The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (24 page)

‘How much?’ I watched Fidel shrug and smile, thinking it’d be some ridiculous sum I could never pay.

‘One million bolos, he says,’ said Billy. About 200 euro. I knew I had it.

‘One million, OK.’ I lifted up a small pouch hanging from a necklace on my chest – a Hungarian inmate we called Peter Pan had made it from a shoelace threaded through a jeans pocket. I had kept my cash from selling the coke in the past, and my home brew. I started pulling notes out of the necklace, all neatly folded.

Fidel’s eyes widened. No prisoner would normally have that kind of cash.

I handed him the notes and he started counting, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘There you go,’ I said, handing him the last few bills.

‘He says OK, let’s go,’ said Billy. Billy was happy to stick with the floor. Organising things wasn’t one of his strong skills.

We walked back into Cell 1 and Fidel walked me over to the empty bunk, pointing at the top one. ‘
Es tuya,
’ (‘It’s yours’) he said.

I climbed up and dropped onto the mattress. It was a different world. I had a view down to Fidel’s telly. I now didn’t have to sit in the yard all day. Life was looking up a bit in Los Teques. For now. I heard the other Veno lags say, ‘
Gringo: chico, luca, chico, luca,
’ a colloquial phrase they used meaning ‘rich kid’, thinking I’d had a stroke of good luck with the boss to wangle a bed – even if I was paying big bucks for it. I could probably get a goose-feather mattress at home for the same cash – not a smelly bunk bed.

* * *

The pizza topping on Eddy’s legs looked like ninth-degree burns. He should have been hospitalised. But no one in the
clínica
thought so, and they just gave him some useless cream. A few days later he was temporarily let go from his job in the kitchen. He was on the shift that cooked for the prison staff; a cop saw the pus weeping from his legs in shorts and pulled up the kitchen boss about it. They didn’t want him cooking their food. I couldn’t see why – it wasn’t like they would dip their bread into his legs.

* * *

I was glad of the bed. I needed it. My back ached in the mornings and for most of the rest of the day from months sleeping all night on a thin cushion on the ground. My bones were sticking into me all night, worse as time went on, and I was getting thinner. How much weight I was losing I had no idea. My jeans told me I was slimmer, though. They were a 34-in. waist and fitted me comfortably before I got locked up in Venezuela. Now I used a piece of plastic cord as a belt to keep them up. The bland diet of porridge, rice and beans was taking its toll on my body.

For weeks I’d seen a group of inmates beavering away with hammers, chisels, drills and welders in the back of Cell 3. They were building a toilet. Soon after the gas attack it was done. I walked in. I looked around, impressed with the set-up: a mirror, a proper wash basin, two urinals, a toilet pot and a tiled floor. All in the honour of the familia visits, of course. It was the first time I’d seen a mirror since Macuto. I’d been shaving with the power of touch for months. I walked over to the mirror, curious about what I looked like. ‘Jesus,’ I shouted out loud. I started working my fingers around my face, nudging it. My skin was tight on my face. The jowls I’d had hanging around my chin were gone. Not that I’d been fat, but I’d a bit of weight, a Ned Kelly from the few pints and bit of a rounded, fuller face. ‘Fucking hell,’ I said out loud again. I was shocked. I’d had my head shaved a few days before and had a couple of days’ stubble on my face. I thought I looked like my da – and he was 77. About nine months in prison had put decades on me. I was horrified. I didn’t know the man who looked back at me.

I ran out of the toilet into the yard. I shouted out at the top of my lungs into the sky, ‘Beam me up, Scotty, beam me up,’ shaking my fist into the air. Some of the Venos started laughing. The gringo is loco. Roberto looked up from where he was sitting on a bucket playing cards, grinning. He knew what I was on about, that this place was a loony bin sucking our lives away. The sight of myself in the mirror was a reality check. It shoved into my face the fact that my life was slipping away – literally before my eyes.

AFTER THE GAS ATTACK THINGS WENT BACK TO ‘NORMAL’. THE PRISON chiefs opened up the jail again. They believed they’d wiped out the cell-block bosses of enough arms. Los Teques was supposedly safe now. Spanish classes were back on and trips to the roof would start again. I was looking forward to that. I’d been feeling the walls in the wing closing in on me. Now I was more determined than ever to figure out ways to get out of this hole.

On my first spin up to the roof I bumped into Aussie Bruce again.

‘Great to be back to normality,’ I said.

‘Can say that again,’ he said. ‘Cooped up like chickens down there we were.’

‘How you getting on with the cancer?’

‘It was on ice with the shutdown. The lawyer’s coming back in this week. We’re getting it back on the go. You still up for it?’

‘Yep.’

‘When he’s in I’ll tell you and you can meet him after me.’

‘Right, sounds good. Now I’m going for me walk.’ I was still sceptical about giving some lawyer 20,000 dollars to get me out, but it felt good to at least have something going on. I stepped away and started doing my power-walking laps around the roof. It was an exercise routine I’d started before the lockdown. A lap only took two minutes, so I just kept going around in circles for about an hour, sucking the air into my lungs as the sun blazed away over my head.

* * *

Father Pat was shocked at nothing. He was back in on his first visit since the lockdown. Myself and Billy stood out in the passageway, telling him about the shootings and the gas attack. He just nodded his head, listening but not judging. ‘Yes, yes, I see, you have to be very careful.’ His face always remained neutral.

He handed me a large brown package he had pulled out of his satchel. ‘This is for you, from your family.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, some letters I think. Dated four months ago in Ireland.’

‘Four months?’

‘The post is a bit slow here. But you’ll see on the letters they arrived in Venezuela only a couple of weeks after they left Ireland. They probably sat in a sorting office in the docks till they sent them on to me.’

Billy stood there nodding. He didn’t say much in the meeting. His eyes were sunk into his head and his cheekbones poked out of his face. The weight was falling off him. He was back on the coke, snorting it most of the day, and had lost his appetite. ‘I’m just getting a coffee,’ he said. He walked off to the canteen.

Father Pat stepped in closer to me and lowered his voice. ‘Billy, is he doing OK? He seems very thin and he doesn’t look well.’

‘He’s grand, Father, it’s just the food in here.’

‘Is he back on the drugs?’

‘No, Father, not at all. Long off them.’

‘OK,’ he nodded, his eyes telling me he didn’t believe me. But I couldn’t tell him the truth. I knew he was in constant touch with Billy’s parents back home and would tell them. I wasn’t exactly a moral guardian either – I was doing a line myself every night. Not much but enough to get a bit of a buzz and to help me sleep.

Father Pat slipped me some cash from the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas fund. They’d come through good with an emergency payment for the bed space I had bought. Although I got it out of cash I’d made from selling coke and booze, I put the charity’s money to good use. I started paying a Nigerian inmate in the kitchen to cook my dinners. The best of the food was all sold like this. What was left in the pot was given out to non-paying inmates – the slop I’d been eating for months.

* * *

‘Paul, we forgive you no matter what you’ve done. You’re our son and we’ll always love you . . .’ I was in the wing reading the letter from my mother and father that Father Pat had brought in the package. It was written by my mother. At the end there were a few scribbles from my Da, Paddy. ‘Well Paul, sure you might as well stay in Venezuela, meet a nice native girl and settle down. There’s no jobs here and nothing to come home to.’ Paddy, he always spoke his mind and wasn’t one for giving any emotions.

There was a letter from Katie, too. I felt tense as I started to read it, my eyes poring over the words, almost as if they were sucking them in. She was still on the line that I could pay a lawyer and walk out the front door of Los Teques. ‘Da, we can still try and get you out. All we need to do is get 20,000 euro and pay a lawyer and you’ll be free.’ Things had moved on since that letter had been written and in my heart I knew no money would get me out of here. I scanned further down the letter. ‘Always love you Da, Katie.’ I had a lump in my throat – all the emotions I’d bottled up over leaving her in the lurch back in Dublin stormed back at me.

I also pulled out a few photos of my family that were in the package. My ma, da and Katie in one. The lump in my throat was getting tighter, like a brick chugging down my neck. There were also letters from Sharon and Mick and a photo of them. I also reached into the package and found a set of glasses in a case. Amazing! I slipped them on and started reading the letter from Sharon. ‘Thought you might need these,’ she wrote. The letters were sharp now and clear-looking through my glasses, it was great. ‘The optician just gave me a repeat prescription of your last ones.’ Shaz, what a star. I looked over at Roberto on another bucket. His hair was shaved at the side now. It looked sharper to me.

Some of the Veno lags started gathering around, pawing at the letters and photos. ‘
Familia tuya?
’ (‘Your family?’) I brushed their hands away like I was swatting flies. It was always the same: they wanted to paw at everything; that’s why I started to call them chimps. More hands started groping around the package and in seconds the photos and letters were being passed around. One of the Venos studied the letter written in English; others were pointing at my mother and father in the pictures. ‘
Tú mamá, tú papá?
’

‘
Sí,
’ I said. I was resigned that they’d get their way and maul them.

Also in the package was a blue and navy hat of the Dublin football team. It was from my mate Cummins. ‘Way to go,’ I shouted, and put it on.

‘Hey, Paul, you go fishing,’ Roberto shouted over. ‘Fishing hat, no?’

‘Dublin team. Irish football. The best.’

There was also a CD in the package that my son Dano had put in. I asked the boss if I could play it on the stereo in the wing. ‘
Sí, no problema,
’ said the boss, waving me off and turning his eyes back to a baseball game on the portable telly beside his bed.

All my gringo mates – Eddy, Henrik from South Africa, Billy, Hanz and so on – sat around out in the yard excited to listen to some European music. ‘Come on, Paul, let’s turn off that salsa shite and listen,’ shouted Eddy.

‘Just a minute.’ I was on my hunkers fiddling with wires at the back of the stereo to get the speakers working, as no sound was coming out. I finally got it going and fastforwarded through the songs Dano had put on the CD. There was a great collection of Irish rock and pop tunes. One was ‘Crazy World’ by Dublin rock band Aslan. The guitars and drums kicked off. It was a sombre enough tune and the verse started ‘I have fallen down so many times / Don’t know why, don’t know where’, but it went down well, all the lads joining in with the chorus, ‘It’s a crazy, crazy world.’

‘Very fitting,’ said Hanz. ‘Sums this place up.’

The words also made me think about Katie and how I had left her high and dry back home. ‘How can I protect you in this crazy world / It’s all right yeah / It’s all right.’ From behind bars there was nothing I could do to take care of her, that I knew.

* * *

The abogado was pale and gaunt, the skin tight around his face.

‘Paul,’ he said to me, ‘you didn’t send any money.’ Straight to the point. Silvio was interpreting for me in the cops’ office. On the table between myself and the lawyer a bowl was littered with cigarette butts and a beer-bottle top.

‘No, and I’m not putting ten grand in your bank till I know this is a sure thing.’

‘He says it’s sure,’ said Silvio, looking from my face to the lawyer’s and back like he was watching a tennis match.

‘Ask him is he well. He looks terrible. I don’t like the look of this.’ The lawyer looked ill. I wasn’t giving him any money if he was on his last legs.

‘You don’t think I look well?’ said the lawyer, his voice raised.

‘No, I don’t think you look well at all.’ Something was fishy about him. I stood up. ‘I’m not going ahead.’

‘You not go ahead.’

‘No, and you haven’t got anyone out yet.’

‘I am working on the papers of a German man. He will be out soon, I tell you.’

‘OK, if he gets out we’ll talk.’ I stood up without saying goodbye. I felt the lawyer’s eyes watch his vaca de leche walk away.

On the way back to the wing Silvio told me his own freedom was on the cards. ‘Paul, I should be going soon, but don’t tell anyone,’ he confided.

‘Jesus, that’s magic. So that’s why you’ve been on your phone a lot lately?’

‘Yes, to my lawyer, my time is nearly done.’ Silvio got just over two years after cops pulled him over in Maiquetía airport on his way home to London and later found he had swallowed a couple of condoms filled with capsules of coke. The rest of us got eight years for trying to smuggle it in our suitcases. It was an oddity in the Venezuelan justice system I couldn’t get my head around.

Silvio kept that to himself, though. Among the prisoners, if you were caught trying to smuggle coke after swallowing capsules or stuffed in johnnies you were a maricón. Real men smuggled it in suitcases, apparently.

* * *

Two cops carried a man in a wheelchair into the wing. It was Terry, a Brit from upstairs in the Special wing. The cops and inmates got tired of always lifting him in his wheelchair up and down the stairs to the canteen, and moved him down to Maxima. He was an old guy in his late 50s with white hair and a beard the colour of snow, a dead ringer for Santa Claus.

I’d seen him a few times on his own two feet while I was walking around the roof. He later fell ill in the jail: he collapsed on the ground and the cops carted him off to hospital. He was diagnosed as having had a stroke and came back in a wheelchair. The cash handouts from the UK embassy were good, so he could pay helpers to carry him in and out of the toilet and bathe him. Being locked up in a hellhole prison in Venezuela as a foreigner was one thing, but being banged up in a wheelchair was another. I’d often watch him in his chair: his right side slumped over slightly, and he cradled his right arm with his left. His right eye was also dodgy: it was stiff and didn’t move, as if the eyeball had been glued. He had a hard life inside and everyone felt sorry for him. ‘Poor Terry.’