My writing arm rather aches of late, but I’m hoping this cramp doesn’t put a crimp in my cramming as much info on the inside to you on the outside as I can in the time that remains for me here. I will soon be leaving orientation at Cedar Hall and be transferred to a regular minimum Yard, replete with a likely work assignment that might eat up much of the time I now spend writing. Or, if I am lucky, I will finish my term out at a drug rehab where I think they’d keep me very busy doing things like sweeping floors and baring my soul at 3 meetings a day. Frankly, sounds like the lap of luxury, and at very least I imagine that I’d emerge from it close to a few people I don’t know yet but after I do, I won’t be able to imagine my life without. This is my secret to accepting and digesting difficult changes. Each new alteration is ultimately acceptable if you look at every new encounter made because of them as indispensable to the future you.
I finally wangled my first phone calls, borrowed from a porter (one must clean to have phoning rights so the jobs are hard to get) and I tried both my mother and my sister Sandra. Unfortunately, neither were at home. Things will be more civilized soon enough (although considering my words are being read as they are by you all now, that’s pretty civilized! What an irony—there are so many—that it took me being behind bars to get close again to so many from my friend-rich past. Holy silver lining Batman! Vive l’Internet!)
Before I tell my story for the day, I must explain some stuff about prison. It is very regulated who you smoke or eat “after,” according to race or sexual preference. Eating “after” means taking from food that has been already touched or partially eaten by someone else, or smoking from a cigarette that has touched someone else’s lips. In the gay dorm at County, this was rarely an issue, as everyone was gay and racial lines were not an issue. But when I went to Delano, the first reception center where I mixed with “mainline” or the general population, I was warned never to smoke or eat after blacks or Latinos—meaning usually someone at your table at Chow, which is the only place the races mix, as seating is according to your place in line, and though the races are bunched, you find yourself sitting opposite other races. If, for example, you have beans left on your plate, you can offer them to a member of your own race, but Blacks never take from Latins who never take from Whites, who never take from Blacks and so on. Meal times often resembled the gym dance seen in “West Side Story,” in which the “mismatched” White and Latin dancers reach around and over each other to commune with their own. Not an atmosphere conducive to convivial dinner conversation, although I once got quite a laugh at the table by attributing my fictional slutty girlfriend’s poor correspondence skills to her being able to lick “everything but a stamp.”
For a gay male, this entire sharing issue is a little problematic because if you don’t share, you are seen as anti-social, but if you do share, some of the ignorant types who find out later you are gay may take umbrage at having eaten the macaroni that had been on your plate. If you’re getting by without there being a general recognition of your sexuality, then dinnertime is an uncomfortably public time to reveal this tidbit, (as the gay comic described coming out to his family at Thanksgiving, “Please pass the mashed potatoes to the homosexual” ) It’s also not recommended that you reveal why you are in line for pill call twice a day. When asked at Delano, I ventured post-prostate cancer therapy as the reason for my meds. A wise choice, as near the end of my 2 months there I did have to duck a hostile gay/HIV outing attempt from the would-be king of “Woods,” an Aryan supremacist asshole (I know that’s a redundancy) by the name of Chainsaw. ( I am starting to enjoy the score-evening this blog is allowing me. But while I skewer Mr. Massacre, it is only fair that I take the opportunity to apologize to all of my friends to whom I was ever an asshole—whether or not I was addled by drugs or alcohol. That’s no excuse for anything.)
Here in Minimum Orientation, where I have finally arrived, there is a general affinity between members of the same race and little enmity shown publicly between races. Any expression of rivalry is watched for by the guards and as these men are "short-timers,” here for mostly parole violations, there are very few hardcore convicts of any stripe among them. Gays are fairly tolerated, if frowned upon by some bible–reading Christians. This is, after all, generally an MTV generation and gays are not an unfamiliar commodity. However, it is considered good form for those who are HIV+ not to offer their cigarettes or leftovers to others without telling them ahead of time. Such a revelation is generally appreciated but often ignored.
So yesterday afternoon, I was the recipient of an orange at Pill Call, as the MTA, (Medical Tech Assistant) just happened to be giving them out. I finished peeling one at my bunk and hadn’t even bit into it. I offered a portion to Magoo, my Latin neighbor. (I’m pretty sure this is his real name, as I haven’t heard a “Mister” attached to it. Although he does have a distinctive penetrating voice, he doesn’t wear glasses and walk into walls.) He was being his semi-humorous, semi-controlling chop-busting self, engaging in the pointed banter where you never know if he’s joking or not.
He responded to my offer with “Hey, you’re gay right?” I nodded affirmatively, knowing everyone was wondering in any case, and having discovered it is actually generally easier to be “out” and unapologetic in prison from the get go then try hiding it. Magoo said “well I don’t eat after gays because who knows where your hands have just been.” (Particularly ironic because I have never been so completely celibate in my life. And amazing because it was the gayness, not my possible HIV status), His reaction actually caused a few jaws to drop and one of my other neighbors, “Cookie,” said to Magoo: “Gee, Dawg what side of the bed did you get up on this morning?” Now, I sensed that Magoo had mis-stepped and knew it and if I said anything he would have immediately retreated into “Dawg, I was just playing with you” and I risked appearing the oversensitive type who couldn’t be “one of the guys.” So I just said nothing, and retracted the offer of the orange, letting the discomfort of the moment fall on his shoulders. I remembered a cardinal rule of prison shared by my gay friend David Sanchez: “Know when to shut up.” I also remembered my own rule “Timing, Timing, Timing.”
As if to confirm that he felt a bit of the asshole and wanted me to know he didn’t “mean” anything, Magoo promptly asked me in the bathroom how my visit with my sister went. I answered “It was lovely, thank-you.” He asked me what we ate. “Chef’s Salad.” I answered. He couldn’t resist editorializing “What? She came all the way from Albuquerque and you didn’t even have Pizza!” (He probably never ate a Chef’s Salad in his life.)
I was actually pretty sure Magoo already liked me, because I’d laughed at a few of his jokes and had snuck in a sly remark or two of my own. But I knew to wait for the right moment to “get back at him” and not to look for it, it would make itself known to me. Such is often the case for wit at its best.
That evening I returned triumphantly to my bunk with a pillow, obtained from an ex-neighbor who had been transferred with me from the last dorm—someone I disliked intensely but who craves my approval no matter how many times I roll my eyes at his adolescent behavior. (He gets around in a wheelchair, completely faking his disability for a bogus lawsuit—I have seen this young man deliver practice karate kicks!)
Anyway, at bedtime I was tucking blanket beneath sheet, and Magoo noticed my bare pillow. In his inimitable shrill tenor he said, “You’re gonna need a case for that pillow” and I said I’d only received the one sheet in my “welcome” roll, so he suggested I use a t-shirt. I didn’t have one, so he offered that an extra sheet of his. I waited just the right beat, knowing everyone had cocked their ears and then hesitatingly responded. “Er…. I don’t know, I don’t usually sleep “after” straight guys. It’s not going to rub off on me, is it?”
You could have heard a pin drop. Then laughter ripped through my little section of the dorm, no stronger than from Magoo himself. “You’re all right, Marc” (or as they say here “AWRIGHT” )
I chalked one up as I wrapped his sheet around my pillow.
His “straight” pillow case did not rub off, however, as I did not dream of big boobs and mini-skirts.
MCO 2004
