when he would go out for the occasional cigarette break (the man’s dying anyway, why not let him smoke?) and gradually got to know his story, of his service in Vietnam, and a criminal record that started in Vietnam (“They sent me over there to kill Gooks, and then they tried to charge me with killing Gooks!”)which I did not press for the details of.
“Terry Bad News,” another inmate who served with him in ‘nam told me “Gimme? That motherfucker’s crazy! He tried to run me over with a tank!” When I told PJ this story he just chuckled and said “Damn near got him too!”
We talked of war and religion. Unlike many members of the “biker trash” faction behind the walls, he didn’t sympathize with the Neo-Nazi groups. He was the one who suggested that I read Mila 18 by Leon Uris. “Those Jews kicked some ass!” he said with admiration in his voice.
Upstairs from the chow hall, there’s a large auditorium and recreation center. There are chess sets and jigsaw puzzles, Nintendo video games with strict half-hour time limits of them and long waiting lists. There are guitars, acoustic and electric.
I ask Sgt. Williams, a gruff, foul mouthed and somewhat anti-social person, redeemed by his readily available sense of humor, if I could check out an electric guitar.
He says, “Yeah, after we see that you can play, and can be responsible for taking care of an instrument.”
He asks an inmate to bring him an acoustic guitar.
“Well, let’s see what you can do”
I pick up the guitar, sit down with it, and plunk out a few rudimentary blues notes and changes.
“What’s that, blues?”
I nod.
“What’s the song’s name?”
“Oh I don’t know, it’s just some blues thing I do.”
“You wrote it?”
“Yes, a very long time ago,” I said, and I remember discovering and plunking out those same notes at the age of fifteen.
The audition ends and I have acoustic guitar privileges. I hang out in the auditorium when not working and try to jam with anyone who's around playing a guitar. There are a couple of sound-insulated rehearsal studios behind the stage.
Sometimes walking by outside of the auditorium, I hear the energetic and defiant sounds of loud electric guitars, bass, and drums, finding their way through the insulation, seeking cracks in windows and walls and finding my ears. I think about how it would be fun to be in a band again, even in prison. I also think it’s unlikely that I will ever play in one. Guitarists are a dime a dozen, everywhere, even in the joint. Im was sure that there are many more accomplished players around.
I keep practicing on the acoustic guitars, and have a little fun here and there, as I progress, from dish-room, to school, to janitorial school, and to my “cushy” infirmary job.
Jesse is one of the people I play a little blues with. He’s in one of the rock bands, playing keyboards mostly. A large, heavy, older ex-marine, with his gray hair grown long into a slightly rebellious pony tail, Jesse’s brilliant, easy-going and just downright weird. We become good friends. Jesse decides that his rock band needs my guitar skills, mostly for bass playing, and he eventually persuades Sgt. Williams to give me my “electric” privileges.
Video games and rock-bands in prison are issues that right-wing demagogues use to get people to listen to their drivel. The prison guard’s unions, organizations not know for their liberalism, nonetheless favor various “perks” and “privileges” for inmates. To be in a rock band, or even to hang out in the auditorium and do various “arts and crafts” projects, (etched mirrors being the most popular, for their high resale value) a prisoner must be “Report Free” for some arbitrary number of days, usually around ninety or so. The same goes for the weight-pile and the gym.
These little behavioral rewards go a long way to making a guard’s life easier. Not only are there less actual infractions, but inmates who have learned to enjoy and depend on these perks to pass the time will be generally more polite and respectful, knowing that this further reduces the odds of a write-up, which can happen at any given time, for little or no reason.
Playing electric guitar, in a band in prison seems too good to be true.
“Be careful,” warns Mr. Goode, “They will torture you by learning what you love, and taking it away from you.”
I earn my privileges, enjoy them, come to depend on them. Still in the first two years (not even two years, more like 21 months) of incarceration, nonetheless I understand that things are indeed “good”. One night, while walking the track and talking with Jesse, we reach the conclusion the “these are the good old days.”
I go to band practice 5 or 6 nights out of the week. On my days off, I stay up to the wee hours of the morning watching old martial-arts movies and drinking Folgers instant. D I almost have myself believing in the correctional cliché’s like “rehabilitation,” and “turning your life around.”
I’m even “making the break with drugs,” or so it seemed. My Mellaril was discontinued early on in my stay with no ill effect, and a marked improvement in my energy level. My few months of working in the steaming purgatory of the penitentiary dish-room sweated and purged the persistent traces of methadone withdrawal from my body.
Working in the infirmary and playing music at night helps me lose the body fat I’d picked up in the county jail.
The first concert I play is in Christmas of ’96. I’m in 1 rock band and one R&B band, which was interracial in its makeup. I also do a brief, opening/warm-up set with a little heavy metal power trio I put together, to do a couple of old songs that I’d written in my 20s. After one false start, we manage to get through both pieces without any further difficulties, and the audience responds with warm applause.
Next up is the rock-band, led and fronted by Mark I play bass on most of the songs. I switch to guitar to do another original, an odd jazz piece that I wrote at the age of sixteen and still feel compelled to play when I pick up a guitar. As a guitar player, my skills are limited and amateurish, and I am not a “well rounded” player. I can’t read music, but can follow chord progressions, and don’t need to have things explained to me too many times, so people like having me in their bands. When practice is over I’m just another old guy pathetically clinging to teenage rock dreams.
Of course, in my teens, I’d wanted to be a “guitar hero,” a heavy metal and fusion jazz improviser. While other areas of my guitar skills went neglected, I learned to play scales really fast, and then to scramble them up and improvise them and finally got to the point where if I wanted a certain melody to come out of the guitar, I didn’t have to think about it anymore, it just happened. The quarter-semesters of music school in an obscure, avant-garde jazz setting also helped me a little. The jazz piece I was playing made me remember those days, before knives, needles, guns, craziness and disease helped me murder those innocent dreams of a young man.
When the time comes for it, I rip into for my guitar solo with everything I’ve got. I receive a standing ovation eight bars into it.
That was a once in a lifetime event. I’d been in a band on the outside, back in DC in my late teens and early twenties, a “punk-jazz” band that was in the wrong town and just a bit ahead of its time, under the direction of a maniacal musical anarchist with an alto sax named Eric Ziarko.
We did nothing but get bad reviews, lose money, and since I was the guy with the van, I was usually physically exhausted after our gigs from loading, driving, and unloading equipment. When the patrons in the club who remained for more than the first minute or two started getting into what we were playing, they would get up and dance. Some of Eric’s artless but sincere political speeches seemed to get through to people at times.
At one of our more memorable gigs, playing in the “Columbia Station” bar and restaurant in the summer of 81, I spotted a young woman I had known in “high school” (it was only high school in the sense that it was called a school and we were all high) with her date, a healthy ,young, corn-fed linebacker from the University of Maryland. I saw this as rather odd, because Susan was quite obviously still the “Hippie Chick,” but I had always admired her open- mindedness. I sat down briefly at their table during intermission (we just played two long sets that night). I told Susan that it was good to see her again after all this time, and I introduced myself to the football player. Then I walked down to the corner, with my crime partner Ellen, a stripper, and dealer in various disreputable substances. I had some crystal meth and we snorted a little of that, then she pulled out a fat joint of Angel Dust, and we smoked it right there on the corner. You could still do that then; it was just so crowded, and the cops had other things to worry about . Reagan hadn’t even been elected just yet.
I went back in to play the second set twisted out of my mind, and when it came time for my big guitar solo, I managed to get through it, with feeling even, and lightning fast chemically inspired licks.
A little later in the set, Eric went into his “World Hunger” speech, which like his sax solos, was improvised for the most part. This time he threw in something about “what if you went to McDonald’s and they didn’t have a Big Mac for you, not even a cheeseburger...”
At the end of the gig, I sat down briefly with Susan and her date again. The young man was moved to tears. Eric had reached him. “I never thought of it that way, going to MacDonald’s and not being able to get a Big Mac...”
Even being in an unknown band that drove half the patrons out of the club within two minutes of starting the first set attracted groupies, and would impress the strippers and the angel dust smoking, “lude” eatin’, coke shooting women I would encounter while “making the rounds” as a young suburban drug dealer. It was good fun for a long time, and when it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it. But never once was there a standing ovation.
The ego boost is brief. I realize where I am and that even if someone had made an audio tape of the show, getting a copy of it, and then managing not to lose it in a shakedown would be impossible. But ironically I’d just enjoyed more success as a musician in prison than I ever had on the outside. Many people don’t know my name, and call out “hey, little wolf dude!” I look forward to the next concert.
People started being a little nicer, and many people gave me encouragement to keep playing. I now had new friends; members of the bands I played in.
Memoir 3
The time comes to go see the dermatologist; a couple of guards from a private security company chain me up and take me to University Hospital. The dermatologist examines the tumor.
It’s an adenocarcinoma, a tiny gland gone haywire; it has the potential to spread over my whole body. About a week after my initial examination, they take me back to the doctor, who numbs the area and starts slicing. They remove every last fragment of cancerous tissue from my finger using a new surgery that involves removing the tumor in really thin layers, and examining each one under a microscope, until finally a layer of tissue with no visible cancer cells can be found. It’s all done within an hour, and the guy is nice enough to prescribe some T3s for afterwards too.
At the infirmary, “vacation” continues; for five days, I can just push a button and say,
“Can I get my pain meds now?”
A gay male nurse encourages me to take care of my personal grooming more carefully.
Who am I trying to look pretty for?” I ask him.
“Look, I try to look my best when I come in here, and you should have the same attitude;
you look like a homeless person right now!”
“Well I have been homeless before.”
“But you’re not homeless now.”
The guy seems to be OK ; I make an effort, but not much of one.
1995, perhaps the longest and most hellish year of my entire life was finally is ending. While I’m still resting in the infirmary, the County of Boulder calls me in to court, and sent a pleasant mannered female deputy, a country girl in her forties, to come get me for my day in court. She frisks me before letting me climb up into the van, chains shackles and all. She ends the frisk with a couple of little pats on my balls. This was a much intimacy as I‘d had with a woman for a very long time now, and in my deluded fantasy, I see those two little pats as a sign of affection (in reality, the crotch area is fair game for officers of either sex, although many officers would just as soon leave that part out of their search routine). As a result of the minimal pat-downs that the crotch area generally receives, it is in fact a favorite place for contraband, at least when a strip-search seems unlikely.
The lady-deputy helps me into the van, and on the ride up, she asked if I was comfortable, if the heat was working properly. Her apparent concern for my well being seems strange.
I appear in court in Boulder. I’m informed of the charges against me. I accept a plea agreement for four sentences of twelve years run concurrently. I’m allowed to enter a plea of guilty and receive my sentencing in the same session.
One of my victims is there. She asks me, via the DA “why?”
I choose to answer, saying that I’d been shooting a lot of coke and wasn’t really thinking right when I did the robberies.
I apologize, “for any additional stress,” I’ve caused her. On the way back to the holding cell, a guard lets me know that she said to tell me “thank you,” for explaining and apologizing.
Christmas, then New Year’s Eve and Day pass unceremoniously. The only indication of the Holidays is Christmas dinner; some halfway decent real turkey, with all the trimmings, and a little cup of ice cream for dessert.
I take the bus back to the joint; spending another couple of days with a cell to myself in Cellhouse three, before being ordered to return to Cellhouse Seven.
Roommates are chosen on an informal basis; this one guy named Red said ‘Yeah, I know —-, he’d be a good cellie.” I’ve been exchanging small talk with this guy since DRDC, and I got the feeling that he was all-right too.
“That OK with you —-?” he asked. I nod and the guard, Sgt. Holden, gives us the go-ahead. I move in with Red, and we get along. He’s got TV, I still have no appliances. Mainly we both just like to read; we don’t really talk much.
Red’s job is graveyard shift in the boiler room and I still don’t have an assignment. I’m not going out of my way to find a gig.
Sometime in march of ’96, Red moves on to a single cell, and this younger white dude, who I’ll just call Chris, (If I wanted to use his real name I couldn’t anyway, it’s been long forgotten) moves in.
At that time, I call a friend who’s been holding some of the money from mom ‘n dad for me, and I ask him to send it to me. I order at small, 99.00 color TV that the prison sells for 215, and a 80.00 typewriter for 140.
I type out a few letters to friends and relatives, and when the urge hits, I take my first stab at some creative writing, just a poem or two.
Yet again my tranquility is disrupted, and I have to go to the Denver county jail, to enter a plea on a dope case. The charge was possession of two tenths of one gram of cocaine, in powdered form. I get five years. The judge also orders that the five years are to be served concurrently with my other sentences. I enter my plea of guilty and accept the symbolic punishment. I’ve seen child molesters get less than five years.
The system has me, in terms of sentencing, somewhere between Joel Steinberg (basehead mob lawyer who beat his stepdaughter to death, and got twelve years on manslaughter one) and Manuel Noriega (He “just said no” to George Bush Sr.; they had to invade a country to arrest him, and American boys died in this “police action”). Yeah, they gave him more time than me, but the guy who killed the little girl got less time than “The BB Gun Bandit”. “Go figure” as they say here in the weird new west.
When I get back, I’m assigned to the dish-room, and ordered to cell with Mr. Edwardrunningfox Goode (actual spelling). I already know him. After finally finding a reserved spot in the chowhall, I know Mr. Goode as one of my table-mates.
He’s a black man in his late fifties who claims to be part Native American, hence his name. He practiced his own version of Orthodox Judaism fanatically. His personal hygiene isn’t the greatest, and he snores loudly at night. He’s got some serious PTSD symptoms; he would get a glazed look in his eyes if we watched a moderately realistic war movie set in Vietnam on my TV. His snoring sometimes makes it impossible for me to sleep;I had to devise schemes to make him stop. None of them work very well.
We become friends anyway, and walk the yard together and talk about things. One day he asks me, “What’s up?
I answer as vaguely as possible. “Well the moon she goes around the earth and the earth she goes around the sun.”
“Who told you that? That’s a lie!” Mr. Goode responds, in defense of the geocentric model of the universe. I choose not to argue this point.
He asks me not to smoke in the cell, and I an entirely reasonable request, so I go smoke in other people’s cells, or outside when possible. Sometimes that’s not good enough. I can’t return to the cell too soon after smoking.If I do he starts going off about:
“I can smell the smoke on you, that’s just as bad as if you smoked it in here!
I tell him that he’s welcome to watch my TV whenever he wants, while I’m out at work or on the yard. I get an hour and a half long break in the mid afternoon from the dish room; I take advantage of this free time by napping, or at least laying on my bunk and doing some relaxation techniques.
He insists on standing next to the bunk and watching TV while I do this. He keeps the little earphone plugged in, but this bothers me too, his movements and the flashing of the TV make it difficult to really rest. I insist on turning off the TV He grumbles a little, but lets it go after that.
At night, when his snoring sets in, first I try moving around on the top bunk and making some small bumping noises. Sometimes these noises half-wake him and change his breathing pattern.
When that doesn’t work, I raise the whole center of my body up and let it crash down. That works most of the time, but on some occasions I have to simply bring my fist down on the bare metal of the bunk, where my mattress ended, with a loud “Bam!”
One night this works a bit too well, and he wakes up in a Vietnam flashback. When he finally figures what’s happening, he’s angry. He tells me that I just need to be patient, that when he’s sleeping deeply enough, the snoring stops. We’re never able to reach an agreement on this issue, and realistically, you can’t tell someone to stop snoring.
I use the time to fantasize and masturbate. (The prison shrink discontinued my Mellaril, and at least I can wack off again). It’s bad form to masturbate in your cell while anyone else is in there. I don’t think he noticed; I’m sure I would have heard about it from him otherwise. Mr. Goode’s vehemently opposed to all forms of “perversion” as he calls it. Worst of all, he hates the homosexuals, both the overtly gay and effeminate ones, and the “real men” who take a gay lover while in prison. I debate this with him too, and then I give up. I just tell him I have no interest in other people’s sex lives, period. He cites examples of such indifference and tolerance bringing down divine retribution in the Old Testament.
It’s impossible to constructively debate anything with a religious fanatic. I learn to steer clear of controversy with Mr. Goode. He always angry, at me, at the system, at the other inmates for being gay, for not standing up to the man, for smoking, for being Moslems and not following all the rules. I learn that watching someone else’s anger is tiresome, and realize how many people had probably found my own anger tiresome at different times in my life.
I read Mr. Goode’s court documents, and it seems to me he’s been fucked over by the system badly. He’s got a good lawyer, or at least it seems so from his pleadings. I’m not too happy with “the system” either, but I’m fucking tired, feeling the last vestiges of youth drain from my body and soul. I often tell Mr. Goode that he’s preaching to the choir, but nothing stops his endless diatribes.
One day, Mr. Goode is stricken with some violent gastro-intestinal disturbance. He saves the strange green liquid he’s puking in a plastic bag, for purposes of proving that it’s a medical emergency to the guards. We walked all over the prison as he tries to get someone to send him to the infirmary.
We walked, from cellhouse, to guard-shack, to the Captain’s office. I’m just there to vouch for him later if someone tries to accuse him of snitching .By the time arrive at the captain’s offices, I’m hearing “oh no, it’s Goode and his bag of puke!” before we even make it to the door.
Finally he’s sent to the infirmary, and promptly discharged again for refusing treatment. He says they refused to tell him what medicine they wanted him to drink.
One day, I return from work in the evening. He’s watching my TV.
“Sorry, I’ve seen this one already,” I tell him and change the channel. “
“You have a very rude behavior!” He tells me in a stern and threatening tone of voice.
I tell him that he’s not the politest person in the world either, and he grumbles again about what would happen in “real prison.”
After a month with Mr. Goode, and working hard in the penitentiary dish-room, my name gets to the top of the waiting list for single-bunked cells. I make the move promptly, and for a day or two I was in heaven. Finally, I have “my own place!”
No one seems concerned about my rehabilitation here, in spite of all the “diagnostic” mumbo-jumbo that had taken place at DRDC. I actually start wanting to be “corrected”
‘Yes, I can use this time to ‘get my life turned around’ and to ‘start being positive!’
The shrink in the county jail had also told me that it was my chance to finally make the break with drugs. That’s not on my list of things to do however. I’m doing much in the way of drugs, but it’s only because as a newcomer I’m not privy to the dope channels, or trusted by the people who are.
However as April moves to May, I decide to make a break with the dish room. I ask me case manager, to enroll me in “Drug and Alcohol Class.”
He’s more than willing to do this for me (many people need to be coerced into attending these classes).
The class is not without its interesting moments. The amount of what I consider to be propaganda and disinformation being dispensed is very offensive and irritating, but I know where the line is. I question, argue, and bring up issues that the class seems to be sidestepping, but I always let the instructor have the last word, giving some monosyllabic response like “oh,” to let him know that he’s succeeded in sharing his insight with me.
“Mr. Buzzard,” as we call him (which is very close to his real name) is a blowhard; he tolerates little or nothing in the way of tardiness, missed classes, or failure to complete assignments. The class-work is simple and boring, and most of the homework is easy; I have no problems meeting these basic requirements.
Mr. Buzzard’s intelligent, opinionated, well educated, and his odd, right-wing libertarian views in his own words are “bordering on antisocial.” The class actually addresses the issue of arrestable versus unarrestable antisocial behavior, and although Mr. Buzzard’s got a “tough on crime” stance with regard to violent offenses. He also repeatedly makes the point that antisocial behavior by the powerful in society goes unpunished or is treated with excessive leniency and that this in his opinion is unfair.
He favors legalization of drugs. He also says strange things like “I think there should be factories where addicts can work and be paid in drugs and whenever one of them dies, their body should be processed into food for the other addicts.” He details this morbid sci-fi fantasy almost with a straight face. To this day, I’m not sure how serious he was about it.
We watch a movie a about a problem child, a little girl who’s been the victim of torture and sexual abuse during the first three years of her life. She’s adopted by a kindly couple, with a young son of their own.
The damage has already been done; she tortures and sexually assaults her new little step brother, and tortures the house pets too. As she grows older and stronger, she becomes increasingly dangerous.
Professional intervention becomes necessary, and she’s was taught to say “When I hurt others, I hurt my good self.”
She talks candidly on camera about her past behaviors, and seems to be genuinely concerned about her own “change process.”
The guy sitting on my right writes on his folder “When I hurt others, I feel good about myself.”
The guy on my left, a tall skinny speed freak named Shakey with a punk-rock Mohawk draws a wobbly, warped, and bubbly syringe on his folder, falls asleep and gets expelled from the class shortly thereafter.
Every Friday we watch a full length movie in class. We’re expected to write a review of it over the weekend, usually with three or four questions about the motives and morality of the characters that need to be answered in the review. It’s a good idea to take notes.
The selection of films is eclectic. We watch “Parenthood,” with Steve Martin and “Clean and Sober,” with Michael Keaton.
There are many other movies, usually with a theme of interpersonal dynamics within a family, or of sobering up and relapse. One especially poignant film with Robert DeNiro starring in it, has to do with the discovery of L-Dopa, and its seemingly miraculous initial effects, followed by the discovery of its horrible and debilitating side effects. I write about the individual vs. institution conflict in the movie, and also tie it in with another film, shown in the afternoon “personal relations” class, having to do with paralyzed junkies who shot up a bad batch of some street Demerol containing the compound MPTP. It left the addicts alive, but unable to move. The substantia nigra, the group of dopamine producing cells in their brains was destroyed by the MPTP, much as this same group of cells dies off in Parkinson’s patients. Mr. Buzzard gives me an “A” on the review.
The concept of how criminals function in a kind of denial, never believing they’ll get caught comes up in a discussion. I remark that I’d been counting on either getting shot or overdosing before they could catch me. The “hail of bullets” from police revolvers was my favorite death fantasy.
A morose, pale white man in his twenties with little round glasses and some kind of hillbilly accent says in a low, threatening tone, just loud enough for the whole room to hear “If this were a real prison, you would be dead.”
Maybe he’s right, but not for the reason he’s implying. He believes the “rat” rumor. Having no snappy comeback, I ignore him. Mr. Buzzard says “See, go to a state where they have real prisons next time.”
Much later, in an episode of repartee after the fact I come up with “If you were real person I’d give a fuck about what you had to say.”
The class is over all too soon. I’m given an “Award of Merit for Outstanding Achievement,” by Mr. Buzzard. I’ve graduated from drug and alcohol class with honors.
Not wanting to start working again right away, I sign up for janitorial school, a two hour long class in the morning, supplemented with various little “hands on” work study assignments at different times.
I get my basic, and then my advanced certificates, with an “A” average. The teacher, Jerry Canterbury, tells the infirmary sergeant that I’ve been doing good work cleaning the halls and the restrooms down there at the school every day and I’m promptly hired by the infirmary upon my graduation.
Memoir 1
I’m certain that I deserved to go to prison. I was not the innocent man, or the peaceful drug offender. I was among the lowest of street scum, a small time junky hood who would deal, con, rob and steal, often more out of sheer boredom than any genuine need for drugs. In that sense, I can say I was a success; that was who I’d set out to become, consciously, with premeditation after my own unarrestable but despicable behavior showed me once and for all who I really was. So why not be what others see, and do my best to live up to their fantasies? I was living in my own trashy and surrealistic novel, an ongoing narrative of actions and sensations streaming through my mind, as if I was already writing the script for the movie based on those days. All that is in fact a “whole other story,” but the result was that I ended up in prison, more or less convinced that it was where I belonged and what I deserved.
Remember that lame old ad that showed a forlorn-looking panhandler holding a paper cup receiving a coin from someone passing by with the voiceover stating with certainty that “nobody wants to grow up to be a junky?” Well I wanted to. I knew it was just a question of time before I found the needle. I didn’t want to grow up to go to prison at the age of 35, but I knew at least on a subconscious level that it was coming. I had nightmares about it years before my first felony conviction.
I felt that perhaps the sentence I received was too harsh for my actual crimes, but that I deserved it for other things that could not be defined within the Colorado Revised Statutes. Could I be charged with being “one cold motherfucker” or a “crazy desperate asshole” or in the final analysis, just a “dumbass?” What I had done to my first wife and child by repeatedly choosing to inject myself with sacred poisons was horrific even in my own eyes, yet not something anyone chose to formally charge me with. What I had done to my lovers both male and female, falling in love with them, winning their love, and then systematically killing the relationship so I could do the whole thing over again is as common as it is depraved, but not a crime.
Some fucked up credit card/Santa Claus western notion of karma named the sentencing judge as its agent in my mind, but by the time I was in the state prison system, I had shed many burdens, and lessened my demands from life. Things can always get worse, but given time, patience, and willingness to alter one’s own perceptions, they usually get better. From the concrete floor of the City Jail holding area to the stinky little one man cells with two or three men packed in, things change. Even if you end up sleeping with your feet next to the toilet, or under the bunk, things have improved, because you have a mattress. You might even get a blanket. By the time you get to your county jail cell, you have sheets, a blanket, and a mattress with a built-in pillow-like hump at one end. Things seem to get better until the withdrawal sets in.
“In the East B.F. Egypt Adult Detention Facility, I went into methadone withdrawal while incarcerated for the fourth time. My nerves turned to white hot barbed wire, my flesh turned to scalding red jello.”*
Martinez is snoring. He’s not a bad guy really, just a Chicano methamphetamine dealer unlucky enough to get caught with a shotgun, but lucky enough to have no meth with him, except in his bloodstream. Now he’s catching up on some sleep. It’s not like I can sleep anyway, I feel like there are hundreds of tiny fishhooks being dragged through my flesh while tiny worms eat the muscles of my extremities. Every couple of hours it feels like someone kicks me in the gut one time, but good. This is methadone withdrawal,. I send a kite to the infirmary, seeing if I can get something to take the edge off.
It was January 15th 1995 when that last, horribly bungled robbery put me in that shit-hole of a suburban Jail, the Adams County Detention Facility. This is my first time in Adams County, and in Boulder and Denver they at least give you something, like clonidine, Tranxene, or Phenergan, to get you through that agonizing first few days. The kite comes back with the following written on it:
“We are sorry sir; we don’t treat withdrawal from drugs.” It’s Tylenol and water from then on. I toy with the idea of suicide, but some perverse aspect of my personality rejects it at an option.
I was at fault in even creating the smallest chance that this could happen, and the fact was that it almost had to happen; but I also decided that in time someone would pay for making me suffer in this way.
People are not denied medications for migraines, depression, upset stomachs, constipation, and a host of other non-lethal ailments that seem to be endemic to county jails, but withdrawal is viewed as deserved suffering that is unworthy of treatment. In most cases, people survive withdrawal from heroin, morphine and methadone, although I still insist that methadone is the worst of the three. Unlike alcohol withdrawal, withdrawal from narcotics is generally not considered to be life-threatening, however, the pain and misery of the experience has driven people to suicide, and lethal seizures can result from severe withdrawal. As I write this today, only Denver County out of all the county jails I’ve been held in has started an experimental program of providing inmates with methadone at the country’s expense. Early results of this and other experiments seem to indicate that inmates treated with methadone in jail, are less likely to re-offend when released. It’s just common sense. Boulder County, the wealthiest county I have ever served time in, let me suffer through withdrawal with only the mildest of medications to take the edge off, although they did not cut off my Xanax prescription. Now, I hear you can get methadone in Boulder too, but it will cost you 25.00 dollars per day. I am sure that all who can afford it, fork over the 25 bucks gladly.
Martinez is still snoring. I read the graffiti that has been painstakingly scratched into the paint, with some contraband piece of metal that an inmate can always find; a staple, the clip from an ID badge, maybe even a “shiv.” Too many gang names to keep track of but the West Side Ballerz, and the GKI are prominent. Someone else has carved their own commentary into the discussion “Fucking gang-banging pussies grow up fuckheads!” County time is always the hardest time, unless one enters the prison system with delusions of being “a real man,” a sure ticket to supermax.
Suffering grows familiar and banal, the concept that there is any alternative to it fades. Lack of distraction from the withdrawal becomes my nemesis. I don’t really sleep for about a month. To endure the suffering was no act of strength and bravery; there simply wasn’t any other choice. Complaining would not have yielded any positive result.
People tell me that I should spend a little time outside of the cell, and walk around a little, maybe use the exercise machines. Most days I just stay in bed, getting up only for meals which I usually give away, the medication nurse, and the occasional chess game. I have no money for commissary at first, and from time to time someone offers me a cup of black, foul-tasting instant coffee made with hot tap water. I accept this brew gratefully, and sometimes it elevates my mood enough to play chess or board games.
After a sleepless month I put in a request form or “kite” as they are called asking to see the shrink. I also get up the nerve to ask my parents for some money for commissary. I feel horrible, guilty as hell for what I’ve done to them this time; there is no need to feign remorse.
I ask for more money than I really need. At this point I’m starting to face the reality of a substantial prison sentence.
More than anything, I just want to sleep. The doctor gives me Sinequan, an odd antidepressant with heavily sedating side-effects that decrease rapidly as the body adjusts to the drug. When the Sinequan stops working, he prescribes imipramine. The imipramine works better. I’m able to make a few trips to the Boulder county jail on the basis of some foolish confessions I had made, thinking that this would help my cause and possibly get me transferred to Boulder for the rest of my pre-sentence confinement.
All I get are extra felonies on my record, with shorter sentences run concurrently with the longest one. However there are a few blessed weeks in Boulder with Tranxene, a long lasting benzodiazepine drug, that a kindly female psychiatrist in Boulder prescribes to me through the jail infirmary (most jails don’t allow such things). This makes the accursed worms beneath my skin to stop crawling, so that I cam actually stand to be awake.
My pre-sentence confinement lasts 265 days. The jail-shrink prescribes another heavily sedating psych med, in this case the “antipsychotic” Mellaril. Between that and the imipramine, I I’m to avoid being awake more than six or seven hours a day. Eventually I can eat again. I develop an extreme sugar habit, buying cookies, candy bars, and junk food from canteen, along with the almost obligatory ramen noodle soups.
I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and a Steven King anthology. I read Sartre’s The Age of Reason and much in the way of obscure, escapist science fiction. I listen to jailhouse preachers in impromptu bible study and rap-sessions but fail to see the light. My weight goes up to 170 pounds from its junky-slim 130 lbs.
I don’t care that my physique is like that of “The Penguin,” I just sleep more and eat more sugar. A pre-sentence investigator tells me she’s recommending a halfway house or treatment program. All I can think of is just how long it would take me to get out the door, down to the dope-zone, and start speedballing.
Some crack finds its way in. I trade my headphone radio for a couple of hits, these two young white dudes get a piece and we smoke it through a chicken bone, making torches with yellow legal pad paper ignited by an arc using wire, pencil lead, and the light switch. We smoke up the cell, and all of the rock, but for some reason the guards don’t to notice a thing.
On another occasion some methamphetamine comes in with a meth-cook who I’d met in the Denver county jail a while back. I don’t even like that stuff very much, but it’s an opportunity to do drugs in jail. It’s always hard to say exactly how contraband gets in to a facility. In a non-smoking county jail, the occasional appearance of a full pack of “Cadillacs” (complete, regular cigarettes) would seem to point to really lax security or even staff complicity. But sometimes, after going through the facility’s screening procedure, it becomes obvious that certain drugs could only have come from one place, out of someone’s asshole. “Keestering it” or “putting it in the safe” are a couple of the euphemisms used.
Cavity searches are almost unheard of because now the law requires that they be done by qualified medical personnel. In Denver County I once heard a guard say “if it’s in your ass, it’s yours, we don’t want it.”
The days move, slow befouled, constipated time, unlike my intestines that continue to go into spasms at random times, when something would come up and kick me yet again. The term “writhing in peristalsis” appears repeatedly in the narratives and “cut ups” of William S. Burroughs, but one can only understand exactly why after going through untreated withdrawal a few times. For a long time I simply can’t stand to be awake at all, because the nightmare of being conscious could only stop if I awakened from it into sleep.
I hear about Oklahoma City, and I think “Good, someone finally hit back,” as the reality of a senseless war crime by a half-witted white supremacist hasn’t yet sunk in. I get a crude tattoo of a bomb on my left arm using a sharpened staple.
Towards the end of the summer, I enter a plea of guilty while heavily medicated, somehow convincing the judge that I understand the full ramifications of my plea, although I don’t. In September, I appear before another judge, Michael Ensor. I tell him that I did it, there is no excuse and that I deserve whatever I get. The judge agrees and gives me 16 years, the maximum possible sentence under the plea agreement. I thank the judge and my attorney as I leave the courtroom.
My existence is improving again. I have nothing left to worry about. The shrink tells me “Now don’t catastrophise,” and while it is hard to define a 16 year sentence as anything less than a catastrophe, I know what he means. I continued to prepare myself mentally for the state prison, talking to more experienced inmates about life “behind the walls” and trying to imagine just how I would fit in to that society. By now I’m just “crazy”. Heavily medicated and clearly not caring what I look like, the label comes to me naturally. In prison culture, there are many worse things to be than crazy.
One of our fellows is Iranian. The white boys harass him mercilessly until he begs the guard to move him, at which point they all start calling him a rat. The guards move him to another pod. There’s a kid they call “Rubberhead,” and his shaven skull with a little Hare Krishna style tail in the back looks like rubber, for sure. I’m coming to accept my fate more as each day passes, but can’t not summon up the bravado and humor that some of the repeat offenders display. For a while, I eat with the “brothers” at their table, which was the ping pong table with the net removed. The other whites seem to want nothing to do with me but the six or seven some odd black guys in the pod –the number changed as people came and went- don’t seem to mind my presence. I usually give away a substantial portion of my tray to someone or other. Even though I can eat again, the jail food remains nauseating.
One day at lunch, an older white convict with a shaved head invites me to sit at his table, sayins “you don’t have to sit with them.,” I accept his invitation. I figure that I won’t really be missed by the blacks, but if I turn down this invitation, it will be an insult to one of my elders, the kind of people who in time will tell me what I need to know to survive, not just physically, but psychically too. In prison I would get to know some of the black lifers too, but race wasn’t the issue, what I needed was the wisdom of experience, knowledge that only comes over time, and at a high price. In the prison, the madhouse, the halfway house and treatment programs, or for that matter concentration camps, this type of simple but vital knowledge is the most valuable gift that one could hope to receive from another inmate.
I buy another headphone radio to replace the first one that I’d traded for a couple of crack hits; it turns out to be a SONY, a lot better than last one. I start going out to the “yard.” Yard time consists of being allowed outside for an hour in the afternoon or evening. “Outside” is a small triangle of concrete surrounded by the walls of the jail itself, and covered with a heavy wire grid. If I look up, the sky can be seen through the grating.
I go to night yard and pace around with the radio on, listening to a Denver hard-rock station, and trying hard to find something acceptable in the whole scenario. I see my first glimpse of a different kind of freedom, a feeling that some prisoners eventually find they can’t live without. It is the freedom to not give a shit about anything, to go crazy, to forget.
Three weeks after sentencing I’m transferred into the custody of the Colorado Department of Corrections. The guard up in the glass cage calla my name, mispronouncing it so badly that I don’t know who he’s calling at first. When I finally figure it out and leave my cell, he tells me to “pack it up”. A crowd of people gather around my door. They know I can’t take any of my canteen food with me. Greedy and vulture-like, hovering with their hands out, most get what they came for as I keep giving stuff away, until finally the guard comes down and runs them all off. As I leave the pod with what is left of my life stuffed into one large clear plastic trash bag, little bits of parting advice find my ears,
“Don’t let ‘em get to you!”
“Don’t take no shit from anyone,”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be OK, just do your own time mind your own business, don’t bother no one they won’t bother you.”
One of the guards offers his own trite attempt at humor:
“Don’t bend over to pick up the soap…”
I have one fruit pie left and I eat it in the holding cell while waiting for the van.
Intake
We make the short trip to the Denver Diagnostic and Reception Center (DRDC) from Adams County, there are two other guys in the van. They take away my county jail uniform and replace it with an orange jumpsuit. They give me a pair of state-issue shoes, heavy, black “Plainsman” work boots, with carefully notched soles to ensure good footprints. They take away my headphone radio and give me the option of donating it to Goodwill Industries, which I do. Ordinary dry-cell batteries are contraband in CDOC. They say you can make explosives out of them.
We have lunch; the food is much better than anything the county had ever serves, but they don’t give us enough time to eat it all. Fifteen minutes after the first to be served sat down, they march us back to our cells, so the folks toward the end of the line are just out of luck. I only get to have a couple of bites of the delicious chocolate pudding and processed “whipped topping” pie.
As we enter the huge three tiered housing unit, I hear a guard yelling at someone making some noise up on the third tier.
“Shut the fuck up. Just where do you think you are the county jail?”
The guard, a thin middle aged black man looks at us, saying quietly, “Oh, that just makes me so mad.” I silently thank the guard. I have no desire for any more jail noise either.
Until we can be “diagnosed” and classified, we are all considered to be maximum security inmates. We are housed in separate cells, and only allowed out for meals, showers, and the various components of the intake procedure.
One afternoon as filled with standardized I.Q. and psychological testing, with the familiar #2 pencils and answer sheet covered with rows of little boxes to fill. That little smear of pencil lead will become a piece of binary code in a computer that eventually will become some minuscule part of a report, to be glanced at by a bored case-manager, filed, and forgotten.
Medical looks at a small tumor on my finger that’s been bleeding on and off ever since the county jail. The Dr. in Adams County had said it was a wart, and offered to look at it again in 90 days. At DRDC, a young PA decides to cut it off and send it for a biopsy. I tell him that at one point it had been removed, diagnosed as a basal cell carcinoma, and grown back, which he take a bit more seriously than the county jail doctor. He even prescribes about five days worth of Tylenol/codeine #3 for me, for which I am most grateful.
Codeine, quietude, a few readable books with a religious theme, novels of Jews escaping the Nazis from Poland, and heading for Palestine, better food than I’d had for a long time, and, after a few days, tobacco. It’s as close to paradise as I’ve been for a long time. CDOC has not yet banned smoking throughout the system. Only the tier porters, guys who’ve gotten hung up at DRDC for one reason or another, and taken janitorial jobs to get a little more time out of the cells, have lighters. The guards make sure that the tier porters make the rounds with the lighters at least four times a day. I haven’t ordered any canteen yet, but I trade a bottle of shampoo for a decent little sack of bugler and some papers. When I light that first smoke, I feel, for the first time in a long time, that life is good again.
My hair gets filthy and greasy from lack of shampoo; if I take my little blue stocking cap off, (a valuable item that DOC issues to all incoming prisoners), my hair sticks out in all directions in sharp angular tufts and clumps. A drug counselor comes to see me; he asks me many questions which I answer honestly. He asks me about my hair, and I just shrug. Why should I care? I have no one to be pretty for. He asks me to try to have my hair clean when he came back. I don’t.
He’s got some intake form for something called the “Crossroads to Freedom House,” a prison Therapeutic Community (TC) for serious drug offenders and violent offenders with drug problems. I refuse to sign it or have anything to do with it, telling him that I just don’t think I’d fit in, in a TC. I stop shaving for the time being. I try washing my hair with state issued lye-soap, but that just makes it worse. Finally, a fellow prisoner takes pity on me and tosses me his shampoo bottle.
We have individual showers out on the tier, with no curtains. No need to worry about bending over here; the worst that can happen is some perverted guard behind the tinted glass in the cage looking at your asshole.
We’re shuffled from one building to the next, after one week. After the second week is done, we we’re shuffled to a third building. By that time we have been diagnosed and classified. I meet with a case manager who simply advises me to avoid hot UAs and “refusal to work” write-ups, if I ever want tpmake parole. A mental health woman lectures a group of us about the treatments available, including a couple of “therapeutic communities” within the prison system for drug offenders and sex offenders respectively. She says that successful participation in a TC could significantly shorten a sentence, and that even inmates with very long sentences and life sentences can benefit, in terms of the type of time they will end up serving. She asks us to tell someone if we’re thinking about suicide. She also advises against it.
“You’ll go out of here in a body bag, and you’ll be forgotten pretty quickly, that’s all you’ll accomplish.”
