Chapter 26

I had done what I could to get ready—the steroids, working out. I tried to prepare myself mentally. After I was sentenced I was cuffed and led behind the courtroom, where the county jail was. I sat there in a waiting cell for two and half hours while other inmates were sentenced. Then it was my turn. Two guards led me down halls like a lab animal in a maze. They stripped me down and searched me. It was all processing stuff I had already gone through. You bend over, grab your ass and spread it while they look up your colon with a flashlight. They ask you to cough to make sure you’re not hiding anything up there. After they searched me they sent me back to county jail, where I finally felt normal again.

I could barely sleep that night. I was thinking about not being with my family and my band. I got up late the next day. It was like that for two or three days. I felt like I had fucked over my daughter and negatively affected my family. I didn’t see any of them for three or four days. Then they came up and visited and we talked. There’s nothing much you can do in county jail but sit around, lift weights, play basketball and read books. I was in an eight-person cell. There were four bunk beds and I took a top bunk.

Jail is full of thieves, rapists, dope dealers, murderers and other people who have done unspeakable things, yet the minute you get in there, you have to be well-mannered. You have to be quick. You have to be prepared. As soon as I was incarcerated, a huge Hispanic guy who had been there a while told me how things worked in jail. He told me who to sit with and who to talk to. Every new inmate experiences that, and the shot caller who comes up to you is always of your race or ethnicity. If you don’t run with your people while you’re there, you’ll be run out because you’ll eventually face some shit and only your people will have your back.

That wasn’t my thing. I’m used to being around people of all races and religions. I liked finding out how different people think and what they value. But when you get to prison, if you’re not racist or religious, you will be shortly. You need to associate with your people and take sides.

I even said that on One Voice in “Force Feed.” There’s three shades of green: light (meaning Caucasian), medium (Hispanic) and dark (African American). You have to run with your own, whether or not you want to, or you’re gonna get hurt.

All these people you hang with are way cleaner and more polite than anyone on the street. After you use the toilet bowl you have to clean it. You have to make your bed. The COs don’t give a shit, but your people care. It’s about respect. There are a new set of rules and attitudes. The day I got out, I left it all behind me. But while I was there, I didn’t have a choice but to be someone I didn’t want to be in a place I didn’t want to be in. That’s what happens when you fuck up and get locked up.

When you’re in county you don’t know when you’re going to be moved. After being in an eight-person cell for two days I got moved into a cell with a light-skinned black kid, who seemed nice enough. We stayed up all night talking about what we were doing. It’s not like the movies at all. There are all these films where one guy goes, “What you in for?” And the other dude says murder or robbery or claims he’s innocent. When you’re in prison, you don’t tell anybody what your crime is. It’s nobody’s business. But I hadn’t learned that yet, and I figured I had nothing to hide. I told him I was in for a possession charge. He told me he was involved in an assault, which wasn’t exactly true. We were friendly for a day or two. In jail, no one has any real connection to anything outside his immediate circle. The only way to know about what’s going on at the prison is from the local newspaper brought in by the guards.

The Monday after I met my cellmate, the paper got handed out to everyone. There was an article about how my cellmate had raped his three-year-old niece and given her gonorrhea. They traced the diseased sperm back to him. He was a child molester, which is probably the worst thing you can be in prison besides a snitch. As soon as some guys in my crew found out I was in the cell with him they let the leaders know and the shot callers decided that I had to get to the guy. One way you get to people inside is to burn them out.

Some of the Hispanic brothers came up to me and said, “Yo, you gotta hit him because he’s a piece of shit.” They gave me a large, open can of tomato sauce three-quarters filled with boiling hot baby oil and told me to throw it at him when I was out on the floor on mopping duty. The order was given, and in prison you either do unto others or others will do unto you. I knew there would be consequences either way. If I didn’t do it, I might be burned out instead. If I did it I’d get caught and receive a longer prison sentence. I weighed both sides and decided I was better off being the aggressor instead of the victim. I psyched myself up and got ready. This motherfucker lied to me, then he acted all nice. More importantly, he did something really sick and needed to pay. I headed back to my cell with the hot oil.

On the way, I thought about how I was gonna do it. If I dumped a little on him he’d be able to fight back and I’d end up in a messy brawl. I considered splashing the oil on his chest. That would do enough damage to incapacitate him. Then I visualized what he did to this three-year-old girl and God knows how many other kids. I thought of Nadia and my temper started to rise. I decided to splash all the oil in his face. I raised the container and opened the top. It seemed like time had slowed and the last few steps to my cell took forever. I gritted my teeth and got ready to attack. The fucking dude wasn’t there.

I looked around and didn’t see him, so I went back to the guy who set up the whole thing and said, “Yo, the cho-mo is gone.”

“Are you sure?” said one of the more muscular Hispanic dudes with more of a threat than a question.

“I’m telling you, man. He’s gone.”

“Okay. I hope you’re not playing us. If you’re backing out and you don’t want to do it, you’re gonna be dealt with.”

They sent another guy to check out the cell and he saw that I was telling the truth. The pedophile wasn’t there. I was relieved because as much as I wanted to hurt the guy, I knew it was a no-win situation.

If you commit murder in prison the penalty isn’t as severe as if you kill someone in the street. But I wanted to get out in four years. When you hit the board with life, everything you do adds time to your sentence. If you get sentenced to two to four, you’re out in four years no matter what. They can’t tack on an extra year for shitty behavior. They can make you stay beyond your minimum, but they can’t keep you in prison for more than your max time, unless you catch a new bid. It was definitely in my best interests not to throw hot oil in this asshole’s face because I would have gotten caught. It’s not like I could say anyone else did it. I was mopping the floors, so I was the only one out on that tier. Everyone else was locked up. No one could have gotten to him but me. Still, I would have taken the fall if I had to.

A few days after my near miss with the pedophile, I was processed out of county to state prison. When you leave county, you get sent to a state correctional facility. You don’t know what part of the state it’s going to be or how long you’ll be there. That’s unnerving, but prisoners are transferred all the time to every type of facility, from medium to maximum security. Sometimes officials transferred guys who had been involved in riots or fights and had become a danger to themselves or others. They shifted dudes around to keep more of an even balance between the whites, blacks and Hispanics. And they transferred prisoners to get some fresh faces in the crowd. I think they also did it so inmates never feel settled. You’re not as likely to form attachments if you realize that any day you could be put on a bus and sent somewhere else.

My first stop out of county was Fishkill Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison 75 miles north of New York City. The ride was uneventful, but my head was racing. I had no idea what to expect and was determined not to be someone’s bitch, even if some motherfucker tried to kill me.

When I got there, they gave me a state-issued prison outfit and inmate ID. They shaved my head and told me to close my eyes. I was no longer human, I was just a number: 89A0136. Then they put insecticide all over my head. It felt like being sprinkled with baby powder, only it didn’t smell like a clean infant’s diaper and it was toxic to bugs and probably humans. Nobody cares what prisoners are exposed to. Maybe they know that shit causes cancer. It wouldn’t have mattered. We were just scum to them.

The whole process was humiliating, but that’s what they do to prisoners. They take away your individuality and humanity and turn you into a number. Every time guys would go out for something or come back to their cells, they had to get checked. Same drill as in county. You’d strip down and raise your arms, then bend over and spread your butt cheeks. You got used to it quickly. It happened all the time—after visits, after riots, any time you went to the yard. If they had any reason to suspect you were hiding anything, they reached up there. Or they’d put you on observation until you had to take a shit and then they’d check your bowel movement. The only time someone was excused from any part of the routine was if it conflicted with their religious beliefs. Rastas were allowed to keep their dreads, and Muslims didn’t have to shave their beards. The same went for meals. Jewish prisoners could get kosher meals.

Being in prison was different than being in county jail. In county they came around to everyone’s jail cell with food, then they opened the doors and you went right out to the yard, where you could lift weights or play basketball. I went from having that to being in lockdown in a solo cell for 23 hours, with one hour of rec. For the hour break, they didn’t even take you outside. You went to a little recreational area. This continued for a week or two until you got classified. At that point you were mixed in with different people. You didn’t know your classification until you got called into the office to meet with a counselor. They wanted to know that you were in good health and weren’t going to commit suicide and what skills you knew or wanted to learn. They needed to make sure they were placing you in the right prison. Different facilities specialized in particular trades. The counselor checked out your tattoos for gang affiliations to see if they might be a problem and if they needed to keep you away from rival gang members.

When the prison officials shaved my head they saw several tattoos: my “skins” tattoo, a pair of spider webs and a spider. That’s how I got the nickname Araña, which is Spanish for spider. In prison, being a skinhead wasn’t very popular. Everyone had seen the vicious segments about skinheads that Geraldo Rivera and Oprah did, and I got weird looks from people that didn’t understand the non-racist side of skinhead culture.

Everybody tried to figure out which gang I was associated with. Right away, being that I looked white and had all these tattoos, they tried to stereotype me as something I had nothing to do with. No one could tell I was Cuban; their first impression was that I was a racist skinhead.

In county you didn’t have to surrender your clothes when you went in. But when you went upstate to serve your real time, you have to give up all your clothes and put on a prison uniform. Amy had to pick up my clothes. It was just sweatpants and a T-shirt. If you had anything fancy, it’d get you in trouble. I was in Fishkill for two weeks. The rules were stricter than county. We had to dress in the same colors and walk down the halls in formation. Different groups came out at different times and followed a stringent set of guidelines. They weren’t divided by race, creed or age. There were guys that had already done 20 or 25 years and were getting ready to get out. Then there were people like me who were getting ready to be processed into the prison system.

You had to be even more polite than in county. If you were sitting around the mess hall, you couldn’t reach over someone’s plate to get the salt or pepper. That was disrespectful. That was grounds to get shanked up. When you were ready to leave the chow hall after you ate, you knocked on the table, bump-bump, and excused yourself.

Being in a maximum security place like Fishkill meant being locked up 23 hours a day. That was confusing at first, but the key to survival was to keep your eyes open. You started observing stuff—who sat with whom and how people who were being accepted behaved. You always had to be prepared to move because you never knew when you’d go to a new facility. You just got a knock and someone said, “Pack up!”

You didn’t even ask where you were going. They weren’t gonna tell you and they wouldn’t give you a warning. Amy visited me in Fishkill, and she said she was going to come back in two days. Later that day I got sent all the way upstate to the Cayuga Correctional Facility in Auburn, far from New York City. I didn’t know where I was going, and there was no way to let Amy know I wouldn’t be in Fishkill when she came back.