a person can be considered competent to stand trial. Below seventy is classified as feeble-mindedness. His counselor at the residential said he had the mentality of a five-year-old.
As I write this, my daughter is five. She sings. She makes up words. She would be happy to not take a bath for a month.
Melvin committed crimes. And, according to the courts, knew the difference between right and wrong. This is what he was: old enough and dangerous enough for jail. Melvin told the judge, “I’m sorry for what I done.”
~
ON his third day at Rockview, Melvin walked onto D block wearing state-issue browns and holding all his possessions in the world: a brown bag of state-issue toiletries. Once he met his celly, an oldhead, and climbed up into his top bunk, I asked Melvin why he was here.
He said, “Too strong to be poor.” He rolled over and faced the wall.
I walked down the range. The guy next door was squeezing a pimple on his nose. While I was new in the jail uniform, if inmates spoke to me, they said things like, “How ’bout them burgers?” Small talk. But Melvin spoke about strength and pain and anger.
I heard him tell his celly, “No jail big enough for me.”
At the end of the range lay another pile of feces. I backtracked and found a block worker to clean it up. He said, “I’ll catch another case if I find the motherfucker doing this.” He meant he’d get another criminal case.
I didn’t want to catch the motherfucker either.
At Melvin’s trial he said that he had made a “bad mistake.” He said, “I need help, like serious help.” And he got it: eighteen to thirty-six months in a state prison with seven impossible-for-him-to-stay-right years of probation afterward. Which is to say he didn’t get any. Which is to say nothing new for him. Which is to say welcome home. Ignore the shit stains.
How to Stop Being Too Poor to Propose
TO work in jail you have to pass the interview. Which means entering a dark room and siting at a table across from five uniformed officers. Spotlights illuminate each officer. Another lone light shines on a pad of paper and pen at your seat. Now answer:
Are you afraid of contracting tuberculosis?
Are you afraid of contracting the AIDS virus?
Are you afraid of contracting hepatitis C? Hepatitis B? Hepatitis A?
Are you afraid of being assaulted?
Are you afraid of being sued?
Are you afraid of the debilitating stress associated with this job?
Are you afraid to work here?
So what are your hobbies?
For the last question, I told them that I loved woodworking, martial arts, and canoeing. I raced my canoe, I told them, down rapids. My girlfriend and I placed fifth in a race the month before. But, I told them, we were just going for survival. No flipping, no lost paddles, no being crushed between our seventeen-footer and the boulders in front of the drunks camped out at the roughest part of the creek.
No laughs or smiles from the officers. Before the interview I had expected my answers to sound like this: I feel my best quality is attention to detail. And: I have no problem staying late or working weekends. Instead, I found myself answering to fear. I hadn’t considered fear. I hadn’t considered incurable diseases, punches to faces, or public records of litigation and condemnation. It was a pay raise. So to fear I answered: No, I’m sure that the jail has procedures to follow, I’m good with procedures, I’ll follow the procedures . . . just what are the procedures? Do we get gloves?
The answer to my question was that when a guard gets a cup of shit liquefied with piss and spit and maybe blood in the face, he has to go to the hospital to pick up a seven-day regimen of pills, which will hopefully kill any life-threatening viruses that may have just swum through the mucous membrane of his eyes and begun the rampant replication, which would only stop once his body was embalmed and wearing its best suit, or sometimes a brand-new suit because maybe his body-that-used-to-be-a-person didn’t own a suit yet because it was too young and oblivious to need one, which is why it allowed itself to get the shit cocktail thrown like a fucking mythical rising fastball into its open-but-not-seeing eyes in the first place. But yes you get gloves.
That’s not what the major said. But that’s what I got from her tone. She mentioned the pill regimen and asked, “Sound good to you?”
I said, Yes, well, no, not good . . . but something like that.
Another officer asked her, “Who’s next?” That meant it was time for me to go. I stood, looked at the unmarked pad of paper and said, Thanks.
Two weeks later a letter came and told me that I didn’t get the job. So I kept the overnight weekend shift at the water-bottling factory and the reality of my life: that I worked the overnight weekend shift in a water-bottling factory.
~
WHEN those five officers around the table rejected me, the fear message was lost—I only felt the money. What is hepatitis A, really, but a few weeks of fatigue and clay-colored feces? The state will pay you 80 percent of your wages until you’re healed up. Enjoy the three months off. More if you can prove your liver’s still inflamed.
I stood spinning a bottle labeler for a year thinking about how I should have answered those questions.
~
THEN, after being promoted to water-bottling team leader over a single mother of two and watching her cry because of it—she felt that loss of money hard, that blue-collar pain—a letter from Rockview showed up asking me to come in for another interview.
This time three officers sat in folding chairs in HR and asked me questions like, “Do you hunt?”
I told them that my friend hunted everything. He ate sparrows (he really did). They laughed, and I, at the age of twenty-seven, the college dropout, the failer of first interviews, the bottle-labeling expert, got to learn the ways of correcting men. When the letter came offering me the job, I was happy to sign up for the union. Inmates weren’t even a consideration then.
And fear? Please. They had pills for that.
~
SOON after, I took my girlfriend out to dinner. She was a petite and driven graduate student studying French at Penn State. She told good stories. Definitely American dreamy. And while eating ice cream I told her that I loved her more than waffle cones and handed her a ring I’d bought with my MasterCard. And she let me put it on her. We went to sleep that night with the synchronized deep breath that lovers do: long inhale, long exhale.
Then I left the next week to attend the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Training Academy to learn how to harden myself emotionally, peer into men’s anuses, and avoid cups of piss and shit like my life depended on it.
Because it did.
D-Ranging
IN jail, everything bolts to something. Bunks: bolted to the floor. Cabinets: bolted to the floor. Block TVs: bolted
