In late August 1998, despite my best efforts not to get my hopes up, I was run over by the ‘DNA Express’ once again.
The 2,000 viable cells collected for testing were too badly degraded by time and exposure to the atmosphere to yield any results. I received the letter from my lawyers informing me of this the day I was sent back from the prison hospital. I had just been through a lot of stomach pain after a bout of food poisoning and had spent two days on my back being pumped full of IV fluids. That was after two lousy days in my cell vomiting up all the food and liquid in my system. Oddly, I found a benefit to being so physically overwhelmed, as when you are that ill you have nothing left for emotions.
By now I was in a new unit, on G-Block, where most of the Death Row men were kept. Sitting at the metal desk in my new cell reading the letter from my lawyers, I could feel my empty stomach burning. I sifted through the papers looking for the lab report – I had become something of an expert at spotting mistakes or incomplete details in lab reports. No luck.
By this time I had made a deal with Walter. I would write his letters to his appeals lawyer for him – thereby ensuring that his case was filed correctly – but I was not prepared to spend hours and hours writing briefs and researching on his behalf. I was barely able to keep up with the work on my own case; just reading all Walter’s trial transcripts would have taken weeks. The letters back from Walter’s lawyer were filled with sheer gratitude. Walter’s mind could not filter facts or state thoughts correctly, and before, he had sent them twenty-page letters crammed full of unending sentences that made little sense. Twice a week for two hours I would sit with him in the library going over his case. Every time I went back to my cell thanking heaven for my lucidity.
My efforts to help Walt made me the scorn of some of the guards, who were petty, broken men themselves. Many made comments about the pair of sex offenders sticking together. Some dropped suspicious comments that I was somehow using Walter. They couldn’t work it out. The silly inmates were just as close-minded. Either I was like Walter – depraved – or I was playing him for my own ends. I hated it. I had had enough of years of judgments being passed on me by both inmates and guards.
Yet, even though they bothered me, I tried to make a game of it and keep smiling. The most judgmental jackasses I have ever met are men who have themselves been convicted of the most heinous crimes imaginable.
The guards at Greene were a mix of rural men, who had a complete disdain for city folk or minorities, and seemingly more tolerant officers drawn from urban areas. They were rotated every six months to avoid long-term fraternisation and in June 1998 a new guard was assigned to H-Block. One of the locals, he had been given the job right after military service. A tall young man, dark-eyed and heavyset, with a loud voice and lousy, tobacco-stained teeth, he was openly hostile to many of the inmates, whom he viewed collectively as the city folk he hated. He was known to all as ‘Lawless’, partly because that sounded like his actual name, but primarily because, according to him, rules were only for lowly scum. His usual manner was surly – particularly in the mornings, when he was hungover – and it was his favourite inmate who had taken over my job as worker. I knew it was only so they could hang out and play grab-ass together. Every guard has his pet inmate they use to pass the time with. That’s what happens when they become overly familiar and the barriers between inmates and staff lower. All you can hope for is that you don’t get physically hurt by them in their rush to set up house together.
As soon as this new guard saw in my records that I was a convicted rapist-murderer who, even worse, hung around with a child killer, he set upon me viciously. I was fired from my job and there was nothing I could do. The block sergeant, AJ, said simply, ‘I don’t know what the truth is, but I gotta back up my men. This officer says he doesn’t feel safe with you out of your cell. That is enough for me.’
I saw some amazing things as a worker. Having suddenly gone from being confined all the time to being able to walk past rows and rows of locked-up men sitting or lying there in varying states of misery, ignorance and bliss, the awful reality of the place sank in. And I learned one thing I will never forget: once they close that cell door, every man feels it.
It doesn’t matter who you are, that cell hurts and it will scar you. You can read until the end of time, or exercise until you pass out. Whatever you do to escape will have to end at some point, and then, when your mind catches up with reality again, you will realise that it has hurt you and you will never be the same for it.
I tended to give Maria ‘sanitised’ accounts of what happened in Greene because she felt it all so keenly. I remember her freaking out when I told her how I had been asked to clean up after an inmate had cut his own throat with a razor blade he’d managed to get hold of during shower time. There was blood all over his cell and it had congealed into the track of the sliding metal door. I had to use a toothbrush and bleach to get it all out. Maria was horrified that I had been made to do this, but I reasoned that, having myself been placed in cells that were nothing better than public sewers, at least I’d spared the next inmate from becoming ill from the blood or bile left behind.
It’s hard not to be affected by the alarm that shoots through you when an ‘incident’ happens while you are out working. And with 400–500 men locked up in the RHU of Greene County prison at any one time, something goes badly wrong nearly every day. I was in the hallway mopping up when I saw an inmate smash a young rookie officer in the face with his handcuffs. The inmate was being removed from his cell by this guard and another officer for a medical examination. As soon as the guard turned his head and lost sight of the man’s hands, the inmate hit him across the eyes with the jagged edge of his cuffs. But the two guards beat the inmate – a mentally deranged prisoner named Curtis – so badly that I nearly lost it. I was quickly thrust back into my cell and told to lock up. I was happy to oblige: I wanted nothing to do with this.
That inmate would face criminal charges and I was not prepared to be used to prosecute someone and then get killed for testifying. When the lieutenant came on to the unit to investigate, the sergeant told him that no worker had been out when the assault occurred. I kept my mouth shut.
Psychologically, I think that the acts of cruelty I saw aimed at other prisoners affected me even more than those directed at myself. Right then I felt more emotionally depleted than at many other stages in my ordeal. When you place groups of men who suffer from a whole range of emotional and mental disorders in the care of other men whose job it is to feed and care for them in cells, it is bound to produce the worst behaviour. Ever since I’d seen Graner toss the coffee in that prisoner’s face, I had been on his ‘hit list’. I thought I’d seen the last of him when I left H-Block, but no. And he reaped his revenge on me with mere words, I might add.
One day in 2002, he came to take me down to the unit counsellors’ office to make an ‘emergency personal phone call’. Such calls are only allowed when something major has happened: an inmate’s death sentence has been overturned or there has been a family emergency. So I was feeling very shaky. The lieutenant had gone to get the key to the office door but, before doing so, he had told me that my father had called to say my brother had died. When I asked which brother, he cringed in the realisation that no one knew such basic information and replied that it was up to my family to tell me and he’d be right back.
As soon as he was gone, Graner smiled at me and said, ‘For two packs of cigarettes I’ll tell you which of your brothers died.’
I stared at him. I wanted to say so many things, but I could feel my head tightening as I started to shut down in anger. So I just stood there helplessly as he pursed his lips, mimicking my mouth trembling with frustrated curses strangled by my damaged brain. Just then, over Graner’s shoulder, I saw in the doorway the lieutenant, who realised what he was doing and at least had the decency to scold him. ‘I’ll take it from here, Chuck. Why don’t you get yourself a coffee . . . or some feelings, you asshole!’
Graner just laughed at the lieutenant’s remark and left us, but not before deliberately brushing up hard against me. It was the cheap move of the bully put in his place in front of one of those he tormented.
The lieutenant dialled the number; when my father answered, he handed the receiver over to me. My brain was so shut down by my fear of what I was about to learn that I could only see out of my right eye. I held the receiver in my shaking right hand and pressed the back of the other hand against my left eye to stop the pain, which was so intense I could barely talk. My dad didn’t even recognise my voice when I croaked into the receiver, ‘Pop, what’s going on?’
Then he told me. The previous morning he had gone down into the basement looking for my younger brother Marty as he’d sensed there was something wrong. He’d found him dead on the couch. Another victim of the OxyContin drug wave of the late 1990s. As he was telling me this I looked out of the office window at all the inmates walking by in the hallway outside. One who was being escorted by two guards stopped long enough to yell through the glass, ‘How come they’re giving that man a free phone call on a direct line on a Sunday?’ Then, as his escorts bustled him along, ‘I bet that bitch is testifying on someone! Get off that phone, you frigging RAT!’
I just dropped the phone into its cradle after whatever it was my father said to me. I kept conjuring up this image of my brother lying there. But I felt nothing. I could not even feel the pain in my left eye. I was just kind of light-headed.
It’s the strangest thing, but all day I had been repeating to myself this line that Ernie Simmons, the Death Row barber, had said to me. Ernie was an old-timer who was the Death Row barber by default, as he was the only one of us with a barber’s certificate, and cut our hair once a month. While he’d been cutting mine, he’d commented on how the old prisons were full of rats and mice, so that when you did time back then you ‘woke up with rats in your bed and mice in your pillow case’ because, as he concluded, ‘Agony and misery both love themselves some company!’
I didn’t understand what the hell he meant, but those words stuck in my mind as I walked back to my cell now. At least they saved me from bursting into rage or crumbling into sorrow. I couldn’t do that. Not after being told how my baby brother had just died a miserable death at age thirty-eight.
I told Walter about Marty in the law library a few days later. I also told him how I used to be an asshole towards him when we were kids and that I had probably contributed a great deal to the emotional and mental problems he had suffered while growing up. Walter replied that he’d hated it when he and his brother fought, because it always hurt his mom and now he had no one left. So I shut up about my own sorrows – his losses were just as bad as mine, I reminded myself – and went back to typing up a letter to his lawyer, clarifying matters for the tenth time. I also went back to figuring out how to tell my folks that I had a terminal illness and that they would have to start planning for my death, too.