September 2017
Days 47–48 of 1,095
What’s weird about Yates Correctional is that it’s seven buildings plopped down between a busy four-lane road and twenty-five acres of woods and wetlands—what could be described as a nature preserve if it wasn’t part of a prison. Deer graze out back; coyotes and weasels prowl; wild turkeys mill for seeds and roost in the trees to elude nighttime predators. The name of the game out there is survival of the fittest, the fastest, the cleverest, the most alert. By my seventh week at Yates, I’ve figured out that this is more or less the name of the game inside this place as well.
I promised Emily that prison wasn’t going to get in the way of my recovery, but I haven’t yet gotten to a meeting here or even figured out how to make that happen. My visitors’ list has finally been approved, and if Emily comes to see me soon, I don’t want to have to sit across from her and lie or admit that I haven’t yet made good on my pledge. I had a close call when I almost let that shrink put me on Xanax, but my determination to stay clean overruled my desire to use. One of the AA Promises says, “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.” Well, happiness is a tall order when you’re in prison, but I’m less preoccupied about drinking or drugging now, so I guess that’s a kind of freedom. And the longer I can stay clean and sober, the more fortified I’ll be against surrender.
But I’m put to the test the following Saturday morning. “Not many of us know about this,” Manny whispers. “And you said you were in AA before you got here, so this probably doesn’t interest you, but I figured I’d let you know about it. There’s real booze at the rec station, not toilet tank hooch.”
The week before, he says, a guard smuggled in a handle of 86-proof tequila for Butler, but he got paroled unexpectedly the next morning before he had the chance to even crack open the bottle. There was no way he’d be able to sneak it out during his discharge, but he didn’t want to just pour it down the sink. Instead, he poured it into the broken twelve-cup hot pot in the rec area. The plan, Manny says, is that, starting with the nine a.m. five-on-the-hour break outside of our cells, us guys who know about it will line up to pour some “hot water” into our disposable cups, supposedly for our instant coffee or noodles.
I tell myself I have no intention of screwing with my sobriety, but when Manny returns from his first visit to the hot pot, his breath permeates the air in our confined space, and the smell of alcohol begins flirting with me, coaxing me to ignore my resolve and indulge. In a way, it would be stupid to pass up a rare opportunity like this or hesitate until it’s all gone. “We are not saints,” the Big Book says. “Progress, not perfection.” Approaching the eleven a.m. break, our end of the tier has come alive with the sound of loud talk, laughter, and the inebriated pleasure of “sticking it to the man.” I used to love that about getting drunk back in high school: the way when, two or three drinks in, your buzz would free you from your worries and inhibitions and let you just float above your sucky reality for a while. My craving for some of that tequila intensifies until I end up waiting by our cell door, Styrofoam cup in hand.
When the door pops, I hustle to the rec area and am fourth in line from the spigot that’s going to allow me an 86-proof minivacation. While I stand here waiting, my effort is to block out the three reasons why Ishouldn’tdrink—Emily, Maisie, and, most of all, Niko—and I start getting the shakes. I don’t justwantsome of that tequila; Ineedto have it. But then, with only Pacheco between me and my alcoholic deliverance, I watch mythumb punch through the bottom of my cup. Feeling conflicting emotions of despair and relief, I leave the line.
Back in our cell, I flop face-first onto my bunk, rattled by how close I came, thanks to the “stinkin’ thinkin’?” we addicts are warned about.
“Hey,” Manny says. “You okay?”
I murmur that I’m fine.
“Should I not have told you the secret?” he asks.
Again, I say I’m fine.
Several seconds go by before I raise my head and look over at him. He’s staring back at me. “You sure?”
“Jesus Christ, Manny, I don’t need a shrink and I already have a mother!”
“Okay, okay. Just asking. I’m not that crazy about alcohol either, to tell you the truth. Give me a dance club and some party drugs, and booze can go fuck itself.”
I don’t sleep for shit that night. The next day, Sunday, Captain Graham is working the control desk. A woman of imposing height and weight, Delia Graham is legendary around here for having single-handedly broken up a fight between two gangbangers, fracturing the arm of one and putting the other in a collar for a sprained neck. The word on Graham is that she’ll treat you decently as long as you don’t piss her off.
On the way back from chow, I stop and, on impulse, ask her whether she knows what I need to do to get to an AA meeting.
“Friend of Bill’s?” she asks, which might mean she’s in the program, too. I nod. “Okay, let’s see now. There’s something about that somewhere in this mess. Whenever I work this desk, I gotta put everything back in order. Next time I’m here, same thing. All the men working this desk expect Mama to get things neat again. Probably treated like princes when they were kids. Not my sons. By the time they left home, they knew how to cook, clean, do laundry, wash and wax the kitchen floor. My daughters-in-law are always thanking me for the way their men got brought up.” She seems to be talking to herself, not me, so I say nothing as I watch her shuffle through a handful of notices. “Okay, here we go,” she says, holding up asheet of salmon-colored paper. “Says there’s a meeting in D Block, second floor, immediately following seven a.m. Sunday Mass.” She glances at her wristwatch. “Which is just about now.” When I ask her whether I can go, she says, “You spoze to put in a request at least twenty-four hours before. But since you didn’t know that, I’ll write you a pass and radio them that you’re not on the list but you’re coming. Make sure you check in with the officer when you get there.”
“Thanks very much,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “When you need a meeting, you need a meeting.”
I walk to the end of the corridor and wait for her to buzz me through the exit door. When she does, I turn back to wave, but she’s busy sorting and straightening up the mess the others have left her. I start down the stairs.
Outside, walking toward D Block, I imagine a chapel of some sort, but when I reach the building’s second floor, I see that “church” is a setup in the corridor. The “pews” are rows of beat-up plastic chairs and the altar’s a sheet of plywood resting on two sawhorses. There are at least twenty guys in attendance—more than I would have guessed. The guard at the desk behind the altar is thumbing through a car magazine, drinking from a bottle of Gatorade, and paying no attention to the service. I hand him my pass and hold up my ID. Without looking at me or lowering his voice, he says, “Better late than never, huh? You staying for the meeting?” I nod. “Take a seat then.”
There’s an empty chair at the end of the third row. I sit and watch, feeling a small measure of gratitude for the priest’s emerald-green robe—a dash of color amidst the gray cinder-block walls and our drab tan uniforms. I can see from the whispered conversations and muffled laughter that some of “the faithful” have come here not to pray but to socialize. I watch a grizzled-looking muscleman up at the altar fill a tray of those little paper ketchup cups from a bottle of what I’m guessing is grape juice. Dude has long, bleached-blond hair and, from the looks of it, is going forthat Dog the Bounty Hunter look. Out of nowhere, I recall how, when I’d fill their sippy cups with grape juice, the twins would pucker up and giggle, showing each other their purple tongues. I catch myself smiling a little until my guilt delivers a roundhouse punch so unexpected that it takes my breath away. If I had any right to happy memories about my kids, I wouldn’t be here.
The priest raises what I recognize as one of the chow hall trays. It’s piled with broken pieces of white bread. “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me,” he calls, his voice traveling down the long corridor. Next, he raises a Styrofoam cup, a few sizes larger than the one I came close to filling with tequila the day before. “This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.” I hear my father say,Pure fantasy. How can people be so gullible?
Someone rings a bell and eleven or twelve believers get up and form an orderly line to the front. Dog the Bounty Hunter stands next to the priest, holding his tray of juice shots. “The body of Christ,” the priest says as he places bread onto the cupped hands of the first guy in line. “Amen,” the guy answers. Puts it in his mouth, slugs down the grape juice, crumples the paper cup, and tosses it in the wastebasket below.
“The body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
“The body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
