Читать книгу Jail Speak - Ben Langston - Страница 16

The Man Factory

A MAN becomes the Man in a Pennsylvania state prison after only five weeks at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Training Academy. The academy’s an old brick children’s hospital with cherub statues on the roof and a pepper-spray chamber out back.

I walked under the cherubs with my gym bag. The duty sergeant working the desk, a young guy, about six foot five and 240 pounds of muscle, said, “S’up.”

My room came with a camouflage bedspread. The window was painted shut. Other cadets walked from the parking lot carrying duffle bags and rolling suitcases. Old oaks and green grass surrounded the building.

~

THE top Man at the academy, Lieutenant Rice, yelled into his microphone, “Welcome, Class 615!” We sat on folding chairs in the gym. Word was inmates beat him badly in a riot fifteen years earlier. Cadets whispered about razor-wire scars. He said, “The food here is better than anywhere else in the DOC. Period.”

Rice introduced the seven sergeants on the stage. There was the redneck, the rugged lady, the one with a bad haircut, the fat one, the gnarly one-eared one, the intimidating one, and the muscly one who signed me in. They stood, arms crossed, and labeled us the same, no doubt. We had the fat cadets, the redneck cadets, the tough-looking cadets, and the one cadet dressed all in black with spikes on his boots. Most of us ex-military. There were only two black guys. The few women, maybe fifteen, were almost all nurses, counselors, or kitchen staff. I put the goatee percentage at 95 percent.

I decided, right then, to grow my own.

Lieutenant Rice told us a cadet had already been asked to leave. He had showed up drunk. “Come talk to me anytime,” Rice said. “But chances are, if I have to find you, you’re done. Kicked out.”

Rice told us to yell, “DOC proud!” So we yelled. Then he said, “Return the chairs to the back of the gym and hit your racks.” So we returned the chairs and hit our racks.

~

CLASS 615 was 180 goatees strong, but they split us into three smaller groups. We wouldn’t get our uniforms until week five, so it was civvies for everyone: polo shirts and jeans seemed to be the unspoken dress code. I bought two polos after the first day.

The Man assigned to my class was the fat sergeant from the stage, a bald man with one squinty eye. He had three rolls of flesh on the back of his neck. The cadets called him the Vanilla Gorilla.

He said that our classroom was originally the ER, then announced, “This is what we are going to do in the next five weeks: get through this.” When he talked, only half of his mouth moved. It looked like he was recovering from a stroke. But he walked fine.

We introduced ourselves by giving our names and favorite movies.

In the class we had a lot of Rockys and Full Metal Jackets. A guy with a flattop said, “I’m a big movie buff. So it’s hard to decide . . . but it has to be Die Hard. The first one.”

“Yes!” another guy with a flattop said.

A guy at my table said that the ladies in high school called him Chocolate Thunder. Vanilla Gorilla loved this. He half-smiled.

I said my movie was Seven Samurai. Nobody seemed to recognize it. There was an actual pause.

Seven Samurai is about seven samurai warriors with different skills coming together to save a farming village from bandits. They take the job for rice and honor only. Working for rice, I felt, everyone would at least relate to.

At a podium, Gorilla gave us our first lesson: how to talk to inmates. He read a chapter from what he called The Book of the Man—which was a jail-policy book.

He read that when speaking to an escalated inmate (jail speak for an inmate yelling something like “I got nobody left. Nobody. Know what that’s like?”) you should appeal to him as an equal by repeating phrases like “I understand where you’re coming from” and “That must be hard.”

Then Gorilla said, “But this is how it really works. Don’t say, ‘Calm down.’ Don’t say, ‘Relax.’ They won’t calm down or relax. Any questions?”

A cadet asked, “It’s okay to shake an inmate’s hand?”

“Well, yes,” Gorilla said, which was a surprise. “But that doesn’t mean you let any dickheads grit on you” (jail speak for mean-mug you).

~

THEY bused in inmates from a local jail to cook our food. I stared at them in the dining hall.

I was not going to let them grit on me.

An obese inmate who wore an all-white uniform and hairnet pushed a plate with meatballs and a brick of garlic bread at me. I did not say thank you. Just gave him a nod to see what he would do. He nodded back. I sat, back to the wall, watching him.

~

SUBJECTS from “use of force” to “use of restraints” changed hourly. Gorilla read from The Book of the Man and taught to the tests while I daydreamed about paydays.

Ultimately, the academy’s mission wasn’t to turn people into perfect guards. It was to get people used to the idea of being the Man over other men. It’s a process. It costs money to hire guards and get them uniformed, and the state wanted to keep them in that uniform for more than a week.

The process was mostly successful. Of the five Rockview cadets, I was the first to leave after three years. But a cadet who graduated six months after me resigned after only one day at Rockview. I heard him say, “Some shit’s going to kick off in here,” after being surrounded in the crush of inmates headed to breakfast.

Gorilla told us, “Today, you can’t just throw a guy in jail with a key and tell him to run the place. But that’s how we used to do it.”

That first Friday, five days in, he stopped me and said, “Your goatee looks like butt. Shave.”

So I shaved.

~

AT home that weekend, my fiancée asked, “What did you learn?”

How to escalate a killer.

“How’s that?”

Calm down, honey. Calm down.

She gave a look and went back to writing. She was halfway through her PhD program.

The joke is, I had so much promise. There I was, a veteran working my way through college to be an engineer. My technical drawings were the best in my intro-to-engineering class. I was president of the Penn State Martial Arts Group. A leader. Until she walked into my karate class one night. And that was it. I dropped out of school and retreated to a factory.

But that’s just the joke. Really, I was tired of orders. Call it an overload. In the army, walking to the chow hall risked having one of the thirty thousand soldiers who outranked me let me know he outranked me by having me pick up cigarette butts or straighten my beret or tuck in the one inch of exposed bootlace that came loose while picking up cigarette butts. I didn’t even smoke. College felt the same. One of my professors told us we couldn’t use blue pens, only black. Never-ending authority. If this was life, I might as well get paid for it.

My fiancée just happened to come along at a moment when, if I were more self-aware and resourceful, I should have gone backpacking across Europe instead of dropping out.

I left her alone and read a well-respected book written by a journalist who had worked as a prison guard for a year. He wrote seventy-three pages on the academy.

I wasn’t convinced it deserved eight.

~

I TOOK every meal in the dining hall and got used to the obese inmate. We nodded to each other on every exchange. I didn’t stare him down anymore.

There was a good weight room at the academy. At night it was empty except for Sergeant Gnarly-One-Ear, who rode the bike or benched. He always came over and talked and held the heavy bag for me. He said that he was taking a lieutenant slot in Pittsburgh and was looking for an apartment. “Hopefully one over a bar.” Wearing shorts and a sweatband, he didn’t seem so gnarly.

I just wanted to get through the school. The tests were easy. A 70 percent on anything passed. The challenge was the method of it all. Having Redneck Sergeant make me do pushups because of a wrinkle on my bed only to report to class fifteen minutes later for lessons on how to be the Man over killers of men confused me. I was not authorized to make the killers do pushups.

But Gnarly said, “Good and solid” about my punching.

~

THREE weeks in, Rugged-Lady Sergeant led a combat lesson. Two cadets posed as inmates. She said, “Step 1 for breaking up a fight: wait for backup.” Gorilla moved behind one fake inmate, she the other. Then she said, “Step 2: break them up.” And she pulled the one cadet’s head back so hard by his hair that he later complained of whiplash. Gorilla grabbed the other by the arms.

Then we were told to eat. So we ate.

Then we were told to report to the gas chamber. So we reported.

Then we were grouped together by fours and ordered into the gas chamber. So my group stepped in as ordered.

Redneck Sergeant wore a gas mask and pepper-sprayed us. It closed my lungs. I fought panic. Intimidating Sergeant, chiseled, tall, came in to taunt us. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He said that he was immune to pepper spray. Then he said, “Why you crying, cadets? You better sound off with ‘DOC proud!,’ cadets.”

Chocolate Thunder was standing next to me. He gagged once. Then puked on my sneakers. Intimidating Sergeant covered his mouth when he saw that. “Pepper spray I can take,” He said. “But not puking.”

I retched.

I wasn’t immune to anything.

We yelled, “DOC proud!” and left the chamber and I washed my sneakers off at the spigot and retched again.

Then we were ordered up to the shooting range to be teargassed. So we walked up to be gassed.

Sergeant Redneck popped a gas grenade and ordered us to walk through the smoke and breathe it.

We walked through holding our breath. We laughed. We defied the Man. We fake coughed to make it look painful.

Then we were told to clean up and have a good night. So we cleaned up and had a good night and I wondered if I was going to ever know what to do with myself once all the ordering stopped.

~

BACK in the gym for the partner baton drills, Gorilla walked the perimeter of the action massaging his eyelid that wouldn’t close. He leaned his head back and squeezed in an eye drop. He watched me for a few moves and said, “For a second there, I could have sworn I was watching Wesley Snipes.”

So I did it right? I asked.

“Different,” he said.

I slowed down after that.

Then Gorilla yelled out, “Lunch!” So we did lunch.

Meal-Line inmate spoke to me. He said, “You should take the bean paste.” That was the vegetarian meal of the day.

I looked around before asking, it’s good?

“Better than the seafood salad.”

I told him that I would take it then, and thanks.

Not that it made us brothers. But I had made contact. Inmates weren’t so alien. Inmates even spoke my language: food. The bean paste was good, as bad as it sounds. The sorry bastards around me ate their seafood salad sandwiches while trying to kill the taste with hot sauce.

~

UP on the shooting range we fired revolvers and shotguns. I was all over the target.

The range master, Sergeant Bad Haircut, told me, “When firing the pistol, visualize pushing the bullet toward the target.” It was martial arty and my shot group tightened right up. He cut his own hair to save money. He shaved the sides and back but left the top a red mop. I never saw him smile.

Gorilla told us, “This will get you jammed up: being too friendly, or too hard. Just be professional.” Haircut kept it professional.

One cadet couldn’t hit the target with a shotgun for all the visualization in the world. Haircut worked with him. But it didn’t help. Lieutenant Rice had to find that cadet. Kicked out. Another cadet failed the hazardous materials test three times and Rice found him. Another cadet showed up late to class four times and Rice found him. Another found Rice on his own and asked to leave. He said the whole job felt wrong.

~

GORILLA said, “Tell the inmate to pull his foreskin back. Give it a 360-degree visual inspection.” Which made me miss the bottle factory. I ran the label machine there. I fed it labels and glue, and it fed me. I could accept that. I prayed for hurricanes—bottled water sales triple during hurricanes—which meant overtime, which meant everything to a guy who charged his computer and a year and a half of college failure on his credit card. I felt communion with the labeler. We were comfortable. We did not inspect foreskins.

But it paid me to be poor.

~

OUR uniforms came in garbage bags. Monday of week five we wore them. The nametag read, “CO₁ B. Langston.” My label. Meal-Line inmate laughed when he saw me. He said, “You’re all official and shit now.” Then asked, “Tater tots, CO?”

~

GORILLA showed my class the type of keepers he preferred. Keepers are clips that attach to a guard’s belt. You clip your key rings to them. He liked the cheap all-metal kind. His used to be black, but the paint had chipped off and all that was left was grayish metal. “It does the job. Nothing more,” he said.

Keeper is also jail speak for guard.

~

ON graduation day, Gorilla said, “Forget everything I said.”

I locked in every word.

My class graduated outside under the cherubs, and everyone got a certificate. Then we put away the folding chairs and made room for class 616, which would be coming in less than forty-eight hours. It was Friday. All the sergeants were there, those seven warriors working for Rice and maybe something else that I hadn’t learned to identify yet. Rice said, “You did fine work. Now do more.” Nothing was special for lunch. Meal-Line inmate told me good luck. I said the same then started that Sunday dressed in my title and uniform for the massive machine labeled the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

In a factory you learn by doing. You keep the labeler glue pots an inch low so they don’t boil over when a bottle with no cap falls in. In a jail you learn by doing. You inspect foreskins. You don’t say calm down. You don’t say relax. And you shake, you really do, you shake the first time you walk, all official and shit, through that gate.