By Joshua Ryan

“Jake,” I said, “aren’t they worried that you might just walk away from here?”

“Naw. Not really. I wouldn’t get very far. Not with my tatts. And not with these clothes! And then there’s this other thing.” He bent down and lifted one leg of his coarse brown trousers. There, on the leg, was an iron shackle! I’d never seen one before. I’d never even seen a pair of handcuffs. But this thing was incredible — wide and thick and as black as death, with a big old hinge on the back and two big rings sticking out on the sides and a thing like a tongue sticking out in front . . .. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This must have been what I would have seen in those leg shots of his, if I hadn’t been rushing through them so fast . . .

“Notice,” he said, like a professor explaining what you see after you’ve dissected a frog, “there’s no lock. There’s just a flange and a rivet. And a couple of D-rings, in case they want to attach me to somethin.” He reached down and patted his iron. “This baby will never come off. It’s here for life. Unless you happen to have a blowtorch and a lot of anesthetic on you. Of course, I could try to escape, if I could just shed these clothes. But . . . ”

I gulped. That thing was monstrous. How guys could actually run across the field in an iron like that . . .

“What do they . . . attach you to?”

“Well, to the chain, of course, when I’m workin the gang. And other things, too. They don’t do that very much, though, anymore. Not to me. When you’re a fish, it happens a lot. You look around the joint, you see rings pretty much everywhere. They can always find a ring to hook you to. You got a couple fish standin around, waitin to get put somewhere, you just ring em to the wall. You send a couple cons to clip the hedges at the Major’s house, you ring those guys to a post and let em work that way. Don’t need to guard em. They did that with me once. The neighbor kids really make a big deal outta you. I had a lotta these coke cans thrown at me, that day.” He crumpled the can in his fist.

I pictured Jake ringed to a post, while a gang of kids lobbed their garbage at him. How do you survive shit like that? But he survived.

“Yeah, and I used to get ringed a lot, just for punishment.”

“Punishment? What did you do?”

“Oh, when I was a fish, I was mad all the time. Just mad and crazy. Crazy not to be there. Crazy not to be a convict.” He shook his head. “It was bad. I talked back to the guards all the time. I was scared to hit one of em, cuz, you know, I was already doin life, so they couldn’t add nothin to that, but they could do a lotta other things. Things worse than paddling, that’s for sure. They could put you in the box for a year or so. I’ve seen that happen.”

“The box?”

“You don’t wanta know about that, dude. Let’s just say it’s made outta steel, and it’s just about big enough for a guy to fit into. I mean, the cells are small, but this thing . . . It’s in the basement. No light, no heat, no nothin. You stay there 23 hours a day. The other hour you can walk up and down in this little cage they got for you to walk in, outside in the yard. One of my buddies, I saw him walkin that cage, every day for a year. Then back in the box. That never happened to me, though. Most that happened to me was the ring row. I suppose,” he said, looking at me like a smart ass, “you’ll make me tell you about that , too.”

“Make you!”

“Sure. I’m the con, and you’re the civilian, right? That means you’re the boss, don’t it?”

“Just tell me, man.” The guy had this cocky, superior smile on his face. I don’t think my dick had ever been harder than it was right then.

“Very simple. There’s this line of rings in the concrete, along one side of the yard. Nothing but a line of rings. You sass the guards, they attach you to one of the rings. Then they leave you there. They might throw you some chow from time to time. And it’s in the shade; you’re not gonna get fried. You might freeze to death, actually. They leave you there, maybe a week. I’ve seen a line of 20 guys, ringed like that, when there was some problem broke out in a gang. Or you might be alone. I was always alone.”

“How many times did they ring you?”

“Three times. One day, three days, seven days. After that, I knew I didn’t want them to ring me again. I guess you could say that I finally got it. I’ve been a good boy ever since. So, comin back to where we started, they’re not worried about me runnin off. They trust me. That’s why they send me on jobs like this. Actually, I could be a trusty, I guess, if I wanted to spend more time around the screws. Which I don’t. One of the screws, he never calls me by my number. He always calls me Slaveboy. That’s what I am, I guess. I’m a slaveboy. Just a slaveboy on the ol’ plantation. That’s what they want, and that’s what I am.”

When he said it, his eyes were laughing, like he was being ironic, but I could see the muscles flexing under his shirt, and his voice was actually proud.

“Jake, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.”

He stopped smiling. “I don’t think I’m ever sarcastic.”

“Whatever, dude,” I said. “If you want to see yourself as a slave . . .” Right away, I knew that was phony. Really phony. That was another thing that some faggot counselor would say to you.

“I am a slave,” he said. “And this is a slave that has to get back to work.”

Now I’d done it. Now I’d pissed him off. Now I’d shown him just how fuckin stupid I was.

“I’m sorry, man. That was a stupid thing for me to say. I didn’t mean it, either. Listen, I want to hear more about all this stuff.”

“You’ll hear more,” he said. “I’m not gonna be over on this side tomorrow, but I know they’ll send me back in a few more days, cuz I’m their faithful slaveboy. You can come back too. It’s up to you.”

“I’ll be back, Jake.”

So that was the end. He smiled and walked away from his side of the fence, and I smiled and walked away from mine. Then I was sitting at my desk and thinking, it’s got to the place where I’m apologizing to him, and he is granting me permission to do what I want. It was “up to me,” but he was the one that was letting it be up to me. I knew I should have felt that something had gone really wrong. But I didn’t. I was just sorry that I wasn’t gonna see him the next day.

By that time, my apartment was filling up; Joey was moving in. Every day I’d come home from work and stumble over another batch of cardboard boxes sitting in the hall. Then Joey would poke his head around the corner. He got off work before I did, so he was the one who got home first. And he made sure to get there early. He wanted to enjoy every possible minute with the man he loved. “Hi babe!”

Like I said, Joey was always cheerful. When had we decided, I wondered for the hundredth time, that he would move in with me?

“Guess what?! I’m learning to cook Chinese!”

“I thought I smelled something.”

“You’re always such a grouch,” he said, grinning. “Grouch” was a word he got from a guy at the bar. He used it all the time now. “Gimme a kiss, you grouch.”

Two arms wrapped themselves around my shoulders. They were wearing a sweater. “New clothes?” I asked.

“Thanks for noticing, babe! A brief visit to The Manly Arts. Like it?”

“It looks good on you.” It was a pink sweater. That much was clear. And it did look nice with his thick dark hair. What would he look like, I wondered, if he was a con in the Durant Unit? I could see Joey stripping that sweater off in a concrete room with steel bars on the windows, then standing there naked, waiting to don his prison garb. He’d be small and cold and whiny; he’d probably be bawling his head off. I wondered how many of them did that. I knew that even Jake had those tears in his eyes . . . So Jake was the one I was thinking about when Joey and I made love that night.

For better or worse, though, I had other things on my mind as well. Freer was going after some new accounts, and times like that are great opportunities for guys like me. You get a chance to do more and learn more, and you can really get in line for a promotion. Yes, please — I’d like one of those. I’d like to get out of my cube and into an office with some windows — not to mention moving to a better apartment, or maybe even buying a house in Werther’s Grove. That’s what I wanted. But trying to get it didn’t leave me much time for anything else. I was staying later and coming in earlier than I ever used to do. Most days, I didn’t even have time to think about leaving the office to visit Jake.

Then on the days when I could do that, sometimes I couldn’t get to him. One time I was walking along the fence, looking, and I almost slammed into the whole fuckin chaingang. The trail bent around some trees, and there they were, slugging rocks out of the bin to make another length of wall. I got out of there fast. Then there were days when I couldn’t even tell which one Jake was, because they were all working so far out in the field. It was disappointing not to be able to see him close, but I have to admit it was exciting to think that he was one of those guys humping along in the gang, a convict attached to all the other convicts. I didn’t know why it was exciting; I just knew that it was, and I knew there was too much going on in my mind for me to work it out. One minute I was totally involved in the latest spreadsheet from Accounting; the next minute my mind was wandering to the tattooes that were rubbing the underside of Jake Cleveland’s shirt. I was surprised that I kept remembering Jake, and I was surprised that I kept forgetting about him. All I can say is, I didn’t want to go too many days without seeing him. And somehow, every few days, we managed to get together.

Actually, it was funny. It was like I was courting him, courting a fucking convict. And it was more of a courtship than I’d ever had before. I mean, you see a guy in a bar, and half an hour later you’re on your way home with him. Or maybe you wait till the second time you see him in the bar. But this one was different. I used to wonder, what if he’s not even gay? What if he just wants me to help him somehow? I knew that convicts usually have a scam. That’s why they’re convicts. It was true, he’d never tried to grab me and go for my money or anything like that. He could have got it, too. He might have been a little shorter than me but he had about 50 pounds of muscle that I didn’t have. Actually, though, the problem was the other way around. As much as I wanted him to, and as much as I thought that he wanted to, he was not coming over that fence. Of course, I knew if he did, it would be considered “escape,” if anybody saw it. And then they could do something really bad to him. They’d box him, for sure. So it was up to me. But I couldn’t just leap over that fence and start sexin him. I wasn’t the type, for one thing. For another, like I said, this was my first courtship. This was my first real romance. What would happen if I put myself out there and got rejected? Rejected by a guy who had to ask some other guy for permission to shit in a ditch. Then there was the problem of what we’d do after we made it. I couldn’t solve that problem. I couldn’t even think about it. How could there be any “after” with a lifer convict? So we talked. Jake liked to talk.

One thing he wanted to talk about was me. He wanted to know all kinds of things — where I lived and where I grew up and where I went to school and what I did in college and what college was like. That was strange, because I didn’t know anybody who hadn’t gone to college, but it seemed like Jake hardly knew anybody who had, except those guys that he used to work for as a janitor. When I mentioned taking physics, he looked at me with admiration. It was like I was a possession that had unexpectedly increased in value. The same thing happened when I talked about going to Europe the summer before my senior year. You could see that he’d never thought that he could actually do a thing like that, even before he got put away. There was a difficult moment when he asked me how I lived and if I lived alone, and I decided to tell him the truth and say that I had a roommate. I didn’t want to just lie to him, but I didn’t want to say “lover,” either; that would be going too far. Like I say, I didn’t want to risk being rejected. As long as there was still that chance . . . When I said “roommate,” his face got dark, which was a good sign in one way but a bad sign in another, so when he asked, “What’s this roomie of yours like?” I said, “Oh, he’s OK, I guess.” Then he looked happy again.

There was one other time when we had trouble. That was when he asked me something about my job and I told him that maybe I should look for another one, that there were things that weren’t right for me there, but it was a hard decision, because if you moved around too much, people would think you weren’t stable, but on the other hand, if you weren’t after a better job all the time, they’d think you weren’t ambitious, so I spent a lot of energy worrying about that, because I wasn’t sure that my current job was the one I wanted, but . . . I was all wrapped up in my explanation — and then I noticed that Jake was staring at me like I was a creature from another planet, and there was no way at all that we were gonna understand each other. And it was true; we were from two different worlds. But that’s why I was there.

Mainly, we talked about his planet. As much as you could talk about it, because it was always the same. Wake-up buzzer at 5 a.m. Make your rack. Crawl into your browns. March to the chowhall with 2000 other convicts. Out to the truck. Hard labor all day. Back to the joint. Shower down with your gang in a basement room. (Hang your uniform on a peg, 3 minutes under the heads, 100 naked cons at a time. “You should see the steam comin out through those bars, dude.”) Chowhall again. May through August, two hours in the yard; September through April, one hour. Lockup till 5 the next morning. Next day the same. On Saturdays, chowhall, haircut, laundry call — two suits of browns turned in, two suits of browns issued back. Visitors if any. Three hours in the yard. Chowhall. Lockup. Sunday, lockup all day. Chowhall at 5 p.m. (“One meal on Sunday. They keep you hungry, man.”) Lockup till 5 the next morning. That was it, unless you got yourself in trouble and got ringed for something.

“It’s not so bad, dude. You get used to it.”

“I don’t know, Jake. You did. I couldn’t.”

“Sure you could.”

“Why do you think so? And stop smiling that way!”

“Because you’d have to, man. Besides, you might even get to like it.”

“I thought you said you were never sarcastic.”

“I’m not.”

I thought about that, later that day. I was on my way home from the station and I stopped at Warbucks for a latte. It was one of those times when you look around and notice where you are. There was the usual crowd of art fags leaning against the walls, yapping about some play they’d just seen, and there was the usual guy in leathers prancing up to a guy in shorts and screeching about how he hadn’t seen him in “years!” Two or three queers in business drag were yelling private information either to themselves or their cellphones, while a chunky barrista in an “ORAL DEPENDENCY” t-shirt swept up around their feet. “So I told him,” one of the queers was announcing, “this relationship may be nurturing you, but it sure as hell isn’t nurturing me. It’s not what you promised. And I’ve decided. I’m outta here, man. It’s not what I need, and it’s not what I want. And you know what he said?” I didn’t care what he said. All I could think was, you would never see a guy like that in the Durant Unit. You would never see a guy like any of these guys. If you did, he’d be ringed and boxed and paddled until he got over it. In the Durant Unit, everything was the way it was supposed to be, all of the time. There were no “promises.” There were no “decisions.”   There was nothing to “want.”   It didn’t matter what a convict “needed.” Jake never had to bother with anything like that. The only thing he needed, I guess, was a good cellmate. “You might even get to like it.” Yeah, I thought. Maybe I could.

Thanksgiving came, and it was a nightmare. Joey was supposed to go to his mom’s place for dinner. I wasn’t invited, because Joey had “never let on” that he was gay. As if there could have been any doubt. Then he decided that he couldn’t stand to think of leaving me alone, so he called his mom on Wednesday night and said he was sick and he wanted to get a lot of sleep, so he couldn’t come tomorrow. He got off the phone and said, “So who should we invite?” On Thursday, the apartment was full — although that might not be saying much, because there were only four rooms to fit them in. Anyway, I was in the living room, trying to keep Joey’s friends in drinks, while Joey was in the kitchen, cooking the interminable turkey. By the time he got it on the table, everybody was drunk and everybody except me had bared his soul about the difficulties of “relationships.” It seemed like Joey’s friends spent all their time having weird misunderstandings, being stood up for no reason at all, leaving in anger, being suddenly and inexplicably betrayed, or else giving parties like this one. I guess I was lucky; my only difficulty with “relationships” was that I had one.

I couldn’t believe some of the stuff I heard myself saying, just trying to be nice to Joey’s guests. I told one of them that he was right to be mad at his lover because the guy wouldn’t “respect his boundaries”; then I agreed with another one that when “you let yourself get angry, you’re just giving away your power.” Finally, after the meal was over and the rest of them were talking about going out to a club, I heard myself telling Joey, “I’d love to come with you, hon, but I gotta get my beauty sleep.” As soon as the door shut behind them, I went into the bedroom, turned on the computer, and clicked onto the DOC.

I always looked at Jake’s picture first, but now I was getting used to calling up some other convicts too. I was curious about whether I’d be attracted to any of the rest of them. I was. They were mainly young guys. All of them were really buff, and most of them were really sexy. I was fascinated by the way they started out as typical young guys, in the earliest pictures you saw in their file, then turned into convicts by the time you got to the last ones. I was fascinated by the fact that each one was a particular guy, a guy with a certain kind of body and a certain kind of history and a certain kind of thoughts and feelings, I supposed, yet each of them was just like every other guy in the Durant Unit — all numbered, suited, shaved, worked, and classified in precisely the same way, as component parts of the Durant Unit. They were totally adapted to the Durant Unit. I couldn’t help comparing them to me. When somebody took my picture, it always seemed like I was in the wrong place. I didn’t belong at that party. I didn’t belong on that couch. I didn’t belong in that body. I never seemed to belong where I was. That didn’t happen to them anymore.

I pushed back the chair and stood up. I started to pace. I never paced when Joey was there. I was scared to pace in my own fuckin apartment! But my whole fuckin life was just pacing up and down. One hour getting ready for work. One hour going there. Eight hours of careful, conscientious, incredibly boring work, work that I did to earn the right to do more work like that, for the rest of my life. One hour for lunch, usually spent dreading the next few hours of work. One hour getting home. Four more hours of doing things I didn’t want to do — talking to “friends,” mainly Joey’s, making him happy enough to keep putting out, worrying about money, doing the fucking shopping with the little money I had. . . . Eight hours of sleep, if I was lucky. Then the same routine again. When was it, during even one of those days, that you could ever take my picture and say, “This is where Jason belongs”? Maybe you would say it. Jason wouldn’t.

That was “freedom.” There was none of that in the Durant Unit. And it didn’t sound so bad.

OK, I was drunk. And I knew that I wouldn’t be thinking this way if I’d never run into Jake Cleveland. But why him, anyway? I got myself another drink and clicked back on his mugshots.

Handsome, yes. Sexy, yes. If Jake was the office boy, I would’ve wanted to fuck his brains out. But I wouldn’t have gotten obsessed with him. And now I was obsessed. All the signs pointed to that. Fine. Then it must be because Jake was a convict. But why was that so interesting? I’d started surfing prison sites from other states, and a lot of them were a real turnoff. All you saw was inmates lolling around in jeans and t-shirts, going to classes, talking with female counselors, and getting “rehabilitated” by doing “work projects in the community.” I couldn’t see why these guys were even “convicts.” They were leading the same life that I led, only not so hassled. They weren’t tough, and they weren’t submissive, either.   They weren’t anything. They weren’t like Jake, that’s for sure. Jake wasn’t in a rehabilitation program. He was just numbered, uniformed, and confined. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had arrived. He was a convict. Maybe they’d turned him into one. Or maybe he’d been a convict all along, and then they’d put him where convicts belong. I’d read that if you start off committing crimes when you’re a young guy, you probably won’t be “rehabilitated” anyway. I didn’t know about that. But I knew that being a convict was a serious thing. Jake was a convict. What was I? Not much, as far as I could tell. . . .

I was sitting in front of the computer, sound asleep, when the door sprang open. Joey was home from the club. What time was it? Two a.m.! And I had to work the next day. Then I remembered how important it sometimes is to turn the computer off.   I reached for the mouse. . . Fuck! The screen froze!

“Hi, hon! You gotta stop puttin yourself to sleep like this. Gimme a kiss and show me how glad you are I’m . . .   Hey! Who’s that ugly guy on the screen?”

“Uh . . . He’s a . . . he’s a wanted man. I was just surfin around . . .”

“Wanted? By who? Turn it off, hon. The clothes alone are enough to give me nightmares. And I only want sweet dreams . . . of us.”

That wasn’t what I’d been dreaming. And there was one dream that kept coming back. It was the same one, every night. I was walking through the park. I had left Jake by the fence down below, and I was walking back to civilization. I had left Jake because there was something I had to do for Joey. It was his birthday, and I had to get him a present. I was nervous. I didn’t like leaving Jake. Something bad might happen if I left. Then I looked in my wallet. Two dollars. Would that be enough for a bottle of cologne? Sure! But the hill seemed higher than it had before. I kept climbing and climbing, but I kept passing the same things, again and again, and I was nervous, so nervous that I woke up.

That was the first night. The next night, I got to the top of the hill. There it was — blue sky! Only where was the sidewalk to the Freer Building? Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but little trails branching off in every direction, and all of them seemed to end in a fence. I must be lost — how did I get in here, anyway? I started to panic. Then, coming towards me, was the familiar figure in the brown convict suit. “I’ll show you the way out,” he said, and he pointed back down the hill. But all I could see down there was a high stone wall, and a line of tall bars set into an archway in the wall. It didn’t look like any way out. I scrambled down and stood in front of the bars. It was like a window. You could see through it. There was something in the distance, something white and hard, like a hard bright light . . . I couldn’t see what it was, but it was fascinating. It had no features; it was all the same, but it was very large, large and complicated somehow . . . Then I didn’t know what to do, and I looked for Jake, but he wasn’t there. So I was scared again . . . and the dream went away. That happened several nights in a row.

Then it was Thanksgiving night, and the dream came back. This time it started when I was standing at the barred up window. I was on the outside, like before, but now Jake was standing on the inside, with his hands on the bars. “I know what this means,” I thought. “Jake is in prison.” Then he said, “Are you still trying to leave? I’ll help you.” He pulled on the bars, and they all swung inward. We were face to face. There was nothing between us. And I was really scared. I was scared to go back and I was scared to go forward and I was scared that Jake would know I was scared. “Yeah,” he said, “I know you’re a coward. But I don’t care. This is it, man.” He was grinning at me, and I couldn’t resist. I stepped up on the sill and went through the window, and the bars slammed behind me. Suddenly everything was hard and white, like I’d walked inside a crystal or a pearl or a gigantic diamond, and I was white too and so was Jake, and our bodies were both the same, white and glittering and wet with light. I looked down, and there was my prick standing out, as hard and white and naked as his, and I felt his arms closing around me. “You’ll never get out,” he said.

“Wait!” I said. “I don’t belong here.” “Just give me what you owe me,” he said, and I knew I had to. I fell on my knees in front of him, and his dick came at me like a firehose, heavy and full and bucking with life, and I opened my mouth and took it inside, and then it was sweet and smooth and quivering and untouched by any mouth before, and my own dick was thrusting up like a rocket that was ready to blow, and Jake reached down and touched its head, very lightly, with the tips of his fingers, and everything inside me leaped to get out, and I heard this noise in the background, like somebody saying, “Hey, what’s goin on? What’s goin on?”, over and over and over again, so I knew that it all had to escape, right then, and I moved my tongue one more time along that little soft white virgin spot where the head meets the shaft, and Jake grabbed my own shaft and held it like he was about to lock it into a chain or rivet it into a shackle that it could never get off, and suddenly those two oceans of cum burst out of us, both at once, wave after wave together, as white as pearl and as pure as crystal, over and over and over until everything that I had ever had on the inside of me had been pumped onto the outside and was gone forever . . . and then I wanted to do it again, in another way, in every other possible way, but that noise in the background kept getting louder until . . .

“Hey, what’s goin on, Jasie? Are you OK?”

It was Joey. He was shaking me to wake me up.

“Huh? What did you say?”

“You were having a nightmare, hon.”

“Really?” Who the FUCK did he think he was?

“Moaning and groaning and . . . Jason! Look what you did to the sheets!”

“I guess I had a wetdream, man.”

“I wish you’d do that with me! Anyhow, I’ll get the washcloth . . . ”

I must be going crazy, I thought. Even my dreams aren’t safe. But they’re the only place where I can go to escape.

 

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