This last store draw, Earl bought a can of tobacco, and I bought a second one for him. This was because I am much “richer” than Earl, and being gay bunkies, we share everything. Consequently, when I leave, I wanted to shore up Earl’s relatively meager holdings. He will have what’s left of mine from this last month’s store, plus whatever else I leave him, plus the proceeds of selling single cigarettes from the extra can of tobacco. (His family sends him the occasional twenty dollars; mine made sure I had at least 6 or 7 times that to spend monthly at canteen.)
So yesterday, Earl was happily rolling these single cigarettes, and as word spread, he was already starting to sell them. (He gets paid in soups or other goods. There is no money in prison. I haven’t even seen a coin in 10 months.)
Inevitably, it was told to us to not sell to the whites, although, counter-intuitively, we could sell to the blacks and Mexicans. At first I assumed this was just so much AIDS phobia, yet again. Then I discovered our crime this time around was no more serious then our sexuality alone. While our offers up until now of unrolled cigarettes have been gratefully accepted (unsealed rolling paper filled with tobacco), it seemed cigarettes that had been sealed with a flick of our tongues were unacceptable.
I’m sorry to be crude about it, but the rationale is this: lips that have touched the genitalia of other men cannot touch the lips of the other whites. It “taints” them.
To point out how ridiculous this is: the men in question wouldn’t think twice about smoking a rolled cigarette from a prostitute whose lips would have been far more promiscuous in the preceding 24 hours than ours might have been in the preceding several months or even years. To boot, if you ask any of these men individually if they have a problem with it, to a man they will say no. Once they consult their “homies” though, they are just "following rules.” It is "out of their hands."
This irritated me no end when Earl told me. He still identifies with the oppressor and can’t understand why I should be upset about something “beyond their control.” I pointed out the hypocrisy and went a step farther. “Don’t you see Earl? When these guys are standing around shooting the shit, someone has to bring this objection up. Though all of them individually profess not to object to our cigarettes, one of them brings it up because he is going to get 'points' from the others for doing so. It’s sickening." I’m sorry to say that this analysis of conformist behavior was beyond Earl, he simply could not grasp what I was getting at.
To his dismay, I brought it up when Jimmy came over, to “help us out” by rolling a bushel of cigarettes with his lips that would go into a separate pile for the whites only. This opened up a much longer discussion that several other whites listened to with rapt attention. (I will have to paraphrase and consolidate somewhat here, my contentions were wide-ranging and my tone a tad relentless.)
They kept feeding me the old “we don’t make up the rules, we only play by them" line of bullshit. I pointed out how many rules had been bent by Jimmy (as I thanked him) on our behalf. I cited how much had in fact changed over the past several years; the way whites, for example, were much more permitted to interact with other races (a veritable necessity when the Mexicans took over the drug trade). I pointed out the prostitute contradiction to demolish the whole lip-to-lip argument, and when the discussion expanded to include whether homosexuality was a choice or not, I rolled out the big guns. “Do you really think, in a society that produces ignorance and hate like all of yours, that any 14-year old in their right mind is going to wake up one day and say to himself 'Oh well, I can choose: a) society's acceptance and the complete support of my family and friends or b) a lifetime of struggle, condemnation and controversy. Oh well, I’m bored today, so I’ll choose b.' Are you guys out of your mind? Is that how you think you ended up straight, because you chose it? Did you choose to wake up around puberty with hard-ons everyday, thinking incessantly about big tits? Did it ever occur to you for a minute to go to your parents and say 'Gee Mom and Dad, I’m thinking about woman’s bodies every waking minute, do you think I might be heterosexual?' Did you ever have to hear them say 'Oh son, you’re a little young to decide on something as important as your sexual orientation, why don’t you experiment with boys a bit first just to make sure you’re not a homosexual?'" One of them offered a lame response, another, more honestly, pointed out here one could get “stuck” for refusing to obey the cigarette (and other) rules. To which I rejoined “You know, Hitler didn’t personally go out and kill 50,000,000 people. He ordered other people to do it. If someone doesn’t follow the rules, the big hoo-hah who orders him punished doesn’t do it himself either, someone has to do the sticking at his behest. You guys can damn well refuse to enforce these ass-backwards rules.” What I didn’t say, but thought about, was a perceptive Turkish filmmaker’s observation about fundamentalist Islamic men being the guards and prisoners of their own concentration camps.
Like so much of America, these guys believe that homosexuality is about what you do, not who you are. I told them they could spend their entire lives in jail, and only have sex with men, and that wouldn’t make them one iota less heterosexual, By the same token, I could marry a woman and have sex with her only for a life time, and wouldn’t be any less of a homosexual.
“And furthermore," (this was the best part) "how is it that you yahoos won’t even obey a red light on the streets, but once you get in here, you don’t dare disobey any of the rules imposed by 'the whites?'" If ever some career criminal tries to tell you he has trouble obeying rules and regulations don’t believe him. He only has trouble with the authority that he isn’t part of imposing and enforcing (it’s not for nothing that so many Nazis were ex-convicts.)
I don’t want to paint myself too much the Martin Luther Queen here, after all, I didn’t do too bad a job of rule-breaking on the outside myself. I will say in my defense though, that I disagreed and still disagree with the laws I broke on the outside on reasons of principle going far beyond playing out dramas of attention-getting rebellion against absent fathers and neglectful mothers. And I will agitate to change those laws on the outside just as I work to change the rules I don’t like in here.
It is highly unlikely I will be successful at either in my lifetime. Neither was Adlai Stevenson though, and most of what he advocated has come to pass years after he advocated it. (Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate who lost to Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Look him up.)
Ready, get set, google!
MCO 2004
P.S. Story Heard at Chow, Sworn to be True
A man came home for lunch from work, and discovered his pet Rottweiller had somehow gotten hold of the neighbor’s rabbit and “playing” with it, had killed it. The man was mortified but was at least able to get the rabbit from his Rottweiller before too much obvious damage was done.
Sneaking over to his neighbors, he propped the rabbit against its water bowl and hoped against hope they would believe the rabbit had expired naturally.
When he came home from work later that day, the police were in front of his neighbor’s house.
“What happened?” he asked fearfully.
The cop answered, “The kid’s rabbit died and they buried it in the backyard. Some SICKO dug it up and propped it against the water bowl for the kids to find when they got home from school!”
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