The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (26 page)

‘Hahaha, Billy, you’d better go out,’ I said.

He sat down, refusing to budge. ‘No, no way.’

Minutes later the lucero came in again. ‘
Visita, ahora,
’ he barked. It was the height of disrespect to leave a visitor waiting.

‘Billy, go.’

He shrugged and pushed through the curtains into the yard.

That evening when the visits all went home Billy was still reeling from having the fattest women in Venezuela in to see him. Nobody ever remarked on a visit. It was a no-no and shameful among the Venezuelans. But they made an exception that day. They were bent over double laughing, calling out
fea
(ugly) and
gorda
(fat). Even the jefe was laughing.

‘Yeah, funny, haha,’ said Billy.

Of course I was interested in getting it on with a girl myself. Months locked up with men didn’t do much for a man’s sex life, a straight one’s at least. There were
putas
, prostitutes, who did the rounds in the prison. I might have been tempted, only they were rotten and pricey. They wanted 100,000 bolos, about 20 euro, for a go of them. No way was I paying that for a quick shag when the same amount of cash would keep me going for a week with food, bottled water and the causa. I might have paid had they been nice and not jail bicycles, but they were.

All the Veno lags were always trying to set me up with a girl. New Yawk Mike even said he’d get me a proper prostitute off the street for about 200,000 bolos, or 40 euro. ‘Paul, I can get you a beautiful queen.’

‘Right, I’ll go for it. Tell me when she’s here.’ I would have been up for it had he produced the goods, but he didn’t. As usual it was
mañana seguro
. Tomorrow for sure.

Apart from that the Venos were always trying to hook up a gringo inmate with one of their family, be it a sister or a niece. Word had it that there was even an inmate up in Mostrico wing who was renting out his mother and his sister for sex to make a few quid. I never knew for sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. It would have been just another level of sickness among the Venezuelans. What I did know for sure was that there was one lag who set the Maxima boss, Fidel, up with his nineteen-year-old daughter. On visit day they’d disappear into the boss’s bed. To me it was shameful that a man would give his daughter up like that, and probably just to score a brownie point with the jefe for an easier life.

The Colombian lad who’d arrived with me in the army bus on the first day in Los Teques once invited me out from behind the curtain on visit day to meet his family. There was his mother, his girlfriend and his cousin. His cousin was
soltera
(single), he said. She was in her early 30s and pretty, with brown eyes and elegant cheekbones. She also spoke some English.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Ireland,’ I said.

‘Yes, Europe, I travel there,’ she said, ‘but mostly Spain for work. I am a travel agent.’ I enjoyed the chat, but I wasn’t going to get sucked into making it a regular visit with a trip to the ‘buggies’. I didn’t want to get sidetracked in jail with women, drugs, drink, nothing. My focus was on getting out and that was that. Aiming for early parole after 18 months and walking out the jail gate.

I did, however, start texting back and forth on the phone with a South African girl who was locked up in the Los Teques women’s prison, close to our jail, and I enjoyed the contact. One of the gringo inmates, Henrik from South Africa, had given me her number. He was a tall lad with blonde hair and a heavy beard. He’d got her phone number from one of his countrymen holed up in another wing. The girl’s name was Zenolia du Plooy. I later typed her name into a search engine on the laptop I shared with a few of the lads. There were stories all over the South African media about how she’d been caught with cocaine in the airport in Venezuela. After chatting to her, it looked like she had gotten roped into some dodgy caper. After a while the texts fizzled out. I didn’t see the point; it wasn’t like I could ever visit her.

She told me she had some rare disease and there was no medication for it in Venezuela. Her family had to have it sent over to her every month on a plane and were campaigning for her to be released on humanitarian grounds. Waste of time, I thought; there was no humanity here.

* * *

Straight love wasn’t the only kind of romance going on inside Los Teques. The gays in the prison had their own wing under the stairs in the passageway. We called it the Pink Room, or the Fresa (strawberry) wing. There were about 20 or 30 gays. Many didn’t have a choice but to be there. In most wings gays were castigated – beaten up and fired into the passageway. Not that they were total fairies that you could push around. Many were in for murder – so cross one and you might not wake up from a night’s sleep.

In Maxima they were welcome, along with the outcasts from other wings such as kiddy fiddlers, rapists and ex-cops. Their causa money was good. Most slept together at the end of the cell near my bed, squashed onto the floor.

I actually got on well with the gays. When I was sitting on my bed one day typing on my laptop, one of them, Chico, came up and asked me for a use of it. ‘
Facebook
,
por favor.
’ He was as camp as Christmas with a high-pitched voice; he’d make gay chat show host Graham Norton look like an alpha male. So I gave him the use of it. In return he gave me a massage. He would light candles around my bunk bed and had all the proper massage oils. He didn’t grope where it wasn’t wanted. It was actually great – my back and shoulders were always aching. Even though I had my own bed now, sitting on the buckets for hours on end behind the curtains on visit days was killing me, my body scrunched up in there in the small space beside the toilet that was getting more cramped every week. I could probably get a gig in a circus as a contortionist after Los Teques.

I used to teach another gay a few English words. He was taking classes in the jail and was keen to learn. I didn’t mind and just taught him a few basics, such as ‘what is your name?’ One day out in the yard he came over and stood in front of me when I was sitting with Vito and Roberto playing cards. ‘
Te quiero mucho,
’ (‘I love you’) he said, with his hand on his heart. I burst out laughing along with the lads and he ran off in a sulk.

‘Haha, you’re in there,’ said Billy.

‘Not a journey I want to take,’ I said.

One day I noticed another gay who had checked into Hotel Los Teques had a shapely rear end like he’d stuffed two small cushions down the back of his trousers. ‘He’s a nice ass. But it looks a bit odd. How’d he get that?’ I said.

‘Paid for it,’ said Silvio.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Plastic surgery.’ It was huge business with women in Venezuela. Even gays got silicone pumped into their rear end. This lag’s ass looked like a double-D cup.

Another day one of the visitors brought in a newspaper, as they always did. Any clippings about gringos caught in the airport with drugs we always read. One story that really caught our interest was a report about a Romanian drug mule who was a transvestite, according to the newspaper. We were all curious about that one.

‘I wonder did they get the male or female cops to search him,’ laughed Billy. A few days later we got word a totally camp gay had arrived in the jail.

‘It’s him, it must be him – or it,’ laughed Silvio. A few hours later the Romanian lad walked out into the yard. He was gay all right; he had plucked eyebrows and manicured nails. But a transvestite? We doubted it. The boss gave him a spot down at the back of my cell with the other gays. He was a bit of a lost soul, didn’t click with them that well. He’d only a bit of Spanish, which probably didn’t help. He was quickly moved up to the Strawberry wing – but not before taking a liking to Ralph, one of the German lads.

‘You’re in there, Ralph, the gay boy fancies you,’ I said.

‘Yeah, sure, see how it goes,’ he said casually.

‘You what?’ We all looked at each other, puzzled.

Not long after, Ralph was seen nipping in and out of the Pink Room on his way back and forth to his kitchen job. He wasn’t shy about it. ‘Best sex I ever had. A man knows what a man wants.’ I doubted he was gay or bisexual – just wasn’t fussy and wanted a bit of strange.

But the other lags weren’t pleased. ‘How he could do that?’ said Billy, his face scrunched up in disgust.

‘Ah, sure, who cares as long as it’s only in here,’ I said. What happened in prison stayed in prison, I believed.

The cops took a dim view, however. They didn’t like the idea that one of the lags who cooked their food was having sex with the gays. A muscular Nigerian guy in the kitchen, Onyeke, told me. He was a wizard with spices and even made the usual prison food of sardines taste good. So he filled me in about Ralph and the aguas plotting to get him out of the kitchen. ‘The cops don’t like the German playing around with the gay boy. He will lose his job.’

I later told Ralph. The kitchen was one of the best jobs in the prison. You got to eat well and it paid OK with a few bolos. ‘Ah, no, it’s fine – I know all the cops, they know me,’ said Ralph. Maybe – but within weeks he got the boot, and Ralph’s fling of passion with the Romanian came to an end.

The director actually loved the Romanian. He picked up Spanish quick and she gave him a job as her runner, flying around with letters and other messages for her. It seemed to me that she liked to surround herself with gays. They were well up the pecking order with the director and got plum office jobs doing admin. She even put three gays who were professional stylists to good use, doing her hair, nails and make-up every morning.

* * *

Terry’s lawyer was still on the case to get him released on early parole due to his health. Weeks had passed and nothing had happened, as was often the case with anything to do with the courts in Venezuela. To speed things up, he wanted to send out a message to the powers that be that his health had taken a turn for the worse. He wanted to get to a hospital and get a check-up, and in there he’d act up for the doctors, who’d hopefully tell the prison director he was too ill for jail. He believed then that the judge on his case would get word of this and speed through his release papers. Fat chance, but worth a try.

The problem for Terry, though, was actually getting the prison bosses to organise transporting him to the hospital. The prison ambulance, which I only ever saw once from the roof, parked outside the jail, was apparently never available. We used to see the black hearse on a much more regular basis. So Terry asked me to get on to the British Embassy and ask them to put pressure on the Los Teques director. I thought I might be getting onto dodgy ground, but I agreed. He was an old guy and if Los Teques was hard for me, it was harder for him. I texted a number he gave me for a diplomat, saying Terry’s health was ‘grave’ and he needed to get to hospital, even if it meant in the back of a taxi.

A few hours later one of the women cops, Morelba, stormed into the wing. I was sitting on my bucket scribbling in my diary and looked up. It was Carlos’s ‘girlfriend’, standing there flapping her arms and shouting. Shit. What’s going on here? She was shouting again, looking around the wing. Mariano, an inmate who spoke good Spanish, interpreted.

‘Who rang the British Embassy for Terry, she wants to know.’ I kept my eyes down in my copybook. Again. ‘Who rang? You will have to say or we are all in shit.’ Terry looked over at me, with eyes saying, ‘How will we play this out?’

‘OK.’ I stood up. ‘It was me.’

‘
Tú,
’ (‘You’) she shouted.

‘Outside now,’ said Mariano. I pushed Terry’s wheelchair into the passageway. The woman boss stood there, arms folded. A scowl on her face.

‘How did you phone the embassy?’ said Mariano.

I knew we weren’t supposed to have mobiles, so I nodded to the payphone at the end of the passageway. ‘The one on the wall.’

She spoke again, her voice louder. ‘She wants to know why.’ Terry said nothing, just tilting his head more to the right, rolling his eyes.

‘The guy’s in a wheelchair, he’s dying. He’s an old guy, he needs help; if I was in his situation I’d like to think someone would do it for me.’ My Mother Teresa act didn’t wash. I watched her reply to Mariano, shaking her head.

‘She says if you do that again she’ll fuck you up. You’ll be given the bat by the cops. Three slaps on the ass.’

‘All right,’ I said, shrugging. Morelba turned on her heel and walked off. She still didn’t say if she would get Terry to the hospital or not.

* * *

I was back up on the roof doing my walking laps and I spotted Bruce. I wanted to catch up with him about the lawyer and his plan to escape on a cancer ticket.

‘Bruce, is the abogado moving the cancer along?’

His usual jolly face was gone. ‘He’s in having an operation for cancer,’ he said. Bruce and a few of the other lads hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks and decided to call his office. A secretary answered and told them that he was in hospital recovering from chemotherapy. I couldn’t believe it: how’s that for a coincidence? Lawyer promises cancer diagnosis then gets cancer. It was taking karma to new levels.

‘Do you think it’s gonna work out – the plan?’

‘It better do. I’ve paid him 10,000 dollars. I’ll kill the old bastard if it doesn’t.’

‘Let’s see how it plays out,’ I said, ‘Should be OK, probably just a few hiccups.’ I had my suspicions but didn’t want to rub it in his face that he’d been sold a turkey. I was just glad I hadn’t given the old guy money. I didn’t trust him from the start.

* * *

Father Pat was in. ‘Billy’s got a lovely girl,’ I said, smiling. I used to talk to him like he was one of the lads down the pub. Billy would look at me like I was mad. He then pulled out a small photo of his Pocahontas, which he carried in his pocket. Father Pat held the passport-size picture and studied her face for a few moments.

‘That’s a very nice girl, Billy.’ He then went off on a sermon. ‘Now, Billy, you’ll have to respect this girl. Treat her right.’ He also told him to be wary. ‘Many of these girls are vulnerable, from poor families. You have to be aware of the implications.’ The underlying story was that she hoped a ‘rich’ gringo would take her to Europe. In Billy’s head I think he already had her on the plane on the way back to Ireland.