Four Feet Tall and Rising (12 page)

Now, outside people assume that inmates are being stabbed or killed all the time, but those were the days of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Prisons had become a lot less violent since they’d instituted the SHU, the Security Housing Unit. It was a system they used to control the really nasty guys, the Hannibal Lecters of the world. Getting thrown into the SHU was essentially like being thrown in the wet room at the Youth Authority. It was solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. Things still happened, of course, just not as often, and in Four Building, it was even rarer. That’s why the attempt on my life was met with such stiff and immediate punishment … lockdown. For the next week, nothing happened. Everybody was locked in their cells. We were let out once every other day to take a shower. Sleeping in my bunk those first few nights, I didn’t feel safe. I trusted my cellie, but he was only one person, and lockdown in a prison is like a woman and her husband driving around skid row at three in the morning. She may trust her husband, and her doors may be locked, but she still wants the hell out of the ’hood.

Lockdown caused even more friction. The inmates were pissed and blaming me. Everyone wanted me shipped away or taken out. The officials convened another meeting with all the
prison gang leaders to calm things down. Of course, the leaders lied and called a “truce” to lift the lockdown, but I knew that with the gates wide open, I was in serious jeopardy. Now anybody could get to me. Every time the guards opened our cells, the Bloods would show up to surround and walk with me. That woman driving around skid row would be a lot safer with three patrol cars escorting her home. The Bloods knew I’d stay alive a lot longer with three or four guys beside me at all times. There was a concerted effort to protect me. They were my patrol cars.

For my first walk across the yard, it took an entourage. I felt like a movie star, everybody staring at me. Crossing that yard was a crash course in Folsom’s gangs and their turf. There was the Mexican Mafia, which was the oldest gang in California’s system. They were considered a prison gang, not a street gang, ’cause they’d actually started at Deuel, the DVI prison I’d just left, and had been around for about forty years. Their members were mostly from Southern California. Across the yard from them was Nuestra Familia, another Latino gang that started at Soledad Prison in the 1960s but also had a strong presence on the street. They were made up of all the Northern Californian Mexicans, and they hated the Mexican Mafia. Then there were the Border Brothers, also Mexicans, to round out all the Hispanic gangs. As for the whites in the yard, there were two gangs that claimed space: the Aryan Brotherhood and the Nazi Low Riders, an Aryan Brotherhood spin-off that started at the Youth Authority back in the ’70s. The Aryans were the ones that really hated me, though the Nazis had no love for
me either. At County, I was used to the Bloods having one side of the yard and the Crips having the other, but at Folsom, all the black gangs shared turf—even the Black Guerrilla Family, which was another prison-not-street gang that had started in San Quentin. There weren’t as many of them as there were Crips or Bloods, but they were still a presence.

Basically the yard was a bigger, more dangerous version of high school. The gangs almost functioned like self-contained cliques with their own “jocks” and “nerds” and “druggies” and, of course, the “popular” guys, the guys in charge, leaders who got their ass kissed by everybody. You could see them, giving orders with a slight nod or just a look. They ran the entire prison, and just like high school, most of them never wanted to leave. Once they got out of those walls, nobody would listen to them. On the yard, they were big men. Outside, they were nothing, nobody.

What shocked the shit out of me was seeing so many guys I knew from the projects. There were more Bloods in that yard than there were on the streets. It was like a damn reunion. I didn’t know it then, but over the next five years, I came to realize prison was a never-ending cycle. If we ever got down to three or four Bloods in the building, ten more would get transferred in. It was just endless.

I saw cons come back through those bars five, six, seven times. They’d be let out on parole and three months later, they’d be back. They didn’t have the motivation to succeed. Either they didn’t care or they didn’t know how to change their lives. It was too easy to do the same old things once they
were out. Most of them went home to the exact spot where they got in trouble, and the temptation of the easy life was just too great. They’d think, “Why am I gonna be yelled at by this damn man, making seven dollars an hour, when I can be my own boss making seven dollars a minute?” Most guys didn’t have the attention span to stick with the struggle. Not only were they a failure at being a gang member, they were a failure at school, a failure at home. They’d never had any success, so they didn’t even know what it felt like to be someone different.

The only guys who didn’t come back were those that wanted to be educated. They were the only ones that gave me any hope. The rest of the guys became institutionalized. There were guys who opted to stay in prison rather than deal with parole. They’d willingly do their full sentences so they wouldn’t have to face the real world. Then there were the guys who’d go back out on the streets and get on parole, but they couldn’t make it. They were starving. They had to hustle for everything. Then they’d have that one thought: “Why don’t I go back to jail? It’s easier there.” We’d see them again. Jail became their comfort zone. Jail was all they knew. They didn’t like change. They didn’t like struggling, and in jail, they got fed three meals, the rules were clear, they had a job, and everything was structured, predictable. They always had someplace to sleep, a couple of girls on the side, and instant camaraderie. Jail was actually easier than having to be responsible for your own life. There were a lot of guys who just threw up their hands and surrendered.

It was the last thing I wanted to happen to me, but Folsom
functioned like a warehouse. The system wasn’t focused on reform. It was focused on trying to keep people alive, controlled, and with minimal violence during the day. My cat sanctuary at DeWitt seemed a million miles away. Those easy moments in the hammock, with Zsa Zsa on my stomach, both of us asleep, those were long gone.

There was nothing for me to accomplish at Folsom. They offered high school programs but I’d already finished my GED. I asked to work for the PIA, the prison industry authority, (where they make all the state license plates), but the factory was in a different section of the building. To get to it, you had to cross eight different security perimeters, and prison officials still had some note on some damn piece of paper that said, “Flight Risk.” They would not let me leave my unit to work.

There were guys in Folsom doing life, who had no chance of ever setting foot on free ground, and they’d let them work PIA, but not me. By now, I knew I only had about five years left on my sentence if I did good time and I certainly wasn’t gonna do nothing to extend my stay. Once I was turned down for a PIA job, I felt hopeless. I couldn’t take a step without an entourage of black asses in my face. I couldn’t work a job to kill the time. I couldn’t take the limited classes that were offered. I gave up on the system. There was no way to create meaning for myself, so I settled for making myself comfortable instead. I surrendered to the monotonous routine of prison life: meals, count, sleep, meals, count, sleep.

Breakfast was served at 6:30 in the morning. It was usually SOS, shit on a shingle, or gravy on a piece of meat. Some
days, they served hotcakes or French toast, but I couldn’t stand nothing with syrup on it. Thank God, they didn’t force you to go. I hated getting up that early, so I mostly opted to sleep in until 8 a.m. and make instant coffee or Top Ramen noodles with my stinger, a slim metal rod that plugged into the wall, heated up, and brought water to a boil. Microwaves and hot plates were illegal. Stingers were the only option. You could buy them through the canteen, which was the commissary, but they’d run you about fifteen dollars. When guys couldn’t afford to buy one, they’d take two square pieces of metal, put a piece of rubber in between them, and screw those together. They’d then attach a positive and a negative wire that they soldered onto the metal. It would get rusted and be dangerous. Guys would get zapped. End up in the hospital. Not everybody was bright enough to be messing with electricity.

Meals were the equivalent of herding cattle. It took two or three hours to feed everybody in a constant flow, an assembly line of guys coming and going all the time. You only had five or six minutes to eat. Once the guards said you were done, you were done, whether or not you still had food on your plate. Breakfast and dinnertime ran this way. Lunch was bagged. They’d slap some form of meat between two pieces of bread, toss in a piece of fruit, juice or milk, and maybe a small bag of potato chips. Lunch was meant to be carried with you to your job. Not that I had one.

There were few meals that were worth the trouble. Hamburgers I liked, but most of the time, I went to chow hall just for the ice cream. I wouldn’t touch the rest of the food. I
lived off junk food from the commissary: canned chili, canned tuna, canned oysters, Top Ramen noodles, potato chips, and popcorn. Money got to me through friends or family on the outside. Janet, Uncle D., who was back out of prison, and my roll dog from the projects, Jerry, would send me a quarterly package when he was out of jail. Quarterly packages were like care packages kids get sent at camp. We were allowed a set amount of stuff per package, so many Ramen noodles, so many cigarettes and cigars. Most of my quarterly packages were made up of cigars. Other than that, I smoked Swisher Sweets, ’cause that’s what they sold at the commissary.

For those guys who didn’t have friends or family sending them things, there were actually companies they could pay to send them a quarterly package. The companies mailed magazines or catalogs to inmates. Their entire customer base was in prison, and they were making millions. They sold radios, Walkmans, or TVs. They had setups with the prisons to actually debit inmates’ prison accounts, so we never even had to write them a check or arrange for our family to do so. There was a whole industry that catered only to inmates. It was disturbing, but as long as there is a dollar bill flying around, somebody will grab it.

Since at first I wasn’t able to have a job, I had to rely on gifts from somebody on the outside. Janet or Jerry or Uncle D. would send me somewhere between $20 and $200, and if I budgeted right, I’d only spend about $50 at the commissary every month. I could make those gifts last. It’s not like having a job would have made me rich. Prison jobs only paid
ten cents or fifteen cents an hour. At the max, guys made fifty cents an hour at their job. So a $15 stinger, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money, was actually very expensive. Cigarettes were better than all the money in the world. You could always wheel and deal and negotiate if you had cigarettes. (I have no idea what those guys are doing, now that they’ve banned cigarettes in the prisons. I have no idea how they function. It would be like waking up tomorrow and finding out that there is no more cash in the world.)

You had to bribe the guys in the laundry to make sure you got your own stuff back. Everyone was issued a set of clothes. Our uniform was white T-shirts, white boxers, white socks, and PIA jeans and jean shirts, both of which were actually sewn by prisoners. Everybody had a jacket ’cause it did get cold. That was your basic. You had two or three of each piece, and each cell had metal compartment-like shelves with four different sections to split with your cellie. That’s where you stored your stuff. Most guys had cardboard boxes slid underneath their bunks for extra storage, but if you were lucky, you could snatch a milk crate from the kitchen. I had five of those. Those were luxury, and illegal. Every couple of days, you’d trade your dirty laundry for clean basics. Sometimes, you would get crappy stuff back instead of your own clothes.

Since I am Little, I was allowed to have outside people send me special things. Janet would send me Levi’s jeans and I’d have the guys in the sewing shop cut them down to size. For the price of a few packs, of course. Janet had to send me T-shirts and shoes ’cause they don’t make prison shoes that small. So
everything I owned was from the streets, and not from prison. I never wanted to lose my things, so I always made sure I paid someone to wash them personally.

Every transaction, every move I made, had to be thought out. How will I get my clothes back? How will I get the best bed? Who will be my cellie? When the new mattresses arrived, the desk clerk, an inmate, was in charge of handing them out. Now, those mattresses get old fast and they’re only so thick to begin with. Most guys had two or three mattresses stacked on top of each other, but when the new ones came in the door, those were the ones in demand. There were five hundred beds and only two hundred new mattresses. Everything had a price.

The corrections officers just looked the other way. Maybe some didn’t know what was going on, but most just turned a blind eye. There were certainly crooked corrections officers who had their hands in drugs, but they weren’t gonna lose their pensions over a mattress or laundry.

At 4:30 p.m., no matter where we were, we had to head back to our cells for count. Count is a statewide activity. Every inmate in every prison in California goes into lockdown every single day at 4:30 p.m. You can set your watch by it. The corrections officers go cell to cell and literally count to see if anyone is missing. In Four Building, it was a process that normally took half an hour, but you’d be surprised at the uneducated people trying to do math. Four or five times a month, some stupid guard couldn’t count past two hundred, and we’d all have to sit for two hours, even though no one was actually missing.

In the bigger buildings, count took much longer. One building was five stories high and held over three thousand prisoners. They had thirty or forty officers patrolling their tiers at any given time. Four Building had twelve guards, or less, walking the tiers. Our officers were around so much we knew them all by name. I was very clear on who liked me and who didn’t. Half of the officers didn’t like me ’cause I had a smart-ass mouth.