WHAT made the patrol truck smell like peanut butter for a week one July was the peanut butter loaded into the shotgun’s chamber. Nobody knew who did it.
Every four hours the guards rotated out. We traded the guns and goods. “You good?”
“Yep. Good. You good?”
“Yep. Good.”
Then the truck rolled on, at idle speed, by double fences, anti-climb wire, motion sensors, cameras, thirty-foot towers, and cats, groundhogs, and skunks that ate scraps the tower officers threw down. On one side of the fences: green fields. On the other: gray concrete.
If idling counterclockwise, the truck idles past Tower 1, which overlooks the main gate, parking lot, and guard locker room. The truck idles past the fenced-in wood and paint shops and former cannery. Those shops all have different roofs, some square, some stepped, some peaked. After turning left at the corner by Tower 2, the truck idles past the bucket (jail speak for the restricted housing unit, or solitary confinement), a newer stone building. Then past the laundry house, an older stone building. Then past Tower 3, which stands over the fence from the big yard with its two softball fields and weightlifting pavilion. The truck idles past where the jail used to end, at an old fence where Tower 4 sits empty during daylight. The truck idles a little farther, turns left, idles past the maintenance shops opposite the jail. That’s a good place to take a leak—not inside, around back. The truck rolls past Tower 5, which stares at the smaller yard with the handball and basketball courts. Turns left. Idles past the largest and oldest block, where one thousand inmates live in two five-story wings. It has a gray concrete finish with ridges and ledges that would be climbable if it weren’t for the razor wire. The building is close to eighty feet tall, longer than a football field, and has a central rotunda where the superintendent works on the top floor. The truck idles past the treatment building, with the control center, infirmary, and visiting room with its outside area, its few tables, its fewer umbrellas that don’t obstruct the cameras’ views. The truck turns left and idles back north to the main gate to idle and turn and idle and turn past the same century-old buildings where thousands of guards have idled away their years until finding a higher-paying uniform or receiving a beating from an inmate or succumbing to heart disease or corruption or just acknowledging that the double-fenced perimeter wasn’t worth the money and forced them to seek a paycheck elsewhere. Some retired.
The truck stops only to refuel, to reload guards, to change direction if the guard wants to fight the monotony. I switched once an hour. It didn’t help.
In jail, you are what you beat. That beat was called perimeter patrol. That job was out there on the threshold between free and not, green and not, poor and not, and right on the limit of boredom.
~
THE biggest supermarket chain in Pennsylvania has ninety-two stores. I stocked shelves at one in high school. I made the toilet paper displays look like giant rolls of toilet paper. Pennsylvania also has 101 jails when you add up all the levels: county, state, and federal. The state-level jails alone stock fifty thousand inmates a year to be watched, restrained, taught, counseled, medically treated, fed, and circled at idle speed with loaded guns at all times. But the public, the other 12 million Pennsylvanians who aren’t doing time, don’t know a thing about them unless they’re on parole, or visiting Ricky, or breaking down in front of one only to be told to remain in their vehicle by a guard who smells like peanut butter.
After I left, Rockview’s administration shut down four of the five towers to save money. In response to the public’s concern, the assistant superintendent told a local reporter, “I don’t think the public understands what we have here because obviously no one comes here. We don’t allow the public to drive by and see exactly what we have.”
The public, for sure, doesn’t know. Jails are everywhere but nowhere. All the public sees of Rockview is a bunker surrounded by flowers, shrubs, fields, and the ancient ground-down Appalachian Mountains.
As a civilian you can look. Go ahead. But don’t stop.
And please leave.
The guard handbook warns, “Employes are prohibited from imparting information to ANYONE not attached to the Institution.”
And I never did.
Until I was not an employee anymore. My wife took a job that let me escape. We moved to rural Missouri and I stayed home with our son. Baby number two, our daughter, was on the way. One day I was in charge of two thousand convicted felons. The next, in charge of making grilled cheese. One of my wife’s colleagues asked, “What are you, a teacher or what?”
Nothing, was my answer. Which was a first. I had always been a something.
After a year I went back to school and took a writing class. The first essay was going to be about jail. But what came out was everything. So I kept writing—for ten years. It pulled me right back in. And I decided that the reason blue-collar workers don’t usually write books isn’t because they’re dumb or untalented—they’re just too damn tired. Energy is energy. It’s burned up circling a jail or writing chapters, and there’s a finite daily supply.
~
WHAT brought a picketer to Rockview was an upcoming execution. Her sign read, Stop The Massacre. I told her she could stand across the street. She told me, “I forgive you.” Then I circled for two hours, holding tight to the perimeter until my relief stepped from the control center. He was an oldhead (jail speak for old) guard. I gave him the guns and the goods: You good, oldhead?
“Good, young buck, real good. I hit the street in two months” (jail speak for he was going to retire).
At the time, that was my future speaking. It looked heavy.
He idled away.
I walked through the reinforced double doors, under the wire, between the motion sensors, and through the metal detector. The control sergeant asked me if the grandmother was hot (“Well, was she?”) then gave me my next assignment. “D block,” he said. “One of their guys went home sick.”
I walked through three more doors, then a gate, and saw a middle-aged inmate throw an empty milk carton on the sidewalk. I made him pick it up. He said, “You trippin’, CO.”
A young inmate sprinted past us. I stopped him and asked why he was running. “Gotta get that money.” Which sounded about right. He had a commissary pass. Inmates called all commissary items money.
I kicked on D block’s door. The block sergeant told me, “Showers, close ’em up.” So I assumed my position at the entrance to the showers. The shower room was 250 square feet of showerheads and soapy men. The steam wrinkled my uniform. The soap stung my nose. I called out, Ten minutes!
And Melvin, that notorious inmate, tiny in size, massive in character, called back, “Fuck yo ten minutes!” I hadn’t even noticed him in there.
A soapy man said, “Fucking Melvin.”
Another said, “Evil dwarf.”
An inmate by the door had a boot print tattoo on his back. And while I considered its meaning, I turned off the water and dared Melvin to turn it back on.
Melvin
ONE afternoon, years after leaving the jail, I watched my daughter play the
