Read Online Uncaged by Frank Shamrock, Charles Fleming - Free Book Online Page B

But he said, “That’s mine, too.”
    I knew from the streets what this moment was, and I could feel twenty sets of eyes sizing me up and down and waiting to see what I was made of. So I said, “Oh, here you go” and threw the chili right in his face. Then I jumped up and started beating him on the head with the metal tray. That was a good start, but then it got ugly. He hit me hard in the stomach, and I hit him back in the face with the tray, and then it was on. He grabbed me and threw me across the room. Then he got on top of me and pounded me on the head and back. I started uppercutting him in the balls. The guard got on us and we all fell over. He was still banging me on the head, but I still had hold of his balls. We were both screaming. By the time theguards separated us, we were messed up. It was a successful fight because that guy never bothered me again, and everyone else was very nice to me, too. In fact, after that, the old-timers would bring their bowls right to my seat and spark up some conversation.
    At CYA, I was always prepared to fight, always on guard. I knew I was going to get jumped, and I was going to get hurt, and I was maybe going to have to hurt someone else. I didn’t want to do that. I had been roughed up a little. I could take a fair amount of punishment. But I didn’t like hurting other people. So I signed the papers and filed the writ, and the transfer came through. I was taken out of CYA and sent to an induction center at Tracy, California.
    This was another step up. Or down. CYA had been weird. This was really, really scary. It was a real prison, a
big
prison. It was eight stories tall. It was all cells. The cells were filled with men—serious adult criminal men. Everyone was wearing prison orange and moving slowly. The mood was very tense, and very sad.
    I remember the first night. I was on one of the lower tiers with easy access, cell block number two or number three, because I was a new guy. I was a fish. That meant they kept me on a rotating suicide watch, in case I killed myself or something. I was alone. Up on the seventh floor there was a gay black guy, and when it got dark he started singing. He had the most amazing voice. He sang “Under the Boardwalk.” It was unbelievably beautiful. It made guys cry. You could hear him singing. You could hear guys crying. You could hear guys getting beat up. You could hear other stuff that you weren’t sure
what
it was. It didn’t sound good.
    I remember lying there thinking, “What’s a guy with a voice like that doing here? And what am
I
doing here?”
    The whole life was new to me. For example, there was the kite. I never knew about this stuff. A kite is a way of sending things from one cell to another. One guy would tie something to a piece of string—a cigarette, a message, a tattoo needle—and send it to thenext guy. He’d send it to the next guy. It might start on the eighth floor and wind up on the third floor, just passing along from one cell to the next, on this little piece of string. Some nights there would be kites going all over the place. Everyone sends the kite along. Even if one guy’s a white guy and other guy is a black guy and they hate each other, they have to move it along. Everyone’s got to move the kite along.
    There was also a “telephone” system. There was a way you could take your pillow and stick it in the top of the toilet and suction the water out of the pee trap. It turned the toilet into a telephone. You could lean into the toilet and talk to the cell above you or below you—depending on whether they took the water out of their toilet, too. You could have a whole conversation that way, or pass along a complicated message.
    Because Tracy was an induction center, everyone was in his own cell. There was no work. You just sat around waiting for your one hour on the yard, or to go to the chow hall, or for someone to bring you a bag