January 2015 - Christmas in Jail

Christmas in Jail

-by Eric Beeman

Living on the other side of the red kettle, the donation side, I receive what the bell ringers collect.  Praise the donators, the chain-store cheese-shop offerings, and the past year's unsold gift boxes. It's fine. Like a grateful Cratchit, I accept what the prison guard tosses my way, his keys chime from the waist and jingle all the way from his wide jack-booted stance, as the box flies toward my hands. I inspect the foil sealed cheese-wheels and shrink-wrapped pub sausages, an inmate in a Federal prison. Breathe deep, no smell.

Such calories of fat are an aid to the holiday mess-hall meal. I am grateful. Food today has been festive, but scarce: a three-by-four inch slice of turkey about quarter-inch thick, a spoon of stuffing and jarred gravy, with a whole lot of canned spinach, and over-boiled carrots. The full portion of food, was craftily commandeered by wannabe Mafiosos yesterday. Jailhouse dons, wrangle and barter with the Three Latin Kings who prepare our meals.  Erase a year's worth of penny poker debts, then sweeten the bargain by offering a few smuggled tobacco cigarettes. Great roasts of meat rolled into winter coats and spirited away. Half turkeys and cans of corned beef, carried under the arms or hidden atop the sucked-in bellies of couriers, up the slope and into to the cellblock units that squat against the edge of the prison compound, built on a dynamite-blasted ledge in the Adirondacks.

Constructed to serve as the Lake Placid Olympic Village, the five identical beige-brick buildings were repurposed as a prison when the Russians left town. The second-place team left behind their silver hockey medals for the fence company to find in the brush, when they erected two sixteen foot high chain-link rings around the yard. And filled the gap in between with coiled slinky tubes of Constantia wire. Razors that catch and kill low-flying quail attracted by the alluring green of the Warden's lawn.

The stolen meat becomes an over-sized private dinner, re-heated on hotplates jimmied from a plug-in iron stolen from the laundry. Greedily the crooks tear at the flesh and gobble it down. Gastric revels of joy sing inside their bellies, while Franco-Canadian Christmas tunes wobble over the mountain via contraband radios that pipe in music from Montreal.

If the Salvation Army gift boxes were something they really coveted, they would have controlled the distribution of it, too. They really can't help themselves, driven by a compulsion to consume what belongs to someone else. Already they plan their next heist.

I am as guilty as them all, of course, but pray that my future lies on the other ide of the red kettle. No gambling, no drugs, no sex. No problems!  That's what my lawyer advised me on my commitment day. And so far he's been right.  

I work harder here than I ever have. Cutting grass all summer, pushing a motor less mower in laser sharp lines, and shoveling the constantly blowing, constantly falling snow in the winter. I'm always tired and always hungry. Instead of food I consume daydreams. At night I sleep with a belly-full of hallucinations, projected by a light in my head that only three years of incarceration can conjure.

But tonight I have a gift, a hot-mustard sausage-dipping dream.

* * *

This Christmas, I asked my family not to visit me. Honestly visits make prison harder for me.

Two yeas in a row during the holidays, my family made the incalculably long trip to Saranac Lake from Oregon, Colorado, New Hampshire. Gerry-rigging their own kind of celebration, exchanging presents in roadside motels and taverns along the old scenic routes of pre-interstate New York.  They'd spend the maximum two hours with me, making small talk, sitting congenially in hard plastic chairs lined up in rows on a high-gloss linoleum floor.

It was a brief reminder that you are human, immediately clobbered to death by a full-cavity search exiting the Visiting Room. A little something to remind you of your status in life, stripped naked, you stand cold in a closet as the guard tells you to shake out your hair with your fingers, lift your sack and spread your cheeks, a sterile preamble to homoerotic porn that never delivers any action.

I can't remember what I even talked about when the family visited. The day the Cubans rioted? Lunging at anyone alive after Immigration arrived to hear their cases, only to offer them all the same photocopied letter from the INS listing their release date as "undetermined." Imprisoned since arriving in the US more a decade before, on a ragtag flotilla of boats. They were soon jailed without any trial, only the reasonable suspicion that they were convicted murderers, rapists, thieves, or all three. Some were, but not all.  Many simply boarded the wrong boat after Fidel emptied his penitentiaries as a big joke on America, easing his own prison budget substantially.

Or did I tell them I now practice yoga? Taught to me by a killer named Bob. He was shipped up from Pennsylvania after a riot there. As a peaceful man (now) he was deemed safe for reassignment to a medium security facility. We practiced weekly in the chapel under the watchful eye of the travelling Chaplin, until the Warden walked by and deemed it "martial arts." Worried we were practicing a khaki-drab coup toward inside his slave-labor fiefdom. I still practice everyday. Alone in my cell: the Five Tibetan Rites, followed by a White Skeleton Meditation.

Two of my visits ended in car accidents.  My grandparents drove into a ditch trying to find Cooperstown. Surely telling friends back home they were going to visit the Hall of Fame, not their convict grandson.  My ex-lover's rented car careened into the woods, flattening a forty yard row of baby fir trees before coming to a stop in tears. That was the day I told him not to come back. I told him I didn't want to be marked as a jailhouse bitch. Because people always talk about your visitors, and men in jail will take advantage if they see a young gay guy to have prison-sex with.

The truth is, I don't plan to go back to my ex anyway. I've spent three years unpeeling a thousand-layer of the onion from around my life, only to find nothing inside of it worth cooking.  The American Express bills, the exposed brick loft apartment, the cocaine nightclubs, and Neiman Marcus shaving salves...that's all his shtick, not mine.  

I think he got the message.

* * *

Christmas is a special time for my cellmate, or "cellie," as they say here. He's serving the eighth year of a nine year sentence for importing heroin. He abused his father's import license, using to smuggle opium into DC from Asia. The big mistake, of course, was using nearly as much as he sold. He was only nineteen when he was sent to prison. Being a denizen and citizen of the Axis of Evil, he was deemed a "kingpin" so they sent his Persian ass as far up the river as they could, spending three years in a maximum security penitentiary before coming here. He dealt with rape and beatings, and everything you expect.

So when I arrived, he took pity on my youth, and schooled me on how to he keep safe from the similar, albeit less violent,  tribulations that could have come my way in a correctional setting. 

My cellie arranges for checks to be deposited in the commissary accounts of the poorer criminals street criminals.  The black guys from DC, where spitting is a federal offense, whose only money comes from the fifteen cent per hour wage the prison pays to work in the textile factory assembling army uniforms. They get to spend half of my cellie's deposit on themselves. With the other half they bring him extra supplies of Spam, ramen noodles, tubes of TV commercial toothpaste and  tiny bottles of shampoo.  

Because Christmas here thankfully arrives with lax policing by the guards, causing their interest in random cell searches to wane. And, since cavity searches can't catch balloons stuffed with heroin, swallowed to and eliminated later, his DC allies got paid even more this week. They kiss their girls goodbye then swallow a tiny balloon of powder to deliver to our cell when colon delivers it.

I tolerate his penchant for inhaling dope, and frightening attempts of intravenous injection via an altered ballpoint pen. Once the deed is done, his intoxication becomes an internal process. The room smells a bit pukeish at times, but otherwise, he seems quite content, and never does me wrong. In exchange for my lassitude about his drug use, he tolerates the four-in-the-morning clatter, the knocks at our steel door, and the guard unlocking the door.  "On Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen! " Someone laughs, the overnight guard startles me awake, hollering my last name. I dress in a flash, and leave my cellie to chase his dragon through sugar plum dreams.

The night guard is handsome. Hot really. Jet black hair, strong Mohican profile, long eyelashes, tight round ass, and thick thighs, that walk with Quebecois swag. He follows me to the Unit door, and I wonder if he's checking me out too, or if my gaydar is simply out of whack after three years of celibate jamming. The key in the slot, he turns.  I am greeted by an artic blast , and the unappreciative white face of a grounds crew officer handing me a plastic shovel.

***

I love being outside in the cold, one of only a few men. The loners, and the lovers of frigidity. Those with shovels, the hungry and the sober. Worker elves.

Wind clips. Snow drifts as fast as it is removed. The path is never clear. Outside the fence, prisoners holding security clearances use snow blowers and drive government plows. Inside, to keep combustible fuels out of the wrong hands, all labor is done manually.

I stand and face the blizzard. It is Christmas, and this is my gift, a North Pole snow. It whistles with the buzz of the light towers, whose sodium lamps shoot prisms of color through the crystals.

A force pierces my coat, penetrating both pair of pants, my long underwear and doubled-up wool, stockings. Six-points enter my veins a hundred times, a race of cold shoots into my blood, molecule by molecule, and forces the darkness of my past out through my pores. Purifying me, until I am new again. Unlayered, free, easy and strong.

As I return to my cell the young, maybe-gay, guard looks up from his sleepy eyes. Hat off, feet on the desk, he gives me a smile. Today, it feels like love. I accept your charity, and return it in kind.  Whatever it is that you want to put in the box.