Use Your Imagination Read online

  The Big Man was sixty-seven and didn’t know how to use a computer. He didn’t even know what a podcast was. All he knew was that the relative peace of his territory had been ruined by the kid that screamed in his room at night. Screaming was for other floors, like the loony bin, maximum security, and solitary, but not this one. DJ was worse, somehow, because his screams weren’t indiscriminate. You couldn’t ignore them. They posed questions, had rhythm, structure. They were interactive. DJ pretended, for some reason, to host a radio show for which screaming was his only means of broadcasting.

  The deal that The Big Man had worked out with the warden and the library was that DJ wouldn’t be moved to another block or punished. He wouldn’t be attacked by inmates. Instead, his “creativity” would be fostered. He would be given a USB microphone and be allowed to record his show and put it on the internet. In exchange for this, he was to stop throwing his fits in his cell at night.

  DJ reacted to the news by visiting everyone in the yard.

  Each group, each circle, each person of note. Men bent over, squatting hundreds of pounds of weight, men doing push-ups and chin-ups, dips and curls, men playing with dice and dominoes, men at chessboards, both real and makeshift, men playing basketball, men reading. Men like me and my roommate, Bradley, who did nothing but walk in circles on the spongy blue track. His announcement went out to everyone.

  DJ told us the good news, but also bragged about its genesis, how The Big Man himself had set it up. He was happy to align himself in this way, as if the most fearsome man for miles was now his friend and protector. With pep, he told each and every one of us how to download and listen to his show when we were on the computers in the library.

  DJ (born Darren Hardman Junior) was in prison because he’d been hit by a car on his way to work. He had survived this indignity, landing with a broken tailbone six feet away from where he’d started, at which point he sprung back up, opened the car door, dragged out and killed the driver. He had a toolbox with him, you see, borrowed from his mother to help the manager of the Starbucks he worked at put up shelves in the break room. This toolbox had come open and its contents were strewn across the intersection, all except for a hammer, which Darren used to bludgeon the motorist.

  The person he’d killed, I should add, had been a mom driving a minivan with her infant daughter in the back seat. She was on her way back from KFC, and had two steaming hot buckets of chicken for her, her two additional children, and her husband, held in place with the driver’s side seatbelt. We knew these facts because sometimes DJ would tell the story of what happened on his “show.” Sometimes he’d joke about it, like it was an unbelievable yarn, some tall tale he’d heard. Other times, he’d cry and cry and lament what he’d done. Those times, I felt very sorry for him.

  Other than this one incident, DJ had accrued no priors, had absolutely no run-ins with the law whatsoever. He was like The Big Man in this way. Passionate. Men transformed by passion, who became their new selves in just a few brief minutes. Light-switch people.

  Unlike The Big Man, whose one violent afternoon had flourished into a long career of violence, intimidation, and coercion, DJ’s one moment of aggression was an isolated incident. DJ was a soft, doughy man with a bald head and a neck-beard. Instead of his prison denims, he wore silk shirts with Japanese cartoon characters on them, sweatpants, and sandals. His hygiene was poor for fear of the group showers. He was a man wholly unprepared for life on the outside let alone in here, where ordinary rules of comportment and human compassion were inverted. He was someone who, on the outside, haunted comedy clubs on amateur nights, visited any open mic he could find, and who showed up, unwanted, to auditions for local theatre. Someone who wasn’t funny or insightful or intelligent, but thought he was. Someone who had never stopped to consider that he might not be the smartest person in the room.

  His “show” was mostly long meditations on his daily routine, and observations about prison life, all of which were neither astute nor interesting. He also produced poor re-enactments of scenes from TV shows and movies he’d watched. His prized possession was a radio which he tuned in to all the Zoo Crews and the late-night airing of Quite Frankly, an uncensored satellite rebroadcast where he pilfered jokes and bits from another man’s personality. He didn’t have the brain for it, unfortunately, and spoke in double-negatives and clichés. Said things like I could care less, and for all intensive purposes. He shouted these things, usually with his shirt off, so he could drumroll his fat stomach for suspense, or fart with his hand and armpit for emphasis. He would keep shouting them even when guards threatened him, wrote him up, or hauled him out of his cell, pushed a shinbone into his neck and zip-tied his wrists. Try to croak out a recap of the show like it had all been worth it. Like he was a prophet and this was gospel. Like he had a lucrative, unbreakable contract with NBC. His last three roommates had viciously attacked him in an attempt to silence him, and had failed. This was another reason DJ was hated: for the last six months, he’d had an entire room to himself, a luxury that no one, not even The Big Man, had.

  DJ had asked me about his “show” before, and said, because he knew I had once published a short story in a real magazine, that he valued my opinion.

  He started every one of his shows the same way, by saying:

  Greetings my Pros and Cons, this is DJ Darren Xtreme and I am a prisoner. I’m facing twenty years for murder.

  In my assessment, I tried to be fair. I told him that mixing that pun with 12-step lingo at the top of the show seemed like a major misstep, and it was emblematic of the show’s numerous tonal problems.

  “But most of all,” I told him, earnestly, trying to be as kind as I could, “it’s not a ‘show,’ Darren. It’s just you screaming while we’re trying to sleep.”

  I wasn’t worried about hurting his feelings because I was afraid of him. Even though he was a murderer and I was not, DJ was below me. He was below everyone. He was pudgy and weak. Tall, certainly, but so, so vulnerable. He had no affiliations, no recourse for anything done against him. Or at least, back then he didn’t. I was worried about hurting his feelings because I felt genuinely bad for him. He didn’t appreciate what I had to say. He called me a loser and said I had nothing nice to say because no one liked me, and I had no one.

  I didn’t respond to him because there was no use arguing, and also because it was unfortunately true. Like it or not, he had me. It was an insult that was obvious, but still painful. I had no one, inside or out. I received no letters, no phone calls, no visits. Even DJ, who had never succeeded at making a friend, still had his mother, who came to see him weekly, who gave him blankets and manga books and baked goods.

  I had never been visited by anyone.

  Even Bradley, who had been beside me every day for three years, was so much less than a friend I didn’t have a term to describe what he was. Bradley was a certain kind of institutional loser I’d see from time to time, motivated to commit crimes solely based on impulses. He’d exposed himself to high school girls, stolen anything he’d ever needed: food, clothing, hair gel, alcohol, drugs. He’d stabbed people he was afraid of, broken into homes to masturbate to sleeping women. He had never held a job, never had a girlfriend, never earned any diploma, and never made it past the seventh grade. He’d never had anyone who loved him in his life, and had been a ward of the state since he was eleven. He wasn’t here because he was bad, he was someone who could not function in society at the most basic level.

  Despite the ability to talk, Bradley couldn’t communicate. I could speak to him at length, but he’d only ever say Yeah man. He couldn’t elaborate, he couldn’t ask questions. He couldn’t think about what any of my experiences must’ve been like. He could only talk about himself, or masturbate. This was all he did.

  The saddest part (the part I am, even now, reluctant to admit) was that I needed him. Very badly. I needed anyone, and he was the only person I had access to. Even if there were
others like me, men who might be in need of a friend, I would never know because it was too dangerous to take the first step and try to get to know someone. There was no telling what they might do to me. So all I had was Bradley, whose mind was either empty or impenetrable.

  One time, early on, when I was a new arrival and was feeling particularly lonely, I had opened up and spoken my thoughts and feelings to Bradley—about remorse, about how afraid I was of certain people, about loneliness—for an entire day, from morning to afternoon, like he had done before.

  I thought we were really getting somewhere when I realized he wasn’t even there.

  I had forgotten his mother was visiting that day. I had failed to notice because he never did offer much in the way of replies anyway.

  Turns out, I got as much out of him when he was present as I did from his jacket and blanket, curled into a ball on the bunk below me.

  ***

  Opinion on DJ and his show was split.

  I thought he should stop, but not be silenced or killed, though Bradley often said he liked DJ’s show. The general feeling was that he ought not to be screaming in his cell, though men were sometimes known to do this. Hollywood movies had grossly exaggerated how horrible prison life was, and it was bad nonetheless, of course, but this kind of thing just made it worse. We needed friends, but we also needed our quiet. It was often all we had. This was what my side believed.

  Still, plenty of people tuned in, opened their toilet lids to hear his routines echoing up through the plumbing every single night. DJ called this “subscribing,” but the fact was most of us could hear it no matter what we did or didn’t do, and me and Bradley were right across from him, so “unsubscribing” wasn’t an option. But people laughed. Guards, the stupider ones, anyway, they even laughed. He could point to a chuckling corrections officer and say Even they like it. This could be nothing other than a mistake, because it legitimized him, and let him say things like I’m allowed to.

  But in this place, of course, mistakes are the norm. Here, mistakes abound.

  ***

  Not a gang so much as a clique, the Chuck Wagon were a band of as many as fourteen young men, and as few as eight (most often Black or every now and then Native, but never white) their numbers growing and shrinking as men were paroled or moved to another prison. All of them worked in the kitchen and centered themselves around another “big man” of sorts, an old-timer called Boss Cook or Cookie or else just Boss. They were most often robbers for some reason. Between them, the Chuck Wagon’s members had robbed convenience stores and banks, restaurants and jewellery stores, pawn shops and junkyards. One man had robbed a coffee stand, and another had robbed a car dealership. One of them had even robbed the ticket person at a ski hill. The exception to all of this was Boss Cook himself.

  Boss was a burglar, but also a kidnapper and a murderer. This was because of the B&E job that had gone poorly. He had broken into a grocery store when it was closed, only to find a cashier who was there because she was recently evicted from her apartment and was secretly living in the staff room. Unable to kill her, he bound and gagged her and drove her to a pig farm. He then pushed her into the cold November mud and told her to count to one thousand, where she was forgotten, unable to move, and died of exposure. He openly admits he was high at the time, which is a common but effective excuse for these, the most repulsive of crimes. I had used this excuse too.

  The Chuck Wagon also felt like I did about DJ.

  When he was doing his rounds, and went over to tell the Chuck Wagon about his podcast, no one made any effort to greet him. They sat on their bleachers near the track, all of them with paper cones or Styrofoam cups of what they would claim is water, all of them dull-eyed, cynical. They didn’t acknowledge his approach and sat, in their immaculate velvet activewear and denim outfits, piled against and on top of one another like a pride of lions in the sun.

  Many of them had reacted to his antics, at first, by screaming and banging against the walls and doors of their cells, cursing at him through the toilet system and uttering threats. Boss Cook had shut this down, and instead instructed his boys to ghost him, which meant to ignore his very existence, even when he was speaking. They would look right through him, focus on a distant location, like the doors to the gym or the watchtowers. Talk amongst themselves and give this trespasser all the regard of a faint breeze coming down from the hills.

  In the same way that The Big Man was a positive force for policing inmates from the inside, the Boss kept the Chuck Wagon from acting out, and encouraged these few men with access to knives and mallets and carving forks to leave them in the kitchen. He was a reformed lifer who had met with his victim’s family, given them a formal, heartfelt apology, along with a carefully written letter of the same sort. Forgave them when they wouldn’t offer him any mercy whatsoever, and agreed, at a follow-up meeting with the warden, that he truly didn’t deserve any.

  While The Big Man was a loner, Boss Cook had surrounded himself with other troubled young men and made himself a spiritual leader to them, a weightlifting Ghandi with a face like Bill Cosby. He didn’t preach religion, but a kind of temperance. A Great Chilling-Out, a restrained drinking of his prison wine and the smoking of smuggled-in weed. Lots of chess, which was not played with boards and pieces but verbally, using classical notation and sixty-four imaginary squares that the entire group would keep track of mentally. They had a meandering, medium-difficulty exercise regimen, and a high-level cooking and baking program where they pushed the boundaries of what could be done with the limited pantry and their paltry commissary supplies.

  Their tenets:

  Living the good life.

  Making the best of things.

  Minding your own damn business.

  But for all their restraint, when DJ approached them with the news of his improved, warden-endorsed podcast, something different happened. This time, when DJ tried to speak, they didn’t ghost him. Instead, they pointed. Pointed away from themselves, and instead directly at the women’s prison. What they called the Skank Tank, a grey stone box with a flagpole out front. To some of the men in the yard, their banishment looked like a salute, the start of a radical new movement.

  ***

  As inmates began to disseminate this story, more and more actions were attributed to DJ. I first heard he had spat on the ground before striding away with that floppy armed, belly-first gait of his, and just one hour after that, I heard that he’d thrown a clump of dirt at them. But by the time this Chinese whisper makes its way to The Big Man, wheezing and huffing and contemplating it amidst his two hundred chin-up/two hundred tricep-dip ritual on the far side of the yard, his maple-leaf outfit dark with monstrous sweat patches, the clump of dirt was now a clump of shit. The story had shifted, and became that DJ had been all but assaulted by these men.

  This warranted Big Man’s attention.

  When Big Man wasn’t working out, he was patrolling. Our floor had an open-cell policy during free time, and Big Man made a point of visiting everyone. He wasn’t fatherly or kind like you’d hope. Instead, he was exactly what he was: a hotheaded elementary school teacher who had been transformed into a full-blown murderer, gang-member, and enforcer. He would want to know what you were doing to facilitate your rehabilitation, what kind of life you had waiting for you on the outside. When he first met someone, he’d demand to see their papers, which meant showing him not only any court documents you might have, but letters from home, too. It had been years since he’d had to do so much as lean over someone in an imposing way, though. He didn’t have to do much of anything, actually. When that wide body appeared and filled up a doorway, inmates stood as if addressing a superior officer in the army. Even the crueller guards could not elicit this kind of behaviour.

  Only the Chuck Wagon had numbers strong enough to disregard him, but they acknowledged him anyway, in their own way, standing to come give him a round of hugs and high-fives like he was an honourar
y member. Big Man and Boss Cook would do a sort of genteel lean and reach for one another’s hand, shaking above some patch of neutral territory between them. They were apex predators who had not yet found a reason to confront one another, but one always had the sense they were prepared for it.

  After DJ’s banishment from their bleachers (and after the story had been confused and contorted by all of us) when Big Man came before the assembly of bodies on bunks and chairs, sprawling out of Boss’s cell and into the hallway of one end of the block, another different thing happened. Something new.

  Big Man walked in with some swiftness, but without a shirt, which was unusual. This meant that the screeching Nazi Imperial eagle tattooed on his back (the one in the process of being lasered off and fading away in weird patches) was in full view. So was the more innocuous “88” over his heart. The swastika that had been turned into a kind of square with stick ’n’ poke technology on his rippled stomach. That these images were being removed was irrelevant.

  Guards took notice, and leaned in to watch what happened, but made no effort to stop him. In some way, even they were below Big Man. He pushed past several of them, his shoulders splitting the Chucks apart with intentional disrespect. The first one who tried to stand in front of him to block his passage, a robber named Jakey, received a crushing blow to the side of his head, which forced the man back into his simple plastic chair.

  Then the whole of the Chuck Wagon stood upright, and made the narrow channel to their leader thicken with bodies.

  Boss Cook stood and parted the men, pointed for the Chuck Wagon to take their seats. He put himself before The Big Man, but his stance was unlike that of every other person in the room. His chest was not puffed, his fists were not balled. His face was slack and his back was hunched.

  I should add that Bradley and I were nearby, somewhere near the door, but paying close attention. We weren’t the only ones.