By Joshua Ryan
Chapter 7: Everyone’s Dream Is a House of His Own
The three months were over, and it was a Sunday—time to celebrate the end of Training Team. The 16 convicts in my cell spent the day cleaning every inch of it, so we would leave it, as 7930 said, “much better than you found it.” Sergeant Wong came to inspect the cell, found problems invisible to us, and made us spend two more hours on “tidying up.” When he returned, the place had been re-cleaned, our bunks had been stripped, our gear had been piled on top of them, ready to travel, and we had dressed up in fresh uniforms, ready for our final inspection. Several of us needed to straighten our shirts or hitch up our pants or screw our caps more firmly onto our heads, but finally, with shoulders squared and eyes gazing resolutely forward, we left our barracks and marched to the Parade Ground, where Colonel Bridger was waiting to review us.
I don’t understand why I was so shocked. I knew he was running the place. I no longer assumed that was a good thing. I did hope I would never have to encounter him, that he would never see me in my convict suit with my number and picture clipped to my chest. Wrong again.
The 64 convicts in our “class” were formed into one long line in front of him, standing at Attention, gear in our arms in front of us. The sergeants and convict instructors stepped forward, sergeants in front. Sergeant Wong spoke: “Sir, we present 64 criminals for entrance to the Penitentiary, sir!” Three months ago I would have thought, “OK, we’ve been here for three months, and we’re still not in?” But I didn’t. I’d been Trained. “Entrance” didn’t just mean “being here.” It meant being a convict who was, physically and mentally, completely incorporated into the Penitentiary.
I looked at “the Colonel.” I’d never seen him in that fast-food uniform that all the officers wore. Now there he was—tall and firm, with pecs you could see from 50 feet away, and insignia on his shoulders that must be badges of rank. They didn’t change the uniform; they just increased the emphasis. Now I was sure that he was the one responsible for the guards’ outfits. By wearing a servant’s clothes, he announced that he was the final master. He could do as he pleased, and it had to be accepted, however it looked.
This was Gordy Bridger. This was the geeky college kid I’d slept with and fucked.
“Very well,” he said. “Prepare for inspection.”
“Attention!” the Sergeant shouted—unnecessarily, because we were already standing that way, but everything at Paris had to be too much.
The Colonel went down the line, inspecting us. He did it slowly and seriously, the way he probably did everything now. Then he got to me.
I was a convict in a convict suit, holding my convict gear in front of me, blue plastic pail and all, like—OK, like a delivery guy who’s lost the address. My address. The address for my whole life. And he was now my owner, totally in charge of me, totally empowered to send me wherever he wanted me to go, to do whatever he wanted me to do. He noticed me, in the way you notice an odd-looking beast in a zoo. He smiled. He seemed interested. He took a moment to inspect my posture, my uniform, my little bucket with my toothbrush and washcloth inside. He nodded—everything was the way it should be. He walked on.
When you stand at Attention, you fix your eyes forward. They can only see so much. They are not allowed to follow a moving object. So I couldn’t see what he did when he inspected the other convicts. Also, my eyes were blurry. It must have been tears.
His inspection completed, the sergeants formed us into our customary eight by eight queue, and the Colonel addressed us.
“Criminals! When you arrived three months ago, you were a random collection of offenders transported here from the county jail. You were animals that had been captured. Now you have been changed. Now you have been trained. Now you have been fitted for your life in the Penitentiary. The Three Questions are now central to your life. Major Xing, please lead these criminals in answering the Three Questions.”
Yes, Major Xing was there. He stepped forward from where he stood. He didn’t need to be in the center. All he needed was his voice.
“Criminals! Who ARE you? WHAT is this place? What are you DOING here?”
We yelled out, “I am a prisoner! This is a prison! I am here to serve my sentence!”
Major Xing bowed to the Colonel and returned to his position. “Thank you, Major Xing,” the Colonel said. Then he looked back at us. “Criminals!” he said. “I hear you! You are here to serve your sentence! You will now begin to serve it! The officers will escort you to your permanent location.”
Sergeant Wong bowed and shouted, “Thank you, Colonel Bridger!” We all bowed and shouted the same.
On the west side of the Parade Ground, on the opposite side from the Training Team, was a wall of concrete buildings I’d seen every day while I was being marched up and down. These structures were just like the rest: thick and squat, painted a depressed shade of yellow, with rows of square windows fitted with bars. They were all former warehouses, lining a street that was no longer there; but they were of different heights and sizes, two, three, and four stories high, stacked together as if a child had mixed up his toys and tried to build a town out of separate sets of blocks. These were the “cell houses” that Gordy had mentioned when we were dining together at La Bête Bleue. This is where I was now being “escorted.”
The file of prisoners snaked toward the cell houses. A sergeant was scanning badges and announcing destinations. “House C, Block 9,” he said, pointing me to an officer with two other prisoners standing in front of him. The officer scanned my badge and announced “Cell 17.” When another prisoner was added, the officer grunted toward the third warehouse in the row, and we followed him in that direction.
Did you ever see a line of ants marching along the sidewalk, carrying eggs or bits of food or whatever? If you do something to break the line of one ant following another, they mill around frantically, not knowing what to do. That was us—a line of ants, moving across the concrete with our gear in our arms, depending on our officer to lead us. Compared to the giant Parade Ground, we were the size of ants, or smaller, and if anything had gotten in our way, we would have been helpless. But an officer was leading us, and our anthill was dead ahead.
House C. You could tell what it was by the huge red letter painted above the black steel door. You could tell it was made for us by the huge red words painted between the third and fourth tiers of windows:
I AM A PRISONER
THIS IS A PRISON
I AM HERE TO SERVE MY SENTENCE
Just inside the door was a flight of steps, and we began our climb to the upper stories. The prisoner in front of me was 4398, the old guy who’d been so indignant in the Uniform Room, the guy who’d fallen on his face on his first time out on the concrete. Great. This guy was trouble. He was healthy enough. He could do all the exercises. He was just a moment too slow—every moment. That was his way of taking it out on the prison, and all the rest of us. I’ll put it this way. If you’re reading this, you’re probably still in the world outside the High Walls. So– When you’re driving down the road, and the speed limit is 65, and the guy in front of you insists on driving 50, and you can’t pass him . . . . As you see, that guard was right to hit him on the ass in the Uniform Room.
Block 9 was on the top floor, which was the fourth, so it took us a long time to get there, but we made it despite the silent rebellion of convict 4398. Our escort unlocked a door, and we entered a long corridor. It was like the one in the Training Team—white, with gray steel doors on both sides. Except that these doors looked stronger. They had locks, of course—locks in black cases protruding next to their handles, locks dangling from the little doors of the observation hatches—but they also had bars, long black bars crossing them at the top and bottom, secured by heavy padlocks. And the corridor was much longer than the one in the Training Team, with many more doors facing each other along the way, all of them the same except for the numbers painted at their tops, and all of them heavy, stern, and final. This was the place where we’d been Trained to live.
At the door numbered 5 a guard was waiting to admit the first of our group, a twenty-something with clenched lips and glazed eyes who was evidently not looking forward to whatever was on the other side of that door. We stopped again at door number 10, to drop off a little prisoner with acne on his cheeks and the air of a dog being put in a kennel. Now there were only two of us, me and 4398. Oh shit, I thought, I’m stuck with him again. As we moved along the corridor, the music of barred doors being opened and shut was loud behind us—there goes the twenty-something, there goes the eighteen-something. . . .
We were to be put in Cell 17, and there was a guard waiting in front for us too. He was young, Asian, tall, and slim. He wore little round glasses and looked like he was taking the day off from college. His nameplate said OFFICER YAN. He nodded to the escort, scanned our badges, and announced our bunk numbers. I would be sleeping in Bunk 12. Then he began the process of unlocking the door. Listening to the padlocks clicking open, then banging against their hasps; hearing the thick crossbars grating as they were yanked from their brackets, the keys moving heavily, somewhere in the fat steel housing beside the handle of the door . . . It was like waiting while your executioner adjusts the guillotine. If prison could get any worse . . . this would be it. Then the door swung back, only to reveal what I should have expected—a second door, a door made of bars. Same as my cell in the Training Team, but these bars were thicker and heavier. Everything said: “End of the road. This is where you live. This is permanent.” I could hardly believe it, but I was feeling nostalgia for the Training Team, for the days before I graduated into a stronger cage.
Officer Yan shoved the bars open. The criminals locked in the cell stood up, formed a double line, faced forward, and bowed to the Officer. The Officer locked the bars and motioned to the two new arrivals to stand and face the residents of Cell 17.
I saw 14 prisoners in 14 prison uniforms. Bald heads, blank faces. White faces mainly. One black face. Three brown. One Asian. Behind them the familiar double bunks, four on a side, 16 in all. Above them, even more space than the cell in the Training Team. Typical warehouse—11-foot ceiling. Narrow bunks, narrow aisle, ceiling rising up like a cathedral, making the rest seem even smaller than it was . . . . At the end of the cell, a square window—eye level this time, but covered with bars, what else? I could see that the end of the cell was the same “rear room” that we had in the Training Team, undoubtedly featuring the same amenities—trough sinks and squat toilets. But those inscrutable blank faces—indifferent, or hostile? These were the people I was moving in with. These were the people I was condemned to spending seven years with. Seven years, at minimum.
“Criminals!” the Officer said to the faces. “These are your new cellmates.” The voice was high, flat, and without a trace of accent. Forget the last name—this guy was an American.
The faces did not change; the bodies did not move. Sometime in the past, they must have stood in the same place, holding the same gear in front of them, in the same unsteady arms. That didn’t matter. They were prisoners. This was a prison. They were here to serve their sentence.
“These criminals will now identify themselves.” The Officer nodded at 4398. “Number, sentence, bunk.”
The old man was sweating. He slurred and stumbled. The Officer had to remind him of his bunk number. Finally he got through it:
G023104398
Four years to life
Bunk number 7
I had to admire Officer Yan’s patience. I would have given the old criminal a good slap for wasting my time like that. From the looks on their faces, most of the other criminals seemed to agree with me.
“Now you,” the Officer said. Meaning me.
G023104411
Seven years to life
Bunk number 12
I felt my cock stirring. Hardening. Why? Maybe it was relief because I hadn’t dropped my gear while trucking it in there and then holding it in my arms like a statue while delivering my little speech. Or maybe it was the Officer, thin and straight as a rod, with his little scholar glasses on his nose and his long black baton dangling from his waist like the world’s baddest dick. If I had to be punished, that stick would be interesting . . . . Since I’d been Trained, it was hard for me to analyze things. I did know that I needed to hide what was happening in my crotch. But I couldn’t—my hands were occupied . . . .
“The boss will give you your job,” the Officer said to the new arrivals. “Chow in 30 minutes,” he said to the rest of them.
The prisoners bowed and followed him with glassy eyes as he left the cell. The bars banged shut; the crossbars fell into their brackets on the outer door; the stiff lines of prisoners dissolved. Most of them drifted back to their bunks and resumed their chats. A few returned to a card game they were playing, squatting on the floor. Some of them loitered and watched the two noobs. A couple of them smiled and gave us the V sign. The Asian guy crossed his legs and leaned against the double bunks, looking at me with a crooked smile that might have meant “you look stupid holding that gear” or “you look stupid with that hardon.” Which was rapidly disappearing.
A prisoner came forward and spoke. This guy was . . . how should I describe him? White, muscly, early 30s, the kind you hire as an office manager. Whatever that means. He’s bright enough to buy a new printer, but he isn’t bright enough to do anything else.
“All right,” he said. “I’m 7014, and I’m the boss in this cell.”
Which is exactly what an office manager would say.
“Officer Yan tells me what he wants. I kick it down the line. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“I like a clean cell, and I like a quiet cell. Keep your voice down and keep your hands off the other guys’ stuff, and you’ll do OK in here. And no line jumpin. Jump a line, you’ll answer to me. Got a beef about somethin, tell me. Got a beef about some other convict, I’ll settle it. But you’ll do what I say. That’s the bottom line.”
“Got it.”
“From now on, you’re the swabbie. You and that con over there.” He pointed toward a young Hispanic convict who was sitting on a bunk, watching the card players. The guy looked back with a faint sign of greeting. All right, at least it wasn’t Farmboy. “He’ll show you how to swab the floor.”
“Got it.” Like I needed help to learn that.
“OK,” said the boss, “you know what to do with your gear. Do it.”
He started chatting with some other convict, leaving 4398 and me to look for our bunks. First we had to get through the gang of players and watchers in the aisle. They were looking for amusement, and 4398 was their man—old, indignant, and carrying fat that the Training Team hadn’t removed. His stomach was still making a hill out of his shirt, and a few of them were putting their feet in his way and saying “umm, we’ll eat good tonight.” He reared his head and made this snuffing sound with his nose, like, “how dare you say such a thing,” so naturally they reared their heads and snuffed their noses and goofed around him like he was a clown who’d been hired to entertain them. But you can’t do much in a narrow little cell like that. He got to his bunk, which I was happy to see was not next to mine.
Since they’d had their fun with him, they didn’t do much with me—just a few comments from the ones that looked like college kids. “Age of the cell continues to rise.” “Guess they’re opening an old folks’ home.” “No problem—when he’s in his nineties, we’ll still be in our seventies.” No comments about my belly; the Training Team had done a good job on that. I took my time stowing my gear and making my bunk (number 12, another upper, second from the end). I was hungry. I wanted chow to happen before I had to spend any time with those cretins. And it did. Officer Yan showed up, lined us up, counted us carefully, escorted us down the stairs and across the Parade Ground, and put us in line to enter the big Chow Hall.
The wait was long. I had time to look at the building. This was one of the new ones that Gordy said they had put up. It was clearly designed, as I used to say when I was trying to unload a property, to preserve the architectural heritage of the neighborhood. In other words, it was big and bulky, and made of that same yellow-painted concrete. Around the top was a line of those square, barred windows; the rest was featureless, except for a display of the Three Questions, in tall red letters over the door, red against yellow. The door itself might have been the door of a boxcar. Given Gordy’s desire to stay within budget, it probably had been. It was a steel panel, studded with rivets, ten feet long and ten feet high, resting on a steel track. It was wide enough to let prisoners march in and out at the same time—one shift going in on the right (slowly), another shift going out on the left (quickly, with guards at their heels).
Inside, the building was even larger than it looked from the Parade Ground. With a steel roof supported by an open steel truss, it might have served as a hangar at an airbase. At each end, an enormous sign said SILENCE, but the sound of mastication, the noise of a thousand men chewing their food, echoed from the roof and filled the room. A table for eight, please, just like in the Training Team, and the food service was organized in the same way—a big mass of something, lugged out in a pot by the kitchen cons, and a criminal from the cell who was permanently assigned to ladle the shit into our bowls. The shit itself was typical Paris cuisine—beans, rice, collard greens, and of course fried bread. The Paris smell was unmistakable.
I’d barely got my ass on my seat when the old guy, 4398, threw his spoon on the table and said, “This isn’t a meal!” I don’t know what had finally done it to him—maybe that hazing by the other convicts. But it was scary to hear a prisoner talk like that—or talk at all, in the Chow Hall. The guards were distant at the moment, but I saw one of them turn and look in our direction, trying to get a fix on the noise he’d heard. The other convicts at the table moved their plates and shuffled their feet to make it seem as if that was the only noise going on, and the guard turned back to whatever he’d been doing. 4398 looked down at his food, deciding whether to throw it on the floor. He didn’t. He ate it.
But something had happened. I’d realized who he was. It had taken me a while, but I knew. He was the guy who had made the same remark—“this isn’t a meal!”—and the same gestures, a long time before . . . at one of those lunches at the Civic Club! Granted, the food at those things wasn’t perfect, but what did you expect? Who was he to make the rest of us worry about that, when all we wanted to do was get on with the lunch? What was his name, I’d asked someone.
“Roger Vandenberg,” I was told. “Joined a few months ago. Known in Springport as the Sports Klassiks guy.”
“Huh?”
“You know, shirts and shorts. Very popular. Great if you’re living a taste-free life. Made overseas, of course.”
I had a vague memory of their ads—loud, solid colors; fabric that clung to your dick and pecs. . . . It was comical, connecting “Don’t Go Klubbin—Without Your K’s!” to the fussy old gentleman walking into the Civic Club with a two-thousand-dollar watch and high expectations for service, and then to the old tub of guts in the Chow Hall. I tried to remember the rest of it. Something had happened, something had gone wrong for Roger Vandenberg—some kind of fight with his investors, some kind of accusations . . . . Whatever. Now he was in prison! I remembered being introduced to him at the Civic Club. “Yeah, right—Perry,” he’d said. Then, noticing my lack of a tie, “the real estate man,” and he turned to chat with someone who seemed more important.
I still had some collard greens to go when Officer Yan appeared, formed us into a line, and quick-marched us out of the Chow Hall. He was efficient. “Not like the good old days, back in the Training Team,” said the prisoner marching in back of me. “Eh, noob?”
The routine, however, was the same. Back to the cell to pick up our wash pails, then down to the end of the corridor and into the Wash Room to use them. This one was bigger than the one in the Training Team. Actually, it was three rooms—a room on the left, where you pissed and shat; a room on the right, where you shared a shower with 40 other convicts, four or five to a head; and a room in the middle, where you washed yourself in the trough in the morning and went to the long lines of tubs to wash your uniform every other night.
There were almost 400 prisoners on the block. The cells washed on slightly different shifts, but there was always a line for everything. Line up to shit, line up to shower, line up for the sink, line up in the corridor before you could even get into the Room. My first shower on the block was too short for me to check out the other prisoners—as if, by that point, anything that went into the shower with a convict suit hanging outside could distract me from the ugliness of my life. A hot guy would be just one more dumb, captured criminal, like me.
I was now a swabbie, and I started my work the first night. The other swabbie, 0631, the little Hispanic guy, showed me what I needed to know. It wasn’t an intellectual challenge; you just had to watch your arms as they moved the mop back and forth, swish swish, swish swish. 0631 enjoyed his work. The other prisoners chatted with him as his mop went past. Of course they were different with me; I was the noob. They balked about moving their legs to let me mop, then told me I’d missed a place and asked if I wasn’t too old to do this job and my day job too. “You know what your day job is, don’t you?”
I stopped and leaned on my mop. “No. Nobody said . . . .”
“Nobody needs to say. The whole cell, we’re all in the factory.”
“Yeah,” somebody added, “tomorrow morning, you’ll be marchin to work with the rest of us.”
“Yeah, steppin on the sewin machine, dude.”
I didn’t get it. Sewing machine—who has a sewing machine? You go to the store and you buy your clothes. You don’t make them. Some old lady might have a sewing machine. I must have had the world’s dumbest look on my face, because they all started to laugh, and some of them kept it going with little comedy acts, mimicking my reaction: “Ooh la la, what ees THEES? What does it MEAN? In Pay-ree they have SEWING MACHINES?” I forced myself to laugh along, but it made me mad. Who were they, after all? A bunch of criminals who didn’t know enough to stay out of prison, a place I was supposed to know all about, just because I accidentally wound up there.
But lights out was coming. I rinsed my mop in the trough that served as a sink and climbed into bunk number 12. It was just like my bunk in the Training Team, so I ought to have been used to its dimensions, but I was frustrated and angry and when I stretched myself out I thought my feet might have gotten themselves into the next bunk, where somebody’s bald head was already in place. I saw the head jerk, and I said, “Sorry! Didn’t mean to get over the line.” I couldn’t afford to have a fight with somebody on my first night in the cell.
The guy sat up and faced me. At first I thought I hadn’t noticed him before. Of course, why should I notice any of them? He must have been quiet . . . . But then I remembered: I did notice him, in a way, because he was the one Asian guy. Among the prisoners, anyway! He was the one who gave me that strange little smile . . . . It was hard to tell how old he was—23, 24? His face looked 18; his eyes, older . . . .
“I don’t mind if you get over the line,” he said. Then he burrowed under his blanket, the bright light went out, and I prepared myself for sleep in this new and even more ridiculous place. The guy wasn’t anything special. He was just another dumb criminal. He probably wouldn’t give me any more trouble than the rest of them. I did wonder what he meant by “I don’t mind” . . . .
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