DOESN’T MATTER WHO I am, not my name, what I look like, how old I am (but I’m no longer young). And what I’m in for is a symptom of a stricken sector, not the murders themselves. Just know that I was the same as most everyone else here, who leaves and comes back again, like homing pigeons driven by compulsion beyond our control. Make that lemmings, marching for the cliff edge to our deaths.
Except they’re drawn-out deaths, of each moment with our tormented selves, a state surely beyond our control or there’d be hundreds of thousands pass through here, our condition would be kind of normal, few would come back, the lesson would be learnt, the assault on your sensibilities would be so shocking as to be life-changing. You’d have to be mad to come back. And sick. More than that. So we’re mad and sick and more.
Or we come back because this is the only place we belong, the only place for society to put us and where we feel valid. We’re most of us dangerous, profound nuisances at best; we’re the spanners jammed in every wheel that ever turned near us, we’ve been busting perfectly good spokes our whole lives, starting at about — oh, I’d say the age of nine.
You’re a symptom, but no one, not even the self-proclaimed experts (who aren’t experts, really), knows of just what. Or they do but the truth’s too unpalatable, it’s too much to handle politically, so it’s never going to get said. We’re the bogey hanging from the nose of society no one’s prepared to point out. A wound that everyone closes eyes to.
So, we’re not only outcasts (grown up and getting grey), we’re cast aside in the too-hard-to-define tray. We’re never going to be fixed, only repeated, of foul deed and cowardly and lowly acts.
We have a need to shed the blood of others, others who know the innocence we have never known. To give us a warped sense of validity, a kind of raw, skin-flailed bleeding meaning.
We’re infected humans, as disorganised as jellyfish floating on the seas, just stinging whoever and whatever comes along. We do everything without thought, or not thought as you know it. Ours is a different process, it must have a different location in our brains. Or maybe we were born with haywired brains.
I’m not just sorry to say, I’m crying inside at saying it, that we’re most of us one race. Without even having to mention what race. Not when everyone knows. (Psst: Maoris.)
In the cell next door he raped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl, buried her alive in a sandy grave on an isolated beach. He reads comics, a dozen a day; he loves fantasy heroes, flights of fancy. It’s how he gets by living with his crime. Superman and The Phantom and Spiderman ain’t no murdering child-rapists. They’re with divine, supernatural powers, can fly and zap their way out of trouble, or from evil deed. Comic book heroes can’t do wrong, and nor, for the duration of reading them, can you. What girl victim was this?
The cell next to Beach Girl is another of his kind. Except he must be of different psychology, even though the same appalling act. He kidnapped a nine-year-old girl he didn’t know, held her captive for three days and raped and sodomised her repeatedly, a crime so bad it shook even us lot up. Though, like to everything, we quickly got numb to what he did. We have to live together. It’s hard to be morally selective, too many dudes here with fooling charm and tongues of snakes and who amongst us is moral?
Kidnap Kevin doesn’t read, like most of the inmates — or they can’t. The only paper Kev gets is toilet paper and the torn-out pages from child porn magazines he and his kind somehow get their worse than grubby hands on. The screws keep confiscating the porn then deal to him, stomach blows, bending the fingers, grabbing a handful of belly flesh and twisting it — he’s only a child abuser, and they charge him with assault, as well as the porn material charge, which adds another meaningless term to his life sentence, along with a meaningless lecture on a subject his brain is not wired to compute. He’s not leaving here except in a box, is Kidnap Kev, the human beast who thinks his nickname is a compliment.
It might be genes, could be genes, must be genes. No one can be nurtured to become that evil. This genetic monster masturbates several times a day, and comes like a little boy moaning in his tortured sleep. It’s only scary that he doesn’t care what his fellow lowlifes think of his unashamed wanking. He asks them if they’re ashamed of what they do or have done. None could answer that, not with a winning retort.
Cell next to Kev is Wally Home Invasion III, for the three homes he invaded his vast, monstrous form with, armed with a baseball bat and a single haka he’d learnt and practised and thought about; set about the respective occupants for no other reason than, he blithely told the court, he felt like it. To us, our thinking, if you feel like something then you do it. Wally smashed in a young boy’s skull as he slept, then did the haka in his poor victim’s bedroom before fleeing. Did home invasions II and III before they got him. He’s the Maori culture class’s most faithful attendee, the selective student who takes out the violent part of Maori history, learns and practises the hakas, but never the lengthy waiata chants that speak of all aspects of Maori history in a most beautiful, poetic form. But still, there’s a truth there for those who don’t feel assailed by it: that it was an endless history of war, its mighty deeds by mighty men, when being a warrior was the only means of validating yourself, fulfilled you as a human being in a time when life was simpler and unknowingly briefer and even more violent than in this maximum-security prison. And they call it: our history, with pride?
Across the landing, two cells to my left facing, is Joe Jurassic Park Jacobs, the serial rapist whose marauding ground was his own residential ghetto in South Auckland. Take a look at him any time of day or what they give us of a night to observe each other, or just happen to notice, his face. His face, how innocent, innocuous it is. They say he’s told one person in confidence — when, hahaha, ain’t no such thing, not here — that he used to go out and observe different people of different occupations and take facial expressions from them.
He started with religious men but Jurassic found they had expressions saying there was too much troubled thought behind the smiling, beatific masks (not that beatific’s a word Jurassic uses, it’s mine, I’ve had time and inclination to learn a more extensive vocabulary). He discovered small-time shopkeepers didn’t have it, didn’t find it in school-teachers either, certainly not cops. He searched every occupation and found it in female nurses.
Happened onto a little café that nurses frequented, would park himself up with a beer and a newspaper and secretly observe them. Then he’d go home and adopt the exact facial expression of whoever he’d chosen for that evening, he’d talk more or less the words he remembered them speaking so to get the feeling from the inside. Then he’d go out and do his dirty deed for the night, gaining trust to a lone woman’s residence by adopting that personality type.
The court convicted him of twenty-seven rapes. Twenty-five years minimum sentence, unprecedented in this liberal, do-somersaults-for-the-criminal justice system. He boasted to what he thought was a single confidant here that the true number was nearer sixty. Whatever, he was never going to be released, one of the few on the never list, since society out there thinks even our types need hope. (When we don’t. It’s saving we need.)
On this top landing are vicious murderers, multiple rapists, men of extreme violence, bigtime heroin dealers. (Outside, our young successors are lined up the length and breadth of this breathlessly beautiful little country kidding itself most is well when it’s not. I tell you, it’s bad seed growing, that ain’t corn waving fecund fat in the breeze. It’s humans made of bad seed, you, someone, everyone, must believe me. This country’s going to reap what it sowed, they’ll (you’ll) see.)
The entire second level is occupied by the Black Hawks, creating force and fear in numbers, strength in their closed gang culture. There’s continuum in the feeding grounds on the outside, festering social sludge pits, feeding the littlies fat on a hard life, a staple diet of lovelessness. It is so I tell you.
On the ground floor are ordinary killers, rapists, men of violence, crazies and a lawyer or three from time to regular time, if they’d been particularly preyful of old-age pensioners’ savings, a doctor who’d murdered his wife, two accountants who defrauded Jurassic’s number, twenty-seven, times a million in dollars from investors nation-wide, in a scheme every prisoner wanted to know so they could go out and do it. No one ever really cares about coming back or they’d not, would they? This lot are the sex toys of the second-floor gang rulers, the heads to bust for that crazy Apeman to play a real wild ape’s old lady, an inquisitor putting a burning cigarette to someone’s skin, like a live coal deciding truth: guilty if you burn, guilty if you don’t.
Why am I saying this? Who’s to listen, who cares in here? No one does. I’m a definition of another type, in here I am. If you don’t count the middle-aged dudes who go for ritual and symbolism, we’re the crim types, who’ve seen the light of God. Only with me, I’ve seen my light, not God’s.
It’s one day waking up from a dream of seeing me. You! Screaming without the hot coal of truth on my skin. Screaming with the truth of Self bellowing it had never belonged to me, had Self, it had always been claimed by someone and something else.
I woke up that day in burning pain of being told what I was. I got unlocked from my cell and stepped out and saw for the first time what and who I was surrounded by and that it had been me, we were one and the same, separated not by degrees, but here for the same reason and therefore existed as the same mindless creature. The creature that does not and cannot change. The creature who feeds on the bodies of innocents. Even as we eat up ourselves.
From that moment on I cottoned on to everyone’s scam and agenda and act and cunning thought and bad intent. I asked myself questions that came as experiences in themselves, so novel and profound to me did they seem. And so alone was I.
I looked back on myself, my past, for the first time. And saw only a dismal empty field, with corpses of people I’d hurt and good ideas I’d failed to do anything about, relationships with women, with ordinary people. Dead. All dead. No, make that destroyed. Everything of meaning we destroy as if another truth we don’t want to confront.
I looked into a future that had the thick wall of a lengthy prison sentence ahead of it, blocking out the light. I went over all that I supposedly knew, and found I knew nothing. Like Jurassic Park Joe, I tried to find it by looking at others’ faces. But I found only masks, on masks, layer and layers thick of life’s scar tissue. Of hurt never got to cry, not even to announce itself.
I asked the old lags what prisons used to be like or were they the same. Not the same, was the unanimous answer. We had a thieves’ code, even a murderer’s code. You killed a man over a debt or pride, but never for the sake of killing. We didn’t regard raping a woman with pride, let alone a badge of honour like these Maori gangies do. We did rape, but it had more a purity, if you will, of simple sexual need out of control than the brutal acts of today. As thieves you never gave up your mate. You never stole from another inmate’s cell, since you were all in the same boat. To rape and murder a child was beyond our comprehension. Those who did had to go on protection.
That’s why I, Nameless, exist now. If only but to give out a message, my urgent ticker-tape message from Hell. Not the Hell of here, locked up, chained of souls and hearts. But the Hell of out there, where all this starts and yet needn’t, not most of it. (It needn’t be, folks. But then how will you ever hear me, a voice like mine from the furnace?) I’m telling any who will listen: It-need-not-be.
That’s why I’ve worked my transfer application to the same new Hellhole as Apeman Black. To stop him succeeding in his mission, to wipe out another innocent. To hold off what nature, not some human plot, should decide: when to put another Heke kid in the graveyard.
Because I’m a Heke, you see.
I’m my brother Jake, and the late Nig, and poor lovely Grace, and tired of spirit Huata, and the morally true Abe. I’m not Polly, can’t hope to get to that level, never could have. Fate deals us different hands in different times. And my smile for her, Beth, who used to be a Heke. The truest Heke of them all, being Beth, mother of Jake’s kids. They let me stay once, long ago — Jake and Beth did — and I’ve followed their progress since. From a distance.
I’m each and every one of them, I’m blood, I’m of their race and with blood equal of the other race. I’m serving a long prison sentence, maybe forever. Killed a man in a pub (over a look he gave me — a look — and it got the man killed), and within a year of getting here got into a fight and killed the guy. Twenty-seven years I’ve done, same as Nelson Mandela, except he came out a hero and he shouldn’t have been jailed in the first place. Still, making comparison to a figure like Mandela keeps these present thoughts absolutely on track, that I’m going to make something of this life, this double life sentence.
It’s the — true — face I’ve shown the authorities. Time and again I’ve been challenged, provoked by my fellow residents, and not retaliated as I’ve been known for. Not even a verbal clash; I’ve just walked away. I’ve put in for a transfer and the authorities are so relieved I’m a new man they’re right behind me.
I’m doing it because there’s a young man’s life at stake. Why see another good Heke go down? And good person, full stop. How many more lives to go to waste?
In the prison library, if only Abe Heke knew, are a nineteenth century English poet’s words: I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day … Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me. Penned by Gerard Manly Hopkins, in his time of utmost despair, and yet his dying words expressed to his mother were: I’m so happy, so very happy. So many written gems available, if you broken boys only knew.
Words which, defining you, could set you truly free.
A single individual’s good cause is what I am living for and none but me will know it. Watch (this space) me.