The first night I tried coke was also the first night I met Jack the Mexican. This, I later discovered, was no coincidence. Jack had a nose custom-built for cocaine: for sniffing it out, then sniffing it up. As soon as anyone opened a bag of it in the prison, he would magically appear.
On this occasion, he had actually been invited, although he turned up late. The celebrations were already well under way when he sat down beside me. At first, I was a little afraid of him; although he was skinny, he was also very tall – about six foot three – and even sitting down at the table, he towered over me. It was night time, but he was wearing a huge pair of sunglasses so that you couldn’t see his eyes and he was talking at me in Spanish at a hundred miles an hour. He kept leaning towards me so suddenly that several times I thought he was going to hit me.
‘¿Habla inglés?’ I asked very cautiously, when he finally paused for breath.
‘Of course. Why didn’t you say before?’
But even when he switched to speaking English, I couldn’t understand much because his massive nose was blocked and the way he spoke sounded like a trumpet. I still thought he was going to hit me.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Jack looked dangerous when you first met him, he was as soft as they come. People assumed that he was tough because of his height, but deep down, he was extremely shy and anyone could push him around, even tiny guys, and he never fought back. In fact, he was embarrassed about being so tall because it made him stand out and, he thought, made him easier to pick on. Once, when he got sent to the punishment section of the prison, known as La Muralla, Jack was beaten up by a skinny Bolivian prisoner and forced to hand over all his warm clothes. Afterwards he was too embarrassed to ask any of his friends to help get them back.
The talking thing was a front also. If you met Jack when he was partying, you would think he was the funniest guy in the world with loads of self-confidence, because he had hundreds of stories to tell and he only ever stopped talking to smoke his pipe or take cocaine. But when he wasn’t on drugs, it was hard to get so much as a word out of him.
Jack took some getting used to, but when you knew him well, he was like a big puppy dog that needed lots of affection; once you had won him over, you could make him run around in circles and chase his tail, or fetch an imaginary stick you hadn’t actually thrown. He became one of my best friends in San Pedro, but I was forever playing with him and tricking him into doing things he didn’t want to do.
One time, about a year after I arrived at San Pedro, Jack came to my room crying. It was about nine in the morning and I could tell that he was coming down badly.
‘Do you mind if I come in? I need to talk to someone.’
‘Of course. What’s wrong?’
‘I’m fucked up, Thomas. That’s what wrong. I’m totally screwed in the head.’
Jack wasn’t suited to prison life at all; he wasn’t tough enough. He came from a wealthy family and I don’t think he had worked a day in his life. He certainly never lifted a finger in San Pedro. His cell was always a mess, because there was no one to tidy it for him. He started complaining that no one in the prison liked him. In fact, that no one had ever liked him his whole life. Not even his own father. He began telling me in detail about his family problems, which were mainly to do with his father, a tough businessman who had made it from nothing and was disappointed that his son hadn’t turned out the same.
‘You’re a failure, son. Look at you. You can’t even deal drugs properly,’ the father had remarked on his first, and only, visit to San Pedro. After that, he pretended he no longer had a son and Jack’s mother had to send him money secretly.
‘But I like you,’ I said.
Jack looked up at me suspiciously, ‘You do? Really? You’re not just saying that because I’m crying?’
‘Hey. I didn’t even know you were crying,’ I lied. ‘How can I see anything when you wear those stupid sunglasses all the time.’ I pretended to be angry with him and it worked. He took his glasses off slowly and looked at me, embarrassed. It was the first time I had ever seen his eyes. The whites were all bloodshot, but the irises were a beautiful green and his tears made them look translucent.
‘Hey. You’ve got nice eyes.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘They’re not contact lenses, are they?’
‘No.’ Jack sat up straighter in his chair and lifted his head. ‘They’re natural.’
‘Well, you should take those glasses off more often, then. You might get a girlfriend.’
‘You think so?’ I could tell that he was already starting to cheer up.
‘Sure. All the Bolivian men have brown eyes. You’ll look like an exotic foreigner to the women with those green contacts.’
‘But they’re not contacts. I already told you. You don’t listen, Thomas.’
‘Prove it. Take them out and show me.’
Jack’s hands made a movement towards his eyes and then stopped. ‘I can’t. How can I if they’re real?’
‘No. I saw you move. You were about to take them out.’
‘I promise you, they’re real.’
I nodded. ‘Uh huh. Yeah. Real contacts.’ Poor Jack. He was like a kid. It was never hard to trick him. Sometimes I felt bad doing it to him – he was vulnerable and it was almost too easy – but it was always very funny, so I couldn’t help myself. ‘That’s OK. Don’t be embarrassed. They still look good on you.’
‘No. They’re my real eyes, Thomas. That’s their natural colour, I promise you.’ He started getting really frustrated.
‘A promise isn’t good enough. You expect me to believe that a Mexican can have green eyes? How are you going to prove it?’
Jack thought about this for quite a while. ‘I can’t. It’s impossible.’ He looked down sadly. ‘The girls will never believe me either. I can’t exactly take my eyeballs out.’ Then, suddenly, he had an idea. ‘Wait! Yes. I can prove it. I’ve got photos from when I was younger.’ And with that, he bounded out of my room to find his photo album.
‘That won’t prove a thing,’ I called after him, just to keep him confused. ‘You could easily have had contacts since you were a kid.’
Jack was like that; one minute coming down and crying, the next minute running around completely absorbed in something different. He would probably puzzle over that problem for the rest of the day, but at least he’d forgotten how sad he had been feeling.
Jack’s main problem was that he smoked base, which made him paranoid. There was only one other inmate in Alamos who smoked more base than Jack: an inmate who went by the name of Cámara Lenta. I didn’t know his proper name, because almost no one in San Pedro was known by his correct name. The foreigners were always referred to by their nationalities; I was always inglés, Jack was called méjico. The Bolivians usually had nicknames based on the town they came from. This meant you could see someone every day for several years and only realise when he’d left prison that there was little chance you would ever meet him again. What were the chances of tracking down someone named Cochabamba in the city of Cochabamba, population one million?
Cámara Lenta’s nickname meant ‘slow motion’. He lived on the ground floor in my section, but I only saw him twice during my whole time at San Pedro. The reason for this was that he smoked so much base he had become too afraid to leave his room.
It was rumoured that several ghosts flew about our section at night, although I had never seen any. There was also a surprising correlation between those inmates who claimed to have seen the ghosts and those who smoked loads of base. Because of these ghosts, inmates like Jack and Cámara Lenta rarely emerged from their rooms after dark, except in an absolute emergency, or in Jack’s case if there was free coke on offer. Jack had an ensuite bathroom, one of only two in Alamos, so he rarely needed to go out. Cámara Lenta wasn’t so fortunate; although he kept buckets in his cell to piss in, he had to leave his room in order to empty them from time to time.
On my way downstairs one evening, I encountered Cámara Lenta several metres from the bathroom door. He was hunched over with his head forward and back arched, carrying his two urine buckets, one in each hand. I assumed that he was resting, since he didn’t appear to be moving. I went into the bathroom and came out five minutes later to find him in exactly the same position. He appeared to have progressed only a few steps closer to the bathroom.
I yelled out, ‘Hey there! Are you OK? Hey, hombre.’ There was no reaction. ‘Do you need any help?’ Still he didn’t move. I clapped my hands, thinking he might have been a bit deaf.
Finally, there was a gradual, although delayed, reaction. Very slowly and precisely, Camára Lenta moved his eyes towards me. Then he cautiously twisted his head in my direction. All the while his body remained motionless and his expression remained unchanged. Using a series of eye movements up towards the ceiling, around the corridors and in the direction of the stairs, he indicated that it wasn’t safe to talk here, or to make any sudden movement, in case the ghosts saw you. If you wanted to survive in this prison, you had to creep around everywhere in slow motion.