Prison Camp: Prison is Home

A Forum for Stories of Incarceration, Justice, and Redemption

You can survive prison, you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you.

Prison Is Home

Everyone told me I’d be out of Bunk Number One in a few weeks, but it ended up being more like three months—and two bunkies later. Then Crazy Lou found a spot for me: a lower bunk on what I called Park Avenue. I kept changing bunks, always trying to find a warm one. I hoped Lou had finally found one.

Lou was the quirky, nerdy former chiropractor I mentioned in my last post—the one who left to save the world after his release. He said he was headed to Harvard. It was hard to imagine Lou and Harvard in the same sentence.

Park Avenue was a row of mostly white guys, all bunks facing a wall. My new bunkie, Mark, was from my hometown in Connecticut. I didn’t know him before prison, but it was oddly comforting to make that connection. The light wasn’t in my face anymore, but I had to dress in the dark—and it was even colder. We were right next to Spanish Harlem, where the windows stayed open year-round. Many of those guys were in for drugs and said they had night sweats. Closing the window wasn’t an option. Mark tried once and gave up. We bundled up and grumbled about it over breakfast. Mark didn’t last long as my bunkie. Everyone called him Happy. He said he needed prison. He’d lost his way, blown through money, and married a woman who left when it dried up. He loved the food—called every meal “deeelicious.” I never quite bought it. He felt more mascot than inmate. But like everyone else, he counted the days until his release.

I went through three more bunkies until I moved to the bunk left behind by my best friend, Steve. Steve was my guide through the early weeks, one of the few I truly trusted. He told me early on that “the days go slow but the weeks go fast.” At the time, I didn’t understand it. I do now.

That new bunk came with Lumi.

Lumi was a feisty, short Albanian in his forties with a large shaved head out of proportion with the rest of his compact, muscular body. He told me three black guys attacked him after a pick-up soccer match when he was a teenager. One of them pulled a gun. For some reason, he wasn’t afraid. The guy looked nervous, Lumi said. He stabbed him with a screwdriver. He and his brother returned home and after he told his father, they left New Jersey the next day and moved to Connecticut. No one ever found out, he said.

He treated me like a father—he was the same age as my oldest son. During the sweltering summer, he redirected one of the dorm fans toward our row. That led to a confrontation with Chiro, the lead kitchen staff member, and two others. Chiro, a squat round guy with a big head, ran what I called the “ala carte menu.”It was the food stolen from the kitchen by a group of inmates who made up dishes, cooked them in the dorm microwave, and then sold them to other inmates.

Chiro told him, “I no like the fan like that.”

Lumi held a broomstick.

“Two things happen,” Lumi said. “One, I go to solitary. Two, you go to the hospital.”

They backed off.

Lumi was a poker shark. He won almost every night and stored commissary items under our bunk—candy, nuts, tuna, all stacked in Tupperware. He had been married young to a girl who later received a $15 million accident settlement. He parlayed that into gambling trips, aggressive dogs, and cash-heavy rental properties that eventually brought him down. He said he was a family man, though he acknowledged dozens of liaisons in Vegas. He didn’t have a long sentence, and he was gone a month after I bunked with him. He tried to get me to escape to Albania, and I think he was disappointed I never considered it.

Then my friend, Jack-the-seafood king, told me I should move to Northern Boulevard because Russ, the Jew, didn’t like bunking alone. Lumi was the one who started calling Russ the Jew. Soon, everybody did. I didn’t like it, and I asked Russ about it. He said it didn’t bother him. He’d been called much worse. I didn’t like Russ that much. He was tall, but overweight, and soft all over with horned-rim glasses. But I felt bad for him, and I’d be near Jack, who had moved over there from No Man’s Land. Also, the bunk had a window, so I wouldn’t have to get dressed in the dark anymore. Russ said it was much warmer over there, but it wasn’t. The wind blew through the window as if there were no wall there. I never did find a warm place in that prison. Russ was a lobbyist who raised money for marginal politicians who had little to no influence. He would funnel some of the money to his client’s accounts. That’s how the system works, he said. That’s also how he ended up in prison. He was a regular diner of the à la carte menu and seemed to be eating all day and night. I got along with Russ, but he was a suck-up after a while. Just when I settled in there, the Camp Counselor, Mr. Larkin, said I had to move because my bunk was the last one in the dorm with a breathing outlet for guys who had sleep apnea. We had a lot of those. Some of their snoring seemed to carry from one end of the dorm to the other. It wasn’t easy to tell who was snoring. Some guys turned the fans on to shade the noise. It was a Catch 22: the whirring fans all night or the loud snoring. You don’t get used to either.

When I moved back to Park Avenue, the neighborhood had changed. Inmates were released, and new guys arrived every day. During my stay there, I think the whole place turned over. Bonds are fragile in prison. Most go out the door when a friend is released and forgotten over time. Quite an adjustment. But in prison, you adjust, or you don’t. And it’s not good if you don’t. It was just around that time, moving back to Park Avenue, about a full year in, that I realized my friend Steve was right about prison time. The days go slow, but the weeks go fast, and eventually you realize that prison is home. I hated to hear that. I resisted it for months. It took a while, but he was right. You find your lane, your routine, and coast. Mine was the kitchen, the track, my log, my books. I had to accept it. I was home.

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And so, after a year of bunk changes, lost friends, and quiet reckonings, I finally settled in. Not comfortably, but completely. I wrote this soon after:

HOME

My bunk is seven feet by eight.
I face a cinder block wall—
a favored view.

Over time, I’ve come
to embrace it.
Even the constant passing
of other inmates morphs
into a kind of rhythm.

Now and then, they peer in—
but only briefly,
a passing glance
we don’t acknowledge.

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Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Family: The other shoe of incarceration

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): God—was not dead there.