All or Nothing (18 page)

Dry-Aged

Dry-aged
: Beef that has been hung or placed on a rack for several weeks to dry.

I
n October 2003 I was halfway through my six-month stint in jail when word came down that I was being transferred to Conte, an intensive substance abuse program within another jail. I was ready. My physical addiction had long passed, and the dreams were gone too. For two months I had woken up to intense, vivid recollections of a belt tightening around my forearm or a needle slowly penetrating my skin. There's a beginning, middle, and end to physical addiction, and I'd made it through all of them for what I knew would be the last time. But the craving, the mental addiction, hadn't yet subsided.

At Conte I was assigned to a cell with a guy named Louie as my roommate. He was doing time for possession of crack, a class A misdemeanor that carries a one-year minimum sentence. He was forty and had been in and out of the system since he was fifteen. Louie was a big boy—at least six-three and fucking ripped. When he talked, his neck muscles twitched, especially if he was excited, and the scars above his left eyebrow and across his chin cemented his reputation as someone to never fuck with.

The cell I shared with Louie had a toilet, a sink, a bunk bed, and a little area for our possessions. The walls were bare. Displaying personal artifacts was not allowed. Since this was jail, not prison, the inmates carried short-term sentences and there were no bars on the cells, just a large Plexiglas window and door that made a loud suctioning sound when closed.

By then Louie knew the ropes. Jail was his second home. “I live better in the jail than I do on the streets,” he once told me, and I could see why. People feared and therefore respected him, and he was like the mayor of Conte. Having a good “cellie” is key when doing time, and I was lucky to have Louie as mine. We hit it off immediately, united in part by a shared addiction to crack.

Jail was a little city of its own with its own rules of engagement, separate from the outside world. Survival was all about relationships, and the interactions between guards and prisoners were an important dynamic. Some guards and inmates had an “us versus them” mentality and drew a line in the sand: the guards viewed the inmates as something less than human, and the inmates saw the guards as the enemy. I had a different way of looking at it, figuring that it couldn't hurt to get in tight with the guards. One of them, Tom, worked the graveyard shift. He was a nice guy, tall and lanky, with the standard-issue buzz cut. Like me, Tom hailed from Parkland and had a family member who was a junkie, so we shared an immediate connection.

It was the prisoners' job to clean the facility. Guards woke some guys up in the middle of the night to help scrub the toilets, mop floors, or do whatever else needed to get done. Believe it or not, this was a coveted gig. To an inmate, any time spent outside of a cell is time well spent. Two or three nights a week, Tom got me out of my bunk. I'd use a huge machine and spend hours polishing the floors. Then Tom would walk me to the staff lounge for a reward of Cheetos, potato chips, and even caffeinated coffee.

In the mornings we went to group therapy, and in the afternoons we attended Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings that were held in the jail by a group called Hospitals and Institutions. They traveled around, bringing meetings to people who couldn't get out to them. I knew the guys from Hospitals and Institutions from my time at BARC and all the other rehabs I'd been in before. Back then, everything they said had sounded like gibberish to me. I just didn't care. I said the right things and temporarily modified my behavior, but inside I was the same depraved human being. I didn't pay any attention to the significance of the twelve steps—sharing, making amends, admitting powerlessness, and whatever other bullshit they were peddling. At least, that's how I saw it at the time. I heard the words, but I didn't listen to the message. It went in one ear and out the other.

But now I was dry and sober for the longest time since I was twelve years old, and something was different. I had been beaten down so low that I knew the only way was up from here, and I was finally willing to do whatever it took to get there. In the past I'd sat in those meetings silently judging the crackheads around me, only half-listening to what they were saying. But now I heard the guys from Hospitals and Institutions say, “I'm thirty years sober. I made it. You can too,” and suddenly I believed them. I listened, really listened to their stories, and realized that their stories were my story too. My judgment washed away, and I embraced the other addicts as it hit me for the first time that I was truly one of them.

Another guy said, “I lost my job, my family, everything. For ten years, I stole from and lied to everyone I met, including my wife and parents, but somehow I got it all back.” I got goose bumps. I was so determined not to live the same way anymore that I was drawing at straws for serenity, and these words inspired me, instilling faith in a higher power that I had never believed in before. My family wasn't religious. We celebrated the cultural aspects of Judaism, but we never talked about God. But the people right in front of me clearly got so much joy from their faith that I started to believe too—not in the God from the Bible, but a God of my own understanding. I became not religious exactly, but deeply spiritual, and it slowly dawned on me that getting arrested the day after falling to my knees and surrendering had been no coincidence. God had picked me up out of that sludge of misery, I realized, and every time I felt a connection to someone's story, I knew it was the work of God.

Sitting in those meetings, I could feel the desire to get high lift off me and drift away. There's a saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” and as my physical cravings for drugs faded my teacher appeared. The twelve steps talk about handing over our will and our lives to a higher power that can restore us to sanity, and in jail I gladly surrendered my will to God. I was so beaten down by my experiences on the street that I was wide open and willing, and it felt good to sit back and let someone else think for me. For the first time in years I wasn't standing in a river trying to walk upstream, and I experienced an entirely new feeling—peace.

After a month I heard that a couple of guys a few cells down from me got picked up at eleven each night and came back in the morning. I asked Louie where they went. “Kitchen detail,” he told me. My immediate response was, “I've got to get on that detail.” I talked to Tom, and eventually I was able to join the kitchen crew. We worked the Bravo shift—midnight to 5:00
A.M
. Lights out was at 9:00
P.M
., and I didn't get picked up until 11:00, so I just killed time for two hours, waiting to get into the kitchen.

About a half hour before pickup, the guys on kitchen detail lined up and were chain-linked together. From there it was a short drive to the commissary kitchen, which was in a long white building between Conte and the women's house. That kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen before. The refrigerator had enough space for at least fifty long racks; the oven was a huge walk-in. There was a twenty-foot-long stainless steel table we used as an assembly line to make sandwiches. But when I got there, it was a fucking mess. Next to the table was a ten-foot-tall rack full of cheap white bread wrapped in plastic. Half of the guys started by grabbing the bread and slapping on a piece of mystery meat. Then they handed it to the next guy, who had no idea what to do with it. The whole thing was totally unorganized, and it drove me crazy. Eventually I put some order to the process, giving each guy on the line a specific job and turning it into a functioning assembly line.

My job was to make the mashed potatoes, and we went through hundreds of pounds of instant potatoes a day, cooking them in kettles that would hold three bodies. Every Sunday we made chicken, placing the chicken legs on sheet pans and pushing them into the huge walk-in oven. From there, we put the food into huge hotel pans that were placed in transfer containers and taken to each cell block.

There was almost no room for creativity when cooking this unadorned, mass-produced food. Spices, even salt, were strictly forbidden. But I still put maximum effort into everything I was doing. Some inmates didn't like working in the kitchen. It was a lot of work to prepare food for hundreds of inmates and the entire staff, plus we had to clean up before finishing our shift. Others found it demoralizing to serve the same guys we were doing time with, but this didn't make sense to me. The fact is, we were all doing time. I didn't think it could get any more demoralizing than that.

To me, the commissary kitchen was like a slice of heaven in jail. During my shift there were two guards present and five inmates with 20,000 square feet of kitchen space to work in. During the day guards would get pissed if an inmate left the cafeteria with an extra piece of bread or fruit, but us guys who worked the kitchen left our shift with half of the fucking refrigerator tucked under our shirts.

Of course not everything was fun and games. The guys were always fucking with each other, doing anything they could to gain the upper hand. Early on Louie told me, “You've got to set a precedent. Don't show any weakness. If some guy fucks with you or even looks at you the wrong way, you have to hit him.” These were wise words that eventually came in handy.

Jerry and I had a couple of run-ins. He was doing a year for selling, and in jail word got around fast. I heard some whispers and knew he'd been talking shit about me. The other guys were wondering why I hadn't responded, and eventually I knew they would start thinking I was a punk. I couldn't let Jerry get away with it. I had to set a precedent.

One night I saw Jerry waiting in line for dinner. I walked over, placed my hands on his shoulders, and shoved him aside, taking his spot. “Fucking cracker-ass bitch,” he said. “Who do you think you are?” I didn't say anything, but my body language clearly stated,
I'm the motherfucker who just took your place in line. What are you gonna do about it?
Jerry puffed out his chest and then lunged in my direction with his fists clenched and his eyes full of rage. I was ready—I didn't flinch. The guards were watching, and they grabbed Jerry before anything else could happen. For the moment, it was over.

A few mornings later it was the end of my shift at 5:00
A.M
. It had been a long night making over 500 sandwiches. I walked over to the sink to wash my hands before exiting the kitchen, and as I rounded the corner I suddenly fell to the floor, the full weight of my body landing squarely on my left knee. I could see a trickle of blood seeping through a tear in my pants. Behind me I heard laughter. I knew that voice. I picked myself off the ground, and there was Jerry, standing just a few feet away. He was pointing in my direction and still laughing.

I knew what I had to do. I stood up, adrenaline pumping, ready to beat the shit out of this guy, when the guard suddenly yelled, “Line up!” It was time for the nightly strip search before being transported back to the main facility. Thankfully, these searches weren't very thorough, or we would never have gotten away with pilfering as much food from the kitchen as we did.

Once I got back to my cell, Louie started asking about my torn pants. “Fucking Jerry” was all I could say.

“Man, I told you,” he said. “You gotta send a message. Can't let anyone get over on you like that. Don't worry. My boys will take care of it.” These were the same guys who had first turned me on to the kitchen detail. We walked over to their cell and told them about the situation with Jerry.

“Meet us at the walk-in tonight at three sharp,” they said.

I approached the refrigerator later that night. From behind the door I heard a loud crashing sound that I knew was Jerry. When I walked in, he was lying on the floor with his head covered by a sheet pan. Louie's two guys were holding him down. One of the guys looked up at me, but no one said a word. They didn't have to. I knew what I had to do.

In jail everyone talks like he's a tough guy. I constantly heard other inmates claiming, “I'll kick his ass,” but none of them ever threw a punch. I wasn't a violent person; I'd ended up there because I was an addict. And facing the moment where I had to take action as a means of survival was scary. But I couldn't let the other guys see that I was afraid, so I dropped to the floor, removed the sheet pan, and started punching Jerry in the face. Jerry let out a gut-wrenching howl, like the cry of a wounded animal. His right eye started swelling shut as blood poured from both of his nostrils.

I felt awful. I wanted to stop, but I knew I couldn't. Sweat collected on my brow and my glasses slipped, dropping down to the tip of my nose. Soon I felt adrenaline coursing through my body, and as I hit Jerry again and again, the fear I had felt gave way to a strange sense of satisfaction, like every punch was releasing years' worth of pent-up anger. In an instant, it all came flooding back—the resentment I had built up toward my parents, the months of sleeping on cardboard boxes and scrounging through Dumpsters looking for something to eat, the entire reality of my debauched, drug-fueled existence. Finally I had exhausted myself, and the guilt and shame returned immediately. I got up. “Don't fuck with me ever again,” I told Jerry, standing over him.

He never did. And after the other guys saw what had happened to Jerry, no one else did either. I had earned my stripes.

When we lined up to go back to the main facility, it was obvious that Jerry had been jumped. “What happened to your face, Jerry?” the guard asked.

“I fell,” Jerry said. “It's nothing.”

“So be it.” The guard turned to the group. “No one is going to tell me what happened to Jerry?” His question was met with silence. “Then you're all staying an extra hour to scrub pots.”

In jail you never rat. The beating Jerry got from me was like a butterfly kiss compared to what would have happened to him—or any of the guys—if they had ratted.