A Rock of Offence
Franklin should have been making friends instead of starting trouble. He’d been at it again today and I began to wonder if the guy would ever learn. Franklin already knew where he was headed after only a month at the Joyceville Penitentiary Assessment Unit. It wouldn’t be to the worst place—max at Millhaven and its constant isolation—but where he was headed was no joke and no way was he prepared. Assessment units determine your level of risk and where you are going for the rest of your sentence. It was hard to read Franklin just by talking to him.
I shook my head just thinking about him, floating for a minute in the peaceful white noise of the laundry room. I’d heard before going to prison that it could be very lonely, but since I’d arrived I never seemed to be alone. I suppose that lonely and alone can be very different things. Even in an empty hallway the noise of people reverberated off of cement walls and followed you. The laundry room was empty right then and the tumbling clothes drowned out most of the outside noises.
The smell of excess laundry detergent cooking off of clothes and sheets took me out of here for a moment, like the way that the moon does when it’s hovering over the fence in the prison yard. Maybe I’d spend my entire sentence sitting here in the laundry room. There are no soft surfaces in prison. It’s true—everything is either cement or steel. You develop calluses on your ass. You can break your glasses, your bones, your dreams, anything just by slipping for a moment.
The buzz of the dryer ending brought me back to Franklin. He’d been driving people nuts all day and it was hard to put your finger on just one thing that he was doing. The best I could narrow it down to was that for some reason Franklin thought that he was special. No one is really special here, not like someone is special on the outside. Some people are more violent than others, or crazier, or have more meds to trade for favours or other things—but not special like Franklin. Franklin oozed the feeling of a kid’s birthday party special. It got under people’s skin.
Special makes people feel uncomfortable. It’s like sitting on a stool that isn’t quite flat anymore—like it’s slanted just a tiny, unnoticeable amount, to one side. You find yourself leaning all the time and you don’t know why. You get sore on that side one day and you don’t know why, and then the next day, and the next. One day you look at the stool and think, “screw this” and you hate the stool and it doesn’t even make sense to you. Franklin had barely escaped getting a beating for it a few times. Franklin had already gotten a serious beating or handed out one in Provincial jail on his way here, depending on which rumours you paid attention to.
There are no true stories in prison. There are things people tell you that you accept and things you don’t. You say that you believe people’s stories in here, but you never really do. Someone would tell you something and then there would be calls of “story up,” that it was bullshit, followed by the teller saying “no, my word” or “100%.” We would all agree that the story was solid, but your outside mind says that it isn’t. Many stories in prison are outright lies or huge exaggerations and you choose to accept some of them, even though you know that they are lies, because they’re funny, or they make you feel better, or they agree with some story you’ve told. In your weaker moments you might even spread stories like that just for the moment of attention.
If you accidentally tell a true story, it is my experience that it gets ignored. These stories are embarrassing because they are true and sometimes the truth is hard to look at for a lot of reasons that people don’t want to discuss. For this, and many other reasons, true stories are practically invisible. I told a bunch of guys during yard about something funny that happened to me when I was a kid and when it was done it was like I hadn’t said anything at all.
At an assessment unit they watch you and question you and look at your file to see how much they can trust you. It’s not so different from how we assess each other. I’m pretty trustworthy and I’m not a dangerous guy. If you don’t believe me then you’re probably part of the law abiding public and I don’t blame you. From an outside view, we’re all garbage in here.
At Joyceville you never know when they’re going to ship you out, and some guys get antsy. This one guy named Johnson got really superstitious about it, trying all kinds of things to get shipped already. It wasn’t really because he was going anywhere better. He just wanted some certainty. Guys teased him that he was never leaving. He stood at different spots in line for food, he would spend one day in his cell and the next he would stay out the whole day talking people’s ears off. He would come up with complicated theories of how the system worked and he’d even try to talk to the C.O.’s, asking them if they knew when he’d leave— which was strictly against range rules.
All the while he would wake up each morning and pack his stuff again, sure that he would ship today.
“Time to pack my shit!” he’d say.
“Give it up already and they’ll send you,” I told him. “Just go limp.”
He still kept at it and tried something new every day and when I finally shipped out he was still there. Maybe he still is. “Go limp”—damn right.
It was part of my philosophy coming in—don’t stand out, fade into the background, be grey like the walls. But Franklin stood out. Some guys said, “You can’t fix stupid,” though I almost brought myself to talk to the guy for his own good. The constant refrain of “Do your own time” stopped me. He would be carried by the great current to the next penitentiary.
A lot of the wondering about other people here is just boredom really. The same conversations, comments, and jokes, pushed around like a bean on a plate. It gets pushed around until all that’s left is the constant scraping of forks against a plate, long after the bean is gone. Their real lives, their people, their true histories are locked away in a steel box deep inside, waiting for a better day in the future, when they could open it in the sun.
The day I got shipped was the same day for Franklin. We were headed to different destinations, but we were brought down to “Admissions and Departures” together. We stood cuffed, mercifully twenty feet apart, behind different transport vans. I was glad to be done with Franklin. We all were. He was a responsibility that threatened everyone to be theirs. He rankled against my “grey man” philosophy and he was best gone to leave me alone. The doors of the transport vans opened and they were leading us in.
The high windows of A & D had been dull blue-grey all morning with the overcast sky. It was just as Franklin made his first step that the sunlight broke through the clouds and entered through the window—dense and luminescent. Franklin stepped out of line and walked towards the spot of sun on the cement floor. He was staring at it as he walked with a smile on his face. I could feel myself tense and wait for the angry voices, the brutal actions.
The beam of light fell on Franklin and as soon as it did, he was gone—the heavy steel cuffs hitting the floor. I stopped my walk and just stared. I was the only one who reacted and the only one who seemed to see what had happened. The cuffs remained on the ground after I was told to get moving, to get to my own transport. The cuffs were still there when we drove away. I never mentioned it to the staff or inmates at my current penitentiary, though I often think about that day—the moment before and the moment just after.
If I’d told the prison psychologist here he would tell me that I didn’t see what I thought I saw. He’d say that I’d likely seen something traumatic, something that my mind couldn’t accept. My mind created an illusion, he would say. Maybe Franklin ran or struggled. Maybe they beat him. Maybe he was shot. Or maybe like the guy we teased—he never left Joyceville. I don’t know the answers to all the questions. I just know what I saw.
There are sounds so distinctive that you know what it is without looking—it can only be what it is. There is no mistaking. The squeaking of hands on a balloon, the snap of a mousetrap, sounds so unique that you can only compare them to themselves. That was the sound, heavy grade steel connected by a short steel chain, hitting unyielding cement. There is no metallic ring—just a dead metal thud collapsing on the ground, a sound so heavy that it almost kills its own echo. That was the sound that I heard and even if I could not, as they say, trust my eyes, I had to trust my ears. Not only did I see it, I heard it. Put aside the event, I told myself, and the thoughts after. Yet, what it did, what I took with me—I would return to it again and again.
When I wake now, when I wake up here, I still wear my cloak of greyness. But unlike then, I’m not sure how much I believe in it. Now, deep inside, I hide, like a star that I’ve plucked from the sky. Sometimes, late at night, I peer deep inside myself and I look at it. I hope that one day when they open the gates for me that it’ll still be there.
Photo by Quỳnh Lê Mạnh on Unsplash.