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The Prison Writer – Chapter 14

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By Joshua Ryan

A month later, on a dead Sunday afternoon, I was lying in the cell when I was told that I had a visitor.  The idea was incomprehensible.  No one had written; no one had come.  Why would they come?  And why would I want them to come?  For what?  To view an exhibit of the once promising author who was now a convict?  To laugh at me in my bald head and my convict suit, and go back and pity me online?  Basically, the only visitors willing to come that far were the ones smuggling some “business” in or out for some convict, and that wasn’t me.

But now I was being taken to the Visiting Room.  It’s a place in that Victorian castle that juts out from the front of the Pen, and it looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1890s.  There’s a high ceiling, marble floors, big windows, and a large collection of cast iron bars.  In the center there’s a long, wide table, and in the center of that is an ironwork grille running up to the ceiling.  Visitors and prisoners sit on separate sides and enter from separate doors.  Visitors sit on chairs with arms; prisoners sit on little wooden stools.  On that Sunday the room was unusually full.  Ten or twelve people on each side.  I mean, ten or twelve visitors on one side, and ten or twelve convicts on the other.  During the time I’d been at Maskawa, I’d never heard a convict being called a person.

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 13

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By Joshua Ryan

No one wants to read a complete account of my daily life.  I’ll hit a few of the high points on the tour.

Food:  Early morning, noon, late afternoon — you go to the Chow Hall, which is that huge concrete thing on the Yard that looks like a feature of some winter Olympics.  You sit on a steel stool attached to a long steel table, squeezed into your seat together with miles of other men with numbers on their backs.  The food is substantial: mes compliments au chef.  It’s also cheap, greasy, and ugly.  First time I went to the chow hall, Finn showed me how to line up and get my grub.  I sat with him at a table and he told the other convicts, “Here’s my new bunkie, Ven.”  “Ven” for “Steven.”  All right, I was Ven.

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 12

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By Joshua Ryan

I was dressed now in full prison garb, and I had nothing to do but watch the other convicts putting on their new identity — pulling their shorts over their butts, jamming their legs into their pants, lacing their feet into their boots, shouldering their coats onto their backs.  The last one to start was a pretty little guy, 19 or 20.  Maybe I should say that he probably used to be a pretty little guy, before they shipped him to prison.  There was still enough of his prettiness to make me follow the lines of his plump little butt and his pert little dick as he stuffed them into his stiff prison pants.  His dick was hard, going into his trousers.  I thought I might be getting hard myself.  I even remembered why I was there — to get my head and my dick in proper order and write that great and wonderful book about prison.  How would I describe that guy?  What words would I use…?

A door slammed; a muscular voice bellowed through the room.

“All right!  Form up for the fish parade!”

So much for the convict bosses — an officer had appeared.  He was a 40-year-old with a Marine Corps face.  The tag on his crisp gray shirt said SGT GIDEON.

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 11

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By Joshua Ryan

The gate was stuck in the wall like a black tooth.  “Cargo of eight,” we heard the driver say.  “Yeah.  OK.  Thanks.”  Soon there was the sound of an old motor reluctantly starting up, and half of the double gate swung back on its hinges.  The bus moved through and halted, blocked by another enormous gate.  The first gate closed behind us; we waited in the stone box between the gates, engine switched off.  Finally two men in gray were seen, walking around the bus and inspecting it.  Then the engine came on; the second gate opened; the bus crept into the prison.

What’s the first thing you see when you enter the walls of Maskawa?  You see crap.  You see a giant wall with razor wire attached to its top and a line of prison trucks parked at its foot —white bugs ganging in a basement.  You see a garage made out of an old Quonset hut.  You see delivery trucks — Philly’s Farms, Industrial Needs, Plastics Plus — backed into a loading dock.  Then you see a low brick building with glass blocks where windows used to be, and RECEPTION carved in stone over the door.  That’s where the bus stops and you have to get out.

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 10

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By Joshua Ryan

Something woke me.  It was the bus slowing down as it took an exit.  There was nothing around but trees.  Tall pine trees.  I knew we’d been going north, but I didn’t realize how far we’d got.  This was the fucking forest primeval.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Junior was awake and looking out the window.  He nodded toward something coming into view.  It was a sign with an arrow pointing to the left.

MASKAWA

Ferry 12 m.

“Maskawa,” I said.  “That name sounds familiar…”

“Worst prison in the state,” he muttered.  He didn’t say it like “I don’t give a fuck.”  He said it like, “fuck, this is bad.”

Then I remembered.  Dean said that too.  He said it was the toughest prison in the state.  When he said I wouldn’t be sent there.

“Maybe we’re not stopping there,” I said.  “Maybe they’re taking us someplace else.”

“Ain’t no other joint up here.  Maskawa’s the end of the line.”

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 09

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By Joshua Ryan

That afternoon I collapsed on my bunk and began to think.  I thought about what a fool that counselor was and about how he must be wrong, how he must have been talking to some imaginary Steven Meres who was going to spend his life in prison.  I thought about how much I hated him for saying those terrible words to me, and how many things I’d like to do to show him that I had a life and he didn’t.  Every time I looked down at the childish orange clothes they’d put me in, I saw how much he and “the institution” had on their side.

But … I needed to come to my senses.  After all, I was there to write a book.  I should be remembering my observations, collecting my story descriptions … I tried, but I couldn’t focus on that.  It all seemed like thoughts in some other person’s mind, the mind of somebody who wasn’t locked in a steel box.

On the morning of the seventh day I was cuffed and taken out of my box and marched to the end of the big hallway, where there was a door that led to a loading dock.  Standing on the dock was a cage with bars on its top and all four sides.  It was a very large cage, and I was put into it with about 80 other prisoners.  The officer who put me in pointed to a small steel toilet next to the bars. “You need to use the can, use it now.  You’re goin on the chain bus.”

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The Prison Writer – Chapter 08

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By Joshua Ryan

The line ended at a door that was so important we had to be buzzed through.  On the other side was a wide white hallway with wooden doors on one side and steel doors on the other — and a yellow line on the left, of course.  Finally we got to a place where there were two steel doors with a glass booth between them.  An old officer was seated in the booth.  Officer Collison pulled me over and told me to stand in front of the glass.

“Got one for ya, Pop.”

“Yeah?  Don’t look like much.  But OK, if you say so.  Hold up your arm, boy.  I wanta see that bracelet you got.”

“Yes, Sir.”  I held it up to the window.  He half-rose in his chair and scanned my wristband.

“Nother lifer,” he said.  “Well, welcome to free room and board.  I’ll take him into Number 2.”

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