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Judged For My Crimes Against Humanity

My new cellmate arrived with a bang in the middle of the night. The guards made as much noise as they could wile dragging the new soul down the hall, banging their nightsticks on the bars of ours cells for nothing but the damn meanness of ruining what sleep there was to get under the always burning florescent lights of our wing of the prison.

I didn’t get up to greet him; I didn’t even turn around as they opened the door to toss him in. I heard him hit the floor with a slap like a sack of wet cement. They laughed, he groaned. “Enjoy your new ‘comrade in arms’ Frank; you two should get along just fine” said the bull, barely hiding his glee at having spent the last few hours turning my new cellmate into bloody shadow of a man.

I didn’t move. I didn’t get up to help him. I just let him whimper and crawl into the lower bunk like so many of the faceless men that came before him. No sense in getting to know the man, ‘cause he won’t be here long anyway.

That’s how it goes in the sad logic of the ‘convict’s code”.

For just a second as I was waking up, I forgot I had a cellmate. Then he groaned to remind me that no matter how much I didn’t want to, I would have to talk to him.

“Listen, get over to the bucket and try to wash up, we’ve only got about 10 minutes before they blow the horn for breakfast lineup”.

He turned and sat on the edge of the bunk. He sat there holding his head in his hands for a few seconds and then stumbled to the wall, where the bucket and washcloth gave us our only link to dignity. Thankfully there was no mirror there to remind us of how far we had gone in our decent into the animal world of prison.

“So what are you in for?” He asked. They always ask that, it’s a sure sign that this person is just a common joe, swept up in the net of the governments sense of justice.

“Cuttin’ the heads off parking meters” I said in return. He smiled and shook his head“ Great, now I’m stuck in a cell with a movie buff”. But now I was stuck too. Now I had to talk to him, he had a brain. He knew “Cool Hand Luke” when he heard it. He might be a convict like the rest of us, but he can't be half bad if he knows obscure movie references.

“Names Frank. Before you ask, I’ve been in here for three years, 4 weeks, 2 days and 8 hours, scheduled for a minimum sentence of another 20 years, but I wont be here for them to let me out if you get my meaning. And before you ask, I’m in for the same thing you are, so don’t ask, ok? It’s a dumb question around these parts.”

His eyes lit up from behind the bruised mounds of red, black and blue flesh that were once his nose and eyebrows. He stuck his finger in his mouth, moving along the inside of his left cheek to find the source of the blood that was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. All standing in mute evidence of the beating he took the night before. With is finger still in his mouth, he stopped and garbled back at me;

“So, you’re a Global Warming Denier too?”

I just smiled at the rookies’ naiveté and said to him;

“We all are friend, we all are”.

Posted @ October 12, 2006 07:40 PM | Current Affairs