Against the Wind (44 page)

We said our goodbyes. Mary Lou drove her to the airport, in Albuquerque. She was much more upset; she didn’t want me to do it. If it was the other way around, I put it to her, wouldn’t you? We both knew that answer. I gave them both big hugs and kisses, watched the car until it was out of sight, went back to town and joined the war party.

I’m not scared; not for myself. There’s a protocol for this, long established. I’ll do the best I can, and either it’ll work or it won’t. They don’t shoot the messenger in situations like this, this isn’t Lebanon.

I just have to go on faith that these men are sane enough to remember the rules. Martyrdom isn’t much of a turn-on for me; I have no desire to become a home-grown Terry Waite.

What I am scared of, rationally, is not being able to make it work. That no matter what I do, say, or promise, it won’t be enough, or worse, that what’s already happened has become such a mountain, is so far gone, that there is no solution except siege. I can’t promise them the moon; I can’t give them their freedom.

They finish searching me. One of them takes my bag, as if he’s my porter. We pass through the inner set of gates, which, from somewhere inside, are automatically locked behind us. We walk the fifty yards across the lawn. The prisoner-guards accompanying me (who are comporting themselves very seriously, almost military-style) flank me front and back, side and side. We fast-walk up the steps to the administration building and inside, and the free world disappears behind me at the same moment that the sun drops out of sight in the sky.

THE WORLD IS DARK,
and it’s on fire. The darkness is not merely lack of light; it’s a real, viscous darkness, thick and heavy, darkness caused not by loss of light but by the forceful removal of light, of light violently sucked out of the air and replaced with oppression. You can almost reach out and touch it, as if it were a wall, it feels so thick, so real. Hanging heavy, suffocating, an accumulation of enormous weight. To live in darkness like this would be to go crazy eventually.

The density of the smoke assaults my mouth and nasal passages as soon as I pass into the old maximum-security section. One of my escorts leads me to a sink, where I dip my hands in tepid water, splash my hands and face. Then he hands me a water-soaked towel, helps me tie it around my face and neck.

“It’s worst here,” he tells me. He’s black, he talks with a thick southern drawl. There aren’t many blacks in here; seventy-five percent of the inmate population is Chicano, the oppressed minority of choice in these parts. “In case they try to storm us,” he informs me, a cautioning, “we got it rigged with oil-drums, we can explode this whole fuckin’ place in a fireball, it comes down to that. The fumes’re fierce though, ain’t they?”

They are; it’s hot as hell, the place has been shut down for over twenty-four hours, so the air-conditioning is off. Except for water, which is a self-contained unit of wells and cisterns inside the prison walls, all the utilities are off. If this goes more than a week they’ll run out of food, unless they negotiate for it. If it goes more than a week, people much heavier than me will be doing the negotiating, and it’ll be at gunpoint. If it comes to that, the hostages will be dead.

I’d given the authorities three days. If I haven’t pulled it off by then, or, at the least, have gotten damn close to a settlement, I’m walking out. Then they can do it the hard way.

Everyone inside the walls has been brought to this unit, A unit. It’s the original prison building, constructed the old way, barred cells in tiers. All the new buildings are compartmentalized; no unit in any of them houses more than two dozen prisoners. It’s a better system because it keeps large groups of the population from gathering together.

When the rioting started, the warden could have shut down the one building where it was happening in D unit; he could have stopped it from spreading prison-wide. Only about two hundred men would have been affected, then. The other six hundred-odd would have been prevented from getting in on the action. The down side would have been that the hostages, at least those who were taken in the first wave, would’ve been assured of being killed; if not at once, definitely before it all ended. Some wardens would have done that; they would have sacrificed their troops. By the book, you’re allowed to do that. Trade lives for the greater good.

To his credit, Gates didn’t. He swapped keeping the hostages alive for control of his prison. I’d bet the farm that most prison officials think he’s a pussy, that he should’ve detonated the place, and made the sacrifices.

But most prison officials never have to face this choice, although they spend their lives in dread of it. I have no doubt Gates did the right thing, and I suspect he still feels the same, even though it’s costing him.

If I can pull it off, bring the hostages out alive, I might save his bacon. But his bacon, or any other part of his anatomy, is not the problem. The problem is the over eight hundred men who have been locked up like animals in these cages. That they deserve to be locked up, that they have to be, is not in question. There’s no other way to handle many of these men. The question is, how do you get madmen, psychotics, losers with nothing more to lose, to agree to docilely go back into their cages?

It’s very quiet. Normally a prison is loud. People talking and yelling all the time. There are men in prison who scream every second they’re awake. Now there is none of that. It’s frightening, the quiet is so intense.

We are in the small holding area outside the main section. Normally, to get in, you go through two sets of thick, lead-covered doors that lock independently of each other, and you wait in between for one set to lock before the other set opens. It’s to keep some chump from trying to make a break. Now, all the doors are open. People can go in and out at will; but they don’t, because they have nowhere to go.

“Put these on, man.” One of my escorts hands me a couple of Baggies, the kind you stick your garbage in. I look down; I notice they’re all wearing them over their shoes.

“What for?” I ask.

“The floors are wet inside,” he answers dryly. “You don’t want to fuck up your new Nikes.”

I wrap the garbage bags around my shoes, secure them with plastic ties.

“Follow me,” the leader, the black convict, tells me. “Keep up. Don’t go sight-seeing on me, you hear? Time for that shit later, maybe.

Right now we got to get you together with the council. Follow up close now.”

We press forward, towards the body of the prison. I’m right up against them, asshole to elbow. We round the bend, and as I walk into the cellblock proper I’m assaulted by the unbelievable, overwhelming smell, it hits me before anything visual registers, almost like shock waves of a nuclear explosion, it’s that strong and immediate, before anything I see makes an imprint: the most powerful, intense, horrible odor I’ve ever encountered, the smell of a thousand septic tanks bursting, ten thousand toilets overflowing. I gag violently, my lunch is in my mouth, my hand is up covering it through the towel. I’m not going to vomit in front of these men, not when I’ve barely set a foot inside the door.

We start forward.

“Watch your step,” my escort warns. The floor is very slippery. Linoleum. Easy to keep clean. I realize that it’s wet, that there’s a virtual river underneath my feet, several inches deep. And immediately I realize, a realization that brings fresh revulsion, that all the toilets are stopped up, I hear them flushing, over and over, they’ve been jammed-up to keep doing it, so that they’ve overflowed out onto the floor and I am walking through a river not only of foul water, but of piss, shit, and vomit. And blood. I can’t help but look down and even though it’s dark in here I can see the blood, it flows in clots, almost fluorescent, silvery-red, the water pale yellow, turds and clumps of vomit carried with it. It moves slowly, from one wall to another, seeking an outlet, a release, but there is none so it’s a stagnant tidal pool, a swamp of human waste.

I force myself to walk, to keep pace with my guides.

We slide our way across the floor, heading (hopefully) for higher ground.

The carnage is unbelievable. The prison is literally on fire. I can see now all the way down to the other end, a couple hundred yards, and up the tiers, three stories. Fires everywhere, countless fires. Everything is on fire: mattresses, trash, any piece of wood the men have been able to get their hands on. Huge oil drums are all over the place, they must have been brought in from the farm area outside, where they’re stored to fuel the equipment. In hindsight you wonder why in the world would a prison keep so much flammable shit around?

It’s like handing a loaded machine-gun to a three-year-old. The drums are all spewing fire, small tires mostly, the kind you see on Chicago street corners in winter. But it’s almost summer now, outside the heat is in the eighties, in here they are burning fires.

I’m immediately drenched in sweat. It feels like a sauna from hell. It must be a hundred and fifteen in here. The fumes roiling to the ceiling, the oil-smoke thick and harsh to the lungs. I press the wet towel to my face as we march onwards.

Every man in the prison is in this building, it seems, and every one of them is out in these corridors. They stand there, in the corridors and in the cells, watching me as I pass them. They are all masked, like my guides. Bandannas around their faces, burnooses fashioned from towels, from pieces of torn-up sheet. Anything to hide behind. Eyes looking out, intense, ready to explode.

To a man, they’re armed. A few; the elite, the appointed leaders, the ones controlling the action, have guns. Shotguns, rifles, pistols. Tear-gas guns, whatever they could get their hands on that can fire a load.

The others, the majority, have their own weapons, made up of what they could find or fashion. Knives, axes, lengths of metal, bedframes torn from the walls, smashed into crude sharp-pointed spears. Others carry bludgeons, pieces of wood, lengths of pipe, bricks, chains wrapped around forearms and wrists. Anything that can kill.

I understand, seeing this, that the weapons, and more important, the masks, are not only for protection from the outside, but are there to cover up from the others in here. It’s an uprising, yes, all banding together for one cause, but it’s also anarchy, every man for himself. The first rule inside: cover your ass. No one can tell who anyone is, with a few exceptions like the blacks. You’ve got to cover your ass, hide your face, because you don’t know when an enemy might use this chaos as an excuse to settle an old score. You learn super-fast on the inside that almost all deaths in prison riots are revenge killings, inmates killing inmates, usually over very petty shit.

“All right, now, watch your step here. Don’t want you falling and breaking your neck, boss,” the lead escort tells me, almost jocularly. “You ’bout the onliest hope we got to settle this thing up without no more bloodshed,”

Without no more bloodshed. That starts my stomach going again.

Have there been killings? Who were they? Hostages we don’t know about, prisoners, what?

He leads me up a set of metal stairs in the center of the complex that winds around the tower housing the control centers where the guards are normally bastioned. From this core area, which extends a hundred feet up and has at its center one secure safety-glass-walled control unit for each floor, a single guard can see three hundred and sixty degrees; he can spot trouble in the making and seal himself off until help arrives, if it’s necessary. The uprising couldn’t have taken place here, because the population in this unit doesn’t have the freedom of movement they give the less-restricted areas. With more freedom of movement comes more responsibility and liberty, and with more liberty and responsibility came anarchy. An irony that will be pondered deeply in days to come.

We’re in the middle tier now. I follow my escorts down a long row of cells. The row is crowded with men, moving about aimlessly, holding onto their weapons. They all watch me as we pass. A few throw out choice epithets, such as ‘jive-ass white-bread motherfucker,’ a few spit on the ground as I pass, but for the most part they watch me silently, hundreds of sets of eyes behind masks boring into me front and back. A gauntlet of fury and rage.

I’m ushered into a large, open room at the end of the cellblock that’s normally used as a dayroom for inmates who’ve earned points for good behavior; trusties and the like. The two televisions have been smashed, as has the Ping-Pong table. The couches have been ripped up for the wire, which is now in use as weapons and defense barriers throughout the building; I passed crude wire barriers on my way through the corridors. Chairs and tables have been brought in; bottles of water, cartons of canned food are stacked in corners.

“Hey there, ace.” From across the room comes the familiar voice.

Alone among the prisoners, Lone Wolf is unmasked. He sits at a long table in the center of the inmate council. His place at the table, the fact that he alone is without a mask, and his overall regal demeanor tell me that he’s the leader. They are all working in concert, of course, but he’s the
jefe
, he’s running the show.

It’s been six weeks since we last sat face to face. He’s let his beard grow longer than he’d been keeping it; for some reason I flash on Che Guevara, on the pictures of Che that used to adorn walls in college dorm rooms back in the radical sixties and early seventies, including my own. Che and Huey and Mao, the unholy trinity to the white kids who were so desperate for a cause, so eager to get in on the action instead of living vicariously on the sidelines like their parents had; looking back on it now, Vietnam was a blessing in disguise, especially to those who didn’t go, because it was something to be passionate for, especially after the blacks kicked the white kids out of the civil-rights movement. (So we thought about Nam—we were never going to cop-out, become middle class. Shit, what drugged-out dreamers we turned out to be.)

Three black-and-white posters on the wall, three heroes of my generation, dead and mostly discredited now, or even worse, irrelevant. The permanency of impermanence.