Читать книгу The Contemptuary - David Foster - Страница 7

Take a sip

They held an open day at the gaol December last that families of staff members might gain a more sympathetic understanding of the working environment their oft-times testy loved ones must endure, of why they so frequently ring in sick whenever there’s a full moon and of why they habitually brace the back door with a foot as they unlock it. Hasn’t been done in decades and I think it a great idea, credit to management as it does entail organization, even a bit of risk. I shouldn’t have done it were I the Senior Assistant Super I was due to become. My youngest daughter Fee, Fiona, who works in the Circle as Screener SAPO, Services and Programs Officer responsible for screening inmates on admission, asked did I want to come along as she was taking Olwyn and Constance, but I said no, not my monkeys, not my circus. Access was via the vehicle gate around four p.m. with one poor girl in the gatehouse, which is electronic, but one door won’t open till a certain interval after another has shut and you need to pass through several doors, incoming and outgoing. A chaplain goes through twelve doors and gates en route to chapel. It would take our Reverend Ruth twenty minutes to get onto the street. There are no little cafes near the Correctional Complex. Quite a show apparently; there was the scumbag armamentarium, our display of confiscated improvised weaponry in the gatehouse, you could see the visitors’ centre where smiles come in in the hairy handbag. Most folk have the idea from watching Foxtel movies that prisoners interact with their visitors through a perspex screen, a box visit. No. While we do have box visits most of our visits are contact and prisoners intermingle with visitors. Dogs can’t sniff out all hairy handbags and strictly speaking we have no authority to strip a woman and make her squat and cough but the threat of a box visit would often bring compliance. That said, female officers baulk at stripping black-clad grannies and fossicking soiled nappies and so we get shrooms and xannies and pink rocks and hash and cell phones in the wings and batteries and chargers. Whilst old lags who would never touch a needle get off their faces on moonshine, brewed from Vegemite, telephone disso, Brasso and aftershave and hidden in laundry detergent bottles, half the population injects using syringes, barrels and picks modified to fit inside the hairy handbag. The salubrious maxim ‘clean fit each hit no shit’ falls by the wayside as inmates share fits with blunt picks. They share tattoo guns fashioned from cassette machine motors and textile shop sewing machine needles using ink made from art class charcoal. Chasers become facultative blasters, given the penalty for a dirty urine; loss of visits, buy-ups, telephone calls, your current classo, is applied irrespective of drug. Boys in blue would prefer all scumbags off their tits on bush buds but the piss-persistent if innocuous cone announces its ignition and so half the prison population has STIs and BBVs, mostly hep C. A few are HIV plus. A good few are in because of dealing and/or clumsy armed robs. The chilly city thus stands in the front-line of Nixon’s War against Drugs.

There is also a widespread notion we would have a communal mess hall, a commensality where plots are hatched, no: Goulburn inmates chow down in their cells. At open day there were no convicts on display but you could peruse industries, woodwork, the textile shop, though not the distal X-wing demounts, the concrete tennis court, the soothing views of the timbered Cookbundoon range as seen from the oval, the dog squad gave a display by the gym with lots of canine leaps, there was a sausage sizzle, the kids were free to clamber in and out of a meat wagon, but what impressed both Fee and me, was they opened up the wings; not X-wing or the MPU, ‘the Boneyard’ as it houses ‘dogs’, argot for informers, or HRMCC, separate gaols, but Fee said you could walk from office to office the entire bottom landing of the four old wings, built the year they hanged Ned Kelly, that radiate out from the Circle, the roofs of which can be seen over the razor wire and twenty-foot high walls, in the middle distance, across the General Cemetery from Sydney Road, Marys Mount as backdrop. Would you like fries with that? Visitors weren’t free to climb the steps to the upper landings, two in the case of B and C-wing, one in the case of A and D, but look at the ground floor shower block. Forget that cake of soap, an empty cell awaits. Thirteen by seven, nine-foot-six high with a small barred window that only a man nine-foot-three high can see through, in you go now gotcha! Imagine the three-quarter-inch iron door, fitted with what in 1880 was the latest in bolts and keepers, slammed shut and secured with an old brass Jackson lock from Lonnie. Two beds to each slot. Are you sharing your slot with a gronk? That is the fate a recidivist most fears, a gronk being a moron, not to be confused with a ‘chat’, who seldom showers and farts and burps and snores and picks his nose. You couldn’t see or hear them but you knew that they were there as you could read their tags with their names and yards; Leb yard, Koori yard, Aussie Islander, Aussie Asian. Putting a man in a wrong yard is a screw’s worst fear. Each yard accommodates thirty inmates constituting a scumbag platoon. The wing in contrast is company size. Fee says there was lots of shouting initially from upper tiers, enough to impress the girls, and the usual barrage of toilet paper that celebrates any lockdown was finding its way through the bars into the yards. I asked Constance, who’s just turned five, what most impressed her and she said ‘the toilets.’

Oh they’re good for a smile, the little girls not the toilets. I love the way during baptisms, mostly done two at a time at Sunday’s choral Eucharist, how to celebrate one of the three occasions she’ll see the inside of a church — water on the head, be-wed then dead — a little heathen three-timer will do a twirl in the aisle of the nave as we vastly outnumbered regulars, cranky from kneeling at unfamiliar stations, prepare to applaud what we suspect to be perjury from the chancel. But we have to give you the benefit of the doubt in the Cathedral Church.

Not so in the slammer. I recall a sergeant-at-arms of an outlaw motorcycle gang and I can tell you which one as we have the tatts of each known gang on a chart in reception, who walking in my close company to the Circle to get his yawns (you get your pills and your methadone swill from the clinic sister in the Circle, which is the donjon, began working life as a chapel, as it says itself in MCCMXXCIII, and has on its roof a disused belltower of the same vintage as the disused belltower on Marys Mount, as well as your DXXVIII pre-release dollars from Centrelink) roared across at the rockies’ yard ‘You love fuckin kids ya cunts but we fuckin love kids!’

He was always there or thereabouts, our Zoltan. Patched members of motorcycle gangs hold rockies (paedophiles) in particular odium while bikie defectors, being known to know too much, are the dogs most at risk. Bikies will always have an old lady and a few kids outside and whilst in boob will often send these kids to exclusive private schools. Imagine the horror on learning from watching Nine Network News that Knox and Trinity Grammar and St Ignatius harbour rock spiders and yes we have free-to-air TV if we’ve been good boys.

A lad in the MPU listens to ABC Jazz. Just listens to channel 201 while reading the Periodic Table. He writes some interesting poetry too and quite popular. Let’s see if I recall the one a friend of mine found by the G-block photocopier;

2-CD PCP alpha-methyltryptamine

LSZee DOC foxymethoxy mephedrone

3-mmc phenmetrazine

4-fluoromethamphetamine

Flephedrone methaqualone

Pemoline methiopropamine

That’s the first verse of several but you get the gist. The Eighth Century Rule of Ailbe was also written metrically. That was to assist the Old Irish monks in memorizing the Old Irish. Rhythm and rhyme are mnemonic devices.

Old bikies, and we’re not talking Leb yard Nike bikies, have cast-iron ethics. The Hells Angels were established by demobbed veterans from World War Two even as certain of their peers took the strait gate and entered religious orders. All were used to uniformed hardship and rigid military discipline. A Russian sniper who later became an Orthodox archimandrite saw off more German soldiers during the battle for Stalingrad than were killed by the entire French army during the whole of World War Two. Such men were accustomed to pulling together against a common foe. When Comancheros who survived the Milperra Massacre did boob at Long Bay MRC, Jock, Chewy and Sunshine had them all painting Twelve-wing. That’s dead-set painting Twelve-wing not just sweeping Twelve-wing. Goulburn is presently the Rebels’ gaol; Bandidos go to Parklea. We can’t have certain inmates in the same gaol.

The present Anglican chaplain is assistant priest in the Cathedral. Chapel today is in G-block, education block. When I was a baggy we didn’t have a chapel and rainmakers had to meet up with their clients in the cells, while services were held in the wings, directly over the main offices, in little rooms that aren’t used anymore for security reasons.

One of them has a carpet-covered trapdoor in the floor and how the gigs love to see it, happen the carpet be folded back.

‘Gigs’ are outsiders visiting a gaol purely for perving purposes, while as to these clients, keep an open mind: Samoans use a condom machine as a hair gel dispenser while I know a man who took a leak behind a tree at a picnic and, spotted by a stone butch, found himself in court defending a charge of indecent exposure. He’s now on the sex offenders’ register.

Toilets! Let’s talk toilets, let’s have some dirty toilet talk. One to each slot, a few to each yard, irrefrangible stainless steel since the Abo emeute of ten years back destroyed D-wing, the two-story D-wing in which inmates are now mostly on remand, yet to face a court.

No toilet seats and no toilet lids to the toilets, naked toilets. Stark in the slots, which are less a double en suite with twin singles than a big dunny, a big dunny with two beds because the toilet is the gazingstock. It glistens. It can be seen from the door. Yes, there is a steel hand basin as well, but the toilet is the gazingstock. No screen to provide privacy so you void your bowel in full view of the gronk and whoever is peeking through the judas hole and the gronk will void his bowel in full earshot of you, a look-at-me, listen-to-me loo, the design world’s 2015 gig-inspired fancy anticipated. In the yards the handful of cans in each latrine is the only yard feature though each yard has a few benches and tables, ultra-sturdy. There is a screen but it’s only a screen of a sort, a half-mask if you like. You can still see the cans because if you’re a screw, you need to see what’s going on around the cans.

So when you’re inside you live in a dunny, you eat in a dunny, you sleep in a dunny and you share your dunny, for the most part, with a stranger who also lives in the dunny. That’s to remind you that you’re a piece of shit and what’s more, a bigger piece of shit than most. When Pico della Mirandola coined the phrase ‘the dignity of man’ in the fifteenth century, he must have forgotten that he had an arsehole and he hadn’t completed his gender studies course. There is no dignity in being a creature that shits, Pico, end of story. Man was not made in God’s image because God does not have an arsehole. God has only a cakehole. God has dignity because He is a spirit as Christ tells us, and spirits don’t shit.

Toilet paper! Where would we be without toilet paper in Corrections? Just the thing to hurl into the yard to valorise your grievances but there is another use to which a two-ply toilet roll may be put, and I don’t mean wiping an arse, though sagacious care of the arsehole is to be recommended in a setting where your arsehole is your most valuable negotiable security. Hanging out for a whack of hammer? Know how you can score a cap without having to pay cash? Just let someone fuck you without using a condom. Blasting ice but can’t find a vein? Douche with the tipless barrel (think safety, use lube). Scored a whack on your contact though you’re wearing overalls with ‘visits’ printed on them, zips secured with cable ties, don’t want to lose it on the strip search? You will be asked to squat and spread but well you know where you can safely hide a cut-down thirty-mill fit.

God the Father is shown with a bum

In the Sistine Chapel in Rome

Because he was made in the image of man

It stands to reason he would have a bum

But Michelangelo must have been first

To sneak behind him and glimpse it

Why on earth would God have a bum?

Purely in order to sit on his throne

There being no toilets in Heaven

But are there toilets in Hell perhaps?

There are and no toilet brushes

A loo for each two cellar dwellers at least

Mind you Satan (whom Allah accurse!)

Has hooves and horns as we know

Which means he’s vegetarian

So the smell’s not too bad there below