By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 11: Welcome to Our Service Team

It’s humiliating to say this, but I’ll do it, because “humiliation” is something I was learning to like: I was enjoying my life in prison.  I was glad I’d told 8363 my story about being the prisoner of my former boyfriend and sub.  It was sort of like bragging.  He took it that way, and enjoyed it: “That is so humiliating!  You are definitely being humbled!”  I liked having things to say that were interesting to him, and that always was.  When we were forming up to be marched someplace, or when we were listening to one of those lectures we had to attend, he’d whisper to me, “This is your punishment for not respecting the Colonel.”  Always gave me a hardon.  Maybe that was just more of the brainwashing!  But it helped me learn more about prison, and being a prisoner.

If you’re a normie, everything about your life has to be taken seriously.  Every decision demonstrates whether you deserve respect or not.  You blew a business deal, you didn’t demand more salary, you didn’t join the right club, you didn’t vote for the right party, you didn’t go to the best resort, you didn’t get a totally hot boyfriend . . . you are in trouble.

Even self-respect is an enormous, scary thing.  If you feel sad or depressed, or your boyfriend walks out on you, you’re told that your problem is “lack of self-esteem.”  Terry was like that.  I don’t mean that he lacked self-esteem.  He had plenty of it—as much as I used to have.  But he’d learned from me that you need to keep testing yourself all the time, to make sure that you’re worth all that pride. Somehow, when he talked to me in the Visiting Room I had the feeling that he was about to ask me why I wasn’t “taking more responsibility” for myself, why I wasn’t “caring for myself better,” why I wasn’t “preparing myself for life after prison.”

I got myself into prison.  I didn’t decide to do it, but I did.  Now I realized that prison was a place where I didn’t need to worry about any of that stuff I’d worried about before.  I had no responsibilities.  I had no respect and no need for respect.  I didn’t need to care for myself; the prison took care of me.  I didn’t need to make any decisions; I wasn’t allowed to make them; I was there to be punished, whether I did anything wrong or not.  I didn’t need to compete; I was a criminal like all the other criminals, just another convict jammed into a convict uniform.  And I’d never be anything else.  All I had to do was eat my chow and fill my quotas and get fucked by the criminal in the next bunk.  So prison was a great place to be.  If I’d been smart, I would have jumped at the opportunity that Gordy laid out to me, way back at La Béte Bleue.  That’s what 8363 showed me.  But now I didn’t need to be smart.

I was shocked that I hadn’t seen all this before, even when 8363 was drawing me a blueprint as he went through the story of his life.  And of course you always tend to forget how good you’ve got it.  That’s where all the discipline and punishment and humiliation come in—they remind you of how beautiful prison is.  Fortunately, I was never allowed to forget that I was just a numbered convict locked up in a cage.  And soon after I realized what I really felt about prison, something happened that definitely . . . .   I’ll tell you what it was, and you can see for yourself.

I was marching in my formation on my way to my job sewing shirts when a sergeant came out of nowhere and pointed at me.  There was a brief argument with Officer Yan, which Officer Yan lost.  He was totally pissed.  “You!” he said.  “Go!  This sergeant will take you!”  OK, I was in trouble again.

I squatted on the pavement until my formation passed—my whole cell, with 8363 included, his eyes forward and his arms swinging in total conformity to what he’d learned in the Training Team.  Sergeant Gaines put me in shackles and marched me, one two one two, to the Administration Building.  I’d been there only once before, during my basement tryst with the Interrogation Chair, so naturally I feared the worst.  This time, however, my path lay upward.  The Sergeant marched me to the third floor, where the lettering on the doors said WARDEN WILSON, MAJOR XING, CAPTAIN GREENE, OFFICERS’ LOUNGE, and yes, COLONEL BRIDGER.  I was nervous about seeing Gordy and hoped that he wouldn’t come out.  But I wasn’t going to one of the gold-lettered offices.  I was going down the hall to a polished wood door with no lettering on it.  I was going to the personal quarters of Colonel Bridger.

The door was opened by a tall convict who glared at me and bowed respectfully to the Sergeant.  He looked to be about 50 years old, and gay.  There was no doubt; he even lisped.

“Here he is,” said the Sergeant.  “I’ll pick him up at 8:00.”  Then he left.  “Follow me,” said the convict, leading me through a hall and a narrow wooden door into a white painted room with a big, very modern stove and a huge double fridge and a gleaming pair of sinks and everything else that highlights the kitchen of an important man.  A young convict was standing in the corner.  “Here’s the new servant,” the older one said, and left.  The young one stepped forward.  The fuzz on his head was blond, and his lips were open in a smile: “Dude.  I’m 9555.”  Tweaking up his badge as if I needed to confirm his number.  “Welcome to the Colonel’s quarters.”  That’s how I discovered that I had become a servant of Colonel Bridger.

The “quarters” of the Colonel and his partner—now husband—Patrick contained a living room, dining room, breakfast room, three bedrooms (one set aside for guests, one for use as a study), three bathrooms (two for people, with marble walls and the most recent and elegant toilets, sinks, and showers, and one for servants, with a squat toilet, a trough sink, and a shower head and drain in one of the corners), a large kitchen, pantry and laundry room, and a connected “servants hall” (someone had been watching dramas on Public TV).  Inside the servants hall was a stand-up cage.  The tall convict returned, opened the cage, inserted me, and locked the door.  “Colonel wants to inspect the new servant.”

I stood in the cage while the young one swabbed the floor and another one, a black convict about 30 years old, cooked something on the long shiny stove.  Everything seemed new and stylish, except my cage.  I was wondering what would happen to me.  I had never thought that my life could possibly result in my waiting in a cage to be inspected by my former boyfriend, but I guessed it was one of those things that make prison so interesting.  Gordy had clearly arranged all of this—just to humiliate me, just to celebrate the fact that he had been right: I could be domesticated.  I was looking forward to seeing how he would handle the situation.  Then he came into the servants hall.

He looked me up and down, watching me through the bars.  Then he told me to turn, drop my pants, and bend over.  “Open your cheeks.  Wider.  I said wider.”  I wasn’t likely to have contraband up my ass, any more than any convict would.  So he must be searching for signs that my ass had been used by some other criminal.  I didn’t know if there were any, although 8363 had been using my butt pretty hard.  Anyway, I took it as an honor.  “All right, turn around.  Hands behind your back.”  There was an interested pause as he inspected my dick.  “You’d better learn how to lose that hardon,” he advised me.  “Criminals are not allowed to rut in here.”  I bowed as well as you can when you’re inside a cage.  “Yes sir!”  It was true, I had an enormous dongstick going on.  The look on his face suggested that he was satisfied with what he’d seen.  “All right,” he said to the tall convict.  “Put him to work.”

Here’s where I can explain some things.  The tall guy was 6839, officially known as the butler.  He was in charge of the quarters.  We were in the Administration Building, so everybody had to wear shackles, including him.  But as I said, he was in charge.  There was a little bunk in the servants hall, and he slept on that.  He was the only servant who stayed, 24/7.  He had to be around to help the Colonel and Mr. Patrick if they wanted something at night and to help them dress in the morning and eat their breakfast.  A guard came in during the day and unlocked his shackles for a shower and change of uniform, then locked the shackles back on.  The rest of the time, 6839 ran the household and disciplined the other servants, who were: 9555, the cute, formerly blond guy; 1057, the Haitian cook; and me, 4411.  9555 had been helping the cook, or chef, as he preferred to be called, while also doing all of the cleaning.  Now I got to clean the shit off the toilets and dust the furniture and scrub the floors and stand like a lamp post while the Colonel and Mr. Patrick ate their meals.  6839 did the serving; I was just there to take orders in case anything else needed to be done, and to smell the food I wasn’t allowed to eat.

Every morning, early, we three under-servants were picked up at our cells, shackled, and marched to the Admin Building.  We went to the servants’ bathroom and showered.  Then the Haitian chef started cooking; the butler started preparing the shower for the Colonel and Mr. Patrick and laying out their clothes for the day; and 9555 and I started laying the table in the breakfast room and arranging the flowers that were delivered to the quarters from a store in downtown Paris.  We tied back the drapes that covered the windows, so the Colonel and his husband could have a sunny view to the south, over the street in front of the prison.  I wasn’t given much time to look at it, but I liked the way the broken windows and dead cars on the other side of the street contrasted with the yellow frame of the window and the bright clear sheen I gave it when I washed it every other day.  I also liked seeing the heavy steel bars that were bolted to the outside of the window—reassurance that although I could see outside, I was a criminal and would not be allowed to go there.

When the couple arrived in the breakfast room, 6839 served them, and I stood with my back against the wall, waiting.  When Mr. Patrick left to teach his classes and the Colonel left for his office, 9555 washed the dishes while I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the carpets; 6839 managed the household accounts and went online to make orders for food and drink and other supplies; 1057 consulted his recipes and began cooking his dishes; and so on, until lunch, served promptly at 12:30 to the Colonel and Mr. Patrick, if he had returned from the college.  Afterwards, more cleaning, and the laundry, done by me every afternoon without fail; then dinner, usually French and served with ceremony in the dining room, with an extra leaf in the table if there were any guests.  The servants were strictly prohibited from eating any of the couple’s food; leftovers went into the garbage.  Our feed was delivered from the Chow Hall three times a day; the butler picked it up at the door, where it was dropped off by the kitchen cons.  That’s what we ate, after we finished serving the Colonel and Mr. Patrick.  Following the servants’ chow and the clean-up and dish-washing, we were marched back to our House, unshackled, and locked in our cells to await our next day of service.

I soon realized that the job had some of the best qualities of work in the sewing factory.  It was mindless and repetitive.  It put you in the zone all the time, except for the excitement when you looked down at your uniform or up at a boss giving orders and realized for the thousandth time that you had been secured in your proper place of punishment.  There were plenty of “I am a prisoner! This is a prison!” moments as I stood with my arms behind me while the couple ate and chatted, as I watched the Colonel passing me without a look, or as I heard Mr. Patrick telling me I’d missed a patch of dust on the bookshelves or a spot that needed to be polished on the paneling in the living room.  I did my best not to let my hardons show.  Usually I couldn’t make that happen, but nobody seemed to care.  I was a barnyard animal—what difference did it make?

I knew from my views of his crotch that the Colonel was excited by his daily routine of treating me like a defective piece of furniture, and it was exciting to me that we had so much in common.  We understood each other better than we ever had before.  We had revealed each other’s character, if you want to call it that.  He’d turned out to be a top dog, and I’d turned out to be a dog.  And we shared our interest in Mr. Patrick.  The Colonel was always concerned about his husband’s well-being, and so was I . . . .   I was required to be.  He had a small, neat body and a careful haircut; his little round glasses accentuated his ten-years-younger-than-he-really-was good looks.  In the study, his desk was directly across from the Colonel’s, but he never used it or the books on the shelves.  He spent most of his time watching movies or going online making reservations somewhere or chatting with friends or travel companies.  When he gave orders, he never looked at you.  He was supposed to be a teacher, and he did remind me of a professor I had at Sterling, who always happened to be gazing at his shoes when his students raised their hands with questions.  He never prepared for a class.  I heard him tell the Colonel, “Why should I?  The students don’t.”  I don’t think he noticed the difference between teaching at a community college and teaching at Sterling or whatever.  He did notice the smallest speck of shit I left on the side of his toilet bowl, and he’d insist that 6839 cage me for my neglect.  I was happy to leave a little shit from time to time.

I spent many interesting hours in the cage, watching while the other servants finished my work and sent angry looks at me, the convict who couldn’t do his job right—although they wondered why Mr. Patrick was so interested in punishing me.  From the looks he gave me I could be sure that he knew why the Colonel’s former lover was now a servant in his home, and that he was taking full advantage of the situation.

The couple did most of their entertaining outside the Penitentiary.  When the Colonel had lunch or dinner with Mr. Wilson, the Warden, it was at the Warden’s house in Springport.  But there were three or four friends who would show up for dinner.  They were all gay and liked to gossip about people they knew.  A lot of the conversation was about Mr. Patrick’s failure to be promoted at his college.  Everyone assumed that “some homophobe” was responsible.  Mr. Patrick’s Best Friend for Life was a guy whose parents had named him Algol, for some unknown reason.  (I knew, because of my “Stories of the Stars” book, that Algol was the name of a star, and that it meant “ghoul’s head.”  So I assumed the parents didn’t read books.)  He always wore a Hawaiian shirt and said that his “family trust” was “an enormous donor” of the college.  He talked about getting “the family” to “put the Board’s feet to the fire” about Mr. Patrick’s promotion.  He also talked about the “great job” the Colonel and Mr. Patrick were doing with the prison.

“I have nothing to do with the prison,” Mr. Patrick said, as if operating a prison was something like driving a garbage truck.

“Nonsense!” said the Hawaiian.  “You’re the First Lady!  And by the way, I can’t help but notice, this prison seems to pick its convicts by their, shall I say, responsiveness?  I mean the responsiveness of their . . . lower regions.  You must have something to do with that, Patrick.”

The man rose slightly in his chair and turned his eyes on my crotch.  I was standing by the opposite wall, and yes, I was totally hard.  That happened a lot.  It was a special form of punishment, serving them in my convict suit and being treated like an object that couldn’t hear or feel.  Of course I enjoyed it.

The Colonel was impassive, as usual.  His husband took up the banter.

“Gordon picks them.  I don’t.”

“Then he must pick them for you, darling.  I can see what you like.”  The eyes moved from me to Mr. Patrick and back again.  “But if you aren’t putting them to use, give me a call.  I’ll know what to do.”

Mr. Patrick’s face started to move, like he had an idea of something to say, but the Colonel ordered me to get the coffee, and that was the end of it, for then.  It was the kind of thing I was used to, the punishment I deserved for the arrogance I used to show.  All the other criminals who worked in the quarters wanted to be back on the Outside.  6839 was eaten up by the couple’s indifference to his superior knowledge of the good life and how it should be led.  Whenever Mr. Patrick purchased some new piece of furniture he said, “If they’d only consulted ME!”  1057 muttered over his stove about some bistro called Le Bon Jour, where apparently he used to work.  9555 was a total nitwit, but with his pert little bald head and the sweet little package of muscles buttoned into his blues, he was definitely eye candy.  He had a vague sense that if he got back on the streets he could find somebody who would buy that candy.  And from the self-satisfied look that Mr. Patrick sported every time 9555 left after cleaning his room, I was guessing that he’d already found a nonpaying customer.  It was interesting to speculate about what the Colonel thought of it.

Back in the cell, I took a lot of ribbing from the other criminals about how “privileged” I’d become, and a lot of envy from criminals who assumed that the job would be my ticket out of the Pen.  Nobody seemed to be worrying about how I could have been chosen for work in the quarters, not so long after getting the Chair.  It wasn’t unusual to get the Chair.  Besides, nobody saw the Colonel; they’d stopped wondering about his plans, which were as mysterious as those of a god.  9443, a young criminal with dark eyes and sharp features whom you could imagine as a priest who decides to be skeptical about the existence of God, kept joking that there wasn’t any Colonel; we were all just doing what we wanted to do, and pretending it was a rule.  0631 replied, “The Colonel knows lots of stuff that we don’t know.  Including you, fucker.”  He was talking to 9443, but he was looking at me.  And what he said was true.  But most of them thought that if the Colonel was impressed by my work, he would get me an early release, etc.  I knew better, and so did 8363.  That first time I was brought back to the cell after work in the quarters, he said, “Fuck!  I wish it was me.  But I’ll get to hear all the amazing stories.”  When he screwed me that night it was a big celebration for him.

The bad thing was that being a servant was a seven day a week job, except when the Colonel and Mr. Patrick were absent for a weekend “conference” or a visit to some romantic resort.  Then I was permitted my normal Yard time with 8363.  The rest of our relationship consisted of late-night whispers and fucks, which were even better because of my daily subjection to the Colonel and Mr. Patrick.  8363 was always happy to hear about my life in the quarters and always wishing that he could be worked that way too.  “But it wouldn’t be the same,” he laughed.  “I’ll never have the excitement of being a dog in my ex-lover’s kennel.”

“Maybe,” I said, “I can make you my dog, after all.”

“Don’t try it!  I’m on top, and I’m staying that way.”

“Yes sir.”

“But what I mean is . . . .  I’ll never have an ex-lover.  I never had anybody but you.”

“What?”

“Nope.  You’re my first.”

“You mean, I’m the first one you fucked.”

“No.  The first.  Period.”

“I don’t . . . .  How can that be?”

“I dunno.  I’m not as hot as you think I am?  Which is true.  Or maybe I was just too shy.”

“You always claim to be shy.”

“I’m as shy as you thought the Colonel was.”

“Too complicated for me.  I’m just a criminal.  Now put your dick in my ass where it oughta be.”

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