Mama's Boy Behind Bars Read online

  Facing off against us were the black guys, all innocent-looking. Big Dick tolerated Colossus and his henchmen, Louis-Honoré and Timoune, who were Haitians. Colossus liked to be precise, so he claimed to be from Réunion, which is a major city in the Haitian archipelago. These guys were skilled at procurement. Incidentally, Butterfly had negotiated exclusive access to my ass through Colossus. The black guys also specialized in contracts: beatings and murders. Demand was low at the time. In a wing with only eleven inmates, you soon reach equilibrium.

  The black guys also had a stranglehold on the tattooing profits. They provided the ink, made up of oil and cigarette ash when pens were in short supply, as well as the motor and the guitar strings to pound the skin. You had to go through them if you wanted to get inked by Philippe. Butterfly had negotiated a good price for the swastika on his shoulder blade.

  * * *

  I’m into black guys who like hip hop. I’d have loved to be in the black guys’ gang, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to stick with my own race. No chance of appeal.

  It sucks big-time, since I’ve always dreamed of rapping with black guys. I’ve always felt close to them, I have rhythm in my blood. My entire existence becomes meaningful when I listen to rap. I write it too, I’m still working on my first album. You won’t have heard anything like it; it’s more unique than a Wayne Gretzky rookie card signed by Mario Lemieux with his own blood. With my major ex-con cred, I’ll totally storm the charts.

  Like Timoune and Louis-Honoré, I shaved my head. It made me look less ginger and it was more practical in fights. Colossus had no need for any such capillary prevention: he let his long dreads grow down to the middle of his back. Nobody would have dared start anything with him; his father had taken charge of his education by making him referee dogfights. That’s where he got all his scars—and his annoying habit of biting people in the face.

  Even if I couldn’t make friends with the black guys, I stayed hip hop in my soul. Anyway, hip hop isn’t even that black anymore. It was taken away from black people, like blues, jazz, soul, bebop, rock and roll, funk, disco, reggae, and so on and so on. White people have always stolen black music. But don’t forget, the best rappers in the world are Eminem, the Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice, all little white guys. I didn’t need a black band to become a good rap group or make a solo career. All I needed was that hip hop in my soul.

  From Wu-Tang to Ku Klux, it’s always the same thing—people’s need for a clan. Same same but different, the Chinese would say. But although the gangs worked with each other on occasion, the tension in our section was palpable. It might explode at any moment. Underneath the debts, the swindles, the aggressions, and the psychiatric symptoms simmered a soup of troubles. If you lock eleven psychopaths up in five square metres, you can hardly expect them to start a knitting club.

  * * *

  Orbiting around these two clans who controlled the immigrants and me were two civilians: Gilbert and Pedo. Gilbert the hooch guy and Pedo, just Pedo. Pedo was overmedicated, ugly, and despised; no gang wanted him in its ranks. It was natural selection, he isolated himself, anyway.

  As for Gilbert, he kept his independence thanks to his talent as a brewer. This makeshift alchemist produced the best artisanal alcohol made in any Canadian prison. Obviously, there aren’t many official tastings, so it’s easy to claim the title. But whatever, Gilbert had the recipe and the power to negotiate prices with his friends or to piss in his enemies’ rations. This allowed him to remain a free agent.

  This whole hooch deal used to give me some problems. I was okay with contributing to production with my oranges, apples, and tomatoes so I could get my share. But I refused to hand over my bread. I kept that for the birds I was taming in a corner of the yard. They were mourning doves. Rhoooo rhooooo hoooo. I love their song and I need contact with animals. I had to dodge the brewer’s surveillance as well as that of the two rival clans, united in their desire to have the maximum possible moonshine.

  I prefer drugs, even if alcohol is a drug like all the others, and hardly any more dangerous and debilitating. My withdrawal from both was hard. My consumption had dropped radically since I’d been in prison. So, it was yes to the moonshine and yes to any medication that could go up my nose. Prison is no place to be fussy. That was the hardest thing to adapt to. I needed to get high, it was a matter of life or death. I was prepared to do anything. It took some effort, getting fucked enough to not give a fuck.

  I stole, did some extras, and tracked down a little line here, a puff there. There’s no shame in it; the quest for drugs is no less noble than the quest for the Holy Grail.

  * * *

  And then, of course, there was the third gang operating in our wing, the only one with the right to wear colours: the correctional officers, or guards, or you-big-dirty-dog-fucker-when-I-get-out-of-here-I’m-gonna-kill-your-whole-family, depending on your mood. They’re nice enough dropouts who used to dream of being in the police. Now they’ve got the grey uniform—no gun, no big paycheque, no social status, but at least they have the inmates, already locked up, to watch over.

  In addition to the guard in the box, there were six that alternated in our particular wing, the loony wing. Six brave civil servants down on the floor with the beasts. Four men and two women. One obese old auntie assisted by a facially challenged young woman. People say beauty’s on the inside, but it certainly wasn’t inside in that prison! So there was one unusable woman and one ugly young woman, but you make do. But I didn’t get bored stiff masturbating over her. Edith, my darling, my unforgettable, my own special officer. Edith. She must have been hit on more during one shift in the prison than during a night out clubbing. It’s therapeutic for ugly women to work in a prison.

  * * *

  So all the characters are in place. I’ll knock one off along the way. Will this or that one die or not? The suspense! I hope to have the time to write the whole story before my summons. It will do me good to get back to the courtroom, take a few rides in the paddy wagon, and enjoy the air conditioning. It’ll break the routine even if it doesn’t break my chains.

  You get used to being imprisoned. Even being overcrowded with the worst specimens of humanity. But being reminded thirty times a day, at every locked door, at every checkpoint, at every light’s out—it all gets pretty intense and heavy, like Justice doesn’t even care about the scales anymore. And during a heat wave, cooped up with guys who are sweaty, stinky, and can’t even be bothered to move their irritable carcasses, time passes slowly. Prison’s hard. Even harder than Butterfly.

  2

  Sharing

  My mother wrote to me. She wrote a long letter of excuses, full of love and promises. She went on at length about all the wounds in her soul, the burns in her mother’s heart, her continuous floods of tears. Every sentence was filled with regret at being separated from me, for not having known how to love me or how to help me when she could. She signed off with lots of capital Xs for kisses and some hearts.

  At least, that’s what I imagined. But the only letter I’d had in six months was held up by the management. My imbecile lawyer, believing I was in strict isolation, had neglected to get me to fill in the forms for receiving mail. And then when a personal letter showed up, which was obviously from my mother, it had to wait for a bureaucrat to get his ass in gear.

  All I could do was wait, dream hard, and hope big.

  * * *

  Big Dick was skinny. But he was well connected. No need for muscles when you’re the brains of the business. Not even any need for tattoos, in his case. He carried himself with an authority full of charisma and experience. He got sent down for dealing. Big dealing, big sentence.

  Big Dick was the only guy in our section who hadn’t been locked up for violent crime. But rumour had it he’d done plenty, all for the Italians. Even if he was old-stock Quebec from way back. You haven’t got many options if you’re not into motorbikes, you don’t want to jo
in a gang, and you specialize in anything that makes money. Especially since the Dubois family, the Provençals and Montreal’s other great crime families aren’t spawning too many new mini-Mafiosi. What a loss of beautiful traditions.

  So he was a Cossa Notra subcontractor, this big, skinny guy in his fifties, grizzled and starting to bald, and with this crazy leopard’s eye. I can’t think of another way to describe it, it was the look of a wildcat ready to pounce. It was easy for him to become the boss of the wing, especially in a protected area like ours. Unlike me, he didn’t want to be with the regular inmates in the general population. There were too many bikers in the other sections—dangerous for a Mafia associate like him. And the crazies get out of working, which is a major advantage for someone who refuses to enrich the state in return for poverty wages.

  I dreamed of being in his shoes. Even in the slammer, with limited power, being the boss isn’t nothing. Especially the boss of a band of mentally ill murderers. If you’re going to be leader of the herd, you should avoid being leader of a herd of sheep. As for me, I wanted to be in the place of the big boss, the alpha male who controls the betas. I’d rather reign over three men inside than be three times nothing outside.

  Big Dick never spoke to me. He only ever spoke to his two lieutenants: his right-hand man, Denis, and Butterfly, his henchman. The latter was the one I had to impress to get close to the boss. For the time being, he was raping me more than he was softening toward me, but I had a plan for reversing that ratio. Sooner or later I was going to replace him in the hierarchy and maybe even become his boss. From that moment on he would no longer be a threat. Henchmen can be good right-hand men, but they never get to be the head on the shoulders. Boss skills are like herpes—you either have it or you don’t. And I have it.

  * * *

  The rare times I heard Big Dick’s voice was when he whispered in his men’s ears, or in that corrupt guard Tony’s. Always in a low voice, his hand in front of his mouth. I was impatient for him to confide his secrets in me, to give me missions to accomplish. He’d only spoken to me once—to order me to change the TV channel. I got the shivers, and then it turned into full-on trembling that almost made me drop the remote. I quickly switched to his favourite channel, then started breathing again. Big Dick had an impressive voice: paternal, soft, soothing, like Rick Mercer, the guy that does that funny show on TV.

  Television’s a big deal in prison—that’s one of the first lessons I learned when I got here. I still have the cracked rib to remind me. Most inmates have small televisions in their cells or cellphones for watching their porn or their American series, downloaded before delivery. Yup, even cellphones are keistered in. Hence their exorbitant price, pegged to the size of the screen. As the optimists insist on telling us, this too shall pass.

  For sound ambience, there’s a television fixed to the wall in a corner of the common area. Who gets to control the TV is like a microcosm of prison hierarchy. Pedo has never chosen the channel. Giuseppe and I try to grab the remote when nobody else is holding it, but as soon as one of the black guys—especially Colossus—rocks up, we hand it over. They in turn defer to Butterfly if Denis isn’t there. And whenever Big Dick shows up, everyone shuts their traps and watches CNN. The boss, a shrewd strategist, likes to stay informed. And reinforce his authority. We recognize it immediately in him because he controls the TV and the drugs.

  * * *

  Getting high is a basic need. All over the earth, since the dawn of time, all humans have consumed psychoactive substances. It’s well documented. The substances and the methods of consuming them change, but the need for them never goes away. Whether legal or not, prescribed or not, expensive or affordable, we get high with whatever’s on hand. Alcohol, GHB, tranquilizers, THC, cocaine, LSD, gas, PCP, ketamine, caffeine, MDMA, nicotine, amphetamines, or antidepressants, the most-prescribed medicine on the planet. You take what you can get. It’s simple supply and demand.

  Inside, there aren’t too many drugs but there are a lot of medicines. Especially in our wing of crazies. We all have diagnoses, more or less legitimate. It’s hardly surprising that the pill market thrives in the slammer with all these long-time addicts. If it wasn’t that, it would be something else, it’s all about availability. Do you really think teenagers would fuck themselves up sniffing gas if they could get their hands on anything better?

  The methadone prescribed for getting addicts off heroin is an excellent drug in itself, the one with the highest value within these walls. There’s a special way of taking it, since the addict has to drink it in the office, in front of a guard, then regurgitate it back up in their crib to sell it. Hardly any of the people who need it keep it for themselves, it pays too well: nearly a hundred dollars a pop. So you end up with addicts in withdrawal and inmates more smashed than Lady Di’s last Mercedes. It certainly makes for an atmosphere. Unfortunately for us, we haven’t got any heroin addicts in our wing, so no methadone. Too bad. But dealing in psychiatric medications is still a growth market. Even if they wreck and destroy you, these artificial paradises allow you to survive these very real hells.

  And we needed to increase supply. That’s what Butterfly told me, handing me a hollow pen. Have a hit! Willingly, I bent over and snorted a long line of crushed Seroquel, almost fifty milligrams, I’d say, based on my nose’s observations. I sniffed it all up in one go. Hssshmmmhhaaa! My nostril was burning, that was a good sign. The drug wouldn’t get stuck in my sinuses. I was going into orbit. There’s nothing like a hefty dose of antipsychotics to make you lose touch with reality.

  Butterfly liked to make me take something before he forced me to make love to him. It made me more docile. And mostly it made the whole operation less difficult for me as well as getting me a free high. If you can make a bit of profit out of someone exploiting you, at least there’s one thing to be said for being submissive.

  As he got into his usual position behind me, he told me that from now on I’d be contributing to the medication supply line. I objected that I’d been evaluated at my trial and when I arrived at the prison, and I’d done a whole bunch of questionnaires and psychometric tests. Apparently the results were impressive, but I didn’t get prescribed anything. It would be furpriving if they prefcribed me anything now… By way of reply, Butterfly contented himself with forcing my head into the pillow to finish off the job.

  There was no post-coital pillow talk. He simply reminded me it would be in my own interests to get myself some pills, any kind, as long as they got you high. He couldn’t go any higher on his own prescriptions. If I would just have a bit more…

  If I juft had!

  Butterfly was disconcerted, even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant.

  What? What did you just say?

  It’f not if I would juft have, it’f if I juft had, if doevn’t take the condiffional.

  Deep silence. Then, Do you know where you’ll be taking it if you ever try to tell me how to speak again?

  I’m forry, I wav juft trying to help you, if I would juft have known…

  He continued, unperturbed, If I would just have a hundred and fifty more milligrams of Seroquel every day, that would cover my needs. That’s the minimum you need to get hold of. You have no choice, this is coming from the top.

  It was an order from Big Dick. There was nothing to discuss. The black guys were getting high more often and had the money to pay for it. We had to provide the merchandise. If the order was coming from Big Dick, that changed things. At long last, here was my chance to shine in front of the boss. Alright, I’ll fort it out.

  It is possible to influence doctors to change test results. We can move around in their probability tables. Just like you can make statistics say anything you want. Here’s the proof: statistically speaking, humans have an average of one testicle each. It’s basic math.

  * * *

  I was going to have to use my acting talents; I wasn’t really mentally ill. App
arently I’m more dangerous than that. I land squarely on Axis 2 of the DSM-5. This means that I, according to psychiatrists and other ignorant medical experts, have a personality disorder. I didn’t suffer from any chemical imbalance in the brain, merely from a few irreversible deficiencies in the construction of my identity. On the mechanical side, my head was good, but my personality had been built around cognitive distortions—survival strategies for facing up to the traumas of my childhood. It was all very reassuring.

  Personality disorders. That’s what the experts at the trial reported. I was impressed when I met them, since I recognized two of the psychiatrists from True Crime Canada. They couldn’t promise me anything but they said I had a good chance of appearing on the show, that I was an interesting case.

  So I asked Edith, the officer monitoring me and my hypothetical rehabilitation, to prepare a request for a medical consultation. And the fooner the better, pleave. She said we’d first have to discuss it at our next weekly meeting, which would happen the day after tomorrow. Edith would have to do a preliminary evaluation before sending me to see the doctor. That gave me some time to prepare my argument. If I managed to convince this young guard straight out of school, I’d easily dupe the doctor. You never get a second chance to make a good first depression.

  Friday, four o’clock. Professional to a fault, she reminded me about our appointment. As if I might be unavailable, or out, or something. Women need to feel safe. That’s why they always choose the strongest men, or the most dangerous. I was very dangerous, and I was single. This led me to start thinking about my only chance of love for the next decade: her.

  Edith wasn’t my type, and I don’t think she was anybody else’s either. Brunettes with brown eyes are pretty ordinary. But if you shut a starving vegetarian up in a butcher’s for long enough, he’ll end up stuffing his face with old dead flesh just like everyone else. Supply and demand once again, as always.