By Joshua Ryan

He stopped the car in something that looked like a garage or an old bus depot.  There was even a bus parked in there, and a whole line of guys climbin off of it.  They were all dressed like me — I mean they were all wearing cuffs and shackles!  Their clothes were all different, though.  Some of them were wearing those cool jailhouse stripes that you always see online, and some of them were dressed in various styles of orange.  About half of them were like me — normal clothes.  I could see what was happening.

This bus had stopped at a few jails, and some of these were guys like me that had just reported for prison, like I was “supposed” to have done, but some of them had been sittin in jail already.   Not enough money, I guess!  But they were all going to prison.  And so was I!  It didn’t take long for me to take my place in line with them.  Lieutenant Brannigan pulled me out of the back seat, and a friend of his came up, another gray-uniformed DOC goon, and I was swept away, into the tide of bodies comin off the bus.  Too bad I didn’t get to know the Lieutenant better — I’d never had a hunk like that grabbing my crotch before.

So I ended up someplace in the middle of this long queue — like the queues at Warbucks but a lot hotter!  Lol!  Or maybe like those lines where you wait for a ride at Disney!  Difference was that this one had assholes in gray stomping up and down, telling you to “close up that line!” and “I thought I told you to shut your face!” and looking as mean as possible, though outside of that and their huge cop suits and badges and belts with sticks hanging off of them, and handcuffs — like we needed some more! — they were just young guys like you’d see in a class or something.  Well, not at St. Swithin’s or Kingston, but maybe in a junior college class.  OK, that’s just my fantasy — when did I ever go to junior college?  Point is, they were just ordinary dudes with this huge attitude.  Gotta say from what was going on with some people’s shoulders and postures and neck angles, a lot of the guys in line had an attitude problem too!  But I couldn’t see that much; all I could do was stand in line.

When I finally got into this little office they have, you could see they were prepared for a crowd, because they had three cops at the counter to deal with us.  My cop took my fingerprints with a neat little machine he had, and he did a lot of looking at his computer screen.  After a while I thought he must be through with me, but he flipped a switch and reached under the counter and pulled something out and said, “Right arm.”  I gave him the arm, and before I knew it he put a strip of plastic around my wrist and clamped it on.  I looked down and saw a barcode, but when I turned it more I saw

ABBOTT CARL OWEN D.O.C. 759384

I pulled the thing, trying to see how you’d take it off.  “Doesn’t come off,” he said.  “That’s your number.”

“My number?” I replied, like a dumbass.

He gave me the kind of look a dumbass is supposed to get.  “Your convict number.  That’s you.  From now on.”  Then he took my wallet and my phone and my keys — why was I even carrying my keys? — and he made a list and made me sign a paper about how my possessions were to be “disposed of” and how my body would be “disposed of” in the event of my demise!  So that’s when it started gettin total!

He put my stuff in a baggie and closed it and dumped it with a thud someplace behind the counter, and I couldn’t help it — my stomach sank about 1,000 feet below ground.  But right away a cop was yelling at me to move my ass and so on, and me and two other guys got herded through a door and into a room where a lot of guys were already standing, and we were told to “toe the line!”, meaning this line that was painted on the floor.  So this was the room where we were gonna get Processed — you come in as a prisoner and you leave as an inmate!

From my perspective it was all chaotic, but I knew that was just in my head.  This was a factory, and the product had been made thousands of times before.  One step would lead to another, and I’d come off the line as a fully arrived, fully processed convict.  So I listened for orders and tried to do what I was told.  Although I did get run into a few times by other prisoners who were stumbling around like they were deaf.  The orders were coming fast, especially for a guy who’d never been given orders in his life.  I mean, in my family it was always, “I expect that you’ll want to” do such and such (which very obviously I didn’t want to do).  And in college, you know how it is.  If they say, “Mr. Abbott, you might consider making an appointment with your curriculum advisor,” you’re supposed to know that you have a problem and you’d better go see that guy.  But in prison, you don’t need to wonder.  It’s just “YOU! I told you to GET your ass over THERE!  Toe that line!”  You find out there’s certain things they love.  They love guys in lines.  They love lines on the floor.  They love total control.  “Strip off!  Yeah, I mean ALL of it!  It ALL goes!  Everything in the boxes — GO!”  And they love to YELL.

After they take you out of your cuffs and shackles, they make you wish you were back in those nice, quiet, secure restraints and everything wasn’t, like, goin nuts all around you.  I’m talking about 20, 25 dudes lined up all at once, strippin down, showin their pits, showin their MOUTHS, liftin their dicks, twistin their dicks, pullin their cheeks — it was so amazing, if I could see a vid about it, I’d watch it from now on, forever.  Especially if the star of the vid was me!  I’d love to see myself losing All My Earthly Possessions, even my fuckin PHONE!, which I’d already had to shed, back in that office, and then doing this death dance in front of a hot young officer who looked even more muscleheaded than Lieutenant Brannigan, while another hot young dumbass stands by and smirks.  Or maybe ogles.  Probably both.  Not to mention jamming his hand up my ass!  I was in some serious pain!  I got the feeling that the guy would have stayed in there a lot longer if he didn’t have so many other guys to service.  It was all about love — they loved to do it, and I loved to get it.

And if you wanted to know if this stuff was real and not just some fantasy you read about, you could check your humiliation meter and see how far down they were pushing you.  When I got to the part where I had my picture taken, my meter was getting close to zero — and then it went down some more.  I’d never had my mugshot taken before, except at the DMV, and that doesn’t count, and this was extreme, because you had to stand at the wall naked and they took you from the front and the sides and the back and if you had any tatts or scars you got a special close up.  So the scar I got from that silly bike accident on Maui, that came to light, and they zeroed in on my thigh, and you know what’s right next to it!  I heard a lotta guys gettin yelled at because they were tryin to cover their junk, which I guess is natural if you aren’t proud of it, but I am, so when my mugs were over I almost said, “Thank you for my screen test,” but of course I didn’t.

Actually, though, despite what I said, the most humiliating thing about Processing was standing there waiting between the acts, with my dong stickin out like a fuckin pipe!  I loved it!  Officer Smirk couldn’t get enough of it.  I thought he was gettin ready to grab the thing and slap some cuffs on it.  I’m not saying all this stuff because I’ve got a big, obvious dick, but … I’ve got a big, obvious dick.  At one point he was nudging the other cop, and they were both having a laugh at the horny animal they’d caught.  Check the humiliation meter again — it’s off the charts!

I wasn’t the only one.  When I looked down the line, I saw half of these dudes with boners.  Although they didn’t look like they were totally letting themselves enjoy it.  Tell you the truth, this was the first time I’d ever been in a group of guys that you’d call working class.  Or non-working class, since most of them seemed like they’d been keeping as far away from work as possible.  Real work, anyway.  The basic groups, as they came off the bus:  First, street kids in washed-out jail stripes, acting tough but looking like they were really missing their abuela.  Next, college drop-out types wearing whatever, with loose, floppy hair (like mine!), and looks on their faces like, “I don’t know why I’m here.”  Then 30-somethings or 40-somethings who came in wearing nice clothes, maybe ties (only a couple of these) and being OVERWHELMED with EMBARRASSMENT whenever anybody ordered them to do something.  And me.  I was the fourth food group.

But we all ended up in the showers together, with five minutes to soap up and soap off, and about half an ounce of soap to go around, and that was interesting, because the hardons happened in all those groups, and they just wouldn’t go away, even after the next thing happened, which was, like, my favorite thing of all.  (Well, I had so many favorites, but right at the moment…)  As soon as the shower heads shut down, which was before I could get all the so-called soap off — but OK, the water temperature was less than ideal, so even I didn’t want to loll around in the shower, thinking about how it would be to get with some of those great lookin bodies — we were handed our first prison uniforms!

I knew they were gonna give us something.  They’d have to.  But what they gave us was definitely a surprise: it was just a skimpy little orange combo — orange tee, orange shorts, and some weird orange plastic shoes that weren’t actually shoes.  I pulled on the shorts and the tee — man, somebody had been using massive industrial soap on these things!  I could have been smelled from a mile away.  It really makes you feel like you’re IN something when the smell is all over you like that.  I took a couple steps in my plastic horseshoes.  Definitely, it would be a man-size job learning to walk in those things.  It was funny how everybody looked like they were back in school, wearing their little PT outfits with the name of the school printed on them, only this time it was DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS.  Black letters, on the pec, on the thigh, on the BUTT, and way big across the back.

So we were starting to look like we were all the same.  Even the dudes with the tudes were gettin all mushed together with everybody else, and the only difference seemed to be that everybody but them was pushin a big boner under those little shorts.  And maybe them too, if I hadn’t been nervous about looking too close.  Anyway, interesting to see all those dicks gettin shoved into a set of prison shorts, and not really fitting.  The dudes that were missing their shotcallers didn’t care; they were cholos no matter what.  But the young dudes named Eli and Hudson kept looking at their rods like, what is this?  Why is this stickin out?  The older guys, they just kept looking around like they’d stumbled into the wrong committee meeting.  As for me — mine was actually pushing right out of one leg of my skimpy little shorts!  Definitely a pride moment for me, and too bad that I felt I had to persuade it back.  But yeah, standing up in my first prison uniform, all bright orange and stenciled up, and feeling SO good about my bad boy boner and how my interest in prison had definitely not waned.  All good!

I wish I could have stood that way forever, but the next thing was, I was herded to a room where two gay guys in nurse’s scrubs were giving free medical exams.  “Free” — but you couldn’t refuse.  I’d had a couple of exams before, because I went out for track at St. Swithin’s.  This one went faster — a lot faster.  One of them said, very faggy, “This is an EXAMINATION to determine if you are ELIGIBLE for INCARCERATION,” like it was about getting into Harvard.  Which for me it was!  More!  But, unlike Harvard, I knew I’d get in.  There were two of those nurses, one black and one white; this was the white one.  He was the one that took the blood samples, and I don’t recommend his methods.  A good thing: I had to piss in a cup, which I was happy to see was a big one, because I was getting pretty needy.  When I handed it in, the black one gave me that crinkly little nose thing that meant he was smelling something AWFUL, because I’d put so much of my yellow gunk in his cup.  “OK, you’re finished,” he said, being a bitch like the other one.  “Getbackinline.  And don’t gimme no attitude.”

So now I was backinline with all the other guys dressed up in their little orange shorts and boners, and as you can imagine, I was feeling totally good about making it that far.  I mean, all those processes they’d put me through — what could be left?  Unless there was something in that piss that I didn’t know about, I was now in prison for life!  OK, 25 to life, so what?  I’d make sure I kept being a bad boy and never got out.  I didn’t like seeing all those other dudes looking so unhappy, but I guess they had the right to feel the way they wanted.  They’d paid their ticket the same as I had, only they did it by committing crimes and not by forking over 100K.  Anyway, we were all where we deserved to be, right?  Right!

I stood in line being happy for maybe an hour or so, and then there weren’t any more guys coming back from the exam room.  What now?  The what was, two of those goofs in gray uniforms stopped walking around thumbing their phones and told us to march.  By the way, I loved that word!  I’d never “marched” before.  The only guys who marched were, like, soldiers, or guys in a marching band, both of which you were supposed to be real proud that they let you be.  When they “march” they’re, like, showing off.  So that was the point of telling us to “march” — it was, what’s the word?, a parody.  It was like wearing a uniform, which in the army you’re supposed to be proud of, but in prison, it’s exactly the opposite.  In prison, everything’s meant to show that you have nothing to be proud about.  It’s all just a joke on you.  So, once I’d caught onto that, my boner was back!  Didn’t take much.

So, they MARCHED us deeper into “the facility,” which is what the cops liked to call it.  Lots of heavy steel doors and long hallways and other steel doors.  Finally we reached our modest hotel, the place where the Department of Corrections was gonna stow us till it figured out where to send us next.  There were a lotta formalities about checking us into Section Number 1, but basically it was just a hallway with steel doors on each side — long rows of doors, all numbered in black.  One sorta scary thing — there were little windows in the doors, where you could see guys looking back at you, but if they tried to say something you couldn’t hear it; you could just hear a soft little ummt-mumpt-nummt or something like that.  So they might as well have had their tongues cut out.  There were also hatches on the windows, so the guards could shut them if they got tired of seeing the faces trying to say something.  Meanwhile, they were opening doors and putting guys into whatever was on the other side, and locking the doors, then doing the same to the next guy in line.  So this was it!  I was about to be locked up!  Locked in my own little box.  Which happened — the door slammed, and I could hear all kinds of locks and bars shutting it down.  Suddenly I was alone in the place where I’d wanted to be but had never really imagined what it would be like.

The box was beyond small; it was just large enough for the shelf I was given to sleep on, a tiny sink, and a metal toilet without a seat — oh wonderful!  Never saw anything like that before!  I hope I can keep my ass clean, LOL!  No window, unless you count that little thing on the door where I’d seen the faces.  I did like I guess everybody else does — I went to the door and stuck my face in the window and tried to see whether there was anybody still in that hallway.  Which there wasn’t, as far as I could see, although I did sort of feel the vibes from some other doors that must have been slamming down the hall.  Or maybe that was my imagination.  All I could see was a face looking back at me from the cell on the other side.  Which was sort of scary — you know, like a mirror with a ghost in it!  But those little windows all have steel wires embedded inside them, so I couldn’t really see what the face was doing.  So much for attempts to communicate!

I gave that up pretty soon and lay down on the shelf, which was as hard as shit and the fuckin mattress was just this plastic thing that was about one inch thick.  My first experience of the classic prison mattress!  But I was happy and I fell asleep.  Later on I had to get up because they were passing dinner through an opening in the door.  Not too bad!  You can’t beat meatloaf, even if it’s over-cooked.  Then somebody came around and picked up the tray again.  But I don’t need to tell you all this stuff.  I was in that box for seven days, and there wasn’t much going on.

There was food, of course!  Really didn’t mind it.  Except the oatmeal.  Hate that shit.  What I worried about most — is this stuff gonna make me fat?  Cuz there was so much fat in it.  But you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t change.  The food helped me learn that.  Which is worth a lot more than almost anything else I ever learned.  So food was a big event.  Also looking up sometimes and seeing a face staring at me RIGHT in my window!  Why do people like scary stories?  I don’t know, but I didn’t mind getting scared by The Face, which was just some cop looking in to make sure I didn’t kill myself.  Like I was gonna do that, after all the trouble I’d taken to get in!  Of course I spent a lot of time thinking, almost all about how proud I was that I’d figured this out and made all these good decisions about my life, which my brother never thought I’d be able to do, and I’d snared this great position for the rest of my life, without any help from my family or recommendations from my professors, or networking or internships or Roped In or anything.  So I spent a lot of time just looking at DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS on my chest and gloating about where I was.

I got a kick out of reading the Rules for Inmates that were posted in big letters on the wall across from my shelf.  My favorite part was where it said:

“The Department of Correction is not responsible for your presence in this Facility.  You are here because you committed offenses for which custody in the Department of Corrections is the price you have to pay.”

I fuckin loved that!  Granted, I’d only committed my offenses in some imaginary story made up for my records, but they did make me a criminal.  I was paying the price for all these things that went on in my imagination.  The price was real, and now everything was real.  Those words on my chest were the proof!  Probably you were supposed to get some deep spiritual experience out of being locked up by yourself with nobody to talk to.  If so, I was having one!  Thank you, D.O.C.!   I certainly wasn’t bored during the time I was in there.  Maybe I did put on a few pounds.

Every couple of days they took me out of my cell for a shower and a new set of orange.  And to shave myself with a little plastic razor.  That was good.  I don’t like having a beard.  Showering in a cage, which is where they made you do it — that really gives you the naked animal in a zoo feeling.  You’re not Tarzan, but at least you’re an ape.  And one time I was cuffed up and marched out to an office where there was this guy who thought he was in some movie called “Shriver H. Pearce, Prison Psychologist,” and he asked me questions about how I felt about my crimes and about having to be in prison.  I got into the role of “Carl Abbott, Reformatory Brat.” and did a lot of shrugging and smirking and claiming that I liked prison fine.  Which of course he’d think was ridiculous and insulting.  So he got pretty abrupt with me and told me that my medical exam had turned up “no difficulties — I wish I could say the same for your attitude.”  Then collected all his sarcasm and told me, “Welcome to prison, Carl,” and I was marched back to my box.

I was trying not to get anxious about when I’d be taken to Maskawa, so I just focused on being happy about being locked up where I was.  But on the eighth day, I think, I was taken out of my cell and cuffed up and herded with a lot of other orange-clad dudes into a big cage on the loading dock.  It was obvious — “loading,” get it? — that I was gonna be loaded up and shipped to my final destination.  Good thing there was one of those little seatless toilets in the cage, because I was excited and I knew it would be a long trip.  And hey!  By that time I was SO used to the humiliation thing that I dumped an enormous load in the can, right there in front of everybody.  No problem for this formerly sweet little gay guy.

There were maybe a hundred dudes in the cage, dudes they’d been storing up so they could go out on the next shipment, and of course I loved being a bubble in that sea of orange.  Some of them were pretty hot, too, now that they’d gotten rid of their homeboy sneaks and their fratboy polos and their weird jail jumpsuits and scrubs and were just arms, legs, and heads jutting out of their totally-the-same clothes.  But I was getting nervous, seeing one group after another being taken out of the cage to be put on buses and sent to some prison or other.  It was like, they’re draining the swamp; maybe they’re gonna leave me high and dry.  Of course that was dumb; down deep, I knew the system would have to take care of me.  I was in custody!  And yeah, they went on down the list and called me!  Actually, they called four of us at the same time.  Then they stood us on the dock and took off our cuffs and made us take off our clothes and throw them in a bin.  We were out there in the early morning, about to freeze our nuts off, but there was a huge pile of white material sitting in one corner, and a cop pulled a hunk of it out and dropped it in front of us and said, “Put em on.”

The “em” were white jumpsuits with

PRISON TRANSPORT

stenciled in red letters across the back and down the leg.  Before I got to Owosso, I’d never even seen a jumpsuit before, except in those pictures of jails and prisons I’d been looking at — and also on Steven, when I saw him on the boat, don’t forget that! — so this was a HUGE present for me!  Literally huge!  These things were four sizes too big.  I mean, when I hauled my suit off the floor, it looked like you could’ve put me and another guy into it, with room to spare.  So if you want a TOTAL experience, I’d suggest going to jail in one of those things; it’s like you’re entering a whole new world.  When I was reading old books, I used to see this weird phrase — “prison garb.”  So THIS was GARB!  I climbed into it, enjoying all the new sensations.  Big, strong, tough!  No undies!  Just prison!  And no buttons or zippers — just a line of steel snaps.  Not clothes, just standard wrapping for the factory product.  While I was snapping myself into my garb a cop threw a bunch of flipflops at our feet.  I snapped the final snap and slipped my toes into my new footwear.  “This,” I thought, “is exactly what Steven was wearing when I saw him on the ship!”  The whole idea of Steven had seemed so distant and fantastic, and now I was practically BEING him!

So I was really proud when they went ahead and put cuffs and shackles on me and got me ready for Transport.  Then after we were all suited up, they pointed us toward a van that was parked out by the dock.  It was a van, not a bus, I guess because there were only four of us passengers.  The van was the size of one of those big blubbery SUVs that hog two spaces in the parking lot, but it was lots gnarlier.  It looked as a heavy as a tank, and the bars on the windows looked they made about half that weight.  The thing was white, with black letters on the side — DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS — and a special message:

STAY BACK!

CONVICT TRANSPORT

I was going to turn to the guy next to me and say, “Don’t you love being dangerous?”, but like most of the things I was tempted to say, I decided that wasn’t a good idea.

And that’s because — I didn’t tell you yet, but when you’re on the dock they make you link arms with the guy that happens to be on your left or right, and THEN they cuff your hands together, so you’re not only cuffed but you’re in this total cuff-up with the other guy.  It’s like you’re one guy now!  Like, NOT separated at birth!  And then you’ve gotta walk out to the van with this dude, like he’s giving you away in marriage, and you’re both shackled of course, so you’re both shuffling along like you’re 150 years old.  The guy they’d attached me to was 35 or 40, with gray in his hair and a build that looked like he went to the health club but missed a few sessions.  You could tell by the softness of his skin that he wasn’t used to working much; he was an executive type.  From the tan, I’m sure he played a lot of golf.  But the reason I didn’t want to make that wisecrack about “dangerous” was that he looked so … stoic.  Like I learned in my Roman Literature in Translation class.  Pained and disgraced and humiliated and all that stuff, but still kind of dignified, even under the circumstances.  So I didn’t want to be the punk kid making cracks.

We got to the door of the van, which was in the side, and then it was a fuckin comedy routine, trying to pull ourselves up inside there.  Me and my twin were assigned to the back seat, and we had about 12 inches of wiggle room to get back there.  We fell on the seat, and right away a cop pounced on us and fastened us in, and the van started up, and we were on the road.

I won’t go over all the things that the officers announced about not making noise and not making trouble and not asking where they were taking us, or the ridiculous sacks of “food” they passed out on the way, except that the food made me wish I was back in my cell at Owosso, where I could at least have some meatloaf.  The guy that was chained to me was very quiet, I was gonna say completely quiet.  He just kept looking out through the bars (which wasn’t easy; those bars were thick!).  But I decided to say, “Hey, my name’s Colly.  Too bad I can’t shake hands with you!”  Ha ha.  He didn’t laugh, but he said, “My name is Alexander.”  He stopped.  Then he said, “People I know call me Alec.”  Said it in this very sort of senior way, like he was part of the boss class.  Like my brother!  Only not like he had something to prove, which my brother always did.  Kind of sad and empty, but lots and lots older than I was, in every way.  “Where are you from, Colly?” he asked.  So I burbled out a lot of things, some of them true and some of them not really true.  He kind of listened, but when I ran down he didn’t say much of anything, and nothing about himself.   I sat there with his arm in mine, feeling his body and making up stories to myself about how he could have got there.  Also what it might be like if I got him alone!  I thought when they gave us our food he was gonna gag on it, but he didn’t, and I was starting to think about Steven again, and whether maybe he’d turn out to be like that guy.  I sort of hoped so.  I sort of hoped that he’d be the older leader type, who’d just tell me what I oughta do.  Very calm and cool and ready for anything, even though he might not be happy about it.  Like Danny in the stories, but older and … wiser.  Not smarter, just wiser.  Yeah, a great older guy!  I knew that Steven was in his 30s, but still, lots older than me!  Then I thought about how silly this guy Alec looked with his neat little head pointing out of his big white prison suit, and that reminded me of how silly Steven had looked on the ferry.  At least I was a young and (sorta!) fit young guy.  So it was funny, but that was all part of what made it great.

I fell asleep thinking about that, and when I woke up we were already off the freeway and there were signs saying how many miles to … the Maskawa Ferry!  The other guys — who were just young guys like me — were looking like, where are we going?  Alec was like, I was expecting this.  You can imagine how I felt!  Score another one for me — I was goin to Maskawa!

I recognized some things along the road, and when we got to that tacky village next to the ferry, I was laughing about the people on the street who were staring and even taking pictures.  It was funny, this was gonna be my last (tacky!) view of the mainland.  Next stop — Devil’s Island!

I don’t know how it was when they loaded Steven onto the ferry, but when they loaded me there was a big mob of tourists and shit standing in back of the ropes and watching as we stumbled out of the van and humped up the stairs.  Then they put us out on the deck — the same deck where I met STEVEN, three years before!  (Well, kind of met him.)  People from the lounge came out to stare at us, and one of them was some punk kid taking pictures — like me!  Only this college boy was showing the pictures to his buddies, and they were all pointing and laughing and then taking pictures themselves.  Just like apes at the zoo.  So how humiliating is that!  Here comes this, like, tour group of himbos, all buffed out in their skimpy little shorts and their shirts without sleeves and all the muscles showing, and I’m their main attraction!  I guess they thought I should be over-the-top humiliated because I was their age and already I was a total fuckin failure in life.  And I was!  No doubt about it!  And my pictures were gonna be all over social media.

There were some waves during the passage, and with all the excitement I hoped I wouldn’t start throwing up.  But I wasn’t the one drinking the beer and eating the tacos, so I made it all right.  I just kept watching that weird thing on the top of the island growing bigger and bigger.  Nobody else seemed to be looking at it, but I was, cuz I knew what I was seeing.  My future home!  And not so far in the future now.

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