After three years in Pittsburgh Penitentiary I was ready for a change. At first I had really enjoyed having a window in my cell. I recalled fondly how, when I was first moved there in January 1995, I would sit for hours just looking out on to the real world through my brand-new window. I thought that at Pittsburgh I would be able to move on from all the dark memories of my twelve brutal years at Huntingdon . . .
But in many ways Pittsburgh was no better. Death Row was located in a sealed unit for which the only source of air was an artificial ventilation system. In summer you froze and in winter you baked. Air – sometimes cold, sometimes hot – pumped out of the wall all day every day. After a while of living like this you could detect the tiniest new smell that floated your way. Also, your ears became deadened to the constant white noise of the air coming out of the vents 24/7. Your eyes also became so used to the fluorescent lighting of your cell that you could not handle natural sunlight when you were taken outside for exercise.
Human skin cells make up eighty per cent of indoor dust. In many prisons they do not change the hepa-filtration filters in the air vents, as they are too expensive to replace, so you end up with this micro-fine dust being constantly blown about your cell. When you get up for the ‘head count’ in the morning you can see your footprints in the dust that has settled on the floor overnight.
In a new Death Row unit like the one in Pittsburgh, built in the 1990s, which is sealed shut and filled with dry, vented air, you end up being preserved like a mummy. Your skin becomes taut. Your sinuses are always full of powdery grit, as are your eyes. I even began to miss the times when I could smell the rain back in Huntingdon. For, whenever the rear door to B-Block was opened and fresh air poured in from outside, the wind would sweep in all these smells of nature. I missed that, I really did. I did not like how in Pittsburgh nothing seemed to change. It felt like I was in one of those controlled experiments in which everything has to be the same all the time.
Maria started coming to see me once a week, on her way either to or from work. All through January and February 1998, as I nervously waited out the time it took for my transfer to Greene County prison to come through, she visited me. I really was so grateful to have this wise and serene woman calmly walk into the wreckage of my life and just listen. By now, also, I knew that I had nothing to prove to her. And she quickly applied her professional skills as a grief counsellor to help me accept my very difficult situation, and made me start thinking seriously about the possibility that my life could end there.
The best thing about having someone to talk to whose job it is to counsel the families of the dying is that you know they are a deeply genuine person. I could never imagine doing Maria’s job. I found it amazing that she worked with the same heartbreak every day and yet she did not walk around in tears.
Through listening to Maria, though, I grew to have so much respect for anyone who works in a hospital. You know that death is a likely outcome for the patients you care for and sometimes the only reason they are alive at all is because they are hooked up to some machinery. You look into the crying faces of family members as someone they love slips away from them. You share in their grief. Then you go home and talk to your grandchildren on the phone or you laugh with your daughter who thinks you are God’s gift to her children who adore you. And you are. You really are.
Maria was such an easy target for my humour, and I quickly fell for hers. Neither one of us wanted just to sit there and trade tales of gore and suffering. We both wanted to share our ability to look at life differently, as a way also of rising above our day-to-day surroundings. I was delighted to have found someone with whom I could laugh so openly. I had such a wonderful time thinking of quips to make to her while she was in the middle of a serious discussion about the Catholic spiritual writer Thomas Merton or the Buddhist freedom rights leader Thich Nhat Hanh. But I also knew that, at the heart of it all, she was trying to find out if there was still inside of me the will to remain what I thought I had become.
Oddly enough, those ‘funny stories’ did often come up naturally in the middle of serious discussions. Prison was such a foreign world for Maria that she was fascinated by every little detail of life on Death Row. Things I would not think to mention. For instance, how do you punish someone on Death Row?
I told her that if a man on Death Row was placed on ‘disciplinary time’, he had his privileges taken away. These might be the TV he had purchased through the prison commissary store, or all his artwork and personal items, until he was left with the bare minimum: two towels, two sheets, one blanket, one pillowcase, one cut-handled toothbrush (no more than two inches long), one tube of toothpaste, one comb, one bible or other religious book, one pair of shower slides, one pair of eyeglasses. He would then be issued with three sets of underclothes and a bright orange jumpsuit with special markings on it to identify him as a disciplinary-timed inmate.
Maria wanted to know about reading material. I told her that while on disciplinary time you were at the mercy of the ‘Death Row library’; that is, a bunch of cast-offs from the prison’s main library which were sent over from time to time. The worst part of it was that, because they left it up to the guards to distribute the two books per week you were allowed, it went ‘wrong’ sometimes.
I was smiling when I said this, so she wanted to know what I meant. I drew myself up and let go. I knew that Maria was the one person who would find it funny when I told her. And, damn it, I missed laughing as I had once done.
She looked at me quizzically. ‘How many times have you been put on “disciplinary time”, Nick?’
I laughed. ‘Lots.’ And before she could ask me what for, I continued. ‘For doing everything from running a football pool to talking out loud inside my own cell.’
She pulled her chair forward. She was totally fascinated. Why had I been put on disciplinary time for talking in my own cell? she asked.
I told her that it was against the rules. ‘But that’s not true,’ she said.
‘Yes, it is,’ I explained. Pennsylvania’s penal system is based on one devised by the Quakers in the seventeenth century, founded on the idea that one powerful aspect of prison should be the mental punishment of isolation. Huntingdon also used the ‘silence rule’ for years as a form of punishment, although there they refined it further by designing the ‘Glass Bubble’ – the sensory deprivation chamber in which men were kept awake for days until they lost lucidity.
Maria asked me how long I had had to put up with this type of abuse.
‘Two years,’ I told her, before it all went whacky during the high influx of inmates in the mid-1980s, when mentally impaired men arrived who yelled and screamed all day long and no one could stop them.
She also wanted to know about the football pool. I told her about how postage-paid envelopes are a form of currency in prison, as they are essential to getting any help from the outside world. Death Row prisoners are fanatical about sports; and watching live sporting events on TV is perhaps the one pacifier that really works in prison. It keeps those men glued to their television sets for hours. I told her that the men also wanted to have a reason to watch the games even more passionately, and while I was in Huntingdon I gave them just that by providing them with a sort of ‘lottery’.
Everyone placed three or five envelopes in a common pot collected by ‘block workers’ – usually non-Death Row prisoners – during meal ‘clean-up time’ when they came to clear away the food and trash. The accumulated envelopes, on each of which was written the secret name of each player, along with his choices for all sixteen NFL football games that Sunday, were then ‘swept’ calmly down the tiers of cells and under my doorway. I would then take out each slip bearing the name and selections of each man and put them on a master sheet.
Once I had them all in, I made a copy of the master sheet for each man, which was then passed back to him during Friday bed linen exchanges by the same block worker who had passed me his selection, so that by Saturday everyone had a record of their opponents’ picks as well as their own and therefore could keep track of who was winning.
It was a simple system whereby I paid myself ten per cent of the total pot collected from the forty or so men on Death Row who played the football pool each week. Some men could afford to play two or three chances per week over a sixteen-week-long season and sometimes the pot got very sizeable. Soon I had gathered hundreds of envelopes in which to put my letters asking for help from campaigning organisations or laboratories conducting DNA testing.
Maria wanted to know if it was possible to cheat in my game. I told her no, as every man had his own copy of the master sheet bearing everyone else’s selections and everyone knew that whoever had played a ticket with the name ‘BDown’ or ‘DB’ or whatever name had won. A tiebreaker was determined by whoever picked the closest number to the total score of the last game played that week. All I’d done was use the sports obsession of these men to help me get what I wanted without having to rely on others.
Unfortunately, my little empire collapsed when I got caught with the master sheets before I could pass them out. A team of officers found them during a random cell search. They took 300 envelopes of mine and another 250 for the pot that week. I was not happy that I had lost so much, but it was the risk I took for trying to ‘hustle’. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘doing the ninety days of disciplinary time I received for this was not all bad. I still had my “Death Row doughnuts” to keep me going!’ She shook her head. She had no idea what I was talking about. I would tell her about that one later.
But part of the reason why I was telling Maria all this was because I wanted to show her how I was able to live and grow amongst all the ugliness. And the more I talked about daily life in prison, the more struck she was by how, as in any confined society, the men fell into a sort of ‘normality’. No one can live in a state of constant terror, so after a while you just go back to living, period. How else do soldiers sleep on the battlefield?
‘But what did you do during those ninety days of disciplinary time?’ she pursued.
I shook my head at the memory. ‘You were totally at the mercy of the guards running the so-called “Death Row library”, remember? The simple act of asking for books could be a nightmare.’
I went on: ‘When I was in Huntingdon the guards on B-Block were picked for their brutality, not their brains, and you could get stuck in some bad situations.’ I told her the true story of what had happened to me so that she could appreciate what it was like to have weeks ahead of you with nothing to read and nothing else to do to relieve the boredom.
The guard who distributed the books followed a simple system. Inmates put in a request for two books per week on Thursdays, and these were given out the following Sunday, when the guard would sift through all the request forms and assign books to each cell for the week. If you moved cells during the week, then tough, the books stayed in the cell. They cared about the books, not you.
Now, the guard running the library was low down on the seniority scale as it was a tedious job to log all the books into the master folder. He also had to keep records of the books that had been collected.
Usually he did not care too much what he gave you; he just reached into a crate of books dumped in an unused cell and stacked them in a large pile two at a time, a little bit of paper taped to the top book of each pair. He used the simplest of systems to keep track of the books. Each was numbered individually, so he would write down, for instance, ‘Cell 334: books given: 236, 421’ on the sheet and then the turn-in-by date over the numbers of the books.
On the form that we used to request books, there was a small box in which we could put our preference for one of two choices: fiction or non-fiction. But I did not stick to just this narrow choice. Oh no. I had to go and make trouble for myself. All because I used that one fancy word: ‘espionage’.
I was sitting on my bed one Sunday morning waiting for my library books to be delivered. I was serving my disciplinary time for the football pool and I had been placed in one of the cells high up on the sixth tier, used not only for men such as myself but also for some of the mentally deranged inmates. These men often did such things as pack the cracks of their cell walls with rancid butter in order to fight off evil spirits. Summer was the worst. There were hundreds of flies in Huntingdon, which thrived in the humid, sweltering conditions where insane prisoners threw faeces at the nurses who were trying to medicate them.
Anyway, along came the guard, walking backwards, with an inmate holding a piece of wood three feet long by two feet wide, piled up with books, and stopped at my door. I watched as he carefully picked up my two new books for the week and pushed them through my ‘pie hole’. I went over to the door and picked them up. But as soon as I saw them, I called for the guard to stop. The books were in Spanish.
‘Excuse me, officer, I can’t read these books!’
He replied: ‘Hold on, hold on. Let me get the slip out.’
Then, having checked it, and with an annoyed look, he said, ‘What the hell do you mean, you can’t read them books I gave you? I got your slip right here.’
‘I know you have it, but on it I asked if you could give me some books on espionage. I didn’t want to end up with cowboy novels again like last week.’
The guard looked at the slip again before asking me: ‘What’s “espionage”?’
By now the nearby inmates were laughing and snickering in the background, but I tried not to feed into them.
‘That means “spying”,’ I replied patiently. ‘I want some books about spying, so I wrote on my library slip that I would like to receive espionage novels.’
The guard knew he was being laughed at by the eavesdropping inmates and so he decided to end it there.
‘Look, we ain’t got no Spanish books on spying or no espionage books as you called them. These are the only Spanish books we got!’
Maria and I had a good laugh. According to the guard, at least he’d gotten the Spanish part right, so I could just shut up!
Maria could not resist adding to the tale by asking how my Spanish was coming along these days. We snickered at the ridiculousness of it all. And once she had stopped laughing about that one she made me tell her how I became the doughnut magnate of Death Row.
I pretended to dust imaginary powdered sugar from my fingertips as if I had just popped the last bit of doughnut in my mouth. ‘Let me tell you about “Lifers’ packages”, honey!’
She groaned at what this could only mean . . .
In my efforts to come up with ways of funding my appeal case, I sold my services as jailhouse lawyer to some of the men on Death Row.
Word had gotten round that I did nearly all my own legal filing and I had built up a good reputation for helping other men with legal matters. For my first client, I wrote a mock brief for his appeal, which he sent to his lawyers to follow. Although I say it myself, it was well researched and well written. About a year later he had his sentence commuted to life without parole and he was sent out into the general population. Then, out of the fifteen or sixteen briefs I was involved in, another man also had his sentence reduced to life. Both these men were housed on D-Block, just next door to B-Block. It was great to feel that two men had been spared the endless solitary of Death Row due partly to my efforts. And they rewarded me with a monthly treat.
Everyone who was a ‘lifer’ was allowed to join what was called the ‘lifers’ organisation’. This allowed them to participate in lifer-only programmes, the most important of which to most of them was the monthly food package. Every month, lifers were allowed to order in from outside a simple array of everyday foods sold in fast-food places. One of these was a local doughnut shop, Dunk-n-Donuts.
Each lifer could purchase a set amount of food, which he was expected to consume quickly. I was only after one thing: powdered-sugar ring doughnuts. I asked each of the former Death Row men to hook me up with a box of doughnuts, which they happily arranged to have passed to me through the shower room door that connected D-Block to B-Block. I paid the B-Block worker two doughnuts for bringing them to me. I then sold twenty of the doughnuts to other Death Row inmates at the rate of ten postage-paid envelopes a doughnut. With each envelope costing twenty-seven cents, I made a nice pile of postage-paid envelopes each month.
All Maria wanted to know, though, was: Why powderedsugar doughnuts? Why not chocolate or glazed?
Simple. When you wrapped each doughnut up in toilet tissue in order for the block worker to distribute it secretly in what looked like a normal newspaper, you didn’t want anything that would get all smeared on the paper. The white powdered sugar also helped keep the doughnuts dry. I explained finally that, as long as I paid the worker some envelopes for passing out the food on top of the two fresh doughnuts a week, I was set.
Maria just could not get her head around all the planning and organisation involved. But I told her simply, ‘Prison is its own world, a strange little society run by a weird set of rules.’ I was just doing all I could to stay ahead of the game.