Further Reading

Pick One
** 'Inside you are nobody & have nothing'

January 1998

'Inside you are nobody & have nothing'

The most profound revelation for me, looking back on a three-month state prison confinement, is how unremarkable in the prison context is homosex, even of openly romantic partnerships. I didn’t participate, but I watched and listened, and learned some things about human nature that, frightening as the whole experience was, I’ve come to value in retrospect.

The kindest person I met inside was a fifty-something, stocky black man. He was back in for parole violation on a murder rap. He lent me a jacket when I was left for days in shirtsleeves in a freezing prison corridor, and he taught me the ins and outs. Together with the other information came the tips about where you could “do” it, and when, and which guards were cool, who was crazy, and who was down with whom. My defenses went up but he never came on to me. He was dying-- an operation could save him but by the time the prison bureaucracy authorized it he figured it would be too late. He was calm and resigned, and one day he was gone.

Inside you are nobody and you have nothing. That piece of wire to make a TV antennae, which took weeks and favors to get, is capriciously confiscated.

I had friendships with other prisoners- always risky, but the need was mutual. I was surprised they weren’t the monsters you see in movies. Though there were crazies to be avoided, most were more humane than your average co-worker.

Sex was an integral part of these friendships. I was reminded about all the courtship and flirtation of high school. There were lovers and lovers’ spats. There were young pretty ones who’d do it for packs of cigarettes (the medium of exchange), who would display themselves in macho but distinctly coquettish ways-- as distinct from the drag queens (even without a dress they manage) who have to be willing and able to rip a tormentor apart if messed with.

They strip search you after visiting time. If you’re there at the end, they do a group strip. One teenager knew what his assets were as he slowly peeled down. When he spread his butt cheeks he lingered and the guards as well as the other inmates stared quite shamelessly. There was one of those little stops in time.

Those with long bids figured out how to side-step the system, though I think most guards preferred the guys to have sexual release rather than pent-up libidos, or they merely despised us, or they didn’t want to be a target for reprisal in some future riot. They kept to a routine and there was time, best with a paid look-out, for most things men get up to.

I saw two guys go to the hole-- solitary-- getting caught having sex. Everyone laughed. It was funny cause the macho was caught blowing the queen, and crazy ’cause if they’d waited until night and a cool guard they’d have been OK.

I never heard “faggot” in there. I never saw anyone attacked except for the breaking of the snitch code, though “skinners” or guys in for sex crimes were usually ostracized if word got out. One kid so treated was only 18 and had been in almost two years. Some kids had been hustlers on the outside and continued likewise behind the walls. It was as if women didn’t exist, had never existed. One pair of lovers, a kid and his older friend, had two fat sisters who came to visit. They dropped money off for canteen, and expected marriage, I think. The guys laughed at them later, and fucked each other.

Finally it was time to go. One of the guys I’d known inside, with a passionate love affair going on there, got out at the same time. I saw him soon after, and he invited me to his wedding-- to a girl. I asked if he’d kept up with that friend left behind. He looked at me for a moment, wondering why I didn’t get it, perhaps. “That was then,” he said, and that was that. **

--Peter Grimes