IT’S FIVE IN THE MORNING AND the deuces squad is standing six strong in front of your cell. The Lieutenant drops about forty pounds of chains on the cement floor and beckons you forward. You rub the sleep out of your eyes; you are confused. You haven’t applied for a transfer and for damned sure it’s not an early release. You have no idea what these guys got in mind but you know it can’t be good.
Get steady boyo because whatever it is you’ve done to piss them off, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to disappear you, put you on the ghost chain. You are about to enter into the perpetual transfer zone. Every morning you will be wrapped up in waist chains and leg manacles, tossed aboard a bus or a plane and shipped around the country doing one night stands in prison isolation wings from California to Georgia and from Minnesota to Texas — for as long as the Bureau deems necessary. Welcome to the nightmare world of Diesel Therapy.
Twelve Step Survival Guide for the Transfer Tour:
1. Don’t protest; it only makes them feel better. Don’t ask where you are going, or why, they will only lie to you anyway. And don’t ask to take anything, even a toothbrush. You can’t.
2. When you kneel on the bench for them to put the leg shackles on, point your toes as far back as you can. Stretching the tendon on the front of the ankle will provide just that squidge of space between you and the steel bracelet when you return to a standing position. Your ankle bones will be grateful at the end of each day.
3. Start to grow your thumbnails.
4. On the first bus away from your home prison there will be faces you know from the compound, maybe even a friend. They will all be speculating on where you’re headed and why. Listen to none of it. They don’t know a godamned thing. Their jaws are working from the same nervous energy you’re feeling. As you get deeper into the trip these familiars will be dropped off or sent off in different directions and soon you are doing the daylight bus rides with strangers. You will feel completely alone, because you are. Within a week you will forget you ever had friends.
5. You will notice that the seating arrangements on both the buses and the planes are colour coded. No matter how enlightened you believe you are on the issue of race, obey the colour code. If you’re white, sit in the white section, if black be on black. America’s prisons are the front lines of an undeclared race war. Don’t be naive about it. Otherwise, one night your cellie is going to be a bald-headed bigot, who upon removing his shirt reveals two lightning bolts rippling across his chest and his enquiring mind wants to know “why you been woofing it up with the niggers all day?” Or if black, “why you been sitting side that blue-eyed devil all trip?” Either way it isn’t a question you want to have to answer while locked up in a tight space.
6. A small white box will be tossed into your lap each day. This is lunch. It is, and it always will be, a pimento loaf sandwich on white bread and one of those pale oranges with the thin skin that is so hard to peel — even without handcuffs. This is why you are growing your thumbnails.
7. At each stop you will always be put in the transfer unit and unless you are the caliber of Pablo Escobar or have the heat of Timothy fuckin’ McVeigh, you will be double bunked. So to avoid the monster racist or the rabid homo rapist, spend at least part of each day selecting your cellie for that night. It won’t always work, but after you’ve been processed through induction at the prison du jour, make an agreement with, and stay in close proximity to, the person of your choice. The Looey doing cell assignments just wants a quick, no fuss lockup and no overnight incidents to have to write up so he will usually go along with your play.
8. If they haven’t issued it already ask for toilet paper, towels, and soap. It’s usually in a cleaner’s closet at the front of the tier as you come in. Once the door slams on your drum that’s it. You ain’t getting out for nothing and there ain’t no tier tender to go fetch you something either. The next time you see anybody it’ll be five am and he’ll be pushing cornflakes and blue milk in a cardboard bowl through your food slot.
9. Always treasure hunt. Check the bullpen and later your assigned cell for contraband. Feel under the benches, along any ledges, inside toilet bowls. Investigate the lump in your mattress. You never know when you’ll get lucky, when someone’s had to dump something or simply forgot. A handcuff key, a paper of dope, whatever.
10. You will have minimal contact with a few of the static prisoners from each joint — the one who brings your morning cornflakes or the guy who takes your picture during induction. Don’t bother trying to get a message to your mother or your girl or your lawyer out through these guys. They have been handpicked; they are near you for a reason.
11. Two types to avoid on the chain at all costs:
(A) The Jailhouse Lawyer. A guy who uses words like mandamus and habeas corpus and who complains to the marshals non-stop how all this is all an abuse of his human rights and against the laws of America.
(B) The Stone Cold Desperado. The guy hobbling across the tarmac flanked on all sides by about fifteen escorts and he has a marshal bringing up the rear holding a ten-foot trip chain attached to his leg manacles. You can bet your pimento sandwich that this guy is just off a fresh homicide, with zero to lose. In all likelihood he has a sharpened toothbrush hidden up his ass and he’s just looking for a warm body to stab up.
Do not sit near either of these guys even if it means violating the colour code. Because every marshal on the plane owns his personal copy of the Con Air video and he’s waiting to even the score. These badged-up, uniform-wearing mothers load their Remingtons and strap on their Glocks every morning the way the rest of us brush our teeth and pull on our socks. You give off even a hint of trouble and the marshals will not only violate your civil rights, they will ventilate them. Just be aware of who you’re riding next to because when they use a shotgun you’ve only got to be in the vicinity.
12. Somehow the homos and the snitches and the strip searches and the marshals and the killers and the five am roll-ups after cornflakes in blue milk seem to all get jumbled together in the endless miles of bad road you’ve been travelling for too long. To survive you must find the zen of the chain. For instance, if you’re unfortunate enough to have a black box designation and you have to wear that uncomfortable contraption over your handcuffs all day, don’t dwell on the cramps and pain it causes, flow with it, become your black box. Don’t be a new wave crack baby criminal, don’t go sissy on yourself. Suck up them fumes, concentrate on your breathing, find your mantra. Diesel in, diesel out. Let that which doesn’t kill you make you stranger. Transform yourself and your busload of fellow maniacs into an edgy version of Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters. Be patient in all things, let the seasons come and go, and one day fortune will smile. The bus will rumble to a stop at some front gate and you will walk in, passing by enough piles of coiled razor wire to make a knife, fork, and spoon for every man, woman, and child on the subcontinent of India. You will step into the induction area, they’ll take off the chains and do the strip fan. You’ll get dressed again but this time the bulls will direct you to the right. And just like that you’re walking down a corridor towards a mainline. You feel weightless. You have survived. Life is grand. Until next time.