By the time the DOC bus pulled into Shawnee State Penitentiary, I had reclaimed my South Philly swagger. I wasn’t some no-name, no-rank punk who felt just awful about his awful, awful crimes. I was B25509, the skinhead celebrity. No matter where the Illinois Department of Corrections put me, I’d have an audience of Aryan Nationalists, all the free dope I could want from the bikers, and if I ever needed it, the backing of the Brotherhood. Those were the credentials that would keep me alive in prison. Those were the credentials I planned to pull out in the yard at Shawnee.
Unfortunately, those were also the credentials the Department of Corrections flagged in the file they sent ahead of me to Shawnee’s intake unit. The whole point of intake units isn’t to let the new inmates settle in; it ain’t like freshman orientation at college. The point is to give the system a chance to figure out who’s who. The tattoos are the first giveaway, since most dudes have gang insignias scattered among their other ink. So the intake guards take photographic tattoo inventories before they even hand out temporary cell assignments. Then the guards watch how everybody interacts for a couple days or weeks. Who’s got a really short fuse? Who’s everybody else bowing down to? Who are the alpha dogs? The puppies? The bitches?
If anybody sees anything they don’t like on an inmate’s skin,
in his eyes, in his actions, or in his file, the intake supervisor does a more extensive interview with him in hopes of figuring out where to place him in the maze of cell blocks so he’ll do the least damage possible. I got called in for a special interview.
The intake supervisor lectured me about how I wasn’t going to be a problem in Shawnee like I’d been in Big Muddy. I thought he was talking about the piss test. Then he drawled deeply, “We don’t tolerate gangs here.”
“Yeah right,” I thought. But all I said was, “I’m not in a gang.”
“Mr. Meeink, don’t try to play games with me.” He sounded like Boss Hogg from
The Dukes of Hazzard
. “Your gang activity at Big Muddy is well-documented.” He dropped my case file on his desk for effect.
“I’m in a political organization.”
He rolled his eyes. Then he trained them on me like a rifle sight. “You can call it the fucking Junior League for all I care, but it’s a gang, and we both know it.” He leaned across his desk, jabbed his fat finger at my face, and said, “We’ve got enough problems with your kind already.”
Actually, my “kind” was almost nonexistent at Shawnee. Among the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of inmates housed in the sprawling prison, I met fewer than half a dozen guys who’d been members of the white supremacy movement before entering the system. And none of them were what I would consider serious. One was a no-rank Klansman from some backwoods klavern. One was a self-proclaimed “skinhead.” He had a huge tattoo of Hitler running from his collar bone to his waist, but he’d never actually met a real skinhead crew member face-to-face until he met me in the yard. The rest of Shawnee’s Aryan Nationalists were just guys who’d been on mailing lists.
Of course, there were plenty of racist bikers at Shawnee, and supposedly even a few members of the Aryan Brotherhood. But none of them turned out to greet me on my first trip to the yard. Instead, the chief of the Northsiders spotted me and filled me in. While I’d been cracking up over at Menard, a war between
the bikers and the Latin Folk had gotten so out of control at Shawnee that the warden had placed most of the bikers and all of the Aryan Brotherhood in protective custody, not to protect them so much as to protect everybody else. They were all still in there, leaving the Northsiders as the only major white gang in general population. Fortunately for me, the Northsiders were freaking huge at Shawnee. The warden couldn’t have put them into protective custody; they wouldn’t have fit. The Northsiders were tight with both the bikers and the Brotherhood because they were all white and all badasses. And at least at Shawnee, the Northsiders also leaned toward the People. All that combined meant there was no question where they stood on the whole Biker versus Folk war. It also meant they had backing in the yard even after the bikers and the Brotherhood got sent to protective custody. The Latin Kings, the Vice Lords, the Bloods, and all the other minority People gangs at Shawnee were willing to risk their lives to protect the white Northsiders from the archenemy Folk. And once the leader of the Northsiders took me under his wing in the yard, the Latin Kings, Vice Lords, Bloods, and all the other minority People gangs knew it was their responsibility to at least keep an eye on me, swastika tattoo and all.
“You come to us if you need anything,” the Northsiders’ leader told me.
That was a relief. No man is an island. But when you’re the only real Aryan Nationalist in the yard, and the Brotherhood and the bikers are in lockdown, it sure as hell feels that way.
“I appreciate it,” I said to the Northsider.
“You just ride under our flag for now, until your boys make it back out.” He motioned his hand toward the assemblies of Vice Lords, Bloods, and Latin Kings scattered about the yard. “They may not like you much, you being a skinhead and all,” he said. “But they’ll murder any Folk who so much as breathes on you.”
As it turned out, some of the Latin Kings, Vice Lords, and Bloods did come to like me, in spite of the fact that I was a Nazi.
And I came to like some of them, too, in spite of the fact they were “mud” by Identity’s standards. We all found this out only because of the tensions being so high at Shawnee.
When I first arrived, Shawnee felt like the main block at Menard looked. Almost every cell block was on restricted privileges and the guards were on edge. So when the war cooled a little and we finally got some freedom, we were all maniacs. We didn’t want to walk the yard, we wanted to run laps around it. We didn’t want to breathe the fresh air, we wanted to suck it in with heaving gasps. And there’s nothing like a good game among convicted felons to get your heart pumping.
Sports were bigger at Shawnee State Penitentiary than they were at Penn State University. If Joe Paterno could’ve recruited out of our yard, he’d have gone undefeated his whole damn career. There’s something magical about a barbed wire end zone and armed guards in the press box that gives a guy a real boost on the gridiron.
Everywhere else I’d been, the bikers fielded a team in every sport. But since most of the bikers were in lockdown and the Northsiders didn’t seem interested in getting a team together, I asked if they minded if I joined somebody else’s team. I had to do that because I was riding under their flag. They looked around the yard at all the black and Latin gang teams facing off, then they looked at me like they thought I was nuts. But they gave me their blessing and I spread the word I was a free agent. One of the Vice Lords I threw Spades with delivered an invitation for me to join their football team. I wasn’t the only guy on the team who wasn’t a Vice Lord: two of our linemen were Bloods. But I was the only white guy, and definitely the only Nazi.
The first game I played for the Vice Lords, I had to beg to even get out on the field. They finally let me in the game after the Gangster Disciples’ team scored a touchdown on them; the Vice Lords said I could do the kickoff return. I was a Nazi skinhead playing tackle football in a prison yard with a bunch of black gangsters. This wasn’t Pop Warner League. I hadn’t expected the
kid glove treatment. They were going to make me prove myself. I
had
to run that ball back. And I did, even though not one dude on my team blocked for me that first play. The Gangster Disciples took special aim when they tackled me. I looked like a fucking rag doll by the end of the second quarter. But I kept hauling my ass up off the dirt and going back in for more. There was no way in hell I was going to let those black players chase me off, not with the whole yard watching. So the harder they hit me, the harder I played. When I ran in for a touchdown during the third quarter, my teammates high-fived me. And when an opposing player hit me so hard in the fourth quarter that I actually went airborne, one of the Vice Lords helped me to my feet. After that, I wasn’t the Vice Lords’ token skinhead; I was their teammate.
At the end of our games, most of my Vice Lord teammates would be panting for air and rubbing their knees, and most of the Northsiders in the audience would be creaking their way down off the bleachers that ran along one side of the field. I on the other hand would be bouncing around like a puppy on crack. And two of my teammates, Little G and Jello, would bounce right along with me. The three of us would race across the yard to the basketball court to get in a little three-on-three time before the guards sent us back inside. Our team was all heart and no height. At 5’9” I was the tallest of the three of us, if we didn’t factor in Jello’s fade. If the courts were full, we’d pace the sidelines, waiting until one of the games ended, then we’d challenge the winners. If nobody’d let us play, we’d just run. Some days we ran sprints; others we ran laps. But no matter what we did, we always did it at top speed and together.
None of our elders on either side of the race line gave us any shit about hanging out together so long as it kept us out of their hair. Like me, Jello and Little G were first-timers; they were also teenagers. Our energy exhausted the older inmates, and their words of wisdom depressed the hell out of us. No matter what color a guy’s skin is, he doesn’t want some old fart telling him that his girl is screwing another guy. I don’t know what it
is about old inmates, but they get their rocks off bursting the young bucks’ bubbles. When you’re eighteen and think you’re in love and the only hope you’re holding onto is that your girl will be waiting when you get out, it hurts like fucking hell to have some lifer declare, “I’ll bet she’s blowing your best friend right this very minute.”
Little G and Jello never said shit like that to me because they too were eighteen and in love and hoping like hell their girlfriends weren’t sucking some other dude’s dick right that minute. They were the only guys I could talk to about Jessica. I read all her letters to them, and they read their girlfriends’ letters to me. We analyzed every word.
“Look, here, where she wrote, ‘I love you, baby.’ ‘You’ is kind of smushed up. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. Where’s last week’s letter?”
We’d dig through the stack, do some analysis. We were like twelve-year -old girls at a slumber party. If we’d done that in front of guys doing serious time, they would’ve busted our balls so bad we would’ve hit high notes like twelve-year old girls.
I would’ve lost my mind at Shawnee without Jello and Little G, because the closer Jessica’s due date got, the more insanely jealous I became. No matter what she wrote about in her letters, I read between the lines until I found a reason to suspect her. I grilled her every time we talked on the phone.
“Frank, I’m eight months pregnant. Who’d want to fuck me?” she’d ask, laughing.
But I missed the sarcasm. I just plowed forward like a prosecutor, quizzing her about how she was spending her every waking moment. God forbid she did something with one of the skinheads, even though I’d personally asked a couple of them to take care of her for me while I was gone.
“He took you out to eat?”
“It was nice to get out of the house for a change.”
“Did he try to kiss you?”
“Jesus, no! I look like a fucking whale. Who’d want to kiss me?
My voice would break a little. “I do.”
“But you can’t, can you?”
The electric chair would’ve hurt less than hearing Jessica say that. I couldn’t kiss her. Prison rules forbid kissing during visits. Not that she visited often; she only made the trip twice, and both times, she got so pissed at me for acting jealous that she left early. Sometimes on the phone, if I asked her too many questions, she’d hang up on me.
Of course, every time she hung up on me, I became even more convinced she was cheating. But Little G and Jello always talked me off the ledge. And I returned the favor whenever their girlfriends hung up on them. We were three pretty typical teenage boys, obsessed with girls and sports. But we were inmates, so we had a few other things on our minds, like keeping safe and doing business. Our friendship bent the rules, but didn’t break the rules: we were all on the right side of the People versus Folk line.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS Movement bypassed Shawnee’s kitchen altogether: the white inmates got the perk jobs, and the black inmates got the shit jobs. Once they got out of protective custody, the bikers resumed their long-held positions as the executive chefs of the mess hall. I lugged industrial-sized ingredients around on their orders while they were cooking; once they were done, I manned a ladle on the service line. Being black, Little G manned a mop. Little G and I teamed up on a food scam simply because we got assigned to the same kitchen crew shift. But Jello was the real entrepreneur in our group. With the right investors, Jello could’ve turned Shawnee’s kitchen into a national franchise, but all Little G and me could figure out was a straight up food heist.
Little G wasn’t much taller or much wider than his mop handle. He fucking hated mop duty, but his mop bucket was the secret to our success. When the guards weren’t looking, we stole as much food as we could grab and wrapped it tightly in plastic bags. Then we dropped the packages into the filthy water of the mop bucket. As the inmates filed through the line, they
placed their orders with me, and I told them what to do to take delivery: take a seat, eat for a while, then spill their drink on the floor.
Whenever an inmate spilled something, the guards would signal the mop boy to go clean it up. Little G would push the bucket over next to our customer and start mopping, then he’d raise some bigass stink to distract the guards. Sometimes he’d go off about how mop duty was another name for slavery. Sometimes he’d start in about how he was going to get the NAACP to investigate Shawnee’s kitchen. But no matter what spin he put on it, he always did it big and loud and moving toward the guards. And while the guards had all eyes on Little G to make sure he didn’t attack them with his mop, our customer would reach down into the dirty water of the mop bucket Little G had parked right next to him, grab his order, and stuff it down his pants. We filled somewhere between three and ten orders at every meal, but the guards never caught on to what we were doing. At an average of fifteen bucks, cash or trade, per order, we made a good chunk of change. Of course, we had to cut in the gangs backing us, but the leftovers were enough to get us by.