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It’s an eminently workable prison hustle, brilliantly conceived and elaborately pla
I let myself be pulled away from the moron and back to the sidelines where my teammates are already gathered. Spooky Jones isn’t there. That’s because he’s lying in a shower stall, his throat slashed and the product vanished. He’s still bleeding when we find him, his heart still fluttering. His breath whistles through the hole in his throat while a deputy warden screams into the phone for a doctor; his eyes remain open and imploring until the doctor rushes into the locker room. Then Spooky’s breathing stops, for good and forever.
I can’t help it. I’m a criminal. I don’t mourn Spooky. Yeah, he was a good guy and we’d split many a joint during our stay at the Menands Correctional Facility, a minimum security joint with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. But if there’s anything a thief can’t stand, it’s being ripped off. Somebody took my coke and I want it back. As for Spooky Jones, he’s past caring.
Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.
“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and u
I’m thinking, If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles. I’m thinking, That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say good-bye to paradise.
“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute, which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”
Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.
“You wa
“The only point I wa
“I asked you if you started the fight.”
“It was the moron threw the first punch.”
“After you elbowed him.”
“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice, you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking, If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal.
Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with Hey, you piece of shit.
“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed to believe this is all coincidental?”
“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”
We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.
Coach begins to perk up toward the end. I’m giving him an out and he knows it. Sure, Menands is a minimum security prison, but it’s still a prison. Assaults among the populace are uncommon, but they happen. Murders are quite rare, but they also happen. I mean, if a murder occurs in the dining hall, do you blame the cook?
When Buchanan finally dismisses me, I plant a seed. “Coach, we’re go
I’m back in living unit 8, locked down, me and the rest of the starting five. Hafez Islam, our starting two-guard, is busting my balls, which I don’t need. Hafez is a prison-converted Black Muslim, the only one at Menands, which has a majority-white population. I’ve never seen him when he wasn’t angry about something, and from time to time (when that anger was directed at me) I was tempted to slap his mouth shut. Unfortunately, our stay at Menands depends as much on our nonviolent behavior off the court as on our game-day ferocity. Which meant that I mostly have to eat it.
“I know you up to somethin’, Bubba,” he tells me. “You coulda took that rebound, only you tipped it out. What’s up wit’ that? You fuckin’ wit’ us?”
“What I’m up to is none of your Allah-damned business, Hafez. In fact, you’re disrespecting me by asking the question.” I pause long enough to let the message hit home. “And you better think about something else. If Warden Brook decides that we had anything to do with Spooky gettin’ capped, he’s go
I gather my troops for a team meeting and explain that there had to be five hundred people watching us when Spooky was killed. “You all are just feeling guilty because you’re criminals and you expect to be accused of any crime that takes place in the neighborhood. I want you to put that kinda thinking out to your minds because a week from today we’re most likely go
Somber nods, sober looks. Now we’re all on the same page.
At eight o’clock, before I have a chance to meet with my surviving partners, Roger “Road” Miller and Hong “Tiny” Lee, I’m called to the office of Warden Odell Brook. Brook was a Notre Dame shooting guard who’d been drafted in the second round by the Detroit Pistons, only to blow out his knee in a schoolyard game before he signed a contract.
“You start that fight, Bubba?”
It was the same question Deputy Buchanan had asked, but this time I put a different spin on it. “I had a bad game, Warden. Real bad. And the moron was in my face from the opening tip.”
“I saw that,” Brook admits. “He was disrespecting you big-time.”
“And I didn’t answer back, right? Even though I was tossing up bricks. Even though he was goin’ right by me.”
“Yeah, fine. You were an angel.” He waves a long blunt finger in my direction. “But that rebound, Bubba. You coulda taken it down. You know that.”
I nod agreement, then feed him the line I should have fed Hafez Islam and which I’d made up on the way to the warden’s office. “It was late in the game and we were tied. I wanted to start a fast break, see if we could get some numbers on the other end.”